Predict the #1 film for the weekend of July 10-12, 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) Will Bruno beat the per screen average of The Hangover? ($13,759 from 3,269 theaters. Bruno is scheduled for 2700+)
2) Will Chris Columbus I Love You, Beth Cooper have an ADJUSTED opening weekend that is over or under his 1991 opus Only the Lonely, starring Macaulay Culkin? ($5,997,993 x 7.18/4.21 = $10,229,356 being the adjusted opening weekend)

Deadline is Wednesday July 8 at 11:59 pm (blog time).

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

AGEBOC 09 score

James: 21

Rob: 17
Joe Webb: 13
Nick: 11.5
Jackrabbit Slim: 10
Brian: 7
filmman: 6.5
Marco Trevisiol: 6.5
Juan: 5.5
Jeanine: 6
Rhymerguy: 4

It’s hard, when you follow the film business closely, to not have certain expectations when you walk into a movie. Public Enemies, Michael Mann’s lavish take on the era of the celebrity bank robbers during the Great Depression, certainly seemed like it would be the definitive take on this subject, casting a popular movie star, Johnny Depp, as John Dillinger. The film doesn’t quite achieve that epic status, and at the same time falls slightly short as a popcorn entertainment. It is sporadically brilliant, though, and on the whole I recommend it, but it’s no Godfather. It’s not even Heat.

I mention Heat, Mann’s great crime film from the 90s, because Public Enemies has certain parallels. The story follows a criminal and his pursuer, who only have one meeting before one kills the other one. The comparison pretty much stops there, though, because unlike Heat, Public Enemies doesn’t explore the inner psyches of the characters. We really don’t know what makes them tick.

The film is ostensibly the story of Dillinger, who was not only a public enemy during 1933 and 1934, robbing several banks and killing several police officers, but he was also a huge celebrity. In a time when banks were held in contempt, Dillinger was cheered on by much of the populace, applauded when his face appeared in newsreels. In Mann’s film the dack is stacked for him with the casting of Depp, a megastar, who plays him with a sleek sensuality. Contrast this to Warren Oates’ portrayal in John Milius’ 1973 film, Dillinger. Oates, a fine actor, would never have been said to exhibit sleek sensuality.

For the most part the film is accurate as it depicts Dillinger’s crime wave from his escape from prison in 1933 to his death in 1934. There are a few changes to the truth: Dillinger’s men did escape from the pen at Michigan City, Indiana through the use of smuggled rifles, but Dillinger was in jail at the time (they later busted him out); Pretty Boy Floyd died after Dillinger did, not before; Baby Face Nelson didn’t die at Little Bohemia; but the shell of the truth is there and it shouldn’t bother experts on the subject. In fact, there are some details that are myth-bustingly true, such as The Lady in Red was actually a lady in orange. What may bother historians is that Depp’s Dillinger is a romantic anti-hero, much like Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway made Bonnie and Clyde. But Dillinger was really just a thug, more Warren Oates than Johnny Depp.

The spine of this film is Dillinger’s relationship with Billie Frechette, a hat-check girl played by Marion Cotillard, and frankly these portions of the film are dull. I didn’t find any chemistry between the two (I’m not sure Depp has ever been convincing in a consummated romance–he’s always excelled more at being the oddball who can’t have requited love). Cotillard is fine and easy on the eyes but the whole relationship, to me, dragged down the story.

Instead the best parts of Public Enemies are the set-pieces. I thought the film really picked up steam during Dillinger’s escape from the Crown Point, Indiana jail, in which he used a wooden gun (that, hard to believe, was true). The editing by Jeffrey Ford and Paul Rubell is spot-on. Then, the shootout at Little Bohemia, a lodge in Wisconsin where the gang was hiding out, is the highlight of the film. The choreography and sound combine to form an almost balletic orgy of violence, and the image of one of gangster going down in a hail of bullets, his machine gun blazing, is an arresting one. And finally Dillinger’s death, outside the Biograph theater, is a fitting climax, shot with precision and powerful emotion.

The problem with Mann’s film is what comes in between. The romance is ineffective, perhaps because we really have no idea who Dillinger is. He mentions spending a long time in prison for a minor offense, but aside from a Bull Durham-like list of things he likes (”baseball, movies, fast cars, and you”) he’s an enigma. Even more of a cypher is Melvin Purvis, the dedicated G-man who hunts him down. He’s played by Christian Bale, who’s a fairly big star in his own right, but there’s nothing there to tell us what his motivation is, other than doing his job (Purvis killed himself in 1960, which is mentioned in the closing moments of the film, but there’s nothing in the script or the performance to tip us off as to why). A more interesting performance is by Billy Crudup, a weird choice to play the gnomic J. Edgar Hoover, but a canny one, giving us a glimpse of the man who would one day be among the post powerful men in America.

Public Enemies, despite these faults, resonates. The imagery of a man in a long top-coat and fedora, a machine gun crooked in his arm, has undeniable power. The costumes of Colleen Atwood are terrific, and all the period cars and locations are exquisitely done. I do have complaints about Dante Spinotti’s photography, as there is way too much hand-held stuff. Or more precisely, hand-held stuff that is not smoothy photographed, and makes the viewer motion sick. I see no reason for it other than hubris.

Given that this film was made in a time when banks are once again thought of with disdain, it makes some interesting statements. Mann has added an element with the addition of characters from the “Syndicate,” such as Frank Nitti, who end up considering rogue bank robbers as irritants. There is a pointed scene when Dillinger is shown a bookmaking operation that makes as much money in a day as Dillinger can in one job, and without anybody shooting at each other. Mann clearly sees Dillinger as the last of a species, which is perhaps why he is tinged in romantic hues. That makes for a handsome thing to look at, but not a particularly substantive one.

Well, it’s off to Texas for the weekend for me. Thought about doing an “Opening in Dallas” this weekend, just for old time’s sake, but then I remembered that I couldn’t care less what’s going on in Dallas.

The Girl from Monaco (trailer)
Director: Anne Fontaine
Meant to see this back in March, when it was playing during the EU Film Festival, but missed it. I think it won the Audience Award then, though I may be mistaken on that. Aside from the most annoying voiceover since Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the trailer is light and appealing. Basically, it looks like one of those airy French things that you can’t remember ten minutes after watching it but it’s enjoyable nonetheless.
Metacritic: 53

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (trailer)
Director: Carlos Saldana (Ice Age: The Meltdown)
Pass.
Metacritic: 51

I Hate Valentine’s Day (trailer)
Director: Nia Vardalos
I’ve asked this before, but why do so many romantic comedies have such stupid premises? This one’s about a woman who always ends relationships after five dates. What kind of idiocy is that? Who lives like that? I should try getting rich by writing asinine shit like this.
Metacritic: 25

Julia
Director: Erick Zonca (The Dreamlife of Angels, The Little Thief)
I had never heard of this (nice work, Magnolia Pictures!) until Ebert come strong with the four-star review this morning, praising Tilda Swinton’s performance to the skies. I should probably go see it. Wish it was playing somewhere other than the aggressively uncomfortable Facets Cinematheque.
Metacritic: 54

Public Enemies (trailer)
Director: Michael Mann (The Last of the Mohicans, Heat, The Insider, Miami Vice)
Already seen it, and I wanted to write a review of this before I left but I’m just not going to have the time. I liked it, and think that it’s undeniably a visionary film. At the same time, though, it’s a challenging work in some ways (hello muddy digital photography – filmman was right) and it’s hard for me to be super-enthusiastic about it. I do think time will be kind to it.
Metacritic: 71

Another celebrity bites the dust: Karl Malden is dead at 97. He may be best known to a certain age group for being on The Streets of San Francisco, or as a pitchman for American Express Traveler Checks (”Don’t leave home without them!”) but his greatest work was in the ’50s for Elia Kazan, specifically as the tough priest in On the Waterfront and his Oscar-winning role in A Streetcar Named Desire.

The morning before I saw Away We Go I spent some time in a dentist’s chair to get some cavities filled. I was more uncomfortable during some of the scenes of the film than I was getting my teeth drilled. Not that all of Away We Go is cringe-inducing, but there’s enough stain on it to keep it from being a worthwhile entertainment.

Written by the husband-wife team of Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, Away We Go carries much of what makes them distinctive in the literary world (I’ve never read anything by Vida, but I read Eggers’ Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and know him as one of the main voices in the McSweeney’s vein of literature). To be sure, Away We Go is full of a kind of arch sentimentality and self-aware preciousness that overwhelms any hope that this film can resonate with authenticity.

The story concerns a young unmarried couple, John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph. She gets pregnant, and they decide they can live anywhere they want, so embark on a tour of some cities across North America, trying to find the perfect home. This odyssey is kicked off when Krasinski’s self-absorbed parents (Jeff Daniels and Catherina O’Hara) tell them they are moving to Antwerp before the baby is born. The characterizations of these two are pretty horrid, but they are mild compared to what’s to come.

Starting in Phoenix, the two visit an old colleague of Rudolph’s, Allison Janney. This is the first scene in which I wished I was back in the dentist’s chair. Janney is a fine actress, but what she is asked to do here is a crime. She plays a loud and obnoxious woman who openly insults her children and makes jokes about her sagging breasts that can be heard by anyone within fifty feet. She and her husband (Jim Gaffigan), who seems to be heavily medicated, take our couple to the dog track, a particularly bourgeois endeavor (we don’t see their home, which is no doubt decorated with prints by Thomas Kincaid).

If that scene wasn’t horrible enough, Krasinski and Rudolph next go to Madison, Wisconsin to visit a childhood friend of his. She is played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, and here we have another example of a good actress forced to inhabit a character that only exists in the revenge fantasies of writers like Eggers and Vida. She plays a college professor, and when she’s introduced breast-feeding a toddler, we know we’re in for a litany of new-age quackery. Sure enough, she and her husband (Josh Hamilton) aren’t really people, they are a chance for the filmmakers to vent against every cliche of holistic, hippie behavior known to man, even taking it into the realm of the unbelievable, such as Gyllenhaal’s objection to the concept of strollers.

These scenes highlight a certain tone that really rankles me–the filmmaker looking back at his audience and winking at us, saying “People! Don’t you just hate ‘em? Aren’t you glad you’re normal like us?” There is such vitriol in these scenes that it’s hard to contemplate where it stems from, other than that Eggers or Vida must have had some horrible friends in their lives.

Not all of Away We Go is like this. There are some lovely scenes in the film, especially when we focus solely on Krasinski and Rudolph. I liked a scene early on when they huddle in bed, their electricity out, and Rudolph wonders whether they are fuck-ups. Then, toward the end of the film, after they are dealing with Krasinski’s brother, whose wife has left him, there is a poignant scene between the two of them on trampoline. But those scenes can’t stand the weight of the general misanthropy on display in the rest of the film. I realize that for two people in love sometimes it can feel like they are the only sane people on Earth, but the ugliness of some of the characters in this film is too much.

The film is directed by Sam Mendes, and this is certainly a departure from his more polished and slick films like American Beauty, Road to Perdition, and Revolutionary Road. Away We Go is casually presented, like a shaggy-dog story, and appears to have filmed on the cheap. The look fits the kind of rambling mentality, though.

Krasinski, as the hirsute boyfriend, is fine, though he is asked to use his expression of a mixture of bemusement and incredulity that he specializes in on The Office. Rudolph is very good, excellently potraying the confusion and panic a woman in her situation would be going through.

Finally, there are some logistical problems that nagged at me. Krasinski is an insurance salesman of some type, though he certainly doesn’t dress like one (I doubt any insurance company would hire someone who shows up for an interview in a tweed sport coat and Hush Puppies). At the outset, they are living in what looks like near poverty (they have a cardboard window) but have no trouble funding unlimited travel across the continent. And the resolution of the film seems to be a complete real-estate fantasy.

I can’t recommend Away We Go, though it does have some admirable elements. In an attempt to isolate just what it is that makes a home for two likeable people, it manages to savage entire classes of people.

(warning: contains very mild spoilers)

From the late 1960s to early 1980s one of the safest bets in the Hollywood film industry was a film based on the work of Neil Simon. An enormously successful playwright, he proved to be very appealing on film because of his exceptional comic skills, especially in writing witty and memorable one-liners.

The 1968 film ‘The Odd Couple’ – based on Simon’s 1965 play – is probably his most famous effort and one of his most successful films. It’s an apt reflection of Simon’s work, showcasing not only his many strengths but also his weaknesses.

Like many of Simon’s works, the plot is simple but appealing. Two long-standing middle-aged friends with recently broken marriages move in together and their contrasting personalities cause much friction. One, Felix Ungar (Jack Lemmon), is neurotic, uptight and obsessed with cleaniness while the other, Oscar Madison (Walter Matthau), is lazy, laidback and a slob.

The film is not without its flaws. As the ‘raison d’etre’ of the film is the byplay and relationship between Felix and Oscar, sections of the film where they’re not sharing scenes feel like padding (especially the opening 15 minutes which feel flat and dragged out). And Gene Saks’ direction is rather sluggish and uninspired, making it feel like it’s a filmed version of the stage play instead of a film in its own right.

But once Felix and Oscar come together, the film is a joy to watch. Not just because of the often superb one-liners and comic situations Simon creates, but because of the skilled performances and terrific chemistry Matthau and Lemmon have. They help ensure these are fully-fledged characters, making the film far more interesting through their relationship than if they’d become the caricatures they could have easily become.

The film’s peak is reached with a lengthy scene where Felix and Oscar have a double date with a pair of somewhat eccentric British sisters which is a masterclass of comic writing, timing and acting. Equally as good is the feuding between Felix and Oscar following the double date disaster which as a contrast has some very funny silent visual comedy followed by dialogue from Oscar listing his grievances about Felix which is probably the highpoint of the film (it can be viewed here).

Overall, this is an excellent comedy that deserves its reputation as one of the funniest Hollywood films of the last 50 years… and yet despite its many outstanding qualities this film can’t be rated as a truly great film. And in an unusual way Jack Lemmon’s performance exposes some of the reasons why.

Lemmon’s performance as Felix seems almost too truthful and honest as it inadvertently exposes the limitations of Simon’s work. The authenticity of Felix’s pain as he goes through divorce seems to clash with the tone of the film which wants to keep things at never more than a skin deep level, invariably falling back on smart one-liners at key moments instead of taking a risk and attempting something more rewarding. As good as a gag writer Simon was, even in his best works there was something constricting and even brittle about characters constantly engaging in conversations so heavily doused with one-liners and snappy retorts. As one critic one said, Simon’s films often feel like the main characters have professional gag writers living with them. That element is present in just about all of Simon’s works and probably prevents films like this from evolving into all-time classic status.

But one shouldn’t detract from the many exceptional qualities this film has. It is a top-class comedy that has held up very well over the years and one can only wish in vain that modern comedies of today would have acting and writing as sophisticated and funny as this.

Note: Image from http://www.movieforum.com/

Hello, people of the future. Not a very far future, perhaps (I scheduled this to appear tomorrow, I hope it will/did), but the future none the less. As you read this I am no doubt being chased by bears in the woods of the wild north, unable to get any wi-fi reception or even find a bathroom that flushes. It’s all good.

The success of Transformers 2 made me consider what the future holds in store for us. Maybe there will one day be giant robots that can transform into GM vehicles fighting on our surface for the survival or destruction of the human race, but for some reason I find it hard to do so. What I, coincidentally, found far more worrying and of more acute interest is the state of our intelligence, and how it’s evolving.

In a way this guy prompted it, because, while he is very passionate in his defense (which is admirable), he is espousing stupidity. “Don’t think so hard, dude. There are robots. Look at Megan Fox’s tits bouncing!” Don’t be boring. Don’t be a “snob”. Be fun. Be dumb. I’ll admit I will sometimes resort to this kind of defensive attitude over things I like but others call stupid (hello Brian thinking of Indy 4, hello me thinking of the snooze-inducing Bandits), everyone does it, but you have to draw the line between willing suspension of disbelief and retardation somewhere.

Idiocracy covered one possible outcome of where this kind of laissez-faire-les-Transformers attitude might lead us.

A film that’s been growing on me lately. Disappointed when it came out, since it could have been much better, but there’s something oddly topical about a show called “Ow my balls” and all the reassurances of “it’s got… electrolytes”.

