|
|
|
|
|
| To say that Strange Wilderness offers up no laughs whatsoever is an overstatement, of course. But not much of one. Part road movie, part stoner comedy, part gross-out set-piece collection of loosely strung-together and half-reasoned sketch ideas, the movie wastes the talents of a game ensemble, and stands ready to slip into lasting cinematic anonymity except as the answer to the following trivia question: In what film does Steve Zahn find his member latched onto by a giant, angry, animatronic turkey? |
|
|
|
| Posted by Brent Simon at | | | |
|
For more than 2,500 years, the Parthenon has been shot at and set on fire by marauders, looted for its sculptures, rocked
by earthquakes, weathered by wind and disfigured by misguided
attempts at restoration. Now, a team of architects and engineers is investigating
the many mysteries of this icon of Western civilization: How did the
ancient Greeks design and build their masterpiece so quickly — in a
span of just eight years? And how did they achieve such precision and
perfection without modern tools and architectural aids that we take for
granted today, such as comprehensive plans or drawings?
An hour-long NOVA special directed and produced by Gary Glassman, Secrets of the Parthenon delves into the 20-ton marble jewel of the Acropolis, a 70,000-piece jigsaw puzzle with virtually no right angles or straight lines. With unprecedented access to the Greek government’s decades-long, $100 million restoration project, this documentary aims to take viewers back in time and inside the minds of the ancient Greeks as they created their most enduring architectural miracle, a publicly endorsed monument to democracy, the goddess Athena and Greek glory in general. While the 46-column Parthenon may be "just" a building, it has inspired the architecture of dozens of state and government structures around the world, from the French Parliament to the United States' Supreme Court, and it's almost as much for this reason as its subtle, illusory lines that it's notable.
As with many academic short-form titles, Secrets of the Parthenon feels it necessary to repeat its central query and thesis over and over, but it eventually gets to the point. Using interviews with Charalambos Bouras, the restoration project's president, as well as University of Florida professor Barbara Barletta and University of Oregon professor Jeffrey Hurwit, the movie shows Greek master craftsmen struggling with 10-ton blocks of marble (think of some of their work as carefully constructing a huge cap for your back molar) and striving to rediscover the lost tools and techniques of their ancestors. It also elucidates the aesthetic considerations that informed the structure's construction, during the reign of Pericles. Secrets of the Parthenon is perhaps most interesting, however, in its last third, when it delves into the competing systems of measurements (Doric, Common and Ionic) that had to be juggled while using masonists from all over different parts of Greece. It's math, sure, and wonkish at that, but still pretty fascinating.
Housed in a regular Amray case, the hour-long Secrets of the Parthenon is presented in 16x9 anamorphic widescreen, and comes with scene selection, closed captions for the hearing impaired and video descriptions for the visually impaired. Apart from downloadable materials for educators, though, there are no supplemental special features, which is a major bummer for the average consumer perhaps looking for a thoughtful, and thought-provoking, DVD diversion for their kids. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) D (Disc)
    |
|
|
|
| Posted by Brent Simon at | | | |
|
| Meeting Resistance, a documentary releasing May 20 from First Run Features, reveals a wholly different narrative about the Iraq War than the one portrayed by many in the mainstream news. In the only-slightly-redacted first-person-plural statement below, co-directors Molly Bingham and Steve Connors talk about their movie, which will be reviewed later in the month...
|
|
|
|
| Posted by Brent Simon at | | | |
|
German-born director Uwe Boll is a filmmaker in the grand, throwback tradition of the snake-oil showmen of the medium’s traveling circus infancy. Derided by some (okay, many), he’s made 10 genre flicks in the last eight years, challenged dissenting journalists to boxing matches and inspired an online petition to ban him from cinema. In his latest movie — a freewheeling adaptation of the videogame Postal, his first (intentional) comedy since his 1991 debut, German Fried Movie — Boll slaughters dozens of sacred cows, mocks himself by claiming his films are financed with Nazi gold, and finally commits to celluloid the scene that Mike Meyers has been too cowardly to include in any of the Austin Powers films: Verne Troyer being sexually assaulted by monkeys. For New York Magazine's Vulture, I spoke with Boll last week about Postal, his failed bid to box Michael Bay and why he's exactly the right guy to direct the inevitable Grand Theft Auto movie. A sample of the conversation:
Brent Simon: Even though it takes place a very heightened and exaggerated world, Postal has a lot of radical things in it — not just of the gross-out or outrageous variety, but also, say, complicity between George Bush and Osama bin Laden. Was that a sticking point at all for Running With Scissors, the videogame's production company, and/or potential domestic distributors of the film?
