Daily Archives: July 26, 2007

Roving Mars

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

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.

The movie centers around the 2003 Mars Rover mission, in
which two robots — feted as Spirit and Opportunity — were
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.

Presented in both 1.78:1 widescreen, enhanced for 16×9
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)

Jacques Rivette’s Rare Out 1 Screens

Screenings

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.

Jean-Pierre Léaud and Bulle Ogier star in this shaggy-dog
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.”

The first Saturday screening will begin at 2:00
pm with an introduction by Variety’s
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 10 p.m. The Sunday schedule follows the same rough pattern. The Billy Wilder Theater is on the courtyard
level of the Hammer Museum,
which is located at 10899 Wilshire Boulevard,
at the intersection of Wilshire and Westwood Boulevards. For more information,
phone (310) 206-8013 or click here.

Matt Damon on The Tonight Show

Ephemera

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…

Moogfest 2006 Makes Noise

Ephemera

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. Housed in a regular Amray case, MVD’s solid little
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.

Happy Birthday, Kate Beckinsale

Birthdays, Musings

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.

On Gone Baby Gone’s Trailer

Trailer Watch



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.