So in an interesting attempt to stave off the inevitable for a few more years (who really religiously goes to a standalone videostore anymore?), Blockbuster has inked a pact with the Weinstein Co. to make the erstwhile leading video retailer the exclusive rental outlet for all its releases, Variety is reporting. The four-year deal takes effect in January 2007, and dictates that TWC will not make any of its titles available for rental through competing outlets like Netflix and Movie Gallery. So if that changes your eventual rental plans for School for Scoundrels, so be it. Of course, you can still turn to peer-to-peer DVD sites like Peerflix.com. For the full piece, from Variety, click here.
Monthly Archives: November 2006
For Your Consideration
Waiting for Guffman, 2000’s Best in Show and 2003’s A Mighty Wind, Guest and his co-writer
and costar Eugene Levy (American Pie)
found a very specific and isolated subset (theater wonks, dog aficionados,
hippie-dippie musicians, et al) and through improv exercises with a faithful
ensemble located the humor in their seriousness and earnest obligation.
desires that are awakened during the Oscar-touted production of a period piece
prestige film, For Your Consideration
harkens back in some ways to Waiting for
Guffman, in that turns its eye inward, toward theatrical performance. Yet
it also feels like it’s serving too many masters, and it represents at its core
a fundamental misreading of the pre-release
derby buzz machine.
film, Home for Purim, that tells the
story of a Jewish family’s reunion on the occasion of the dying matriarch’s
favorite holiday. When Internet-generated rumors begin circulating that three
of Purim’s stars — faded luminary
Marilyn Hack (Catherine O’Hara), journeyman actor Victor Allan Miller (Harry
Shearer) and ingénue Callie Webb (Parker Posey), who’s involved with her screen
brother, Brian Chubb (Christopher Moynihan) — may be playing their way into
Oscar nods, excitement rattles the cast. Once a pair of Access Hollywood-esque tele-mag hosts (Jane Lynch and Fred Willard)
pick up the rumors, things really heat up.
is the first of Guest and Levy’s films to incorporate a straight narrative tack
instead of mockumentary noodling, and it’s ill-suited for the movie. The cast
is studded with fine performers (Ricky Gervais even pops up as an executive who
tries to tamp down the film’s “Jewishness”), and there are plenty of nice
one-liners at the expense of myopic
come from everyone from Willard’s characteristically oblivious host (“They’re
not only alive and well, but more importantly, they’re working” he says of
Marilyn and Victor) to a publicist who lectures an on-set reporter in charge of
crafting Purim’s EPK, “In every
actor, there’s a tiger, a pig, an ass and a nightingale — you never know which
one is going to show up,” before further rattling off a hilarious list of
assumptions not to make when dealing with actors.
wanly sketched, from Levy’s glad-handingly insincere talent agent, Morley
Orfkin, to John Michael Higgins’ clueless senior publicist Corey Taft, who we’re
supposed to believe is a P.R. mastermind who’s never heard of the Internet.
(“That’s the one with email, right?” he asks) It’s not that some of these angles
aren’t fair game, just that they feel both a bit hackneyed and unconnected to
the rest of what’s going on in the movie. For
Your Consideration also doesn’t seem to have a particularly strong grasp on
its main triumvirate of Marilyn, Victor and Callie, each of whom only allows a
sliver of self-centered yearning to show.
track, and when the film flashes forward from Purim’s production all the way past
its theatrical release, the most crucial timeframe of awards season jockeying —
and certainly the richest for untapped satire — is abandoned. I guess it’s
easier to fall back on some of the familiar circumstances and environments that
For Your Consideration does (clueless
producers, frustrated writers, ethnic niche comedy), but it’s a lot less
refreshing and rewarding. (Warner Independent, PG-13, 86 minutes)
Little Miss Sunshine Makes Its Move
As previously mentioned here, Fox Searchlight will be mounting an aggressive Oscar campaign for Little Miss Sunshine, and with so few clear-cut leaders out in front in the awards derby, they’ve already rushed into the breach a bit early, with an eight-card postcard set mailing, housed in its own same-sized cardboard slipcover (above), touting various performances with pull quotes from critics’ reviews.
