Everyone, please: a moment of mourning now for the death of the serious studio women's weepie. Now take another moment to mourn the dearth of leading roles for the animated, three-dimensionally high-strung likes of Marsha Mason (and though this goes without saying, those nattering, self-consciously drippy-neurotic Neil Simon scripts that made them possible). Finally, let us now weep for the passing of this genre's signature poster style, with its cursive, feminine scrawl, diary and photo album–aping imagery, and portraits of empowering togetherness. So gone is this era that films of this ilk (see also The Turning Point, Six Weeks, Resurrection, Terms of Endearment) now seem as alien as ethnographic exploitation like Mondo Cane (maybe they deserve their own Flaherty seminar?).

So unafraid of ornate text is the poster for the never-released-on-DVD (despite three Oscar nods way back in 1981) Only When I Laugh, that a quick glance to its top half demonstrates that you don't need imdb synopses to get...all...your....plot . . . tidbits: "Kristy McNichol's a daughter who never had a childhood . . . Marsha Mason is a mother who never grew up. For 16 years, they've been practically strangers. And when they get together, they're the most mismatched roommates since 'The Goodbye Girl'" . . . "It'll make you laugh . . . 'til you cry." Whew, I'm bushed, both from the excess of narrative information and the amount of weird grammatical choices. Haven't seen the film, but apparently rich supporting turns from James Coco (known here as an aging sadsack self-loathing gay actor; known in Muppets Take Manhattan as the upscale pet-shop customer who affectionately calls his dog "lumpy dum-dums") and Joan Hackett (who would only live, sadly, for two more years) make it worthwhile....though judging from the poster, Marsha's snazzy jacket crest would probably be worth the price of the rental.

Now when most critics/jerks talk of guilty pleasures, they're usually just patting themselves on the back for their oh so outré taste, lack of middlebrow kowtowing, and their astonishing, unprecedented ability to watch films like Earthquake, Nuns on the Run, or the oeuvre of Pia Zadora with above-it-all condescension. When forced to trot out the term "guilty pleasure," as I have been on occasion, I'm actually so mortified by my own number-one choice that to even admit it would make my head explode with guilt. Would I lose friends? Am I falling just one smidge too far into a gay stereotype? Can I safely lay the blame at the feet of my parents, both Jewish, both musical theater followers, both baby boomers, and therefore both unapologetic Barbra Streisand fans? Yes, it's with all due shame that I admit (and my Region 2 DVD, safely tucked away behind my Criterion and Woody Allen DVDs, can attest) that Yentl brings me extraordinarily guilty pleasure. (Second horrific admittance of the day: Someone make Miss Saigon: the Movie....seriously.)

In any case, rather than delve into the whys and hows, and instead of detailing the ludicrousness of the plot (after her father dies, Streisand's Yentl dresses herself as a boy in 19th century Eastern Europe so that she can study Jewish theology, her one true passion), the shimmering gorgeousness of Michel Legrand's songs (I have no guilt about that), and the insanely self-flattering, self-promotional, self-satisfying nature of Babs' project, let's keep things on the surface, shall we? Since Streisand is notoriously in control of every aspect of every corner of every fragment of her productions, there's no doubt that for this, her 1983 directorial debut, she had final say about this poster design. And what do we see, when we look deep into the abstract recesses of this difficult to ascertain work? Oh yes, that's right: it's Barbra Streisand's enormous head gravely staring up, taking over the entire frame, her famously exaggerated features ("hello gorgeous...well....kinda....well, not really") and prominent cheekbones poking out of the shadows like some mythic gorgon. "Nothing's impossible," it reads in capped letters at the top; and indeed, it's true, especially if you're Barbra Streisand.

