Opening in Chicago, 05/01

Audience of One (trailer at official site)
Director: Mike Jacobs
From the IMDb: “A documentary following a Pentecostal minister who receives a vision from God to create an epic science fiction movie based on the biblical story of Joseph, sending him and his followers on a journey of extreme faith.” And that movie is called … BATTLEFIELD EARTH 2! Just kidding.
Metacritic: not listed

Battle for Terra (trailer)
Director: Aristomenis Tsirbas
It’s a bit late, but it occurs to me that a good AGEBOC bonus question would have been an over/under on the percentage of screens that will actually be showing this in 3D, as the posters for the film advertise. I’d say something on the order of 10.
Metacritic: 58

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (trailer)
Director: Mark Waters (The House of Yes, Freaky Friday, Mean Girls, The Spiderwick Chronicles)
Take a look at the poster for this one. I’ve seen some questionable PhotoShopping in my day but I’ve never seen poster artists make the leading man in a romantic comedy look like he’s doing a Hannibal Lector impersonation. Creepy. Is McConaughey trying to win Jennifer Garner’s heart, or eat it? For that matter, Garner looks a little scary herself. Maybe the movie’s about husband-and-wife cannibals who frame photos of their victims and hang them on the wall. If only.
Metacritic: 37

Is Anybody There? (trailer)
Director: John Crowley (Boy A)
Micahel Caine returns in wise old codger mode, which is more or less all he’s done for as long as I can remember. Nonetheless, he hasn’t done something I’ve wanted to see less since Secondhand Lions.
Metacritic: 54

Lemon Tree (trailer)
Director: Eran Riklis (The Syrian Bride)
Israeli film about a Palestinian widow who fights the Israeli government over the rights to her late father’s lemon grove. Stars Hiam Abbass, who was terrific in The Visitor last year.
Metacritic: 73

Lymelife (trailer)
Director: Derick Martini
Suburban coming-of-age tale that won the Critics’ Prize at Toronto last year. The blurbs on Metacritic feature comparisons to American Beauty and The Ice Storm. I have to say, I’m not feeling it.
Metacritic: 68

The Merry Gentleman (trailer)
Director: Michael Keaton
I’ll see this if I have the time. I’ve always liked Michael Keaton and it’s good to see him in something worthwhile again.
Metacritic: 58

Sita Sings the Blues
Director: Nina Paley
Animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana that has been championed by Roger Ebert for several months. I have to say, he’s convinced me to check it out. Incidentally, director Paley has been the entire film available under a Creative Commons license.
Metacritic: not listed

Tyson (trailer)
Director: James Toback (Fingers, Two Girls and a Guy, Black and White, When Will I Be Loved)
I’ll probably go see this, even if other people have always found Mike Tyson to be a more compelling figure than I have.
Metacritic: 83

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (trailer)
Director: Gavin Hood (Tsotsi, Rendition)
What a stupid title.
Metacritic: 42

Z (trailer at Rialto Pictures site)
Director: Costa-Gavras (The Confession, Missing, Betrayed, Mad City)
Costa-Gavras’s film returns for its 40th Anniversary, foiling all those who had X-Men Origins: Wolverine alphabetically last in their office pool. I actually watched it on VHS about a dozen years ago or so, and was impressed; it’s about an investigation into the murder of a left-wing politician in 1960s Greece.
Metacritic: not listed

Lost, 4/29: “The Variable”

One mother of an episode. Discuss in comments.

AGEBOC 09 – May 1-3

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of May 1-3 2009.

The one who predicts closest to the total Friday to Sunday gross for the #1 film wins 4 points. Runner-up gains 2 points. Predicting within half a million earns 2 extra points.

Bonus questions:

1) Battle for Terra: Over or under $3 million this weekend?

2) Ghosts of Girlfriends Past: Will the McConaughey beat the Beyoncé this weekend?

Deadline is Wednesday April 29 at 11:59 pm (blog time).

To find out the rules of the game, go to the main thread for AGEBOC 09.

Current standings: There aren’t any! You are a clean blank slate, ready to begin anew. To grow. Like a seed. Of box-office mastery. All you need is water. But you must water yourself. With knowledge. Go forth, little seed, so that you may sprout. Go. Come on, go. No, seriously. Go. Like a tree.