With so many Academy Awards contenders falling on the swords of mixed critical reception and/or commercial indifference, there’s definitely a “feel-good” slot open in this year’s Best Picture race, and Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’ feature debut has a lot of love from its mid-summer bow. Audiences feel for Little Miss Sunshine the same sense of discovered ownership that they did with My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Harsh Times for Christian Bale?
Do the low grosses of crime drama Harsh Times, the directorial debut of Training Day scribe David Ayers, spell… well, harsh times for Batman Begins star Christian Bale, upon whose name the film is largely being sold? Well, in a word no. More likely, Harsh Times is just indicative of the new trend of
blockbuster summer entertainment, in which headlining doesn’t necessarily translate
into tabloid-selling, movie-opening cult of personality. Actors like
Bale, Tobey Maguire and others are beloved in their comic book flicks, and
frequently respected in other work, but not always a massive draw in and of
themselves. For the full piece exploring this notion, from FilmStew, click here.
RIP VHS
Variety has posted an obituary for the VHS format, which almost all major retailers have officially booted from shelves to make way for the oncoming glut of Christmas… sorry, holiday product. For those who simply can’t cope with the death of the format, don’t worry — there’s always Ebay and Half.com, where those 30 million copies of The Lion King will be peddled for another generation or so, likely at or around shipping cost. Of course, once your kids’ Barney or Dora the Explorer tapes wear out the heads on the VCR, you’re totally screwed…
AFI Fest Announces Winners
Fast Food Nation Site Showcases Interconnectedness
Fox Searchlight, always adept at seeking out and embracing alternative marketing techniques, has up an interesting web site in support of Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation, the big screen adaptation of Eric Schlosser’s bestselling investigatory novel, which opens this Friday, November 17. In addition to the regular behind-the-scenes material and a whole slew of clips, there are reader-fed debates about corporate beef and the like from a variety of blog sources. The film has also teamed up with www.participate.net to further illuminate the connections between cheap food, illegal immigration, brutal working conditions, suppressed wages and unsanitary food preparation. For more information, click here.
The Da Vinci Code
The Da Vinci Code was one of the most anticipated films of the past several
years, so the big screen adaptation of Dan Brown’s controversial bestseller was
bound to disappoint a large number of folks, if only due to the law of
averages. In the end, though, lukewarm critical reaction couldn’t dint Sony’s
savvy day-and-date release scheme, which let much of the world see the film at
the same time — a rarity for anything except an action blockbuster. Cash registers rang loud and clear, with a
final theatrical tally of over $750 million, “only” $218 million of which came
from the
Still, popularity doesn’t equal quality, and as adapted by
Akiva Goldsman and directed by Ron Howard, The
Da Vinci Code is executed with such grim turgidity as to drain the ostensible
popcorn thrill out of Brown’s novel. In its steadfast devotion to the
source material, the film version of The Da Vinci Code eschews the sort
of spry adventure pacing that would help circumvent, or at least gloss over,
many narrative potholes, proving with a loud thud that that which delights the
mind does not necessarily delight the eyes.
Harvard professor of religious symbology Robert Langdon, who is in
to give a guest lecture. Just as he’s finished, he’s summoned to the Louvre to
aid in the identification of mysterious markings found on the body of curator
Jacques Sauniere (Jean-Pierre Marielle), who we’ve seen murdered by Silas (Paul
Bettany), an albino monk who inflicts
ritualistic pain upon himself to be closer to God. Captain Bezu Fache (Jean
Reno) — like Silas, a member of the ultra-conservative Catholic sect Opus Dei —
suspects Langdon of the murder, and is hell-bent (if you’ll pardon the
expression) on extracting a confession out of him.
