Monthly Archives: June 2007

Bridge to Terabithia

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Reserved 11-year-old Jess Aarons (Zathura’s Josh Hutcherson) is a
bit of an outsider — both at school and, as the only boy among five siblings
in a working-class family of seven, at home as well. When he strikes
up a friendship with the quirky new girl in his small town, Leslie Burke (AnnaSophia Robb,
from Because of Winn-Dixie and The Reaping), she introduces him to a world of
imagination. Together they create the secret kingdom of Terabithia, a
magical place only accessible by swinging on an old rope over a stream
in the woods near their homes. There they play-act a series of
fantastical escapades against figurative representations of school
bullies and, in the process, change each other for the better.

Based on Katherine Paterson’s popular Newbery Award-winning novel,
Bride to Terabithia is part family drama, part adolescent fantasy – a
movie about friendship, as well as about the power and exhilaration of
a blossoming imagination. Beautifully fleshed out in non-pandering
fashion by screenwriters John Stockwell and David Paterson, and
directed with a clear, streamlined tone by Emmy Award-winning producer Gabor Csupo (The Simpsons), the film mines
a deep reservoir of genuine feeling that’s often missing in adolescent
entertainment, combining it with just the right amount of sensory
pleasures. Robb and Hutcherson are warm and engaging; the
conflicts, schemes and resolutions are also all believably to scale,
resulting in a winning piece of family-friendly entertainment.

Housed in a regular Amray case with a raised-print, hard-stock cardboard slipcover, Bridge to Terabithia is presented on DVD in anamorphic widescreen, preserving the aspect ratio of its theatrical presentation. Two separate audio commentary tracks headline the slate of bonus materials — one from director Csupo, writer Stockwell and producer Hal Leiberman, the other from cast members Hutcherson and Robb, and producer Lauren Levine. Depending on what sort of information you most want to hear — pre-production back story or goofy production anecdotes — each is worthy in its own right. A six-minute featurette on the movie’s special effects work — by Weta Digital, the visionary, Oscar-winning digital arthouse that created the visual masterpiece of Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings trilogy — is a worthwhile inclusion, while “Keep Your Mind Open,” a music video featuring Robb, is pure fluff. Rounding things out is a solid little 15-minute production featurette, including interviews with novelist Paterson and cast and crew members. A- (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Bruce Willis on The Daily Show

Ephemera, Musings

I caught Bruce Willis on The Daily Show on Tuesday night, June 26, in support of Live Free or Die Hard, just in advance of its Wednesday release. He and Jon Stewart spent about half of their allotted time talking about Salem County, and other municipalities of southern New Jersey — it was kind of bizarre. It reminded me of this post I wrote about selling a turd, inspired by a talk show appearance by Sandra Bullock (also on The Daily Show, actually) while stumping for  the utterly dreadful Premonition. I don’t think that’s the case here, though (e.g., that Willis thinks he has a piece of crap movie on his hands), but even if it were, the key difference is that ol’ Bruno knows how to keep it light with grade-A banter. Willis possesses a unique combination of self-effacement, guile, cool emotional distance and great anecdotal savvy; he had Stewart in stitches with offbeat stories about his work as a security guard at a nuclear power plant during its construction.

Jurassic Park III

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

It’s summer, and I was just attacked by a velociraptor this past weekend, so what better time, really, to re-post this DVD review of Jurassic Park III, originally from 2001? Oh, there’s also the fact that it costars Téa Leoni, who’s in the just-released You Kill Me, and is also totally hot.

Téa Leoni), contract Grant’s services. Under the
impression that he’s merely serving as a well-paid emcee on a low fly-by, Grant
awakens to discover he’s back in the one place in the world he least wants to
be.

With very few and very minor story qualms aside, Jurassic Park III is
structurally sound; it’s an easy story to buy into, and under director Joe
Johnston’s solid summer romp guidance, there’s plausible suspension of
disbelief. A good deal of credit should also go to the unlikely pinch-hit
writing team of Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor (Election), who stepped in and
did such a significant stem-to-stern rewrite that they ended up sharing
screenplay credit with Peter Buchman. It would have been very easy for the
character of Grant, though necessary as a guide and narrative device, to be an
overly cynical and burdensome presence. But he’s not; though often agitated and
exasperated, he’s not grumpy, and we get a surprisingly clear sense of what
Grant feels and has gone through since the events of the original film. By
design, this third installment is a lot more of a straight-up action film than
its predecessors — without the wide-eyed, untainted wonder of these creatures
being (first) brought to life to capture our attention, the filmmakers rightly
realize that the entertainment is in new dinosaurs, new combinations and new
situations.

