Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler opens across the country this weekend, and in addition to being hailed as a return to form for the Pi director and a triumphant comeback for shooting star Mickey Rourke, it's also one of an increasingly large number of acclaimed films -- both narrative and documentary -- to deal with professional wrestling.  High culture has always had a problematic relationship with rasslin'; it's popularity is undeniable but has always upset the intellectuals of the sporting press, who delight in reminding people that it isn't real, as if its fans don't already know that.  It can be lowest-common-denominator entertainment for sub-morons, but it also carries an undeniable emotional heft and a sort of physicalized symbolism that was remarked on at great length by no less august a personage than Roland Barthes, who wrote a famous essay about it for his book Mythologies.  And now, years after it was considered an activity significantly less respectable than bowling or roller derby -- the great 'untouchable' sports of the 1950s -- a number of directors have found its combination of artifice and wounded reality irresistible.  Here's some of our favorite movies that make reference to life inside the squared circle.

BARTON FINK (1991)

In the Coen Brothers' masterpiece about the art of writing and the way crafting fiction gets in the way of seeing reality, wrestling is used as a metaphor by the highfalutin playwright Barton Fink to symbolize class struggle -- but his inability to complete a simple screenplay in the wrestling genre also serves as a metaphor for his creative blockage.  While he seems almost physically incapable of putting words on paper, his flustered producer Ben Geisler (Tony Shalhoub) delivers a classically bewildered line:  "Wallace Beery!  Wrestling picture!  Whattya want, a road map?"  Watching the moral and physical struggles of wrestling in stark black and white on cheap B-picture dailies, Fink still can't think of anything -- and is typically dismissive and oblivious when his neighbor Charlie tries to show him a few moves.  John Goodman's Charlie will eventually teach him a lesson he'll never forget.

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Gus Van Sant is certainly one of the most curious figures in contemporary American cinema.  He pioneered a very specific breed of indie filmmaking before it even had a name, but his forays into mainstream cinema have alternated between clever successes and embarrassing failures.  He gives some of the oddest interviews in Hollywood (compared to him, David Lynch is a downright pedestrian chit-chatter), and he's as dedicated to constant reinvention -- or at least refinement -- as anyone in the industry.  And his career would seem downright schizophrenic if it weren't so marked by intensely personal qualities; he's done everything from big, Oscar-baiting biopics (such as Milk, his take on the rise and demise of openly gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk) to small, artsy, improvised tales with almost no commercial potential.  He's equally capable of having his characters spout unadulterated Shakespeare and having them say nothing at all for endless minutes of screen time, and make both choices seem perfectly natural.  He has a curiously critical eye towards his own work -- that is to say, it's not curious that he is self-critical, but rather it's curious how much he talks like a film critic; many of his longer discussions with journalists have sounded more like a well-informed film critic discussing Gus Van Sant's work than it does a director talking about himself.  His stabs at mainstream credibility have yielded decidedly mixed results; his successes have been noteworthy (see below), but his failures, especially flattened-out duds like Finding Forrester and Good Will Hunting, and an utterly pointless remake of Psycho, have been spectacular.  Through it all, he's remained one of the film industry's hardest men to figure out, but it seems no one ever tires of watching what his next move will be.  Here's five of our favorites by the Prince of Portland.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (1991)

Mala Noche was the movie that made the underground sit up and take notice of Gus Van Sant's talent; Drugstore Cowboy won over the burgeoning indie world and made him a critic's darling.  But the daring, explosively risky My Own Private Idaho was the movie that convinced me that I was seeing the work of an American genius in the making.  The story of two sad, sincere male hustlers (played by River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves), it blended elements of Shakespearean drama, class warfare, transgressive queen cinema, and pure street poetry in a way that so clearly shouldn't have worked that it's downright amazing how well it did.   Van Sant crammed the movie with real characters from his beloved Portland and made an intensely personal film that nonetheless hit everyone who saw it right where they lived.

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Film critics often love character actors more than leading men or women.  With good cause, too: as we saw with our Leading Men and Leading Ladies Top 25 lists, some of the people at the top of the ticket couldn't act their way out of a wet paper bag.  But they have charisma in spades, and that's what it takes for a leading actor to make the big bucks.  Character actors, on the other hand, are the craftsmen of the profession, learning how to bring their own sense of self to many different roles.  They have charisma, too, but it's a weird, flawed charisma. Character actors seem more like regular people, although they are usually the hardest-working actors in the trade.  They often don't have the luxury of choosing their projects, and many seem happy to be earning a paycheck.  But they don't just spin their wheels, no.  They bring their game to even the paltriest of projects.  For them, acting is about the love.

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When a franchise has legs, the people who own it whip it so hard that those legs inevitably come off.  That doesn't keep them from flogging its backside, of course; there have been eleven Friday the Thirteenth movies, eight Freddy Krueger flicks, and so many James Bond movies that they're starting to use grocery lists written by Ian Fleming on the back of cocktail napkins as their source material.  The Saw franchise is already on its fifth installment, despite the fact that the first movie opened roughly three weeks ago, and I'm pretty sure they were filming the sixth and seventh movies at the craft table of the set of the fifth one.  Compared to this level of sequel overinflation, you might think that the venerable Halloween franchise is a virtual model of restraint.  That's what I thought, anyway, when I decided to watch every single one of them in a row.  Frankly, I didn't even think there was enough of it to make a Take Five; I was completely convinced that the ultra-bizarre Halloween III had killed the thing off until Rob Zombie decided to bring it back with his 2007 remake of the original.  It turns out there were five more sequels before the White Zombie frontman took a swing at reviving Michael Myers.  A chilling prospect, but lucky you:  this Halloween, you won't have to read my mini-reviews of each one.  The first five will do, but believe me:  simply living in a world that has Halloween 6:  The Curse of Michael Myers in it should scare you more than anything else about the holiday.

HALLOWEEN (1978)

Often credited as the movie that kick-started the whole slasher-film genre, Halloween doesn't really deserve that title.  For one thing, it's too good.  Tautly directed by John Carpenter, and featuring performances by genuine movie actors like Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasance, Halloween was likewise a big-budget picture with a canny script, a plausible if terrifying villain, and actual production values.  The future would belong to movies like Friday the Thirteenth, which would be released a few years later and combine all the low-budget qualities of an indie production with the bloody aesthetic of Carpenter's best work, but none of the smarts or skills.  If it can't lay claim to being the progenitor of the genre, though, Halloween can at least say that it's one of the best; it still holds up years later, and makes what came after that more of a waste.

