Screenrant List: 15 Regrettable Final Roles for Great Actors

chris-farley-in-almost-heroesGiven the option, we imagine that most actors would choose to go out in a blaze of glory, hitting a career high, or maybe even making their best film, just prior to their death. But it usually doesn’t work out that way. Of course, bad movies happen to good actors all the time, but they don’t always get to make up for it before kicking the bucket. What’s worse, the films they would have preferred to sweep under the rug tend to gain extra notoriety on account of their…finality.

Here are 15 roles in films that acclaimed, promising, and/or beloved actors would likely prefer never to have seen the light of day. The problems run the gamut. Sometimes, these actors are quite clearly phoning it in. Very occasionally, it’s a role of which they should be utterly ashamed, or their talents were simply squandered. Often, however, their performance is the best thing about these films that are so bad, that they’re…still pretty bad. Only a few of these titles qualify for “cult” status. The rest are Rotten Tomatoed and Razzie Approved.

Read the list at Screenrant!

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Screenrant List: 15 Game of Thrones Couples We’d Love to See

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Let’s face it, life in the Seven Kingdoms sucks. On Game of Thrones, minimum wage, benefits, and unions have yet to be invented. Even having a title by no means assures you a relatively happy life — nor even a safe one. If it’s not the job or a rival that kills you, it’ll be the greyscale or a White Walker. But sometimes, a twist of fate, or a bonding experience, affords our favorite characters just a hint of happiness.

At long last, season seven is nearly upon us! There is undoubtedly a plethora of treachery, misdeeds, and murder most foul on the horizon. Basically, with George R.R. Martin and the Game of Thrones showrunners in charge of your fate, you could die at any moment. The best that folks can hope for are a few fleeting moments of joy during their short, miserable existences.

Here are 15 characters on Game of Thrones who we would love to see hook up, be it sexually, romantically, or just because they would make awesome scene partners…

Read the list at Screenrant!

Screenrant List: 20 Times Orange is the New Black Ruined Our Lives

oitnb-piper-screaming-in-orange-is-the-new-blackOrange is the New Black, Netflix’s first foray into original programming, was a surprise smash. Showrunner Jenji Kohan (Weeds) based the series on Piper Kerman’s memoirs, Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison. Audiences instantly connected with the way in which the show humanizes prisoners, presenting the whole and empathetic people behind the crimes that put them away. In the first season, Kohan established the formula of character introduction, followed by a series of flashbacks showing defining moments or the circumstances that led to their incarceration. These vignettes are almost always poignant and demoralizing. Of course, there are plenty of awful things that happen to the inmates of Litchfield in the present as well. Kohan is a master at introducing likable people and then tearing their lives apart, and because we’ve grown to love these characters, the audience feels their pain in full force.

With season five now streaming, hardcore fans who’ve already done their binge-watching know that the emotional moments didn’t end with that season 4 cliffhanger. But here are 20 times Orange is the New Black proved to be particularly skilled at breaking our hearts.

(Since this is a list of plot points, it probably goes without saying that there are many massive spoilers for the previous seasons ahead, though none for the latest season.)

Read the list at Screenrant!

Screenrant List: 15 Things You Didn’t Know About Gollum

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Perhaps more than anyone else, Gollum was the breakout character for Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved epic trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. The first film in the series, The Fellowship of the Ring, shows Gollum only briefly in a flashback, when Gandalf is giving Frodo some background about the Ring of Power that he’s been tasked to destroy. But in The Two Towers, the second film (and book) of the series, Gollum’s character arc is tightly woven into the story, as he stalks and subsequently joins Sam and Frodo on their journey.

Actor Andy Serkis brought Gollum to life through innovative technology invented expressly for the films. In the books, Gollum is a tragic figure, but Serkis gives him a massive upgrade, epitomizing a sympathetic creature that has lost his true self to addiction and mental illness. Serkis’ portrayal marks the first time a CG character felt truly real in a film. So real, in fact, that in 2003, the MTV movie awards created a category expressly for Gollum, called Best Virtual Performance. When Oscars aren’t in the cards, mo-cap actors have to take what they can get.