AGEBOC 09 main thread

It’s that time of the year again! Because the old rules thread for last year’s AGEBOC is filled with info that is not exactly pertinent anymore, I’ll repost most of the info and rules that is pertinent this year, so we can link to this one every week instead. Plus references to some extra stuff, like the bonus questions that James introduced last fall, and this awesome logo that James’ buddy Brad did for us.

Also it’s good to have a thread where people can go “Nick, you lazy/forgetful [BLEEP], you forgot [insert whatever Nick forgot here].”

Update:

- Forgot to link to the GEBOC.

Rules of the Advanced Gone Elsewhere Box-Office Challenge (aka the AGEBOC)

READ BEFORE POSTING!

The rules are as follows:

- Each Monday Tuesday an AGEBOC thread for the upcoming weekend will be posted. Your predictions for the coming weekend must be posted in the specific AGEBOC thread for that weekend.

- You predict the number one film in the US for the weekend (Friday to Sunday) along with the amount you believe it will make. Wednesday and Thursday earnings will not be tallied (remember to subtract!).

- The one who gets closest to the final amount gets 4 points. Second runner-up gets 2 points. If it is a tie they each get 3 points (if it is a three-way, 2 points, etc.).

- If a player makes a correct prediction of a film’s box-office take for the weekend within half a million, whether or not the film is #1, the player will be awarded 2 extra points, provided that the movie finishes in the top 3.

- There will be two bonus questions for every week. Each right answer yields an extra half point. What the bonus questions will be is up to whoever runs AGEBOC at the time, but they must be pertinent to the weekend in question, preferably not subjective and related to box-office prediction. Suggestions for future bonus questions are always welcome.

- Deadline for predictions for the coming weekend is midnight 11:59pm the day before the weekend’s wide releases are, well, released. So typically if the week’s wide releases come out on a Friday, then it’s Thursday 11:59. On the other hand, if it’s on a Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday, then perhaps the deadline will be the same day 11:59pm, depending on how large the movie or movies are expected to be.

- Before the deadline has passed you must post your prediction in the specific AGEBOC thread for that weekend.

- If you wish to change your prediction, you must post a new comment in that week’s thread.

- No changes to your prediction after deadline has passed is allowed to be made. Cheaters who are caught will be punished by a subtraction of 4 points.

- The timeline of the Advanced Gone Elsewhere Box-Office Challenge will be, unless otherwise agreed, from the first large opening in May until the same weekend or the one before Labor Day.

- A player may join whenever he or she wishes, but if the player misses out on one or more weekends or deadlines no comfort points will be awarded just to make the player feel better.

Good luck everyone!

Send In The Clowns

From veryshortlist:

Technically, Adam Berg’s short film Carousel is an ad for Philips’s flat-screen Cinema 21:9 (“the world’s first cinema-proportion TV”). But in terms of technical achievement, it’s a flat-out masterpiece.

The spot consists of a 2-minute-19-second tracking shot: an intense firefight between cops and bad guys. The characters never move, but the camera does…

Opening in Chicago, Weekend of 04/24

In box office terms, this is the last week of spring, as the summer season unofficially opens next week with the release of Wolverine … er, I’m sorry, X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Unsurprisingly, there’s not much to choose from.

Anvil! The Story of Anvil (trailer)
Director: Sacha Gervasi
Honestly, I know this is supposed to be all kinds of awesome, but I don’t know if I can take it. I’ve mostly hated heavy metal all my life, and I in the spirit of full candor I must admit that I could care less about triumphs of the human spirit.
Metacritic: 82

Earth (trailer)
Directors: Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield
From what I gather, this is an abridged version of the TV series “Planet Earth” which aired a couple years ago, and which was completely awesome in every respect. We had just gotten our HDTV at the time, and I thought “Planet Earth” was the absolute zenith of HD programming; over two years later I’m still not sure it wasn’t.
Metacritic: 71

Fighting (trailer)
Director: Dito Montiel (A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints)
I’d never looked to closely at the poster before, and I now see that this stars Channing Tatum and not Josh Hartnett. Or James Marsden. Who knew?
Metacritic: 60

Forbidden Lie$
Director: Anna Broinowski
This actually looks interesting. From the IMDb: “A dramatized documentary investigating accusations that ‘Forbidden Love’ author Norma Khouri made up her biographical tale of a Muslim friend who was killed for dating a Christian.”
Metacritic: 85

