The Screengrab

Duncan Jones's Moon stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, the sole human being employed at a mining station at the title location by a corporation called Lunar Industries. Sam is weeks away from completing a three-year stint that will end with the arrival of his replacement and his return to Earth. He's settled into a hermit's existence, kibbutzing with "Gerty", an all-purpose computer gofer with the voice of Kevin Spacey, letting his hair and beard grow out for weeks at a time, then getting a shave and a haircut to check in with his family and company masters back on Earth via telescreen conferences. Then...something happens. It would be unfair to give too many plot details away, since Moon, with its limited cast and scenic options, needs all the surprises it can hold in reserve. But the movie does turn on the idea that, in the future, technological advances will make work in space routine, grubby, even tedious, and that the corporations on whose behalf this work is performed may regard their intergalactic labor force less as Buck Rogers heroes than as insects whose air supply can easily be cut off if they present any inconveniences. In interviews, Jones has gone out of his way to pay tribute to the movies that plowed this line of speculation in the past, including 2001 but also such later sci-fi films as Silent Running, Alien, and Outland. Back in Kubrick's day, the idea that anything about life in outer space could ever become so routinized that it might become boring was a fresh joke, and even then, there were scenes in 2001 that maybe went beyond the call of duty in showing just how boring things in space could get. (There's a reason that it's not easy to recall, just of the top of your head, what's the second best movie starring either Keir Dullea or Gary Lockwood.) It takes a special kind of genius to depict tedium without seeming tedious, and in fact, tedium is something that Moon has plenty of.

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A lot of my friends have been going through break-ups and divorces lately, which means they’ve probably also been hearing that old familiar friends/family/Facebook folk wisdom about how the end of a relationship is like a death, which must be properly mourned.

And, given that we're down to our next-to-last Thursday list before getting dumped for some younger, sexier blogs by Hooksexup, your pals here at the Screengrab, having moved beyond denial, anger and bargaining, figured we oughta tackle grief -- well, grief and “holy shit, did you see that guy’s head explode?  How frickin' cool was that?” -- with THE SCREENGRAB’S FAVORITE DEATH SCENES OF ALL TIME, including...

The Guy With The Exploding Head, SCANNERS (1981)



Holy shit!  How frickin' cool was that?  I remember first seeing the aforementioned Exploding Head Guy during one of the montage sequences of the 1984 theatrical clip show Terror in the Aisles (a horror film comprised entirely of classic moments from other horror films, kind of like the Scary Movie franchise without the dick jokes). Later, I saw David Cronenberg’s Scanners in its entirety, although the only thing I really remember about it now is the scene above, where renegade telepath Darryl Revok (B-Movie Hall of Fame villain extraordinaire Michael Ironside) totally blows that bald dude’s skull apart -- with his mind! -- in one of the most memorable death scenes in cinematic history...second only, I suppose, to John Hurt’s demise in Alien (below) for its shock value imagery. In a way, then, it’s sad to realize that, in the wake of Saving Private Ryan and the recent wave of torture porn cinema, the image of a bloody cranium bursting like a ripe watermelon is now considered tame enough to show as a sight gag on The Daily Show. (AO)

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After 33 years and 374 issues, Starlog magazine has ceased to exist as a print publication. “Official word of Starlog's demise came in a posting last week on the Starlog.com site, buried five paragraphs deep in an update informing readers that Starlog.com had relaunched in beta as part of a ‘massive digital initiative’ and touting the fact that a ‘Digital store,’ to launch next month, will feature digital editions of the entire Starlog catalog,” SciFi Wire reports. “The last print issue available for the time being is #374,while issue #375 will be available exclusively as a digital edition on the network in the very near future.”

I’m not going to claim that I’ve kept up with Starlog lately – I’m guessing the last issue I read had some hot scoop on the secrets of Return of the Jedi – but this announcement still bums me out a bit.

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How could a space vampire-zombie apocalypse movie with tons of gratuitous nudity not live up to expectations?

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10. THE FLY (1986)



Horror movies, contrary to the claims of highfalutin critics like us, don’t necessarily have to be about anything. If they’re scary and well-made and don’t insult your intelligence, just being a good horror movie is enough. But when they are about something, especially in the hands of a storyteller of the depth and intelligence of David Cronenberg, they transcend genre and become something truly special. Cronenberg took a popular pulp story by George Langelaan, which had been filmed once before as a pretty straightforward monster movie in the 1950s, and remade it as a terrific modern-day horror flick, complete with terrifically suspenseful moments and plenty of nauseating fluids for the grindhouse crowd – but he also infused it with a powerful undercurrent of extremely personal terror. The Fly, carried on the hair-sprouting, wing-bearing back of Jeff Goldblum’s greatest performance, is one of the finest movies ever made about the betrayal of the body: in the story of a scientist who is transformed into an insect-like creature, Cronenberg manages to isolate not only the horror, but also the loneliness, the helplessness, and the frustration of the sick and the dying. When Brundlefly is finally dispatched at the movie’s end, the pervasive feeling isn’t one of revenge, or relief – it’s one of terrible sadness.

