The Screengrab

Bruce Willis in THE SIXTH SENSE (1999)



The big parlor game after The Sixth Sense hit theaters was asking your friends, “Did you guess the ending?” (As opposed to, say, The Village, where pretty much everyone guessed the dopey twist.) Some people claim they caught wise to Shyamalan’s scheme the second Donnie Wahlberg’s buff, naked psychopath shot Bruce Willis’ mumbly psychiatrist in the gut, but I’m not one of them...and as an online screenwriting teacher (at UCLA Extension...summer courses forming now!), I regularly praise the sleight-of-hand brio of the scene above. We see Willis’ character shot dead right in front of our eyes, then in the next scene it’s two years later and he’s sitting on a park bench, seemingly alive. It’s a neat trick, and for the majority of us who didn’t stop and go, “Hey, wait a minute...” it led to a clever, head-slapping reveal that Shyamalan achieved fair and square without cheating (hello, ridiculous Mission Impossible "Jon Voight" mask) or bending the willing suspension of disbelief to the breaking point (so...they set up a fake 19th century society with monsters but without antibiotics? Does anyone ever actually read Shyamalan’s scripts before they go into production?). (AO)

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With this week’s release of J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek, I thought the time was right to look back at an earlier big-screen installment of the franchise. But which one? Despite the enduring popularity of the Star Trek brand, few of the Trek movies could be classified as blockbusters. Even The Wrath of Khan, the current fan favorite among the original-cast adventures, only grossed a fairly unremarkable $78 million domestically. As of earlier this week, the biggest hit out of the Trek movies is the series’ fourth entry, 1986’s The Voyage Home, which was the only pre-Abrams Trek movie to gross upwards of $100 million.

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As J.J. Abrams’ mega-hyped, blockbuster-in-waiting reboot of the Star Trek franchise begins, we might be watching any other movie in the series. The usual massive space behemoth posing a threat to the continued existence of the galaxy has materialized, and Starfleet is racing to the rescue. As the responding vessel is not named Enterprise, it’s all reduced to fireballs and cinders in a matter of minutes. But something is different: the captain of the destroyed starship is named Kirk…George Kirk, whose son James Tiberius is born on an escaping shuttlecraft even as his father heroically goes down with the ship. There’s your back story: roguish adventurer Jim Kirk can’t help what he is – he was literally born into it.

All right, so there’s a little more back story than that.

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Hardcore Trekkers can debate whether J.J. Abrams has committed heresy with his franchise-restarter Star Trek. For those not deeply invested in Gene Roddenberry’s humanist sci-fi series, however, this summer spectacular will prove a largely thrilling surprise, its blend of humor, romance and action so kinetically orchestrated that calling out its shortcomings feels like excessive carping. By constructing a story around planet-devouring black holes that function as time-travel portals, Abrams not only affords himself a premise fit for grand intergalactic conflicts but also a handy explanation for why Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), McCoy (Karl Urban) and their fellow Starfleet peace-keepers only sort of resemble themselves. It’s an alternate reality Star Trek, and all the better for it, serving up the type of breakneck thrills and operatic excitement that’s been absent from this sci-fi universe since 1982’s Wrath of Khan. A distinctly modern blockbuster that comes on like gangbusters and rarely lets up, it re-confirms that Abrams – after energizing Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible saga in 2006 – is a director tailor-made for event pics, his sleek, lens-flared cinematographic style and vigorously to-the-point pacing well-suited for the demands of mega-budgeted tentpole extravaganzas.

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Yesterday we told you about Leonard Nimoy’s surprise appearance at the Alamo Drafthouse, where the new Star Trek movie unspooled in place of the previously announced screening of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The Alamo blog has the scoop on how the evening unfolded: “The opening credits of KHAN played out on the screen, and the audience was already psyched…In the very opening scene, though, something started to look off. The print we had was really bad, with long green lines and scratches through the whole thing. Before we’d made it more than ten lines into the dialogue, the scratches consumed the film, the picture got warped, and the film itself caught fire like the engine room of the Enterprise.” At this point, the screenwriters took the stage and…well, see for yourself. We have the video after the jump:

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Proving again that there is no truth in advertising, a theater full of Star Trek fans promised a shiny print of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan were instead forced at phaser point to sit through the new J.J. Abrams reboot of the franchise due in theaters next month. To say this is an outrage would be an understatement. I stayed up all night putting the finishing touches on my Ricardo Montalban breastplate! Do you know how many times I rehearsed Khan’s big speech so I’d be prepared to emote along as he announced, “I'll chase him round the moons of Nibia and round the Antares maelstrom and round perdition's flames before I give him up!”? And all that for nothing. I was so upset, I actually left my tricorder in the men’s room.

All right, I didn’t actually attend the screening last night. I’m always up for a little Khan, but I really don’t want to be in a theater full of people who are really, really up for a little Khan. Call me a hypocrite if you must, but now I know I missed out on a big surprise.

