Are you tired of all the false rumors of celebrity deaths (today it was Rick Astley)? And are you tired of all the jokes that Michael Jackson is really still alive somewhere, hanging out with Tupac, JFK and Elvis? So are we, but we thought we’d take both the obnoxious death hoax trend and the idea that MJ faked it so he could live in peace and out of debt as inspiration for something more worthwhile: a discussion of favorite false deaths in movies.

The device is quite popular, especially in thrillers and horror flicks, and it can be employed as a plot starter or in a twist ending. James Bond has done it, as has Sherlock Holmes. Whether someone fakes his/her own death or is simply mistaken for dead, the actual deed or the ultimate reveal can end up terrific cinema. In fact, it was very difficult for us to narrow our favorites down to ten. It’s a shame we had to leave out memorable scenes from Heathers, Hero and many other movies. Certainly you’ll disagree with some of our exclusions, too, so feel free to name them in the comments section.

Just beware; there may be SPOILERS after the jump:
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A few weeks ago, Summit Entertainment released the first seven minutes of The Brothers Bloom online. Normally, this kind of marketing strategy is useful, particularly if the movie isn’t well known. However, it helps for such a movie to have a terrific opening, which grabs the viewer in and makes him/her need to see what happens after that teased beginning. The Brothers Bloom, unfortunately, has an unbearable start, enough that I couldn’t even get through the entire seven minutes. I turned the streaming video off at the 4:24 mark.

The primary cause of my annoyance was the voice-over narration, provided by actor/magician Ricky Jay, a man whose speech is easily recognizable, only not for good reason. His lisped reading, sounding like a poor man’s Wallace Shawn, ruined the movie for me immediately. And I decided within those few moments that I wouldn’t bother to go see The Brother’s Bloom in its entirety.

I later learned that Jay’s narration is only in the film for that seven-minute prologue that opens the film, so I am willing to give it another shot, with hope that it gets better. Due to my initial irritation, though, I’ve decided to share a list of ten other movies ruined by their voice-over narration.
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“If I were to make a picture that was badly acted, I would feel I’d failed.” – Peter Bogdanovich

Peter Bogdanovich has spent his entire career chasing the spirit of Orson Welles. As a mentor, friend and frequent critical subject, Welles has loomed large for Bogdanovich ever since their first meetings in 1968. Bogdanovich is at a point in his career where he is remembered by few and celebrated by none, not unlike Welles was when the two embarked upon the interviews that would later form the text of This Is Orson Welles, first published in 1992. Last year marked the fortieth anniversary of Bogdanovich’s proper debut as director, Targets. However there was no fanfare. There were no retrospectives. Part of this is likely due to Bogdanovich’s spectacular, Wellesian flameout in the early nineties, culminating with, possibly, the most disreputable project with which either director was ever involved. It is unfortunate that the sharp young man who was so taken with the elder statesman of cinema should have found himself following his heroes footsteps, this time towards obscurity, failure and embarrassment.

This year (specifically January 24th) marks the ten-year anniversary of A Saintly Switch, a telefilm Bogdanovich directed for the Disney channel wherein David Alan Grier’s football quarterback and Vivica A. Fox’s stay-at-home-mom/aspiring painter switcheroo, and end up trapped in one another’s bodies. The picture is positioned at the nadir of Bogdanovich’s miserable late-nineties output, which included, in 1996, To Sir With Love II, a made for TV sequel to the Sidney Poitier film (Poitier stars in it), The Price of Heaven (1997), about which no information seems to exist, Rescuers: Stories of Courage: Two Women (1997), also made for TV, and Naked City: A Killer Christmas (1998), made for, yup. TV. Coming off of The Thing Called Love in 1993, he would not direct a theatrical feature again until his ‘comeback’ The Cat’s Meow in 2001.

A Saintly Switch is a baffling film. It almost fits into the classic Bogdanovich cannon, with screwball situations abound, a comically immature leading man and slapstick on top of slapstick. However Fox and Grier are no O’Neal and Striesand. They’re not even Shephard and Reynolds. So just how bad can A Saintly Switch be, considering it may be the only Disney Channel film ever directed by an Academy Award nominee who counted among his friends the greatest filmmakers of the twentieth century?

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If you haven’t already heard the news, I’ll sum it up for you: Ridley Scott is directing a feature film version of Monopoly. It’s probably the single strangest thing I’ve ever heard in the film business. I’m not sure if Scott himself seems to know what this movie will be about, because he keeps waffling on the subject: one moment he says it’ll be a broad family comedy, and the next minute it’s going to be dark like Blade Runner. He seems to have only been wooed by the fact that it’s one of the best-selling board games in the world.

This doesn’t mean that making a movie out of a board game is a bad idea, necessarily. It worked for Clue, after all. But unless Scott’s movie features Rich Uncle Pennybags jumping around with his monocle screwed firmly in place, I’m going to have to call shenanigans on it. Check out our list below of the 10 Board Games We’d Like To See As Movies, complete with fantasy casting.