comes to Langdon’s assistance, and together they wriggle free of Fache’s
custody; she also eventually reveals herself to be Sauniere’s estranged
granddaughter. At issue for the duo are a
series of coded messages that Sauniere has left. These messages lead to a
key, and the key in turn to even more clues that all point to a secret about
the mythical Holy Grail and Jesus Christ of Nazareth — a secret that a shadowy
Opus Dei council, led by Bishop Aringarosa (Alfred Molina), will stop at
nothing to destroy. Wanted by Interpol, Langdon and Neveu manage to stay one
step ahead of Fache and solicit the assistance of Leigh Teabing (Ian McKellan),
an old colleague of Langdon’s.
jet-setting fashion all over
in the movie over the course of 36 hours or so are, of course, wildly
improbably condensed, but to get hung up on that is to miss the point. National Treasure and any number of
other historical thrillers are based on equally implausible or fancifully
ridiculous turns, but nowhere near this dramatically inert; lightness afoot is the key to their success.
surface touch with intricate conspiracies, its savvy commingling (and
co-opting?) of history and religion with more traditional elements of the
thriller genre. It’s the literary equivalent, I assume, of sugar-free
dessert; one reads it and feels like they’re somehow smarter or healthier than
before they started. The big twist of the movie centers around “the greatest
hoax perpetrated on mankind,” yes, but the filmmakers and every member of the
cast save McKellan seems to be ground into the shoals of dullness by the weight
of that quote-unquote obligation. Howard attempts to ratchet up the profundity
of it all by shooting dark, dour frames and working in some transposed
backdrops to help “connect” present and past, but what this chiefly means is long, chunky passages of didactic
exposition. What does pass for character development — say, Neveu taking
Langdon to a park and buying drug paraphernalia off a lingering junkie so that
they then “have a moment to think” — is frequently downright laughable.
but evidences no discernible chemistry with Tautou, who is a charming actress
out of her depths here. Only McKellan breathes some quirky, sardonic life into
his role as Teabing. Everyone else seems
to be solemnly intoning from one of the various narrated guidebooks for the
cottage industry of Da Vinci Code
travelogue tours. The end result is a self-serious bore, with just a few
precious intermittent moments of excitement.
is available in separate full screen or 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen editions, each
of which contain the same bonus material spread out over two discs. Audio
choices offer forth English, French and Spanish language 5.1 Dolby digital
surround sound tracks, as well as an English 2.0 stereo track. In somewhat keeping
with the bloated nature of the feature, it’s quantity over quality with regards
to The Da Vinci Code’s bonus slate. Most
of the 10 included featurettes clock
in at four to eight minutes, and give vague and/or superficial insights into the
making of the movie or a single aspect (Hans Zimmer’s score, for instance) of
its construction.
together and touches on the practical hurdles and complications of production as
well as Bettany’s make-up, etc. Also of
some atypical interest is a five-and-a-half-minute featurette on the hidden codes
and visual signifiers with which Howard seeds his film. A downloadable puzzle
game is also available via DVD-ROM, though I’ll be sticking to sudoku, thank
you very much. C- (Movie) B- (Disc)
Borat to be Co-opted by Unfunny People
So Borat expanded to more than 3,000 screens this past week, and in doing so pulled in another $29 million, up from a 837-theater/1,100-screen, $26.5 million bow last week, and good for the top spot at the box office. Thank goodness for the timing in one respect, releasing after Halloween. But it struck me last night upon exiting a restaurant that Borat will be — if not already — the new Austin Powers, by which I mean a funny character being co-opted by unfunny people for unfunny impressions. It already makes me kind of queasy, the mangled idioms, malapropisms and awkward Jew-baiting that middle-aged, WASPy bankers and insurance company middle-managers not savvy enough to get the original joke will be peddling. On the plus side, you know Steve Carrell’s Michael Scott on The Office will be perfecting an imitation… so we have that going for us, which is nice.