As one would expect, the DVD is chock full of supplemental extras, including
storyboards, bios, trailers for all three films in the series and an
informative but slightly intrusive feature-length audio commentary from Stan Winston,
animated effects director Dan Taylor and several other techies. The best bets,
though, are a self-guided virtual tour of Winston’s studio, a 3-D look at the
12 dinosaurs created for the film and a special making-of featurette, which
offers viewers insight into the filming of several key set pieces. B+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)

You Kill Me

Film Reviews

With his one-two noir punch of 1994, consisting of the fantastic Red Rock West and equally serpentine and deliciously entertaining The Last Seduction,
director John Dahl made a convincing play for genre all-star honors. He
showed deftness with labyrinthine plot, a great touch with actors and
an ability to milk both menace and dark comedy out of the same scene.
Dahl’s career since those days, though, has been one of a seemingly
stalled engine. A quick studio gig re-teaming with Linda Fiorentino, Unforgettable, proved anything but so. The extremely underrated Rounders starred Edward Norton and Matt Damon, but released in 1998, just a couple years ahead of the full-fledged
poker renaissance; it grossed $22 million, which is probably about what
it would cost to get those two actors back together today. The modestly
budgeted and effectively taut Joyride, putting a slightly modern spin on Steven Spielberg’s classic Duel, rung up $36 million worldwide, Dahl’s biggest hit, but still didn’t break out commercially like many thought it could.
Then there’s the matter of 2005’s The Great Raid,
Dahl’s World War II rescue flick, based on a true story. Budgeted at a
reported $80 million, it was a total commercial washout, grossing only
$10.5 million worldwide.

The somewhat liltingly melancholic hit man character piece You Kill Me, then, represents a return-to-roots of sorts for Dahl — a characteristically small story
with mixed tonalities, about the sparks flying between headstrong
and/or wounded characters. It’s also the director’s first real foray
into comedy. Unfortunately, despite the slight novelty of some of its
performances, the movie never rises above anything more than the sum of
its fractured parts, and it lacks a strong enough narrative spine to
break out much further beyond arthouse devotees.

As an alcoholic Polish mob family killer, Ben Kingsley rolls together traits and trace character elements of several of his previous gangster incarnations (Lucky Number Slevin, Sexy Beast, Bugsy) and puts a sad-sack spin on them.
It’s a strange mixture — sometimes compelling, but also a little vague. For someone experiencing a supposed awakening of the mind or spirit, Kingsley remains surprisingly sedate and down-tempo. Téa Leoni, meanwhile, plays a tart-tongued saleswoman, with her own damaged past, who becomes the object of Kingsley’s character’s affection. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Sam Moore: The Original Soul Man

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

If James Brown was, up until his death, the hardest working
man in show business, Sam Moore couldn’t have been that far behind, as he puts
plenty of heart, soul and sweat into the two shows that comprise this concert
DVD presentation, The Original Soul Man.

As one half of the famous 1960s Stax-minted R&B duo Sam
& Dave — known for their emotional intensity and gospel-infused
call-and-response style — Moore earned seven gold and platinum records and a
1967 Grammy to boot. Supported by the songwriting talents of Isaac Hayes and
David Porter, the group produced a string of hits starting with “You Don’t Know
Like I Know” in ’64, and followed by such classics as “Hold On, I’m Coming,”
“Soul Man” and “Soul Sister, Brown Sugar.” This DVD features two complete mini-concerts
performed by the original soul man. The first set, clocking in at 28 minutes,
was recorded live in Cannes, France
and the second, an 18-minute, three-song affair followed by a rendition of “My
Boyfriend’s Back” by The Angels, comes from the Church Street Station in Kissimmee,
Florida.

Of the two, the former set is the more substantive. Clad in
blue (suit, shirt and, yes, shoes too), Moore has a friendly, welcoming stage
persona, and jokes around a bit between numbers with the crowd (“No, I’m not
going to give you my tie!” he says at one point, when he ditches his yellow-colored
slipknot after “Hold On, I’m Coming.”) It’s funny to see Moore get the French
crowd going with numbers such as “You Got Me Hummin’,” “I Can’t Stand Up” and
“Take What I Want.” The highlight of the show, easily, though, is Moore’s
duet with Carla Thomas on “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby,” a showstopper
in every sense of the word.

