THE GODFATHER tops Empire magazine’s 10 best films of all time list

September 24th, 2008 by Scott Marks

“Are you trying to make me look ri-diculous?”

Did Moe Green put in a call to Paramount Home Video? As if in conjunction with Francis Coppola asking us to once again shell out money for yet another edition of The Godfather, Empire Magazine named his gangster epic the greatest movie ever made. Not a bad choice, but relax. It gets worse.

Rounding out the top ten are another Coppola picture, only one by Scorsese, David Fincher’s best movie, a ridiculously overrated prison picture, a crumb of Tarantino offal, two of the too many Star Wars pictures, two spielberg’s, nothing in black-and-white and only one film produced before 1970.

Won’t somebody please hand me a magnum in a manila envelope…

“No, Scott…DON’T!”

Read ‘em and weep:

1. The Godfather (1972)
2. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
3. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
4. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
5. Jaws (1975)
6. Goodfellas (1990)
7. Apocalypse Now (1979)
8. Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
9. Pulp Fiction (1994)
10. Fight Club (1999)

As much as I revere Apocalypse Now and Fight Club, they are both a safe distance from my pantheon. Honestly, none of these films, not even The Godfather (I’m a “2” man myself) would make my top twenty. Truth be told, half these nags wouldn’t make my top thousand.

The good news is, Empire Magazine is to serious film criticism what Citizen Kane is to kinesiology. Lists such as this depress me to no end. With all of the films released on home video, one would hope that Empire’s reader’s would display at least a modicum of film history. How many times must they watch that fanboy crap before taking a moment to look back at past forms? Who the hell am I fooling? I should be thankful that Empire’s list isn’t comprised of five by Lucas and five by spielberg.

Fanboy Faves For Ewe!

Here is a more sobering compilation to help strike back at Empire:

The Sight and Sound Critic’s Top Ten Poll for 2002:

1. Citizen Kane / Orson Welles (1941) USA
2. Vertigo / Alfred Hitchcock (1958) USA
3. The Rules of the Game / Jean Renoir (1939) France
4. The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1975) / Francis Ford Coppola
5. Tokyo Story / Yazujiro Ozu (1950)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey / Stanley Kubrick (1968)
7. Battleship Potemkin / Sergei Eisenstein (1925)
8. Sunrise / F.W. Murnau (1927)
9. 8 1/2 / Federico Fellini

To do what I do best, blurt out my opinions, here are my top twenty films of all time. The greatest? Probably not. Let’s call them the films I choose to take to hell with me:

1. Citizen Kane / Orson Welles (1941) USA
2. The Rules of the Game / Jean Renoir (1939) France
3. Touch of Evil / Orson Welles (1956) USA
4. Vertigo / Alfred Hitchcock (1958) USA
5. The Searchers / John Ford (1956) USA
6 Tokyo Story / Yazujiro Ozu (1950) Japan
7. The Life and Death of Col. Blimp / Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger (1942) Britain
8. Sherlock, Jr. / Buster Keaton (1924) USA
9. Written on the Wind / Douglas Sirk (1957) USA
10. L’Age d’Or / Luis Bunuel (1930) France
11. The Passion of Joan of Arc / Carl Theodor Dreyer (1928) Denmark
12. Sunrise / F.W. Murnau (1927) USA
13. Scarface / Howard Hawks (1930) USA
14 Once Upon a Time in the West / Sergio Leone (1969) USA/Italy
15. Casino / Martin Scorsese (1995) USA
16. Artists and Models / Frank Tashlin (1955) USA
17. In Harm’s Way / Otto Preminger (1965) USA
18. Some Came Running / Vincente Minnelli (1959)
19. Shock Corridor / Sam Fuller (1963) USA
20. While the City Sleeps / Fritz Lang (1956) USA

See the rest of my list here.

Tags: 10 best films of all time, empire magazine, george lucas, greatest movies ever made, r. budd dwyer, sight and sound ten best list, STAR WARS, Steven Spielberg, ten best films of all time, The Godfather, top 10, top ten

Filed Under News, Rants

Spielberg sued for plagiarizing Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW

September 9th, 2008 by Scott Marks

Steve stared too long and stole too much

According to the lawsuit, filed by the Sheldon Abend Revocable Trust, Steve Spielberg’s Dreakworks Entertainment shamelessly “borrowed” the plot from The Master’s Rear Window for last year’s Disturbia.

High five me!

According to Yahoo! Movies, “Dreamworks, its parent company Viacom Inc, and Universal Pictures, a unit of General Electric Co’s NBC Universal, are accused of copyright infringement and breach of contract for making Disturbia without first obtaining permission from the copyright holders, the suit said.”