Happy Birthday, Grace Kelly
Sincere birthday wishes to Grace Kelly, who would’ve been 77 today. A real looker, she was.
Edwige Fenech Two-Fer
Edwige Fenech was a natural fit for these sort of unabashed romps, which reveled in a silly, heightened style. Lovingly packaged and produced by No Shame Films come two of her earlier works, previously unreleased in the United States — 1972’s Ubalda, All Naked and Warm, from director Mariano Laurenti, and Sergio Martino’s Giovannona Long-Thigh, from the following year.
Ubalda is a top-notch if still somewhat culturally specified la ronde, its farcical story centering around a medieval Italian knight, Olimpio (Pippo Franco, of Billy Wilder’s Avanti!), who returns home from war and finds himself caught between his unfaithful wife (Karin Schubert) and the comely Ubalda (Fenech), a bored bride with a jealous husband-to-be (Umberto D’Orsi). Frustrated to no end by the chastity belts of the women in his life, Olimpio slips in and out of fanciful daydreams and concocted schemes, dressing up as a painter in order to try to get closer to Ubalda, who certainly does little to discourage his attention.
. Franco again pops up as a bumbling underling assigned to oversee the seduction, but <b>typically crossed signals and miscommunications ensue, leading to all sorts of jaunty consternation</b>.</p>
<p>Through set worlds apart, both films are spry and lively, powered by typically turbo-charged Italian genre dialogue and <b>Fenech’s flirty demeanor, a cross between Audrey Hepburn’s eye-batting innocence and Elsa Martinelli’s high style</b>. It’s a shame that more films of this ilk — carefree movies that capture the whipped subservience of men in pursuit of for the most part innocently depicted carnal release — aren’t made today.</p>
<p><b>Presented in 2.35:1 widescreen enhanced for 16×9 televisions, both pictures look great for their age</b>, and are remarkably free from grain or discoloration. The Italian language Dolby digital soundtracks (mono for <i>Ubalda</i>, stereo for <i>Giovannona</i>) are more than adequate, though some of the transliterations of the English subtitles seem to lose a bit in crossing the ocean. The bulk of these titles’ extras are replicated on each disc — namely, a 10-minute trailer collection of Fenech titles and a pointless, three-minute “groovy sexadelic reel” that appears strung together by someone dropping acid and listening to Jimi Hendrix.</p>
<p>Thankfully, <b>each release comes with an eight-page, full-color insert booklet that includes biographical information, liner notes and miscellaneous photos, plus current day subtitled interview segments with Fenech</b>. The only rub on these two different bits is that they’re somewhat short (seven minutes), and additionally padded by extra-long credit sequences. Still, even if she doesn’t address much directly in regarding <i>Ubalda</i> and <i>Giovannona</i>, it’s interesting to hear Fenech talk about her near-casting in Federico Fellini’s <i>Amarcord</i> (in the part of Gradisca, eventually awarded to <a href=)
Magali Noel Naturally, the Q-Man was intimately familiar with her work.) and meeting Quentin Tarantino at the Venice Film Festival. Now a wider American audience can be too. B (Movies) B (Discs)
Snoop Dogg Does Segmented Horror
Does anyone else remember 1995’s Tales from the Hood? Hell, does anyone even remember Rusty Cundieff? I mean, like, including his mother?
It sounds like Snoop Dogg might, actually. Xenon Pictures is announcing that Hood of Horror, an anthology directed by Stacy Title, will screen as the special ninth film in the forthcoming “HorrorFest: 8 Films to Die For” (no word on what that does to the series’ promotional campaign), a weekend of hardcore horror flicks that, if you live in Los Angeles, you’ve seen the flippin’ billboards for everywhere.