Of course, below this death mask is the most telling point of all: "A film with music." By God, not a musical, in case you were thinking that...no, this was more than a decade into the post-Star!, post-Paint Your Wagon demise of the musical, so the parsing of words here is pretty transparent. Though, truthfully, this is no traditional musical: all forty-eight-or-so songs featured in the movie are sung, in soliloquy, either as elaborate internal voice over or as sheltered, hushed alone time, by Streisand; even though she cast Broadway belter Mandy Patinkin as her bushy-bearded love interest, she refused to allow him a single musical peep. You've come for the Streisand, and you get the Streisand. Truth in advertising.

Side note: Is there a Yentl resurgence going on? Just last night, during a preview screening of the upcoming Sundance-celebrated Son of Rambow, I noticed in the film a theater marquee (not proudly) displaying the title of Streisand's film. I think it was meant as some sort of a punch line, as the theater had previously been showing the slightly more testosteroned First Blood. Regardless, I'll take Streisand's brave journey into boyhood over Stallone's jungle warfare any day of the week; and trust me, Babs has got a far more piercing, infinitely more sustained scream, at the end of Yentl. She doesn't need a machine gun to amplify it.

Speaks for itself. So instead I'll tell you about this delicious grilled-cheese sandwich I had yesterday. I was generously treated to a lunch at a new restaurant with a Belgian bent on 29th street and Lexington Avenue called Resto. Though resolutely non-vegetarian (even the tables I think were whittled from some kind of pork flank), Resto was an upbeat, sunny, unpretentious place with friendly staff. One of its "small plates" was the grilled cheese sandwich: with its mix of cheddar, gruyere, and pork belly (now turn that frown upside-down, it was just a flat, crispy variation on bacon), and thick, substantial slabs of buttery bread, this was one of the most delightful sandwiches I've eaten in some time (second place, an innocuous-seeming little Chinese fusion place on 16th and 3rd or so, called Chinos; the offensiveness of its retro font is commendably countered by its delicious Mahi-Mahi sandwich, served with pickled onions, I think, and cilantro on a puffy, slippery bun, with light dijon mayo).

A trenchcoated mystery man with a dagger; a pistol-packing, handpainted Chevy Chase dripping with butter-faced sarcasm; an adorable little schnauser/poodle/spaniel mutt perched on the side of a bathtub holding a magnifying glass up to an oblivious Jane Seymour's sudsy breasts. And all of this wrapped around a not-quite-to-scale Big Ben erected lasciviously in center frame. A prime example of a certain type of lost art form, and evidence that in the Lazy Eighties the paperback-style collage wasn't just strictly for action-adventures but also for "adult tails" such as this.

Just another in a long line of films that I can recall and situate in some sort of film-historic continuum but that I've never seen and can't envision seeing, Oh Heavenly Dog is probably best remembered as a title rather than as a movie. Though this film isn't quite an anomaly (there was no shortage of Chevy Chase vehicles or detective/doggy buddy pictures in the Eighties), it gives off a singular whiff of tragic miscalculation nevertheless. Benji may not actually have transformed from beloved children's icon to a dirty dawg hungry for human titties, as the poster indicates, but who would actually want to see the pooch, already a headlining star, made second fiddle to the star of Foul Play? Chase had yet to embody Fletch or Clark Griswold at this point; hence his infamous "bologna sandwich dance" wasn't yet part of the cultural vernacular....(or is that just my vernacular?).

In fact this whole period of Chevy Chase vehicles could make for an interesting Reverse Shot retrospective: I call Under the Rainbow (IMDB User Comment: "This is a great movie that satirizes Hollywood stereotypes in a fun filled slapstick romp. Sadly, many people miss the point of satire, and will only see the stereotypes. They will not enjoy the movie, but then why do people with no sense of humor even pick up a comedy??"). But who gets Modern Problems? ("Chevy Chase stars as Max Fiedler, a down on his luck air traffic controller who develops the power of telekinesis via nuclear waste. He uses said power to take vengeance on anyone that had wronged him. A mildly intriguing premise is undermined by loose, unfunny writing, horrid acting, and dated material.")

Sorry, but we couldn't let this one go.

