Daily Archives: June 28, 2007

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.