Uwe Boll: Yeah, it was. Running With Scissors in the beginning wanted only a hard rampage movie where a guy flips out, basically, a little like Falling Down meets Taxi Driver. And then I said, “I think that the videogame is cultish and funny, because you can [play as] Bush or bin Laden, and the guy lives in a trailer park with his 500-pound wife, you can use cats as silencers.” I mean, it's totally absurd, in a way. And I felt that it was an opportunity for me to first of all make something that was funny, but secondly put also a lot of my frustration in the script. So there's the frustration about myself, and how I get bashed in the Internet about my career and about the reviews, and I used that to put myself in the movie. Then there's the frustration about the whole political landscape since Sept. 11, like we're all running in between fundamentalist terror and George Bush craziness, in big danger — not only financial disasters, but who knows what will happen? When I wrote the script, we were almost on the edge of a war with Iran after the unsolved Iraq war. At this point, we all felt like if the Iranian president [says] one wrong thing, there will be the next war starting, and this will end. And at the same time, I wanted to make a comedy like some of my personal favorites, which are all a little bit older, like Naked Gun or Life of Brian, Monty Python-type of stuff. Or Blues Brothers. And I felt like this is all missing in the last few years — that everyone wants to be so politically correct, and all the Ben Stiller or Will Ferrell comedies have their moments, but overall they are all kind of clichéd, they have happy endings where families are back and weddings are the best, and it's all about being nonpolitical or whatever. I wanted to make a ruthless movie and hit everybody with a hammer. This is what I went for.
For the full Vulture piece, click here. More from the interview later in the week, including Boll's thoughts regarding the American political landscape, and his pending litigation against Billy Zane. |
|
|
|
| Posted by Brent Simon at | | | |
|
Forgetting Sarah Marshall has been a solid hit ($51 million and counting, domestically) for debut director Nicholas Stoller, who helped screenwriter-star Jason Segel get the story on its legs. Their off-screen friendship will bear more professional fruit, too, in the form of the comedy spec script Five-Year Engagement, which he is attached to helm for Universal.
“It's kind of an Annie Hall or When Harry Met Sally-type story," says Stoller. "With Sarah Marshall, a lot of what was a little bit frustrating about the narrative of that was that we couldn't really get into the relationship as it was happening, we were sifting through the wreckage of the relationship. With Five-Year Engagement, we want to watch it implode in real time. It's kind of that couple we all know that gets engaged and then takes five years to get their shit together and get married. Both myself and Jason, we'd been in relationships — I'm married now, and this is not my wife I'm talking about — for years where it didn't go anywhere, and it was just almost right. So we kind of wanted to make the movie about a relationship that's 60 percent right." |
|
|
|
| Posted by Brent Simon at | | | |
|
A friend clued me into Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, a shot-by-shot, Son of Rambow-style recreation (or "sweding," if you will) which three
Mississippi 12-year-olds began filming in their backyards shortly after the release of the original Indiana Jones movie in 1981. Seven years later their film was in the can, and this Wednesday, it's screening at the Mann Chinese 6 in Hollywood, at 8 p.m. For the diehards this is old news, I guess, but somehow this had all escaped my attention up until now, even though producer Scott Rudin purchased the trio's life rights years ago, and Daniel Clowes is at work on a script for a big screen adaptation about their pubescent odyssey. By the way, shouldn't Paramount have pushed that into production, and have it locked and loaded to come out at least around the same time as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Or shall it eventually suffer the same ill-timed fate as the Weinstein Company's Fanboys, which I think finished filming eight years ago? |
|
|
|
| Posted by Brent Simon at | | | |
|
In 1999, a landmark year for American cinema all around, but especially with regards to studio filmmaking, Andy and Larry Wachowski — who had previously scripted Assassins and directed only 1996's small-scale crime thriller Bound — set the sci-fi adventure genre on its head with The Matrix, a labyrinthine, parallel-world shoot-'em-up in which Keanu Reeves' office drone unlocks the power within in a manner in which Tony Robbins could have never dreamed. Their latest movie is Speed Racer, a colorful, golly-gee-toned adaptation of the old Japanese import cartoon series.
