Monthly Archives: August 2007

7 Dias

Film Reviews

U2 for a
show in his hometown of Monterrey. To finance the event, he coerces his
girlfriend Gloria (Martha Higareda) into a scheme in which they place a
bogus $500,000 bet with local mob boss Moro (Dino Garcia) on a soccer
match. They lose, yet are saved by the mobster’s son, Tony (Jaime
Camil), who so loves U2 that he prays to a little statuette of lead singer Bono in
his car. Given a week’s reprieve, Claudio and Tony set out to make
their joint dream come true — creditor oddly helping debtor through a
careening kaleidoscope of sticky business dealings.


Writer-director Fernando Kalife’s 7 Dias rides into the States on a
crest of interest in Mexican cinema largely affirmed by last year’s
acclaim for Pan’s Labyrinth, Children of Men, and Babel, which
collectively rang up 16 Oscar nominations. It has the advantage of some
rooted specificity: U2 granted the project limited rights and music
licenses, though Kalife originally shot without them, making for some
disconnected scenes. But it is Camil’s colorful performance — part
gruff goomba, part oversized man-child — which gives the movie the
occasional bounce in its step.

Fatally, though, much action of consequence is constructed around
universally held regard for Claudio’s deceased brother, a character
whom we never glimpse, nor really understand Claudio’s relationship
with. This, combined with Tony’s vibrancy, render Claudio a cipher in
his own story. The film’s quick-reversal ending, too, is a cheap
gambit, hardly earned and even less understood. With a lot more visual
flair and some sense of real danger, this could be a
south-of-the-border Guy Ritchie flick, but with heart. As is, it’s a
diverting cultural curio, pretty much gone from your mind the moment it
ends. To view the review in its original capsule form, from CityBeat, click here and scroll down.

Danny Boyle on English Cinema

Interviews

As I’ve mentioned previously, I chatted with Danny Boyle a couple months back about Sunshine,
for a feature piece that will now apparently be pegged to its DVD release later this year, but among the other odds and ends that came up in the interview was the notion of expressly
national cinema, which is to say whether filmmakers have a certain duty or
obligation to their countries of origin to contribute to those cultures, and if
so whether and how Boyle saw himself fitting within those strictures.

“I don’t know whether it’s an obligation,” Boyle says, “but
I personally prefer to work (at home) because I sort of know it, the things
that are important to me, and I can answer the questions. I don’t have to ask
other people to answer them for me.” Here Boyle explains being able to size up
a person and tell roughly what kind of car they drive, or if he’s wrong about
the guess, then figure out why he’s wrong. In America,
Boyle notes, he’s more frequently baffled and adrift.

“The film industry in Britain
I always describe as occasional, which is really the best way of describing
it,” Boyle continues. “Because occasionally
we have a decent film, but we get the film industry we deserve — and we don’t
really go to the cinema enough. Why should we have an industry like America
or France?
That’s what everyone always winges (note: I suppose the British equivalent of
whines) about in Britain,
why don’t we have a movie industry like Hollywood?
And you think, because we don’t fucking go! If it’s a sunny day the cinemas are
completely empty because everyone’s at the pub drinking or at the park. There
isn’t that love or fanaticism about film that you get here, and in France
and in India —
you get it there as well. What we’re good at is music.”

Affleck, Henstridge Get Sex Tonight…

Amusements, Birthdays

So Ben Affleck, who turns 35 today, and Natasha Henstridge, who turns 33, share a birthday, ehh? That must’ve made for a nice moment on the set of Bounce. I like to think that Henstridge pointed it out in effusive fashion over craft services one day, and Affleck just stared at her blankly and told her how he was the bomb in Phantoms. Affleck’s directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, bows in just over two months; no word on any of Henstridge’s moves behind a camera.

So… The Invasion Opens August 17

Amusements, Ephemera

several times before last night’s screening of The Invasion at The Grove in Los Angeles to make sure that journalists knew the embargo on reviews for the film was Friday, the date of the release. So, no reviews before then.

That’s Friday, August 17. That’s when The Invasion opens. Starring Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig and Jeremy Northam.

Just sayin’…

Julie Delpy on 2 Days in Paris

Interviews

The daughter of French actors Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet,
Julie Delpy was born into an artistic family, and the values with which
she was inculcated extended beyond those of your typical actress.
Echoes of this are glimpsed in Delpy’s own eclectic career both in front of and behind the camera (she not
only attended but also graduated from NYU Film School) as well as the fact
that she nurses a long love of music. In fact, in 2004, in addition to
co-writing the film’s screenplay, Delpy penned and performed several
songs for Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, a follow-up to Before Sunrise.
One of three tunes on the soundtrack, the heartrending, acoustic “A
Waltz for a Night” served as her character Celine’s pivotal confession
to Ethan Hawke’s Jesse, with whom she spent a single evening in Vienna nine years prior.