Yet a cure for stupidity exists! Reading! Books! But for those disinclined towards such arduous activity there already exists a machine that can raise your talent level temporarily. Developed by Allan Snyder, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation can enhance your cognitive abilities for a limited time through electro-magnetic stimulating pulses to your brain (the name sort of gave it away). That already sounds like science fiction, but it’s been available for quite a while now. Its main use has been for helping people with depression and schizophrenia.

On top of all that there’s the future of controlling objects with your mind. This fall a toy will be released where the amount of concentration you use will determine if and how high you can keep a ball floating in the air. It’s not technically telekinesis, but close enough.

Two things struck me while watching that clip. One was that that thing is going to get real old, real fast. It’s the kind of toy that the boring geeks buy to impress and distract people at a party, and it does so for an hour or two. A $100 well spent? Second was that of all the things they could come up with using that technology for, all they could come up with was keeping a ping-pong ball floating in the air? Not even having something where you can compete with someone in concentration, trying to force it towards your opponent? Give him an electric shock if he loses, thereby making it harder for him to concentrate next time. Or mental Pong? The possibilities are practically endless already. And they chose to have it in a Star Wars package, with Yoda mewling in the background. It almost went from being cool to being sad.

So, in conclusion, while our intelligence may drive us to create the most amazing technology to realize the most profound things, be sure that we will use it in the dumbest and most commercialized way possible.

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of July 3-5, 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) Will Ice Age 3 have the 3rd largest 3-day Independence Day weekend, counting from Friday July 3 2009? (Superman Returns has held that position for the last three years, with an adjusted opening of $57.58 million)
2) Will the Friday-Sunday take of Public Enemies be the largest Friday-Sunday take of Michael Mann’s career? Yes or no? (His largest until now is Collateral with an adjusted opening of $28.55 million)

Deadline is Tuesday June 30 at 11:59 pm (blog time).

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

AGEBOC 09 score

James: 21

Rob: 17
Joe Webb: 13
Nick: 11.5
Jackrabbit Slim: 10
Brian: 7
filmman: 6.5
Marco Trevisiol: 6.5
Juan: 5.5
Jeanine: 6
Rhymerguy: 4

Film snob alert: you know what I’m really looking forward to watching this weekend? My newly arrived Blu-ray of The Seventh Seal. Suck on that, Bay.

Big Man Japan (trailer)
Director: Hitoshi Matsumoto
There’s probably no way I’ll have time to see this, but seriously, watch the trailer. I haven’t seen a trailer this bizarre since … well, Kung Fu Hustle. Maybe.
Metacritic: 62

Cheri (trailer)
Director: Stephen Frears (High Fidelity, Dirty Pretty Things, Mrs Henderson Presents, The Queen)
Stephen Frears hits paydirt in his search to make a movie about a hot over-50 actress, after a horrible misfire with Judi Dench and a gamble with Helen Mirren that was a long shot to start with before finally being sabotaged by the makeup department.
Metacritic: 62

Jerichow
Director: Christian Petzold (Yella)
Apparently a German reworking of The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Metacritic: 72

My Sister’s Keeper (trailer)
Director: Nick Cassavetes (She’s So Lovely, John Q, The Notebook, Alpha Dog)
Talk about timely, here’s a movie that addresses the high-profile epidemic of people raising kids for the purpose of harvesting their sweet, sweet organs. I knew Jon and Kate were up to something!
Metacritic: 50

The Stoning of Soraya M. (trailer)
Director: Cyrus Nowrasteh
Parable about an Iranian woman who turns to Jesus when overcome with despair. Hint, hint, Iranians!
Metacritic: 52

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (trailer)
Director: Michael Bay (Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor)
I pretty much hated the first one … well, that’s not quite right. I didn’t so much hate it as much as I just thought it was unbelievably stupid. I came out of it dreading the sequel. After awhile, I started to consider skipping the sequel so that I wouldn’t have to dread it (there’s precedent for this – I skipped Bad Boys II on identical grounds. Over time, this developed into a general feeling that I would likely skip the sequel. Now, I’m wondering exactly what eternal horror God would have to threaten me with that would convince me to go. Fortunately, I suspect God is on my side in this matter, and I think I may instead actually stand to gain some kind of eternal reward for having the purity of soul required to abstain from defiling myself in such a crude and vulgar manner. Basically, what I’m saying is that I thank Michael Bay for getting me in touch with my spiritual side again. I haven’t felt this close to God since summer church camp back in 1991 (or maybe 1992?) when I refused to clean the horse stables, on the grounds that the kids actually going to horse camp should have to do that. God protects the righteous!
Metacritic: 36

Whatever Works (trailer)
Director: Woody Allen (Match Point, Scoop, Cassandra’s Dream, Vicky Cristina Barcelona)
Perhaps the saddest aspect to Michael Jackson’s passing is that we’ll never see his long-anticipated collaboration with Woody Allen, in which Jackson plays a self-absorbed middle-aged malcontent with a conspicuously young romantic interest. It would have been called Michael Bubbles Bahrain and whatever problems it would have had in the US market, it would have killed in Eastern Europe.
Metacritic: 47

Warning: This review contains mild spoilers about a plot point that occurs very early in the film, but you may want to experience it without knowing that, so tread lightly.

Duncan Jones has directed a nice quiet sci-fi film in Moon. It is not the most original piece of work, though, and as I watched it I counted the films that it reminded me of, including Silent Running, Solaris, and most especially 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the use of a computer with a spookily level speaking voice and its own agenda.

However, the nods to 2001 are, by the end of the film, clearly part of Jones’ plan, and he uses those cinematic references to catch snarky viewers like me off  our guard.

The simple premise of the film is that a new form of energy is being mined on the moon. A one-man crew, assisted by a computer, looks over things. That crewman is Sam Rockwell who, we are told, is near the end of a three-year contract. He is looking forward to returning to his gorgeous wife and their adorable little girl. At first you may wonder why a guy would leave a family like that to spend three years in isolation on the moon, but don’t get too critical, all will be answered.

Going out to investigate a mechanical problem, Rockwell crashes and is injured. When he awakens in the infirmary, the computer (called Gerty, and voiced eerily by Kevin Spacey) tells him that he will be fine in a few days. But Rockwell is suspicious, and when he goes out, against Gerty’s instructions, to the scene of the crash, he finds something shocking–himself.

I won’t go any further than that, but I needed to reveal that bit of plot to discuss the notion that the bulk of the film consists of Rockwell playing two parts, and the special effects involved to have both characters on screen at the same time. This is accomplished most effectively because Rockwell, even though he is playing two characters who are the same person, manages to make us see separate individuals. But the camera tricks are interesting. Jones starts with having them simply share the screen, but then it gets more complicated–they play a game of table tennis. Finally they are physically interacting, such as dressing each other or having a knockdown drag-out fight.

But I don’t mean to suggest that this film is about special effects. Instead it’s about identity, and what makes each of us unique. Discovering one has a doppelganger is surely very disquieting, and Jones and Rockwell both express this notion effectively.

I wouldn’t say the film is excellent, though, just good. At times it seems like an extended Twilight Zone episode. Though I understand what Jones was trying to do with Gerty vis-a-vis the HAL 9000 in 2001, I couldn’t help but spend half the film thinking to myself, “It’s been done” (but I did like the monitor on Gerty which showed his mood with a changeable Happy Face application).

Appropos of nothing, Jones is of course the son of David Bowie. I can only be grateful he did not name his main character Major Tom.

According to Variety. Whoa.

Will they do it for any other categories? Foreign, for example?

Joe got flummoxed last week when I posted a link to the awesome inbflat.net on Facebook but not on the blog and he almost missed it. It is indeed great. I like combining the glass marimbas with the bass, the clarinet, the weirdo with the ambient voice and the flight of the red balloons sequence. It’s like my own little Michael Mann soundtrack.

Something I’ve been playing more with lately is the tonematrix by programmer André Michelle, based on Yamaha’s Tenori-On. Sometimes I’ll just let the mouse slide around randomly on that board and come up with the strangest, hypnotic pling-plong.

There is also something called Audiotool, where you can have a whole set of amplifiers, knobs and stuff, but that’s way too complex and timeconsuming for me.

Thankfully there’s the slightly easier WD-1 DJ-trainer to practice on, even if its selections are pretty cheesy.

Then of course there’s just the plain weirdness that is Looptracks.net.

Before this film I had seen two of Oliver Assayas’ work: Demonlovers, which I found incomprehensible, and Boarding Gate, a standard and seamy thriller. Therefore I was totally surprised by Summer Hours, which on first glance appears to be a pastoral drama about artsy-fartsy French people, but on further investigation is a metaphor for the crumbling of European culture.

We begin at a gathering of the Marly family. The widowed mother, celebrating her 75th birthday, is obsessed with how her house and pieces of art will be distributed after her death. Her uncle was a famous painter and collector, and she seems to regard his legacy and these objects with more affection than her own family.

She has three children, played by Charles Berling, Juliette Binoche, and Jérémie Renier. Berling is an economist who doesn’t consider economics a science, Binoche is an edgy designer of housewares, living in New York and working for a Japanese department store chain and Renier works for Puma sneakers in China. The matriarch, Edith Scob, recognizes that Binoche and Renier are unlikely to ever live in France again, so she urges Berling, who lives locally and will be the executor of her will, to sell everything.

When the old lady dies, the film goes into how the three siblings deal with her inheritance. Berling, sentimentally, wants to hang on to the past as much as possible, but recognizes the wisdom of Binoche and Renier, who tell him that having a country house in France is not a benefit to them. Binoche is marrying an American, and Renier is accepting a promotion that will keep him in China for the foreseeable future. His children speak French at home, but go to an English-language school and have a fondness for American culture.

This film says a lot of smart things and in clever ways. For example, the film is bookended by parties at the country house. The opening has children in a treasure hunt, romping through the verdant grounds as their ancestors could have. The close finds one of these same children, a teenage granddaughter, throwing a party for her friends, who arrive on noisy motorcycles, play loud music on their laptops, and pass around joints. Assayas shows us the global economy has chipped away at the vault of French culture (and by extension, the other old world nations) and is being replaced by a world culture that is like a rude guest at a garden party.

There is much to admire about this film. The script is like a Swiss watch in it’s structure and economy of parts. We hear Binoche and Renier say that they are unlikely to return to France, and then we realize that they have disappeared from the film. Asssayas also skillfully uses the camera. At times it is unmoving, as if we were seated at a party, and characters move in and out of frame. But then, as if we got up and are mingling, the camera moves through space, and his choice of when to do each are spot-on.

The acting is restrained and very good. Berling is the emotional center of the film, the man who tries to hold his family culture together at impossible odds. After some of his mother’s things are donated to a museum and he visits them, he remarks that they look like they are caged. Binoche is also very good as a woman who has more going on than she’s willing to tell us. There’s a fragility beneath her steely exterior.

I think the thing I most appreciated about this film was that it didn’t go where lesser films would go. After the mother dies there are numerous discussions of how the property should be divided, but for the most part the siblings come to accord. A lesser film would have been all about screaming matches, and the opening of old wounds. Assayas isn’t interested in simple family melodrama, though. There’s more afoot.

Kurt Kuenne is one of many talented filmmakers who do great and sometimes fantastic work that still never quite break into the mainstream. Last year he received the most attention so far in his career with the documentary Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father, in which Kuenne chronicles the life of his friend Andrew Bagby for the sake of Zachary, Andrew’s son by way of the ex-girlfriend who murdered him and then fled to Canada. “A film worthy of comparison to Errol Morris’s seminal The Thin Blue Line” according to The Village Voice. I won’t review the film here, only say that it is perhaps one of the most wrenching, personal documentaries I have ever seen.

What’s also worth seeing are Kuenne’s short films, two of which are available on Youtube. The first one, Validation, stars TJ Thyne, most known for his role on the tv-show Bones. The other one, Rent-A-Person, stars James Haven, most known for being Angelina Jolie’s brother.

It’s cool seeing two short films whose stories intersect, but what is most impressive is how the two films manage to embrace high melodrama yet have a three-act structure that does not take the usual turns. It’s whimsical without being annoying; very sweet and upbeat without being cloying. Together they’re a half hour of your life well spent.

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of June 26-28, 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) Will the Thursday to Sunday (note: excluding Wednesday, but including Thursday midnights) take of Transformers 2 be more or less than the first weekend of The Dark Knight ($158.4 million)?
2) Will My Sister’s Keeper earn more or less than Year One does this weekend?

Deadline is Tuesday June 23 at 11:59 pm (blog time).

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

AGEBOC 09 score

James: 18.5

Rob: 16.5
Joe Webb: 13
Nick: 10.5
filmman: 6.5
Brian: 6
Marco Trevisiol: 6
Jeanine: 5
Juan: 5
Jackrabbit Slim: 5
Rhymerguy: 4

Food, Inc. (trailer)
Director: Robert Kenner
Newsflash: lots of mass-market food is bad for you and/or produced in ethically questionable ways. Maybe one of the reasons that documentaries typically bomb at the box office is that it’s so rare to see one distributed that doesn’t tell you things you almost certainly already know.
Metacritic: 80

Moon (trailer)
Director: Duncan Jones
This looks definitely worth seeing, my general dislike for Sam Rockwell aside. Trailer is strong, at any rate.
Metacritic: 63

Of Time and the City
24 City
Directors: Terence Davies (Of Time and the City), Jia Zhang-Ke (24 City)
The Gene Siskel Film Center is showing both of these films as a double bill called “Cities Past and Future.” Of Time and the City is Davies’ documentary about Liverpool, while 24 City is a fictional story set against the backdrop of a factory closing in Chengdu, China.
Metacritic (24 City): 75

The Proposal (trailer)
Director: Anne Fletcher (Step Up, 27 Dresses)
I don’t have anything to say about this movie, except that it occasions me to reflect that Bullock’s breakout in Speed, and hence my first job at the now-defunct Mandarin Corners cinema in Jacksonville, Florida, was fifteen years ago now. This makes me feel old – I was only 16 at the time. It means that almost as much time has passed between then and now as passed between the time I was born and Speed came out.
Metacritic: 52

Séraphine (trailer)
Director: Martin Provost
Winner of all kinds of César awards, which is actually not a bad indicator of quality. Recent winners include The Beat That My Heart Skipped, The Secret of the Grain, and Lady Chatterly, all films that were well worth watching. Certainly those are three much stronger films than the last three Best Picture Oscar winners. This one’s a film about the French painter Séraphine de Senlis, who I have never heard of.
Metacritic: 86

Tetro (trailer)
Director: Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, The Conversation, Jack, Youth Without Youth)
I saw Youth Without Youth, and while I can’t claim to have gotten much out of it, it seemed like the kind of movie that cinephiles 50 years from now will remember and bitch and moan about when Criterion puts out a Holo-ray of The Outsiders instead of Coppola’s shamelessly overlooked late-career gem. I’ll see Tetro because I expect it to be genuinely unique, like Youth, even if I perhaps won’t quite know what to make of it.
Metacritic: 63

Year One (trailer)
Director: Harold Ramis (Caddyshack, Vacation, Groundhog Day, Analyze This)
Apparently this is terrible (but Manohla Dargis likes it?), although I have to admit that I find Michael Cera’s bit to be ceaselessly amusing, similar to how I feel about Owen Wilson. In the end, I’m sad that Harold Ramis has apparently hit rock bottom, but I can’t say I didn’t see it coming. Analyze That and The Ice Harvest were both basically uselsss, and I didn’t even see Bedazzled.
Metacritic: 41

Princesses!

There has been some discussion here, as well as other places, over the lack of female protagonists in Disney fare lately. The response was that Disney has actually been focusing specifically on female role models these last few years, with their retro-fitted Disney Princess line (sales in excess of $3.5 billion). You go to their site and they have The Official Princess Website (funny how they can make stuff like the idea of princesses and old fairy-tales appear like their intellectual property), a predominantly pink website with sections where kids can learn to color in Cinderella and parents can learn “Parenting a Princess”.

Personally, I’m not against kids having role models, but in this case the artifice starts to crumble a little when you start asking questions about it. Is it okay for little boys to follow the princess line, i.e. can a little guy be a princess too? I didn’t find any pictures of boys with tiaras on the website. And what, exactly, does being a princess entail?

