This Christmas I got a book titled The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook.
Contained within were tidbits of information on how to survive shark attack, a volcano eruption, even what to do when the pilot passes out leaving you to land the plane.
It’s an interesting read, but I am a visual person and have learned much more about survival from watching movies than from the pages of this book.
From this weekend’s The Grey, a man versus nature tale starring Liam Neeson, I learned that empty airplane booze bottles can be broken, wedged between your fingers and repurposed as Wolverine-style knuckles of death.
Hopefully I’ll never have to use that trick, but it is just one of many lessons learned at the movies.
Alive, the story of Uruguay’s rugby team whose plane crashed in the middle of the Andes mountains, I learned that cannibalism is a good way to stave off hunger pangs.
A similar lesson was taught in the Robert Redford film Jeremiah Johnson, based on a real-life trapper named John Johnston, nicknamed “Liver Eater Johnston” for his habit for cutting out and eating the livers of men he killed.
From the true-to-life mountain climbing movies 127 Hours and Touching the Void, I learned perseverance.
In the former a man is wedged literally between a rock and a hard place. To get free he cuts off his own arm with a pocketknife. Now that’s stick-to-itive-ness!
The latter sees a man with a severely broken leg crawling his way out of a deep crevice to safety.
From Cast Away, Tom Hanks’s stranded-on-a-desert-isle movie, I learned how to build a raft from a portable toilet, and how, in lieu of friends, a soccer ball with a bloody handprint can be man’s best friend.
Should you find yourself stranded on a snowshoer mountain top think back to the Lance Henriksen movie Survival Quest; not only does it teach viewers to forage for food and raft raging waters, but also how to dig an ice cave to survive the bitter cold.
In case of a zombie attack the classic George A. Romero movies teach us all we need to know. Remember the rhyme: “Shoot the living dead in the head.”
Should you find yourself in mortal combat with a monster, another tip learned from dozens of other horror films suggests that once you’ve slain the creature, don’t double check to make sure its really dead.
Demonic possession has been terrifying moviegoers for decades.
The Exorcist, the most famous fiendish film, created such a stir with audiences that in 1973 Newsweek ran a cover story entitled The Exorcism Frenzy. Complete with stories of queasy theatre-goers and their Exorcist barf bags, it helped create hysteria and make the movie one of the biggest hits of the year.
The impact The Exorcist had on audiences has yet to be duplicated by any of the dozens of possession movies released in its wake, but this weekend’s The Devil Inside is hoping to bring a little good old-fashioned hellfire back to theatres.
The devil, of course, is the star of any possession movie, even if you don’t actually see him. What’s more petrifying than the idea of Old Scratch taking over your body and making your head spin 360 degrees?
But what about the brave priests who battle Beelzebub? Here’s a few cinematic celebrants who have gone mano-a-mano with Mephistopheles.
Father Lankester Merrin, as portrayed by Max von Sydow in The Exorcist, presided over the most famous Satan skirmish.
The statuesque Swedish actor played Merrin twice — he’s seen in flashbacks in Exorcist II: The Heretic — while Stellan Skarsgård played him in two prequels.
The loopiest of devil hunters must be Father Pierre Barre (Michael Gothard) from the Ken Russell film The Devils. He is a corrupt and despicable holy man who convinces a group of terrified nuns to fake a mass possession with the words, “You will scream! You will blaspheme!” His other questionable methods include “forcible colonic irrigation” with holy water and torture.
Barre isn’t the only real life exorcist to be portrayed on film, however. Both The Rite, starring Anthony Hopkins as a real life exorcist tutor and The Exorcism of Emily Rose with Tom Wilkinson as a priest accused of murder when a young woman died during an exorcism, are based on true stories.
More fanciful is Leslie Nielsen as Father Mayii in Repossessed, an Exorcist parody co-starring Linda Blair, who played the possessee in the original film. When told she “has an ungodly voice and maniacal facial expressions” the skeptical Mayii replies, “That doesn’t prove a thing! She could be related to Joe Cocker.”
And finally, Beetlejuice has a different kind of exorcist. Michael Keaton plays a supernatural character called in as a “bio-exorcist” to rid a house of its human inhabitants.
These days it seems there are almost as many movies set in Sweden as there are Billy bookshelves in college dorms. The original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books and movie series kicked off a thirst for all things Scandinavian.
Headhunters, a Norwegian noir, was a big hit recently at the Toronto International Film Festival and Let the Right One In placed vampires against a snowy, stark white Swedish backdrop.
This weekend the Americanized version of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo opens, starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara in the roles Swedish superstars Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Repace made famous. Shot in Sweden, the movie promises open landscapes, the crunch of snow underfoot and even the odd fjord.
