Miss Potter star Renée Zellweger might have helped drag her modest, turn-of-the-century biopic to wider commendation.
However, Helen Mirren’s towering turn as Elizabeth I in the HBO film of the same name and as Elizabeth II in The Queen
effectively
cornered the 2006 market on real-life British figures, sucking the
awards circuit oxygen out of the room.
Miss Potter, then, remains a story of bucolic idyll — a dainty-literary piece in the mold of Finding Neverland, but one with no profound or stirring rumination on imagination, or loss, or any of the other themes that the movie putatively touches upon. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.
It’s a happy birthday to Gene Hackman, who turns frickin’ 77 years old today, and will probably celebrate by punching out some motorist who steps to him. Your phlegmy turn in the underrated Heartbreakers (yeah, I said it…) is a thing of beauty, Gene, and though I know you’re probably busy penning another novel, please don’t fully disconnect your phone. We need something to wash the taste of Welcome to Mooseport out of our mouths.
So I caught Catch and Release for review last week, and it triggered another big screen irritation with insert shots for the lowest common denominator. A week after his death, after she’s already discovered a secret bank account with a hefty balance, there’s a point in the film where Jennifer Garner’s bereaved Gray comes across her deceased fiancé’s cell phone, and further cements the discovery that she didn’t know quite everything
she thought she did about him. Someone was calling late at night, you see; “10 missed calls,” reads the cell phone.
So eventually (which is to say, the next scene, the following day) Gray has to try to call this person back. We see her fiddling with the established cell phone, obviously to pull up the number to call. She then dials from her office phone. Instead of conveying this with one shot, though, director Susannah Grant gives us another look at “10 missed calls,” with Gray scrolling to the number. Why 10? Well, so there’s a full screen of the same number, of course, so there’s no possible confusion about what’s going on, even though the answering machine message that Gray reaches on the other end matches the voice of the messages she’s already listened to on her fiancé’s phone. Thanks Hollywood, thanks a lot. What a money shot. If you’re not engaged enough in the movie to pick up on and follow a simple detail like this, you’re an idiot. And don’t tell me this was for the technology-impaired, over-60 set. Is that Catch and Release‘s core audience?
For those Stateside and on the left coast, meanwhile — more specifically, the Bay area — Inland Empire will bow in Santa Cruz on Friday, February 9 at the beautiful Del Mar Theatre, alongside a newly restored print of 1964’s Beckett, starring Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton. For directions and more information, click here.
It’s great news for cinephiles, as after more than six years of toiling, Charles Burnett’s fantastic Killer of Sheep will enjoy its first-ever proper theatrical distribution this spring, from Milestone Films. One of the more acclaimed and influential movies by an African-American filmmaker, Killer of Sheep
was one of the first 50 films to be selected for the Library of Congress’
National Film Registry, and was chosen by the National Society of Film Critics
as one of its 100 Essential Films. But, chiefly due to music licensing problems and rights issues, the
film has very rarely been publically screened, and then only typically in film school settings and occasional retrospective presentations.
On occasion of the movie’s 30th anniversary, Milestone cleared all the rights, and will
present the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s dazzling 35mm restoration of
this landmark film. Killer of Sheep will first screen at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival, and then premiere in New York at the IFCCenter on March 30, and in Los
Angeles at the Nuart Theatre on April 6. Set in Watts in the mid-1970s, the movie centers on a sensitive, blue-collar dreamer (Henry Gayle Sanders) haunted by his work at a slaughterhouse, and his struggles to keep his family together, and keep from becoming detached and numb. For more information, click here.
For those in the Los Angeles area, Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s Oscar-winning The Apartmentwill open the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s new Billy Wilder Theater on Friday, February 9 at 7:30 p.m. Appearing in person for a post-screening chat will be Shirley MacLaine, Audrey L. Wilder and Curtis Hanson. Some Like It Hot, meanwhile, will screen the following evening. For the full calendar of upcoming events, click here.
The result is last year’s quietly released adult rom-com Boynton Beach Club, a
middling movie about the amazing capacity of the human heart to rebound and fall in love at any
age.
Recently widowed Marilyn (Vaccaro), still reeling
over the sudden passing of her husband, finds an unexpected new circle of friends
when she accepts an invitation to join the titular bereavement group.
While not ready to embark on a relationship herself, she is amused to realize
that so many of her contemporaries are actively looking for love.Lois (Cannon) is being courted by a
younger man (Nouri), while Harry (Bologna) tries Internet dating
and encourages his friend Jack (Cariou) to pursue a romance with the
mysterious Sandy (Kellerman). Through all sorts of ups and downs, these adults rage — individually and collectively — against the autumn of their years.
Boynton Beach Club posits that “60 is the new 40,” though this is more a product of fanciful language than realistic depiction. That the movie is able to wring occasional laughs from its set-ups is a testament to both some of its cast — Cariou and Bologna are in particular quite nice — but also its bawdiness, its refusal to conform to staid expectations regarding the niceties of language, body image and the like. Writer-director Eric Schaeffer tried this in 2001’s Never Again, with Jeffrey Tambor and Jill Clayburgh, which fitfully achieved patches of interest, and Boynton Beach Club goes down much more smoothly, if not quite as, ahem, memorably. So that’s a good thing, actually, but also a bit indifferent. Cannon is serviceable, much more sympathetic than I remember seeing her before, but I didn’t have much use for Kellerman, alas. It’s the aforementioned men that strike one as most interesting, surprising for a film with so much estrogen coursing through its veins.
Presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen that preserves the aspect ratio of its original (however limited) theatrical exhibition, Boynton Beach Club comes with a 5.1 Dolby digital English language track, and optional English subtitles. The transfer is relatively nice, and free of digital artifacting and, for the most part, grain. Seidelman also sits for a feature-length audio commentary track, the disc’s sole supplemental feauture. Therein, she discusses her own mother’s grappling with aging, and what she thinks it foretells for her, as well as all manner of production anecdote, sprinkled liberally along with much genial backslapping and congratulations for the cast. C (Movie) C+ (Disc)
The obligatory “early jobs” question gives way to this response from Brad Pitt: “I had a job driving strippers around… my job was to drive them to bachelor parties and things. I’d pick them up, and at the gig I’d collect the money, play the bad Prince tapes and catch the girls’ clothes. It was not a wholesome atmosphere, and it got very depressing. After two months I went in to quit, and the guy said, ‘Listen, I’ve got this one last gig tonight.’ So I did it, and this girl — I’d never met her before — was in an acting class taught by a man named Roy London [a famous acting coach]. I went and checked it out, and it really set me on the path to where I am now.”
Ahh, yet another reason to love Pitt: his disarming penchant for candor, even as the most paparazzi-hounded star on the planet. For the rest of the full, lively conversation — which also includes Cate Blanchett, Forest Whitaker, Penelope Cruz, Helen Mirren and Leonardo DiCaprio — click here.
That former porn star, wrestling show producer and (apparently) metal enthusiastJasmin St. Claire“hosts” this disc is its main claim to fame, but even that shouldn’t be enough to inspire a rental or purchase from anyone but the most hardcore metal devotee with an Andrew Jackson burning a hole in his or her wallet, and absolutely no proximity to a Taco Bell.
The disc’s subtitle, if you will, is “The Deeply Disturbed,” and that appropriately describes the feeling one will likely have after subjecting themselves to the screeching, screaming, posing and derisible pontificating of this roster of rightfully undiscovered and unacclaimed bands. The track listing is as follows: an interview with Paul Romanko and Brian Fair, of Shadows Fall (not to be confused with Darkness Falls); an interview with Terrance Hobbs and Frank Mullen of Suffocation, followed by the music video for their song “Surgery of Impalement”; an interview with Rick Hunolt and Gary Holt of Exodus, followed by the music video for “War Is My Shepherd”; an interview with members of Deconstruct, followed by live footage of a performance of “Deeper Down”; an interview with The Black Dahlia Murder’s Trevor Strand and Brian Eschbach; and an interview with Arch Enemy’s Sharlee D’Angelo.
The cachet, I suppose, comes from the scope of the material, which spans from backstage at the Key Club in Los Angeles to the NAMM Music Conference and a small roster of other summer music festivals. Unfortunately, though, the mix of back-slapping biographical chat and balls-to-the-wall tunage is an awkward one, and at a scant 70-plus minutes, makes for a disc that’s irritating on several levels. Naturally, despite her enthusiasm, St. Claire isn’t necessarily the most discerning interviewer. Despite a few bonus videos — Fight Paris’ “Complete Heat” and Firewind’s “Tyranny” — I found this a big waste of time. Lots of “rawk” signs are flashed, though. And before you write me any hate mail, angry linked readers, just go back to Blackmetal.com already, will you? D- (Concert) C (Disc)
Oscarwatch.com’s Sasha Stone pretty much nails part of the main reason for Little Miss Sunshine‘s popular groundswell of support when she points out the film’s rootedness in idealism in these turbulent times, and its contrast in this manner to the rest of the nominees. Still, while I’d agree with her analysis in respect to the film’s nomination, I’m not yet officially 100% sure this can be extended to a hypothesis that foretells a victory. Best Picture Oscar winners whose directors aren’t at least same-nominated for Academy Awards are few and far between.
But again, Little Miss Sunshine carries the impression of weight or substance, and it’s all pitched in such a heightened fashion as to make audiences feel both that their lives aren’t quite as screwy and/or depressing, and that there’s a profundity at its core. This is why many folks who don’t typically bite on traditional comedies really like the movie. And Fox Searchlight has run a very smart, shrewd awards campaign. So in the end it doesn’t matter that the seams of its story show, or that the characters are willfully colorful responses to the
sort of stale, cardboard characters we see in many broadly pitched,
mainstream comedies — atypical, therefore, but just as flatly
two-dimensional and in blind service to the contrivances of plot as
their less original contemporaries. No, Little Miss Sunshine is beloved because we all want to believe in goodness. It would be interesting to ponder the film’s reception, though, in a parallel universe in which the disasterous quagmire of the Iraq War didn’t exist.
Miss Potter star Renée Zellweger might have helped drag her modest, turn-of-the-century biopic to wider commendation.
₤19.75.  and starring Academy Award nominees Dyan Cannon, Sally Kellerman, Brenda<br />
Vaccaro and Joseph Bologna — as well as erstwhile <i>Flashdance</i> star Michael Nouri, plus Len Cariou — <b><i>Boynton Beach Club</i> feels like a relic of some old-guard Hollywood party, littered as it is with notable players of the 1960s and ’70s</b>. Director<br />
Seidelman’s mother, Florence Seidelman, and her friend David Cramer wrote a story about<br />
life as they experienced it at a so-called “active adult community,” which the younger Seidelman and co-screenwriter Shelly Gitlow then fashioned into a feature film script.<span style=)
The result is last year’s quietly released adult rom-com Boynton Beach Club, a
