Screengrab In Exile’s Shameless Friday Pandering: Sexy Ladies Kissin’

So, back in the glory days of the Screengrab, we tried our best to drive up the site’s hits with occasional pandering posts about sexy naked people doing sexy naked things (between the scholarly posts about Harvey Keitel’s schweenus), but this qualifies as real, earth-shaking, honest to God news (or, at the very least, it’s news to me):  Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis (the dirtiest name in show biz) will be getting it on in Darren Aronofsky’s next masterpiece, Black Swan.

Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats

by Scott Von Doviak

Jon Ronson’s nonfiction account of the U.S. military’s experimentation with the paranormal, The Men Who Stare at Goats, is a fascinating and often hilarious read, but it doesn’t exactly scream “soon to be a major motion picture.” Its digressive approach combined with Ronson’s quirky first-person viewpoint would seem to lend themselves more to an oddball documentary (along the lines of the one made from Ronson’s earlier book Them: Adventures with Extremists) than a George Clooney vehicle.

Read the full review here

Nightmare Week: “Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare” (1991)

It’s not often that a movie manages to combine two lies into a single title, but Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare does the trick. No doubt the suits at New Line (aka “The House That Freddy Built”) would insist on the accuracy of at least the first part of the title, in that Freddy dies in the movie, but I’m not buying. Freddy dies in all the movies, and it’s no more a permanent condition than this case of gluteus maximum syndrome I’ve developed from sitting through them all. I know Freddy’s death isn’t permanent, and I definitely know this isn’t the “final nightmare,” because I still have two more DVDs to get through before Nightmare Week comes to a close.

Nightmare Week: “A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child” (1989)

At this point in Nightmare week, I’m starting to feel like I’m trapped in one of Freddy’s endless time-loops; no matter what else the day may bring, I know it will end with a fresh crop of annoying teenagers screaming at me as they meet their grisly fates in dreamland. The makers of this most perfunctory installment appear to share my lack of enthusiasm, as did audiences, which made The Dream Child the lowest grossing of all the Freddy flicks.

Maine Bigots Defeat Gay Marriage

by Andrew Osborne

What the fuck, Maine?  I thought you were my friend!  You’re part of New England and right next to Canada, for Christ’s sake!  You’re supposed to be friggin’ libertarians, remember?  Y’know, rugged, pot-smoking anarchists and conservatives who don’t like being told what to do, especially by the goddamn government…

…unless it’s about gay marriage, because I guess you think that somehow affects your heterosexual lives even the slightest little bit.

Oh, but wait a minute, I forgot…it does affect your lives, because gay couples LOVE antiquing in Bar Harbor and vacationing in cute little B&Bs in Ogunquit.

Or, y’know, maybe not so much anymore.

(And can someone please explain to me why the government has the power to enforce conservative religious values?  I’m Unitarian, my religion allows gay marriage.  Didn’t we used to have some kind of separation of church and state thing in the Constitution?  Or did Bush and Glenn Beck rescind that as too socialist?)

Nightmare Week: “A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master” (1988)

By the fourth installment in the Nightmare series, it appears that Robert Englund realized he had some leverage, which is something the faceless actors who played Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers never had. Silent and hidden behind masks, they were hardly in any position to demand raises or top billing, and indeed those roles in the Friday the 13th and Halloween franchises were recast constantly. Freddy, on the other hand, had not only a personality but a very recognizable face, hidden behind latex or not. So it was that Englund not only received above-the-title billing in The Dream Master, but an expanded onscreen role – and Freddy the yukmeister took over the series.

Vadim Rizov Reviews How To Seduce Difficult Women

It is, perhaps, best not to expect too much from the directorial debut of Grace Kelly’s ex-hairdresser; still, How to Seduce Difficult Women is woefully incompetent and ugly, throwing out multiple threads without resolution, randomly interspersed with man-in-Union-Square documentary commentary of the Mars/Venus kind. Writing, producing, and directing, Richard Temtchine makes his debut with more or less the He’s Just Not That Into You B-side: men discovering that, despite their stereotypical inadequacies, the ladies really are into them.

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Hayden Childs’ Music Library: Archie Shepp to The Fall

Whew!  Another round of catch-up!

Archie Shepp – The Magic of Ju-Ju (1967). Sounding somewhat like Coltrane’s final albums, the first track on this album is 18+ minutes of Shepp chasing his bliss while a small army of drummers provides a polyrhythmic foundation. When the rest of the band joins with bass and two more horns, Shepp sounds just as driven and intense. Top-freakin’-notch.

Danielson – When It Comes To You I’m Lazy single (2006). This has a different mix of the title song from Ships. A better one, actually, and I thought the album version was pretty great. The b-side is another little gem called “Goody Goody.”

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Surviving Samoa: Week Seven

Click Here for Week Six!

So, I don’t really have anything to say about Episode Seven.  I’m too horrified by the utter decimation of my Fantasy Survivor team, which used to include Marisa, Betsy, Black Russell and, finally, Liz.

Do I know how to pick ‘em, or what?

I’ve been playing an online Fantasy Survivor game since the second or third season, and I’ve NEVER lost all my players before the Merge before…but, then again, there’s never before been a Survivor season that bit so hard I was still having trouble telling the players apart by the Merge, so I guess it makes sense I’m a little out of synch this time around.

Nightmare Week: “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” (1987)

After sitting out Freddy’s Revenge, Wes Craven returned to the Nightmare series for this third installment, though how much of the finished product reflects his contributions is debatable, given that Craven did not direct (those honors went to Chuck Russell) and was only one of four credited screenwriters (a group that included future Stephen King prison movie auteur Frank Darabont). Whether the credit is due Craven or not, Dream Warriors is a significant improvement over its immediate predecessor; it’s still not particularly scary, but at least it advances the real world/dreamworld conceit in a modestly clever way. And it brings back Heather Langenkamp to delight us once again with her uniquely dazed baby-talk delivery.