Suddenly, it seems people are hungry for movies from Sweden, Norway and Denmark, but there has always been a smorgasbord of cinema available from that part of the world.
No discussion of Scandinavian cinema can be complete without mentioning Ingmar Bergman. Woody Allen named him “the greatest film artist since the invention of the motion picture camera,” and Francis Ford Coppola called him “my all-time favourite.”
If you haven’t seen The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries, you should; they are both classics. But you have undoubtedly seen movies inspired by or parodying Bergman’s work.
His famous Seventh Seal scene of Death playing chess has been mimicked in everything from Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey to Woody Allen’s play Death Knocks, which features a man playing gin rummy with Death.
More recently a Norwegian mockumenary called Troll Hunter earned praise from critics all over the world. One writer said this Blair-Witch-style story of cave-dwelling trolls and the government-sponsored hunters who track them was “destined to be a classic of its kind.”
Another said, “You’ll want to catch this clever movie before Hollywood ruins everything with a dumb remake.”
Denmark has a thriving film industry. Since 1956 they’ve entered 40 flicks for Best Foreign Film consideration at the Academy Awards.
At last year’s Oscars Susanne Bier’s drama In a Better World beat Canada’s entry Incendies to take home Best Foreign Film.
The best-known Danish films of recent years have been made by Lars von Trier, the distinctive and controversial director of Breaking the Waves and this year’s Melancholia. As well known for his depressed behaviour as he is for his films, Von Trier once said, “Basically, I’m afraid of everything in life, except filmmaking.”
Wikipedia says “babysitting is commonly performed as an odd job by teenagers for extra money.” While that is undoubtedly the stereotype, the movies have shown us that babysitters come in all shapes and sizes.
This weekend Jonah Hill plays an irresponsible college student who reluctantly looks after his neighbour’s wild kids. How wild is it? Well, let’s put it this way; I don’t think Nanny McPhee had a “red band” trailer.
If it sounds familiar, it should. Twenty-four years ago babysitter Elisabeth Shue led her young charges through the streets of Chicago in Adventures in Babysitting. At one point they end up on a nightclub stage. The leader of the house band, played by blues legend Albert Collins, says, “Nobody leaves this place without singing the blues.”
After an awkward pause she improvises the Babysitting Blues.
“It’s so hard babysitting these guys,” she sings. “And they should be in bed,” replies the guitar player over a classic blues-rock riff.
It’s a fantasy, but then again, babysitters have often been the subjects of fantasy. Mary Poppins is a mythical character, a “practically perfect in every way” nanny who knows how to do the right thing in every situation. Kind of like a Victoria Age Super Nanny. In The Babysitter, however, Alicia Silverstone was a much different kind of fantasy child-minder.
This 1995 thriller about a babysitter who becomes the object of obsession for not only the young boys she looks after but for their father as well, is more chilling than titillating. The ads hinted at some nudity from star Silverstone, but in reality she refused to do the film unless the nude scenes where removed.
The most lovable movie minder has to be John Candy as Uncle Buck. Even though he pretends to be capable of mutilation with power tools, he’s less violent than Rebecca De Mornay in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, manlier than Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire and more alive than all the babysitters in Halloween.
In the movie’s most famous scene he answers a barrage of questions from his nephew, played by Macaulay Culkin.
On the day of filming the younger actor couldn’t remember all the questions, so Candy wrote them out and hid them where Culkin could read them.
The new Martin Scorsese film is the director’s first PG rated film in 18 years. Hugo is a handsome 3D kid’s flick featuring adventure, a broken robot, a toy store owner and one of the mainstays of Central Casting—an orphan.
There are all kinds of on-screen orphans, some lovable—The Jungle Book’s Mowgli, Harry Potter—some not– Hannibal Lecter, Darth Vader—but few have been as memorable as Oliver Twist.
The younster first captured people’s imaginations one-hundred-and-seventy-three years ago as the title character in Charles Dickens’s second book and debuted on film in 1908. Since then there have been at least eleven adaptations of the story of an urchin who famously asked his cruel workhouse foreman for more gruel with the words, “Please sir, I want some more.”
The most famous version of the story has to be Oliver!, a splashy 1968 all-singing-all-dancing edition which film critic Pauline Kael said was one of the few film adaptations of a stage musical superior to the original stage show.
Oliver had it rough. Much rougher than Little Orphan Annie, the perky red-haired waif adopted by the über -wealthy Daddy Warbucks but for the actress who played her in the 1982 movie Annie there were some unpleasant moments.
