So not to go on a total poster bitch-fest jag, but the one-sheet for the forthcoming Whiteout, starring Kate Beckinsale, has dropped, and it also looks like a weird Photoshop job, albeit a better one than Good Luck Chuck‘s sorry poster.
 <b>But the proportion of feet to gun to head is off; it doesn’t quite play</b>.</p>
<p>Maybe I’m subconsciously pissed because this shot affords no glimpse of skin. Or maybe I’m just unnerved because it reminds me in passing of a recurring dream I had as a young kid, wherein a hooded Eskimo tried to violently shiv me.<br /><a href=)
After all, that’s a large part of the reason that to this day I bear a grudge against the Inuit. Well… that, and the fact that they clubbed the rest of my family to death with baby seals when I was 10.
A consensus slice of cinematic crap screens at the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles on August 10. Released in 1990, Troll 2 has nothing to do with the
original Troll. In fact, there isn’t a single troll in it. Instead, a traveling
family is menaced in the town of
by vegetarian goblins (!) that turn their victims into plants and devour them.
With endlessly quotable one-liners, terrible acting, plot non-sequiturs, homemade
special effects, and ’80s synth music, Troll 2 epitomizes the type of movie to
experience in shared darkness, in a theater with an enthusiastic (and possibly intoxicated) crowd.
Stephenson, George Hardy, Jason Steadman and Darren Ewing, as well as the
film’s director/co-writer Claudio Fragasso, and co-writer Rossella Drudi,
coming all the way from Italy. All will be present to answer questions
about the production of the worst movie ever made, and lead actor Stephenson
will also be compiling footage from the event for his documentary on the film’s
cult following, Best Worst Movie.
Good Luck Chuck‘s set of teaser posters, but its one-sheet takes misguided idiocy to a whole other level. I know this shot has been out for a while now, and I’ve meant to tackle it sooner; I even had the photo saved and loaded. But I just couldn’t pull the trigger.
Where to begin? First, yes, of course I know it’s a riff on the famous John Lennon/Yoko Ono Rolling Stone cover shot. But this appropriation of it is wrong on so many levels. First and foremost, it reveals more of Cook’s haunches than I ever wanted or needed to see. Secondly, how does it advance the actual plot or conceit of the movie in any legitimate way? Finally, it’s just awful, awful Photoshopping. If you’re going to do something like this, stage the goddamned thing in a one-setting shoot with both parties. The fact that you didn’t merely confirms the obvious — that this is a desperate, see-through ploy, conceived long after the wrapping of principal production, to try to polish a turd and sell some tickets.
During a recent interview for Sunshine, the subject of humanity’s self-destructive impulse — a steady thread through many of his movies — came up with filmmaker Danny Boyle, and in asserting his personal optimism, he made an interesting connection to the rest of his canon, and how maybe his experience on The Beach has informed his work since. “Yeah, I think [issues of man grappling with self] are certainly there, and I think that’s why a lot of my scenarios are almost apocalyptical. I love those set-ups. But I think you
do battle against it. I am
optimistic and positive, and I want that to be in all the films. The only
one I think it’s not in, in a funny sort of way, is The Beach, which is a very depressing film in the end, a very
negative film in many ways. It surprised me why it came out like that.
Because normally, even in the bleakest scenarios, I kind of dig out
some spirit and hope.”
“The Beach was a
big film, but it wasn’t a big film — it just was big, though it shouldn’t have
been. It became,” continues Boyle. “It wasn’t Leo, who was fantastic. But it’s a big movie star,
and a big studio, and it suddenly becomes a gross, inflated thing. Suddenly
there’s 400 people working on the film everyday, and you think, ‘I don’t need
400 people to make this film, it’s a film about a bunch of hippies in a jungle!
I need only maybe 30 people.’ And it just grows like that. So [Sunshine] was big,
yet we controlled it. We kept sealing it — I didn’t want money, I didn’t want
loads of extras. I wouldn’t have got it anyway, because we didn’t have any big
stars in it. But I didn’t want money, I didn’t want a big star in it… I wanted
to try to make it with restraints, real disciplines that we had to work around
and be creative about how we got round them, and to make it feel like $150
million, but not force it.”