No, we haven't seen the film. No, we won't see the film. Yes, we want to put this poster of a Glick-i-fied Jared Leto on our kitchen wall and stare at it while we eat Ring Dings, Lucky Charms, cigarette butts, small animals, and our own legs. The somewhat well publicized trick of the film is that this ain't no fat suit, folks: in a bid for cred or Oscar, or perhaps just as a token of his "craft," Leto gained what appears from this poster to be four-hundred pounds in order to play John Lennon killer Mark David Chapman. The transformation might not be as head-turningly hideous as once-pretty Leto's recent forays into a kewpie goth rocker for his band 40 Shades of Blue, er, I mean 20 Feet to Donut Shop, er...I don't remember what it's called, but when blown up to billboard size, this is a whole new world of gross. I already learned my lesson watching Charlize Theron's grunt and snort Oscar-winning latex work in Monster (a pretty good approximation of Dan Aykroyd's weenie-eating leper judge in Nothing But Trouble), so I'll definitely be sitting this one out. Leto's constant mission to de-beautify himself has thus far extended from his face-pummeling in Fight Club to his collapsed veins in Requiem for a Dream to his bounding up and down the rows of a plane I took to California last year in ill-fitting chapeau and pitch-black eye-liner (way to make yourself inconspicuous...in coach, no less!)—Chapter 27 seems to be his most desperate bid yet. Of course if this doesn't work out, Leto can always have a future as a villain in the next installment of Spawn.

Wow, that looks like one hell of a party: you got cool football dude "88," neat-o "tie-guy" tipping his two frothy beers in a gesture of jocular invitation, that reclining girl who’s just too much of an iconoclast to take her feet off the table, the affable chain-smoker, the cut-up wearing the napkin over the lower part of his face. I’d sure like to attend that shindig. But, oh, wait, who’s that saucy new arrival, raising a glass to toast this holiest of holidays, wherein we light our menorahs with trick candles and eat communion wafers dipped in super glue? The dress is lovely and formfitting, but she looks a little dangerous, no? And who does her hair?!

As with so many eighties horror films, this is one I never saw and can't imagine seeing. Why this poster, which as far as these things go, is pretty innocuous, so greatly disturbed precious little me when doing my weekly shelf scouring at Video Paradise I really can't describe. I still don't know whether it's really about a young girl with a moussed noose for a ponytail showing up at a co-ed dorm party and proceeding to pick them off one at a time—though that's my best guess. And for that I want to seriously credit the poster designer, not only for preying on my impressionable young mind but for creating a surreal image that also seemed to stand in pretty well for the film's literal narrative. Twenty years on, and this image is vivid, man. A quick, brave visit to the imdb page and I realize from reading user comments that April Fool's Day doesn't seem to be overly gory, is fairly well shot for this type of film, and features a group of nubile teens spending a fuck and slash weekend in a remote island home in the Northwest. The question remains: is there a death by ponytail? If not, after 25 years, I would feel slightly cheated.

Take a second and look at that cast. Quoth headliner Paul Lynde (as Templeton the Rat in the similarly choppily animated 1970s non-Disney cheapo Charlotte's Web) this is a "veritable smorgasbord" of voice-over talent, albeit a roster that might better please the closing night crowds at the Catskills. (Was this where Lynde first met Margaret Hamilton, who was soon to make her ignominious career bookend in Lynde's indelible 1978 Halloween special?) This is a film I haven't seen, but whose poster strangely obsesses me: those shoddy Little Golden Book drawings, that desperately unmagical maize soaking the back of the paper like urine. And who is that angry elephant? I can think of few things that scream "relic" more than this poster, which dares to advert "HERSCHEL BERNARDI" in large caps as a way of drawing in the parents (what, no Topol?), and has the decidedly historic pairing of Liza (as Dorothy!) and Mickey Rooney. Add the nattering screeches of Lynde, Ethel Merman, and Uncle Milty, and I can freakin' hear this movie, as it whinily belts through my head.