Even though Peter Jackson delves into some of his backstory in The Return of the King, there’s still a lot to unpack about the character of Gollum/Sméagol. Here are 17 things you probably didn’t know about everybody’s favorite psychotic riddling fish enthusiast…

Read the list at Screenrant!

ScreenRant List: 16 Times Superheroes Were Careless with Human Lives

superman-and-metropolis-destruction-in-man-of-steelFor a long time, superheroes were universally revered in their respective universes. Evil was afoot, and most folks were just glad someone was there to help them out of their jams. Sure, you’d get the occasional detractor, like J. Jonah Jameson, the newspaper editor who had it in for Spider-Man. But, for the most part, heroes could do no wrong. In fact, they were so good at their jobs that civilian casualties were virtually non-existent. Sure, destruction of property was rampant, but everyone seemed to understand that was all just collateral damage. When a civilian did die, it would be a major plot point and our heroes would be wracked with guilt over it. But in recent years, superheroes have gotten pretty sloppy, and the people are not pleased.

Here are 16 times that our careless crusaders had lapses in judgment, or were just plain oblivious to the safety of the powerless people unfortunate enough to be caught up in their bad guy beefs.

See the list at Screenrant!

H2N Review: The Fabulous Allan Carr

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One of the greatest things a documentary can do is introduce a wide(r) audience to someone who contributed to the cultural zeitgeist without receiving proper recognition. Case in point: Allan Carr, a movie producer who brought us the musicals Grease, and La Cage Aux Falles and invented both the Village People and saying, “And the Oscar goes to…” instead of “And the winner is…” Maybe Grease didn’t influence your life per se. But I bet you know at least a couple of bars of “Summer Lovin’.” And even if you aren’t proud of that fact, chances are you’ll find something to love about The Fabulous Allan Carr.

Director Jeffrey Schwarz (I Am Divine) knows his way around a gay icon biopic. His latest film is based on the biography, “Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock n’ Roll Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr” by Robert Hofler. Schwarz didn’t have a lot of personal video archives to work with so he had to animate some of the story using a sort of art deco, “Bewitched” style. Sometimes animation can overwhelm a documentary, but since Carr was a larger-than-life persona, it works. Schwarz also collected a stellar group of people to discuss Allan’s legacy including close friend Lorna Luft, the singular Bruce Vilanch, and sound-bite master Frank DeCaro. Allan had a lot of friends. Really, almost every talking head in the film is identified as a friend of his. And they all loved him.

Read the rest of the review at Hammer to Nail!

This film played at the 2017 Seattle International Film Festival.

H2N Review: The Hippopotamus

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The opening of John Jenck’s The Hippopotamus is a flawless, wordless introduction to the film’s protagonist, Ted Wallace. It starts with a close-up of a book baring a snippet of the identically titled poem by T.S. Eliot: “The broad-backed hippopotamus rests on his belly in the mud; although he seems firm to us, he is merely flesh and blood”. While the original poem is a metaphorical takedown of the Catholic Church, Ted Wallace, a lapsed poet and current theater critic, is a man who is skirting the edge of oblivion with his lifestyle.

The camera pulls out from the poem to reveal an unmade bed covered in books, an overturned lamp, and a full ashtray. A hand tosses a porn magazine atop the pile of intellectual vice. The camera cuts to a nearly empty whiskey bottle set on a brimming bookshelf. The hand snatches away the whiskey bottle, revealing a photograph of Wallace with his son and a postage stamp over the face of one who can only be his ex-wife. He pours the whiskey into a glass. He unbuttons his shirt, exposing a large, round belly. The camera cuts to a wide shot, as Wallace lowers himself into a claw foot bathtub of steaming water. He immerses himself, comes back up spouting water, and then brings the whiskey glass to his lips as the title appears. We already know so much about this man without the utterance of a single line of dialog. Once Wallace starts speaking, however, he never stops…

Read the rest of the review at Hammer to Nail!