The Informers (trailer)
Director: Gregor Jordan (Buffalo Soldiers, Ned Kelly)
Adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis that looks like a relic from 2001, when ’80s nostalgia was all the rage, and James Van Der Beek was trying to let us all know that he could do more than “Dawson’s Creek.” But, in case this comes as news to you – I’ll wait for you to sit down if you need – there were seedy things going in in Los Angeles in the 1980s. Some people did cocaine on a regular basis. Some youths were corrupted. Shocking, I know.
Metacritic: 19

Obsessed (trailer)
Director: Steve Shill
I had not heard this until I saw the trailer a couple months back, probably in front of Taken. I had the pretty much the same reaction to it as I did when I first saw the Spice Girls’ video for “Wannabe”: the sense that this must be a prank of some kind balanced by the rational awareness that it in fact was not. Not screened for critics, and again I don’t understand why. What’s going to happen?
Metacritic: no score

The Soloist (trailer)
Director: Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement)
Joe Wright continues his quest to become the poor man’s Anthony Minghella with this story about a journalist and his friendship with a mentally ill violin prodigy. Honestly, when this was kicked back from its Fall 2008 release date, I think we all knew that it was going to be problematic, and the reviews thus far have been unenthusiastic or worse.
Metacritic: 60

Robert Rodriguez to direct ‘Predator’ remake

The hellish zombie form of once-promising director Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids 3-D, Sharkboy and LavaGirl, Shorts) will produce and direct Predators, a remake of 1987′s Predator for FOX.  No start date has been announced, but it’s probably safe to assume it will be a tentpole for the studio in 2011 or 2012.

In the mid 90′s, Rodriguez actually penned a sequel to the original franchise also using the plural Predators title. Of the hundreds of screenplays I’ve read in my lifetime, it would be among the worst.

The director also announced a whole bunch of other films at a press conference today including: Machete, Nerveracker, Sin City 2 and The Jetsons. Rose McGowan or whatever opportunistic, homewrecking coke partner he’s hooked up with at the time will star in all.

Lego Silence of the Lambs Musical

The Great Buck Howard

This film is a lightweight but pleasant film that is bursting with affection. Write and director Sean McGinly briefly served as a road manager for the Amazing Kreskin, a “mentalist” who was a ubiquitous talk-show guest in the 1970s, and it’s clear that McGinly both loved and hated him, but mostly loved.

For anyone old enough to remember Kreskin, the similarities are apparent. The crippling hand-shake, the precise enunciation of the patter, and the signature trick of letting the audience hide his performance fee–if he can’t find it, he forfeits it. There’s a title card at the end of the picture thanking Kreskin for the inspiration–maybe it’s also to hold off a lawsuit.

I say that because McGinly’s Buck Howard is not a cuddly figure. John Malkovich plays him with magnificent verve, and is a joy to behold. Howard is reduced to performing in small cities to half-filled auditoriums, but he never fails to give a good show, and somehow manages to be both a glad-hander and a man who suffers no fools.

Colin Hanks is the stand in for McGinly, a bland character who has dropped out of law school, much to the disappointment of his father (Colin’s real dad, a sometime actor named Tom). Looking for adventure, he takes a job with Howard as his road manager, and rides the rollercoaster of Howard’s rage and his praise, which can sometimes happen within the same minute. Hanks rolls with it, and carries a respect for his employer, and can never figure out how he does the hidden pay trick. He is also repeatedly asked about Howard’s sexual orientation, another mystery. Nothing is said about Howard’s hairstyle.

Things get complicated at a big gig in Cincinnati, when Howard hopes to revive his flagging career by performing a big stunt. He hires a publicist (Emily Blunt), but she constantly lets him down, as well as entering into an obligatory relationship with Hanks. Things go horribly wrong, but Howard ends up getting an extra fifteen minutes of fame, which gets him back on TV and a deal with a Vegas casino, but it’s clear that Howard just wasn’t made for these times.

This is not a hard-hitting film, it’s a relaxing and occasionally amusing hour and a half that is a tip of the derby to a byegone era of entertainment. The screenplay is over earnest, with way too much voice-over narration by Hanks (including the dreaded “it was then that I realized” ). The film is also packed with celebrity cameos, from Martha Stewart to Gary Coleman. So many real-life talk-show hosts show up that I’m baffled as to how Larry King avoided being in this. This is more distracting than anything else, although I did smile at the eventual appearance of Jay Leno, who Howard refers to as “Satan.”