I went for another walk-run-lounge (my own version of the triathlon) in Santa Monica this past weekend, and in three weeks or so the wraparound trashcan ads for Hot Rod have faded mightily in the sun, in addition to some of the expected petty graffiti (fake mustaches drawn on Isla Fischer, rather appropriate considering the movie’s fascination with them). Advance word via viral and new frontier advertising is all well and good, but when you’re heading into the home stretch prior to your film’s release and a string of its posters look worn and faded… well, that has to have a psychologically dampening effect. Underdog ads, meanwhile, have taken over some of those same trashcans. And that movie releases this Friday as well, along with Hot Rod. Smart, that Underdog. For once.
In 2002, The Bourne Identity drew a large part of its pop and verve from the attached-at-the-hip nature of its conceit and action — as Matt Damon’s overwhelmed, memory-impaired CIA operative Jason Bourne experienced the action in bewildering fashion, so too did the film’s audience. With elements of his personal identity uncovered, the sequels have each in their own way extended Bourne’s search for professional closure. To his former employers, however, Bourne is the loosest of loose ends, and so they’re still looking to tie him off.
The Bourne Ultimatum, then, serves as an involving and fitting bookend to Damon’s character-powered spy thriller series, paying off in a thrilling manner his amnesiac assassin’s search to uncover the roots of his identity while also delivering plenty of slam-bang, real-world action set across a sprawling variety of locations. The film opens at a dead sprint, and doesn’t much slow down; even its quiet, contemplative moments have a sense of unease and their own careening forward momentum.
Anchoring the movie in resolute fashion, Damon delivers another intense performance, absorbing information at a high rate of speed and translating that into both rapid analysis and breathless deed. The combination of massive raw intelligence and swallowed grief and self-torture that inform Bourne is captured as much in Damon’s clenched jaw and hard-set eyes as any dialogue (after all, who is left for Bourne to really open up to?), and he feels every bit the chariot driver here.
The film’s narrative proper is very contemporary in its subject matter — a covert intelligence program targeting, and in some cases eliminating, American citizens — but returning director Paul Greengrass (United 93) keeps the focus quite tightly personal. He does this by staging large swathes of The Bourne Ultimatum in crowded public places, settings where Bourne is palpably uncomfortable, and forced to constantly react and improvise.
As always, too, Greengrass trades in small details that mightily inform character, and thus help elevate The Bourne Ultimatum above and beyond its genre roots. In a game of high-stakes cat-and-mouse at a packed Waterloo Station in London, a single quick glance conveys that Bourne knows the angle of a gunshot that has felled a bystander; later, after a ferocious close-range action sequence, the director indulges Bourne a moment of quiet, broken shame over the fact that he’s been forced to kill again. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 111 minutes)
Proving its pan-generational appeal, The Simpsons Movie scored the third-highest opening weekend ever for an animated film, pulling in just under $72 million at 3,922 theaters, ranking behind
only the last two Shrek installments. Needless to say, that was good for the top spot at the box office this past weekend. Last week’s two big debuts, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (notable only, it must be stressed, for Jessica Biel prancing about in her bra and underwear), and the buoyant musical Hairspray, fell to second and fourth place, respectively, ringing up $19.1 and $15.6 million.
Rounding out the top five were Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which tallied just over $17 million, and new release No Reservations, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhart, which grossed $11.7 million. Fellow new release I Know Who Killed Me, meanwhile, fell on its sword of bad publicity swirling around star Lindsay Lohan; a late scratch in some rural areas, the movie opened in just over 1,300 theaters, and grossed only $3.4 million.
Among niche pics, Michael Moore’s Sicko — a look at the sorry state of health care in America, and its for-profit manipulation at the hands of corporations — stands on the verge of becoming
the fourth highest grossing documentary of all time, eclipsing the
$21.5 million grossed by Moore’s own Bowling for Columbine.
de Lauzirika spoke for about seven minutes (audio of the chat can be accessed here, though without the benefit of a direct mic it’s a bit dodgy in spots), and says that CBS enjoys a great relationship with filmmaker David Lynch, and that they “got away with murder” with respect to the amount of material being included in the set.