The technical proficiency of the film is never in question; from frame one, the Wachowskis succeed in crafting an ecstatically eye-popping spectacle, buoyed by neon-tinted primary colors, extreme close-ups and wild, desert-set car chases in which automobiles pogo over one another to cool sound effects. All in all, I'm pretty sure Hunter S. Thompson had hallucinations like this.
Yet there's an ineffable but chokingly pervasive sense that Speed Racer is, well, sort of a cop-out. Sure, it's a family flick first and foremost, and not fair to judge based mostly on what it isn't. Yet anyone in their teens or older is almost certainly going to have seen one or all of the Matrix movies before this, and the chief, whispering thought lodged in their brain, irrespective of whether they're pleasantly surfing along on Speed Racer's surfeit of “cool,” is going to be, “Hmmmm... this is kind of tame.”
While its two 2003 sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, both met with lukewarm-to-stinging critical reaction and more than a bit of fan-boy howling, they were undeniably of a piece with the original movie, stylistically and tonally. All three films were rated R, and dealt in explosions and hand-to-hand combat. The mixing of these base elements along with ample portions of armchair psychology and religious theory gave the movies a pop, a certain contrast to other genre flicks of their ilk.
The PG-rated Speed Racer, on the other hand, feels safe, and made of prefabricated parts. While sabotage and subterfuge are the name of the game within the plot, there's nary a gun in sight. Which got me to thinking — unless it's inherently part of the narrative (see David Lynch's The Straight Story, or David Mamet's The Winslow Boy), it's nearly impossible for filmmakers with some sense of auteurish branding to go forward or backwards in rating by more than a single classification. It's just inviting ruin, in a way. That's why, rightly or wrongly, after the splash of cold water to the face that was bullet-time, Speed Racer feels like a water-treading ploy by the Wachowskis for wide-scale embrace. For the full piece, from FilmStew, click here. |
|
|
|
| Posted by Brent Simon at | | | |
|
There's a nice short piece in the Los Angeles Times today, by Paul Davidson, which focuses on costume designer Bernie Pollack (yes, brother of multi-hyphenate Sydney) and his work for the forthcoming Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Not surprisingly, the film presented some unique challenges. "The last film was made 18 years ago," says Pollack. "Everybody that worked on it was out of business. The hat maker was gone. The costumer was gone. So I had to start from scratch. I had to find fabric, find people who could make it. I mean, I'm making an iconic movie. He has got to look as good or better than in the other films in the series. If he looks less than that, I'm an ass."
All's well that ends well, of course, and eventually Pollack found his perfectly distressed archaeologist gear, he claims. Of course, as insurance against damage from water, fire, dirt, blood (fake and otherwise), stunts and anything else that might happen, Pollack wanted to play it safe and order in bulk, and the not-quite-cash-strapped production was happy to oblige. The final tally for Harrison Ford's character: 30 identical fedoras, 30 leather jackets, 60 pairs of khaki pants and 72 shirts. |
|
|
|
| Posted by Brent Simon at | | | |
|
Character actor Andy Serkis (below right) is best known for the computer-generated creatures he lent physicality in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings films, and King Kong,
but in his latest movie he meets perhaps his most formidable screen challenge to date — a
psychopathic farmer with a penchant for masks made of skin. Written and directed by Paul Andrew Williams, The Cottage is a strange little British cocktail of horror and bickering comedy, a movie done a grave disservice by a grisly DVD cover that sells it as something it's not entirely.