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Oliver Stone's hastily assembled, curiously timed film biography of George W. Bush, W., opens everywhere today.  "Why?" is a question for the ages; Bush is not only still alive, he's still President of the United States, and the movie was completed before one of the major events of his administration actually happened.  Couldn't Stone have waited a few years?  After all, Jim Morrison had been in the ground for two decades before Stone got around to making a crappy movie about him.  Our own Scott Von Doviak has already done the heavy lifting of actually seeing W., and his review suggests that it's another non-triumph for Ollie; but in this case, as much as we may find the guy off-putting, Take Five comes to praise Stone, not to bury him.  As we do every time he comes out with a new movie, we float our favorite theory about the man:  that he's actually a very good writer who failed upwards and became a very mediocre director, a living example of the Peter Principle.  With the sole (and bewildering) exception of Evita, Oliver Stone hasn't written a movie he didn't also direct in over twenty years; but lest we forget, in his early years, Stone was considered a top-notch screenwriter who was expert at plucking the key themes out of someone else's vision -- making them lean, mean, and, perhaps most memorably, violent in an incredibly compelling way.  So today, we're going to look at five movies which Stone didn't direct, but whose screenplays he fully or partly wrote -- almost all of which we like more than most of the films where he was behind the camera.

MIDNIGHT EXPRESS (1978)

Directed by the erratic Alan Parker, the infamous, controversial Midnight Express was a 32-year-old Oliver Stone's first major motion picture as a screenwriter.  It went on to become a huge box office success, as well as spurring a major moral panic over drug smuggling and making the words "Turkish prison" as paralyzing as an ice cube down the back of the shirt.  Unsurprisingly, in later years, it became clear that Stone's screenplay was a wildly over-the-top exaggeration full of fabrications, distortions and outright nonsense, despite its claim of being based on a true story; even the real-life Billy Hayes repudiated it.  But that was, and to some extent still is, the genius of Oliver Stone:  he could extrapolate the juciest meat of a story and sizzle it up into an absurd paranoid fantasy you couldn't help but devour.

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Opening this Friday, Neil Burger's The Lucky Ones is a bit of a gamble as a follow-up to The Illusionist.  Following the plight of three soldiers recently returned from Iraq (played by Tim Robbins, Michael Pena and Rachel McAdams), it quickly turns into a sort of social statement-cum-sign o' the times story as they find themselves on a road trip together across the country.  It's hard to predict how The Lucky Ones will be received; Iraq movies are always a crapshoot, and the movie's curious blend of comedy and drama may not fit in with the subject matter.  But it's always fun to see a new road movie, especially this late in the year when the possibility taking real-world road trips becomes more and more daunting.  Road pictures have a long and storied history in Hollywood, and filmmakers have managed to fold everything from bone-chilling noir to high-concept comedy to existential drama into the format.  America is especially adept at making road pictures, not only because of the grand canvas that is the national geography, but because of our total immersion in car culture.  Here's five of our favorites.

DETOUR (1945)

Film noir, despite its association with the urban environment, was never afraid to take its show on the road as long as there was a nice juicy crime at the center of the story, and Detour serves up a doozy.  A grade-z Poverty Row picture made for the cost of Clark Gable's lunch, Detour nonetheless proved to be one of the most effective noir films of its day, thanks to its relentless, grubby energy.  Tom Neal, who starts the picture looking like he's had his insides scooped out and just gets worse from there, plays a sad-sack piano player who just wants to get to the west coast so he can be united with his former flame.  But along the way he gets framed for murder after running afoul of Ann Savage in one of the most terrifying femme fatale roles of all time.  A terrific, unsparingly bleak little film that proves a little can go a long way.

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Neil LaBute's new movie, Lakeview Terrace, opens this Friday.  Critical opinion is still split, but critical opinion will have its say soon enough about whether the director is returning to the promising form he showed in In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, or whether he's just cranking out a cheap thriller because he wants to buy a new boat.  Lakeview Terrace finds Samuel L. Jackson, Hollywood's default angry black man, in the role of a mean-tempered, menacing L.A. cop who takes offense to an interracial couple (played by Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) who move in next door to him.  The idea of crooked cops has always been an appealing one to people who write thrillers; the idea of the very people charged with protecting the innocent being the ones who might hurt them has powerful appeal, and plenty of filmmakers -- Alfred Hitchcock comes immediately to mind -- have put their ambivalent feelings about the police front and center in their movies.  By the same token, however, due to the strict content restrictions of post-Code Hollywood, it was a taboo subject for decades; with very few exceptions, a crooked or evil cop was one of the very few things it was absolutely verboten to show on screen.  When the code era passed, almost as if to make up for lost time, dozens of scriptwriters and directors began to explore the idea of the cop who betrayed the ideals he was sworn to uphold, and the bad cop genre was born.  Here's five of the best.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950)

John Huston's masterful ensemble picture about a daring, carefully calculated jewel theft gone awry is one of the greatest noir films ever made, with an incredible cast (headed by Sterling Hayden as the iron-willed thug Dix Handley and Sam Jaffe as the brilliant crook Doc Riedenschneider) and a taut, fatalistic atmosphere that keeps you glued to the screen.  But it's also a fine example of how movies had to creep around the concept of the bad cop at the height of the Hays Code:  although it's made clear that Barry Kelley's Lt. Ditrich is on the make, and that his accepting bribes from hoods helps crime flourish, the idea of a crooked policeman being so plainly presented ran afoul of the Code.  So a scene was filmed in which his incorruptible chief set him on the straight an narrow, and the end coda assures the viewer that such crooked cops are an aberration that will always be found out and punished, rather than the norm.

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The hotly anticipated release of Towelhead, the controversial Alan Ball adaptation of Alicia Erian's well-received coming of age novel about a young Arab-American girl, gives me a chance to finally feature one of my all-time favorite subjects in a Friday Take Five:  the horrendous stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood films.  Naturally, I'll be hitting the theaters bright and early this weekend to get my ticket to Towelhead; my hopes are high that it will do a small part to reverse the dismally one-dimensional portrayal of Arabs in cinema since the invention of the medium.  (It would have been nice if they could have gotten an actual Arab-American actress to play the lead, but that's a rant for another day.)  One of Thomas Edison's very first moving pictures portrayed a seductive odalisque, and ever since then, Arabs have been portrayed on screen as one of what Mazin Q'umsiyeh of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee calls "the three Bs":  belly dancers, billionaires, or bombers.  Since the late 1970s, when blacks made it known they were a bit tired of being Hollywood's favorite punching bag, Arabs have been killed on screen at a pace that far outstrips the slaughter of Indians in movie Westerns, and with a very few exceptions (sala'am, Tony Shalhoub), if you're an Arab in the movie business, if you don't play a terrorist, you don't work.  So I'm off to the multiplex, hoping that Towelhead can start to clean up the mess made by movies like these.

BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985)

Although it's one of the most beloved comedies of the '80s, Back to the Future didn't win a lot of friends in the Arab-American community for its mindless portrayal of north African terrorists.  Typically, the Arab villains are portrayed as both sinister (gunning down poor old Doc Brown and, in so doing, teaching a whole generation of American kids to hiss at the swarthy bearded kaffiyeah-wearing dirtbags) and incompetent (so dumb that it took them the whole movie to figure out that they'd been sold a "shiny bomb casing filled with pinball machine parts).  Worse still, that's not even the movie's biggest ethnic crime:  there's that whole business of whitebread Michael J. Fox teaching black people about rock 'n' roll...

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Usually, the Screengrab's Take Five feature is inspired by some new release coming out the day we go to press.  However, sometimes, if the raft of new releases in relatively uninspiring or inappropriate, we go with a different sort of them, and since today is the start of Labor Day weekend, what better time to salute organized labor?  After all, some of us are union men ourselves (hey, the National Writer's Union is too a real union!  We're part of the United Auto Workers for some reason!); and what with the writer's strike earlier this year that brought the movie business to a near-halt, and the possibility of an actor's strike later in the year coming along to finish what the writer's strike started, America hasn't been this aware of what organized labor is up to in years!  Unfortunately, unless Vin Diesel's mercenary Thoorop in Babylon A.D. happens to be a dues-paying member of the International Brotherhood of Hired Killers & Machinegun Operators, there's no new released this holiday weekend that are even remotely about unions or the labor struggle.  But that doesn't mean we can't dip back into our video vaults and come up with five fine flicks about working-class struggle for your Labor Day enjoyment.  (And, as a special treat before you go back to work on Tuesday, take a few hours to watch Barbara Kopple's masterful Harlan County U.S.A., referenced in last week's Take Five.)  Happy Labor Day, readers!

MATEWAN (1987)

Possibly John Sayles' finest film, Matewan depicts -- with the heart of a union man and the eye of an artist -- the brutal struggle to unionize among the West Virginia coal miners of the 1920s, one of the bloodiest periods in the history of organized labor.  Based on the Matewan Massacre of 1920 and featuring breathtaking cinematography by Haskell Wexler, Matewan' s powerful story is bouyed by wall-to-wall terrific performances by Chris Cooper, David Strathairn, James Earl Jones, and a young Will Oldham, in his pre-rock star days.  Essential.

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Patrick Creadon’s I.O.U.S.A., a documentary about the massive national debt being accrued by the United States, opens in limited release today.  Using charts, graphs, and mountains of economics statistics, Creadon – the man who brought us the charming crossword puzzle documentary Wordplay – has essentially created An Inconvenient Truth 2:  The Doomsday Debt.  In the film, which features guest appearances from a pantheon of econ-nerd luminaries including mega-investor Warren Buffet, Comptroller General David M. Walker, and celebrated presidential candidate/crazy person Ron Paul, we are shown how our unthinkably huge national debt may lead to war, inflation, the collapse of our international alliances, economic catastrophe, dogs and cats living together, and mass hysteria.  But hey, every movie with those three wonderful letters ‘U.S.A.’ in the title has to be about how we’re all doomed because of the short-sighted policies of warmongering, tax-cutting, pork-barreling, corporate-welfare-loving presidential administrations!  Maybe it’s just some residual patriotism from the Fourth of July, but this movie inspired us to create a Take Five featuring other ‘U.S.A’ movies that aren’t quite so bleak.  Or, at least, don’t have so many pie charts.

UNDERWORLD U.S.A. (1961)

A little-seen late-period noir from the underrated Sam Fuller, Underworld U.S.A. is a flawed film, particularly in its underwhelming cast, predictable action, and sometimes hokey dialogue.  But Cliff Robertson is dynamite as Tolly Devlin, a man who, after seeing his father murdered by two-bit hoods, decided that revenge is a dish served straight out of the freezer, as he spends the next 20 years infiltrating their organization.

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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.     

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Larry Bishop's Hell Ride opens in limited release this week.  Advance buzz about the retroriffic biker exploitation flick isn't great, despite the fact that the movie features one of the most mindlessly entertaining trailers of recent years.  Still, it's good to see the biker movie, a cultural leftover from the 1960s that has remained with us despite the transition of Harley culture from last refuge of dangerous lowlifes to weekend amusement of the upper middle class, survive in some form or another.  For over 40 years, the lone, leather-clad biker on a flipped-back hog or amped-up chopper has been one of Hollywood's most enduring archetypes, used for everything fom a means to instill mindless terror to cheap comedy relief to, all too often, both.  If Hell Ride does nothing more than give Michael Madsen a chance to play an all-new variant on his standard violent lowlife character, it will at least keep this archetype alive.   Though, given that plenty of aging Tinseltown stars, writers and producers are themselves motorcycle enthusiasts, it's probably not in any immediate danger anyway.  While you're waiting for Hell Ride to come to your local theater -- or, more likely, given its dismal advance hype, while you're waiting for it to show up at your local video rental bargain bin -- here's five more biker movies to help you unleash your inner scuzzball. 

THE WILD ONE (1953)

Laslo Benedik's teen-menace movie started it all, in more ways than one.  Not only was it the first major motion picture to deal with the alleged menace of out-of-countrol outlaw biker gangs (which, a little over ten years later, would developed into a full-blown moral panic, as exquisitely detailed in Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels), but it was one of the first movies to present us with the raw sexual charisma and magnetic, brooding talents of young Marlon Brando; it almost single-handedly started the 1950s craze among teen boys for leather jackets; and each gang in the film lent a name to a rock band (Brando's Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Lee Marvin's Beatles).  The events of the film -- which is still highly entertaining today, despite literally decades of imitators -- involve the takeover of a small California town by rival gangs of outlaw bikers; based on a story in Harper's (which was itself based on a real-life incident in Hollister, CA in 1947), it also starts a less pleasign tradition:  that of ridiculously overstating the biker menace to appeal to your audience.  Not only were the events in Hollister terribly mild compared to the dramatization in The Wild One (there was no real violence, and very little vandalism or criminal behavior), but the bikers involved were invited back a number of times over the years until it became something of a local tradition.