To wit: in addition to all the episodes from each season of the show, this collection will (finally) feature both the European and American versions of the
show’s pilot (the former featuring a closed narrative loop, so it could be released as a feature), deleted scenes from both seasons, and loads of other extras, including a feature-length
documentary called Secrets from Another Place.
UPDATE 8/03: A release date through Paramount, which handles the bulk of CBS’ television properties, is confirmed for October 30.
No Harry Potter expert, I, but Dylan Callaghan has a nice, short and very to-the-point interview with the writer of the fifth film, Michael Goldenberg, on the Writers Guild of America site. Regardless what one thinks of the movie — and the book is said to be somewhat unwieldy in its adaptability, perhaps a smartly chosen break for scripter Steve Kloves — I think Goldenberg’s comments about organic restrictions is a smart one, and one that obviously informs The Order of the Phoenix.
It’s a happy birthday today to Hilary Swank, I guess, who turns 33 and celebrates the same way all sensible girls I know do — by not having sex with Chad Lowe. If anything is clear at this point in her career, it’s that Swank doesn’t really have a box office following of any sort of consequence (the above-average Freedom Writers pulled in only $36 million earlier this year, and The Reaping, though possessing the advantage of topicality, grossed only $25 domestically).
Still, Swank has done a pretty good job of just keeping her head down and cranking out respectable contemporary dramas (her oil-and-water relationship with period piece drama was confirmed with The Affair of the Necklace), character ensembles and the like. If she does this for another five or six years, folks might just come around to respect her as the authentic face and voice of her generation. Not saying that’s what she is, or that she’s there yet, but with two Oscar notches already on her belt, it can be achieved, because in addition to a few plumb supporting roles she can simply take middle-of-the-road genre product and try to give it some uplift, instead of having to swing for the fences.
All of this will further enrage my sister, who’s praying for a fall from grace and return to obscurity for Swank since strangers insist she looks like her (“you know, in the face,” one helpfully explained). Sorry, Erica. Odds are…
America
does nostalgia quite well, and the emergence of new technologies allows us to
continue to perpetuate this unrelenting packaging of yesteryear. Presenting
eight cherry-picked acts each jamming through two tunes, the concert
compilation ’60s Rock ’n’ Roll Jukebox
does a good job of that, even if its material is somewhat uneven.
awkward crowd dancing mark this title a kitsch delight of sorts. Erstwhile teen
heartthrob Bryan Hyland kicks things off — he of the chart-toppers “Sealed with
a Kiss” and “Itsy Bitsy,” that rather cloying tune currently getting some
commercial run pegged to that yogurt ad about the girl who works up the courage
to finally sport her bikini at the beach. Del Shannon follows, working through
the utterly pedestrian “Hats Off to Larry” before more or less still
approximating the high notes of the solid bop ditty “Runaway,” which also
features a wicked synth keyboard pattern.
Davis — whose top 10 hit “Gimme Some Lovin’” helped bring British rock to the
rest of the world — plays that tune and “Keep on Runnin’,” while ex-Byrd Roger McGuinn
offers forth lilting versions of “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Turn Turn Turn,”
which the audience doesn’t really seem to recognize until about halfway through
its first choral pass.
rock ’n’ roll generation, grabs a stool to massacre “Old Time Rock ’N’ Roll”
and “Shake Rattle & Roll” in sweaty, obese fashion, while the goofily
earnest John Sebastian reveals himself a one-trick pony with the very
similar-sounding “What a Day For a…” and “Welcome Back Kotter” (yes, the TV theme
for the show of the same name). Rounding out the disc are Johnny Tillotson
— who charted 26 hits between 1958 and ’65, and here plays “Dreamy Eyes” and “Poetry
in Motion” — and Ray Peterson, who contributes “Goodnight My Love” and the
maudlin “Tell Laura I Love Her.”
region-free disc. Its soundtrack is pretty solid, though definitely not given
to a lot of rear channel differential. There are some nice, quite extended
text bios for most of the acts (Spencer Davis also plugs his own web site), but
this title runs only 38 minutes, despite the hour-long running time advertised
on its back cover. Additionally, a few of the numbers end abruptly, giving off a very
choppy, unprofessional vibe.