It’s seemingly kismet, and not particularly surprising, then, that music features prominently in the making of 2 Days in Paris, Delpy’s latest film — which she wrote, directs and stars in opposite former, if brief, off-screen beau Adam Goldberg. “I co-wrote a song with a band named Nouvelle Vague,
which is actually a really good French band, and it was the way that I
financed all the music in the film, all the songs playing in the
background,” Delpy says. “Because if I gave (a song)
to the music company that works with the financing company in Germany
who financed the film, then they would pay for all the songs in the
film. So I gave them the song,” she continues. “That was the deal, and that’s what you do on independent films; all sorts of little deals, and you have to give a bit of yourself to
get money from them. But it wasn’t bad, though I had to write the song
at night while I was mixing the film. That was a bit exhausting.”

Delpy
doesn’t seem to know any other way, though. In fact, talking to her, and
listening to digressive, flight-of-fancy stories about a brisk, 20-day
production schedule on location in the City of Lights last summer, one
can reasonably come to the conclusion that she in a way feeds off of
such chaos, breakneck pacing and on-the-fly pacts and revisions. For the full interview feature, from FilmStew, click here.

Advance Thoughts on 3:10 to Yuma

Musings

Again, I’ve been remiss about pumping out some quick thoughts on both the good and bad of what I’ve seen long lead, but James Mangold’s remake of 3:10 to Yuma , the 1957 western starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin, is a very, very good film… like, go-ahead-and-start-the-Oscar-derby good. Starring Russell Crowe, Christian Bale, Ben Foster and
Peter Fonda, the movie is a slow (pleasantly so), protracted chess match of wills.

Set in Arizona in
the late 1800s, it centers on captured outlaw Ben Wade (Crowe), and his date with a train that will take him to justice. Bale plays Dan Evans, a broken down Civil War veteran struggling to keep the respect of his headstrong son (Logan Lerman) and the support of his wife (Gretchen Mol), as well as merely hold onto control of his drought-plagued ranch. Needing cash, Evans volunteers to help deliver Wade, but is set upon by the latter’s vicious gang.

The script is tight, the acting and production value top-notch, and Crowe — speaking in a low, hypno-masculine purr — drives this well-oiled baby inexorably forward in charismatic bad-boy fashion. Bale’s performance, meanwhile, is a master class in measurement and subtle reaction. Looking to beat Warner Bros.’ The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford out of the gate, LionsGate has moved the film’s release date up to September 7, nationwide; to visit its web site, click here. More to soon follow.

Uwe Boll Goes Postal

Amusements

FilmStew has up a nice little piece about Uwe Boll’s response to a critic’s response to his latest film, Postal, and it’s a laugh-out-loud doozy. Among the more coherent charges levied at Wired writer Chris Kohler? That he “wrote that article in bad faith to damage me — his whole goal is to destroy my business,” as well as the fact that “people like [him] are the reason that independent movies have no chance anymore.” It gets even better than that, though, trust me.

I’ve interviewed Boll a couple times before (even talking about Postal, which he said would be “like Falling Down,
but funny”), and he’s got a bit of a hair-trigger temper, no doubt. He also speaks, though not quite as heavily accented as you might expect, in a garbled manner that certainly shows English is not his native-born language. But it’s useless trying to parse constructive criticism with him, because he then just gets wildly excitable and starts making even less sense than usual. Dry sarcasm, that’s the way to go with Boll; give him enough rope and let him hang himself…

Are We Done Yet?

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Now, was there ever a chance that Are We Done Yet? — a sequel to 2005’s $82 million-grossing Are We There Yet? — was going to be a critics’ darling? No, probably not. But the first film was a harmless enough family comedy about besieged masculinity and eventual maturation. It had its moments of diverting amusement, and it actually told a linear story in some loose, relatable sense. This sub-moronic re-up, though, is completely divorced from any sort of reality (even of its own invention) and totally mind-numbing, even at well under 90 minutes.

Scrubs‘ John C. McGinley, above left), Nick’s dream home becomes a nightmare.