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15. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)



Yes, I know you never actually see the witch. Yes, my wife and my father and countless other people got motion sickness from all the whip-pan video camera shots, and many others felt ripped off when the scariest thing in the much-hyped “new horror classic” was a bundle of sticks. And, true, the sequel was a jaw-dropping fiasco. And yet, I defend The Blair Witch Project on many levels. First, it did its job and creeped the bejesus outta me. Now, maybe that’s because I grew up (and later got stoned) in the dark woods of New England, where we used to actually burn witches, and so I’m the ideal audience for a flick about the paranoid possibilities of a forest at night. I also saw the movie on the big screen, after watching the brilliant small screen promotional faux-documentary Curse of the Blair Witch, so I was up-to-speed on all the Elly Kedward/Rustin Parr mythology and ready to be seduced by the film's tone of ominous forboding (rather than waiting to be impressed by gory special effects or whatever the haters didn’t find in the film). Plus, directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez turned a $22,000 budget into a $200 million dollar indie smash and then disappeared without a trace, kinda like the actors from the movie...so maybe there really is a curse.

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The new Entertainment Weekly cover story has the scoop on J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, and while the cover photo doesn’t exactly set my phasers to stun (Kirk looks like he should be leading panty raids at Starfleet Academy), at least fans can be reassured that Abrams never much cared for Trek anyway. “‘All my smart friends liked Star Trek,’ he says. ‘'I preferred a more visceral experience.’ Which is exactly why he accepted Paramount's offer in 2005 to develop a new Trek flick; creatively, he was engaged by the possibility of a Star Trek movie ‘that grabbed me the way Star Wars did.’” Oh boy!

What Abrams does like about Star Trek is its “unabashed idealism. ‘I think a movie that shows people of various races working together and surviving hundreds of years from now is not a bad message to put out right now,’ says Abrams, whose infectiously upbeat energy and disdain for cynicism are among his most marked attributes… In a world where a movie as incredibly produced as The Dark Knight is raking in gazillions of dollars, Star Trek stands in stark contrast…It was important to me that optimism be cool again.’”

The EW piece goes on to drop a few hints about the story.

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On the occasion of the release of Scarlett Johansson's debut album, Matthew Oshinsky has assembled a handy wrap-ups of actors, or at least professional camera subjects, turned vocalists. It comes divided into categories: "the teenyboppers" (Annette Funicello, David Cassidy, Hillary Duff); "former child stars" (a category that, perhaps surprisingly, seems to be the likeliest to yield an actual recording career, along the lines of those enjoyed by Janet Jackson, Phil Collins, and Alanis Morissette); and my personal favorite, "former soap stars" (including Rick Springfield, who Oshinsky notes "was already a popular singer in his native Australia when he suddenly found himself on millions of afternoon TV screens in 1981 [on General Hospital] and learned that he didn’t know what popularity meant"). For those fully fledged adult mainstream celebrities who decide that this is their big chance to show that they've still got what they had at the high school talent show, Oshinsky favors the label "Meatheads." Here we find your Russell Crowes, your Eddie Murphys, your Steven Seagals (no shit, really!?), and Bruce Willis, whose 1987 Motown release The Return of Bruno (with backup work by Booker T. Jones and members of the Temptations) tried to hedge its bets by presenting itself as a "soundtrack" to an HBO special in which Willis pretended that he was pretending to be a legendary white soul singer on the comeback trail. He thus hedged his bets in a way that, in this specialized field, passed for clever, inviting people who noticed that his music sucked to treat the whole thing as a joke. His hideous, malformed cover of the Staples Singers' "Respect Yourself" made it to number five on the charts anyway. If I live to be a thousand, I will never understand how anyone could miss the 1980s.

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Everyone’s talking about all the comic book movies infesting theaters this summer, but there’s another pop culture invasion afoot – from Speed Racer to Sex and the City to Get Smart! and the second X-Files movie, small-screen fare is taking over the multiplex. This is nothing new, of course, but it is a handy excuse for your friendly neighborhood Screengrabbers to look back at the history of TV-to-movie transitions and pluck a few diamonds out of a deep, dark mine.

THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987)



Technically, Brian De Palma’s stylish, iconic film version of The Untouchables isn’t based on the hit TV show from the early 1960s; it’s based on incorruptible federal agent Elliot Ness’ book of the same name. But the TV show and the movie both sprang from the same source material, and that’s good enough for us. Besides, DePalma adapted many of the same narrative tropes as the television show: the morally inflexible Ness, his wise old streetwise mentor, and his diverse band of wisecracking cops aping the stock players in WWII movies. What DePalma did with them, however, is what made the movie great: elevating the entire conflict beyond the simple good guy/bad guy cops and robbers drama of the TV show, he turned it into grand opera, nothing less than an epic, tragic conflict between Al Capone as a smiling Satan and Ness himself as a tortured Jesus. And because it’s sly postmodernist Brian De Palma behind the camera, he couldn’t help winking at the audience from time to time, whether he was blatantly ripping off – er, paying homage to – the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin in the thrilling train station shootout or tipping the hand of his entire approach with Capone ordering a brutal execution as he tearfully watches Pagliacci at the theater. Gone are the cramped sets and gritty feel of the series, replaced by grand, chasm-like buildings and swooping outside shots; gone is the cocky, confident Ness of Robert Stack, set aside by a tortured Kevin Costner in what would be one of the last coherent performances of his career. Capone is a jolly Lucifer, and Frank Nitti (played by the sallow, vampire-faced Billy Drago) is his lizardlike assassin. Adding, on top of the whole thing, a classic, catchy, percussive score by none other than Ennio Morricone, and De Palma – the director so many people love to hate – had finally scored the first major blockbuster hit of his career.

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