A simple E-F-E-F bass line progression is all it took to make a generation of moviegoers scared spitless to swim in the ocean. With Steven Spielberg’s classic 1975 beach emptier Jaws set for Blu-ray release on Tuesday, composer John Williams talks about the simple-but-oh-so-effective theme he created for the film’s voracious Great White shark in an interview with John Burlingame. According to the interview, the first and only music Williams played for Spielberg prior to the recording sessions was what would eventually become known as the Jaws theme that Williams says was “so simple, insistent and driving, that it seems unstoppable, like the attack of the shark.” Spielberg was not sold at first. “I played him the simple little E-F-E-F bass line that we all know on the piano,” and Spielberg laughed at first. But, Williams explains: “I just began playing around with simple motifs that could be distributed in the orchestra, and settled on what I thought was the most powerful thing, which is to say the simplest. Like most ideas, they’re often the most compelling.” Spielberg’s response, according to the composer who is also known for his indelible scores for the Star Wars films, Raiders of the Lost Ark , and Close Encounters of the Third Kind , among other landmark films was: “Let’s try it.” Burlingame writes that Williams spent two months writing more than 50 minutes of music for Jaws . They recorded in early March 1975 with a 73-piece orchestra. “It was a lot of fun, like a great big playground,” Williams says. “We had a really good time, and Steven loved it.” Spielberg even lent his less-than-masterful clarinet playing — shades of Woody Allen worship, perhaps? — to the soundtrack for a scene early in Jaws when a high-school band plays Sousa during a parade. Burlingame notes that “Williams needed to record a terrible-sounding rendition with his orchestra, which included many of the finest musicians in Hollywood.” Or as Williams puts it: “It’s very difficult to ask these great musicians to play badly.” So, Spielberg, who’d played clarinet in a high-school band, joined the orchestra on that number. “He added just the right amateur quality to the piece. A few measures still survive in the movie,” says Williams, who is probably one of the few people in the movie industry who could say Spielberg sucks at the clarinet and still manage to work in the business. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
A long time ago in a culture far removed from this one — 1987 to be exact — cinematic satirist Mel Brooks took on box-office game changer George Lucas’ Star Wars franchise and didn’t end up in the Hollywood equivalent of a Sarlacc Pit. Substituting the Schwartz for the Force, Yogurt for Yoda and Pizza The Hutt for Jabba, Brooks gave us Spaceballs and made us laugh harder (intentionally) than Jar Jar Binks ever did. To celebrate the movie’s 25th anniversary, Sony has released a commemorative Blu-Ray edition that mostly does justice to this comedy gem. The Film: Spaceballs (1987) Why It’s An Inessential Essential: Although Life Stinks (1991) was Mel Brooks’ last sturdy feature, the often gut-bustingly funny Spaceballs was his last really inspired comedy. Like many of Brooks’ earlier films, Spaceballs spoofs generic and genre cliches. In this case, the director aimed his blaster at science fiction and fantasy films, Star Wars in particular. Viewed 25 years after its theatrical release, Spaceballs suffers from lopsided structure and occasional laziness, but the movie repeatedly breaks down the fourth wall with such zeal and absurd charm that it’s impossible to resist. (It’s worth noting that the movie was released during the heyday of the Bruce Willis/Cybill Shepherd ABC comedy series Moonlighting , which was heralded for doing the same.) A large part of the movie’s giddy appeal is its game cast, led by SCTV Jedi the late John Candy and Rick Moranis. Candy plays the Wookiee-like Barf and Moranis is particularly hilarious as the clutzy, over-compensating Darth Vader spoof, Dark Helmet — a puny man topped by enormous circumcised headgear. As ringmaster of this circus, Brooks (who also appears in the movie as both President Skroob and Yogurt) is at a point in his career where he’s starting to toss things against the wall out of sheer desperation. And because he’s working with talented comedians and co-writers, most of what he throws sticks. The move is a collection of blisteringly strange and funny sketches, such as the one where Helmet fantasizes about seducing Princess Vespa (Daphne Zuniga) while playing with a set of action figures that includes an even tinier facsimile of himself and the Druish princess. Brooks’ wise-ass, Brecht-by-way-of-Vaudeville sensibility is at the core of the movie’s cantankerous, Yiddish sensibility, and though some of the yucks feel a tad musty, the movie is never tedious. Riffs on cash-in sequels, “Moichandizing” and “turning off the movie” demonstrate that, at that point in his career, Brooks’ cultural comedy mojo was still working. Indeed, Spaceballs doesn’t just hold up as a laugh riot. It’s still highly quotable right down to the characters’ names. (Yogurt! Pizza The Hutt!). “May the Schwartz be with you” still provokes laughter after all these years, as does Barf’s “Funny, she doesn’t look Druish” comment about Princess Vespa. And when the Spaceballs and Dark Helmet land on the Planet of the Apes, one of its denizens grouses; “Oh