In the back and forth that finally resulted in last week's list of the Screengrab's favorite leading men [favorite leading ladies list is being compiled now, will your favorites make the cut!?], one name that never seemed to come up was that of Christopher Walken. I cannot speak for my colleagues, but I know that one reason that Walken's name never passed my own lips was that...well, I hate to say that I am not worthy, but it's kind of like that. It's not even that Walken is such a great actor (though on many occasions he has proven himself to be just that) but that he's turned into such a strange mixture of artist, self-parodying comedian, cultural icon, and "X" the unknown: who wants to take on a subject that slippery? The answer to that last question turns out to be Patrick O'Sullivan, a San Francisco standup comic and creator of (in the words of Lisa Marks in the Guardian) "a partly scripted, partly improvised, partly biographical" Los Angeles stage show called All About Walken. O'Sullivan has his own measure of Walken's place in our world: "Here was a man doing big-budget movies, independent movies, music videos, Saturday Night Live - and standups were impersonating him. So all around there was this melding of Walken and pop culture. Not everyone knows his name, but they know his persona, from little kids who know what 'More cowbell!' means, to 65-year-olds who admired him in The Deer Hunter. He floats across it all."

Read More...

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975)



By the time I first encountered the film version of Richard O’Brien’s bizarre musical paean to ‘50s horror movies and polymorphous perversity, it was already a well-established cult classic, regularly attended by freaks and frat boys, geeks and fad-of-the-week trendies. But underneath the audience-participation spectacle was a gleefully subversive last gasp celebration of gender-blind free love (before pop culture sexuality became more repressive yet somehow simultaneously more commodified, fetishized and pervasive in the neo-con '80s and '90s). The invocation of Tim Curry’s infamous sweet transvestite Dr. Frank-n-Furter to “Give yourself over to absolute pleasure” became highly questionable advice in the AIDS era; even in the no-holes-barred world of the film's Transsexual Transylvanians, Frank’s lifestyle’s too extreme (and the character, like many overreaching sensualists before him, meets a tragic demise). Yet, the Rocky cult continues to flourish, years after its early ‘80s heyday, with screenings often serving as safe havens for GLBT (and straight!) misfits seeking community, acceptance and glamour in the midst of a “Science Fiction Double Feature” lost in time, lost in space and meaning. (Mee-eeaaaaa-nnniiinnnggg!!!!)

Read More...

As a professional film critic, it is my most sacred duty to deliver honest, truthful assessments of the films I am assigned to see — and to review them fairly without prejudice or favor.  It would be a betrayal of my professional and personal standards to review, positively or negatively, a film without actually seeing it. Having said that, here’s a prediction: Saw IV, which opens today nationwide after having been completed approximately three days ago, is going to suck. Now, I say this without having seen Saw IV; for that matter, I say this without having seen Saw I, Saw II or Saw III. For all I know, they’re cinematic masterworks the likes of which Orson Welles could never dare to dream. But let’s face it: the fourth installment in any series, let alone one as misbegotten as the Saw series, has the deck stacked against it from the jump-off. The number of Part 4s that have been worth watching can be counted on one hand; it just so happens that I have five fingers on my left hand, so here’s five fours that aren’t complete wastes of time.

Read More...