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As you may have heard unless you've just gotten back from an alternate dimension with no public relations industry, The Dark Knight opens this weekend, and even our resident skeptic Scott Von Doviak is hailing Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker as one of the pinnacles of big-screen malevolance.  Batman is the perfect illustration of the principle that a hero is only as good as his villains; the Clown Prince of Crime is the outstanding member of an unforgettable rogue's gallery that throws the lonely heroism of Bruce Wayne into sharp relief by illustrating the other facets of his personality and demonstrating how terrible he might have been had he not taken the path of righteousness.  Indeed, there are any number of genres, from true crime to film noir to serial thrillers to even Shakespearean tragedy, that prove that a story is only as strong as its most detestable character.  Crime, as the man once said, is only a left-handed form of human endeavor, and for every enigmatic nihilist like the Joker who simply wants to watch the world burn, there's a figure whose vileness and evil are the result of a good man gone just a little bit bad.  If your showing of The Dark Knight is sold out, here's five movies featuring some of our favorite big-screen villains to tide you over until you get to hear Ledger's deadly cackle for yourself.

THE STEPFATHER (1987)

These days, Terry O'Quinn is best known for his portrayal of John Locke, the mysteriously healed castaway from Lost  who can be both hero and villain as he attempts to forge a mystical connection with the island.  But 20 years ago, when the veteran stage actor first came to the attention of the moviegoing public, it was in this smart little thriller about a man so obsessed with having the perfect family that he was willing to kill to get it.  His face an affable blank, O'Quinn goes about his father-knows-best routine with barely a harsh word for anything, until something goes wrong.  That's when the devil inside him comes up, and he moves quickly from tearing up his tool room to butchering his whole family.  O'Quinn's tightly controlled performance here is what makes the movie, and his quiet intensity is what makes it so devastatingly effective when he temporarily forgets the careful fiction he's made of his life and asks, with genuine confusion, "Who am I here?" -- before remembering, and delivering the news to his new wife in an especially brutal way.

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Death Defying Acts opens in limited release this weekend, and so far, it hasn't generated much advance buzz.  It's hard to figure out why:  It comes on the heels of other successful movies involving magicians, including The Prestige and The Illusionist;  it's a romance-driven period piece (which should attract women), but it features a murder mystery, psychics, and famed escape artist Harry Houdini (for the fellas); it's got an all-star cast led by perennial heartthrobs Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones; and it's directed by none other than girl-geek icon Gillian Anderson.  Maybe people are confused by the premise:  in Death Defying Acts features Zeta-Jones as a spiritualist out to run a con on the master magician.  We haven't seen it yet, so we're not sure if Zeta-Jones' powers are portrayed as being authentic, but in real life, Houdini was a relentless skeptic who didn't believe in any aspect of the paranormal, and who, in fact, went out of his way to disprove all claims of the supernatural as buncombe.  Regardless, Hollywood has always been a sucker for a good psychic yarn, which probably explains why goofy New Age religions tend to take root in southern California before hitting the rest of the country.  For today's Take Five, we bring you a handful of fine films about psychics -- and not a single one starring Shirley MacLaine.

THE SHINING (1980)

Nobody does psychic powers like Stephen King, and nobody realizes those psychic powers on screen better than Stanley Kubrick does in this horror classic.  One of the most effective ideas Kubrick had was to de-emphasize Danny's psychic abilities, to tone down the paranormal aspects of the story (such as the hedge topiary coming to life) in order to play up the much more compelling dramatic element of a family in isolation slowly falling apart.  Not that the terrifying paranormal elements aren't there:  few moments in contemporary horror are creepier than seeing Danny go into a drooling fit, or the bizarre images he sees in the abandoned rooms of the Outlook Hotel -- but by keeping them ambiguous, by allowing the suggestion that none of it is real, that it's all just possibly the byproduct of an epileptic vision or a mind damaged by loneliness and alcohol -- the whole thing is made more compelling and upsetting than if the paranormal elements were made explicit.  

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Opening in limited release this weekend, the goofily titled Gunnin' for That #1 Spot is a compelling documentary look at the annual Rucker Park basketball tournament, made up of the majority of New York's best streetball players.  It may not be the biggest money game in the history of professional hoops, and it hasn't produced many NBA superstars, but its distillation of pure street ball has been hugely influential, and the style of play in both the pro and college ranks has been greatly affected by the smooth moves and trash-talking traditions that evolved in Rucker Park.  Gunnin' for that #1 Spot is also attracting a great deal of attention because of who's behind it:  Oscilloscope Pictures is a new production house headed by the film's director, Adam Yauch, better known as MCA of the Beastie Boys.  Having polished his craft directing videos for his crew, he's now taking his game to the next level, and has made sure that the banging soundtrack matches the smooth hoops action on screen.  The movie's release, in seven cities (all of which have NBA franchises), is being timed to coincide with the NBA draft; if all that isn't enough for your hoops-hungry self, try these five examples of big-screen action from the world's most cinematic sport.

HOOSIERS (1986)

Generally acknowledged as the greatest basketball film of all time, Hoosiers -- directed by the forgotten David Anspaugh and written by sports-triumph specialist Angelo Pizzo -- is based on the true story of the Milan Indians, an unlikely small-town outfit who went on to win the 1954 Indiana State Championships against some of the powerhouse teams in that basketball-crazy state.  Unabashedly sentimental and unrepentently traditional, Hoosiers is nonetheless is a winner, illustrating that you can avoid criticism for making a straightforward sports film by simply getting it right at every turn.  From the terrific period details and the astonishing degree of verisimilitude to the terrifically staged sports action scenes, Hoosiers never makes a wrong turn, and is held together from the first frame to the last by a tremendous performance by Gene Hackman as the gruff coach, Norman Dale.

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Mike Myers' not-so-glorious return to the big screen, The Love Guru -- also known as Austin Powers IV and Verne Troyer's Pleading E-Mails Finally Pay Off -- opens everywhere today, and critics couldn't be more disappointed. Not only is it reported to be low on laughs, it's also being criticized as being high on stereotypes; despite his alleged friend and idol Deepak Chopra coming to his aid, Myers has been attacked for his stereotyping of Asian Indians and his portrayal of a cartoonish, caricatured guru.  But let's face it:  Hollywood has always loved its gurus, spiritual masters, and wise old mystics from the subcontinent.  Hardly had the Beatles falled under the influence of the Maharishi than Hollywood followed suit; here's a look at some of the more memorable wise men of the East that the movie business has given us. 