The Florida set, I gather from sometime in the ’80s, gives
off a slightly cheesy vibe, though it’s funny to see a crowd boomers shaking
their thing on the dance floor, and three small kids up front near the corner
of the stage, goofing off. The energetic “Wrap It Up, I’ll Take It” (not part of the first
concert) is given a great run here, but it’s “When Something Is Wrong” that
gets everyone slow dancing. That doesn’t stop Moore
from sweating it out, though.

Housed in a regular Amray case, The Original Soul Man is presented on a region-free disc in 1.33:1
full screen, with a Dolby 2.0 stereo audio mix that is adequate if not
mind-blowing. Nit-picking but slightly irritating is the fact that the disc
lists its runtime as 75 minutes, which must be including some of the
self-described “propaganda” clips (not of Moore) that round out the disc,
touting other soul and folk releases from manufacturer Quantum Leap. Moore’s
inclusions, as noted, run well under a combined 50 minutes, so that little fib
marks things down a notch in my book. Other meager bonus features include a
brief biography and discography for Moore,
as well as a scroll-able text history of Stax Records. B (Concerts) C- (Disc)

Live Free or Die Hard

Film Reviews

Bruce is back, baby. And he’s so comfortably besieged. While
a movie not without its faults, Live
Free or Die Hard is like hooking
up with an old girlfriend late one slurry night and realizing all the things
that were right about the relationship. Too rangy by half, the movie
doesn’t quite work in lockstep with the rest of the Die Hard series as a piece of ticking-clock containment, but it’s action-packed,
personality-driven, and at least achieves a certain nimbleness. While Len
Wiseman, of the Underworld series, is
a relatively anonymous director of action, he has a superlative team of
technicians with which to work here. The problem is that in scenes requiring
lots of talking, he typically shoots things too jittery and canted;
furthermore, a good handful of these scenes are quite simply awful in terms of
their coverage and editing, and the ADR overdubs covering up R-rated curse
words are derisible.

Where the film really
succeeds is as a piece of burly, cathartic, uncertain-world entertainment. “Did
you see that?” sputters Justin Long’s computer hacker at one point, to which
Willis’ battered, cynical super-cop replies reflexively, “See it? I did it!” In
the current geopolitical landscape of apathetic delegation, fuzzy-minded
operational objective and botched prosecution, there’s an escapist’s solace to be found in Live Free or Die Hard. Unlike our current leaders, John
McClane always seems to actually have the right answer at just the right
moment, with quip-laden assurance to boot. For
the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Steve Carell: No Longer a Hollywood Virgin

Interviews

There’s a time-honored axiom in the film business that comedy is harder
than drama, so while dramatic performances are typically lauded come
awards season — and the actors that give them both well respected and
rewarded — Hollywood also enthusiastically keeps its eye out for new
comedic talent, since more often than not it’s those types of movies,
typically cheaper to produce, that keep their coffers filled.

After first gaining recognition for his contributions as a
correspondent on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, and more recently on television’s The Office and in 2005’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin — a rare, R-rated comedy smash, to the tune of $175 million worldwide, that wasn’t also pitched solely at a teen-skewing audience — Steve Carell has emerged as one of the most sought after comedic actors
in Hollywood. (Ben Stiller and Will Ferrell can’t headline everything,
after all.)

Evan Almighty, then, easily represents Carell’s biggest screen venture to date,
because it just so happens to also be the most expensive comedy ever
produced. Still, he’s not feeling any pressure. In fact, he seems… strangely normal. “I’m willing to take pretty much any job offered to me,” says Carell, with enough amiable modesty and seeming sincerity to allow him
to pull off such gross misstatements. “I’m pretty amenable, I don’t
really have a path set, like, ‘Well, I need to do this kind of
movie and then that, and then I need to switch it up and play a
psychopathic killer. I don’t look at it that way. …I know that there’s a
window of time that I’ll be able to do these things, so I’m just trying
to do that now, while at the same time be very cautious to not let it
interfere with my family life.” For the full feature piece, from FilmStew, click here.

Transformers Aid Learning

Ephemera

So with Transformers set to bow next week, the franchise is of course making the most of its marketing push, and not merely with a new, tricked-out toyline for kids.

KIDdesigns is trotting out the Transformers Head of the Class Activity Center (ages 5+, $69.99), which looks like the above in its folded-up, compact version, and appears as below when opened up. They’re also releasing a Transformer Trans Portable PC (ages 3+, $29.99). For more information, visit KIDdirect.com by clicking here. (There’s no word, alas, on if there will be a Transformer Micro-Pirate Video Recorder.) For a review of the movie, meanwhile, click here. More thoughts to follow this week.