Featuring Snoop himself, Proactiv candidate Danny Trejo, Anson Mount, erstwhile Playmate Brande Roderick, Lin Shaye, Billy Dee Williams, Jason Alexander, Method Man, Ernie Hudson and others, Hood of Horror will screen in 35 markets and in over 500 theaters
on Sunday, November 19 at 10 p.m. before its general release in early 2007.
Xenon Pictures is also offering a contest on www.jumpcut.com,
where contestants can use animated clips to create a new trailer for the film. The
two winning entries will walk away with $250 cash, and have their efforts film’s
web site and eventual DVD release. For more information on this and Hood of Horror in general, click here.
At the Intersection of Hoops and Film
If the kick-off of college basketball season has you pumped and reaching for your well-worn copy of Hoosiers, there are other worthy flicks out there as well to indulge a shared appetite for roundball and film. Everyone knows about Steve James’ Hoop Dreams, but for a more up-to-date look at the pressures facing elite high school athletes as they decide where to matriculate at the next level, check out the documentary Through the Fire, which debuted at AFI Fest in 2005 and released on DVD earlier this year. For a more in-depth review, click here.
Family Guy: Volume Four
Another animated sitcom of exaggerated proportion, creator Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy is sort of a love-it-or-hate-it proposition, and I freely admit that it eventually reaches a point of diminishing return, where it’s only really funny in relation to your understanding of and appreciation for the characters. “More is more,” could be the unofficial credo of the show, much to the chagrin of those invested in quaint notions of story. The difference is that Family Guy‘s characters are so out there, and its setting (Rhode Island) and point-of-view are so canted and different from a lot of other sitcoms out there that it can be willfully ridiculous and still fairly successfully funny at the same time, if ultimately fleeting and a bit forgettable., talks, and is actually a much more central character than either Chris or Meg.<BR><BR>If that sounds strange, that’s only the beginning of <I>Family Guy</I>‘s off-centeredness. Not only are <B>almost all of its jokes tossed-off asides</B>, but its putative B-plotlines are frequently just as esoteric or out there (e.g., Stewie loses sleep over <A href=)
The Da Vinci Code, Chris battles a talking zit and the angry monkey that lives in his closet). There are times when the story stops cold so that Peter can engage in a two-minute fight sequence with a giant, evil-eyed chicken. “PTV” and “Brian Goes Back to College” kick things off, with the former finding Peter refuting the FCC’s stringent new broadcast standards (leading to this hilarious song) and realizing that everything is much more interesting when framed as part of a reality TV show and the latter highlighting the differences in Brian’s intellectual interests and pursuits from the rest of the family. Other episodic highlights include “I Take Thee Quagmire” and “The Courtship of Stewie’s Father.”
It’s fitting that since Family Guy was rescued from the trash bin of cancelled TV series by (at least partly) its robust reception on DVD, this release includes a heaping helping of supplemental material. First off, it must be noted that the full frame, 1.33:1 presentation of the series looks exceptionally pristine, though that may speak more to the cruddy broadcast quality of my local Fox affiliate than anything else. In addition to jocular audio commentaries on every episode from MacFarlane and other writers, Family Guy: Volume Four also includes multi-angle scene studies on four episodes (“PTV,” “Brian Goes Back to College,” “Patriot Games” and “Sibling Rivalry”) and a featurette that shows one how to sketch the irascible Stewie.
The bulk of the supplemental material is available on the last disc, and includes a seven-minute walking tour of the writers’ offices and animation studio with frequent guest voice Adam West, as well as a 15-minute look at what it means to be a director on an animated show. The disc’s crown jewel, though, comes in the form of more than 40 deleted scenes; if the show’s scattershot humor is right up your alley in the first place, these are like manna from heaven, and definitely provide some fun new clips for your outgoing answering machine message. B- (Show) A- (Disc)
A Good Year
Russell Crowe smiling! Truly, Ridley Scott’s A Good Year is a strange thing to behold. Dewy and inert, it’s a film that could be packaged alongside Under the Tuscan Sun and sold with matching, his-and-hers fluffy bathrobes. It’s made by people who are talented, absolutely, but also
wholeheartedly sure of that talent. The phrase “courage of one’s
convictions” comes to mind, insomuch as there’s a foolhardy confidence
that comedy has a single definitive formula that can be cracked like
the spine of a book. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.