On Wikipedia there’s this perspective on princesses:

Yet another take on the rising popularity of being a “princess” is the gentleness and refined composure associated with the title. It often conjures images of elegance and self-control, and among the younger generations, is a depiction of all things feminine and lovely, yet in reality, a real princess is just a title given to one who is part of a royal family and does not necessarily mean that they are always like so.

Australia’s The Age has an an intelligent article on what it calls The Princess Syndrome. Even if the author of the article (Tim Hunter) can’t seem to come to a conclusion, it does make some interesting observations, such as “On a very basic level, princess stories are transformation tales [...] one of the classic narratives of social mobility.”

‘Social mobility’ in modern society is represented by consumerism. “Part of becoming a princess is getting a lot of good stuff: jewellery, clothes, and even houses. The shopping experience therefore is becoming closely linked to the princess experience,” Tim Hunter writes.

How does a princess achieve the transformation, this princess experience? By way of a man, of course! Prince Charming, to be precise. “The notion that women rise in the social stakes by virtue of the man they attach themselves to [...] that marrying well, especially financially, is desirable, so they can easily live the life of a princess.”

While the Disney princesses have become much more active lately, even in the case of the Disney Pocahontas who chooses country over man, nearly all of them have required a man to achieve their goals. Only Mulan is the notable exception, although she too returns home to her father. It’s like, if you don’t care to start a family yourself, take care of the one you have.

In a NY Times article entitled “What’s Wrong With Cinderella?” writer Peggy Orenstein, worried about the influence of the Disney Princess line on her young daughter, had another example of a princess who didn’t need a man.

I mulled that over while flipping through ‘The Paper Bag Princess,’ a 1980 picture book hailed as an antidote to Disney. The heroine outwits a dragon who has kidnapped her prince, but not before the beast’s fiery breath frizzles her hair and destroys her dress, forcing her to don a paper bag. The ungrateful prince rejects her, telling her to come back when she is ‘dressed like a real princess.’ She dumps him and skips off into the sunset, happily ever after, alone.

There you have it, ‘Thelma and Louise’ all over again. Step out of line, and you end up solo or, worse, sailing crazily over a cliff to your doom. Alternatives like those might send you skittering right back to the castle.

Orenstein’s article is worth a read, but she doesn’t come to any firm conclusions about the Princess line either. (She does note that pink was considered a masculine color up until the 1930s, something I didn’t know.)

Recently a marketing campaign from M&C Saatchi that was done for Disney, “Life should be a little more Disney”, was uncovered by the Super Punch blog.

More pictures after the jump.

They’re somewhat controversial, I suppose. It’s not how we’re used to seeing Disney princesses. The commenter Drew over at Cinematical has a good angle.

Cinderella [...] surrounded by a world that treats her like crap. Realism be damned; there’s no reason that the audience can’t wish for a Prince Charming to come along in her case. After all, isn’t Disney about ‘making dreams come true’ and ‘when you wish upon a star’ and all that jazz? Some people might find it offensive, but in a way, it’s sort of a noble statement.

It might be a “noble statement” but I’m not sure it’s a very encouraging one. What both ads are indirectly saying is, once again, that women need a good man to take them away from their troubles. Will the fairy godmother give cleaning lady Cinderella a college scholarship or turn her into a one-night debutante so she can woo the boss of the big corporation? Life should perhaps be a little less Disney.

Aside from all that a princess has to want, there’s also what a princess has to be and show: gentleness, refined composure, elegance and self-control, according to the Wikipedia entry, but most of all “the connection between beauty and goodness has always been an integral part of the princess tale” (Hunter again).

The connection between beauty and goodness is perhaps not as crystal clear as it once was, what with Shrek’s Princess Fiona choosing to be herself, i.e. fat and green, but even there I’m left wondering if it’s not more like a racially mixed woman acknowledging herself as black or Asian. Ogre-Fiona might look somewhat averse from a Western ideal, but beautiful from the perspective of an ogre. Still, that’s a good lesson for a kid to have.

Princess Fiona’s “be yourself” is probably the most positive message one can get from a princess film, because you have to wonder where the causes of wanting to be a princess lies. The appeal is clearly about more than wanting to be pretty in nice dresses (the similarity between the princess syndrome and the boom in models over the last decades is worth noting, though).

Fear. Simple fear is the cause. Insecurity in one’s ability to weather difficulties. Better to have a man to defend oneself from dragons. Sit high up in a castle and look down on the commoners. Have a pretty dress that all the other girls can envy but still be loved by all. Always be smiling, because smiling signifies happiness. Never want for anything and always get what you want, because what you want and what you need is stuff, and a man that can get you that stuff and keep you safe. Your main preoccupation should be to be pretty and nice. Whenever a girl tries to help herself she gets in trouble.

It’s not even curious that girls want to be princesses but not queens, women who might actually rule. Four out of five times Disney queens turn out to be witches and they always turn out witches because they want power. Women and power equals bad. Better to be a princess.

Over at JPG Magazine the photographer Dina Goldstein has done a series on Fallen Princesses. I like the one with Beauty best. It’s good (and fun) seeing a continued questioning of these role models.

This winter sees the next Disney Princess enter the commercial zone, this one specifically engineered to fit into the lineup – Tiana in The Princess & The Frog. It’s about time that a black woman took center stage, even if this one is somehow a princess in New Orleans and the central plot surrounds the fable of the princess kissing the frog. Funny how the girl always has to look past the guy looking like shit (see also: the Apatow universe). Of course I don’t know if they’ll spin the concept somehow. Maybe the frog prince turns out to be white.

To complete the rainbow spectrum of princess colors, will the next Disney Princess be from India? Might I suggest Mumtaz Mahal? She’s suitably passive and became famous because of her man.

Going back to the first question, would a boy want to be a princess? Honestly, would you want your boy to be one?

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of June 19 – 21, 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) Will Year One be the #4 most grossing film in the US this weekend? Yes or no?
2) Will The Hangover place over or under Up this weekend?

Deadline is Wednesday June 17 at 11:59 pm (blog time).

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

AGEBOC 09 score

Rob: 16

James: 14
Joe Webb: 13
Nick: 9.5
filmman: 6
Brian: 6
Marco Trevisiol: 5.5
Jackrabbit Slim: 4.5
Rhymerguy: 4
Juan: 4
Jeanine: 3

One thing about doing this Thursday night is that the Metacritic ratings don’t include all of the Friday reviews. So, you know, buyer beware.

Away We Go (trailer)
Director: Sam Mendes (American Beauty, The Road to Perdition, Jarhead, Revolutionary Road)
I’m surprised by how much I want to see this, actually. I always thought that Maya Rudolph was one of the most talented SNL performers of the last decade or so, even if, like all SNLers, she had to rely too much on funny voices.
Metacritic: 58

Enlighten Up! (trailer)
Director: Kate Churchill
Sometimes I’ll be sitting in a movie theater, minding my own business, just waiting for the picture to start, when I’m hit for a trailer for a movie for which I have no idea how it ever got a distribution deal. This is one of those movies. I can open a year-end issue of Film Comment and read about 100 movies that were made around the world that I’d love to have seen but couldn’t, because someone instead decided to distribute a documentary about some jackass doing yoga. The free market in action, I guess.
Metacritic: not listed

Imagine That (trailer)
Director: Karey Kirkpatrick
It’s almost midnight so I’m not going to waste time coming up with a pithy comment.
Metacritic: 54

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (trailer)
Director: Tony Scott (Spy Game, Man on Fire, Domino, Deja Vu)
Up until very recently, I thought this existed only to embarass people who used to be John Travolta fans. I mean, come on, he looks utterly ridiculous in the trailer. Tony Scott is usually dependable enough, however (besides his last two films, I mean), so I guess we’ll see.
Metacritic: 55

Tulpan (trailer at Zeitgeist Films site)
Director: Sergei Dvortsevoy
Following Nomad and Borat in a long, proud tradition of Kazakh films comes this tender comedy about a shepherd trying to romance his neighbor. Reviews are good enough that I’ll make time for it if at all possible – screw Terminator, right?
Metacritic: 90

Ahhhh, Pontypool.

There are some brilliant choices and touches of flair in this unique take on a time-warn genre. However, those brilliant choices and touches, for me, sadly, didn’t live up to the idea of what I thought this film would deliver, especially given it’s high festival marks.

First, I will say that, as independent films go, this is a crackerjack of conceit and execution. Confine your characters to one place, put them in a tense situation, heighten the tension and suspense by never showing the horrors we keep hearing (save for one really well done scene) and let us watch a great actor at work and we’ll be riveted for the time it takes to finish the story.

Bravo to the filmmakers and writer for showing us just enough of these characters to make them believable and to make us care and then good job to the director for stepping back and simply letting the camera wash over the made-for-film face of the lead actor, Stephen McHattie. Why hadn’t I known about this Canadian actor sooner? My loss, because he is simply amazing.

I don’t like to give away any of the story in my reviews. Suffice to say, it takes one simple click and not much typing to figure out what you need to know and I, for one, love to go into a movie I know nothing about knowing nothing.

That said, something has inflicted the people of Pontypool with a deadly virus that turns them into the type of Zombie you’ve never witnessed before. The conceit is handled brilliantly and it’s a shame the filmmakers didn’t have more money to explore the idea a bit further than they did.

A few things I didnt understand:

1. The characters’ complete inability to simply not speak. Why not just write things down? (They eventually do, but, come on. You see the horror first-hand. SHUT UP!)

2. The way characters simply appear, sometimes nearly out-of-nowhere.

3. Please, please, please do a remake and show more of what happens in the run-up to the virus destroying its host. This is something we’ve never seen before and it’s really a great idea. Make the doctor(who was a great character) more of the movie so we can see more of what’s happening.

Things I LOVED:

1. The lead actor and his character. Eric Bogosian and Talk Radio pale in the light of this genius.

2. The young woman and her turn. She was great, had a good backstory and then…she loses it. Sad and scary and tense and very-well-handled. (If slightly not handled fully enough).

3. The humor and the pathos mixed together. This guy is sad and finished with life. But they still laugh, they still cry and he still thumbs his nose at the man. Brilliant.

4. The entire last third. The movie goes from tense to awesome to funny to crackerjack zombie flick. Thank you.

If it seems I liked this movie more than I let on, I did. I’m just not sure where to put the ending and what the writer was trying to say. I felt it took something away from the horror of it and made it…dare I say…political. Confused me somewhat and would have liked a different reason for what ultimately happened.

Definitely worth a watch!

Ahhhh…Pontypool.

These two videos are taken from the Empire Awards 2009, which was three months ago. Russell Crowe received an award as Actor of Our Lifetime (as voted by Empire readers), while Viggo Mortensen received an Empire Icon award.

You don’t need to watch the whole of Russell Crowe’s acceptance speech, just get the gist of it. Suffice to say, after reading two minutes of poetry cribbed from someone else, he left the entire ceremony.

Viggo Mortensen’s speech is the one to watch, where Viggo, an actual published poet, rips into Crowe and “his unfathomable literary aspirations.” One of the strangest yet funniest in a long time. Gives one a whole new perspective on the guy.

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of June 12 – 14, 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) Imagine That: Will the Eddie Murphy starrer earn over or under 12 million?

2) Moon: Will the Zowie Bowie directed film earn more PER SCREEN than the combined PER SCREEN earnings of Tetro and Call of the Wild 3D this weekend? Yes or no? (read this one carefully, i.e. “Will Moon > Tetro+Call of the Wild 3D in per screen earnings this Fri-Sun?”)

Deadline is Wednesday June 10 at 11:59 pm (blog time).

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

AGEBOC 09 score

Rob: 15

Joe Webb: 13
James: 11.5
filmman: 5.5
Brian: 5
Nick: 4.5
Jackrabbit Slim: 4.5
Rhymerguy: 4
Juan: 3.5
Marco Trevisiol: 3
Jeanine: 2

There have been a lot of films about wild Vegas toots, from the abysmal (Very Bad Things) to the sublime (Go!), but the genre may have to be retired after The Hangover, which exhausts all the elements of the blowout Sin City bachelor party. The movie is rude, profane, and very funny–I haven’t laughed so much since Superbad.

The set-up is pretty simple–four guys head to the desert for a bachelor party. Three of them, including the groom, are old friends, while the fourth is the bride’s brother, who is decidedly weird (I think his defining line of dialogue is when he’s told that card-counting at blackjack is illegal, but he replies, “It’s frowned upon, like masturbating on an airplane.”) They toast the groom on the roof of Caesar’s Palace, and the next thing they know they wake up in their suite, the place a disaster area, with a chicken wandering around, a live tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the closet, and the groom is nowhere to be found.

The meat of the film is the three remaining hangover sufferers piecing together what just happened the night before. The hotel room is a classic bit of art direction, and as the camera pans it the audience that I was with was howling with laughter. Evidence of debauchery mounts–the hen-pecked dentist (Ed Helms) discovers he’s missing a tooth; the callow schoolteacher (Bradley Cooper) has a hospital bracelet on his wrist, and the Ewokish brother-in-law (Zach Galifianakis) delights in manipulating the baby’s arm in rude gestures.

Eventually the baby is returned to his mother, a woman that Helms, to his horror, discovers he married the night before. The drunken wedding-chapel marriage is well-worn territory–it’s been done everywhere from the TV show Friends to last year’s What Happens in Vegas, but Helms is so pitch-perfect that we can excuse the cliche, even if his new bride, Heather Graham, is right out of a Penthouse Forum fantasy (she’s a stripper and a hooker).

As these three hapless guys try to find the groom, they discover more and more of the things they did the night before, such as stealing a police car, locking a Chinese man in the trunk of their Mercedes, and breaking into Mike Tyson’s compound. Not all of it is funny–the Chinese character edges into caricature, and Tyson’s scenes fall flat. I would have preferred to see the encounters with Vegas personalities Carrot Top or Wayne Newton, which are hinted at in the closing credits.

Another problem is the character of Helms’ Xanthippe girlfriend, played by Rachel Harris, who is such a harridan that it’s hard to believe anyone would tolerate her for more than five minutes. But any faults the film has are excusable because of the bonhomie created by the laughs generated by the film in general.

The Hangover is directed by Todd Phillips, who specializes in films that are better than their time-worn premises, like the Road Trip and Old School. This one fits right in with his oeuvre.

As promised, a Thursday night edition of Openings this week. Enjoy!

Daytime Drinking (trailer)
Director: Young-seok Noh
Korean film about a man who arrives on vacation in a tiny seaside town, only to find the place deserted. I’ve never heard of it until now. James knows it, maybe? Nick? Filmman?
Metacritic: not listed

The Hangover (trailer)
Director: Todd Phillips (Road Trip, Old School, Starsky & Hutch, School for Scoundrels)
I’m so far behind on movies right now – I still haven’t even seen Wolverine. If I get caught up, I’ll probably go see this, even if I feel that resorting to Mike Tyson for comedy is a sign of desperation.
Metacritic: 75

Land of the Lost (trailer)
Director: Brad Silberling (Casper, City of Angels, Moonlight Mile, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events)
I usually think the trailers for Will Ferrell’s movies are amusing, even if I never actually go see the movies. That is not the case for this one, however. Plus, it has Danny McBride, which is the kiss of death as far as I’m concerned.
Metacritic: 32

My Life in Ruins (trailer)
Director: Donald Petrie (Miss Congeniality, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Welcome to Mooseport, Just My Luck)
Well, um, no. Just think: My Big Fat Greek Wedding made over $240 million domestic. Out of all the weird box office phenomena over the years, I don’t think there’s one weirder than that. And all for a movie that I doubt anyone much even remembers anymore.
Metacritic: 39

O’Horten (trailer)
Director: Bent Hamer (Factotum)
Seems like an interesting, offbeat sort of film, and I wish I had more time to see it. Factotum wasn’t half bad.
Metacritic: 78

Sleep Dealer (trailer)
Director: Alex Rivera
Previously reviewed by filmman here on Gone Elsewhere, and he was blown away, thanking his lucky stars that he’s “fortunate enough to be able to begin watching [Rivera's] films at the beginning of his career.” Given his enthusiasm, I feel compelled to go see this if I am at all able to do so.
Metacritic: 59

This summer marks the fortieth anniversary of the release of Easy Rider, a motorcycle picture made for $350,000 that has ended up being emblematic of a generation. A big hit when it was released, it’s undergone some reappraisals since then, becoming something of a bellwether for attitudes about the sixties. At times, such as the Reagan eighties, it was pretty much relegated to the status of a relic of the counter-culture, like a wizard bong. But today, when Hair can be a hit on Broadway, Easy Rider looks pretty relevant, and darn if it isn’t a pretty good movie.

