Cool poster for Spike Lee’s upcoming remake of Park Chan-Wook’s Oldboy (FilmDistrict, October 11th). I’ve long wondered how they’re going to market this thing so it’s nice to get a taste. Imagine a trailer should arrive in the next month or so.
(Via Collider)
One of the things that astonishes me the most about cinema isn’t so much the films I have seen, but the films that I haven’t seen. Or, to be more precise, the amount of films that I have yet to see.
Even if one limits cinema to just the English-language aspect, there are thousands upon thousands of worthy films that I have yet to see, and most I will probably never get around to seeing. Even as someone who has been fascinated and devoted to cinema since a young age, it’s always felt I’ve never seen enough films as I should’ve. And now well into adulthood and with the responsibilities and requirements that entails, the time to watch films seems less than ever.
Despite all that, there are holes in my film-viewing experience that are inexplicable, even embarrassing. Not just individual films, but directors and genres that I’ve watched far less than I should’ve.
Now, seven years into this site, now is as good a time as any for us regular contributors to confess what parts of cinema we’re a bit embarrassed as to not have viewed as yet.
The one that stands out for me is that I’ve never actually watched a Danny Boyle directed film, something I only realised this week when I saw mention of his latest film ‘Trance’ within the media. It occurred to me that despite being a highly-acclaimed filmmaker for over 15 years, with early films like ‘Trainspotting’ having a major cultural impact and won international recognition and the Oscar for ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, I’ve never gotten around to seeing any of his work. It feels a bit embarrassing, not only as a long-time contributor to this movie blog but also because people who know me assume I’m a film buff, and yet haven’t seen a film of a director that most of the public have seen at least one of his films.
Until fairly recently and even more inexplicably, I had also never seen a film directed by Steve Soderbergh. Again, there was never any conscious choice to avoid his films, I just never got around to seeing any of his work. Funnily enough, the first film of his that I did see a couple of years ago was one of his most obscure, ‘King of The Hill’, which I watched on a giveaway VHS tape (still hasn’t been released on DVD as yet). I’ve seen ‘Out of Sight’ also since, but there’s a heck of a lot of his film work that I need to catch up on.
So to the other contributors here (and anyone else for that matter), is there any gaps in your film experience you feel regretful or baffled about?
Universal is promising more Bourne pictures, a Kristen Stewart-starring Snow White and the Huntsman follow-up along with sequels to Identity Thief, Mama and The Fast and the Furious as the studio continues to focus on franchise-building:
Oddly, not a peep on Jurassic Park 4 – which comes out in a year and change despite not having a director, cast or start date.
Also – where is news on the Battleship quadrilogy?! Audiences MUST* know what happens next to the boring guy from all those bombs last year, random hot blonde girl, black Oscar Pistorius and Rihanna. At the very least, I want a prequel titled Battleship: B4.
Via Moviehole
* Must!
Scenes like this all over the area, with some huge trees scattered like kindling. Of course, this is nothing compared to the Jersey shore and Staten Island.
I’m sure it’s all going to be great!
Somewhere within the Nicholas Stoller directed film ‘The Five-Year Engagement’ there’s a really interesting and funny examination of modern relationships waiting to burst out. Occasionally you see it with some sharp dialogue, interesting character interaction, funny scenes and pointed observations. But alas, it’s suffocated by an average script and weak direction.
The plot centres on young San Francisco couple Tom, (Jason Segel, who also co-wrote the script with Stoller) who is a sous chef, and Violet, (Emily Blunt) who is a psychology graduate. They are deeply in love and Tom’s rather clumsy marriage proposal at the beginning of the film is gleefully accepted by Violet. But their relationship begins to hit the rocks when Violet gets into a post-doctorate university program which has them move to Michigan with Tom having to take a menial cooking job which he resents. As the strain on their relationship increases Violet’s charming professor Winton (Rhys Ifans) looms on the sidelines.
Probably TFYE’s greatest strength is the likability of the central characters Tom & Violet who are both portrayed and acted sympathetically. This ensures that even during its weaker sections a level of interest is retained.
And there are bright spots in the film – an argument in bed between Tom/Violet is truthfully and interestingly done. The gradual decaying of their relationship in the Michigan and increasingly desperate attempts to keep it alive feels reasonably genuine. And a late scene where two characters carry out a major conversation while doing voice impersonations of Elmo and the Cookie Monster is amusing.
