Daily Archives: May 25, 2007

Bug

Film Reviews

Bug stars Ashley Judd as a haggard small town waitress caught up in a spin cycle of poor choices and revisited consequences. She hooks up with a quiet and nervous but kindly drifter (Michael Shannon, above right) who turns out to be an Army deserter, and it’s not long before his paranoid rantings about parasitic bugs in his blood stream have rubbed off on her, and they’re feeding off of one another’s wide-eyed, rampantly increasing obsession.

Bug tangentially recalls certain thrillers of containment like Cube,
movies which are constructed, at least to some degree, around a plot
device or setting that explains their limited production means. Another
movie Bug recalls in fits and starts, actually, is director Richard Linklater’s Tape, another stage-born, three-character piece, unfolding in a single dingy hotel room, in which old transgressions and recrimination are dragged out into the ugly, fluorescent light. Like Tape, Bug courses with a similar airborne tension born
of unreliable characters and shifting rationales. Unlike Linklater’s
film, though, Bug‘s act breaks are hard and
discrete, and if many of its set pieces individually contain a queasy, goosing
energy, in aggregate there’s not a smooth plane of ascension to all the
dizzied-up paranoia. Things become panicky, but remain willfully ambiguous. For director Friedkin, these buggy characters are enough of a reason to submit to the film. Those who enjoy arthouse character studies will likely agree, but mainstream audiences looking for the next big psychological disturbance
will have to wait a few weeks until Hostel II. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

On Hairspray’s Test Scores

Irritations, Musings

I’m steadfast in my blaming of both TiVo and my girlfriend for this, but I admit that I recently caught part of Oprah Winfrey’s show, I believe from May 14, with most of the cast of Hairspray. On it, Oprah indulged her longstanding crush on John Travolta by batting her lashes and goofily hoofing it with him, and there was a nice casting bit with Nikki Blonsky, who was plucked from ice cream shop obscurity to star in the film by director Adam Shankman.

As detailed here, from a peek at advance footage last month, the movie actually looks good, or at the very least of a piece and consistently energetic. What rankles, though, or at least stands out as ridiculous, was Travolta’s on-air assertion, when lobbed an obviously tipped-off Winfrey softball about its advance testing with audiences, that Hairspray was the “highest scoring movie in history.” Really?

Look, I can’t immediately summon to mind all the other examples, but in around 10 years of film reportage, I’ve heard this very statement about, no lie, probably 15 or so different movies, from producers, directors and stars alike. It always struck me as somewhat desperate — something to talk about it lieu of the actual content and artistry of the film. Distributor New Line is obviously enthusiastic about the finished product (you don’t trot out footage this far in advance if you’re not), but is pushing cotton, as it were, over the prospect of selling a grand-gesture musical to a summer audience conditioned to look for more spoon-fed explosions and thrills.

Ergo, this sort of attempt at pre-selling word-of-mouth. Travolta’s comment was partially qualified (as in prefaced by, “I think it was”) — cloaked in blithe, movie star-ese — but in my view it’s still a goddamned stupid thing to say. I get that this tack is a consequence of a world where weekend box office grosses get mainstream press coverage, but it’s cynical and it devalues, in ways both specific and less concrete, the creative and aesthetic achievements of films, even if one accepts the false supposition that such rendered statements are always true. Hairspray is currently set
for wide release on July 20. For more information, click here.

John Cusack Haunted by Carpenters

Ephemera, Musings, Trailer Watch

Just as Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You, Babe” took on its own special hell in 1993’s Groundhog Day, so too does the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun” in 1408, a thriller of containment, based on a short story by Stephen King, set for release this summer, June 22.

The film stars John Cusack as Mike Enslin, a cynical writer with a shattered past. Enslin has penned a a string of bestselling “spooky travel” tomes, centered around the most infamous haunted houses and graveyards around the country. He takes as his latest challenge the titular suite in New York City’s Dolphin Hotel, as part of a book project entitled Ten
Nights in Haunted Hotel Rooms. Defying the warnings of the Dolphin’s manager (Samuel L. Jackson), Enslin checks in and quickly becomes plagued by visions both general and unnervingly specific.

He’s also intimidated by a clock radio that, even after being ripped from the wall, occasionally blares out “We’ve Only Just Begun,” as it counts down the hour that he ostensibly has left to live. It’s a characteristically sardonic sort of detail from King, not played for laughs like with “I Got You, Babe,” but also not without its tongue-in-cheek amusement. Besides, the Carpenters’ “I Won’t Last a Day Without You” or Hall & Oates’ “Maneater” would’ve been a little too on the nose, I reckon. I’ll have more discrete thoughts on the film itself later next week, but in the meantime, for 1408‘s trailer, click here.