The Screwfly Solution

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Showtime’s Emmy-winning, hour-long Masters of Horror
series, written and directed by some of the genre’s leading practitioners, has from
its inception married its predilection for macabre, spookiness and well-timed
gore with interesting topicality and sociopolitical inflections, as with John
Carpenter’s Pro-Life.
Another such piece was Joe Dante’s first-season offering Homecoming, which tackled the issue of the Iraq
war in somewhat controversial fashion. Now, with The Screwfly Solution, Dante (The
Howling, Gremlins) returns to the
series, tackling a conflict as old as time itself — the eternal rift between men
and women.

Blending social observation and satirical commentary with
the sort of budgeted horror mayhem that series fans have come to expect, The Screwfly Solution is adapted by Sam
Hamm, from James Tiptree, Jr.’s award-winning short story. It begins with an
unexplained outbreak of isolated homicides around the world, normal male sexual
urges suddenly transformed into violent rage. With the number of incidents on
the rise, a father-son pair of scientists, Alan (Beverly Hills 90210’s Jason Priestley) and Barney (Elliott
Gould, most recently of Ocean’s Thirteen), find themselves locked
in a desperate race against time to figure out both how and why this war
between the sexes has turned murderous. Is a mysterious virus making every
red-blooded man a potential lady-killer? Could the extermination of all women
lead to the extinction of the human race?

Well, duh. While part of the “Masters of Horror” formula lies
in telling a story from a very focused and specific point-of-view, the
narrative conceit herein might be a bit too big, even though it’s framed in
such a fashion, with Kerry Norton (Battlestar
Galactica) co-starring as Alan’s wife Anne, as to make its stakes personal. The Screwfly Solution
is much more graphic than Dante’s previous series entry, but the material seems to
dictate that. Some of the delight to be found in his usual light touch, though, is missed, if understandably not appropriate. Priestley and Gould are an interesting match, and each give good performances. If the piece’s wide-turn climax catches some off-guard, the worst that can be said is that the movie feels like it deserves a larger palette.

Housed in a cardboard slipcover and presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, enhanced for 16×9 televisions,
The Screwfly Solution’s DVD bonus
features include kick off with an audio commentary with Dante and writer Hamm, in
which they talk about the making of the movie, and adapting the short story’s
South American setting for production in Vancouver, but also discuss the state
of the horror genre and industry in general. A brief making-of featurette is
also included, while a segment entitled “The Exterminators” takes a more focused
look at the movie’s special effects. Rounding out matters are a DVD-ROM copy of
the screenplay and an image gallery. B+ (Movie) B (Disc)

Gil Scott-Heron: The Paris Concert

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Beat poetry and longer texts set to free-form blues, folk or
soul music always spark suspicion amongst a certain set of the population,
perhaps because of their pungent association with a certain breed of hippie
that’s no longer (or never was) in favor. Encouraged by writer Langston Hughes,
though, gangly, Tennessee-bred spoken word performer Gil Scott-Heron, the son
of a Jamaican footballer, did some quite interesting things; he tried his hand
at keyboard in several rock groups and published The Nigger Factory,
a raw examination of racial politics and activist university life in the 1970s.

If he’s never really broken out into the mainstream, and
additionally had to battle his own personal demons (he recently served a prison
stint of several years on a drug-possession charge), Scott-Heron is one of
those figures whom other artists you
admire would certainly recognize and cite as an important influence. His music
and lyrics, mixing the political with the poetic, and denouncing the repressive
violence and oppression inflicted upon African-Americans by society at large,
made him a cult hero in the eyes of radical rap and hip-hop musicians
throughout the world.

Newly released on DVD, this concert performance from July of 2001 at the New Morning club in
Paris showcases Scott-Heron’s fine,
bristling soul tradition, billed alongside the Amnesia Express. “Blue Collar”
kicks off the two-hour set, followed by the frequently sampled “A Lovely Day,”
an airy valentine of perfect-stride empowerment. Other tracks include “Three
Miles Down,” “Work for Peace,” “Angel Dust,” “There’s a War Going On,” “Did You
Hear What They Said?,” “Your Daddy Loves You,” “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,”
“Winter in America,” “95 South (All of the Places We’ve Been),” “Johannesburg”
and “The Bottle.” What one sees in these tunes, regardless of their familiarity
with the peddler, is the laid-track for the sort of social consciousness found
in rap from groups as disparate as Public Enemy, The Roots and Common.