The curly red wig Aileen Quinn wore was so itchy a specially designed comb had to be created to give her some relief and in order to get Annie’s dog Sandy to realistically kiss her the prop master rubbed Alpo all over her face. Still, Quinn says, “I just remember having the best time.”
Unlike our next orphans Oliver and Annie were decidedly earthbound ragamuffins but the movies have seen lots of alien children abandoned on our planet. In Escape to Witch Mountain Tony and Tia Malone’s psychic abilities made them standouts at the orphanage and the moniker Clark Kent was the name his human adoptive parent’s gave to Kal-El. You know him best as Superman.
Superman wasn’t the only superhero orphan, however. The death of Bruce Wayne’s parents at the hand of the Joker prompted him to become the Caped Crusader. “You made me,” he grumbles to the parent’s killer in Batman.
Finally, Peter Parker’s parents were Richard and Mary, CIA agents killed in the line of duty. Rumor has it they will appear in the 2012 reboot, The Amazing Spider-Man, played by Campbell Scott and Embeth Davidtz.
At the start of the animated penguin picture Surf’s Up, Cody Maverick (the voice of Transformer’s star Shia LaBeouf) takes a shot at another cartoon tuxedoed bird movie.
Asked if he has any other skills besides surfing. Cody sarcastically says, “Like what? Singing and dancing?”
Of course, he’s referring to Happy Feet, the Oscar winning movie about an Emperor Penguin who can’t find his soul mate the usual way — through song — so he uses his other talent — tap dancing.
The musical penguins of Happy Feet shim shammed their way to huge box office in 2006, and will paddle and roll their way back into theatres again this weekend in Happy Feet Two.
For a while, it seemed like you couldn’t swing a herring without hitting a penguin at the movies.
March of the Penguins, a real-life look at the migration march of Emperor penguins to their traditional breeding ground, was a left field hit in 2005. The winner for Best Documentary not only out grossed all the nominees for Best Picture that year — it took in $77 million vs. $75 million for Brokeback Mountain — but also became the second highest grossing theatrical documentary after Fahrenheit 9/11.
It was such a huge hit it inspired an R-rated parody, Farce of the Penguins. Featuring the voices of Samuel L. Jackson, Jason Alexander and Christina Applegate, it’s an R-rated spoof that imagines what sex-starved penguins might talk about on the 70 mile walk to their mating grounds.
“I am tired of the club scene,” says one penguin. “So are the baby seals!” replies another.
More family friendly was Madagascar, the story of four Central Park Zoo animals who get stranded on the island of Madagascar. The movie featured a large menagerie of characters, but the zoo’s penguins, Skipper, Kowalski, Rico and Private, proved to be audience favourites. They have most of the movie’s best lines — on landing in Africa one of the flightless birds says, “Africa? That ain’t gonna fly!” — and were featured in a short film, The Madagascar Penguins in a Christmas Caper, a TV series and video games.
Probably the most famous penguin character in the movies is Oswald Cobblepot a.k.a. The Penguin, as played by Danny DeVito in Batman Returns.
This super villain is human, but dresses like a penguin, eats raw fish and tries to conquer Gotham with an army of specially trained penguins.
Ben Affleck did it. So did Eddie Murphy and Charlie Chaplin. Heck, Alec Guinness did it eight times, including once as a woman.
This weekend in Jack and Jill, Adam Sandler adds his name to the list of actors who have played multiple roles in the same film.
“In Jack and Jill I play me,” says Sandler, “and I play my twin sister. The man version of me is doing OK; he has a family out in L.A. The twin-sister version of me lives out in the Bronx and comes out to L.A. for Thanksgiving and then refuses to leave.”
The idea of playing more than one role in a movie dates back to the Mary Pickford 1918 weepy Stella Maris.
In it she plays the wealthy title character and the uneducated orphan Unity Blake. The studio balked at her insistence on playing both roles, but Pickford insisted.
As Stella she was photographed like a glamorous movie star, but as Unity she wore unflattering makeup and was shot from her right, less photogenic, side. Scenes where the two characters shared the screen were achieved through double exposure.
Since then everyone from Mel Brooks (he was President Skroob and Yogurt in Spaceballs), to David Carradine (remember him in Circle of Iron as The Blind Man, Monkeyman, Death, and Changsha?) to Peter Sellers (who played as Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley, and Dr. Strangelove in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) have taken on multi-roles.
Perhaps because of their sketch comedy backgrounds, Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers often take on various roles in their films, but Alec Guinness, the actor best known in North America as Jedi knight Obi-Wan Kenobi, must hold the record for character changes in one feature-length movie. In Kind Hearts and Coronets he plays no less than eight characters. In an acting tour de force he’s easily recognizable in each part, but doesn’t repeat himself from character to character. Instead he carefully constructs each, from the happy-go-lucky young photographer to the window-smashing suffragette Lady Agatha.