shit, there goes the planet.” How the Blu-Ray Edition Makes the Case for the Film: The best special features on Sony’s25th anniversary release are the least serious ones. New interviews with a doddering and-haughty Brooks don’t contribute much. (“We were looking for a new genre to destroy,” he exclaims at one point). Much more satisfying is a very funny list of continuity errors in the film, including, a scene in which Dot Matrix (Joan Rivers playing a droid even bitchier than Anthony Daniels’ C-3P0) appears to stop leaving a trail behind her in one desert scene. The film’s gag audio commentary tracks are also suitably ridiculous. One is in “Mawgese,” presumably the native language of Barf, another, in “Dinkese,” the mother tongue of the Jawa-esque Dink Dinks. Unfortunately, the Blu-Ray edition does not markedly improve the picture quality that was found on the 2005 DVD release of Spaceballs . There are still notable visual blemishes, including artifacts that resulted from poor video compression. Still, the dual Blu-Ray/DVD package is worth buying if only because the menus included on the new DVD release are more interactive and the features they include are more impressive than the last time around. Other Trivia: The new 25th anniversary Spaceballs Blu-Ray is loaded with new special features. If you’re a dedicated Mel Brooks fan — even one who lost faith or interest after Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving It — you’ll probably get a big kick out of the jokey introduction he recorded to the film’s original trailer. Brooks’ audio commentary track is also worthy, even if he is more than a little full of himself after the wild (and not entirely deserved) multi-platform success of The Producers . Compared to the meager 2005 DVD release, which came with a making-of featurette and a skimpy souvenir booklet, Sony’s 25th anniversary Blu-Ray release is a much more comprehensive presentation of the film. Simon Abrams is a NY-based freelance film critic whose work has appeared in The Village Voice, Time Out New York , Vulture and Esquire . Additionally, some people like his writing, which he collects a t Extended Cut . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Also in Wednesday afternoon’s round-up of news briefs news Hawk Koch steps down from PGA presidency; A pair of film pick-ups for U.S. release; Two companies team for a “social film project” and William Hurt and Michael McDonald take on new roles. Hawk Koch Temporarily Stepping Down as PGA President Koch was elected president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences last night. He’s taking a leave of absence from the presidency of the Producers Guild of America. Co-president Mark Gordon will continue as the sole president of the group. Excuse Me for Living Headed for U.S. The film will open October 12 both theatrically and via day and date VOD platforms via DadaFilms/Required Viewing, which announced its acquisition of the title Wednesday. Starring Tom Pelphrey, Christopher Lloyd, Wayne Knight, Jerry Stiller, Robert Vaughn and Melissa Archer, the film centers on a charming, suicidal druggie must obey his rehab-clinic’s demand to lead a seniors men’s group or face incarceration and lose the love of his psychiatrist’s daughter. Sushi Girl Heads to U.S. Theaters Phase 4 Films and Magnolia Home Entertainment jointly picked up North American rights to the film directed by Kern Saxton. The revenge thriller will have a theatrical release in the U.S. and cable VOD by Phase 4 in late 2012, with Blu-ray, DVD and digital VOD handled by Magnolia in early 2013. Mark Hamill stars as Fish, who has spent six years in jail. The night he is released, the four men he protected with silence celebrate his freedom with a congratulatory dinner. The meal is a lavish array of sushi, served off the naked body of a beautiful young woman. The sushi girl seems catatonic, trained to ignore everything in the room, even if things become dangerous. Toshiba and Intel Team for The Beauty Inside The two companies are collaborating to create a social film project and has a global online casting call to audition for a starring role online . Starring Topher Grace ( That ‘70s Show ) and Mary Elizabeth Winstead ( Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter ) and directed by Sundance award-winning director Drake Doremus ( Like Crazy ), The Beauty Inside is an experiment in social entertainment. The project will engage the audience through social media and encourage them to connect and interact with Alex via Facebook. The film will be available online in weekly episodes starting on Aug. 16 and continue over 6 weeks. Around the ‘net… The Dark Knight Rises Hits $300M Milestone The final Batman installment by Christopher Nolan hit the $300 million milestone in North America Tuesday after 12 days. Only The Avengers and Nolan’s The Dark Knight have hit that figure quicker, THR reports . William Hurt Joins Winter’s Tale Hurt plays the father of a dying young woman who falls in love with a thief who breaks into her home in the Warner Bros adaptation of the novel by Mark Helprin. This will be Oscar-winning writer Adiva Goldsman’s directorial debut, Deadline reports . Michael McDonald Takes On The Heat McDonald hails from the Fox series Mad TV . He joins Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy, playing a villain in the 20th Century Fox-produced project which Paul Feig will direct, Deadline reports .