Housed in a regular Amray case and presented in 4×3 full
screen on a region-free disc, this disc comes with fairly solid Dolby digital
5.1 and DTS stereo audio tracks. There are no DVD extras (an interview or
something would have been nice), but this DVD is a fine example of a fitfully rebellious
storyteller’s sterling ability. To purchase it via Amazon, click here.
B (Concert) C+ (Disc)

Evan Shows Environmental Concern

Ephemera

Evan Almighty, may be a grand-scale misfire of sorts, but don’t let it be said director Tom Shadyac and distributor Universal didn’t try to do some environmental good with the movie (above), planting over 20 acres of trees in protected areas across America and balancing out the carbon footprint of both the movie’s production and its premiere. For more information on The Conservation Fund, America’s top-rated environmental charity, visit Get on Board by clicking here.

MVD Offers Up Killer Portrait of GG Allin

Ephemera

It has to be the most bizarre DVD tie-in of the week. Celebrating the forthcoming August bow of its special edition
release of Todd Phillips’ documentary Hated,
about punk rocker GG Allin, MVD is giving fans an unusual opportunity — to
purchase a limited edition 18” x 24” replica poster of the GG Allin portrait
that serial killer John Wayne Gacy painted in his jail cell on death row, two
years before his execution. The
cost is only $4.95 (including shipping). For more information and/or to order, phone (800) 888-0486
between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. EST, Monday through Friday, or order
online
by clicking here.

On Die Hard’s Advertising Push

Musings

I’ll have even more thoughts later and the full review tomorrow, but I thought I’d toss out another couple thoughts on Live Free and Die Hard‘s advertising campaign. First off, is it just me or does the poster not sort of look like the design folks at 20th Century Fox decided to knock off early, take a half-day and go play some golf? It’s iconic imaging by rubber stamp, really — maybe not the smartest move for a franchise whose last installment came 12 years ago, and barely crawled across the $100 million line domestically. That said, Die Hard: With a Vengeance absolutely killed overseas — where Willis remains hugely popular — so I guess they figure, perhaps somewhat rightly, they can phone that one in.

Mainly, though, I was amused by an interstitial bumper I saw for the film, after pausing late one night while making coffee to watch the last seven or eight minutes of Phone Booth on Fox-affiliated cable channel FX. (Incidentally, that movie plays awfully on television; it’s egregiously over-edited and Kiefer Sutherland’s voice work is flat-out terrible, consisting of a dozen different campy/exasperated iterations on the line, “C’mon Stu!”) Pitching Phone Booth to commercials was an awkwardly shot segment — billed, no lie, as a “McClane Moment” — with Willis and filmmaker/co-star Kevin Smith, in which the pair sat down together on a stoop (a stoop!) and talked a bit about Live Free or Die Hard. Cutting back and forth between footage from the movie and the pair, Smith lobbed genial softballs at Willis, but the actor was so down-tempo and barely audible that I sincerely thought the whole thing was a set-up for some joke or punch-line at the end. But… nope. Just strange, really. I don’t know if they’re still broadcasting this throughout the week, but it’s amusing if you happen to stumble across it. For a full review of the film, meanwhile, click here.

Lie Hard: Ratings Controversy Mis-Reportage

Irritations, Musings

So it’s tilling old Earth, perhaps, but I just stumbled across Paul Davidson’s piece about the Live Free or Die Hard rating controversy, from June 8 in the Los Angeles Times, in which he talks about Bruce Willis taking to the Internet to connect directly with fans and address their concerns over the movie, etcetera. All fine and good… one big qualm, though.

The second paragraph of his piece reads, verbatim: “To know why fans are up in arms, you have to go back to how 20th Century Fox tackled this question: How does a studio take a money-making franchise such as Die Hard ($740 million worldwide to date) that’s been missing in action for more than 10 years and position it as a summer blockbuster that a new generation of moviegoers will clamor to see? If you’re Fox, you take what was once an R-rated, foul-mouthed, thrill-ride of carnage and mandate a friendlier, gentler PG-13 rating from the start.”