Publicity, David Lynch-Style
Terry Gilliam rustled up publicity for his film Tideland recently by panhandling in the streets of New York, but David Lynch has one-upped him and further consolidated his bemusing hold on the throne of Auteur Oddity. He was spotted in Hollywood yesterday at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea Avenue — a busy but by no means essential intersection. With him? A cow on a leash and two signs, one reading, “Without cheese there would be no Inland Empire,” and the other touting star Laura Dern’s performance in Lynch’s latest head-trip. You can check out a YouTube.com clip of the curiosity, captured by two passersby, by clicking here.
F*ck
What’s in a word? Quite a lot, of course. Sticks and stones may break our bones, as the saying goes, but words still hold a very particular power to hurt, enrage, mollify and titillate. Those who think that vocabulary by and large doesn’t matter or that the examination of modern language is too much of an abstraction (“Just live in the moment, man!”) are wrong, and missing the point. is interested in language, too. So much so that he made an entire film based around one word. <STRONG>Entitled <EM>F*ck</EM>, it’s a documentary about that very famous, oft-used, titular expletive</STRONG>, and both its remarkable flexibility and the affection, amusement and outright hostility that it engenders. There are other so-called dirty words, naturally, but <STRONG>“fuck” is the gold standard of curses</STRONG>. It’s a word that completely permeates our culture — from Howard Stern’s daily radio broadcasts to Vice President Cheney’s curt dismissal of <A href=)
Senator Patrick Leahy and President Bush’s “one-fingered victory salute” — yet still likely appeared above with an asterisk or hyphen. While many terms — from “love” to “bitch,” and dozens more — carry a significant emotional weight and are thus potential powder kegs of response, there’s not another word in the English language that so alternately vexes, amuses and enthralls us.
Buoyed by a few animated clips from Bill Plympton, Anderson’s movie delves into the word’s history and impact through a variety of film and television clips and, predominantly, talking head interviews. The latter subjects include a wide range of folks, from many of those that you’d expect to be tapped for a project of this sort (Bill Maher, Kevin Smith, a handful of porn stars) to an equal number that you might not (Ice-T, Sam Donaldson).
Clerks director Smith — who with his debut film helped perpetuate if not invent a new lexicon of hybrid swearing, and infamously dragged the definition of “snowballing” into the light of day — speaks in a fairly reasoned form about his opinion in relation to God’s thoughts on language; fellow entertainment industry vets like Alanis Morissette, Deadwood creator David Milch, Steven Bochco and Drew Carey also have some interesting perspectives. Carey in particular highlights how those that so loudly decry the word often impart a thin veneer of classism.
While Anderson’s own personal views are clear, given the manner in which he assays the Federal Trade Commission’s seeming hypocrisy regarding fines, there are also a host of more conservative souls given wide berth within F*ck, including “Miss Manners” Judith Martin, conservative talk show host Dennis Prager, perennial political candidate Alan Keyes, Morality in Media president Robert Peters, singer Pat Boone (who uses his own surname in exclamatory fashion whenever he feels the need to curse) and Janet LaRue, the chief counsel for the Concerned Women for America. Most of these folks are equally well reasoned and articulate, and lay out a convincing case for the abetting and subsidizing of something that all parties agree should begin with more parental responsibility.
Some of the random bits of arcana tossed out in passing are hilarious (“Ford’s economics are the worst thing that’s happened to the country since pantyhose ruined finger-fucking,” Lyndon Johnson is quoted as saying in a passage you won’t likely find cited in any compendium of presidential oration), and Lenny Bruce’s trailblazing comedy and George Carlin‘s infamous routine about the seven words you can’t say on television get some nice run.