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Are you walking around with your “I Voted!” sticker proudly adhered to your chest? If not, get out there and do some lever pulling, chad punching, and ballot dropping. Then take the rest ofthe day off and watch one of these movies that’ll get you through the rest of election day and away from the nail-biting edge of election return coverage. There are a few minor spoilers inside, but don’t view that as me messing with the ballot box. You’ll still love the movies more than CNN’s infographics.

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We’re less than a week away from the release of Tropic Thunder, and as the reviews and puff pieces make their way onto the web, there’s one thing clearly uniting the media’s coverage: talk of Tom Cruise’s appearance in a small role as a Hollywood studio boss. Everyone seems to agree that he steals the show and that his performance — or the joke surrounding it — is one of the comedy’s major highlights, if not the actual best part.

Of course, we can expect a good cameo from Cruise every now and then. He showed up for a bit part in Young Guns and played himself as playing “Austin Powers” in Austin Powers in Goldmember. But from what it sounds like, his role in Tropic Thunder is featured for longer than might qualify as a cameo. Some are regardless referring to the performance as an “extended cameo”, and in theory it certainly fits in with the huge crop of so-called “ironic cameos” that have become popular in movies and TV in the last ten years.

Still, despite my not having yet seen the movie, I’m thinking that Tom Cruise’s involvement in Tropic Thunder is more like the following list, which consists of merely small roles filled by big stars. You might consider some of them to be technically cameos, especially the ones that aren’t integral to the plot and/or call attention to themselves. But with each of the roles I’ve included, I consider them to be either the best part of their respective movies or at least a major highlight, which is how Cruise’s appearance is being touted. Anyway, forgive me for trying to come up with something different than simply a best cameo list, even if the focus here seems less than clear.

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My favorite anecdote about Charlton Heston, who died over the weekend at the age of 84, has to do with him fighting for the role of the Mexican cop in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. As Glenn Kenny tells it:

…any self-respecting cinephile knows that it was only through Charlton Heston’s intervention that Welles directed Touch of Evil in the first place. Welles had only been contracted to co-star in the picture as corrupt bordertown cop Hank Quinlan. When the producers contacted Heston for the lead role of Mexican narc “Mike” Vargas, they told him, “We’ve got Welles,” to which Heston replied, “Any picture Welles directs, I’ll make.” Which sent producers scurrying back to Welles, who rewrote and directed the picture for no extra fee.

Manohla Dargis, in her tribute to Heston, also waxes rhapsodic on Welles’ film, and particularly, its infamous opening tracking shot.

Shortly after the film opens, Vargas and his delectable new American bride, Susan (Janet Leigh), kiss at the Mexican-American border, a passionate embrace that leads to a cataclysmic explosion and soon plunges the newlyweds into a phantasmagoria of sleaze, violence and very low camera angles. Vargas, a celebrity cop who has brought a case against a drug ring that’s about to go to trial in Mexico City, spends much of the story separated from Susan and circling Quinlan, a dirty American lawman.

You can watch the first five minutes of Touch of Evil above. For more Heston memorials, check out David Hudson’s master list at GreenCine Daily.

Happy St. Patty’s Day! Screenhead has a decent but disappointingly short list of the Best and Worst Irish Accents in Cinema. I can’t really disagree with any of the three choices on either side of the fence (despite my devotion to Samantha Morton’s acting talents, bad accent or not), but I must gang up with the commenters in addressing some major exclusions in the worst category. Certainly Tom Cruise in Far and Away, yes Richard Gere in The Jackal, definitely the unmentioned Brad Pitt in The Devil’s Own.

But I most agree with comment #7 that Orson Welles in The Lady from Shanghai, which I just saw for the first time a few weeks ago, has given us the worst fake Irish accent of all time. Maybe it’s not the most inaccurate, though it is surely the most annoying. It’s so awful it’s driving me to drink just thinking about it. Take a listen to the narration in the video above to hear it for yourself. By the way, it might go down a bit easier with the clip I’ve chosen, as it features some really bad colorization that mutes Charles Lawton’s otherwise stunning cinematography. Watched as the film should be watched, though, Welles’ voice is more distinct, intrusive and offensive. It really makes a should-be-great film unwatchable save for in an academic setting.

Anyway, now that I’ve possibly ruined your holiday, let me ask this: are Irish accents the most faked in cinema? I figure a general British accent is actually more faked. So what is it about the Irish accent that gets more attention when faked? Is it more difficult? Is it more obvious to the ear when done badly? Is it just so notable because every March 17 we have to suffer some co-worker or friend attempting one for laughs?

News hit the web late Friday that Maila Nurmi, the actress, model and TV host best known as Vampira, died last week at the age of 86. As always, David Hudson at GreenCine has the most comprehensive round-up of obits; I thought I’d do my part by rounding up a few video clips that demonstrate the original Goth queen’s impact on pop culture. Above, you’ll find a short clip of Vampira’s memorable appearance in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space. Click through the jump for Vampira minutia courtesy of Tim Burton, Glenn Danzig and more.