The problem is that Fox very clearly didn’t communicate this wish, to either Willis (who initially lashed out at the rating in a Vanity Fair interview) or director Len Wiseman. Or if they did, Wiseman is perhaps one of the worst directors working today — one who kept his actors in the dark and took a terrifically awful chance, somehow thinking he could call his bosses’ bluff. The fact is that Live Free or Die Hard‘s action is suitably “hard,” but the movie has several scenes in which characters very clearly drop F- and MF-bombs. The editorial circumvention in these scenes, both visually and aurally, is very poor; if the film truly was mandated PG-13 from the beginning, instead of being massaged down, this kind of slipshod filmmaking wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, be evident.

Paris Hilton Loosed Back on Society

Ephemera, Irritations

In air-quote honor of Paris Hilton‘s release from prison, and no doubt her transformation into a paragon of virtue and intellectual and spiritual pursuit, let’s pause to celebrate the inescapable Paris we all know (if not love) with the above photo, allegedly snapped in Amsterdam a while back. I know, I know… she’s changed. She read The Secret while in jail. Big whoop. Good to hear, by the way, that Michael Moore has been bumped from Larry King Live to talk about his health care documentary Sicko this evening to make way for Paris. Nice. Just fantastic.

On Die Hard’s Action, Rating Controversy

Musings

Bruce Willis’ Die Hard series made its reputation as a bit of a gritty but certainly a gleefully R-rated series… until this iteration, of course, which hits theaters tomorrow with a PG-13 tag. Those fearing a watered-down Live Free or Die Hard needn’t worry, however — audiences don’t get cheated on its rating in terms of action, that’s for sure. There’s some pretty wicked pyrotechnics, but also a bit of cold-blooded hand-to-hand combat with Maggie Q. It’s a pretty hard PG-13, honestly.

There’s likely a little less blood in the movie than there would otherwise be, but the big hit/main concession comes in the form of language, in which a bunch of obviously harsher curse words get dubbed over with some quite shoddy ADR. More discrete thoughts will follow later, along with a full review posted later tonight or tomorrow.

Transformers

Film Reviews

Transformers, an orgiastic action
extravaganza based on Hasbro’s line of convertible kids’ action toys. Some
likeable characters and early, intriguingly seeded plot strands of clandestine
overlap are sacrificed at the altar of expediency and clash, and in its third
act the movie suffers a tonal blowout, devolving into little more than a furious assault on the
senses. Powered by superlative special effects from Industrial Light & Magic, though, Transformers splays its budget and production value across the screen during almost
every scene, and the high hoo-rah factor should turn out young males in
droves.

Penned by screenwriting tandem Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (The Island, Mission: Impossible III), the film’s story is certainly no more preposterous than
the basic concept mandates. Trading especially on Sam’s home life,
the script locates a few smart points of entry for early pockets of humor, though
a sequence in which the Autobots impatiently hide outside Sam’s house
while he searches his room for a key piece of evidence drags on for far
too long. In fact, after a lengthy first act spent setting up
all the military intrigue, it’s somehow less than thrilling when
Autobot leader Optimus Prime and the other Transformers show up and
actually start talking. The wonderment of the conceit is punctured, and
a few of the robot exchanges come across as hammy, at odds with the established tone.

That said, Bay makes certain that the audience isn’t left wanting
for action, erring on the side of distended, explosive set pieces, as
he did most recently in both Bad Boys II and The Island. Trading in the sort of emphatic, canted close-ups and adrenalized style
that have been his hallmark throughout his career, Bay delivers quick-cut action made up of individually effective, sometimes even iconic shots. The
problem, for those sensitive to matters of rationality, is that Bay, for
all his arguable skill as a conjurer of sugar-rush catharsis,
frequently creates escape through reverse shots rather than any sort of
sensible internal story logic. There is little sense of spatial
coherence, and even less artful massaging of tension. The action, then, becomes the
cinematic equivalent of a false show-and-tell exercise — bravura
demonstration lacking any rooted truth, emotional weight or
involvement. For the full review, from Screen International, click here.

Saw IV Image Releases

Ephemera

I didn’t really want to imagine Saw IV actually existed, but it apparently does, with Shawnee Smith, Angus Macfadyen and Tobin Bell all returning… the latter maybe in cameo form? At any rate, an image from the film has released, of a woman sitting in a chair that can’t be that good for the back, rocking one of those animal masks — all steeped in shadow, naturally. The only interesting thing is that if you look closely, there appears to be a gun pointed at her head.

Kudos to LionsGate for teasing this one out. Still, I think David Morgan at Filmwad pretty much hit the nail on the head with his comments. Continuing director Darren Lynn Bousman — whom I’ve interviewed, and stuck me as a nice guy — has pretty much hit the gravy train with this series.