Low budget biker flicks were a staple of the sixties. Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson were veterans of them. Fonda got the idea for the film from a real incident in which two biker hippies were killed in Florida. He got Bert Schneider (the man behind the Monkees) to executive produce, and Columbia put up the money. Fonda produced, Hopper directed, and they both wrote the screenplay, along with Terry Southern (who also wrote Dr. Strangelove, among other films).

Easy Rider is firmly set in the Western idiom, with Fonda and Hopper starring as Wyatt and Billy (names lifted from two heroes of the Old West–Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid). They buy some cocaine in Mexico, and then sell it to a rich guy near LAX (played by the recently convicted Phil Spector, who provided his own Rolls-Royce). They take the cash and hide it in the gas tank of Fonda’s chopper, and then head across the American West to Mardi Gras. If we didn’t get the Western connections, there is a pointed scene in which Fonda and Hopper work on their bikes while in the foreground a rancher works with his horses. Clearly these two bikers are the outlaws of their day, riding across the land, camping out at night (no motel will rent them a room), and living in complete freedom.

The two ride through Monument Valley, a nod to John Ford, and pick up a hitchhiker, Luke Askew. He takes them to a commune, where naive young escapees from suburban America are attempting to create a utopia. The script looks at them with something of a gimlet eye, as Askew tells Fonda that these are city kids who have no idea how to grow food, and will probably starve. This section of the film is also enlivened by a scene at an Indian burial ground. It was completely improvised (it should be also noted that whenever characters are smoking pot, the actors were really smoking it). I loved when Fonda asks Askew if he ever wishes he were someone else. “I’d like to try Porky Pig,” Askew answers.

Fonda and Hopper move on and end up in a jail cell in some small hick town. They meet Nicholson, who shares a cell, coming down from a bender. He is a lawyer who works for the ACLU, and gets them sprung for a minimal fine. He also tells them they’re lucky, because this part of the country has a “scissor-happy American beautification” program, taking rusty-razor blades to long hair. When Nicholson hears they are headed for Mardi Gras, he wishes he could go along. “Do you have a helmet?” Fonda asks, and Nicholson says he does–a football helmet, which he wears as he happily rides behind Fonda.

At this time period Nicholson was a star of marginal films, like Roger Corman horror pictures, biker films, and as the author of Head, the psychedelic Monkees film. For Easy Rider he received the first of his sackful of Oscar nominations, and he sure deserved it, making his George Hanson a vivid creation. He’s the son of privilege in a redneck town who is sympathetic to the counter-culture without being part of it. In the film’s crystallizing scene, he tells Hopper, as they sit around a campfire, “This used to be a hell of a country. I can’t understand what went wrong.” Hopper says that they are disliked because of their long hair, but Nicholson corrects him, that what they fear is that hippies represent freedom. Hopper says, “What’s wrong with freedom?” and Nicholson replies, “But talkin’ about it and bein’ it, that’s two different things. I mean, it’s real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. Of course, don’t ever tell anybody that they’re not free, ’cause then they’re gonna get real busy killin’ and maimin’ to prove to you that they are. Oh, yeah, they’re gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it’s gonna scare ‘em.”

While they are with Nicholson they stop at a small cafe where local rednecks regale them with an onslaught of insults, while the teenage girls flirt with them. Hopper had his casting director use actual citizens of the small Louisiana town, and told them to say anything they wanted, and the vitriol flows like water. I think the best insult is the older man who says the bikers look like the result of a gorilla love-in. The boys decide they aren’t so hungry and move on.

Eventually Fonda and Hopper make it to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. They end up at a whorehouse, where they pair off with Karen Black and Toni Basil (yes, the dancer and singer who had a hit with “Hey Mickey”). Here is where the film takes a turn toward the excess of sixties filmmaking that today seems most dated–the acid trip. The four of them drop acid while in a New Orleans cemetery, and we get some surreal images and trippy editing.

The film then ends famously with the two of them being blown off the road by another pair of overall-wearing rednecks (the one with the gun has a monstrous goiter on his neck). Is this the death of idealism? It’s hard to say, since the two of them are not really represented as white knights. Hopper is nakedly capitalistic, a guy who always wants to push on and has the ultimate dream of getting rich and retiring to Florida. Fonda is more Zen (and his nickname is Captain America, as his bike and clothing are covered with the stars and stripes), and during the last dialogue sequence he cryptically tells Hopper that “We blew it.”

What’s amazing about Easy Rider is that through all of the marijuana haze, this is a well-made movie. Hopper took a year to edit it, and his influence from European filmmakers is evident (he utilizes a lot of flash cuts, even giving a quick cut of Fonda’s burning motorcycle some ten or fifteen minutes before it happens), but it all works. The cinematography by Laszlo Kovacs is stunning. From what I’ve read, this is how it was among the hippies. Communes ended up as filthy sties of child neglect and bad nutrition, and it’s true that, especially in the South, people were beaten or even killed for having beards or long hair. The division of America was clear and succinct, and if you weren’t with us, you were against us. This feeling is palpable in the film, particularly in the cafe scene, which has a rich tension.

Then there’s the music. In those days all that was needed to put a song in a movie was the artist’s permission, so Easy Rider is full of classic rock songs. The opening credits are to Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild,” which is a blast of energy, and then there are songs by The Byrds, The Band, Jimi Hendrix, The Electric Prunes, and Bob Dylan. It’s quite a time capsule.

Easy Rider ending up being one of the films that marked a major shift in Hollywood, as the old guard gave way to the rebels, which led to the remarkable seventies. If it’s true that Hopper and Fonda never made as interesting a film since then (although Hopper shows up as a supporting actor in a lot of fine films) then they certainly did their duty with this one.

Ants! Many I have slain. Fun facts about ants:

- A worker ant can live up to 1 to 3 years. An ant queen can live up to 30 years.
- Ants evolved from wasp-like ancestors in the mid-Cretaceous period between 110 and 130 million years ago.
- Ants communicate by using pheromones, and perceive them by using their antennae. So an ant that finds food will return and mark the trail on the way back to the colony.
- A crushed ant emits an alarm pheromone that sends nearby ants into an attack frenzy and attracts more ants from further away.
- Several ant species even use “propaganda pheromones” to confuse enemy ants and make them fight among themselves.
- Ants organize themselves after castes, with the queen on top, and after that the worker ants. Within the worker ants there are task groups (such as foraging or nest maintenance). The pheromones allow them to see what they’re tasked with.
- Many animals can learn behaviours by imitation but ants may be the only group apart from mammals where interactive teaching has been observed. Controlled experiments with colonies suggest that individuals may choose nest roles based on their previous experience. As a result, members of the successful group (foraging the cabinet, say) intensify their tasks while the unsuccessful group ventures out less and less, and eventually specialises in a different area (nest maintenance, for example).
- Foraging ants tend to travel distances of up to 200 metres (700 ft) from their nest.
- Some species attack and take over neighbouring ant colonies. Others are less expansionist but just as aggressive; they invade colonies to steal eggs or larvae, which they either eat or raise as workers/slaves. Captured workers of enslaved species have evolved a counter strategy, destroying only the female pupae of the slave-making species, but sparing the males (who don’t take part in slave-raiding as adults).

As if this wasn’t impressive enough, the following video (a must see), taken from Spike Jonze’s blog on the making of Where the Wild Things Are, demonstrates how fucking huge and complex ant colonies (or city states, as the video rightly calls them) can become. I thought he was joking when he said that it gets better at the halfway mark, but it does.

Part three of our discussion on the films of the 00’s, this time focusing on 2002.

1) Best of 2002?
2) Worst of 2002?
3) Most underrated?
4) Most underseen?
5) Most overrated?
6) Best performance(s) of the year?
7) Best single scene/sequence of the year?
8) One thing you could change about any single film in 2002 (Example: different cast, different director, different style, different release date, different studio).
9) Most memorable (good or bad) theatergoing experience of the year?
10) Most influential film/performance/style/director?

Obviously feel free to answer only the questions you’re interested in or to write/respond to something else entirely. The lists themselves are just a starting point designed to foster discussion.

Previously: 2000, 2001

IGN has scored 4 exclusive images from the upcoming video game for James Cameron’s Avatar, thereby providing the first verified glimpse of how the film will look. All that color in 3d will no doubt be gorgeous, but already getting vibes of this being a very pretty package, but relatively little in the box. This will no doubt be a huge landmark in film, but depth isn’t Cameron’s forte, spectacle is. Looking at this, I’m thinking this is a landmark film more along the lines of Jurassic Park than Lawrence of Arabia.

Here’s a link to a video of Cameron talking about the videogame (and indirectly the film) in front of a large crowd at an amphitheatre during the E3 conference. Some mildly interesting things about the origins of the projects. What’s really cool to see is what a geek he is deep down.

(click the images to see them in a larger format, plus the other two)

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of June 5 – 7, 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) The Hangover: Will it make over or under 22 million? (Knocked Up made 30 million in its opening weekend)

2) My Life in Ruins: Will it make over or under 3 million? (Compare:
My Big Fat Greek Wedding made 3 million on its first wide weekend, 241 million total domestic.
Connie & Carla made 3 million on its first wide weekend, 8 million total domestic.)

Deadline is Wednesday June 3 at 11:59 pm (blog time).

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

AGEBOC 09 score

Joe Webb: 12

James: 11
Rob: 10.5
Brian: 5
filmman: 5
Nick: 4.5
Rhymerguy: 4
Jackrabbit Slim: 3.5
Juan: 3
Marco Trevisiol: 2.5
Jeanine: 2

“Still the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune.”

Samuel Coleridge

The amazing thing about Pixar films, and the main reason why their films are so consistently excellent, is that those responsible for the stories–and it’s all about story–know how to be poignant without being mawkishly sentimental. And so it is with Up, directed by Pete Docter, a film that is so heart-wrenchingly poignant that even as the wee ones will have their funny bones tickled, the grandparents taking them to the theater will have tears streaming down their faces.

I was sold after the stunningly brilliant prologue, about five to ten minutes that could have been a short film of its own. We meet Carl, a young boy who dreams of adventure, and worships an explorer who disappears in South America. He meets a kindred soul, a spunky girl named Ellie, and they share their love of adventure. We see as they get married, move into a house, have the heartbreak of learning they can’t have children, and grow old together. They both work at the zoo–he as a balloon salesman, she as a zookeeper in the South America exhibit, and they dream of visiting a mysterious place there called Paradise Falls, where the legendary explorer of their youths collected exotic specimens. But unexpected things happen, and they never get there, as Ellie dies and leaves Carl in their beloved house.

As the action of the film proper begins, Carl’s house is surrounded by new construction. He’s held out and won’t sell and move into a rest home, but after an altercation with a construction worker he’s court-ordered out. Not going quietly into that good night, he attaches his house to thousands of balloons, and drifts off into the heavens. Being a Disney film, there’s a catch–he has a stowaway, an over-eager and lonely Wilderness Explorer named Russell (not a Boy Scout, interestingly) who needs one more badge to be promoted: the assisting the elderly badge.

Eventually Carl takes the boy in and they drift to South America, where they find some grand adventures, including a giant bird that Russell names Kevin, a maniacal villain, a blimp, and most amusingly, a pack of dogs that have been outfitted with collars that translate their thoughts into English. The collar for the Alpha dog, a Doberman, doesn’t work right and he sounds like Alvin the Chipmunk.

Deciding what Pixar film is the best is a little like deciding what your favorite flavor of ice cream is, i.e., virtually impossible. Suffice it to say that Up is right there with both Toy Story films, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles and Wall-E. Up is both a fantastic adventure yarn (a better title might have been The Spirit of Adventure, rather than the prepositionally prosaic Up) and is a beautifully wrought poem of a life-long love affair. There’s a scene at the end in which Carl looks through a picture album that is as touching as anything I’ve seen in a film in a long time, and reminds me of the scene in The Grapes of Wrath when Ma Joad looks over the valuables she’s forced to dispose of.

All that remains for Pixar, a complaint that Manohla Dargis made a few weeks ago in the Times, is to have a female protagonist (after Ellie dies, there is no female presence in this film). The only one I can think of is Elastigirl in The Incredibles, and she’s really second-fiddle to Mr. Incredible. I’m confident that when they get around to this it will be well worth the wait.

Apologies again for the late post. Hopefully this will be the last time in a while that I’m so late getting this Up. It’s what happens when you go to three-hour Thursday night movies and then a concert on Friday night (Doves were great, by the way).

Departures (trailer)
Director: Yojiro Takita
Japanese film that won the Foreign Film Oscar earlier this year, about an unemployed cellist taking a job at a funeral home.
Metacritic: 66

Dillinger Is Dead
Director: Marco Ferreri
1969 Italian film gets its first US release. It’s about a bored industrial engineer whose life goes off the rails after finding a gun that may have belonged to John Dillinger. Probably worth checking out.
Metacritic: not listed

Drag Me to Hell (trailer)
Director: Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead, Darkman, The Gift, Spider-Man 3)
Interesting case, this one. I was surprised when people started talking it Up as some kind of potential runaway hit, and it doesn’t in fact look like that will happen. As far as the movie itself goes, it’s worth remembering that Alison Lohman is a pretty terrible actress (although at least she’s playing an adult for once), and that it’s very easy to overrate Sam Raimi. That said, reviews are frighteningly good.
Metacritic: 82

Easy Virtue (trailer)
Director: Stephan Elliott (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Welcome to Woop Woop, Eye of the Beholder)
I actually saw Eye of the Beholder, a genuinely strange movie with Ewan McGregor and Ashley Judd, and which managed to top the box office on Super Bowl weekend in 2000 with less than $6 million. Too bad we didn’t have AGEBOC back then. Anyway, Jackrabbit Slim reviewed Easy Virtue for us the other day, saying that it’s “about seventy-five percent delightful and twenty-five percent head-scratching.” Honestly, whatever its charms my be, I don’t think I have the patience to put Up with it.
Metacritic: 61

Eldorado
Director: Bouli Lanners
Melancholic Belgian road trip comedy that I saw earlier this year and just about hated. I’m surprised it’s even getting a release here, although I’m not sure that distribution by Film Movement and an engagement at Facets Cinematheque really counts as a “release” as such. Still, it deserves worse. I mentioned it in the Brief Film Reviews thread back in March if anyone cares.
Metacritic not listed

Up (trailer)
Director: Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc.)
Will be seeing this tomorrow, I believe, probably in good, old-fashioned 2-D. Not much to say except that I’m very excited, and after the hiccup of Cars, Pixar’s putting together another awesome streak.
Metacritic: 89

Easy Virtue, directed by Stephan Elliott and adapted from a play by Noel Coward, is one of those fizzy cinematic concoctions about the Brits between the wars that seem to crowd the art-houses every year. There are a lot of period songs and vintage cars, references to Picasso, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, lots of cigarette smoking, and an abundance of withering witticisms. There’s also the obligatory huge manor home, which begs the question–do the owners of these English estates make most of their money by renting them out to film companies for movies like these? There sure does seem to be plenty of them.

I mostly liked Easy Virtue, which is about seventy-five percent delightful and twenty-five percent head-scratching. I think most of the pleasure comes from Coward’s original script, which of course has some very droll dialogue. The plot concerns the Whitaker family on one of those baronial estates. The mother, Kristin Scott Thomas, is Gorgon-like, trying to maintain the prestige and dignity of her forebears, while her husband, Colin Firth, has never been the same since the Great War and takes to lounging about the house, unshaven, with sardonic witticisms at the ready. They have two daughters, one of whom gloomily awaits a beau who will never arrive, and the other a chipmunk type who eyes the young man from the neighboring estate.

There is also a son, Ben Barnes, who has been gallivanting in France. He turns everything upside-down by coming home arm in arm with a new bride, Jessica Biel. To Thomas’ horror, she’s not only American, she’s a race-car driver.  Firth likes her right away, but over the course of the film Thomas and Biel will lock horns over Barnes and the future of the family.