THE LOVED ONE (1965)

One of the few countercultural satires from the 1960s to hold up in the modern era, Tony Richardson's The Loved One holds up for two reasons:  first, it was based on an Evelyn Waugh novel from nearly two decades prior and isn't quite as tarred, as a result, by the hippie-dippie vibe of its time; and second, it's got an impeccable crew behind the camera, from Richardson to cinematographer Haskell Wexler to skilled, hip screenwriters Christopher Isherwood and Terry Southern.  This satire of capitalism run amok in the funereal industry crams so many jokes into its two-hour running time that it's almost impossible to keep up with them all, but make sure you don't miss gravel-throated character actor Lionel Stander as the Guru Brahmin, one of the first-ever big-screen gurus -- and one of the first to be portrayed as a bumbling fraud.

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Normally, the Friday Take Five feature is built around some new release.  But this is a very special day for bottom-drawer cinephiles the world over:  today is Friday the 13th, the day commemorated in a series of eleven of the rootin'-est, tootin'-est, sexually-active-teenager-beheadin'-east movies of all time.  While there isn't a new Friday the 13th movie coming out -- unfortunately, or thankfully depending on your perspective, we'll have to wait until 2009 for the proposed remake of the first movie -- there's no reason we can't take a look back at what is, despite the universal revulsion of critics, one of the most successful franchises in motion picture history.  It's hard to believe it's been 28 years since the first Friday the 13th movie, but the mass-murderous adventures of the scrappy, plucky Jason Voorhees (and what's with all the big-screen serial killers having such WASPy names, from Voorhees to Krueger to Meyers?  Aren't there any unstoppable, inhuman psychopathic butchers named Breitkowicz or Morelli?) have manage to last longer than most marriages.  With little more than a machete, a hockey mask, and a can-do attitude, Jason has become a cultural icon, almost single-handedly birthing the lamentable teen-slasher genre so popular in the 1980s and managing to set a standard for improbable resurrections that not even superhero comics can rival. I'm not going to say that the movies below represent the best of the Friday the 13th movies; to be perfectly honest, "best" just isn't a word than any of these flicks can aspire to.  But at the very least, these are the five that represent, in some way, a hallmark acheivement for everyone's favorite reason to avoid summer camp.

FRIDAY THE 13th (1980)

It's usually claimed that the first of the venerable hack-'n'slash franchise is the best, and we can't argue with that claim.  However, while John Carpenter's Halloween was a genuinely good low-budget horror movie that spawned a ton of far inferior sequels, Sean Cunningham's Friday the 13th was pretty much a crappy exploitation movie that produced a bunch of sequels that were marginally worse.  The francise didn't have far to fall, but at the very least, if you were of a certain age in the 1980s, seeing the original Friday the 13th was something like a rite of passage.  Of mild canonical interest due to the fact that Jason Voorhees isn't the killer and doesn't even appear in the film in his familiar form, this would still just be a long-forgotten curio along the lines of Silent Night Deadly Night if it hadn't happened to catch an inexplicable fire and turn into one of the biggest indie movie hits of all time.  The sequels that it birthed are all much, much worse, don't get us wrong -- but don't go into this expecting any kind of a diamond in the rough.  It's just the least objectionable turd in a very big punchbowl.

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Sex and the City:  The Movie opens everywhere that Cosmopolitans are sold today, and the odds are pretty good that it will make enough money to keep Sarah Jessica Parker in sundresses for the rest of her life.  There is little doubt as to whether or not the movie -- based on the inescapable HBO original series -- will be successful; the real question is whether or not it's going to be any good.  One thing is for sure:  it will at least make more money than the other films that have been made out of HBO's original television programming.  They're a pretty dismal set of money-losers and critic-displeasers, ranging from the not good (Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny) to the very bad (the Mr. Show movie, Run Ronnie Run) to the completely awful (the Tales from the Crypt spin-off Bordello of Blood).  If the long-rumored Deadwood movie ever gets made, or if the Sopranos movie doesn't turn out to be a disappointment, this may change things, but in the meantime, HBO's television shows have yet to produce a movie worth watching.  Less known, however, is that HBO has a production arm that has put out a number of worthwhile films, many of which had theatrical releases prior to their run  on the pay cable network; some of them, in fact, were released exclusively for theatrical release through HBO Films or their sister company, Picturehouse FIlms.  With their overseeing company, New Line Cinema, dead, the future of HBO Films is uncertain, but given the quality of their past releases, they're sure to find a new home somewhere with parent company Time/Warner.  Here's five fine films that were released under the HBO Film distribution banner.

AMERICAN SPLENDOR (2003)

The first, and arguably the best, of a rash of terrific film releases by HBO Films in the mid-2000s, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's inventive (and sometimes elusive) documentary about underground comics writer Harvey Pekar stands alongside the remarkable Crumb as a compelling, if sometimes troubling, look at an American original.  The comparison is by no means coincidental:  legendary cartoonist Robert Crumb is a longtime friend of Pekar's, and the man he first recruited to illustrate his stories of the struggles, victories, humiliations and triumphs of everyday life.  If it's a little disengenuous to claim that Pekar is the indestructably normal person he claims to be (and it is -- normal people, after all, do not compulsively and sometimes brilliantly catalog the minutia of their lives in autobiographical comics), there's nothing at all phony about Pekar, his everyday heroism, the skewed attitude and refusal to surrender to the diificultues of an ordinary life, or his irascible and cynical -- if never openly cruel -- sense of humor.