A Mighty Heart

Film Reviews

A Mighty Heart — a labyrinthine procedural and doomed investigative piece of glancing emotional blows, centering around the wife of kidnapped and ultimately beheaded Wall Street Journal
reporter Daniel Pearl — comes to see the light of day just after the
official dawn of summer.

A very autumnal, let’s say, film releasing in
the midst of a lot of splashy, effects-laden fare, A Mighty Heart is a project built for the long-run, certainly. Still, even though it
stars tabloid favorite Angelina Jolie, its commercial prospects hinge
on how willing American audiences are to relive a story as complex as
it is unsavory in nature, particularly as news of more violence from
Iraq and abroad filters in over the next several months. As directed by Michael Winterbottom, the movie has the same sort of clutchy immediacy that Paul Greengrass brought to United 93 and The Bourne Supremacy; it’s a slowly building collage of dread and tension, this time infused with the slipperier elements of an inherently ungraspable foreign landscape. Though not conventionally cathartic, A Mighty Heart is powered throughout by the superlative lead performance of Angelina Jolie, and her portrayal is one of mesmerizingly tightened effect and distress — her very soul seems clenched. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Steve Carell on Dan in Real Life

Interviews

Steve Carell’s latest film, Evan Almighty, may be a grand-scale misfire of sorts, but the actor is feeling good about his upcoming slate of projects, including this fall’s Dan in Real Life.

“I thought the script for [the movie] was great and Peter Hedges is a very thoughtful filmmaker,” says Carell at a recent press day. “Pieces of April I thought was fantastic, and he wrote About a Boy and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, so he’s a really accomplished person, and I thought, ‘That’s somebody that I’d love to work with.’ It wasn’t so much, ‘Oh, I want to do a romantic comedy with Juliette Binoche,’ it was more like, ‘Wow, I think that could be good, and really interesting, and I think the script will be really good.'”

“The movie involves a guy who was fairly recently widowed, three or four years before,” continues Carell. “And he’s been raising these three daughters on his own. And they’re reaching a point in their young adult lives, at least two of them, where he doesn’t know what to do. He still has one that’s kind of a baby girl that he can manage, but… one of the themes of the movie is that he kind of doesn’t take his own advice, and kind of lets things get away from him in terms of his own kids.”

“So did I take my own personal experience [into the film]? I don’t know. I don’t know that I even have a personal take or mental manual on how I’m raising kids,” says Carell, himself a father of two. “I think with everyone it’s just day-to-day, and you try to deal with each situation as it comes.” For Carell’s thoughts on Get Smart, meanwhile, click here.

The 40-Year-Old Virgin

Film Reviews, Old Made New

Given that it’s currently all things Steve Carell, what with the release of Evan Almighty, I really should have re-posted this review of The 40-Year-Old Virgin much earlier. Oh well, here goes, redacted from its original publication on occasion of the film’s release in August of 2005, by an outlet that still owes me (and many others) money, an outlet that may or may not be named Now Playing Magazine, formerly published by Douglas Brisotti. To wit:



Given the rich tradition of comedies of humiliation, it’s hard to believe that until The 40-Year-Old Virgin there hasn’t been a major Hollywood laugher set around the romantic fumblings and flailing of an adult virgin. (I guess this says something about where the line of degradation exists for actors, or perhaps more accurately men in general.) Given Hollywood‘s penchant for smooth edges, then, it’s also surprising that the collaboration between writer-actor Steve Carell and writer-director Judd Apatow still retains such a shaggy, idiosyncratic appeal. Coming closely on the heels of Wedding Crashers‘ R-rated success, The 40-Year-Old Virgin seems to augur a potential return to more delightfully unrestrained but not insistently vulgar adult comedy.

Carell stars as Andy Stitzer, an all-around nice guy who works at an electronics store in the San Fernando Valley, content with his bicycle for transportation and his vast assortment of videogames and mint-in-box collectibles for entertainment. Andy’s lack of success with women has calcified into a complete lack of amorous effort. When Andy gets sucked into a poker game with three co-workers — David (Paul Rudd), Jay (Romany Malco) and Cal (Seth Rogen) — and subsequently “outed,” however, his life takes a big turn. His newfound friends are adamant that they play a part in his “de-virginization,” and so they bombard Andy with advice and push him into interactions with the opposite sex, a string of women who include a drunken, bipolar speed-dater (Leslie Mann, Apatow’s real-life wife) and a nearby bookshop employee, Beth (Elizabeth Banks), enamored with Andy’s spookily casual indifference. (He’s instructed by Cal, hilariously, to “act like David Caruso from Jade.”)