Zathura, I think that’s most of it; I’m really interested to see where he goes as a director. With this picture, surely Robert Downey, Jr. had to be having some Natural Born Killers flashbacks, though…
Dr. Ravi & Mr.
Hyde is a comedy about a doctor who goes to film school to make a film about
being a doctor. It’s produced, written and directed by and starring Dr. Ravi
Godse, who plays himself, or at least an approximation thereof. Even the thick,
vanity-project scent which that description gives off, though, doesn’t fully do
justice to the eye-gouging amateurishness on display herein.
The movie opens with a sing-songy tune set under the lyrics,
“Movie/I wanna make a movie/A groovy movie/It’s the dream of my life…” Seriously.
It then segues into a halting, accented introduction from Godse (above center), who sets the
scene, and describes, without a hint of irony, “sleeping comfortably in the
arms of the one I loved.” We then cut to Godse sleeping in a queen-sized bed, a
good four to five feet apart from his wife (Olga Segall), who is also a doctor.
Incongruities like these (Godse is Indian, Segall appears Latino, and the pair’s
young son is white) are a hallmark of this production, whose first 20 minutes or
so will have you wanting to slam your head against a nearby table or book, if
only to numb the pain of what’s unfolding. A funny thing then happens, though.
The movie doesn’t so much necessarily become good as become just slightly more competent. The urge to do harm to
yourself through consuming massive quantities of ice cream slowly passes.
you could say it’s loosely inspired by something like Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda, with a pinch of Living in Oblivion and mistaken
indentity mob caper thrown in for good measure. Like many men his age, Dr. Ravi
finds himself halfway through his life having not yet achieved the greatness he
anticipated. He is rich (as he tells us many times), but is sick of being
constantly on-call, and being accosted on the street by the flower guy for a
Viagra prescription. Sure, he could buy a sports car or have an affair with a young
babe to help him through his midlife crisis, but Dr. Ravi yearns for more. His
search for personal fulfillment takes him from the halls of a hospital to what he
believes is his true calling — directing and producing a true “timeless classic”
motion picture, a movie that just so happens to be an adaptation of a novel he’s
relatively recently self-published. (What inspired him to pen that is a mystery
hopefully left unexplored in an imaginary prequel.)
agents, reluctant colleagues, an unenthusiastic wife and even the mafia. From
the streets of
sun-swept shores of
Dr. Ravi’s search takes him near and far, and eventually brings him to the
realization that it’s not important what he does or how well he does it, as long
as he just does something.
bandied about in his home, but Godse, whose novel was apparently a Top 5
bestseller in India, is an awful actor, and though the film’s ensemble cast features
American Radio Hall of Fame inductee Myron Cope as well as Emmy-winning TV
personality Dave Crawley, for the most part this is strictly amateur hour. There
are multiple incidences of an actor looking at the camera, or visibly toeing
their cue, and the ADR is at times atrocious, recalling the scene in Grindhouse
where Tarantino’s squirrelly bartender in the Death Proof segment is purposefully looped from off-camera.
bad, all things considered. And where Godse scores is in some of the movie’s sardonic
asides and ping-pong dialogue exchanges, like when Dr. Ravi’s book agent advises
him to drum up controversy to help his movie’s chances at getting off the
ground, and offers his help thusly: “I have contacts in the Indian government —
I can get it banned.” The problem, though, is that the story is extremely
indulgent and just not very inviting. Tone is a big problem; one minute you’re
supposed to be taking things seriously, but that’s hard to mesh with a harridan
wife and buffoonish film school colleagues.
stops and a gallery of trailers for other films, but no other bonus materials —
surprising for a film made with such personal gusto. Or who knows… maybe there’s
a feature-length documentary on its making just around the bend. To order the movie via Amazon, click here; to order the movie via Half.com, click here. D- (Movie) D (Disc)
Word of advice: when you have a stack of DVDs sitting
around, slated for review, and the spine of one of them, in large pink text on
a black background, reads This Ain’t Your
Mom’s Hardcore Vol. 2, it’s not unreasonable to assume that your girlfriend’s
eye might be drawn to it, and think it’s porn.