Executive Producer Steve is named as a defendant.

Instead of a convalescing Jimmy Stewart witnessing a killing across the courtyard, Disturbia places Shia “Indy, Jr.” LaBeouf under house arrest and has him peep on a murderous neighbor.

The rights to Cornell Woolrich’s short story Murder from a Fixed Viewpoint, were purchased by Hitch and James Stewart in 1953 and transformed into Rear Window. In 1971, Hollywood producer Sheldon Abend bought the rights to the short story. The lawsuit claims that in 1991, Abend obtained “exclusive right to adapt or copy the story.” In 1998, Abend produced a dreadful TV remake designed as a vehicle (no pun intended) for wheelchair bound Christopher Reeve. Abend died in 2003, but the Sheldon Abend Revocable Trust filed the lawsuit in New York last week because it claims the makers of Disturbia did not obtain the rights to the story before raping Alfred Hitchcock’s bones.

The Daily Telegraph reports, “The trust complain of copyright infringement and breach of contract. The lawsuit said: “What the defendants have been unwilling to do openly, legitimately and legally, (they) have done surreptitiously, by their back-door use of the Rear Window story without paying compensation. “In the Disturbia film the defendants purposefully employed immaterial variations or transparent rephrasing to produce essentially the same story as the Rear Window story.’”

No word yet on whether the Ford Bebe estate is considering a similar lawsuit for Steve’s using his Monogram serials as the basis for the Indiana Jones series.

Music to listen to while enjoying this post

Tags: DISTURBIA, REAR WINDOW, Steven Spielberg, steven spielberg sued

Filed Under News

SPIELBERG GOES BOLLYWOOD!

August 12th, 2008 by Scott Marks

Available in Push-start and Pull-start models

In a textbook example of garbage finding its own level, two of the most revolting developments in cinema over the past 30 years are joining forces as Steve Spielberg hops the road to Bollywood. I’d rather sit through Hook again than one of those weightless Bombay song and dance caravans.

Variety is reporting that DreamWorks looks to be closing in on a deal with India’s Reliance ADA Group that would help Steve Spielberg “start fresh and DreamWorks to reboot” after Paramount gave the studio the boot. Steve and David Geffen may announce the merger as soon as this week.

The company was born soon after third-Stooge Jeffrey Katzenberg’s 1994 resignation from Walt Disney. The founding partners each put up $33 million in addition to $500 million dollars Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen coughed up to sweeten the pushke. The studio’s first feature was the 1997 Mimi Leder bomb The Peacemaker starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman. Budgeted at $50 million, the film had a $12 million opening weekend and fell $10 million shy of recouping its budget.

The studio found success in animated features and in spite of a lot of high grossing titles, there’s not but one decent picture (Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron) in the bunch. There were cookie cutter Antz, a feature set in a toilet and a school of sharks that should have been flushed away. Appropriately, their biggest hits all rhyme with “dreck.” I made an early exit from the first Shrek and never looked back. The unappealing, badly designed computer generated characters spouting endless pages of sitcom dialog made me pine for Bucky and Pepito.

Artistically speaking, their live-action features fared only slightly better than their pixilated counterparts. Of the little over one hundred features released by the studio, only 7 are worthy of your time:Small Time Crooks, American Beauty, the remake of War of the Worlds, the remake of The Heartbreak Kid, The Cat in the Hat, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events and Dreamgirls.

I’M KIDDING! Do you think I’m cutting my Paxil with Testor’s glue? Come to think of it, I’d rather sniff glue than ever again asphyxiate myself on one of those clunkers. Here are the few pearls cast amidst the DreamWorks swine: Small Soldiers (the only decent thing that Steve’s ever done is backing Joe Dante), Chicken Run, Paycheck, The Chumscrubber, Match Point, Letters from Iwo Jima and Perfume.

Will Columbia replace Paramount as DreamWorks distribution arm?

Quality be damned: DreamWorks took home three consecutive Best Picture Oscars (American Beauty, Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind) and many of their releases hit pay dirt at the box office. In December 2005, Paramount agreed to fork over $1.6 billion for the the live-action studio. With it came Steve, a 60 film library and the right to distribute DreamWorks Animation. Nikki Finke called the purchase “a veritable steal” and predicted “the deal will be in the black ahead of schedule.”

Continue reading SPIELBERG GOES BOLLYWOOD!

Tags: bollywood, david geffen, DreamWorks, dreamworks animation, dreamworks skg, india, jeffrey katzenberg, mumbai, paramount, reliance, Steven Spielberg

Filed Under News, Rants

Diablo Cody teams with Steven Spielberg: Garbage seeks its own level

June 5th, 2008 by Scott Marks

Juno meets Jew, yes…Yes…YES!!!