Elliott directs with manic energy, and the film is always bubbling with humor. I especially liked the business involving a jaded butler, Kris Marshall, particularly in a scene in which Biel accidentally kills Thomas’ beloved chihuahua. But there are is also some keen weirdness. In a scene in which Barnes takes a spin on a new motorized tractor, the song on the soundtrack seems familiar. Yes, I’m hearing correctly, it’s the 1970’s hit Car Wash, albeit done with a twenties’ jazz sound. Most of the soundtrack has songs from the period, a lot of them by Coward (Mad About the Boy, Mad Dogs and Englishmen) but the song over the closing credits is by Billy Ocean.

Biel looks great and is just about convincing as the brash heroine. We can only be glad that Scarlett Johansson didn’t get the role, since she’s been playing a lot of roles like this lately. Firth has the fun role with most of the good lines, and he knocks them out of the park.

An interesting historical note: Easy Virtue was made into a film before, a silent film in 1928 (an interesting choice for a play by Coward). It was directed by none other than a very young Alfred Hitchcock.

We all know it.

Click image for further proof.

Since nothing much happens on Tuesdays around here on Gone Elsewhere, I figured I’d introduce a new weekly feature: Crap On the Internet Tuesdays, or COITuesdays, for short. This in order for me to have an excuse to post weird shit I find on the net when I should be studying or working or working out or whatever. My guess is that half of the people here will love it, half will hate it, which is okay by me.

Our honorary introductory feature is The Next Generation Remix, where some other guy with too much time on his hands has edited Star Trek: Next Generation into a series of wonderfully wrong webisodes, depicting the often hidden desires and impulses of the crew of the starship Enterprise.The first episode is strange and sort of amusing, but after that it just goes totally off the rails.

All safe for work, though perhaps not mind, except #10. My favorites in sequence were definitely #2, #15 and #21.

In order to celebrate their 20th anniversary Empire Magazine have had, among many other things, a large canvas made consisting of 50 visual puns on their favorite films of the last twenty years. It’s good fun if you’re a huge film fan. There’s a lot of “facepalm!” answers to the visual cues. I’ve done one of these before (for M&M, I think it was).

25 right so far.

Click the image to see the whole thing.

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of May 29 – June 1 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) Drag Me To Hell: Will Sam Raimi’s new horror movie end up at second place? Yes or no?

2) Terminator Salvation: Will McG’s new horror show drop over or under 65%? (Terminator 3 dropped 55%, Wolverine 69% in their second weeks)

Deadline is Wednesday May 27 at 11:59 pm (blog time).

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

AGEBOC 09 score

James: 10.5

Rob: 7.5
Joe Webb: 5
Brian: 4.5
Nick: 4.5
filmman: 4.5
Rhymerguy: 4
Jackrabbit Slim: 3
Marco Trevisiol: 2.5
Juan: 2.5
Jeanine: 2

Having been a theater student in college and rubbing elbows with those who aspired to be on the stage, I watched Every Little Step with a great deal of fascination and emotion. The film is a documentary that attempts to do two things: relate the origins of the watershed Broadway musical A Chorus Line, and document the casting for a revival of the show in 2006. Both of these documentary styles are very familiar, as “making of” featurettes are common on DVDs, and the winnowing nature of auditions unfortunately recall all sorts of reality shows on television.

Unlike most reality shows, though, those auditioning for A Chorus Line are professionals at the top of the game (although there are a few newcomers). They’re not talentless fame-whores chomping on insects for cash, they are devoted practitioners of the art of dance who, for the most part, toil in anonymity. What makes auditioning for this particular show different is that the action of A Chorus Line is an audition itself.

Michael Bennett conceived of A Chorus Line in the mid-seventies. He gathered a few dozen Broadway gypsies and tape-recorded a twelve-hour bull session of the dancers talking about their lives. He turned these stories into a show, which was produced by the legendary impresario Joe Papp. It was unusual for the time, as it was far removed from traditional book musicals, but it swept the Tony Awards, won a Pulitzer Prize for drama, and ran for fifteen years (at the time it was the longest-running musical in Broadway history–it’s number four now). Essentially, A Chorus Line is a valentine to dancers who are the best in the country but still have to endure the brutal auditioning process. They don’t do it for riches, as the show’s ballad goes, they do it for love.

The history of the show, with ancient video clips of the original show, plus interviews with composer Marvin Hamlisch (always a good interview) and star Donna McKechnie, is interspersed with the story of the revival auditions. The director is Bob Avian, who was Bennett’s co-choreographer from the original production. The revival’s choreographer is Bayoork Lee, who was in the original cast. They start with an open call of 3,000, and the filmmakers follow a select number of dancers through the process, including a girl who rides into the city on the bus from New Jersey, and has never been in a Broadway show before. In this respect the film resembles documentaries like Spellbound, about spelling bee kids.

Every Little Step isn’t as cut and dried as Spellbound is, though. Aside from Jessica, the Jersey Girl, many of the performers drift in and out of the action. We really see the process for only a few characters, and get to hear those particular numbers several times, while other songs are alluded to and never heard. The most focus is on the competition for Val, who sings “Dance 10, Looks 3,”  the cynical Sheila, who sings “At the Ballet,” and the lead role of Cassie. Up for that role is Charlotte D’Amboise, something of a name on Broadway, but she still has to audition anyway.

The ups and downs of the auditioning are mesmerizing. The director and his cohorts watch with a mixture of empathy and steely-eyed criticism. One young man brings them to tears with his monologue, and another woman asks to hear whether she got the part or not immediately. The casting director is sent to give her the bad news, and someone whispers that he may come back with an ax in his head. The emotions are raw–one dancer is told, during a call-back, to do what she did last summer during a previous round, but she has no memory of how she did it then, and another despairs that she really needs this job (this of course, is a refrain heard in the opening number of the show) because she is out of unemployment.

The resolution of the film, when we see who gets cast and who doesn’t, is exhilarating. There is so much joy in the good news, but for every person cast there is the heartbreak of who doesn’t get cast. It’s hard not to be moved by the entire thing, and then realize that this happens for every Broadway show, over and over again.

As much of a pleasure this film is, it is not perfect by any means. It is not virtuosic filmmaking. Shot with handheld cameras, the directors stay out of the way and let the story take center stage, but at times it looks pretty shoddy. They even keep in a couple of scenes where an interview subject hits some equipment, as if to say, “See! This is real!” Also, if you have no knowledge of A Chorus Line you may be lost, as a lot of shorthand is used. Some characters are completely ignored, and we don’t even know who gets cast in some of the featured roles (although we see who doesn’t get cast).

Still, this film will easily be remembered by me at year’s end as one of the best. The crowd I was with stayed firmly in their seats during the closing credits, as “What I Did For Love” plays on the soundtrack. Who could walk out on that beautiful song?

So, as most of you know, I started a new job this past week. I’m not sure how long this one will last, but right now it looks like at least 60 days. At any rate, it’s something for now. I plan to start writing the Openings column on Thursday evenings, but at times this won’t work, so it’ll appear late Friday nights when I don’t get to it Thursday.

Anyway, hope everyone has a good holiday weekend.

Adoration (trailer)
Director: Atom Egoyan (Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, Felicia’s Journey, Where the Truth Lies)
The first film in a while from former arthouse sensation Egoyan, and it arrives with so little advance word that I had never heard of it until this very day. It’s worth repeating that Where the Truth Lies is one of the worst films of the decade.
Metacritic: 68

The Brothers Bloom (trailer)
Director: Rian Johnson (Brick)
I loved Brick, so I’m seeing this one regardless of whether or not it’s any good. Which is important, because it’s apparently not much good. Oh well, I don’t care.
Metacritic: 54

Dance Flick (trailer)
Director: Damien Dante Wayans
Another Wayans spoof.
Metacritic: 38

Fados (trailer)
Director: Carlos Saura (Flamenco, Tango, Goya in Bordeaux)
Another dance flick (sorry), this one a documentary about Portuguese dance.
Metacritic: 70

The Girlfriend Experience (trailer)
Director: Steven Soderbergh (Bubble, The Good German, Ocean’s Thirteen, Che)
As always, I’m happy to see a new Soderbergh film roll around, no matter what I thought of the last few. Jackrabbit Slim previously reviewed it on this site, saying that “while the film is interesting, and offers a look into a world most of us know nothing about, it also isn’t terribly compelling.”
Metacritic: 68

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (trailer)
Director: Shawn Levy (Just Married, Cheaper by the Dozen, The Pink Panther, Night at the Museum)
I didn’t see the first one, but I suspect that if I had, there’d be no reason to watch this one. To the uninitiated such as myself, the two movies couldn’t look more exactly alike.
Metacritic: 44

Outrage (trailer)
Director: Kirby Dick (Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, This Film Is Not Yet Rated)
The latest from muckraking documentarian Kirby Dick. Like This Film Is Not Yet Rated, I probably more or less agree with the politics, but can see nothing to be gained by seeing the film. I already know there are closeted gay politicians who support anti-gay legislation, and their actual identities hardly seem relevant to me. Hypocrisy isn’t so much an issue to me as much as the way they support anti-gay legislation in the first place.
Metacritic: 68

Summer Hours (trailer)
Director: Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep, Demonlover, Clean, Boarding Gate)
I was disappointed when Assayas’ Boarding Gate didn’t play in Chicago last year, and equally disappointed when I missed my chance to see this film here earlier this year. Fortunately, I get another chance; I just hope I have time this week to see it. As a general rule, anything with Juliette Binoche is worth seeing. She’s probably the most underrated actress alive, at least here in the US. As an aside, Clean when we get to the 2006 year-in-review, Clean will be my Most Overlooked; check it out if you get the chance.
Metacritic:

Terminator Salvation (trailer)
Director: McG (Charlie’s Angels, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, We Are Marshall)
So, all along I’ve thought it would suck, and now it appears that it probably sucks, and frankly I have no idea if I’m even going to bother to see it at this point.
Metacritic: 52

The promised land has finally arrived! Now, I know you PS3 owners have had your Netflix integration forever, and there are many 3rd party / fakey plug-ins, but Windows Media Center has finally received something official.

Today at lunch I turned on my computer to find that there was a new icon next to “Recorded TV” called “Netflix.” Homina homina homina. Someone finally read my post from two years ago!

Clicking on the selection brought me to a screen that said it had something to install. The installation button in turn downloaded a file and began running some sort of update(s)

After the required updates it was time to click OK and restart Media Center (the application – not the whole computer). The same Netflix choice was in my menu, but now when I selected it, I was prompted with a fairly standard logon screen

After putting in my information it took me straight to my “Instant Queue” I haven’t had time to play around with the other choices, but it looks like it will let me see my regular DVD queue and also add new movies as I see fit. This was no time for games, though, because I wanted to test out the viewing right away!

I haven’t seen any of these movies and the most obvious choice on my list was, of course, “Kickin’ It Old School.” How could you pass that up? By selecting the movie you get the standard Netflix info   along with a few options you can see here. Again, this was no time to play with options – I was on a mission from 1986!

Clicking play takes you to a fullscreen Netflix window which is exactly like the one directly on the website, with the exception of the MCE integration. It’s designed to be controlled by your remote, so there is no need for pointing and clicking. The standard MCE progress bar appears at the bottom when you pause, rewind or fast forward.

This brought me to my next discovery: the REW/FFW feature. When you do either you are presented with a screen as below which shows you where you are in the movie visually as well as via timestamp. Cool!I know the movie is terrible but, as a kid from the 80’s, the first 9 minutes had me laughing out loud. The rest cannot possibly keep up.

The point is: I have no point. I’m excited that Netflix and/or Microsoft finally developed some integration with Media Center and I look forward to more of my posts coming to fruition in the future.

After exploiting old television shows, movies, comic books, action figures and board games, Hollywood is moving on to the next logical property: gum.

Michael Eisner and his Tornante Co. have tapped newcomer Mark Hammer to pen a feature adaptation of “Bazooka Joe,” the comic strip that comes with Bazooka bubble gum.

Hammer, who this weekend is attending the graduation ceremony at Orange County’s Chapman University, where he studied film, wrote a spec titled “Sonny Takes to Peru,” which made the studio rounds but ultimately did not sell.

That spec, however, turned into a strong writing sample that got him into meetings as well as representation at management outfit the Safran Co. Execs at Tornante, seeking to fill their open writing assignment,liked the spec and brought in Hammer, who gave them his winning take.

“Bazooka Joe” has been a comic strip used as an advertising device for the gum since the 1950s. Joe, who wears an eye patch for reasons never explained, has child-friendly misadventures, sometime joined by a host of friends with the names Pesty, Mort (always with a turtleneck sweater pulled up over his mouth), Toughie, Hungry Herman, love interest Jane and a dog named Walkie Talkie.

Bazooka, the gum and the comic, are part of trading card company Topps’ stable. Eisner purchased the company in 2007 for $380 million with a mandate to rejuvenate the brand.

For too long: this important pop culture icon has been hampered by poor story telling in the form of unfunny two-panel comic inserts. Here’s hoping they take the character back-to-basics with a complex, realistic, “darker” origin story in the vein of Nolan’s Batman films.

Since this is likely signaling a new trend, please pitch your own product-turned-movie in comments.

My personal dream casting is Dwayne Johnson for a Mr. Clean movie.  I’m just sure he can capture the essence of the character: a vaguely ethnic, chrome-domed lothario who charms lonely housewives with his washboard abs and nearly-debilitating obsessive compulsive disorder.

Previously: Larry Clark’s ‘Candy Land’

Went to see Tokyo! at the Criterion Cinemas in New Haven yesterday.  After patiently waiting for several months, I was thankful for the opportunity to see the film theatrically before it hits video in June.

I parked, purchased my ticket, a soda and started wandering the halls looking for the correct auditorium.   No dice.  Couldn’t find it.  Headed back to the lobby to figure out which screen was labeled incorrectly.

Ran into the Manager along the way who directed me towards a glass door near the entrance of the theater (that I had always assumed were offices) and said he’d “be there in a minute”. While this seemed like an odd statement, I disregarded it and moved on.

I followed his instructions and entered the previously-unknown screening room.   The sign on the door read:  “Maximum Occupancy: 24″.

So fine, it’s a small screen.  It’s 24 seats.  It’s still a nice, modern theater and the presentation should be top-notch.  It will be like a private studio screening!  I walk inside to discover another confused-looking older gentleman sitting in silence.   My gut instinct tells me that a) he’s in the wrong theater and will leave when Wolverine fails to appear or b) he will fall asleep.

The Manager walks in, announces that we’re about to watch Tokyo! and whips out…a remote control.

He clicks a button, a “play” symbol appears on the screen and the movie immediately begins (windowboxed AND letterboxed, no less).  I notice a large rack of equipment in a glass case next to the screen and watch as a digital display begins counting upwards.  This is not film.  What the fuck am I watching?

The Manager asks if “the volume is ok”.  Both myself and the other dude (dumbfounded) say “yeah” and he exits.  He does not offer me the remote in case I need to hit pause for a bathroom break.  I sit filled with rage for the next hour and forty five minutes.  My efficiency theater roommate snores from about the 30 minute mark until credits.

Here’s the thing:  I’m thankful to have a good indie theater near me.

What I’m not thrilled to do is spend $10.75  for a ticket to watch a DVD or Blu-Ray projected.  At the very least: I want to know what I’m walking into beforehand.

Is this common?  Has this happened to anyone here?  Should I have asked for a refund or done something to express my displeasure?

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of May 22-24 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.

NOTE: Keep in mind that Terminator Salvation premieres on Thursday and even though it’s Memorial Weekend, the AGEBOC only counts Friday to Sunday.

Bonus questions:

1) Night at the Museum 2: Being a kiddie film, will its Saturday gross be larger than the Terminator’s? Yes or no?

2) Terminator Salvation: The largest single day gross for a Terminator film (adjusted for inflation) is $21.1 million for Terminator 3. Will Thursday’s grosses (including midnights) for Terminator 4 surpass that? Yes or no?

Deadline is Wednesday May 20 at 11:59 pm (blog time).