 No, <b><i style=)
This Ain’t Your Mom’s Hardcore is a punk/aggro
compilation disc, and a suitably eye-opening and tympanic membrane-annihilating
one at that. Featuring almost two dozen bands and almost 150 minutes of video, the
disc spotlights 28 ferocious live performances by artists such as Maylene and
the Sons of Disaster, Bury Your Dead, Destroy the Runner, Misery Signals,
Secret Lives of the Freemasons, The Chariot, Haste the Day and As Cities Burn. (Incidentally,
this reminds me of the time a friend and I spent an entire chemistry class
period sitting around thinking up band names for another mutual friend, and
while I’m unable to remember them all, it’s safe to say that a little more
brainstorming should have likely gone into some of these handles.)
area, these packed shows, filmed from every angle, serve as a loud, loud reminder why
nothing quite compares to a live rock concert. While the material itself is
quite uneven, and in fact generally ranging on the downside of average, the video footage
itself is filled with incredible breakdowns, sonic blasts and energy; the variety, in both
venues and stagecraft, is something to be admired, if only barely through the din. Among the more memorable
acts are Grace Gale, August Burns Red, Classic
Case and Thumbscrew. I also really like the
name Twelve Gauge Valentine, but am unfortunately unable to give their music a
thumbs up. Fleshing out the live sets are some music videos and interviews,
though the regional, super-niche appeal of some of these acts renders those
bits for the most part irrelevant.
disc, with a solid Dolby digital stereo audio track that captures the
hard-charging aural demands of these thrash-and-burn acts. Not for all tastes,
definitely, but the sheer volume has to be appreciated on a certain level I suppose, especially at a time when so
many concert discs try to fallaciously inflate or pad out their running times. C- (Concerts) C+ (DVD)
An original, screen-used “General Lee” car from The Dukes of
Hazzard TV show — expected to fetch between $180,000 and $220,000 — the
original “Johnny-Five” robot from Short
Circuit and Short Circuit 2, an
original Chewbacca
head from Star Wars, Tony Soprano’s Chevy Suburban from The Sopranos, Tom
Cruise’s “Cole Trickle” stock car from Days of Thunder and Uncle Rico’s
van from Napoleon Dynamite
are just a few of the more
than 1,000 iconic Hollywood items up for grabs in a two-day auction
taking place under the watch of Profiles in History on August 2 and 3.
www.ebayliveauctions.com), click here to visit Profiles in History’s eponymous web site.
Worldwide bidding begins at
days.
At the recent press day for The
Bourne Ultimatum, Julia Stiles took some time to also talk about The Bell Jar, the filmic adaptation of
Sylvia Plath’s novel to which she is attached. “That book is very meaningful to
a lot of people, and so we don’t want to disappoint them,” says Stiles. “In
terms of people not wanting to see an indictment of Ted Hughes again, although
the book is probably inspired by Sylvia Plath’s personal experience, it is not
her autobiography, and it takes place at a time in her life before she met Ted
Hughes, although she was writing it while she was married to him. So I’d really
like to keep the book separate from her autobiography. What I’m trying to do is
make it something that will pleasantly surprise fans of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, because I think her biography
has overshadowed the book a lot, and people think of her as this brooding, dark
poet, because of her death. But actually the book that she wrote is incredibly
vibrant, and has these beautiful images and hallucinations that she had that I
think would be perfect for a film.”
version — which is being penned by actress-scribe Tristine Skyler, but still
shopping for a director — to be a movie unlike the previous, 1979 version of The Bell Jar, directed by Larry Peerce
and starring Marilyn Hassett. “I saw [that movie] and I don’t want it to be
anything like that, with all due respect to the people that worked on it,”
Stiles says. “Stylishly, the way they shot it was very dark, and the images in The Bell Jar call for something like
what Julie Taymor did with Frida, [which
capture] that intense artistic drive that Sylvia Plath had, and that Esther
Greenwood has in the book. …The character in the book, you could say that she’s
almost manic depressive, in that she experiences these extreme highs and
extreme lows. And that needs to be reflected, which I don’t think you’ve seen
in any other movie that deals with depression.”