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Martin Scorsese has never been shy about aligning himself with brands, but when the offer came in to shill Freixenet sparkling wine, he must have momentarily flashed back to Orson Welles’s Paul Mason commercials. There’s a difference between taking home a paycheck, and prostrating your legacy to a bald-faced, half-assed cash-in, remembered for all eternity via the YouTube dissemination of regrettable outtakes.
It’s no wonder, then, that this elaborate Freixenet ad directed by and starring Scorsese barely announces itself as an ad until the final minute or so.

The concept: Scorsese the tireless film preservationist finds three pages of an unproduced Alfred Hitchcock project called The Key to Reserva; Scorsese the filmmaker decides to film the pages “the way [Hitchcock] would be making it then, only making it now.” The ensuing short combines elements of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, North by Northwest, The Birds, and probably countless other Hitchcock films; there are just two, extremely fetishistic, shots of the product. Watch it here.

[Via GreenCine Daily]

The 43rd Chicago International Film Festival begins on Thursday with the U.S. premiere of Marc Forster’s The Kite Runner. Roger Ebert has a preview of this year’s lineup, a remembrance of CIFFs past, and an anecdote on the Festival’s rumored origin story:

Legend has it that Orson Welles is responsible for the founding of the festival. Kutza, then fresh out of college, was at Cannes in 1963 and met the great man himself.

“Chicago?” Welles said. “That’s almost my hometown. Why doesn’t it have a film festival?” Kutza told Welles that he would personally start one if the director promised to attend it. Welles promised, Kutza delivered, and Welles never came.

Dan Fogler, who won a Tony for his work in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and who will soon star in ping pong/FBI spoof Balls of Fury, tells MTV he’s currently preparing to play Alfred Hitchcock in a movie about the early life of the famed director. From MTV’s movie blog:

You see Hitchcock for two weeks out of his life in [his] early 20s. He just finished his first movie, which is supposed to be a comedy, but it’s not. So he’s freaking out about it and realizes that if he just switches a few things, it can become a thriller. [And] that’s how he finds his niche… give away your trade secrets. [The movie is] cool if you’re a Hitchcock fan. Just like Shakespeare in Love, you see how he comes up with certain ideas [for future films] from events that happened during the course of the movie.

Fogler’s film is titled after Number Thirteen, Hitchcock’s actual first, never-finished film. Only a few scenes of the original were shot before the production was shut down, and those have apparently never been seen by anybody and are thought to have been melted. Hitchcock rarely spoke of this point in his career, and there’s only one brief mention of the film in Donald Spoto’s definitive Hitchcock biography, The Dark Side of the Genius:

A comedy script was prepared, called alternately Mrs. Peabody or Number Thirteen, and Clare Greet and Ernest Thesiger were singed to play the leads. Alfred Hitchcock undertook the direction, on assignment from the chief of production, but by this time the studio’s dwindling funds were being diverted from production to pay debts and salaries, and the unfinished film was shelved. To this day, nothing else is known about this aborted project apart from Hitchcock’s assertion that it wasn’t very interesting.

So it seems safe to say that, like Shakespeare, this new Number 13 is going to be a work of extremely speculative fiction. I couldn’t find an image of a 20-something Hitchcock, but based solely on my lazy Photoshop composite above, wouldn’t Fogler make a good young Orson Welles?

With Michael Bay’s Transformers hitting theaters (and possibly TV screens) next week, Jake Coyle reminds us that the first Transformers movie was relatively star-studded, featuring the voice talents of Judd Nelson (at the peak of his career right after St. Elmo’s Fire), Eric Idle, and, of course, Orson Welles.

In the above clip, from a documentary shot for the Transformers DVD, the director and producers of the 1986 movie explain how the Hollywood legend came to voice the villainous robot/planet Unicron. Welles is described as a fallen giant–literally, a 400-pound man in a wheelchair who, despite his formidable reputation, was too frail to deliver the lines as powerfully needed. Director Nelson Shin describes having to run Welles’ tapes through a synthesizer in order to make the voice of Unicron “gigantic and strong.” The director/star of the alleged greatest movie ever made died a couple of months later.

Transformers was typical of the paycheck work Welles took throughout his career in order to independently finance his personal projects. It’s such an easy thing to mock, but still — I laugh out loud every time I watch this:

Appropriation: Originality is overrated. Filmmakers taking footage from another film and adapting it into a new movie–Orson Welles (F for Fake), Werner Herzog (The Wild Blue Yonder) and Roger Corman (Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women)–are they inspired or just desperate? (Chat about it in the FilmCouch group)

In the spirit of appropriation, email a sentence into filmcouch@spout.com. Kevin and Paul will incorporate it ever so naturally into next week’s show. The first person to identify the appropriated sentence wins a Spout track jacket from American Apparel (valued at $50).

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