Yet as cobwebbed as this appears now, and as easy as these kid-unfriendly cabaret stars (destined for Forbidden Broadway parodies for years and years to come) are to bash for us "sophisticates," let us flash forward twenty years, to little Richie or Jimmy eyeing the voice talents of the state-of-the-art Pixar extravaganza Cars: Cheech Marin, Tony Shalhoub, Larry the Cable Guy, George Carlin, Katharine Helmond, John Ratzenberger, Jeremy Piven . . . Merman's lookin' pretty sweet, now, eh?

I would guarantee that anyone of my generation who frequented video stores in the late Eighties and early Nineties and had a certain morbid fascination with the horror section (see also: Creepshow, and any number of Herschell Gordon Lewis atrocities, all of which are still crouching like fanged possums somewhere in the hollow of my skull) will remember this charming little Ken Russell ditty. I never saw the film, not once, not one frame of it, but thanks to this indelible poster/video art, with its horny little devil perched, claw-splayed, like a living gargoyle atop a supine victim in a nightgown (who I now realize is Natasha Richardson...who knew?!), I feel like I've seen the film about eighty-seven times. The late-Eighties Ken Russell comeback, largely buoyed by tantalized video renters no doubt, is dotted with curios such as these (remember Lair of the White Worm? How about Theresa Russell in Whore?), films eternally recalled (and doubtful just by me) for their box art more than anything that happened in them. For the record, Ken Russell's oeuvre is one of my movie gaps, save Women in Love, and I'm not sure that needs to be corrected anytime soon. I prefer my memories of Gothic and its ilk relegated to the dusty shelves of the once-beautiful Video Paradise, small-town video store of my childhood . . . now a Hallmark shop.

Not much more to say, is there?

courtesy RS correspondent "The NB"

(Thursday's game is courtesy Reverse Shot at-large correspondent "Micky.")

It is now time for everybody's favorite game: "Apocalypto or Home Alone?"

If you have not seen either of these movies, you are not allowed to play, so STOP READING.

You know the rules, now tell me... is it Apocalypto or Home Alone?

1) A character screams and rubs his burning skin in a moment of levity.

2) Booby traps set up early in the film are set off at the end of the film, to hilarious result.

3) Macaulay Culkin exclaims "YES!"

4) Skinny main character gets into fights with his fat costar.

5) Jaguar Paw exclaims "NGABWE TUNMONGOW!"

6) Main character rescued at the last minute by strange white man.

7) Film is a poignant metaphor for modern day America.

8) Jungle cat eats a living human jawbone.

9) Man gets tarred and feathered.

10) Illustrates the importance of family.

11) Explores man's inhumanity to man.

Have at it. The winner will receive Mel Gibson's beard trimmings.

After repeated exposure to a cropped version of the above image during my subways waiting periods, the inevitable question arose: "What is Little Man about?" A visit to the official website would easily enough clear everything up, but I prefer to try to extrapolate from the poster.

What do we have to go on? A slightly befuddled Shawn Wayans, full-sized, carries Marlon Wayans, infant-proportioned, but with the face of a thirtysomething man, in one of those Park-Slope-dad-style slings. Further confusing matters: Marlon's forearm prominently bears (if memory serves, I can't make it out in this image) a USMC tattoo, and his baby bottle is wrapped in a brown paper bag, which generally implies a concealed alcoholic beverage.

So. What is Little Man about? I have the following theories:

A) Shawn and Marlon are top secret government agents, sent deep undercover to blow open some sort of drug smuggling ring/ money laundering ring/ terrorist sleeper cell/ child pornography production studio who're using a day care center as their front. In order to "get a man inside," new, space-age technology is employed to shrink regular-size Marlon into the pint-sized Marlon seen in the poster image. Shawn poses as his dad; a speedboat chase can hardly fail to ensue, as well as at least one scene of mortifying sexual grotesquerie.