Sunshine,
and he expressed no small amount of wonderment at humankind’s instinct for
exploration and sort of beautifully arrogant propensity for believing that that
which it can scarcely see with the naked eye it can visit, explore and
eventually harness and control. A visually stunning short-form documentary that
garnered justly excellent reviews during its original presentation on IMAX
screens last year, Roving Mars is a testament
to just that sort of impulse and intuition. While definitely possessing a bit
of the sort of compulsory awe present in the best forms of propaganda, the
movie is a perfect gift for science and space enthusiasts, as well as history
or general non-fiction film fans looking for a unique new experience.
which two robots — feted as Spirit and
sent to explore the red planet. Roving
Mars opens with the development of the machines by a team of dedicated scientists,
and chronicles the project through to the stunning images of Mars sent back
from the unmanned explorers. For something whose final outcome is never really
in doubt, a lot of time and effort — if not necessarily parallel exacting detail
— is spent chatting up the Mars Rover mission as a near-impossible challenge. Head
scientist Steve Squyres and others give long odds for its success without really delving into the trial-and-error process that led to certain key calculations and conclusions.
Directed by veteran, award-winning documentarian George Butler (1977’s Pumping Iron, 2000’s The Endurance), Roving Mars won the 2007 Visual Effects Society Award for
Outstanding Visual Effects in a Special Venue Project, and this is where the movie really succeeds. Though definitely ceding some of its original majesty in this reduced-to-scale form, Butler and his colleagues do a nice job of blending actual landscape footage and speculative CGI work, providing for some stunning vistas that might be glimpsed by future generations but no one living on Earth today.
televisions, and a full screen option as well, Roving Mars comes with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio
track, complementary French and Spanish audio tracks, and French and Spanish
subtitles to boot. Its video transfer is clean and clear, with crisp, vibrant
colors and no problems whatsoever with edge enhancement. As far as supplemental
material, a 53-minute 1957 animated television special entitled Mars and Beyond — hosted by Walt Disney himself, and part of the Walt Disney Treasures Tommorowland set — offers a fantastic look
into the scientific knowledge about space from that era. Also included is the forward-looking, 25-minute Mars: Past, Present & Future, a new
feature developed especially for this release that includes personal
reflections on Mars from the filmmakers, JPL Rover team members and students
from the “Imagine Mars” program. The most interesting parts of this featurette take a look at the very real possibilities of eventual manned flights to Mars. Handy proof-of-purchase title tabs, meanwhile, allow for participation in the Disney Movie
Rewards program. B- (Movie) B (Disc)
Presented in association with Los Angeles Filmforum, the
Film and Television Department of the French Consulate, Los Angeles and the Los
Angeles Film Critics Association’s “Films That Got Away” program, the Los Angeles
premiere of Jacques Rivette’s legendary 1971 12-and-a-half-hour masterwork
Out 1 takes place this Saturday and Sunday, July 28 and 29, at the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer
Museum in Westwood, via a new 16mm print with electronically projected English
subtitles.
tale, seemingly about two theater groups rehearsing Aeschylus, that takes off
into a complex mystery loosely adapted from Balzac (with a nod to Lewis
Carroll). Hailed by Jonathan Rosenbaum as the definitive film about 1960s
counterculture, Rivette said famously of his work, “The fiction swallows
everything up, and then self-destructs.”
pm
Robert Koehler, followed by the first two episodes. The one-hour dinner break
will begin at approx. 5:30 pm. Episode 4 will end at approximately
level of the
which is located at
at the intersection of Wilshire and Westwood Boulevards. For more information,
phone (310) 206-8013 or click here.