Heads up, fanboys and girls: Marvel has released a barrage of Avengers clips ahead of its September 25 Blu-ray/DVD street date, including the geek-baiting post-credits scene that had fans in a tizzy. No, not the one that boosted sales of shawarma around the nation ; the other Easter Egg, which revealed a menacing glimpse of the real orchestrator behind Loki’s invasion of Earth. The impending Blu-ray/DVD release has also given Marvel occasion to release a handful of additional clips from the film, reminding what life was like before The Dark Knight Rises came along and stole everyone’s thunder. I’d include a spoiler warning here, but if you’re reading this now and haven’t seen Avengers yet… well, I can’t help you there. The post-credits peek reveals Marvel baddie Thanos, who is believed to be the villain in the next Avengers pic. This might also be the closest we’ll come to another Hellboy sequel. (Kidding!) [via Badass Digest ]
If a lip slip is the Holy Grail of celebrity nudity, does that make Mr. Skin Indiana Jones? We already got a good look at Ellen Barkin ‘s oyster in a bottomless scene in 1987’s Siesta , and now Mr. Skin’s own Blu-ray Ninja has discovered another lower lip scene from Ellen in the thriller Sea of Love (1989). Previous versions of the film hid her furburger in shadow, but with some gentle tweaking the Blu-ray revealed A-list labia in the scene where she gives a fully clothed Al Pacino a reacharound. There’s one key difference- unlike in Indiana Jones, when you open Ellen’s Ark of the Covenant, you won’t melt. Well, maybe in your pants. See strawberry-blonde bombshell Ellen Barkin exposed in Siesta (1987), Sea of Love (1989) and more right here at MrSkin.com!
A caped crusader. A city wiped clean of criminals. A madman with a doomsday device who terrorizes the populace until average citizen heroes step forward to help save the day. Batman? Nope! On the heels of The Dark Knight Rises , Movieline takes a look back at 1999’s Mystery Men , new to Blu-ray, in the latest installment of Inessential Essentials . The film: Mystery Men (1999) Why It’s an Inessential Essential: Based on characters by comics creator Bob Burden, Mystery Men is an anomalously charming and amiably goofy superhero film. The film is very much a product of the creative chaos that ensued after Hollywood executives realized comic book properties like Batman could make a mint at the box office. But with many more duds than hits on their hands, execs were apparently clueless about what they should adapt and how to do it. It’s not only strange that a movie with characters as alienating-ly campy as the ones in Mystery Men ever got made — it’s even freakier to note that the film is actually pretty funny. So while mass audiences didn’t know what to make of the film when it was initially released, the film can now be enjoyed as a more than welcome antidote to the recent trend of self-serious but mostly drab superhero films. Mystery Men was co-produced by Dark Horse Comics publisher and creator Michael Richardson, the man responsible for turning such comic book properties as Tank Girl (1995) and The Mask (1994) into half-baked films. It was directed by Kinka Usher, making a big leap from being the assistant camera operator on such films as the 1987 Kato Kaelin vehicle Beach Fever (Usher would not go on to direct any other movies after Mystery Men , not even short films). Usher clearly directed the film in the style of the Joel Schumacher Batman movies; he makes frequent use of campy Dutch angles, crash zooms and first person POV shots, like the one where we see Ben Stiller being attacked by Geoffrey Rush’s character — from the perspective of Rush’s extended pinky. To call this film’s success as a comedy anomalous would be putting it very diplomatically. In the film, a group of wannabe superheroes that mostly don’t seem to have any real powers band together to fight the nefarious disco-obsessed Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush, who had just won an Oscar for Shine two years before Mystery Men was made). Now that Frankenstein has kidnapped the all-powerful Captain Amazing (Greg Kinnear), the only people that can stop him are the then-unnamed group of heroes: Mr. Furious (Ben Stiller), a tantrum-throwing wimp who isn’t very strong; The Shoveler (William H. Macy), a middle-class father and a guy that fights crime with a shovel; and the Blue Raja (Hank Azaria), an adenoidal mama’s boy who pretends to be a British mystic and uses flatware as projectile weapons (mainly forks and spoons). To defeat Frankenstein, the team has to hire some new members, including the gaseous Spleen (Paul Reubens) and the haunted-bowling-ball-chucking Bowler (Janeane Garofalo). It’s a fittingly unusual line-up for a rather odd film. By today’s standards, Mystery Men is seriously dated. For starters, Smashmouth’s “Allstar” is used twice as a song cue. But it’s also often disarmingly eccentric, as in the scene where Tom Waits, who plays a mad scientist, shows off his arsenal of weird weapons (including the Blame Thrower), or the one where Wes Studi’s enigmatic, platitude-slinging hero The Sphinx trains the titular heroes (“To learn my teachings, I must first teach you how to learn”). All of the characters are also endearingly neurotic, like Invisible Boy (Kel