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Okay, so there's a new Uwe Boll movie coming out.  Big deal, says we.  Sure, we're curious about how the Teutonic uber-hack managed to get Dave Foley to star in his new film (Postal, opening in limited release today).  And sure, we're even more curious about how he got Dave Foley to do a nude scene.  And yes, we must admit that there is something oddly compelling about a filmmaker so universally reviled that a chewing gum manufacturer has helped sponsor a petition to get him to stop directing movies, and who is himself so adamant that he is a cinematical genius that he has challenged his critics to meet him in the boxing ring.  But however rotten this German-come-lately may be -- and he's plenty rotten -- for us here at the Screengrab, there is only one true heir to the crappy moviemaking throne vacated by Ed Wood, and that man's name is Albert Pyun.  The Hack From Hawaii -- who directed his first film in 1982, only four years after Ed Wood's death -- has been responsible for over forty films and direct-to-video releases, at least one of which has already turned up on movie janitor Scott Von Doviak's "Unwatchable" list.  Both in his ridiculously prolific output and his utter lack of talent and shame, Albert Pyun leaves Uwe Boll in the dust.  So instead of trying to find a theater willing to screen Postal this weekend, why not settle down for a film festival with our man Big Al?  To help you in this terrifying endeavor, we've assembled a list of five of Pyun's best works -- and we use the word "best" in the loosest possible application to which the word has ever been put.

THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER (1982)

Albert Pyun's first screen credit -- as both director and writer -- is a real doozy that sets the tone for his innumerable too-cheap-to-be-camp movies to come.  A standard-issue steel-and-spells epic ripped straight out of Albert's Friday night dorm room Dungeons & Dragons games, The Sword and the Sorcerer cost about nine dollars to make, with a script too dull for TV and special effects that would have seemed hokey in 1972.  The real treat here is the cavalcade of has-beens populating the cast:  there's well-past-his-prime teen idol George Maharis, his suntan decaying before our very eyes; future Murphy Brown fixture Joe Regalbuto; hulking, self-serious Night Court golem Richard Moll; coked-out Nina Van Pallandt, a million miles from The Long Goodbye; unreconstructed manimal Simon McCorkindale; and, in the lead, none other than Matt Houston star Lee Horsley!  Sadly, this collection of fourth-stringers would be the hottest cast Pyun would ever work with.  It would be all downhill from here.

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How the Garcia Girls Spent Their Summer gets its limited-release debut this Friday, after two years of lingering on the festival circuit without a distributor.  Although some critics have praised its good-natured look at sexuality and overall sunny demeanor, it's likely that the real reason Georgina Riedel's feature-length debut is finally seeing the light of day is the newfound TV stardom of its lead actress, America Ferrara.  Still, the reason I want to see it is simple:  it's set in Arizona.  I was born and raised in Phoenix, at a time when everyone from there was from somewhere else, and while I don't really miss the place, I still have that hokey boosterism that makes me raise an eyebrow whenever I hear a movie or television show is set there or filming there.  During the early days of Hollywood, the movie business was obsessed with the 48th state -- largely because it had only recently become a state.  It was the last of the frontier, the final remnant of the proud plains and deserts of the New West, and while the vast majority of the western shoot-'em-ups set in Arizona were really made on a back lot five blocks from La Cienega Boulevard, there's still plenty of movies out there claiming Arizonan provenance.  As the state has morphed into Southern California's bedroom annex, with all the strip malls and chain stores that implies, there's continued to be a few standout films that use the Grand Canyon State as their setting; here's five of them.

IN OLD ARIZONA (1929)

The filming of this early classic western didn't get within 300 miles of Arizona, but like a lot of early cowboy pictures, it's set there.  In Old Arizona has a lot of the corny qualities that modern audiences associate with this era of filmmaking, but it's worth seeing -- and historically significant -- for a number of reasons.  The first full-length talkie ever released by 20th Century Fox, it was also the first talking picture to be filmed outdoors.  Director Raoul Walsh was set to play the lead himself, but a car accident robbed him of the chance, and cost him an eye, leading to the eyepatch that became his tradmark in later years; his replacement was Warner Baxter, who won only the second Best Actor Oscar in history for his performance as the Cisco Kid.  Finally, the movie has a memorable twist ending that sets it apart -- courtesy of the original story, by O. Henry.

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Responding to criticism that a review of his had unfairly given information about the ending of a thriller, the late film critic Gene Siskel is said to have replied:  "Here is the ending of every thriller ever made -- the bad guy dies."  So when, in this week's Take Five, we talk about revenge thrillers, we're not talking about movies where some power-tool-wielding misogynist more or less accidentally gets it in the neck after two hours of tormenting co-eds and/or mapless vacationers.  We're talking about movies like Xavier Gens' Frontiers, opening in limited and highly disgusting release this Friday; movies where evildoers show up at the doorstep of innocents only to have the tables turned upon them fairly early on; movies where, for at least a third of their running time, the bad guys aren't in control, and the thrills come from wondering how far those who have been wronged will go to get even.  While the revenge flick has a pretty shoddy history, and while Frontiers doesn't look like it's going to bring much more than grosser-than-usual levels of violence and some hamhanded political commentary to the mix, not every movie in the tables-get-turned genre is an exploitative dud.  The concept may have reached its nadir with flicks like I Spit On Your Grave, but that doesn't mean you can't savor a pretty tasty dish served cold from time to time.

KEY LARGO (1948)

One of Hollywood's first, and finest, attempts at subverting the conventions of the innocent-people-beseiged-by-evil chestnut was this powerful, terrifically acted quasi-noir.  When exiled gangster Johnny Rocco holes up in a Florida resort to wait out a storm, after which he looks to make a triumphant comeback, he doesn't count on two things:  the presence of embittered but hard-as-iron vet Frank McCloud (played with icily ironic contempt by Humphrey Bogart) and his own terror at a coming hurricane.  As the movie progresses, Edward G. Robinson turns from utterly unflappable master manipulator (as in his famously cruel scene with alcoholic gun moll Claire Trevor) to cowering paranoiac, and the desperate sense of terror is ratcheted up to unbearable levels by director John Huston, at the peak of his powers.

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We were going to call this Take Five "Buddha", and then, like, totally blow your mind by not including Kundun, but frankly, we're just too, you know, we're too, uh...what were we talking about?  Oh, right!  That weed!  The chronic!  Sweet Mary Jane!  A favorite in Hollywood for so many years that it doesn't even seem like a vice to some people (remember Tom Hagen warning the movie producer in The Godfather that one of his stars was about to 'graduate' from marijuana to cocaine), it was a while before social pressures eased up enough to portray herb in anything but the most hysterical terms.  How far we've come, bros!  Today, only a few scant days after 4/20 (the national stoner's holiday), we can each of us get nicely toasted and ditch work early for a matinee of Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, which posits that even our Commander-in-Chief enjoys a good bong hit now and again.  The noir classic The Sweet Smell of Success contained a plot point that expected us to believe that a jazz musician -- and a white one, at that! -- might see his career ruined by the mere possession of the devil weed, while the new Kal Penn/John Cho vehicle implies that toking up on a regular basis is the best career move you can make.  Here's five more films that deal with the sweet leaf in all its hazy glory.