Rivaling Guinness’s achievement is Buster Keaton who played every part — including a stagehand, a dance troupe, a full band and every member in the audience — in the 1921 short film The Play House.
To top it off he also took credit for every crew job including editor, director, writer and cameraman.
The week after Halloween is a strange time to be writing about Christmas movies. Almost like cooking a Thanksgiving dinner in July.
But if department stores can display Lady Gaga masks beside Christmas ornaments and Hollywood can release A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas while we’re still digesting our Halloween haul, I can write about some movies that put the tinsel in Tinsel Town.
Harold and Kumar isn’t your average Christmas movie.
I doubt Jimmy Stewart would have considered burning down the family Christmas tree part of his wonderful Yuletide life, but Harold and Kumar aren’t the first to put the X into Xmas.
Many movies are set at Christmastime — the Brat Packer flick Less Than Zero features an LA Yule, and Die Hard takes place on Christmas Eve — but I’m thinking of movies that use the holidays as a springboard for the action.
The raunchiest Christmas movie has to Bad Santa, starring Billy Bob Thornton as a boozed-up, thieving department store Kris Kringle.
Unsentimental and crude, Bad Santa is bound to make the elves choke on their eggnog.
Dan Aykroyd also played a less than cuddly Santa in Trading Places. Drunk, disorderly and waving a gun around, he even has a fish hidden in his fake beard.
Unwrap Mixed Nuts, the 1994 Nora Ephron black comedy, and you’ll find Christmas tree theft, lunatics and the worst Christmas gift ever: a dead body.
Staying up on Christmas Eve, waiting for Santa to come, will be easy after watching Black Christmas. You’ll be too scared to sleep!
The tinsel terror about a mysterious killer in the attic is considered to be the first modern slasher movie.
Gremlins mixes horror, humour and ho ho ho’s. Set at Christmas, the story of little creatures who turn nasty when wet features a gory story about a missing father, a chimney, an overstuffed Santa suit and the punchline, “And that’s how I found out there was no Santa Claus.”
A very merry Crime Christmas can be had in both The Ref and Reindeer Games.
In The Ref, cat burglar Dennis Leary soon regrets breaking into the home of squabbling couple Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis on Christmas Eve.
Reindeer Games sees Ben Affleck reluctantly rob a casino at Christmas.
The movie is such a lump of coal that one of its stars had this to say about it: “That was a bad, bad, bad movie,” said Charlize Theron.
A new movie called Anonymous asks a question that has kept academics debating for decades. Was it actually William Shakespeare, of Stratford-upon-Avon, who wrote the plays and poems attributed to him?
The film suggests it was Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans) who actually put pen to paper.
Then to hide his identity he hired a semi-employed actor named William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) to act as his literary beard.
There is no evidence to support the movie’s theory but at least one detail is consistent with history — the likeness of Shakespeare. Even though no painting of the Bard was done during his lifetime, the 1632 Martin Droeshout portrait showing the writer with, “a huge head, placed against a starched ruff,” has become the accepted version of his appearance in art and on film.
Shakespeare and his ruffed collar has popped up in everything from The Simpsons’s 2007 videogame to the Bugs Bunny cartoon A Witch’s Tangled Hare.
Playing the Bard as a lusty poet in Shakespeare in Love made Joseph Fiennes a star, but he was far from the first actor considered for the role. Daniel Day-Lewis and Kenneth Branagh both turned it down before Ralph Fienne’s little brother snapped it up.
The movie, about how Shakespeare’s love affair with Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow) helped him overcome writer’s block and pen Romeo and Juliet in her honour, earned 13 Oscar nominations and won seven, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Gwyneth.
One of the stranger depictions of Shakespeare on screen came in Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear.
Called “Godard’s most insane, headache-inducing and inscrutable movie,” by one critic, it features Peter Sellars (not the Pink Panther actor, but an avant guard theatre director) as William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth.
In the movie’s post Chernobyl world, all of the world’s culture has been lost and it’s up to folks like Shaksper Junior to try recreate it. Searching for inspiration he scribbles familiar phrases in his notebook — “Love’s Labors Lost. As you wish. As you wish. As you wish. As you witch. As you which? As you watch. As you watch…” — as he tries to piece together the works of his long lost relative.
Best remembered as the Woody Allen movie you haven’t seen — the comedian plays Mr. Alien in an uncredited cameo — King Lear is a head scratcher, even for the often unfathomable Godard.