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In our time of financial crisis, a nation turns to a tiny talking dog for comfort. Hey, we’ve all been there, right? Er…not that my tiny dog talks out loud. Not often anyway. Heh heh heh. Anyway, Beverly Hills Chihuahua continues to rule the box office chart, digging up $17.5 million over the weekend for a total haul of $52.5 million so far. And then there are those who seek respite from our trying times in the comfort of flesh-eating monsters, as Quarantine took second place with $14.2 million. The one-two punch of Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe had to settle for third, as Body of Lies debuted with $13.1 million.  America apparently decided a terrorism thriller wasn’t really the salve it was looking for.

Seth Rogen will make you laugh at cancer. That’s the plan, anyway.

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Tasha Robinson at the AV Club brings us a brief but very engaging interview with Andrew Stanton, longtime studio pro at Pixar and the director of WALL-E.  In a wide-ranging discussion, he talks about the lunch meeting that produced a decade of the best animated films in history, the development of Pixar from a handful of like-minded creatives to a massive Hollywood studio employing hundreds of people, and his unconventional approach to writing a script in which the main character has no voice.  "I remember reading the script for Alien," he recalls; "It was written by Dan O'Bannon, and he had this amazing format where he didn't use a regular paragraph of description.  He would do little four-by-eight word descriptions and then sort of left-justify it and make it about four lines each, little blocks, so it almost looked like haikus.  It would create this rhythm in the readers where you would appreciate these silent visual moments as much as you would the dialogue on the page.  It really set you into the rhythm and mindset of what it would be like to watch the finished film.  I was really inspired by that, so I used that format for WALL-E."  

One of the fascinating things about the interview is the discussion of how the most high-tech movie studio in history uses some positively primitive methods to actually make their movies.  Starting with the standard lament that computers will always take up all the time you allocate them to solve a problem ("Once you've got more memory, you just want to do more with it.  And you end up feeling it takes just as long to do now the 16 things in five minutes instead of the one thing you used to do in five minutes"), Stanton notes that Pixar always views its films as storytelling challenges, not technical ones (how do you make a cool movie about monsters, as opposed to how do you solve the fur problem in CGI).  He also notes that, with WALL-E, they were attempting to tell a story almost entirely visually, and so looked back -- way back -- for cues:  forsaking Chuck Jones' Warner Brothers cartoons as overly familiar to geeks like themselves, they instead prepared for each day's work by watching a Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd silent short every day at lunch for a year and a half.

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The new Pixar film Wall-E might be considered the real blockbuster of the summer movie season so far, if only because most of the other obvious lollapaloozas--Iron Man, Sex and the City, that Harrison Ford thing--opened a month or so before summer officially started a little more than a week ago. A very funny, beautifully designed, unexpectedly affecting (I cried, okay? The walking trash compactor with the googly eyes fell in love and I cried. And I'd do it again.) animated fable, Wall-E deserves all the riches it will earn for its makers, which will probably only pile up faster and faster as people look for something to take the kids to see even as the remaining summer sure-shots, such as the new Batman and Hellboy films, turn weirder and darker. Because the movie carries a pretty explicit satirical message indicting the human race--or Americans, not that there's that much difference--of having selfishly abandoned their stewardship of their own ruined planet, it will also set off a publicity-getting barrage attacks by conservative commentators denouncing it as tree-hugging propaganda, which I'm sure will do it at least as much harm as those attacks on Mr. Incredible and his family for being elitists.

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SEATTLE: The 34th Seattle International Film Festival opens tonight and runs through June 15. The opening night attraction is Battle in Seattle, directed by Stuart "Mr. Charlize Theron" Townsend and starring an ensemble cast led by Charlize Theron. The movie is a "semi-fictionalized account" of the 1999 meeting in Seattle of representatives of the World Trade Organization, which was plagued by demonstrators who thought that globalization sucks, man. (As part of the movie's celebration of down-with-the -street anti-capitalist action, the festival organizers promise an "unforgettable opportunity to walk the red carpet with the stars" to be followed by a "fabulous gala party will follow with live entertainment, and complimentary champagne cocktails and hors d'oeuvres.") For more information and a lot of laughs, check out The Stranger's festival blog.