H2N Review: Infinity Baby

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If you’re going to freeze your offspring at a certain age, the one in which they need the most care seems like the worst choice. But the eponymous company in Bob Byington’s Infinity Baby doesn’t make their money by selling babies that don’t age. Rather, they are a subsidiary of a pharmaceutical company who created these babies by accident and now must find homes for them. The pharmaceutical company most certainly makes money and lots of it. Those who choose to adopt an Infinity Baby are given a check for $20,000 and a supply of pills that nourish the baby once per day, keep it happy and sleepy, and somehow prevent it from soiling its diapers more than once per week. These kind souls are basically getting paid to help clean up corporate messes.

Read the rest of this review at Hammer to Nail!

This film played as part of the 2017 Seattle International Film Festival.

H2N Review: Handome Devil

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Few things can make you feel more alone in this world than being surrounded by people whose priorities are completely at odds with your own. Ned (Fionn O’Shea) knows this pain all too well. He’s the only artistic fellow in a posh Irish all-boys boarding school where rugby is religion. If you aren’t part of the game, you’d best be cheering from the sidelines. And if you aren’t doing that, you’re in for a rough time. But when Ned gets stuck rooming with the new kid, a fetching rugby prodigy named Conor (Nicholas Galitzine), he finds kinship in an unexpected place.

Writer/director John Butler knows a thing or two about rugby fanatics. While the film isn’t autobiographical, per se, he did base the school in Handsome Devil on his own childhood alma mater. Ned is a suitable “every freak,” with a general interest in the arts, minus the talent to focus on any particular area. He gets good marks for writing, but only because he passes off song lyrics as his own. That all ends when a passionate and hip younger man (Andrew Scott, TV’s Sherlock) replaces the doddering old English teacher, and immediately spots the plagiarism.

Read the rest on Hammer to Nail!

Handsome Devil played at the 2017 Seattle International Film Festival.

 

 

H2N Reviews: Family Life; The Transfiguration; Score: A Film Music Documentary

Family Life (Vida de Familia)

Chilean directors Alicia Scherson and Cristian Jimenez teamed up for this tragicomedy about a trainwreck of a man who is ill-advisedly hired by his distant cousin to housesit for the family of 3 while they’re in Paris for several months. The script deftly hits on several beats including a satire of married life with a small child, the weird things people do when they’re alone in a house, and the trope of misunderstandings getting out of hand. Jorge Becker shines as the emotionally stunted house sitter who falls into a relationship with a single mother based on a fleeting ruse in this entertaining, dark, and occasionally poignant film.

Score: A Film Music Documentary

Matt Schrader wrote and directed this auditory treat about how music went from simply a distraction from the noise of a projector during silent film screenings to an indispensible part of the movies we love. You can’t think of Jaws, Psycho, or Star Wars without humming the score. Instrumental Gods like John Williams, Hanz Zimmer, and Danny Elfman discuss the nuances of their work and the process behind composing the most iconic music in film history. It’s lots of fun revisiting favorite emotional cinematic moments and also noting the vastly different outfits that score orchestra musicians choose to wear to work, from business suits to sweats.

The Transfiguration

Just when you think you’ve seen every possible take on vampires, Michael O’Shea presents a story that’s both genre subversion and a love letter to other subversive bloodsucker tales. Milo (Eric Ruffin) is a bullied teenage orphan living in the projects with his older brother. Whether or not his bloodlust is supernatural is left ambiguous, but he’s certainly studied. When he hangs with a similarly down-and-out neighbor girl, he ranks the realism of vampire iterations (his favorite being Let the Right One In). Dramatic irony meets urban allegory in a bleak but compelling story that will certainly resonate with fringe audiences.

These 3 films played at the 2017 San Francisco International Film Festival.

Reviews originally posted on Hammer to Nail