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

AGEBOC 09 score

Rob: 6.5

James: 6
Brian: 4
Rhymerguy: 4
Joe Webb: 4
filmman: 3.5
Juan: 2.5
Jackrabbit Slim: 2
Jeanine: 2
Marco Trevisiol: 2
Nick: 1.5

The Kimchi western is that oddest of genres: the non-US western. ‘Kimchi’ being a traditional Korean pickled dish made of vegetables with varied seasonings, it was obviously inspired by the Italian renaissance of the genre, the Spaghetti western (there are also Noodle westerns, Sauerkraut westerns and Borscht westerns). A popular genre in Korea during the 1960s and 1970s, like its progenitor, it eventually died out.

Enter Ji Woon Kim (aka Kim Jee-Woon), director of such hits as A Tale of Two Sisters and A Bittersweet Life. With an astronomical budget for a Korean film of US$17 million and three of the country’s biggest stars, he’s not about to just revive the Kimchi western for a new era but the entire Korean cinema landscape. Only a few years ago one of the world’s most vibrant and succesful, for the last couple of years South Korean cinema has been languishing with markedly decreased national attendance and quality films. His homage becomes not only the highest grossing film of the year, but one of the top ten of all time in the country.

The Good, The Bad and The Weird (Joheunnom nabbeunnom isanghannom, 2008) takes place in 1930s Manchuria, a vast desert area north-west of Korea (that’s why they can call it a western), it incorporated parts of China, Russia and Mongolia. Korea was at the time under colonial rule by Japan (1910-1945) and in this largely unregulated area those unwanted by the Japanese – mostly independence fighters and criminals – are trying to carve out a living among the general population.

The Bad, played by Byung-hun Lee (A Bittersweet Life, G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra), is given the task of stealing a treasure map that the local crimeboss sold to the Japanese and now wants back. The independence fighters hear about the map and hire bounty hunter Good, played by Woo-sung Jung (Musa), to hunt down Bad and get the map for them. Problems arise for everyone when motorcycle bandit the Weird, played Kang-ho Song (Memories of Murder, The Host), robs the train before them and gets away with the map. Pursued by the armies of the Japanese, Chinese, Korean independence and a large crime syndicate, the Weird stays one step ahead, on his way to the buried riches of an ancient Chinese dynasty.

Like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, TGTBTW has a western setting (west of Korea, remember), but is essentially an adventure story. There are plenty of nods to that film, but the film has a Korean character all of its own, mainly exemplified and driven by Kang-ho Song, who not only steals the map but runs away with the film. His reckless and eccentric Weird is reason alone to see the film. Song is not a particularly good looking guy (either) but he has charisma enough to power any film. I liked and respected Byung-hun Lee’s work in A Bittersweet Life but he tries to pull off a Bad that can’t restrain his own evil self and the actor doesn’t quite succeed on that front. He is basically too evil and too unrestrained, to the point of overacting. Woo-sung Jung is given the rather thankless role of being Good without any distinctive characteristics and somehow measuring up to Eastwood. Between those three he can’t help but be swallowed up.

I have now seen three of director Jee-woon Kim’s films (this, A Tale of Two Sisters and A Bittersweet Life), and it’s clear that Kim is one of the great visual filmmakers working right now, with a grand, opulent yet fresh style. The problem with Kim is that in a contest of style over substance, style wins, hands down. If something is cool, but is stretching it, Kim will go for what is cool. So Byung-hun Lee will have a punk haircut that no one in the thirties would have stood for (it covers up half his eyesight!) and Woo-sung Jung will be able to use his shotgun like a sniper rifle because, you know, what the hell. This leads to films where audiences are rarely bored and will have a good time, but also muddled and frequently confusing films. Elements will be thrown in arbitrarily and resolved, in my opinion, unsatisfactorily. His last third acts are often orgies of excess.

To Kim’s credit, the last fifteen minutes of TGTBTW are notably pared down (ironically, excessively so), but they are still preceded by a fifteen minute, hundred horse and car, Blues Brothers chase across the Manchurian desert that felt oddly lacklustre. Still, aside from Kang-ho Song, the set pieces are the main joy of this film. The train robbery has one of my favorite extended sequences since Children of Men and a village/market shootout was more fun than the entire Die Hard 4. In general, the film looks great.

The Good, The Bad and The Weird is a fun ride that is both made and doomed by its excess. Like the Weird towards the end, you can’t help but wonder how it’s going to get away with it all, and of course, it can’t. Still, you can’t fault them for the ambition.

Three years ago I gave a pass to The Da Vinci Code, despite many misgivings. Yes, it was a slick Hollywood film without a shred of authenticity, but it was also fun. The puzzles were clever, the race across Paris was a nice travelogue, and the bits or arcana about The Last Supper and the Nicene Council gave the film an unusual aura of intellectualism. It was a joy to watch Ian McKellen chew the scenery. But I have my threshold for this kind of thing. Angels & Demons, which reunites director Ron Howard with the author Dan Brown, is essentially a pale copy of The Da Vinci Code.

I realize that Angels & Demons was written before The Da Vinci Code, so when discussing the books it can be said that A&D was a warm-up for the second, more successful book. But in making these films in the order they did, they’ve done a disservice. Angels & Demons follows the same pattern as The Da Vinci Code–a threat by a secret society in a great capital of Europe (this time it’s Rome), and a series of clues that leads our hero to one musty old building after another. Mix in a skeptical member of law enforcement and a pretty girl at the hero’s side, and these films resemble variations on each other.

The story takes place in one night. The pope has just died, and the college of cardinals has gone into their conclave to elect the new pontiff. But four cardinals have been kidnapped, and clues point to the Illuminati, an old secret society of scientists and thinkers who were once persecuted by the Catholic church. They’re out for revenge, and have stolen a canister of antimatter, which they will use to blow up the Vatican. The church reaches out to professor of symbology Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) to follow the clues that will find the explosive device and save the day.

Most of this is complete nonsense. The history and the science is all wrong, and would have a much better home in a second-rate comic book that in a film based on a book that is supposed to be historical. But beyond that, there are the tics of films like this that grate on the nerves. There’s the exposition that is yelled as Hanks and Ayelet Zurer, as a physicist who knows all about antimatter, race up and down staircases. Or the solemn way one of them will announce a find in one language, while the other responds with equal solemnity the English translation. There’s so much over-explanation in this film I was expecting a quiz at the end.

Then there’s the story arc, which is also identical to The Da Vinci Code. If you saw that film, you’ll know who the villain is, as Brown is not exactly a supple plottist. I haven’t read the book, but I’m guessing the screenplay pays certain respect to the text, and the writers, David Koepp and Akiva Goldsman, are two guys who aren’t exactly Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond. Ewan MacGregor, as the pope’s chamberlain, gives an embarrassing speech about how science and religion can co-exist. Props to MacGregor for being able to say that with a straight face. As director, Howard offers his usual fare: it looks good, it has an obnoxious score, and it has an eye on the bottom line. That’s a shame, because as A Beautiful Mind and Frost/Nixon show, he can do better.

Dan Brown is working on another book, called The Last Symbol. That title offers us hope.

Angels & Demons (trailer)
Director: Ron Howard (The Missing, Cinderella Man, The Da Vinci Code, Frost/Nixon)
Longtime readers will know that I’m not particularly a Ron Howard fan, but even still, I didn’t think The Da Vinci Code was all that bad. I can’t say that I’m really looking forward to this, but at the same time there’s no way it’ll be the worst movie of the summer, either, so no harm done as I see it.
Metacritic: 49

The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) (trailer)
Director: Ellen Kuras
Documentary, filmed over the past 23 years, about a Laotian family who fled to the US amid the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
Metacritic: 78

Every Little Step (trailer)
Director: James D. Stern & Adam Del Seo (The Year of the Yao, …So Goes the Nation)
Documentary about the casting for the revival of “A Chorus Line.” I’ll admit, whenever I see the title, I don’t think of “A Chorus Line” – I think of Bobby Brown’s theme song from Ghostbusters II. And let’s face it, a Bobby Brown documentary wouldn’t be the most interesting thing in the world, but it would be more interesting than a documentary about the casting of “A Chorus Line.”
Metacritic: 76

Management (trailer)
Director: Stephen Belber
Years from now, if there are still people watching and studying movies, people will be debating whether or not Jennifer Aniston had any genuine acting talent. She’s had kind of a weird career, having established herself on a sitcom, and since then doing very few movies that were notably good or notably bad. She seems to be someone famous that a lot of people like and who simply isn’t interested in being much more than that.
Metacritic: 50

Rudo y Cursi (trailer)
Director: Carlos Cuarón
Sort of an unofficial follow-up to Y Tu Mamá También but with Carlos directing instead of his brother, Alfonso, who produces along with Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu. Reviews are about what you’d expect from a kind-of-but-not-really sequel of this sort, i.e., unenthusiastically respectful.
Metacritic: 67

Vivre Sa Vie
Director: Jean-Luc Godard (Contempt, Alphaville, Masculine-Feminine, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her)
I’ve seen a few Godard films in my time – I count 6, I guess – and they tend to be pretty difficult for me. I’m just being honest here … I always get more out of films by his New Wave contemporaries than I do from his films. I know I’ll never be a real c–easte until I stop preferring Truffaut’s empathy and warmth to Godard’s arch disdain, and I’ll just have to live with that.
Metacritic: not listed

Actor Stellan Skarsgård (Breaking the Waves, Pirates of the Caribbean), who has a big supporting role in this week’s upcoming Dan Brown adaptation Angels & Demons, when asked about the books by Swedish television show Kulturnyheterna.

Dan Brown is, I think, a terribly bad writer. But he has cliffhangers at the end of each chapter. It’s like when you eat peanuts in a bar, you know? You may not like them, but you still eat them.

When asked why he took the part, he said that the script was better than the book.

The film is better than The Da Vinci Code. The story is both simpler and more straightforward, but just as dramatic. Dramaturgically it was simply better.

He says that he was ultimately pretty pleased with the result, which he calls “an exciting action film and nothing else.”

Bernard! Rose! Discuss in comments.

Inspired by this post over at Postmodernbarney.com, I thought of one.

“Billionaire Attacks The Mentally-ill At Night”

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of May 15-17 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.

Tracking from the theater chains for Angels & Demons:

RS: High 50’s

MTC: 50

Bonus questions:

1) Angels & Demons: Will its foreign take be DOUBLE its domestic take this weekend? Yes or no? (Last one wasn’t.)

2) Star Trek: Will it drop over or under 52%? (The previous record-holder for a Star Trek opening weekend was fan favorite Star Trek: First Contact, with $50 million adjusted for inflation. That one dropped 42% the following weekend in November.)

Deadline is Wednesday May 13 at 11:59 pm (blog time).

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

AGEBOC 09 score

James: 5.5

Joe Webb: 4
Brian: 4
filmman: 3
Rob: 2
Jackrabbit Slim: 1.5
Jeanine: 1.5
Juan: 1.5
Rhymerguy: 1.5
Marco Trevisiol: 1.5
Nick: 1

(The script is available for download here.)

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is a character that, though iconic, is not one that exactly ignites the passion of the general population. He has his fans, no doubt dedicated, but there’s not that many that run around with Sherlock Holmes t-shirts (or hats or whatever). This probably has a lot to do with that on film the character has been done as a stodgy, slightly arrogant, middle-aged Brit in a deerstalker puffing on a pipe.

Dr Watson (Jude Law) and Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr)

So when it’s announced that Guy Ritchie is directing a re-invention in a new potential franchise, starring Robert Downey Jr as the detective and Jude Law as Dr Watson, it sounds like a clever idea and perhaps even a good film. Holmes hasn’t been done memorably in any specific film in quite a while and there is no actor associated with the role specifically (although purists could perhaps make a good case for Basil Rathbone, many don’t remember him). Downey Jr is a clever enough actor to make a hipper Holmes a credible alternative.

Director Guy Ritchie has done two very good and two very bad films as far as I’m concerned. RocknRolla, though a bit tired at times, was none the less something of a return to form for someone who looked close to having fallen off the rails. He’s a good choice for a smart London thriller, though he’s never done anything on this scale before. Let’s not forget that a reboot with a Young Sherlock Holmes has been attempted before, with no less than Spielberg producing and Barry Levinson directing. If that failed to create a franchise then this one is facing some long odds.

Script is credited to producer Lionel Wigram, who wrote the upcoming comic book the story is based on, and Mike Johnson with revisions by Anthony Peckham (Don’t Say A Word and the upcoming Eastwood/Mandela film The Human Factor).

Dr Watson (Jude Law) and Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr)

Plot synopsis (setup):

Script begins in London, 1891. Holmes and Watson are on the trail of cult leader Lord Blackwood in the sewers along the Thames. They find and arrest him just as he is about to carve up his eigth victim and sacrifice during an occult ritual.

Cue six months later and Watson is about to ask Mary to marry him, something which has put a strain on the relationship between the two men, as Holmes feels it will be the end of their partnership. When Lord Blackwood summons the detective to his cell on the day of his upcoming execution, he tells Holmes that he will escape, kill him and rule London. Something which appears impossible as Holmes and Watson watch him getting his head chopped off on the grounds of the Tower of London.

The following day the Blackwood family tomb has been found broken into, with Blackwood’s body gone. Holmes and Watson are set on a chase throughout London, as more and more indications show that Lord Blackwood is indeed alive, and may be about to overthrow the throne of England. Each step of the way they are preceded by conwoman Irene Adler, the only one to ever best Sherlock Holmes.

Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) and Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr)

Review: (many spoilers, skip down to Conclusion at the end to avoid them)

My first thought was that it’s pretty ballsy to go with a religious cult as the main baddie when that was done in the previous, failed, retooling of the character. It is a logical choice, though, since many of his most famous cases deal with the detective disproving common superstitions through faultless deduction. It’s too bad that the sect’s a pretty faceless and aimless bunch, apart from their leader.

What the script focuses on, succesfully, is the camraderie between Holmes and Watson. The character work in this script is excellently done overall. Watson comes off as a more gruff and practical version than the befuddled fat man we’re used to seeing. He is less a mirror used to show off Holmes thought process than a necessary part of a succesful duo, one who is not afraid to criticize Holmes. Holmes comes off as a high functioning autistic, one whose genius makes him inevitably lonely and easily makes him go off the rails. Which is why Watson considering marriage and starting a clinic works as a conflict between the two characters. Script makes it clear that Holmes can’t function without Watson. In essence this is the same template for the traditional buddy action-comedy, where one partner is close to retirement and the other is being sidetracked by an attractive woman. Irene Adler as the love interest for Holmes, the-one-that-got-away, is well done too, believably self-confident without coming off as bitchy, but in the end falls prey to the typical trope of damsel in distress.

It’s a shame they didn’t spend that much effort on Blackwood, who comes off as a one-note supervillain. He’s charismatic but mad. His motive is basically just that he’s evil and wants power. Not much more to him than that. There’s not much time spent on backstory for him, aside from him being rich and noble, with a family history of devil worship. (Mark Strong will probably still own the role though.)

My main problem is that this is a Sherlock Holmes movie without much of a central mystery. When the woman fires at Blackwood during the execution, you know there’s a misdirection going on. The central who-dunnit rests on what even Holmes describes as “a second-rate magic act”. I was mostly annoyed at how a man who is portrayed as highly observant and quick-witted falls for this out of plot necessity. The two heroes staring increduously at the “resurrected” Blackwood felt simply out of character. This is a script that thinks it’s cleverer than it is and not as intelligent as it needs to be. When we hear Blackwood’s company is the one building the Tower Bridge, no one should be surprised that a final showdown will be going down there. Imagine, they’re in a chemical factory, Blackwood plans on taking over London, could he perhaps be making a poison? No shit, Sherlock. Brilliant deduction.

It’s clear that when it came down to it, story and character moments were sacrificed for the sake of making this a big-budget blockbuster, with some nice big explosions and action set-pieces for the trailer. I didn’t think Holmes and Watson as fighting men stretched credibility, but I never felt really engaged in any of the action scenes. I’m sure they’ll be fun to watch at the cinema, but many of them feel too long. Honestly, it feels like they could have shortened or gotten rid of more than a few of them and thrown in a few more actual detective moments where it was apparent that Holmes was solving a case as a detective, not being a more observant form of action hero. Or just given the bad guys some personality and smarter choices.

That aside, the cameo at the end was handled nicely, and I dig who they’ve apparently gotten for that part.