Andy’s dilemma isn’t merely some misogynistic quest, though, as he meets Trish (Catherine Keener), a divorcée and single mother (and grandmother, though there’s thankfully no baby involved), and finds himself falling for her even as Jay and Cal insist that he needs some “starter nookie.” As he wins Trish over, Andy must slowly come to grips with how to break his secret to her.

Not particularly surprisingly, the film feels very episodic and bears the marks of test audience-tinkering. Certain scenes, such as one involving a transvestite prostitute (accidentally) hired by one of Andy’s friends, are over before they even begin, and other sequences — including a bit where Andy gets locked in the showroom with nothing but porn playing around him on all the big-screen TVs, and a scene of self-gratification set to Lionel Ritchie’s “Hello” — seem definitely trimmed with an eye toward propriety. That may seem strange for a comedy to all outward appearances bawdy as all get-out, but The 40-Year-Old Virgin is essentially a relationship comedy masquerading as a sex farce.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing (think of the diminishing return of Stifler and the grandmother in the dreadful, forced American Wedding). The 40-Year-Old Virgin creates palpably human characters (Rudd, Rogen and Malco are all a treat) and grows the comedy from there. If the film cycles through jokes and scenarios at a clip that’s both inspiring and sometimes frustrating (because it doesn’t fully exploit certain set-ups to their logical conclusion), you at least appreciate its groundedness. Apatow (Freaks and Geeks) proves himself as suited for the big screen as the small, and Carell, taking a cue from Ben Stiller’s propensity for comedic debasement, launches himself into his role with a complete lack of ego; the much-trailered chest wax scene is 100 percent authentic, and achieves a sort of flippant Zen brilliance even though you know what’s coming. (Universal, R, 116 minutes)

Where is the World Going, Mr. Stiglitz?

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews, Politics

What, per se, qualifies me to sit in judgment regarding this
chatty, direct-address documentary offering about the world’s economic problems?
Quite simply, nothing. The global economy, made up as it is of myriad smaller
parts, is a fantastically complicated thing, and so any macro, birds-eye view assessment
of it is bound to be on some level an exercise in tedium. Expectation meets an execution
dictated by subject matter, then, in Where
is the World Going, Mr. Stiglitz?

Sarasin (I’ll Sing for
You, the forthcoming On the Rumba
River) obviously feels deeply about globalization and the industrialized
world’s skewed relationships with developing nations, and I share many of his interests
and concerns. To say that unfair trade and other foreign policy decisions by the
United States
have had no role in shaping the rest of the world’s view of us is, well, silly,
to put in nicely. Still, while there’s a powerful social conscience here, a lot
of the pearls get lost in a sludgy mixture of staid delivery. Hate as I do to
take the easy point of comparison, Sarasin and/or Stiglitz could stand to learn
a thing or two from former vice president Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
Sure, that film was at its core a PowerPoint presentation, but this film needs some
of David Guggenheim’s smart Inconvenient
framing mechanisms, or at the very least an outline that can be followed and
digested with more ease. Extra footage blended in with the tightly framed talking-head material would give the movie not only visual depth, but help illustrate the points its subject is making.

Look, obviously I can’t parse Stiglitz’s credibility, nor am
I trying to; the man’s credits and intelligence are unimpeachable. Recognized
around the world as a leading economic educator, Stiglitz’s résumé includes stints
as Chairman of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors; Chief Economist at
the World Bank; professorships at Yale, Princeton, Oxford, Stanford and Columbia
University; and work as a private consultant to several world leaders (how do
you get that gig?). His books — including
the worldwide bestseller Globalization
and Its Discontents and its newly released follow-up, Making Globalization Work — have been translated into more than 35 languages.
So with all that experience and specialization, it would stand to reason that there
is legitimate insight that follows. For every concise metaphor or savvy extrapolation,
however, Where is the World Going, Mr.
Stiglitz?, also features a yawning, over-the-shoulder introduction or
set-up. For these reasons, some of the causal relationships and complexities of
globalization dance still just out of reach, at least for an audience of
laypersons.

Spread out over two discs and housed in a regular Amray case
with a snap-in tray, Where is the World
Going, Mr. Stiglitz? includes as supplemental bonus features downloadable
audio files for MP3 players as well as brief biographies on both its creator and citizen-star. To purchase the film via Amazon, click here. To purchase the film via Half.com, click here. C+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)