The Screengrab

Lest we forget, Elvis Presley was once a movie star.  In fact, as malicious movie writer Joe Queenan put it, Elvis -- in his spare time from being the biggest rock and roll star in the history of the world -- also made dozens of the world movies of all time.  Elvis' movie work was noteworthy not only for its poor quality as film (honestly, folks, he turned out one stinkeroo after another; he made thirty-one movies as an actor, and maybe three of them are even remotely worth watching), but for their poor quality as soundtracks.  Considering that almost all of his movies were musicals -- because, believe me, nobody was hiring the guy for his acting chops -- they produced very few good songs.  Elvis had tons of great singles, but hardly any of them came from his movies.  Jailhouse Rock was a notable exception.

Made in 1957 with workmanlike pro Richard Thorpe at the helm, Jailhouse Rock was Elvis' third movie as a leading man, and one of his only tolerable ones.  He plays Vince Everett, a sneering yet charming hillbilly who serves a stint in the joint for involuntary manslaughter.  While there, he writes the title song, invents a hot dance craze to go along with it, and gets out of jail just in time to romance snooty society dame Judy Tyler.  It's pretty standard fare, and plenty hokey at that, but it's at least snappy and enjoyable instead of a joyless slog like most of his movies.  (It also had a tragic dimension -- Elvis' co-star Tyler died in a car wreck only three days after the film wrapped, and he refused to see it out of respect for her, thus ensuring he never got to see one of his only decent big-screen appearances.)  As Queenan has astutely noted, it's not as if we were particularly robbed of a bunch of great performances by the rotten scripts Colonel Tom Parker foisted on Elvis, but in the early days at least, he was occasionally cast in roles that played to his strengths as a rockabilly performer and allowed him to have fun with his roles.  Elvis also choreographed the dance number, basing it not on the formal dance routine called for in the script but his own hip-swinging moves of the day. Citizen Kane it ain't, but if you insist on seeing an Elvis movie, you could do worse.  Boy, could you do worse.

Read More...

Boy, what's up with all the Woody Allen posts this week?  I mean, sure, he's got a new movie opening today (Vicki Cristina Barcelona), and sure, a lot of critics are claiming it's his best work in a decade.  But someone says that every decade, and have been doing so for approximately four decades.  So who is this jerk who's so obsessed with the Wood-man, that he keeps forcing Screengrab readers to share his mania?  Oh, right -- it's me.  It may surprise you to learn that, given my fascination with the former Mssr. Konigsberg, I am not especially a huge fan of his work, and I'm certainly not one of his more vociferous defenders.  I think he's mistaken about being a Serious Artist, which gets in the way of his being one of the funniest men of his generation; he's got a major Mary Sue complex; he's somewhat technically limited as a director and receives a lot of credit for work that is properly given to his cinematographers; and I agree with Joe Queenan that his work is literally sophomoric -- the intellectual, moral and emotional themes in his movies rarely get past the level of someone who, like Woody himself, dropped out of college his sophomore year.  But in Annie Hall and Manhattan, he made two of the best movies of the 1970s; he's one of the finest comic minds on the planet; and he's managed to make a career for himself so robust that he's made an average of a movie a year for 30 years, which, no matter how similar the themes in said movies, is something like a miracle.  So, after you've watched Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson make out in the Wood-man's latest masterpiece, why not rent five more of my favorites, and make it a festival?

WHAT'S UP, TIGER LILY?  (1966)

The fact that the directorial debut of a man many people consider the greatest moviemaker of his generation was little more than a cheap Chinese action-thriler with jokey dialogue dubbed in over it is shocking to some people.  It's as if someone told you that thumbocentric auteur/Kung Pow!  Enter the Fist director Steve Oedekerk grew up to be Jean-Luc Godard.  But it's true:  for his very first film in 1966, Woody Allen got the rights to a junk chop-socky called Key of Keys from American International Pictures, who had judged its plot too elaborate.  Woody and his cast simply chucked the damn plot out the window and turned the entire thing into a goofball James Bond parody, which the studio padded out with some extraneous nonsense and a couple of pop songs by the Lovin' Spoonful (the biggest brush that Woody would ever again have with modern popular culture), released, and went on to make a fortune off of.  What's even more surprising than the fact that What's Up, Tiger Lily? was Woody Allen's first movie as a 'director' is that it works so well -- it's tightly paced, contains tons of funny gags (many of which seemed a lot fresher than when bad comedians and internet wags recycled them 40 years later on the internet and in movie theatres).  A fun, funny piece of detournment , no matter how you view Allen's later career.     

Read More...

One reason Woody Allen drives critics crazy these days – aside from his increasingly flaccid self-parodies posing as new movies, of course – is that there’s nothing they can do to hurt him. One of the recurring character types in his “serious” efforts is the guy who gets away with murder, never to receive his comeuppance. Clearly a lot of people think Allen is that guy. It’s not so much that he survived the whole Mia Farrow/Soon-Yi contretemps; in Allen’s case, he keeps getting away with making movies that are murder to sit through.

The British papers are particularly harsh in this assessment, probably because the critically excoriated Cassandra’s Dream is just now reaching London theaters. Interviewing Allen for The Times, James Mottrom comes off as a man beating his heat against a brick wall.

Read More...

Professional cranky bastard Joe Queenan surveys the current contenders for the title of worst movie ever made and finds them lacking. He is appalled that a walking answer to a trivia-quiz lightning round like Paris Hilton can take a few weeks off from doing nothing to doing nothing in front of a camera crew, and that the results can be used to scare people away from theaters for a weekend or two in the late winter season, and this gets called the worst movie ever made, as if enough work had gone into it for it to qualify as a movie, let alone the worst anything. "That is not fair," he grrumbles. "It is not fair to Kevin Costner, it is not fair to Jennifer Lopez, and it is certainly not fair to Madonna. Though it is a natural impulse to believe that the excruciating film one is watching today is on a par with the excruciating films of yesterday, this is a slight to those who have worked long and hard to make movies so moronic that the public will still be talking about them decades later. Anyone can make a bad movie; Kate Hudson and Adam Sandler make them by the fistful." Queenan saves his lowest accolades for movies that are shown real misguided imagination and daring in their very conception. As examples, he cites Futz!, a 1969 hippie extravaganza based on an Off-Broadway play, written in verse, about a farmer whose very close relationship with his pig meets with the disapproval of his neighbors.

Read More...