Dr Watson, Sherlock and Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams)

Conclusion (no spoilers):

Overall, it’s a good script with some great new interpretations of the classic Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson characters. Making Holmes something like a troubled and probably slightly autistic man, with Watson as a more practical and direct partner is what makes the entire script work. The conflict between this gruffer Watson and unstable Holmes is a good driving force. Interspersed with some good humor, the entire script works on this basis alone. Spending time with these characters felt like a fresh experience.

Its main problem is that it’s a Sherlock Holmes movie without much of a central mystery and a superficial villain. At times the plot requires characters that are supposed to be the smartest guys in the room to act and think like complete dimwits. It’s sacrificed a potentially compelling and clever story for long action set-pieces and chases throughout London.

The draft is dated March 14 2008. Filming began October 3 2008. Hopefully Ritchie got someone in there to give this script some more meat. Still, the casting is aces, so it should be an enjoyable time none the less.

The Music Box is showing a few Kubrick films this week; I’ll try to get to Dr. Strangelove on Monday. Other than that, nothing too exciting this week, unless you’re a Trekkie and/or a big J.J. Abrams fan.

Leave Her to Heaven
Desert Fury
Directors: John M Stahl (Leave Her to Heaven), Lewis Allen (Desert Fury)
The Gene Siskel Film Center is showing a double bill of these two mostly forgotten Technicolor film noirs from the 1940s. Of the two, Leave Her to Heaven, starring Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, and Vincent Price, looks more interesting, but I’ll be happy to see both if I get the chance.

The Limits of Control (trailer)
Director: Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Coffee and Cigarettes, Broken Flowers)
I’ve not seen any of Jarmusch’s films other than Broken Flowers, which I honestly didn’t really care for. This one comes with negative reviews – a few quite hostile – in tow, but seems worth checking out, if only for what seems like good cinematography and some random strangeness. The IMDb lists this film as No Limits, No Control, for reasons I do not know.
Metacritic: 39

Little Ashes (trailer)
Director: Paul Morrison (Solomon and Gaenor, Wondrous Oblivion)
See Twilight’s Robert Pattinson play Salvador Dali – really! Talk about surreal (rim shot) Along with Stellan Skarsgård as Goya and Anthony Hopkins as Picasso, this completes the “Inappropriately Cast Spaniard Artists” trilogy, no doubt on its way from Criterion shortly.
Metacritic: 42

Next Day Air (trailer)
Director: Benny Boom
Moron drug comedy that actually looks funnier than most in the genre. I’ve always liked Mos Def as an actor.
Metacritic: 50

Oblivion
Director: Heddy Honigmann (, , , )
The Facets Cinematheque can play some obscure stuff, but this one doesn’t even have an IMDb page, as far as I can tell. It’s a Dutch documentary about the struggling residents of Lima, Peru.
Metacritic: not listed

Star Trek (trailer)
Director: J.J. Abrams (Mission: Impossible III)
The only question I have here is whether it’s worth seeing for someone like myself who couldn’t care less about the Star Trek mythology. Reviewed on Gone Elsewhere by Marco Trevisiol, who seems to be answering in the negative, saying “overall, this was a disappointing experience.”
Metacritic: 84

(Warning: may contain mild spoilers)

I’m no ‘Trekkie’ by any stretch but I’ve seen enough episodes/movies of the original Star Trek series (and of ‘The Next Generation’ series/movies for that matter) to see its appeal and its weaknesses. At its best, Star Trek provides sophisticated entertainment not through action or gadgetry but through ideas; it dealt with complex moral and personal issues with significant intelligence and perception. The best episodes of Star Trek often linger in one’s memory.

On the other hand it was often schematic and pat in its story and character construction so that it lacked spontaneity and felt a bit lifeless (especially The Next Generation). And virtually all attempts at humour have been corny and dire.

Therefore as a mild fan I was probably in a good a position as any to judge how this film rates on its own terms and as a Star Trek film. Would it carry on the best qualities of the Star Trek series while adding a genuine liveliness to the proceedings, or in its attempt to expand its audience would it ‘dumb down’ with ideas replaced by mindless action? Unfortunately, the latter is the case.

The film’s basic plotline showcases the origins of the assembling of the crew (the characters from the original show) of the USS Enterprise and how James T Kirk (Chris Pine) becomes captain. Mixed in with this is a threat to not only the Enterprise, but the planet Earth from a renegade Romulan force led by Nero (Eric Bana).

The film started off promisingly with a nice pre-title sequence showing the birth of Kirk just as his father sacrifices his life to save hundreds of lives; it had the right balance of action and emotion.

However the film soon loses its way after that especially in its establishment of Kirk’s character which underlines the problems of the film. There’s no hint of the thoughtful persona with a fairly carefree manner being part of Starfleet for noble principles that was evident in the Kirk of the original series. All that’s left here is the carefree style; indeed he’s defined by being a cocky maverick with ‘attitude’. He’s totally insubstantial and seems more suited as one of the central characters in ‘Cloverfield’ (which director J.J. Abrams produced). As a result he’s a less than compelling character to follow.

Kirk’s flippant style is reflected by the film itself; his decision to go from a life of wastefulness to joining Starfleet is done so abruptly and superficially it’s treated as the equivalent of someone deciding to take up soccer on weekends.

There were some scenes that were so inane and lazy they were dispiriting to watch. In particular an early scene where a smug Kirk tries to pick up a disinterested woman in a bar with a brawl ensuing when her colleagues intervene. It’s a scene that’s been done a million times in the past and every tired cliché is dredged up for this version.

What is particularly regrettable is that virtually all the moral and ethical rigour that characterised the series at its best is absent here. Instead we get lots of action, most of it competently staged but without any substance or context it’s hard to care particularly much about it. Not that the narrative is particularly compelling anyway; it relies on more than one unlikely coincidence and the villain Nero is a one-note and unmemorable characterisation.

To be fair the film isn’t a total write-off and has some compensations. It’s watchable and reasonably slick, with a few nice performances. Simon Pegg and Anton Yelchin are enjoyable in their supporting roles of Scotty and Chekov respectively and Leonard Nimoy’s return as Spock provides some badly needed dramatic substance to the film.

But overall, this was a disappointing experience. Plotwise, it reminded me a fair bit of ‘Star Trek: First Contact’ which on all fronts was a far superior film. As for the overwhelmingly positive critical response it has got, I can only summarise that critics are easily pleased these days.

Don’t know how many were aware of this but the third draft (dated March 14, 2008) of the script for the upcoming Sherlock Holmes film is available online.

Thinking of having a proper review up on Sunday. Those that want to can join and comment then but try and keep this thread clean of spoilers, for those that want to see the movie *clean*, so to speak.

Over at the forum for TheAuteurs.com, some of its members have been doing their own covers for Criterion discs. Some of them are truly inspiring and even better than the originals. I can not for the life of me understand how the marketing department at Warner Bros did not go with this image for the poster of Benjamin Button. I recommend checking out the entire thread here.

To see some even more original covers check out the NeoGAF forums GAF collection of fake videogame covers here. To see all their covers collected (warning, there’s a lot of them) click here. Some of my favorite GAF covers after the jump.

“We’ll buy Microsoft.” Discuss in comments.

Predict the #1 film for the weekend of May 8-10 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) Wolverine: Will its second weekend drop-off be over or under the 66.9% of X-Men 3?

2) Next Day Air: Over or under 6.99 million? (Projections are for it to make between 4-7 million on 1000 screens.)

Deadline is Wednesday May 6 at 11:59 pm (blog time).

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

AGEBOC 09 score

James: 5

filmman: 2.5
Jackrabbit Slim: 1
Jeanine: 1
Rob: 1
Juan: 1
Nick: 1
Brian: 1
Rhymerguy: 1
Marco Trevisiol: 0.5
Joe Webb: 0

At one point in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a character is killed and told by his vanquisher, “You are so predictable.” That’s my chief complaint about this film–it’s a by-the-numbers superhero film that offers very little sizzle or flair. And that’s a shame, because I like the character and how Hugh Jackman, now in his fourth go-round, has successfully made Wolverine a compelling figure. It’s perhaps the best marriage of performer to character in all of the Marvel films.

But alas, Jackmancan not save this thing. I find it interesting that Gavin Hood was chosen to make the film. He has drifted far from his art-house origins. There’s no trace of the ingenuity he brought to his film Tsotsi. After making a fair-to-middlin’ Hollywood film, Rendition, he’s now reduced to churning out standard-issue greasy kid stuff. They could have done just as well to bring back a hack like Brett Ratner, who certainly would have been more comfortable dishing out the cliches, including two of my least favorites: the character cradling a dead loved one, looking to the heavens and screaming, with the camera directly overhead; and the character calmly walking away from an explosion.

If the title doesn’t clue you in, what we have here is Wolverine’s origin. We learn that he was born in Canada in the early 1800s and discovers he has claws when there’s some sort of family dispute (perhaps this is spelled out in the comic books, because it sure gets short shrift here). He learns that his brother, Victor, is also a mutant, who also has some gnarly claws, and the two can’t be killed and don’t age. During the prologue they fight in several wars (somewhere along the line they’ve moved to the States). What they do during peacetime is not specified.

After Vietnam, they are recruited for a special unit run by Stryker (Danny Huston). Jackman has had enough of the bloodshed, and turns to a simple life of lumberjacking and living with a hot schoolteacher (Lynn Collins). His situation is so idyllic that we know it will end tragically.

There are a lot of extra characters, some of whom were X-Men, in this film. I faithfully read Marvel Comics for twenty years and I had trouble sorting out who was who. In some instances they scraped the bottom of the barrel (The Blob?) and also briefly feature some more prominent characters, like Gambit, Deadpool and Emma Frost. Victor (played well by Liev Schreiber) is of course Sabretooth, although he is never addressed by that name in this film (perhaps to avoid the problem that Sabretooth was a character in the first X-Men film, without the baggage of him being Wolverine’s brother). This is probably the only comic-book film I’ve ever seen that needs annotation. Many of these characters have powers that are never fully defined: if Gambit is a mutant, what’s with the magic stick? How is John Wraith different than Nightcrawler?

The action scenes are nothing to write home about. Wolverine and Sabretooth square off several times, and each time is about the same. There are long stretches where nothing seems to be happening, yet the film isn’t that long, by comic-book standards. The music score is wretchedly bombastic.

The film does tie-in nicely with the beginning of the first X-Men film, as Patrick Stewart makes a cameo (although he appears to be doing it against his will). Since Jackman was one of the producers of this film it’s pretty clear he’s not tired of wearing those funky whiskers, but I don’t know what the future of Wolverine could be, without making another full-blown X-Men film. Maybe by then we’ll see the New Mutants. Casting ideas for Cannonball, anyone?

If prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, it is also one of the oldest film topics, going back to the days when a woman couldn’t be directly identified as a prostitute. But The Girlfriend Experience, the new film from Steve Soderbergh, takes a contemporary view of the life of an escort.

The Girlfriend Experience (the title refers to a service provided by an escort that is supposed to simulate an encounter with one’s girlfriend–namely French kissing and unprotected oral sex) details the logistics of being an elite courtesan, the kind of girl frequented by the likes of Elliott Spitzer. The escort in question is Chelsea, played by Sasha Grey. We meet her as she’s on a long “date” with some kind of financial poobah, that includes dinner and taking in Man On Wire at the Sunshine Cinemas.

Chelsea takes her business very seriously–she works independently, not with an agency–and it’s fascinating how she manages it. We hear a vocal diary, and she notes her wardrobe for every appointment, right down to her underwear. She meets with a Web site designer, a financial analyst (she’s told by more than person to invest in gold) and the operator of a message board called The Erotic Connoisseur (today’s escorts live on the Web, and rely on customer’s reviews for generating new business). What makes this all the more interesting is that it takes place in a very specific time–October 2008, when the presidential election looms ahead and the economy is in a free-fall. More than one of her clients complain about their failing businesses.

As Chelsea goes through her days and nights, we also follow her live-in boyfriend, Chris Santos, who is a personal trainer. He knows what she does, and he loves her anyway, but when she takes a liking  to a new client and agrees to go away with him on a weekend, the boyfriend has had enough.

While this film is interesting, and offers a look into a world most of us know nothing about, it also isn’t terribly compelling. It’s art as a conversation piece, and emotionally cold. What it says about prostitution isn’t very original (at one point Chelsea speaks to a journalist, and tells him that men are paying her to be who they want her to be, not to be herself). I think the film has more interesting things to say about the economy, which must have been an accidental plot consideration (the script was written by David Levien and Brian Koppelman, but was filmed exactly when it’s taking place, so the financial crisis stuff must have been improvised or written on the set).

What gives this film a lot of buzz is that Sasha Grey is an adult film star. For as long as adult films have been part of popular culture, there has been the hope of many in that business that someone would cross over into the mainstream as a performer in legitimate films, but it’s never really happened. Will Grey do it? I have no idea, but she acquits herself well in this film. Soderbergh doesn’t ask her to do much–Chelsea is fairly mysterious, which may hide an individual that is pretending to be sophisticated but is really faking it. She also follows some flaky numerology thing, which is about the only glimpse we get into her inner life.

Watching this film we can wonder what Soderbergh’s motivation was for casting Grey. There is very brief nudity and no explicit sex scenes, so there was no burning need to hire an actress who has starred in films like Gang Bang, Vol. 5 or Fuck Slaves. I imagine he did it because a porn star is really a kind of prostitute, in that they have sex for money. Grey, who is exotically beautiful but also has a natural vulnerability, certainly does express a kind of emotionally adrift state. Whether that’s acting or behaving, I don’t rightly know. (I did spend a glorious three minutes in her presence in a convention hall full of socially maladroit men, and she was perfectly charming. I watched her in this film as if she were my kid in the school play).

Soderbergh has the kind of career I’d love to have–he’s made Oscar-winning pictures, big-budget blockbusters that look as if they were made by a bunch of guys horsing around, and these small, laboratory experiments that have attained various levels of success. The Girlfriend Experience has a great look–the shots are frequently from long distance, giving us the feeling of being eavesdroppers or voyeurs. Told non-linearly, it comes into focus like a developing Polaroid. And it’s a very lean 78 minutes, so if you don’t like it, it will be over soon.

Finally, I checked the entry on IMDB and its genre listing is comedy. Either that’s a mistake or I’m missing something.

It’s Mental Health Awareness Month, and Older Americans Month. Two birds…

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

One mother of an episode. Discuss in comments.

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.

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 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, and answerable in the manner of either “Yes” or “No”, or “Over” or “Under”. Suggestions for future bonus questions are always welcome.

- Deadline for predictions for the coming weekend is every Wednesday 11:59 p.m (blog time), unless there is a wide Wednesday release. If there is a wide Wednesday release then the deadline will be Tuesday 11:59 p.m.

- 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 of the summer of 2009 (a.k.a. AGEBOC 09) will be from  Monday April 27 until Sunday August 30.

- 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!

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…

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

I happened to catch a few minutes of Ashton Kutcher’s Just Married the other night and it occurred to me that he’s made a pseudo-”Marriage” trilogy this decade, likely without even realizing it.

Guess Who
A Meet the Parents redux, albeit one infused with interracial conflict. Kutcher falls in love with a girl and must deal with her bigoted, traditionalist father (Bernie Mac) before asking for her hand in marriage. It’s about falling in love and getting others to accept your somewhat non-traditional relationship before taking the next step and starting a life together. Parallels to the actor’s own romance with Demi Moore are clear as day.

Just Married
Kutcher and his new bride (Brittany Murphy) encounter obstacles while on honeymoon that test the bounds of their relationship. It’s about facing the world together as a newly married couple and coming out stronger in the process.

What Happens in Vegas
Two strangers (Ashton Kutcher, Cameron Diaz) drunkenly hook up and get married. While shocked to find themselves trapped in their situation: they resolve to make it work, while each secretly conspires to retain the fortune jointly won the night of their wedding. Is it the first part of the trilogy (discovering a new partner, falling in love despite the odds) or the life-affirming affirming finale (finding yourself married to a stranger, money troubles that lead to strife, eventual rebirth and renewal)? I can’t decide, but I appreciate that it’s left open to the viewer.