Mitchell, of Keenan and Kel fame), a teenage loser who can only turn invisible when nobody else is looking at him, or Garofalo’s Bowler, a woman whose dead father nags her even from beyond the grave. Filmed on a reported $68 million budget, Mystery Men only grossed $33.4 million worldwide but went on to earn something of a cult status. How the Blu-Ray Makes the Case for the Movie: You can appreciate just how bizarre Mystery Men is just from watching the Spotlight on Location featurette, which makes it seem like the film’s production was pretty manic. For instance, Stiller reveals that the film’s cast were working with an improv-reliant script. “We’re always coming up with ideas, which is the fun thing about…” Stiller says, comically pausing to look around him and finishing his thought, ” not having a script.” Garofalo and Stiller both joke about the fact that they had little confidence in Usher. “I’m only doing this for the money,” she teases. “Kinka doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doin’. He hasn’t directed a movie before.” Even nice guy Greg Kinnear chimes in: “I describe [ Mystery Men ] as…a cartoon gone horribly, horribly wrong.” But Usher got results; even the film’s deleted scenes, like the one where Waits macks on a blue-haired retiree by telling her that he’s actually a doctor, are pretty funny. Other Trivia: In a rather thoughtful special feature, Burden shares a detailed history of his original comic book characters through interviews conducted before the film’s release. It’s especially funny to note that the character of the Shoveler was originally armed with King Arthur’s singing shovel, which was sentient and talked in “Middle English.” Also, apparently, Danny DeVito was supposed to not only direct the film at one point but play the Shoveler, too. Burden is also quoted in a Comics Buyer’s Guide interview as saying that he didn’t write the characters with modern actors in mind. “Originally, as I envisioned them, the Mystery Men were characters like Ernest Borgnine and Vic Tayback — all Mike Ditka-type guys. The only current star I could’ve seen as a Mystery Man would’ve been Steve Buscemi from Fargo .” Previously: Reconsidering Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia Simon Abrams is a NY-based freelance film critic whose work has been featured in outlets like The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Vulture and Esquire. Additionally, some people like his writing, which he collects at Extended Cut .
This week on the boob tube, Mary-Louise Parker treated us to some unexpected full nudity during a moonlit skinny-dip on Weeds . Plus, Jessica Clark’s full-frontal reveal on True Blood is enough to wake the dead, and Al Pacino’s gal pal Lucila Sol a flashes a few frames of ass on Political Animals .
We’re all getting a raise this week on DVD and Blu-ray: First, Kathleen Robertson , Hannah Ware , Jennifer Mudge and more turn the City of Big Shoulders into the City of Big Boulders on Boss , nude on DVD and Blu-ray. Next, Anna Friel bares bloody T&A in the revisionist biopic Bathory: Countess of Blood (2008), and Sasha Grey goes mainstream in a non-nude role (don’t worry, Brandy Grace , Gina Jackson , and Elizabeth McDonald pick up the slack) in The Girl from the Naked Eye (2012), both nude on DVD and Blu-ray. Plus, ’90s horror flick The Faculty (1998) gets a Blu-ray release, as does a double feature of the original I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and the 2010 unrated remake . More after the jump!
There’s not much going on in mainstream Blu-ray releases this week, but we’ve got a few arthouse chicks in arthouse flicks who are willing to bare all for their art: First, Shanyn Leigh goes out with a bang as an artist facing the end of the world in 4:44 Last Day on Earth (2012), then Michelle Jenner shows off her out-of-this-world ass in Extraterrestrial (2011), Audrey Tautou flashes her tit-ou in Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Billie Neal lets down her bra in Down by Law (1986), and finally Blair Brown gets us high on hooters in Altered States (1980). More after the jump!
First of all, we’d like to give a great big THANKS to everyone who entered our American Reunion caption contest! You all made us laugh out loud with some truly SKINspired captions. But there were three commenters whose quips stood head and shoulders above the rest. For the pic of Katrina Bowden holding her bo-bos as Seann William Scott taunts her on the beach, the Skin Staff got a big laugh out of this caption from HansLanda. That’s a bingo , Hans: “If you’re angry and you know it and you really wanna show it, if you’re angry and you know it clap your hands! CLAP! CLAP!” For our Saturday pic of Ali Cobrin giving Jason Biggs a faceful of thong, we had a few dudes present some variation on this joke, but our favorite came from James Vagabond : “Hmm, never even knew this ride came with rear side airbags.” And over on our Facebook page, Dave Miller won the day with his caption: “The private Romney fundraiser was WAY different than I expected!” Congratulations to Dave, James and HansLanda! You’ll all be receiving an American Reunion prize pack featuring American Reunion on Blu-ray, American Pie on Blu-ray, and beer-flavored lip balm courtesy of our friends at Universal Pictures!