If you have a nostalgia for the old days of TV in the Mike Douglas Show era, or want to see a finely-etched performance by Malkovich, this could be worth your while. Like the main character, it’s a film that is hard to hate.

Observe and Report

A lot of the chatter about  Observe and Report has centered on the fact that it is the second movie in a few months about a mall security guard, following the hit Paul Blart, Mall Cop. I haven’t seen that film, but I feel like I have after seeing the commercial. The film that Observe and Report is really like, believe it or not, is Taxi Driver. The sad thing, though, is that Taxi Driver had more laughs.

Seth Rogen plays Ronnie, a simmering cauldron of rage who is employed at a generic mall. The idea that a shopping mall is a simulacrum of American society is pretty old by now, and has been addressed by directors as diverse as Paul Mazursky, Kevin Smith, and George Romero. The writer/director of this picture is Jody Hill, who was the director of The Foot Fist Way (unseen by me). After watching Observe and Report, I would think twice about meeting this guy.

The film begins with a pervert flashing women at the mall. He’s even wearing a trench coat, like in old Playboy cartoons (do guys do this anymore?). Rogen is obsessed with catching him, particularly after his fantasy girl, an obnoxious cosmetic-counter girl played charmlessly by Anna Faris, is flashed. Rogen resents the police presence, in the person of a detective played by Ray Liotta.

Right away I felt like slinking out of the theater. First of all, it’s not clear why the mall manager wouldn’t have fired Rogen a long time ago, especially after he interferes with a police investigation. Secondly, Rogen’s character is like nails on a blackboard, you just want him to go away. I think we’re supposed to root for him, but I spent the film wanting him to be locked away and violated, repeatedly.

Rogen tries to join the police academy,  fails the psychological exam, and manages to get a date with Faris, proving his love by kissing her after vomiting. The section of the film that deals with their date is particularly shrill, and doesn’t do Faris any favors. Things continue to get worse for him to the point where he is hauled out of the mall by an entire squadron of cops who beat him senseless. But by the film’s end, just like Travis Bickle, he acquits himself as a hero.

I didn’t find this film funny at all. Most of it is deadpan obnoxiousness, as if Hill is trying to tell us he’s above it all. He hates his characters, so why should we like them? The only characters I liked are Liotta, who seems to be on loan from a better movie, an actress named Collette Wolfe, who plays a coffee vendor )and “born-again virgin”) who inexplicably likes Rogen, though he’s too stupid to realize it, and Celia Weston, who has the film’s few funny lines as his perpetually drunk mom (she makes a big life decision by deciding to stick only to beer).

The definitive scene in this film is when Rogen and his partner, Michael Pena, go medieval on some kids skateboarding in the mall parking lot. I was slack-jawed while watching this–I guess it was supposed to be funny, and if so I despair. Do people really think it’s funny for kids to be bashed in the head by skateboards? I don’t get it.

Are mall-cop movies the genre of the moment? A few weeks ago I was in a mall and saw a guard riding on a Segway. I couldn’t help but inwardly snicker. I’m afraid it’s going to be difficult for these poor slobs to do that anymore without being figures of mockery.

State of Play

Directed by Kevin McDonald. Screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan and Tony Gilroy and Billy Ray. Released by Universal Pictures.

(Warning: Potential spoiler in the final paragraph.)

If you didn’t know that State of Play was based on a much longer miniseries, you’d probably be able to guess. It features story elements that don’t make a lot of sense, subplots that turn out to be dead-ends, and too many characters to keep track of in a satisfactory way. Either this movie was based on source material that was orders of magnitude more complicated, or there’s a four-and-a-half hour cut out there somewhere.

Director Macdonald has obviously tried to make a film that harkens back to the political-corporate thrillers of the 1970s, and he has three big name screenwriters – all with experience in this kind of thing – credited to help him do the job. Carnahan wrote The Kingdom and Lions for Lambs. Gilroy co-wrote the Bourne films and wrote and directed Michael Clayton. Ray wrote and directed Shattered Glass and Breach. Yet despite, or maybe because of, the presence of all three writers, the movie never develops a point of view that can give it purpose. It labors under the weight of making a social statement about the nexus between journalism and politics, without ever deciding what that statement should be.