Anyway, the series isn’t exactly told in the correct order (Guess Who was actually the second film released, following Just Married) but it works.  Here’s hoping The Criterion Collection reads this and issues the three films in a exquisite box set.

UPDATE 4:28 PM EST: This might be the worst, most incoherent thing I’ve ever written.

I just hope that Marshall/Universal don’t blink once Paramount slots the third remake of Transformers for the same weekend.

Frank Marshall’s Twitter, via CHUD

Bob Funk (trailer at official site)
Director: Craig Carlisle
Never heard of this, it’s apparently an indie comedy about a lame Denis Leary wannabe who … just goes around being a lame Denis Leary wannabe, I guess. When you go to the official website, you’re greeted by a guy who walks out on screen and delivers a short non sequitur about guys in bike shorts. How edgy!
Metacritic: no score

Dragonball Evolution (trailer)
Director: James Wong (Final Destination, The One, Final Destination 3)
“Dragonball” is a good example of something that I can vaguely remember hearing about for years, but I have no idea what it is, kind of like “Halo” or “World of Warcraft” or “The CW Network.”
Metacritic: no score

The English Surgeon (trailer at official site)
Director: Geoffrey Smith
Documentary about a British neurosurgeon practicing in the Ukraine.
Metacritic: not listed

Gigantic (trailer)
Director: Matt Aselton
Movie starring Paul Dano and Zooey Deschanel that, with all due respect to the actors involved (who I like), appears to be a huge (pun averted) quirky trainwreck. It’s about a quirky mattress salesman with a quirky family who dreams of adopting a baby from China and who falls in love with a quirky girl with a quirky family of her own.
Metacritic: 32

Hannah Montana: The Movie (trailer)
Director: Peter Chelsom (The Mighty, Town & Country, Serendipity, Shall We Dance)
I thought there had already been a Hannah Montana movie, but sources now tell me that was merely a concert film. As an aside, from what little I’ve seen of her, Miley Cyrus doesn’t seem like a particularly notable talent; if VH1 is still doing reality shows in 10 years, she’ll have one. This ends the “Picking on 16-Year-Olds” portion of the broadcast.
Metacritic: 49

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (trailer)
Director: Rawson Marshall Thurber (Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story)
Here’s a movie with a title and a plotline (coming of age in 1980s Pittsburgh) straight out of the indie world of 1997. Peter Sarsgaard, Sienna Miller and Nick Nolte are in it, so it barely qualifies for my Suspicious Cast Theory, which holds that terrific movies can show up via no-name distributors (in this case, a group called “Peace Arch Entertainment”) with little advance buzz, but they almost never have name actors in them.
Metacritic: 38

Observe and Report (trailer)
Director: Jody Hill (The Foot Fist Way)
Was unsure about this until I saw Seth Rogen on Letterman last week, and Dave couldn’t stop laughing to himself every time he mentioned something about the movie. In other news, sources tell me that a sort of cult following has sprung up around Anna Faris, which I don’t really understand. I haven’t seen her in much, though.
Metacritic: 52

Paris 36 (trailer)
Director: Christophe Barratier (The Chorus)
French film about a group of actors trying to save their theater in 1930s Paris. Doesn’t look promising.
Metacritic: 41

Tokyo Sonata (trailer)
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Doppelganger, Bright Future, Pulse)
A Japanese family unravels after the father loses his job. I know this is hotly anticipated within certain corners of the Gone Elsewhere community; anyone seen it yet?
Metacritic: 79

“The monster will understand.” Discuss in comments.

Part two of our discussion on the films of the 00’s, this time focusing on 2001.

1) Best of 2001?
2) Worst of 2001?
3) Most underrated?
4) Most underseen?
5) Most overrated?
6) Best performance(s) of the year?
7) Best single scene/sequence of the year?
8) One thing you could change about any single film in 2001 (Example: different cast, different director, different style, different release date, different studio).
9) Most memorable (good or bad) theatergoing experience of the year?
10) Most influential film/performance/style/director?

Obviously feel free to answer only the questions you’re interested in or to write/respond to something else entirely. The lists themselves are just a starting point designed to foster discussion.

Greg Mottola was the director of Superbad, the Citizen Kane of teen comedies, but his latest film, Adventureland, is much closer in feeling to The Daytrippers, his modest art-house film from 1996. Essentially, Adventureland is a mumblecore film in teen-comedy clothing. This may make for a more intelligent experience, but it doesn’t bode well for the box-office receipts. At the Saturday matinee I attended, I was one of three patrons in the theater.

Set in 1987 (I really feel old when a year I clearly remember is depicted as being a much more innocent time), the film centers on Jesse Eisenberg as a college graduate who hopes to spend the summer in Europe before heading to Columbia journalism school. His father, though, gets a downgrade in pay, so he scraps the trip and is forced to take a summer job. As a comparative lit major, he’s not qualified for much (except restoring a fresco, he jokes) but is immediately hired manning the game booths at a second-rate amusement park.

He is schooled in how the games are rigged, and warned never to allow anyone to win a “giant-assed panda.” He befriends Martin Starr, who is a Russian lit student who fancies Gogol and smokes a briar-wood pipe, and is captivated by Kristen Stewart, a fetching lass of enigmatic beauty. However, she is secretly sleeping with Ryan Reynolds, who is the older maintenance man who has a demi-god status because he supposedly once jammed with Lou Reed.

There’s a lot to like in Adventureland, but it took a while to shed my preconceptions based on the television ads. For one thing, the characters played by SNL cast-members Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, as the bosses at the park, are very minor and are hardly worth mentioning (except perhaps for Hader’s porn-star mustache).  And as I wrote above, the film is not a raucous comedy. There’s a lot of pot smoked and alcohol imbibed, but there is no semen in beer (aside from vomit, there are no bodily fluids on prominent display) and only a couple of boner jokes. Instead the mood is almost melancholy, especially from someone with my point of view, who is watching as the dreams of young people are crushed by circumstances beyond their control.

Eisenberg, who played similar characters in Rodger Dodger and The Squid and the Whale, is very good as an intellectual kid trapped in degrading circumstances, as is Starr, who is even more pathetic. Stewart is another story. In some ways she’s playing an idealized character, the kind of girl that every young man would pant over, but fortunately Mottola gives her some depth. But Stewart, who was as wooden as oak in Twilight, isn’t much more animated here. If in Twilight she ran the gamut of emotions from A to B, in Adventureland she gets up to D or E.

And this leads to a problem I had with the film that tempered my enjoyment of it a great deal–I had trouble hearing everybody. The entire cast of young people (with one exception) seems to have been directed to act with extreme lethargy. Maybe it’s all the pot they smoked, but instead I think it’s supposed to be some kind of not-give-a-shit cool that may be true to the age but makes for a hard movie to understand. The only kid with any spirit is played by Matt Bush, that kid from the cell phone commercials, who is so wound up he’s supposed to be thoroughly obnoxious. That may be true, but at least I could understand what he was saying.

As the morale around Gone Elsewhere spirals to the ground in a fiery heap, leaving only a charred and desiccated corpse in its wake, it’s perhaps reassuring to know that there’s always that eternal source of compassion and dignity, the art form that brings out the full spectrum of the grace and eloquence of all humankind the world over to the forefront of our lives, renewing itself in a weekly dance of hope and brotherhood … the cinema.

OK, well, not so much this week.

Adventureland (trailer)
Director: Greg Mottola (The Daytrippers, Superbad)
Generally strong reviews, but I’m not sure why it is that I don’t feel much interest, personally.
Metacritic: 76

Alien Trespass (trailer)
Director: R.W. Goodwin
Sendup of 1950s sci-fi films starring a bunch of actors that you recognize but haven’t seen in awhile.
Metacritic: 50

Fast & Furious (trailer)
Director: Justin Lin (Better Luck Tomorrow, Annapolis, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Finishing the Game: The Search for a New Bruce Lee)
I look back on it now, and if John Singleton had directed the first Fast and the Furious movie instead of the second, I may have been convinced to go. But since it was Rob Cohen … no thanks. And I never looked back.
Metacritic: 45

Ivan the Terrible, Part I
Ivan the Terrible, Part II
Director: Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky)
Well, hey now. Eisenstein’s two-part masterpiece (he never finished Part III because Stalin was pissed) is showing as a double-feature all week long in “newly struck 35mm prints.” Very exciting – nothing cures the blues like “a nightmare of despotic paranoia.”
Metacritic: not listed

Shall We Kiss? (trailer at Music Box Films site)
Director: Emmanuel Mouret
Light French comedy about a hesitant romance between two strangers who meet while traveling.
Metacritic: 72

Sin Nombre (trailer)
Director: Cary Joji Fukunaga
Story about Latin American immigrants, including a teenage Honduran girl and a Mexican gang member on the run, trying to make the treacherous journey to the US. Probably as much interest as I have in any new movie this week.
Metacritic: 77

Hurley = Marty McFly. Discuss in comments.

Won’t get fooled again.

Obviously internet piracy has been a major issue for the past few years, but this is something else entirely: a studio’s major summer tentpole hitting the internet over a month before release in perfect quality with no watermarks, no timecodes…just a few unfinished effects shots to tip you off to the fact that it’s not entirely kosher.

Now while I personally planned to skip Wolverine theatrically and certainly have a negative opinion at how the current FOX regime has run things into the ground: this is one of the most disturbing developments for the industry in memory.  No one deserves this.

You’ve got a studio spending several years and hundreds of millions to develop, produce and market a film worldwide (along with untold numbers of merchandising and promotional tie-in companies) and someone ruins it all with a broadband connection. Given that word of mouth based on the screener appears to be toxic, I can only imagine it will impact the opening weekend number in a negative fashion.

How does FOX proceed from here?  Is it possible to move the release date up?   Is this the “Pearl Harbor” or “9/11″ moment for the studios and their attempts to curb piracy?  Thoughts?

Given that their stock value has doubled in the last 5 months, I’m not sure why they feel the need to raises prices so dramatically in the middle of a recession.  I’ve had little to no complaints about the service over the past six years, but I can see this causing a backlash:

On April 2-3 the University of Dalarna will hold the annual Existential Film Festival, to discuss whether there is a rise in unhappy endings in modern cinema and its possible causes. The theme of this year’s festival will be “Collapse and Renewal”

Translated from the festival webpage. (Bold text mine)

We think we see a clear trend in which happy endings on the screen are increasingly overshadowed by a dark perspective; No Happy End. Is cinema in this manner reflecting a growing desorientation and confusion in the present, a lack of confidence and a sense of imminent collapse?

We see signs of disruptive forces in the western way of life. A growing climate crisis, a slow and inexorable threat to human civilization, demonstrated in such films as The Planet and WALL-E. A small, growing, super-rich elite, anxious and entrenched behind walls and a rising anger among those outside of La Zona or at The Edge of Heaven. Even films that affect human collapse where humanity and compassion is challenged, as in The Secret Life of Words or Young Freud in Gaza. And how do we respond to this? With inertia and apathy? Or with the mobilization and re-orientation?

Good to see my countrymen continuing to lift spirits after the death of Bergman.

Here’s a film that is better than its trailer, remarkably so. And, despite several indications, Judd Apatow has nothing to do with it. In fact, it’s somewhat of a mirror image of films that come out of the Apatow factory. His films deal with man-children who reluctantly are civilized by women. In I Love You, Man, a man who is perfectly comfortable with women is indoctrinated into the world of man-children.

Paul Rudd plays Peter, a real-estate agent who has popped the question to Zooey (Rashida Jones). He’s the kind of guy who enjoys eating summer salad with his girlfriend while watching the movie Chocolat, or making root beer floats for her girlfriends (topped with chocolate straws from Pepperidge Farms). When wedding plans are underway, he realizes he has no real male friends (he has a much younger gay brother, played by Andy Samberg). Extrapolating on the classic Seinfeld episode co-starring Keith Hernandez, he confronts the absurd situation of how adult men go about making new friends.

Peter in encouraged by Zooey to make guy friends, but the efforts are comically disastrous. Then, at an open house (he is selling the home of Lou Ferrigno), he meets Sidney (Jason Segel). Sidney and Peter share some similarities, most notably a love for the band Rush, but click more because Sidney complements Peter. Sidney is completely comfortable in his own skin, so much so that he willingly shares his masturbation habits and has no qualms about wearing Uggs in public (even on the beach). Peter becomes enlightened through the relationship, and things start to get strained with Zooey. In a switch on rom-com cliches, it’s Peter and Sidney who go through the break-up and reconciliation.

There is a lot credit to throw around with this film, which I found to be completely charming and frequently funny. The director and co-writer is John Hamburg, best known for being involved with several films with Ben Stiller, none of which I’ve seen (Meet the Parents, Meet the Fockers, Zoolander, and Along Came Polly). Thank god Stiller did not play Peter, which is the kind of role he usually plays and mercilessly overacts. Instead, Paul Rudd is a pleasure. I’ve always liked Rudd, and think that Forgetting Sarah Marshall could have been much better had he played the lead, instead of Segel. In this film, Segel’s strengths are much better served, and he’s marvelous as the in-your-face Sidney. The role is a tricky one–he has to be somewhat abrasive, but he has to sell that Peter would like him, and it works.

In a somewhat thankless role, Jones is also a delight. Mostly she’s called on to be supportive, and at times seems like the fiancee of fantasy and myth, but her performance is canny enough to keep it real. Jaime Pressly and Jon Favreau have some amusing moments as a battling couple, and the always steady J.K. Simmons livens up his scenes as Rudd’s dad.

The film isn’t perfect–I was resistant to it at the beginning, because I found Rudd to be a bit too much like Steve Carell’s character on The Office, what with his mangling street slang and inability to do accents. But the film gradually picked up steam and really started working for me when Segel makes his entrance. And I give props to any film that makes such good use of Lou Ferrigno.

Goodbye Solo (trailer)
Director: Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop)
I listed Chop Shop as an Honorable Mention in my Best of 2008, and Bahrani’s new film comes with even stronger critical acclaim behind it. It’s about an immigrant cab driver who picks up an apparently suicidal old man in North Carolina. A definite must-see.
Metacritic: 90

The Haunting in Connecticut (trailer)
Director: Peter Cornwell
I remember once in grade school, I drew a picture of Grant’s Tomb in school. It was just a box, basically, with the words “Grant’s Tomb” on it, and a little door in the front. Looking at it, I felt I wasn’t getting my point across, so I wrote “It’s haunted!” on it also, and drew a little ghost. Don’t know why this movie made me think of that drawing.
Metacritic: 31

Monsters vs. Aliens (trailer)
Directors: Rob Letterman, Conrad Vernon
I tell you, Dreamworks really has something going here; somehow, each of their animated releases looks less charming than the last. On the bright side, I thought this was a summer release until just this past Tuesday (I’m not good with release dates these days), so I’m being spared months of marketing and promotion.
Metacritic: 55

12 (trailer)
Director: Nikita Mikhalkov (Dark Eyes, Burnt by the Sun)
Russian film, apparently a loose remake of 12 Angry Men about a Chechen standing trial for killing his Russian military step-father. Nominated for a Foreign Film Oscar in 2007, but only now getting a US theatrical release … I’m a fan of Sony Classics, but way to strike while the iron’s hot, guys.
Metacritic: 70

12 Rounds (trailer)
Director: Renny Harlin (Driven, Mindhunters, Exorcist: The Beginning, The Covenant)
It’s not hard for those of a certain age to remember when Renny Harlin was at the top of his profession, directing high-profile action fare like Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger. Even after the high-profile flop of Cutthroat Island, and as recently as Deep Blue Sea, his movies carried a certain high-profile cachet. But look at his last four, which I listed above, and which don’t even include his last feature (Cleaner) which went direct-to-DVD. And now he’s doing WWE movies with John Cena.
Metacritic: no score yet

Valentino: The Last Emperor (trailer)
Director: Matt Tyrnauer
Documentary about fashion icon Valentino.
Metacritic: not listed

Just call Sayid “Killer.” Discuss in comments.

I guess I’m a little behind the curve, because there’s a new genre out there that I hadn’t heard about (although I have seen a few of the films within it). It’s called “mumblecore,” and is characterized as extremely low-budget films, shot on camcorders, on sets that are practical locations (mostly apartments) and are largely improvisational. The stories, where not a lot happens, concern twentysomethings in the void following college graduation, usually those with a s