Still, Anderson fails to fully plumb the history of the word, which has been around for centuries, and first appeared in print in 1475. Furthermore, there are pockets of the film that raise interesting questions about the persistence of the word’s shock value (e.g., you need a group to not accept it for it still to have heft), and I wish Anderson had spent more time with Stanford linguistics professor Geoffrey Nunberg and Jesse Shiedlower, the principal editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. These folks, and a few others, rate lower on the “star chart,” but often have more interesting and detailed perspectives to offer than, say, Ron Jeremy.
Anderson also misses a fun opportunity to deftly tie things together. It would have been interesting, for instance, to ask participants their first memory of the word, either heard or used. As is, Anderson’s work is a fleeting F*ck — quite lively, interesting and engaging in its own right, but maybe not quite the definitive fucking film that it could have been. (THINKFilm, unrated, 93 minutes)
A Sneak Peek at 300
For the full report, from Rotten Tomatoes, click here.
Come Early Morning
I wrote a bit earlier about the directorial debut of former Chasing Amy star Joey Lauren Adams, Come Early Morning. Starring Ashley Judd as a woman struggling to overcome the familial dysfunction around her, Come Early Morning is a movie driven by slow revelations,
subtext and inner quietude, and while it’s not a perfect movie, amidst the cacophonous offerings of today’s
cinematic landscape, on balance those are certainly welcome things.
Adams has an interesting and
steadfastly unflashy (read: un-commercial) predilection for uncommunicative standoffishness, and
Judd can take these scenes and quietly make them naturally gripping without
injecting too many streaks of overt showiness. For the full review, from IGN, click here.
Ryan Murphy’s… Sigh… Dirty Tricks
It’s somewhat old news, I realize, but the cast keeps growing for Nip/Tuck creator and Running with Scissors director Ryan Murphy’s Dirty Tricks, an adaptation of John Jeter’s stageplay about the women of Watergate, which I realize sounds like a special Playboy spread. Brad Pitt and Sharon Stone have joined the cast, which already includes Meryl Streep as the whistle-blowing Martha Mitchell, Annette Bening as frumpy reporter Helen Thomas, Gwyneth Paltrow as Maureen Dean and (naturally) Murphy good-luck charm Jill Clayburgh as Pat Nixon. (Jim Broadbent is reportedly set to play Tricky Dick himself.)
Mitchell’s various revelations to journalists, of course, — including Bob Woodward, who
broke news of the Watergate story, as well as veteran White House
correspondent Thomas, still walking the beat — firmly implicated her husband in the
scandal, but also corroborated Nixon’s involvement. Great. So there’s a story there, maybe. But while I don’t know if it’s the hermetically sealed colorfulness of Running with Scissors or what, why can’t I shake the feeling that this is a bad idea? Or at least an interesting idea that will be done badly?
Free Screening of The History Boys
For those on the left coast or planning to for some reason be in Los Angeles next week, Fox Searchlight is offering up free seats at a promotional screening of The History Boys, its new film from director Nicholas Hytner, on Thursday, November 16 at 7:30 p.m. The movie tells the story of a class of bright but unruly history students in pursuit
of an undergraduate placement at Oxford or Cambridge. Richard Griffiths plays their maverick
English instructor, while Clive Merrison is a headmaster obsessed with results. RSVPs are accepted on a first come, first served basis. For location information and to RSVP, click here.
Faux Oscar Dark Horse
With pre-anointed contender after contender falling by the wayside and support registering as less than firm for some of the other ostensible heavy hitters, chances are looking better and better for Little Miss Sunshine to sneak up and grab a couple of top-shelf Oscar nominations. An Academy campaign veteran tells me to expect a “late and classy” but overwhelming push on the film’s behalf from distributor Fox Searchlight.