In story begins when a veteran Washington, D.C. reporter named Cal McAffrey (played by Russell Crowe) starts investigating an unusual double shooting. Later in the day, a young Congressional aide turns up dead, having apparently committed suicide by jumping in front of a subway train. Her death sets off a media firestorm, and rampant speculation that she was having an affair with her boss, Congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), who happens to be in the middle of congressional hearings to investigate the dealings of a major defense contractor called PointCorp (and who also is Cal’s former college roommate). With the help of a novice reporter/blogger at the paper named Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), Cal realizes that the double shooting he’s investigating is related to the aide’s death, and that the events point to a major conspiracy involving PointCorp.

Indeed, that’s a lot of plot, and that’s not even covering a handful of subplots that the movie introduces but doesn’t have time to do anything with. Mostly, the filmmakers are concerned with showing us how real journalism is supposed to work, which leads to a lot of sermonizing by Cal, under pressure from his editor (Helen Mirren) to produce eye-catching headlines, about getting “the real story” and not being distracted by all the tawdry details.

For all of the lectures, however, it’s striking how tawdry the movie’s plot actually is. When all is said and done, we’re given strippers, coked-up PR guys, sleazy congressman, dead junkies, shootouts in public, and so on. I’m not sure that the movie misses a trick in hyping and glamorizing the journalism trade; it’s like an Indiana Jones movie pretending to focus on best practices in archeology. In a bewildering third act twist, the betrayal of the film’s themes are complete, as the “real” story Cal had been chasing is more or less abandoned in favor of a far simpler, but more audience-pleasing tale of a congressman gone bad. I guess Cal isn’t the only one who’s being pressured to deliver dirt over substance.

Lamest Gone Elsewhere Exclusive® ever: MGM prepping ‘Legally Blonde’ prequel

The Platinum Menace?

Following in the footsteps of other…things people have made…MGM is developing a prequel to the 2001 hit Legally Blonde, focusing on the teenage years of Reese Witherspoon’s Elle Woods.

April Blair (Gummo*) is the writer. Blair’s recent credits include the Jessica Simpson Iraq War drama, Major Movie Star.

The original Legally Blonde was a critical and commercial success, raking in nearly 100 million domestically.  Witherspoon returned two years later for a follow-up, but we’re going to pretend that didn’t happen.

The actress recently produced a second sequel called Legally Blondes (like Aliens, but scarier) that’s due for release this Summer.  That installment is directed by ‘Savage’ Steve Holland (One Crazy Summer, Better off Dead) from a script by Chad and Dara Creasey (Pushing Daises).

The original film also spawned a fairly successful musical that ran on Broadway for almost two years.  It’s currently touring nationwide.

Trivia: the working title of the film is Legally Blonde: Think Pink.  I believe there are, at minimum, seven adult features with the same name.  Expect lawsuits aplenty to emanate from the San Fernando Valley as this inches towards release.

* Ok, Blair was only a Post Production Assistant on Gummo but I had to credit her that way.

Sleep Dealer

Sleep Dealer is a film that played the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Prize, a prize that awards $30,000 dollars to an outstanding film at the festival dealing with science or nature or featuring a scientists or…naturalist, I guess you could say, as a main character.

Sleep Dealer - Directed by Alex Rivera

I will say without hesitation, that the screenwriting award is more than well-deserved and the themes it tackles are so fantastical yet prescient that the Sloan award is easily a no-brainer.

I often try to remember, back when a movie like Blade Runner was released, what it was like to look at the screen and see these fantastical images, images dealing with  a robotic future in a wasteland of tv images and technology run amok and not have any present-day framework to connect any of it to what we’re living today.

Watching a fictional vision of the near-future now, however, is a completely different experience.

One is able to see a movie such as Sleep Dealer and  afterward go to Google and pull up stories that, though in the framework of the movie were as fantastical as machines that can read our thoughts and then actually read a story where scientists have created a machine that can read our dreams. Just what type of paradigm shift is now happening?

A lot of science fiction movies proffer technologies within storylines that most likely will never be any more than fantastical fictional elements. For example,  the 2004 independent film Primer and its treatise on time travel.

Sleep Dealer, however, manages, through its award-winning screenplay, to proffer a future with technology that eerily evokes modern possibilities and ties it into a, if not completely original and a bit clunky, thoroughly engaging and absorbing love story revolving around a devastating incident that the main character unwittingly causes.