Forced into hiding after their kidnapping of bratty spitfire Tracey (Jennifer Ellison, above) goes awry,
at-odds siblings David (Serkis) and Peter (Reece Shearsmith, above
left) find themselves fighting for their sanity while they hole up in a
secluded country cottage. Refusing to stay quiet, foul-mouthed,
sweatpants-clad Tracey puts up quite a
ruckus, and once she susses out the involvement of her oafish stepbrother Andrew (Steven O’Donnell) in the $100,000 ransom plot, turns the tables on the guys, who find themselves somewhat held captive by their own
victim. That's only half the story, though, as everyone’s problems soon go from bad to much worse when they all come
face-to-face with a towering, axe-wielding monstrosity who would feel very much at home with the families of The Devil's Rejects and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
The Cottage is essentially two films mashed together — one part screwball character-rooted caper, one part goosing, self-aware horror flick — and how one feels in gut-reaction fashion about that prospect very much informs one's take on the movie as a whole. The first 30 to 35 minutes is very much about David and Peter's complicated relationship, and the chemistry between Serkis (who gets to play hectoring and exasperated) and Shearsmith is a pleasure, reminding me, perhaps strangely enough, of Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane from The Producers. When things turn violent, though, director Williams doesn't skimp on the gore, even as he plays things with a wink and a nod, tossing in amusing character bits (Peter is terrified by moths) and setting one frightened-flight sequence to Beethoven's "Ninth Symphony in D Minor." Powered by this weird, anything-can-happen vibe, The Cottage feels reminiscent (at least emotionally, hopefully not in any specifics) of the way bedtime stories mattered so much as a kid, when even boilerplate characters and silly twists could make you squirm in feeling delight. Trying to parse and make sense of some of the story choices and twists is a losing proposition, but The Cottage at least has an idiosyncratic stamp of personality, and that's a welcome enough thing to make it a fun rental.
The Cottage comes in a regular Amray case with a cardboard slipcover, and is presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English, French, Spanish and Portuguese language Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks, and optional subtitles in all the aforementioned tongues. Five minutes of outtakes highlight mangled lines and missed cues, while 12 minutes of deleted scenes, nine in total, showcase among other things a third, dead brother, "Smoking Joe," who was excised from the movie early on, apparently during filming. There are also 11 preview trailers and two storyboard galleries, both involving Peter and Tracey crossing paths with the psychotic killer. Finally, as with Sony's recent release of Hero Wanted, there's also a free digital copy of the film,
which purchasers can transfer to their PC, PlayStation 3 or PSP
(PlayStation Portable) system, pending minimal memory requirements. The only thing missing, unfortunately, are some cast and/or crew interviews, which would seemingly be of extra interest given the wild-and-woolly tone of the material. For a couple sample clips of the movie, click here and here, respectively. To purchase the film via Amazon, meanwhile, click here. B- (Movie) B (Disc) |
|
|
|
| Posted by Brent Simon at | | | |
|
| A hearty slice of pre-code cinema screens at the Egyptian Theatre Thursday, May 22 and Friday, May 23, with insightful documentaries and double- and triple-features that include films from Cecil B. DeMille and Frank Capra that have yet to be released to DVD... |
|
|
|
| Posted by Brent Simon at | | | |
|
The favorite what-if scenario of ultra-right-wing nutters will get its day in Unthinkable, which centers on a major threat to the United States involving three nuclear devices whose locations are shrouded in secrecy by a single terrorist. With only two days before they are deployed, a black-ops interrogator and a female FBI agent have to decide how far they will go to find them. Variety reports that Buffalo Soldiers helmer Gregor Jordan will direct, and Samuel L. Jackson will star (presumably as the black-ops interrogator, not the female FBI agent, which will be, I don't know, Julianne Moore? Rachel Weisz? Rachel McAdams?)
While this will surely, finally give the talking heads at Fox News something other than 24 and Jack Bauer to reference, given the conceit, the guy-and-gal commercial concession and, I'm sad to say, the involvement of Jackson, does anyone doubt that this movie is going to suck in dispiriting ways? Jackson only tries in approximately every fourth film (the last time was in Resurrecting the Champ... though I haven't seen Renny Harlin's direct-to-DVD Cleaner), and everything about this reads phone-it-in, gun-waving, loud-authoritative-voice-using Jackson, which we've seen approximately two dozen times before. Can't wait for the water-boarding recreations set to Hans Zimmer music, though. Oh wait... yes I can. |
|
|
|
| Posted by Brent Simon at | | | |
|
There have been literally dozens of documentaries made about the war in Iraq, and almost without exception they've been rather famously ignored by a filmgoing populace seemingly too ground down by a combination of their own economic anxieties and generalized, numbed depression or despair to care about a cinematic rehashing of what they now overwhelmingly judge as a from-day-one fuck-up.
Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris, though, is mad as hell, and thinks others should be too. “I would often say when I was making this movie that I don't know, really, whether Americans care about torture. I care about it,” he says, stressing the personal pronoun and leaning back in his chair, “but I don't know whether most people care, in the sense that they tell themselves, 'Well, it's an implacable foe, a ruthless enemy, and you have to do what you have to do to win the war.'”
Among other works, Morris is the director behind The Thin Blue Line, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and, perhaps most eerily timely and insightfully, 2003's The Fog of War, which used former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his decision-making in the waging of the Vietnam War as a prism through which to assay the missteps of American military aggression and intervention. His latest film — the “this movie” referenced above — is entitled Standard Operating Procedure. It's about a series of photographs at Abu Ghraib prison that changed the world, changed the nature of the Iraq war and changed America’s image of itself, or at least dragged into the light of day the yawning gulf between a nation's soaring rhetoric and its actions. A hundred years from now, these photographs in all likelihood will define the war in Iraq, in particular three iconic photographs taken by soldiers in the 372nd MP Company — soldier Lynndie England posing with a prisoner on a leash, a hooded man standing on a box with wires attached to his fingers, and a pyramid of naked prisoners.
In his perspicacious new film, Morris shows how the photographs served as both an exposé and a cover-up — the former because the photographs offered everyday Americans a glimpse of the horror of what was happening at Abu Ghraib, but the latter because they seduced people into thinking what they saw was an aberration limited to a few rouge soldiers working the night-shift. “The photographs became politicized immediately — the left would say one thing, the right would say something else,” Morris says. “And it very, very quickly devolved into an argument about rogue soldiers versus administration policy, without anyone ever really bothering to investigate the circumstances under which the photographs were taken. It became political football.”
“I wanted to make a movie about... the kind of bizarre misdirection created by the photographs,” Morris continues. “There are lots of other movies to make [and] other stories to tell, including those that involve the higher-ups. I think there's so much anger and frustration about the war that [people] want some kind of superhero to come out of the wings and nail (former Secretary of Defense Donald) Rumsfeld to the wall, and if I haven't done it they're just pissed off, like, 'That's the job, guy! Why are you fucking around with a bunch of pictures?' And it's because I'm actually fascinated by those pictures, and photography, and I'm fascinated by the fact that there are things in front of our eyes that we can't see. The scary thing about pictures to me is that they can be used to reveal and to hide. They can [both] make you think you know things that you don't know, and they can certainly show you things that you cannot have seen otherwise.”
While it's built chiefly around unblinking interviews with the actual subjects at the center of the controversy, Standard Operating Procedure, like most of Morris' other films, also includes exacting reenactments. Because of this, and also because it's in part about the inherent ambiguity of still photography — which after all captures only one moment in time, and in subjective fashion — it only stands to reason that the documentary arrives on the heels of Nonfiction, a 100-page book of photographs taken by Nubar Alexanian on the sets of Standard Operating Procedure and other Morris films.
The photographer, who has a relationship with Morris spanning more than 15 years, says he got a feeling early on that this project was different in substantive ways. “Errol created an exact duplicate of the cell block of Abu Ghraib. So all of us working on the set were in Abu Ghraib prison, and [yet] we were not,” says Alexanian. “Standard Operating Procedure is a movie about a subject we all know something about, that the press thinks it's covered. But what Errol Morris has is the truth.” For the full feature piece, from FilmStew, click here. Meanwhile, for a longer question-and-answer interview with Morris, click here.
|
|
|
|
| Posted by Brent Simon at | | | |
|
So according to Screen International, a sequel to Richard Kelly's surreal, quasi-apocalyptic 2001 cult sensation Donnie Darko will begin shooting in Los Angeles on May 18. Entitled S. Darko, the movie will find Daviegh Chase reprising her role as Donnie's younger sister, Samantha; other cast includes Gossip Girl's Ed Westwick (also currently on screens as the jerky older brother in Son of Rambow), Step Up 2 the Streets' Briana Evigan and The Invisible's Justin Chatwin. The story allegedly picks up seven years after the first film, when Samantha and her best friend Corey, both now 18, find themselves plagued by bizarre visions while on a road trip to
Los Angeles.
Chris Fisher, who previously co-wrote and helmed Rampage: The Hillside Strangler Murders and | | | | |
