The Screengrab

This week, the Screengrab is honoring "the 15 Top Bars of Cinema", which provides us with a handy occasion to remember many filmmakers' favorite literary drunk, Charles Bukowski. Aside from the best-known Bukowksi-based movie, the 1987 Barfly (which Bukowski wrote in tribute to himself), the man has been well-represented on-screen in such films as the 1981 Tales of Ordinary Madness (in which his alter ego--"Charles Serking" he's called this time--is playing by an enthusiastically rutting Ben Gazzara) and the more recent Factotum starring Matt Dillon, as well as the posthumously assembled documentary Bukowski: Born Into This, which is full of footage of the man himself, explaining the world to the camera to kill time while wondering when his good friend Peaches is going to call. Worth tracking down: J. J. Villard's 2003, award-winning animated short Son of Satan, a heart-warming tale of cruel youth based on a Bukowski story. (We're still holding out hope that we might someday get to see the 1977 Supervan, in which Bukowski is said to have a small, uncredited role as "Wet T-Short Contest Water Boy.") The real ringer in the Bukowski filmography is the 1987 Belgian feature Love Is a Dog from Hell, a sensitive three-part story about a man with a romantic spirit who longs to be in love and to be loved but whose inability to meet the real world halfway dooms him to a life of terminal loneliness. It was directed by Dominique Deruddre, who used Bukowksi's story "The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California" as the basis for a short film and then came up with the other two episodes as lead-ins to the concluding episode so that he could expand it to a feature. It's about how the adult Harry (Josse De Pauw), a ruined drunk in his early thirties, finds one night of bliss with a beautiful woman who can't reject him--a corpse (Florence Beliard) that he and a buddy swipe from the back of a hearse.

Read More...

American moviegoers can't get enough of the 1980s, apparently. Those of us who had to live through it the first time remember it primarily as a time of bad metal, worse sitcoms, and waiting around to see what dumb-ass thing Ronald Reagan would say next, but to the generations that followed, it is a time for richly veined cultural nostalgia. From what we can recollect through the haze of drugs and alcohol that coat our memories of the decade, the hallmark of 1980s cinema was very loud explosions punctuated by the occasional car chase or wise-cracking black transvestite. It's not something we thought anyone would be eager to repeat, and yet there have been, in recent memory, new installments of the Die Hard and Rocky franchises; a new TV series based on The Terminator; an upcoming Indiana Jones picture; and, opening all across the country this Friday, a new Rambo movie. Even the Screengrab is getting into the act, with Gabriel Mckee posting his top ten action heroes who deserve a comeback, many of whom hail from the Decade That Time Refuses To Forget. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em: so says Take Five as we present a fistful of '80s action movies that we. . . well, we don't love, exactly, but we at least look back on with something less than severe brain trauma.

ROCKY III (1982)

Sure, the first movie had heart and soul. And the second movie had a ruthless determination to capitalize on the first movie's heart and soul. But do you know what they didn't have? Do you know what they lacked, which made the third installment unquestionably the best of all the Rocky movies? That's right: MR. T. They didn't have Mr. T, and as such, they suffered, as do all artistic projects not involving Mr. T. Here's a little secret they don't teach you at film school: sure, Citizen Kane might have been the greatest movie of all time — but it would have been even better if it had been able to feature Mr. T yelling at people. And Rocky III, whatever its other faults — and it had hundreds, from its hamhanded TV-movie direction (by Sly himself) to its predictable storyline — at least gave us Mr. T yelling at people in abundance. When his Clubber Lang (a savage, media-loathing brute allegedly inspired by young George Foreman) wasn't yelling at people, he was beating people up, and Rocky III brings us the double pleasure of seeing Sylvester Stallone clobbered by Clubber and Hulk Hogan as "Thunderlips". Just turn it off halfway through.

Read More...