Daily Archives: April 30, 2007

Next

Film Reviews

There’s typically just something kind of right about Nicolas Cage and dusty localities, from John Dahl’s criminally underrated Red Rock West to David Lynch’s enthusiastically overwrought road trip Wild at Heart,
which winds its way across the country on what might be described as
the a fever dream tour of demented trailer parks, both literal and
figurative. Maybe it’s because, for all the charm and magnetism of his
easygoing smile, there’s still something slightly wounded and aloof
about Cage; a bit melancholic even when he’s happy, he seems vaguely
wolfish, and is thus easy to imagine skulking around in a desert,
searching for something, the content of which even he might not know.

Next, with its slightly orange-hued trailers and TV ads, has the look, on its
surface, of another enjoyably dusty Cage flick, albeit much more of the
disposable popcorn variety. But a collectable-worthy Sin City Cage trilogy (alongside Honeymoon in Vegas and Leaving Las Vegas), alas, Next, does not make.
In fact, it’s not heresy, I promise, to say that Next doesn’t really qualify as a film. A sort of wan warm-up for the heroism of his now-lensing National Treasure sequel, Next is a shrugging, unsolvable riddle, if not necessarily a completely boring one.

Its future-vision gimmickry is flippantly handled, and one can’t reasonably parse
the specifics of the nuclear bomb plot with any more clarity, only that
an oft-mentioned “eight million lives” are hanging in the balance.
Sense is reduced to a greater-than/less-than sign; it’s a simple
cinematic equation you’re being asked to buy into. Cage, meanwhile, looks pensive, and is occasionally charming. Next is a
piece of good-time, eye-catching, desperately of-the-moment entertainment that just happens to be captured in celluloid form. That said, its hold is still awfully loose. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Sigourney Weaver to Join Baby Mama

Casting About, Musings

I wrote recently about Sigourney Weaver’s success in negotiating the perils of aging in Hollywood, and her success in balancing projects of wildly dissimilar tone. And The Hollywood Reporter now indicates that Weaver is in negotiations to join Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in the comedy Baby Mama, the directorial debut of former Saturday Night Live, Thunderbirds and Undercover Brother writer Michael McCuller.

The film, for Universal, is about a single professional woman (Fey) whose desire to have a child and simultaneously maintain her career track leads her to hire a surrogate (Poehler); Weaver will play the owner and operator of the surrogate agency that Fey’s character uses.

Coming on the heels of her recently released work in Jake Kasdan’s The TV Set and Marc Evans’ Snow Cake, opposite Alan Rickman, Weaver’s turn in Baby Mama will follow appearances in the presidential assassination thriller Vantage Point, with William Hurt, Forest Whitaker and Dennis Quaid, and her co-starring role in James Cameron’s highly anticipated Avatar. Fleet of foot and multi-talented, Weaver is definitely following through on her advice of mixing it all up with parts big, small, funny and sad, and in the process remaining one of the more flatly enjoyable screen presences out there; when you see her, you know you’re going to get something interesting, whatever the context surrounding it.

Binky Goes Nuts

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Kids’ television show titles are always kind of difficult to
gauge as an adult, largely because I’m so juvenile and immature that when I
think of kids, I still think of the line from the South Park movie: “The world is pretty gay/But it doesn’t seem that
way/Through the eyes of a child.” That said, I love things going nuts, so the DVD debut of Binky Goes Nuts, a collection of episodes from the animated PBS
show Arthur, clearly had me at hello.

Featuring four stories from the Daytime Emmy Award-winner for
Outstanding Children’s Animated Program, this special DVD offers both kids and
their parents and teachers insights into important health issues for children,
including nut allergies and the benefits of exercise. In the title segment, when
Binky discovers that he’s allergic to peanuts, he has so many questions: Will
he be forced to live without Chinese food? Will he ever again be able to eat
with his friends? And most importantly, will his Mom ever chill the eff out? After
some general hand-wringing, Binky learns that the best way not to “go nuts” is
to be well informed and better understand his allergy.

“Breezy Listening Blues” finds Brain scoring a low B on a
test — only one notch above a dreaded C! Determined to get to the bottom of what
caused this disaster before he loses what’s left of his evidentally melting I.Q.,
Brain investigates whether the new “Breezy Listening” background music playing
at the ice cream shop could be the source of his troubles. In “Arthur Weighs In,”
when Arthur doesn’t fit into his costume for the school play, he’s shocked to
learn that he’s gotten “husky-sized.” So he becomes serious about getting in
shape. Will he turn to an all-protein diet? Eat only herbs and berries? In the
end, he tries something even more radical — exercise! The final segment is
entitled “The Law of the Jungle Gym,” and it centers around Muffy, who’s found
the perfect place to take pictures with her new digital camera: the jungle gym.
Unfortunately, bully Molly tries to run Muffy right out of her new space.

Housed in a regular Amray case and presented in 4×3 full
screen, each segment of Binky Goes Nuts
runs around 13 minutes or so, making for a title that clocks in at under an
hour. All in all, it’s a breezily entertaining title, with light, lesson-based
moralizing and entertainment equally balanced. This DVD release includes
downloadable educational materials, including classroom activities in both
English and Spanish. To order this title or any other DVD release from WGBH
Boston Video, phone (800) 949-8670 or visit
their eponymous Web site’s shop by clicking here. B (Show) C (Disc)

Crowe and Scott Team Again

Casting About, Musings

It seems that Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe aren’t done with one another just yet. Variety is reporting that their respective man-crushes will continue for a fourth picture, with Scott set to direct the no-nonsense actor in the Universal Pictures action drama Nottingham, sold last year as a spec script by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris, creators
of the Showtime series Sleeper Cell, as well as writers of Bulletproof Monk.

Crowe will star as the titular sheriff in a revisionist take on the
Robin Hood tale, with Nottingham cast as a noble lawman who labors
under the rule of a corrupt king, and as caught up in a love triangle with Maid Marion and
Robin Hood. The movie comes on the heels of Scott and Crowe’s last collaboration, American Gangster, and will shoot after the filmmaker finishes directing Leonardo DiCaprio in Body of Lies. Brian Grazer will produce the film for Imagine Entertainment.

Casting will say a lot about this movie, which is easy to see in multiplexes, if not exactly thrilling, on the surface of things. It’ll be interesting to see how high the producers and bankrollers stretch for Robin Hood, who by default is here playing second fiddle. As for Maid Marion (assuming she’s halfway decently sketched), paging Rachel McAdams… If she can’t be coaxed into a commitment, however, one could see Rachel Weisz in the part, I suppose, depending on how high the spitfire quotient is.

The Invisible

Film Reviews



Caught in a state of bodily limbo, well-off but emotionally isolated teenager Nick Powell (Justin Chatwin, above) must try to unravel his own death in David Goyer’s The Invisible, an evocatively gloomy, elliptical drama of redemption that pretty nicely captures the palpable disconnection of youth. The problem is that the race-against-time elements aren’t always quite galvanizing enough to elicit and hold the attention and appreciation of younger audiences wanting or expecting a goosing supernatural thriller. This is much more a character-rooted, sustained mood piece than a commercially geared film, but since it’s about teenagers, well… it faces an uphill climb wooing its target demographic. All in all, though, certainly not a bad movie. For the full review, from Screen International, click here.