Screen Grabs: End Times

Spring was in the air last week, but it came with a whiff of apocalypse. The legendary actor Charlton Heston, who spent much of his film career grappling with mankind's fate, whether in a biblical context (as Moses, John the Baptist, and Ben-Hur) or in dystopian science-fiction visions of the world's end, passed away at age 84. While some rushed to make jokes about prying the gun from Heston's cold, dead hands, many others focused not on the actor's long affiliation with the NRA but on the towering screen presence that once led a famous French critic to describe him as an "axiom of cinema." One writer challenged the "libel" against Heston in Tim Burton's Ed Wood; another wondered whether Heston was the prototype for Indiana Jones; another recalled his "asexual beefcakeiness"; another his flair for camp; another his sense of righteousness; and still another recalled her certainty that if anyone could save mankind from certain destruction, it was Charlton Heston.

You could feel Heston's reach in still other ways last week: Will Smith's apocalyptic New York nightmare I Am legend, based on the same material as Heston's 1971 film The Omega Man, ruled the DVD charts even as one observer eulogized Heston by remarking that "Heston's Omega Man would have ripped Will Smith's face right off its silly skull." With remakes of such apocalyptic classics as The Day the Earth Stood Still in the works (script review: "can't hold a candle to the original timeless original"), can an updated version of Heston's eco-sci-fi fable Soylent Green ("It's made out of... people!") be far away? Meanwhile, yet another of Heston's campy parables of the future, Planet of the Apes (already remade, of course, by none other than Tim Burton), appeared at the beginning of New York critic David Edelstein's list of best New York movies of the last 40 years. Much of the list is, by Edelstein's own admission, dominated by '70s visions of New York City as an end-times cesspool—a view of the city that seems to retain endless fascination to filmmakers, as evidenced most recently by Tony Scott's upcoming remake of the 1973 film The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (which didn't make the list)—a focus which led some to wonder why Edelstein's got no love for more contemporary depictions of New York end times, like, say, Cloverfield.

While Cloverfield was a self-consciously schlocky, deliberately exploitative metaphor for the fears engendered by the threat of terrorism, the parade of documentaries investigating American abuses spawned by that fear continues this month, in the form of Errol Morris' eagerly awaited Standard Operating Procedure, about the "bad apples" behind the infamous Abu Ghraib photos. The film, out later this month, has already seen a supporting text run in The New Yorker and received considerable critical analysis, with widely disparate responses ranging from "a fascinating investigation of the borderline between free will and determinism" to an assessment that Morris "grafts visual tropes of horror movies onto the wrong piece of wartime real estate." (You can decide for yourself when the film screens at this year's Tribeca Film Festival.) What is certain is that, as with almost every Morris film, this one will start a lot of very serious conversations. So it's a bit of a surprise to learn that Morris sees humor in end times as well. His next project is a comedic fiction feature called The End of Everything, which will reportedly involve a wingless bird, the author of Gone with the Wind, a volcano, and Laura Bush. "I'm a funny guy," he insisted. Will audiences agree? Impossible to predict, but it would certainly seem like a good time for Morris to make another bet with Werner Herzog.

One filmmaker who is definitely a funny guy, if unintentionally, is Uwe Boll, the hack German director of films based on video games, who threw down the gauntlet by declaring that if an online petition requesting him to stop making movies received a million signatures, he would quit. When the petition immediately picked up steam, Boll fired back with an insane NSFW video message in which he declared himself "the only genius in the whole fucking business," requested the creation of a pro-Uwe Boll petition, and dissed Michael Bay, Eli Roth, and George Clooney, all in a single minute. Bay claimed he didn't care about the remarks, while Roth called them "the greatest compliment ever." If terminating Boll's career represents end times you can get behind, you can sign the petition (160,000 signatures and counting) here. A pro-Boll petition has also been created—a little over a thousand people have signed so far.