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To celebrate the success of Iron Man, which apparently does a much better job of realistically depicting how a man might go about turning himself into an armored guilded missle than, say, Spider-Man did in its speculation on the probable effects of being bitten by a radioactive spider ("Mommy, hiw come he's not turning brown and lying crumpled on the floor weeping?"), New Scientist has compiled a list of "five science fiction movies that get the science right." This is one of those areas where we'll just have to take their word for it, along with whether the kids in Spellbound got those words spelled right or not, or what circumstances would make it possible for a strange man to flirt with Julia Roberts on the street and not wind up in traction. It may be no surprise that 2001 leads the list; it is, after all, an acknowledged masterpiece of the genre whose "strikingly realistic depiction of space travel" was forged in a collaboration between a serious sci-fi author and a cerebral, perfectionist director. And besides, it always puts us to sleep, just like science class.

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A lifetime of playing character roles may not have exactly made Yaphet Kotto into Hollywood royalty; but he doesn't have to settle. He's the real thing: though a lifelong New Yorker, Kotto is the son of a genuine Cameroonian prince, the great-grandson of the king of the Douala people in the late 1800s, and (according to the man himself — and are you going to call Yaphet Kotto a liar?), the great-great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria. That ought to get him a seat on the House of Lords and nice swanky country estate, but until his relatives stop treating him like, er, the black sheep of the family, he'll have to keep on being one of our all-time favorite African-American character actors. It's easy to see why Kotto is often cast as a soldier or a tough cop: even at age seventy, he struts through life in his powerfully built 6'4"-inch frame looking as if he owns the place. Although he resembles nothing less than a real-life John Shaft, with his strong features and a wide grin that hovers between gregarious and feral, he hasn't always had an easy time of it: in addition to being born with the wrong color skin to make it as a Hollywood superstar in the '50s and '60s, Yaphet Kotto is also a devout Jew, going back generations to his African roots.

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So many filmmakers have aped David Fincher’s true-grit style since Se7en came out that it’s hard to believe that movie was released a mere twelve years ago. It certainly feels like a lot longer. I haven’t seen it yet but from what I’ve heard Zodiac is on par with Fincher’s best work. His fascination with the story of the Zodiac killer is infectious in this interview with Ain’t It Cool. It’s a good read on the whole too. Fincher talks about the painful learning experience that was making Alien 3 — “Alien 3 probably made me more of a belligerent asshole than I otherwise would have been.” — and discusses his upcoming adaptations of Brian Bendis’ graphic novel Torso and Arthur C. Clark’s Rendezvous With Rama. Shame he isn’t doing Childhood’s End. I was just thinking about how awesome a movie of that would be last week.

What did you think of Zodiac, Screengrab readers?

The setup: To celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of the New World, Paramount Pictures needed a filmmaker who could be counted upon to create a handsome and commercial film about the great man and his momentous voyage. Who better than Ridley Scott, a dependable stylist best known for Alien and Blade Runner, and whose faltering career had been revived the prior year with the critical and audience favorite Thelma and Louise?

What went wrong: Scott, for all his directing skill, has always been a journeyman, making films from material originated by others. Because of this, the screenplays are usually the keys to his films' success. While no one would deny that Columbus' story lends itself well to cinema, the 1492 script (credited to Roselyne Bosch) simply isn't very good, and Scott was unfortunately unable to cover that up with style.

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We're pleased to have an exclusive clip from the new Twin Peaks "Gold Box Edition" DVD set, which finally supplants a couple of incomplete older releases. The old Season 1 box didn't even feature the pilot, a ridiculous omission that this set corrects with both the U.S. and European versions. It's also got a ton of bonus stuff (including, I'm delighted to report, Kyle MacLachlan's Twin Peaks sketch on SNL), assembled by DVD maestro Charles de Lauzirika, who produced the spectacular Alien Quadrilogy box and whose new Blade Runner set I am itching to get my hands on. In any case, it's good news, and you will surely relish this clip from the bonus features, of the costume contest at the "Return to Twin Peaks" fan convention. (That guy really looks like MacLachlan, no?) — Peter Smith

So everybody’s all a-twitter about the new Clooney flick Michael Clayton and how realistic and original it is. "Realistic" is a relative term, sure, but we’d like to note humbly that Clayton fits into a long line of movies about characters crusading against Evil Movie Corporations, some real, many fictional. The fact is, the Faceless Corporation is one of cinema’s easiest targets — cooking the books, offing all detractors, bribing officials, and usually killing its consumers. But maybe it’s about time we paid tribute to these parasitic, conglomerated baddies. They may not sneer like Lee Marvin, and they may not cackle like Gert Frobe, but without them, the annals of movie villainy would be a far more impoverished place. So here they are, The 22 Most Evil Corporations in Movie History.

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