But unfortunately these strengths are outnumbered by its weaknesses. A scene where Tom chases Winton through the streets at night goes on endlessly without any payoff. A scene where two periphery characters give toasts that involve putdowns of a colleague is pointless and could’ve easily been excised from the film. A supporting character who has a penchant for wearing awful jumpers he’s knitted is mildly amusing initially, but is turned into a tiresome running gag.
More significantly, there’s a silly segment where a demoralised Tom turns into a sub-Jeremiah Johnson hunter type, even donning a very rough beard. While it gets a couple of cheap laughs it’s impossible to believe that Violet would stay with him in this state and it undermines the attempts at truthfulness elsewhere in the film.
Also, the character of Winton is very lazily constructed. A professor who’s pretentious (yawn), arrogant and devious – it’s as if the writers wanted to create a character from the most negative clichés associated with academics (all that’s missing is for him to be smoking a pipe). It’s only due to the work of Ifans that the character has any interest whatsoever.
As an individual film, TFYE isn’t especially noteworthy. But it does gain interest in the broader context that it’s produced by Judd Apatow, a notable figure not only due to the amount of hits he’s been associated with in recent years but that his brand of comedy has become well-known and identifiable.
I don’t consider myself a fan of the Apatow-style films (I should add I don’t really consider the Will Ferrell films Apatow produced part of this sub-genre). They have their appealing aspects such as a fresh modern style of humour and usually likable characters. But TFYE is a good demonstration of the weaker characteristics – scenes last twice the length they should, very self-conscious low-brow humour, supposedly liberated on the topic of sex but in truth conformist and conservative, etc…
Despite all that, TFYE is not a turkey by any stretch. It’s a tolerable time-waster with some interesting and endearing aspects. I think it’s marginally better than last year’s hit Apatow-produced film ‘Bridesmaids’. But it could’ve – and should’ve – been better than it is.
Rating: C+
Continuing Sony’s wondrous marketing for their 2012 tentpoles, Barry Sonnenfeld (perhaps lacking anything insightful to say about filmmaking, his career or the junk he’s peddling) simply summarizes most of Men in Black III to MTV:
Agent J needs to go back in time to save Tommy Lee Jones’ [character] from some event that’s happened decades earlier. He needs to learn something about Tommy’s character that he didn’t know before.” That was the genesis. Ten years later, we’re about to come out and show the world what that meant.
In the first act, Agent J is a bit fed up with how closed K is as a person, how he feels he needs to open up and communicate more, but it’s not happening. K says to J, “You know how I live such a happy life? I don’t ask questions I don’t want to know the answers to.” At the end of the first act, Jemaine’s character, Boris the Animal, breaks out of prison and finds a guy who has a time device. He says he’s going back to 1969 to do something to the man who shot off his arm – because Boris only has half an arm – and of course, that man is Agent K. At the end of that first act, Tommy’s character disappears, and no one remembers that he ever existed… except Agent J, who realizes that someone went back in time and did something to Agent K. So he has to track down who gave Boris the device, and travel back to 1969 with one warning: He has to stay away from his old partner.
What happens, actually, is he gets arrested by Agent K – now Josh Brolin – in 1969. The second and third act is all about tracking down Boris and Will renewing his friendship with a different K than the K he knows from 40 years in the future. What’s really cool is that J is constantly wondering why this guy who seems sort of open and happy became the sort of curmudgeon that has been his partner for the last 14 years. He makes a discovery about that. So, “Men in Black 3″ is by far the most emotional of the movies. It has a really surprising ending.
The fantastic thing about “Men in Black 3″ is that it totally closes out the trilogy, it answers questions that you didn’t even know you should be asking, it leaves you emotionally warm and sad and happy, and it could also reboot the franchise. But I can’t even begin to tell you how to interpret all of that. [Laughs] But I would say this: If your interpretation is that “Men in Black 4″ will only star the worm guys and Frank the pug, you are wrong.
My wife and I are planning a quick overnight trip with our oldest son in April. While running some searches for hotels in the New England area, I came across this site.
Maybe we’ll just do a day trip somewhere.