Matt Damon appeared on The Tonight Show last night in support of The Bourne Ultimatum, and his was a textbook example of how to be a great talk show guest, especially hilarious for Los Angelenos. After poking fun in good-natured fashion at Ocean’s mates George Clooney and Brad Pitt over the fact that his recently received star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was the first amongst the three, Damon talked about the days when he first moved to L.A., and lived with Ben Affleck and another guy in an apartment complex on Cherokee, just off Hollywood Boulevard. According to Damon, they ran a contest to see who could make it to the corner store and back without being offered crack — but offered so nicely, Damon made a point of emphasizing. (Jay Leno also then shared a funny story, about how his star on the Walk of Fame is near where he was once arrested for vagrancy, and sleeping in his car.) The second segment found Damon pleasantly suffering some paparazzi-snapped surfing photos of a recent vacation in Hawaii with Affleck and the guys’ wives. They finally got around to showing a clip from the movie, of Jason Bourne hot-wiring a car and driving off the roof. Good times…
Featuring an incredible array of the world’s leading keyboardists,
Moogfest, the annual festival celebrating the groundbreaking achievements of
maverick inventor Robert Moog and his namesake synthesizer, captures the spirit
that altered the course of modern music for all time and has since become an
integral part of our musical culture. Filmed live at New York’s famed B.B. King
Blues Club, a DVD of this past year’s celebration features performances from some of its greatest
practitioners, including Keith Emerson (The Nice, ELP), Jan Hammer (The
Mahavishnu Orchestra, Jeff Beck), Jordan Rudess (Dream Theater), Bernie Worrell
(P-Funk), Roger O’Donnell (The Cure), The Mahahavishnu Project and DJ Logic.
full-frame, region-free niche release comes without benefit of any supplemental
extras, but it is anchored by a nice Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio
track. To purchase the title via Amazon, click here.
It’s a happy birthday to Kate Beckinsale, who turns 34 today. It took a couple years — back in the Cold Comfort Farm and Shooting Fish days — for me to get it through my thick head that her surname was actually Beckinsale, without the “d” that I apparently wanted to add before the last syllable.
Whenever
people ask about the hottest or best looking celebrities (however you
want to quantify or describe it) that I’ve interviewed, my mind will
typically fog for a split second, because the person asking usually has
a specific crush or three that they’re interested in hearing more
about. Beckinsale, though, always comes to mind in these moments.
I’ve interviewed her a couple of times — for print pieces, too, not television — and Beckinsale is criminally hot, flawlessly beautiful in a not overly made-up kind of way. It’s like looking directly at the sun, quite frankly.
But the flip side of this is that I know she split from her baby daddy, actor Michael Sheen (The Queen), which means she can’t be fallen-from-heaven perfect. So (in my accursed over-analyzation), I look at her and think, “What’s the deal?” I mean, I know she smokes, but one could get over that easily enough, right? Beckinsale is so incredibly hot that to have a man who doesn’t want to any longer be with her she must be either a dead lay, or have a seriously defective personality. Or both. And yes, yes, I know… that says a lot about me that I think that. Shoot me.
The trailer for Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, is up and running, and has been for a while. A Boston-set investigatory piece centered around the disappearance of a four-year-old little girl, the movie stars Affleck’s little brother, Casey (above left), as well as Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris. The trailer is full of boilerplate plot marker cards like, “In a city that protects its own,” and someone (in this case a teary Michelle Monaghan, above right) advising our protagonist to, “Let it go,” yet it’s also well constructed, and you can tell that the older Affleck allows for the indulgence of small moments and subtle underplaying, no small whoop. That it gives off a strong Mystic River vibe is of course no surprise given that the material is of the same source — author Dennis Lehane, in this case adapted by Affleck and Aaron Stockard.
The word around town is that this is a solid credit and legitimate career makeover for the erstwhile chaser of Amy, but if people didn’t know that Affleck was actually an intelligent, insightful guy, they weren’t paying attention to anything other than the paparazzi photos for the past six or seven years. And as much as it’s a film of note for Ben — who never would have had any trouble finding open doors anyway — it could represent a massive change in the career of Casey, who’s said to be stellar in his role as Patrick Kenzie. Miramax will release Gone Baby Gone in limited fashion on October 19, and take it wide the following week. For more information, click here.