The skill filmmaker Alex Rivera shows with this material goes a long way to helping the viewer look past the Captain Power-level special effects and the sometimes jagged editing to see a somewhat profound view of what our future and the future of the American work-force will look like not far from now. Add to that the filmmaker’s idea to give light to a problem most of the world faces with public/private water supplies, and one can’t look at what they’re seeing with anything but understated awe at how Rivera was able to say so much with so little.

If there is one thing that can be said for how much someone likes a film, it’s that I wish there had been more time devoted to each element of the movie. If this were a two hour film, and funded correctly, Rivera could speak on social issues using the genre of sci-fi far better than anything Inarritu has ever managed to accomplish with his esoteric, hollow dramas.

Someone please give this man the funding he needs for his already-mentioned sequel. I can’t wait to see what comes next from this first-rate international filmmaker and I’m glad I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to begin watching his films at the beginning of his career.

Opening in Chicago, 04/17

Still excited from the hockey game last night. It’s really a good time to be a Chicago sports fan. The ‘Hawks are making their first playoff appearance in seven years, the Bulls have half a chance against the Celtics now that Kevin Garnett is out, the Bears just made the biggest trade in the history of the franchise as far as I can tell, and both the Cubs (hurrah!) and the Sox (boo!) figure to be contenders in their respective divisions.

Anyhow, there are also interesting movies playing again, to the point where I feel I’ve fallen way behind. I still half-intend to make it to I Love You, Man and Adventureland, plus Sin Nombre and Observe and Report. Add in a few more possibilities this week, and it looks like I’ll be pretty busy on the movie front after about a month of slow-going.

American Violet (trailer)
Director: Tim Disney
Story about a young single mother fighting to clear her name after being wrongly arrested on drug charges.
Metacritic: 55

Crank: High Voltage (trailer)
Directors: Neveldine/Taylor (Crank)
Movie about a man who has to give himself electric shocks periodically due to heart problems. If this were 2000, there would be an awesome Dick Cheney parody to be done here, but I feel that joke is kind of played out. Mysteriously, Lionsgate decided to bypass the critical screening process … I mean that seriously, by the way. What’s the worst that could happen? Some critic calls it “disgusting, over-the-top trash,” or something like that? Wouldn’t that count as a positive to roughly 90% of the target audience?
Metacritic: no score

Hunger (trailer)
Director: Steve McQueen
Previously reviewed on Gone Elsewhere by Nick. Says he, “[not] anyone’s idea of an enjoyable film, but for anyone willing the film is quite an experience.”
Metacritic: 82

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Director: Chantal Akerman (La Captive, From the Other Side)
Not being familiar with Chantal Akerman’s work, I’m a bit intimidated by this reissue of her 3.5-hour minimalist opus from 1975 about a widowed mother who loses her grip on her life. Of course, this is nothing compared to the reissue of Masaki Kobayashi’s 9.5-hour The Human Condition, which is playing next month.
Metacritic: no listing

17 Again (trailer)
Director: Burr Steers (Igby Goes Down)
Burr Steers? Is it just me, or does this sound like the name of a Texas rodeo clown? At any rate, we’ll simply note that I am not in the target demographic for this and move on.
Metacritic: 49

State of Play (trailer)
Director: Kevin Macdonald (One Day in September, Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland)
Macdonald’s Touching the Void was a truly incredible experience, though his shift into features, The Last King of Scotland, was disappointing. He also did another documentary about Klaus Barbie entitled My Enemy’s Enemy, which was shelved by the Weinstein Company (who else?), and has now apparently disappeared into the ether. What a bunch of assholes. Anyhow, the trailer for State of Play doesn’t make it look like much (“Who told you that?” “You just did!” … oof), but who knows.
Metacritic: 61

Sugar (trailer)
Directors: Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson [Fleck])
Previously reviewed on Gone Elsewhere by Jackrabbit Slim. Says he, “earnest if not exactly compelling … a clean single up the middle, but not a home run.” Sounds about right, although being an aficionado of minor league baseball (I’ve been to 21 different minor league stadiums around the country), I find the subject matter interesting enough to make time for this.
Metacritic: 82

Lost, 4/15: “Some Like It Hoth”

“Let’s face it, Ewoks suck, dude.” Discuss in comments.