Kidding aside, I’m terrified of hotel rooms to begin with (fear of bugs; fear of uncleanliness; fear of the unknown guests who previously stayed in the room; fear of what those guests may have done in bed, in shower, on floor; fear of odd smells; fear of unoffensive, corporate art; fear of room service; fear of cheap furniture; fear of weird cable systems and limited channel line-up; fear of slightly-dated $12.00 pay-per-view movies; fear of hotel employees, hotel pools, restaurants and bars; utterly terrified of other guests) Reading that almost every major hotel in New York is at least partially infested by bedbugs is enough to make me swear off traveling overnight forever.
Will be away from the computer for most of the weekend, so here’s an early edition of Openings for the holiday masses! Featuring some of the biggest-profile releases left this year, to boot:
A Dangerous Method (trailer)
Director: David Cronenberg (eXistenZ, Spider, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises)
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Don’t get me wrong, I’m looking forward to this and I don’t want to prejudge it too harshly, but it’s clear that Keira Knightley is going to be a problem for me in this movie. She’s a very limited actress, and any time she has to dial up the intensity (e.g., the “IT EXCITED ME!” line in the trailer), she looks utterly ridiculous. On the other hand, I genuinely look forward to watching Viggo Mortensen ham it up as Sigmund Freud. Meanwhile, the ubiquitous Michael Fassbender defied all odds by getting through the year without being in a movie with Jessica Chastain. How’d that happen?
Metacritic: 74
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (trailer)
Director: Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille)
Personal Interest Factor: 7
Main appeal here is Bird directing and a half-decent title, even though I’ve never been that excited about the M:I franchise. Paramount, curiously, is rolling this out nice and slowly, hitting only 425 screens before expanding wide for Christmas. Apparently, they’re planning the same thing with Tintin and War Horse. The strikes me as a more notable development than Universal’s pointless flirtation with VOD, because unlike Uni’s aborted VOD plan, it’s an experiment that directly challenges the “milk the first weekend for all it’s worth” conventional wisdom that took over Hollywood for good sometime around the release of Batman Forever. Plus, by necessity it actually incorporates word-of-mouth as a marketing strategy, and when’s the last time that happened with a big-studio franchise movie? Never, that’s when. It’ll be interesting to see how it works out for them.
Metacritic: 73
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (trailer)
Director: Guy Ritchie (Swept Away, Revolver, RocknRolla, Sherlock Holmes)
Personal Interest Factor: 5
WB taking the opposite tack from Paramount here, offering up a sequel with a director I don’t care about and an awkward title. This strikes me as an unnecessary sequel anyway, since the first movie was passable at best and AFAIK there aren’t a whole lot of people out there who were a whole lot more taken with it than I was. Is there real excitement out there about this one? I have my doubts.
Metacritic: 50
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (trailer)
Director: Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In)
Personal Interest Factor: 8
Sounds like a movie about a legendary turn-of-the-century infield combo and it has a somewhat uninspiring trailer, but a John Le Carre adaptation starring Gary Oldman sure sounds like a winner to me. I’m really glad to see the reviews to strong, because I was a little worried about that trailer when it first came out.
Metacritic: 87
Also this week:
Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked (trailer) – no, no, no
That Girl in Yellow Boots (trailer) – Indian film about the sleazy side of Bombay
I have been a Beatles fan most of my life and over the years I’ve found the most intriguing personality of the quartet to be George Harrison. Sure, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were more talented and integral members of the band, but their music and lives have been covered in such detail s there doesn’t seem to be much more one can know about them. As for Ringo Starr, not only is he the least significant band member musically but his uncomplicated ‘what you see is what you get’ personality suggests his is a persona that doesn’t require further investigation.
But Harrison is another matter. Not only because his talents were largely overwhelmed and overlooked due to Lennon and McCartney while in The Beatles (and perhaps post-Beatles in different ways) but because he always seemed a personality full of mystery and contradictions. While he was generally known as the ‘quiet Beatle’ who was considered the most contemplative of the group, there were enough examples of him being quite an intense, even volatile personality. To use a more specific example it seemed bizarre how someone defined by spirituality and search for inner peace would be such a major fan of what would appear to be the antithesis of those concepts, Formula 1 racing.
Above all else, Harrison in interviews over the years always came across as a thoughtful and perceptive personality (probably the most interesting of the Beatles imo) which made me seek to learn more about him. I read a biography of Harrison by Joshua Greene earlier this year which was pretty good and provided some insight into him. But I hungered for more so when it was revealed Martin Scorsese’s TV documentary on Harrison ‘Living in the Material World’ was getting a brief cinema release in Australia, I jumped at the chance to see it.