A stripper turned screenwriter cause celebre is teaming with a manchild mogul who never saw a girl naked until he was forty for a new pay cable sitcom about a dysfunctional family.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Showtime has picked up 12 episodes of United States of Tara, a comedy series to be overwritten by Diablo Cody (Juno) and produced by Steve Spielberg.

The show stars Toni Collette as a wife and mother with a dissociative identity disorder family and John Corbett, who plays her husband. It’s expected to enter production in Los Angeles in the summer.

On the basis of one film and a stack of teleplays, Showtime president of entertainment Robert Greenblatt fawned over “Diablo Coby’s vision.” Single-camera comedy does not a visionary make. Her characters, who don’t shut their mouths for two seconds, are too busy blabbing to worry about seeing.

“It’s a very provocative idea,” said Greenblatt, “and there’s a combination of humor and real drama. It’s a unique show that seems to be right up our alley.”

Cody will continue to serve as a writer; she also will exec produce with Spielberg, Justin Falvey and Darryl Frank of DreamWorks TV and Alexa Junge. Craig Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl) directed the pilot.

Greenblatt expexts the show to debut early next year. He had originally hoped he might be able to launch it earlier, but the writers strike and Collette’s pregnancy delayed the shooting of the pilot.

The series kickoff focuses on a pregnant, unwed and underage concentration camp victim (who owns nothing more than a little red latex dress) saved from the gas chambers by a band of renegade space aliens that magically appear in the final reel to extinguish Hitler’s inferno.

Loads more spielberg hating here.

Tags: Craig Gillispie, Diablo Cody, DreamWorks, JUNO, Showtime, spielberg, Steven Spielberg, UNITED STATES OF TARA

Filed Under News, Rants

Review: INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL / steven spielberg (2008)

May 21st, 2008 by Scott Marks

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
DIrected by Steve Spielberg
Written by David Koepp from a story by George Lucas & Jeff Nathanson
Starring: Harrison Ford, Shia LaBeouf, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen, Ray Winstone & John Hurt
Running Time: 124 min.
Aspect Ratio:
Rating:

Bring me the skull of Steven Spielberg.

The question remains: Why? It’s been nineteen years since the last Indiana Jones sequel and it’s impossible to imagine a huge outpouring for another installment. Steve and George obviously don’t need walking around money so why the belated effort?

It’s been three years since Steve littered multiplex screens with his mawkish remake of War of the Worlds and the dreary thriller Munich. After a yearlong self-imposed hiatus, Steve strikes back with yet another vacation from filmmaking.

It’s all downhill after the vintage Paramount logo.

The director (and I use the term loosely) operates on two nearly indistinguishable narrative planes: juvenile takes on important subject matters (The Color Purple, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan) or cloying amusement park attractions (Raiders, Jurassic Park, Hook).

Steve’s biggest flaw is his inability to suspend disbelief without resorting to cheating. Poor little E.T. can’t figure out how to phone home, but has no problem piloting a kid and his bicycle past the moon. Watch the boulder chase in the original Raiders. In one shot the rolling stone is poised to flatten him, the next it’s ten feet behind.

Sadly, my hatred of all that he stands for has placed me in the unenviable position of having to see everything Steve signs. All I need is some bozo pulling me aside and chiding me for judging the guy without having seen his latest brainless theme park ride. It doesn’t matter that I’ve suffered through all but a few and have plenty of ammunition upon which to base my feelings.

Raiders of the Lost Ark is an abomination. Dopey dramatics, insipid acting and climax piled upon climax without benefit of style or narrative cohesion. Just so long as the action-packed set pieces logjam, who cares whether the dots connect? Raiders is not his worst film, that honor goes to either Schindler or Hook, but it was bad enough to keep me away from parts two and three. I also successfully avoided anything with the word Jurassic in the title. His kidpics are insufferable to the point that my cinematic universe will not crumble without viewing them. It’s only when he tries to run with the big boys that you can count me in.

Crystal Skull does not fall into the latter category, yet I couldn’t wait to see it. With the exception of War of the Worlds (a pile I never should have stepped in), everything from Schindler on has been mundanely efficient at best. Yet for some odd reason, I was really looking forward to Crystal Skull. Not because it held any hopes of converting me. On the contrary: this smelled like the Steve I’ve known and despised for decades.

And reek it does. This time the dope doesn’t even bother following the rapid-fire formula that made him famous. There are vast, action-less stretches that almost had me studying the inside of my eyelids. Forget about a crystal skull; you’ll need crystal meth to get through this one.