The company previously and most famously pulled an Oscar rabbit out of its hat with The Full Monty, and they have a deft touch with putting little movies in a place to succeed, both critically and financially. They’ll be a bit busy pushing Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland, but that’s a one-horse show. Little Miss Sunshine will get the nostalgic underdog selling, touting its little-indie-that-could box office ($58 million and counting) and reminding those folks in theory how much better it was than the rest of the summer’s fare.
Of course, on one level it’s hard to really classify this as a dark horse positioning when it’s been in the works for so long. But in a down year like this, there is a pre-seasonal Best Picture slot open, and Little Miss Sunshine will be gunning for it.
The Golden Girls: Season 6
It’s funny, in hindsight, to think of The Golden Girls as the proving/staging ground for Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry and Arrested Development creator Mitchell Hurwitz, both of whom penned more than a dozen episodes of the series during the course of its seven seasons and 159 shows, including several here in this set. (The Golden Girls also gave a chatty youngster named Quentin Tarantino work as an Elvis impersonator, but that’s neither here nor there…)
On the surface, its premise should have rendered the show it a quaint little sitcom for almost exclusively older audiences. Yet the series’ whipsmart joke writing and strongly defined, amusingly drawn characterizations helped it earn not only an incredible 11 Emmy Awards and four Golden Globe statuettes, but also the respect and love of younger adult audiences who recognized a bit of themselves and awakened to the possibility of life after 50.
Per its title, The Golden Girls is centered around three somewhat aged friends — naive Minnesota native Rose Nylund (Betty White), promiscuous Southern belle Blanche Devereaux (Rue McClanahan) and perpetually exasperated den mother Dorothy Petrillo-Zbornak (Bea Arthur) — who live together in the retirement haven of Miami along with Dorothy’s cuttingly sarcastic mother Sophia (Estelle Getty). The fall-back template for much of its comedy lies in the nudging, back-biting and loving sniping of their own relationships, but comedic fodder is often also found in their various romantic liaisons.
That’s certainly true of this penultimate season, in which Dorothy attempts to reconcile with ex-hubby Stan (Herb Edelman), only to have old problems flare up; she later gets wooed by none other than Sonny Bono. Sophia takes Blanche’s tips to attract men, leading to some unique disasters. Rose, meanwhile, tries skydiving to add some spice to what on the surface is an unlikely relationship. Other guest stars this season include Debbie Reynolds and Jeffrey Tambor.
Presented in 1.33:1 full screen, the 26 episodes of The Golden Girls: Season 6 come spread out over three discs and housed in an attractive cardboard slipcover in a pastel-hued shade of purple. The audio is anchored by a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound track, and there’s a chat from a retrospective on the show from the Museum of Television and Radio, part of their nice recurrent series on sitcoms and serials of yesteryear. B+ (Series) B (Disc)
Aardman Animations Efforts Screen in NYC
Flushed Away and last year’s Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the
Were-Rabbit. The program includes the deliriously funny Rex the Runt (pictured above), plus Penny, Pib & Pog, Angry Kid, Morph, the groundbreaking “Sledgehammer” music video for Peter
Gabriel and installments of the company’s Wallace
& Gromit and Creature Comforts
shorts.
Recommended for ages 10+, the compendium screens at 11 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday, November 18 and 19, at the IFC Center, 323 Sixth Avenue at West Third. For more information, click here, or phone (212) 349-0330.
Uwe Boll Plots Next Screen Crime
As previously discussed, director Uwe Boll (Alone in the Dark) already has a few more films in the can and awaiting release. Now comes news that he’s plotting a sequel to BloodRayne, courtesy of the deceptively named Brightlight Pictures. Instead of erstwhile Terminator 3 hottie Kristanna Loken, though, this woman will instead presumptively lace up in leather. That would be Natassia Malthe, who also looks like this. While the world’s film critics alternately weep and box the effusive German filmmaker, Boll continues to get paid, yo, thus validating the genius of P.T. Barnum’s oft-invoked maxim.