REEFER MADNESS (1936)

This absurd scare-flick is typical of the anti-drug hysteria of the 1920s and 1930s; it's only exceptional in that it's exceptionally over-the-top in its woozy narrative, lurid dialogue, and bizarrely sensationalistic vision of what marijuana will do to you.  (Apparently, it turns you into a murderer or a sex fiend instead of a lazy Xbox-addicted dolt.)  Directed by French-born Louis Gasnier (whose other major claim to fame was the Perils of Pauline serial), it's unintentionally hilarious to the degree that it's been reissued endlessly in every format imaginable for new generations of potheads to giggle at.  In fact, for a film that did poor business, featured no stars, and is incompetently made at every level, it very well may be that Reefer Madness is the most-watched film of the 1930s.  Ah, irony.

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With My Blueberry Nights getting a limited-release opening in major cities across the country this weekend, Hong Kong legend Wong Kar-Wai will finally make his English-language feature film debut, and, after twenty years of building his reputation as a filmmaker, get a shot at the cherished American audience that can make or break a director. The only question is, will My Blueberry Nights be his Fritz Lang moment or his John Woo moment? Early reviews indicate that it might be the latter; the movie wasn't especially well-received when it opened Cannes last year, and producer Harvey Weinstein's drastic cut is said not to have helped matters any. The jury, likewise, is still out on whether or not Norah Jones can act, but the testimony onscreen is said to be pretty damning. If it turns out that it's a stiff, it might be all to the good and he can return to the environment in which he did his greatest work; and regardless of its quality, we're all geeked about his upcoming remake of Orson Welles' The Lady from Shanghai. We'll have to wait and see, but even if it turns out that My Blueberry Nights is Wong Kar-Wai's first major dud, he's still one of the most innovative, fascinating and consistently talented directors in contemporary film. Here's five movies that prove it.

CHUNG KING EXPRESS (1994)

Although he'd shown flickers of brilliance before (and already begun his tradition of naming his films after pop songs with his 1988 directorial debut, As Tears Go By), Chung King Express is the movie that established Wong Kar-Wai as a director capable of legitimate greatness. The highly stylized film, about a heartbroken Hong Kong cop on the prowl who falls in with a gorgeous and mysterious young woman in a drug gang, so impressed Quentin Tarantino that he invested a chunk of his own money to get this and Wong Kar-Wai's other films released in the United States. Even now, after he's stretched substantially, this is still a stunning film, chock full of quirky moments, philosophical speculation on the mediated life, and his ability to coax stellar performances out of his actors. A Godardian triumph.

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Getting wide release this weekend is Roger Donaldson's The Bank Job, also known as the movie that seems like it should be directed by Guy Ritchie but isn't. It is, however, based on an infamous 1971 vault heist which has gained recent noteriety not so much for the unsolved crime — although it was one of the biggest bank jobs in British history at the time — but the circumstances of its aftermath: what seemed to be an incredibly newsworthy story was hardly written about in the days following thanks to a "D notice" that served to gag the press. Speculation as to why this would be the case has raged for thirty-five years, and now, Donaldson's film (informed by a newly popular conspiracy theory involving a royal sex scandal) attempts to answer the question definitively, if fictionally. Nothing makes for an exciting movie like crime, and nothing makes a crime movie have that little extra edge than the slightest elements of truth. True crime movies have been a fixture of the silver screen almost since their inception; there's so many to choose from that we don't even begin to pretend this list is definitive. It's just a few of our favorites, each for a different reason. Line them all up on a cold night, watch them in a row, and thank your lucky stars this never happened to you... 

THE PHENIX CITY STORY (1955)

A little-seen and underrated noir thriller from the genre's waning days, Phil Karlson's The Phenix City Story eschews the highly stylized approach of many of its contemporaries and goes for an understated, gritty style that allows it to function almost like a documentary.

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Brett Morgen's highly praised documentary Chicago 10, about the fallout of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago forty years ago opens in limited release this weekend. Morgen has claimed since it first debuted last year at Sundance that the film isn't really about 1968, but about 2008, and indeed, it seems to have fresh, albeit grim, resonance today, with the recent death of arch-conservative William F. Buckley, who had a memorable confrontation on the air while covering the convention. Steven Spielberg is himself crafting a fictionalized version of the same events for The Trial of the Chicago 7, and America gears up for one of the most electrifying presidential races in recent memory as an unpopular war rages overseas and tumult grips some of our closest allies. But as relevant as it might seem from a moviemaking perspective, in other ways, 1968 couldn't be further away; the revolutionary consciousness of that bloody year and the infinite possibilites that came with the Paris revolts seem like they happened on another planet. Still, in many ways, it was a magical year that casts a very long shadow over the lives of a number of people, many of whom are filmmakers. Here's a look at some of the better films about or influenced by that impossible year.

MEDIUM COOL (1969)

In many ways, the definitive film about the events of 1968, at least from an American perspective, will always be Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool. The first nondocumentary feature film directed by the legendary cinematographer was meant to be a highly fictionalized treatment of chaos and mayhem breaking out at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; but it quickly transmogrified into something altogether stranger, blurring the line between truth and fiction, as reality quickly began to outstrip Wexler's fictionalized vision. Eventually, while filming, he found himself caught up in the (unstaged) action of the riots and police brutality that wracked the city and altered the political landscape of America, and one of his crew uttered the immortal warning: "Look out, Haskell! It's real!" (This later became the title of a very worthwhile 2001 documentary about the movie.)

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<Ever since a November afternoon in 1963, a man in a high place with a rifle and a head full of malice directed at the President of the United States has arguably been our most persistent national nightmare.  And from Abraham Lincoln's assassination by one of the nation's best-known actors to the appropriately ham-handed attempt on the life of the ineffectual Gerald Ford by a Manson Family hanger-on, the murder of famous politicians has absorbed our national attention in the news, so why shouldn't it equally influence the kind of movies we watch?  Pete Travis' Vantage Point opens across the country this weekend; early buzz has it that the movie, about the assassination of someone pretending to be the president, is all style and little substance, wasting its interesting cast on a movie filled with jump-cuts and car chases.  The assassination of a political leader, more often than not (especially in recent big-budget actioners like Shooter), is just a McGuffin to carry us to the punch-outs and crashes.  Still, there have been a number of movies in which the killing of a high-profile politician has driven the plot with highly engaging results; today in Take Five, we'll look at a few of the best.