His clumsiness becomes apparent in the very first scene. Watch the way the sky changes when Indy first meets the Russkies. One second it’s clear and sunny, the next overcast. In his ILM jungle, this could have easily been corrected with one click of a mouse.

Normally I’d put up a spoiler alert, but if you can’t predict what’s going to happen reels in advance you must have one of the few human brains that the skull can communicate with. Since George Lucas wrote the story, what are the chances that Harrison Ford is going to play daddy Darth to Shia LeBeouf’s sonny Skywalker?

As the film unravels, it soon becomes obvious that this is more a compendium of Steve’s greatest hits than an out and out Raiders sequel. The title deity carving, a prop that resembles a gaudy ashtray found at a Tijuana swap meet, bears more than a passing similarity to the hydrocephalic E.T. A fight in a soda shop recalls a similar brawl in the cocaine-fueled floperoo 1941. There is even a third act spaceship that houses a spindly, hollow-eyed alien. What, no concentration camp survivors?

From the outset, Steve makes it clear that he has no intention of challenging his audience. While most filmmakers search hard to find pre-existing music that not only compliments the narrative, but acts as signature songs, Steve hits us with overplayed pop hits like Hound Dog and Shake, Rattle and Roll. A far cry from his use of Danaher’s Theme in 1941. He also makes it clear that he has very little faith in his audiences’ intelligence. When Dovchenko (Igor Jijikine) utters his first line of dialog, there’s a billboard-sized close-up of Indy saying “Russian” for the mental midgets in the audience who might think the bad guy is speaking French.

Trapped in a typical suburban style nuclear testing center, Indy seeks refuge from the blast in a refrigerator. A carload of crash test dummies melt under the heat of the mushroom cloud while an unsinged Indy is catapulted to safety in a frost-free Frigidaire.

Even the film’s running gags need crutches. Well-groomed greaser LaBeouf constantly runs a comb through his hair. Funny stuff. And don’t forget those goofy CGI gopher cutaways. It’s enough to make men puke.

The biggest cheat comes when the invaluable crystal tchotchke is entrusted to brain damaged Professor Oxley (John Hurt). One of the film’s few arcane in-jokes (Professor Oxley is the name of Charles Coburn’s character in Howard Hawks’ Monkey Business) is systematically done in by dumbed-down plotting. Oxley manages to protect the skull from three, count ‘em, three rides down gushing waterfalls only to fumble it after taking a ten-foot drop.

What about the film’s pricey special effects work? The slapstick chase scenes alternate between grainy and fuzzy and the jarring lack of continuity frequently pulls the viewer away from the action.

Talented actors Jim Broadbent, Ray Winstone and Cate Blanchett (Natasha Fatale sporting a Louise Brooks bob) add little more than marquee value. A talentless actor like Ford is called upon to look dyspeptic, something he has mastered. The guy is limited to two facial expressions: pained and more pained. Admittedly, no one watches a Spielberg film for acting or scintillating verbal exchanges. How can you when the dialog consists of little more than characters swapping one-liners? The only pleasant surprise is Karen Allen who managed to escape the ravages of time. With the exception of a few extra pounds, not much has changed in the twenty-seven years since Raiders debuted. Unfortunately, all the script demands of her is cutesy bickering with Indy. Do yourself a favor: skip this nad rent John Carpenter’s Starman.

With Ford looking every second of his sixty-five years, it’s hard to imagine him coming back for another sequel. That’s where LaBeouf comes in. Perhaps he’ll find a nice Jewish girl to marry and they’ll call it Indiana Jones, Jr. and the Temple Beth Israel.

I’ll say one nice thing about the film. I’d sit through it ten times before ever again subjecting myself to Speed Racer. How that for a glowing endorsement? Go ahead, lambs. Enjoy your slaughter.

Tags: crystal skull, Film Review, harrison ford, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Steven Spielberg

Filed Under Reviews, Theatrical

National Lampoon parody movie ads

May 8th, 2008 by Scott Marks

As if preparing me for this Sunday afternoon’s date with dreck, I came across this ad from the 1978 National Lampoon Sunday Newspaper Parody. While not as rich as their hilarious high school yearbook vamp, the paper spoof still brought back a lot of memories and more than a few snide chortles.

Sadly, we’ve become so politically incorrect that much of what once passed for social criticism could not be posted for fear of harsh reprisal. And that’s just from my partner on the site, forget about Al Sharpton.

It’s safe to say that twenty minutes with a NatLamp parody is bound to be more enjoyable than Indiana Jones’ skull, although it may not produce as many laughs. I’ll let you know. In the meantime, enjoy a nasty chuckle.