Mixing to pleasingly irreverent effect the same sort of light
social satire, dysfunctional family comedy and base physical gags that have
been part of its well-honed formula for almost 20 years, The Simpsons Movie smoothly jumps the yawning chasm from small
screen to large, delivering consistent laughs from the start-to-finish fallback position of a
wide, nearly uninterrupted smile.
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The Simpsons Movie forward is Homer’s habitual indifference and
inattention, which drives Lisa and Marge up the wall and sends Bart, searching for a father figure, into the
open arms of do-gooder neighbor Ned Flanders.
launching-off point a premise of environmental destruction. With
teetering on the brink of ecological ruin thanks to its rampant pollution,
littering and illegal dumping, Homer unloads a silo full of his new pet pig’s
waste into the local lake. The effect is toxic, and draws the attention of
hard-charging Environmental Protection Agency chief Russ Cargill (voiced by
Albert Brooks), who advises President Arnold
Schwarzenegger (voiced by Harry Shearer) to seal off the entire rotten city with
a giant biodome.
With Homer scape-goated for their situation, the town turns
on the Simpson clan, who manage to accidentally escape the bubble, and briefly
set up a new family life in
Old fractures quickly give way, however, and Homer — aided by an Inuit-assisted epiphany — is forced to embark on a
personal odyssey of redemption, seeking the forgiveness of Marge and his
family, as well as the salvation of his hometown.
It’s somewhat surprising how immediately suited for long-form narrative
the characters feel, and this is without even giving much more than lip
service throwaway jokes to many of the supporting players that have
come to flesh out the citizenry of Springfield. The only surprising thing might be that the movie doesn’t feature any
satirical musical numbers, something for which the television show has
become known. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. For more random thoughts and a few good joke bits (like how a book club reading of Tuesdays with Morrie sets off a riot), check back over the next several days.
Has anyone else seen those unnerving Hanes commercials with box office toxin Cuba Gooding, Jr., alongside erstwhile basketball star Michael Jordan? It’s not merely bad enough that Gooding’s in a forthcoming sad-sack sequel/spin-off, Daddy Day Camp, directed by Fred Savage, but he’s also prostrating himself in commercial work. The pieces (of which I’ve seen two cuts), find a couple production assistants instructing Gooding to be cool in front of Jordan as they prepare to shoot an ad, and then Gooding running up like a fan-child, and locking himself around Jordan in a bear hug.
To be clear, this would (or at least could) be funny if it played off the dignified image of a cool and collected customer, but Gooding reeks of flop-sweat and desperation. He’s got the accumulated stench of a dozen bad choices on him, and it’s clearly a burden that weighs on him. I last interviewed Gooding for Dirty, writer-director Chris Fisher’s very derivative amoral cop drama, and he seemed like a dead man walking even then, before the release of the emotionally overdialed, air-quote artistic Shadowboxer. (His action movie End Game, meanwhile, didn’t even make it to theaters.) It’s not mortgage-payment commercial work in and of itself that is misguided (Kevin Bacon also appears in Hanes ads with Jordan, and Jennifer Love Hewitt has some herself), it’s just the shuck-and-jive desperation to please that comes across as debasing — here as in the Daddy Day Camp poster. Can Chill Factor 2 really be that far behind?
I just put a bullet in another episode of The Daily Show — this one with guest Adam Sandler, from Thursday, July 19, in support of I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry — and I found it telling that Sandler and Jon Stewart were able to avoid talking about that desperately unfunny trainwreck for almost the entirety of their six-minute chat.
I’ve talked before about how the special evasiveness involved in selling a crappy movie is its own art, really, and Sandler showcased some nice moves on The Daily Show, talking in relaxed and relatively amusing fashion for a good four minutes about the “rabbinical” goatee he’s grown for a film he’s currently shooting, which I assume to be You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, about a Mossad agent who fakes his own death to relocate to New York City as a hairstylist. Sandler was relaxed, much more so than on other talk shows; it certainly helped that he and Stewart have a friendly rapport dating back to Big Daddy. Strangely, they did show a clip of the movie with Sandler and costar Kevin James, instead of just Jessica Biel prancing about in her bra and underwear, which is the only real value that Chuck & Larry holds.