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962)

One of the first post-Kennedy assassination films, John Frankenheimer's best film was actually completed before that fatal day in Dallas; but its release was unluckily ill-timed to just after November 22nd, 1963.  It was almost immediately pulled from release and remained unavailable for decades until Frank Sinatra, who played the movie's protagonist, personally intervened to help get it back into production in the VHS era.  It was a generous decision:   the original Manchurian Candidate remains a masterwork of suspense and intrigue, with a towering performance by Laurence Harvey as the doomed assassin of a presidential candidate.  The movie's stunning fantasy sequences, bittersweet moments of drama and romance, constant air of paranoid menace, and final bloody ending make it an assassination classic.

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George Romero's Diary of the Dead opens this Friday, and it's the fifth in his legendary zombie film series. We thought about dedicating this week's Take Five to an overview of each installment, but not only could we not swing a screening of Diary (dammit!), but we figured, what better time to look at some of Romero's other films? Yes, it's true: the man who invented the modern conception of the zombie, who's responsible for one of the most durable and appealing of the Famous Monsters of Filmland, has actually made a couple of movies that do not feature the living dead! We're the first to admit that we're suckers for the low-budget, foul-mouthed, expatriate Pittsburgher, though, and while he seems to save his best stuff for the zombie pictures, that's not all there is to the man. True, he sticks with bloodshed and horror — we aren't expecting a Shakespeare adaptation or a minor-key family drama from him anytime soon — but at least a few of his non-zombie pictures are worth checking out for various reasons. So if you're in one of the many cities where Diary of the Dead won't open for a while, head to your local grindhouse video emporium or fire up your rent-by-mail queue and have a Romero-fest in which the dead don't walk: they just die.

THE CRAZIES (1973)

Romero's fourth film overall, and his best to immediately follow the original Night of the Living Dead, this is similar to his original zombie masterpiece in many ways: the Pittsburgh-area filming locations, the largely amateur cast and the ultra-low budget, and the dreadful atmosphere of paranoia and nameless fear. It concerns the government's attempt to control a bizarre outbreak of a strange virus that causes instant, violent insanity in all who contract it; but the government, as it often is, isn't telling all that it knows, and the faceless federal agents in stark white biochemical hazard suits quickly become as menacing as the maddened townsfolk. A fascinating, underseen movie that creates a terrific mood of terror and insanity, with some of Romero's pointed social commentary; he's currently working on a big-budget remake.

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Opening wide this weekend, Martin McDonagh's In Bruges stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as a pair of exiled hitmen stuck in the Belgian city until it's safe for them to return home, and their sojourn is meant to be hellish in every sense of the word. Belgium has long been Europe's punchline — yes, even more so than Poland; its stolidly middle-class character and reputation as "where culture goes to nap" makes it the butt of many a joke. David Rees of Get Your War On calls the sixteenth-century seer Nostradamus "the last interesting Belgian", which insult is all the more cutting considering he was actually French; and in a memorable Monty Python sketch, game show contestants are challenged to come up with a derogatory term for Belgium, and one noteworthy entrant claims that he can't think of anything more derogatory than just "Belgian". But all kidding aside, if you actually were trapped in Bruges for a prolonged period of time, you could do a lot worse as a way to pass the time than to head for the local cinema. Belgium has, er, sprouted one of the more interesting independent film scenes in Europe recently, and as this short list of some of our favorite Belgian movies of recent years should illustrate, there's a lot more to Belgian filmmaking than just Jean-Claude Van Damme.

MAN BITES DOG (1992)

One of the first Belgian films to create a great deal of buzz outside of Europe, Man Bites Dog (the French title translates, creepily, to "It Happened in Your Neighborhood" or "He is Coming to Your House") is a postmodern twist on the serial killer narrative a good five to ten years before such things became trendy. Anticipating the self-aware American horror films of the 2000s, it follows a small documentary camera crew as they tag along with Ben (played with sinister charm by co-writer/director Benoit Poelvoorde), a disconcertingly media-savvy mass murderer. Crammed with supremely disturbing moments, shocking violence, and genuinely clever moments of humor, Man Bites Dog has held up quite well and is still better than most of the films it undoubtedly helped to inspire.

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Hollywood loves a good monster movie. The recent success of the risky Cloverfield is proof of the fact that audiences, too, will flock to a good creature feature even if the monster's main purpose is to ruin the first-date memories of outer-borough hipsters. Strangely enough, though, movie studios and filmgoers alike are a tad more diffident when it comes to monsters that have a slight possiblilty of being real. Vampires, zombies, wolfmen, and whatever the hell Gamera was supposed to be? Sure, we'll take whatever you got. But when was the last time you saw a bunch of lithe, promiscuous teenagers menaced by a bunyip? What was the last movie that featured a small town in the middle of nowhere being attacked by a rampaging Cornish Owl-Man? Paramount is hoping, with the Friday release of Fred Wolf's shaggy Sasquatch story Strange Wilderness, that audiences will evince an interest in Bigfoot unseen since the glory days of the Six Million Dollar Man. But as we'll see, the history of movies based on so-called "cryptids" — creatures or animals widely thought to be legends, but believed by some researchers to be real — is dismal enough that the studio has as much chance of actually uncovering the Loch Ness Monster than turning a profit off of this dud-in-the-offing.

NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1980)

An almost-forgotten, and rightfully so, horror cheapie from the dawn of the slasher era, Night of the Demon does for Bigfoot what Jason Voorhees did for big-screen murderers, or at least tries to. Big-screen Bigfeet are usually portrayed as either gentle giants or, at worst, misunderstood animals, but in this null-budget exploitation number, he's more like a bloodthirsty devil on a rampage, Freddy Kreuger without the stylish hat and sweater combo. The movie's Sasquatch romps all over the Pacific Northwest, terrorizing anthropology students, yanking the junk off of an unfortunate hillbilly, and having his wicked way with local farmer's daughters. The high, or low, point of the flick comes in a flashback sequence: the innocent young lady who found herself at the receiving end of unwelcome advances from Bigfoot decides, for some reason, to bear its offspring (birthing the child of a monstrous rape apparently being less shameful than an abortion), until her overbearing dad decides to force her to kill the Bigfoot baby! A hallucinatorily bad movie sure to be the final word in, as the poster copy put it, "cross-breedin' Bigfoot".

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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.

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