Unfortunately, while there numerous pleasures to be had from LITMW and was glad I saw it, I had a feeling of disappointment by the end.
Covering Harrison’s life in largely chronological order, LITMW has a good beginning with friends and family showing how much his absence has impacted on them. But it falls away once it begins on the Beatles period, mainly because it falls into the trap of not being a documentary about George but the Beatles as a group, and on that level it feels like a pale imitation of The Beatles Anthology 1990s documentary. At times, it almost feels as if Harrison is a periphery figure in his own documentary!
The documentary does pick up once it moves to Harrison’s post-Beatles career. The section covering his debut solo album ‘All Things Must Pass’ is particularly compelling as it illustrates someone -his talents suffocated for years in the Beatles environment – bursting out with a fountain of individual compositions that he’d been stockpiling for years. Seeing the dedication and passion Harrison devoted to the project, it seemed impossible to think the album wouldn’t be anything but a critical and commercial triumph.
Also, the final years of his life are covered effectively. The 1999 incident where a crazed man invaded his home and stabbed him is covered in graphic detail. This sounds rather ghoulish to focus on but it conveys Harrison’s personality, humour and beliefs quite effectively.
But even in the post-Beatles section, the documentary frustrates. Despite being over 200 minutes in length, Harrison’s post-mid 1970s solo music work is totally ignored, including his successful ‘comeback’ 1987 album ‘Cloud Nine’. Even more bafflingly, the successful copyright infringement lawsuit against his hit single ‘My Sweet Lord’ isn’t even mentioned. In a documentary lasting over 200 minutes, such gaps shouldn’t have occurred.
But most frustrating of all in LITMW is that it doesn’t attempt to probe at the contradictions and mysteries present in Harrison’s persona that help make him such a fascinating subject. For example, the general perception on Harrison and drugs is that he largely gave it up in the late 1960s and instead sought out a higher state of being through a spiritual and religious search for truth (something implied in an excerpt from a Harrison interview in LITMW). Yet, Klaus Voorman (a friend of the Beatles since they were in Germany in early 1960s) is fairly explicit in saying that Harrison was getting derailed by drug usage from the early to mid 1970s. Yet, no other mention or investigation is made of this claim elsewhere in the documentary.
That is a constant frustration with LITMW – things are hinted at with Harrison’s character but never really probed. On some occasions we get an account of someone who was peaceful with his life, on others someone who was in a regular state of agitation. An example being how we get two different accounts of how he handled the end of his marriage to first wife Patti. Disappointingly, the film probably provides less insight into Harrison’s persona than Green’s biography did.
In terms of style, the documentary is unusual in that it has no narration and no attempts to put a biographical timeline on proceedings. This is a positive in that it has a fluid, languid style with its own character which makes it more enjoyable to experience than the standard doco. On the other hand the lack of biographical information means that viewers need to have a deep knowledge of Harrison’s career to fully appreciate the events covered. If you’re a person with limited knowledge of Harrison or the Beatles and want to understand their significance, this isn’t the place to start.
Harrison’s passion in music and involvement in movie production (without him ‘Life of Brian’ wouldn’t have got made) mean that he ‘talking heads’ include not only friends, family and the surviving Beatles, but racing car drivers and members of Monty Python. Standouts are Harrison’s wife Olivia who is tactful and moving in her summation of his final years. As well, despite appearing only briefly, racing car driver Jackie Stewart is notable, particularly as he provides insight into how someone like Harrison would love motor car racing.
While there are many problems with this doco, I shouldn’t be too down on it as there is much to enjoy from it. It is well-made, with an amazing array of footage from the era (much of which I hadn’t seen before). And of course, there is the pleasure of listening to Harrison’s songs, which Scorsese wisely gives them plenty of time to be heard. For Beatles fans it’s definitely worth watching.
But as a portrait of Harrison, this could’ve and should’ve been better. My favourite moment in the doco is when we see a picture of John Lennon sitting in the studio shortly after the death of former Beatle and friend Stu Sutcliffe worked in. The look of vulnerability and devastation isn’t something I’d ever seen before in the usually confident and cocky persona of Lennon.
It’s a great moment, but when the best part of a documentary about Harrison centres on John Lennon, it suggests not everything has worked.