B) Same as above on the government agents/ day care thing, except Shawn is a super-genius computer hacker born without a lower half. Through elaborate costuming and prosthetic puppetry, he is affixed, backpack-style, to a tough-as-nails ex-marine, played by Marlon; together, they form some kind of crazy-efficient Master-Blaster mega-agent. Ditto on the speedboat and sexual grotesquerie.

C) Marlon is just like a midget or something. LOLs aplenty there.

What's your guess? The best answer wins a date with a Reverse Shot staffer, followed by a screening of Little Man, cocktails at Jackie's Fifth Amendment, and sex (optional). Go to!

One is a product that has the same effect as vigorous masturbation, the other... (insert joke here)

Even in the world of hopeless, puerile nostalgia for all things '80s (in which I'm about to take part), nowhere is this piece of crudely-drawn Hanna Barbera magic ever mentioned. I remember my dad grudgingly taking me to see it when I was about five or six at the now-hollowed-out Route 3 cinemas in Chelmsford, MA. From the size of the audience and the look of distress on my dad's face, I had assumed at the time that it wasn't the most regaled of the bumper crop of animated (hand-drawn, so antiquated!) films of the era. I remember the Jule Styne score (its songs sounded like warmed-over HELLO DOLLY rejects), the truly bizarre Night on Bald Mountain-inspired nightmare sequence (which to this day I wouldn't believe actually happened if not for the Chernobog-esque mountain man at the top of this dazzling poster), the adorable non-talking goat sidekick. and of course, the evil, slimy Sammy Davis Jr. voiced rat (get it?) Heidi encounters when locked in the grubby basement of her wicked aunt's mansion. Regardless of the shitty reviews it received, Heidi's Song was a nearly seminal film for me for some reasons: it was one of the few non-Disney animated films I was taken to (along with TRANSFORMERS THE MOVIE some years later, whose Orson Welles voice-over work even outdid Lorne Greene's stellar effort here), and because it was a film that only my father accompanied me to, my mom probably too busy with grocery shopping or a League of Women Voters meeting. Never have I met anyone else who has seen it andnever have I seen a video copy of this, nor a DVD version, so the film simply exists in vague outline in my memory, almost as if it never quite happened at all. In this sense, the film does indeed stand alone.

My apologies (condolences?) to all Harry Potter fans, but Barry Levinson did it first and much better than Columbus (screenwriter here) ever could. Mercifully quidditch-free yes, but also one of the most goddamned perverse things one could ever hope to see: virgins wrapped in mummy tatters and boiled in oil, priests throwing themselves under horse carriages, adorable old men hallucinating that they've seen horned flying demons crawling into their coats and stabbing themselves to death with daggers. God bless the PG-13-petrified Eighties...

P.S.- Beware walking pastry

We ALL remember this one, don't we? Don't we? Do we? Well, I sure as hell do. High-schooler and aspiring journalist Terri Griffiths (the criminally underrated and climactically de-robed Joyce Hyser) poses as a boy in order to win the schoolwide essay contest. Mild hilarity ensues. Hyser showed up only one more time before my eyes, in 1994's Michael J. Fox-Kirk Douglas dream-pairing "Greedy," but even her brief appearance sent me into paroxysms of glee. An easy shortcut was to call it a pubescent Tootsie; I'd argue it's more like an Eighties Woman of the Year, with Hyser a fine Hepburn substitute. Not to mention the always-reliable Clayton "The Relic" Rohner, as Hyser's dorky crush Rick Morehouse, perhaps even improving upon the Spencer Tracy template of sensual clumsiness. Coming soon: an appreciation of the recurrent Teutonic villain of Eighties High School films, William Zabka, here at his most fibrous.

Remember when they used to do it right? Honestly, will the poster art for the new House of Wax or the latest Wes Craven shitpile haunt the dreams of the next generation of scaredy-cat kids like this one did to little old me while perusing the dusty shelves of Video Paradise? Doubtful. Elegant, freakish, and smart...and the movie still rocks. Robert Rodriguez's digital "comic book aesthetic" can take a gander at this Romero pioneer any day of the week and learn a thing or two.