The latest writing from all your favorite Screengrab refugees
I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess there won’t be a whole helluva lotta posting here this week, what with various vacations and post-vacation hangovers distracting us from the important business of blogging…
…but make yourselves at home, stay tuned and feel free to scrounge around in the refrigerator for snacks…we’ll be right back in a few (unless the monsters get us)!
As a longtime listener, no-time caller of WFAN, New York’s nexus of sports-talk radio, I can’t help but find something mildly relatable about the deranged devotion of Paul Aufiero (an authentically schlubby Patton Oswalt), a 36-year-old Staten Island loser who habitually phones radio shows to blab about his beloved football Giants. Realism, though, is only partially sought by Big Fan, the directorial debut of The Wrestler scribe Robert D. Siegel, which fancifully imagines such sports chatterboxes as neo-Travis Bickles, dangerously unstable loners with skewed perspectives on themselves and the world.
by Leonard Pierce
See, there’s something you need to understand about me; I am not, to appearances, a refined gentleman. I’m a big guy, with a forceful physical presence. Though it’s been a long time since I worked with my hands, my day-to-day uniform is still jeans, a T-shirt, and boots; about the only thing separating me from the guys on the roadgang are steel toe-caps and a couple of weeks in the sun. I’m neither a snob nor a oenophile, is the thing, and when I’m at the ballgame or slapping burgers on the grill, I usually stick to beer.
So it is both surprising and a little embarrassing for me to admit that many a winter’s night finds me by the fire, with my feet up and a glass of port at hand.
Port? Isn’t that stuff reserved for drawing rooms, exclusively for the consumption of elaborately-bewhiskered Victorian swells? Well, no – because port has a dirty little secret…
As most of you probably remember, I used to run what were called Trailer Reviews over at Screengrab three days a week. It wasn’t a great column, but it helped to pay the bills, even if it meant having to crank out 200 words about the likes of Beverly Hills Chihuahua.
by Lauren Wissot
Sophie Barthes’ stunningly smart debut, Cold Souls, stars the always-impressive Paul Giamatti as the actor Paul Giamatti whose soul has become a burden during a production of Uncle Vanya, resulting in his inability to separate himself from the character. Anxious to alleviate the pain Paul seeks out a facility called Soul Storage—“conveniently located on Roosevelt Island” a soothing automated phone message explains—run by David Straithairn’s hilariously laidback Dr. Flintstein. While comparisons to Charlie Kaufman’s work, especially to Being John Malkovich, will inevitably be drawn (the meta lead roles, the soul storage warehouse in “New Jersey,” the gender-bending aspect of male souls taking up in female bodies and vice-versa), Barthes has distinguished herself from the Kaufman machine mainly through the help of her partner and cinematographer/producer Andrij Parekh. Parekh’s elegant lighting and fluid camerawork stand in stark contrast to the off-kilter hyperactive style of Being John Malkovich; Cold Souls is clearly not “A Spike Jonze Film.”
Quentin Tarantino has described his World War II epic as a “bunch of guys on a mission movie” in the vein of The Dirty Dozen, but don’t take his word for it. The Basterds, an elite squad of Jewish-American soldiers assembled by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), are anonymous ciphers for the most part — barely extras in the grand scheme of things. Their exploits are but one ingredient in a typically Tarantino-esque goulash — a war movie that plays like a spaghetti western, a comedy of violence, history re-written with lightning wit. It’s easily the director’s most entertaining, accomplished work since Jackie Brown.
by Leonard Pierce
And now it’s time for your SAN ANTONIO MEETUP.COM MONTHLY ROUNDUP! Apparently, a whole bunch of new groups have formed since July, because the people of SATX need something to do in the constant 100-degree weather. What does Meetup.com suggest I do with my time?
- SAN ANTONIO TEA ENTHUSIASTS
Hmmm. Well, I like tea and all, but I wouldn’t exactly describe my feelings towards it as ‘enthusiastic’. Unless “tea” is a code word for something else.
- THE SAN MARCOS CONSOLE GAMING MEETUP GROUP
I’m not gonna drive all the way to San Marcos just to hear people yelling at Dean for not guarding the flank.
- THE SAN ANTONIO NUDE MASSAGE SESSIONS FOR WOMEN
Are you sure you mean just for women? You don’t maybe mean “featuring women”? Because if you do, I’m on board.
Post Grad tries to do three things at once—and half-hits the mark on only one. Part of it is wacky Little Miss Sunshine family time, with Carol Burnett in the Alan Arkin part and Michael Keaton as the clueless paterfamilias. Part is sketch comedy, which—given Keaton’s frequently under-used talents, plus Jane Lynch as his wife and a supporting cast stacked so deep that J.K. Simmons can be thrown away on two scenes—is not half-bad. But most of Post Grad is a soggy, Devil Wears Prada–aspiring romance, with Ryden Malby (Alexis Bledel) as a just-graduated girl whose deep lust for literature (she has read Catcher in the Rye!) is exceeded only by her flawless navigation in heels.
by Paul Clark
Hey bud. First off, just wanted to let you know that I think you’re doing an awesome job. In my experience, your movie reviews tend to be the most insightful on the site. In addition, I’ve been a fan of your weekly New Cult Canon column ever since it started up last year. As someone who knows what a grind it can be like to crank out content with any regularity, I admire that you still manage to keep the pieces fresh without being stingy with the critical insight.
I recently worked my way through Danny Peary’s first volume of Cult Movies- the book you cited as your inspiration for the series- and I couldn’t help but notice some differences between Peary’s M.O. and what you’ve been doing so far in the series. The biggest difference I could see is that, unlike Peary, you seem to enjoy nearly all of the movies you’ve selected. Now, don’t get me wrong- I’m not trying to say that you’re more of a pushover than Peary was by any means. Instead, I see this as a kind of difference in approaches. Whereas Peary’s goal was to write about movies that had already amassed passionate followings at that point, you also seem to be looking at movies you like that fit the definition of a “cult movie” even if the cult hasn’t quite happened yet.
Now, you’d think that by using this approach that it would be you who would have included more legitimate “classics” in your series, but in fact the opposite is true.