That Are We Done Yet? runs on comedy of the predictable is surely no surprise, but Hank Nelken’s script is especially atrocious, a desultory mix of slapstick and bland bickering, powered by mind-boggling contradictions in character. You know going in that there will be: a) toys stepped on; b) a leaky roof; c) a falling chandelier; d) a comic electrocution; and e) Ice Cube falling through said roof. And there are, courtesy of Steve Carr’s reliably awful direction. What you don’t expect, necessarily, are bits involving a talking raccoon, a deer whose eyes bug out in cartoonish fashion and Ice Cube wrestling a giant sturgeon.

Still, it’s the breathtaking manner in which the movie so immediately announces its complete gracelessness and lack of respect for its audience’s intelligence that is most amazing. After ananimated opening credits sequence that trumps the entire combined feature for imagination and sheer entertainment value, Ice Cube’s character is awakened by his alarm clock, at 5 a.m., to an outdoors that is completely bright and spilling sunlight into the room. Nothing gets much better from there, in either attention to detail or certainly cleverness. Despite its cheery pitch, this most certainly isn’t one for the entire family.

Are We Done Yet? comes housed in a regular Amray case and presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track. Distributor Sony tries to put a nice face on matters, with supplemental extras consisting of a five-minute featurette about McGinley’s character, an interactive quiz on the movie, three minutes of bloopers (during which McGinley goes spitfire, and directs himself), and a short, seven-minute making-of featurette. F (Movie) C (Disc)

On James Gunn’s Belcoo Experiment

Musings

I missed this from last week or so, but some word about Slither writer-director James Gunn’s The Belcoo Experiment apparently leaked (oozed?) out at Comic-Con recently. On his eponymous (and frequently hilariously profane) site, Gunn talks a good bit about the movie, describing it thusly:

“It’s a script I wrote on spec [and] an ultra-violent thriller with a lot
of action. It has to do with a group of 83 American expatriates who
work in a building in Sao Paulo, Brazil. At the beginning of what is at
first a regular, boring day, walls close up around the building,
trapping them inside. A voice emits over the speaker system, forcing
them through a series of murderous moral decisions.”

Sounds a bit like Chris Gorak’s forthcoming Right at Your Door, but writ large, and with spicy pinches of Saw, Entombed and maybe Turistas thrown in for good measure. Still, Gunn says he’s not sure The Belcoo Experiment will in fact be his next directing project. “The acting in the film is heavy, there is a large cast, and we need to
find actors who meet the needs of myself, my producers, and Universal/Rogue,” he writes.
“A lot of things need to fall into place for the casting to be perfect,
and I don’t want to do the film until that’s the case.”

How Does Brett Ratner Celebrate Rush Hour 3?

Box Office

Topping the box office this past weekend was the rather sigh-inducing Rush Hour 3, which I couldn’t really be bothered to write much about, perhaps because I was still laughing my ass off over this bon mot from director Brett Ratner. The sequel — and first public sighting of Chris Tucker in six years — grossed just over $49 million, a pretty penny but not nearly well enough to offset its bloated price tag.

Stardust, meanwhile, had a lot of trouble selling filmgoers its whimsical touch, pulling in only $9.1 million at 2,540 venues, while Wednesday release Daddy Day Camp flamed out with an estimated $3.4 million over the weekend at just over 2,300 locations.

Matt Damon’s critically and commercially embraced The Bourne Ultimatum rang up another $32.8 million, bringing its total to north of $131 in its second full week of release. The Simpsons Movie, meanwhile, added $11.2 million to its box office totals, which now hover in the $150 million range. In other long-playing news of note, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, perhaps somewhat improbably, has now grossed over $100 million, though I think at least 10 percent of that should be attributed to Jessica Biel’s ass. Michael Bay’s Transformers, meanwhile, crossed the $300 domestic mark in its 39th day of release. Hot Rod, on the other hand, proves that cultish DVD sales is the chief dominion of a young, up-and-coming Saturday Night Live talent like Andy Samberg; no biggie, same thing more or less happened to Adam Sandler’s Billy Madison, which laid the groundwork for Happy Gilmore and all that followed it.

In super-limited release, finally, Rosario Dawson’s Descent, a muted revenge drama about a sexually abused college student, tallied just $8,400 on two screens, while the canted, refreshing Rocket Science pulled in $58,500 on six screens in advance of a widening this week.

All My Loving Screens Across United States

Screenings


All My Loving, Tony Palmer’s groundbreaking 1968 documentary on
music and its effect on pop culture in the late ’60s, releases on DVD in
mid-September, with previously unseen footage from The Beatles, Cream, Jimi
Hendrix, The Who, Pink Floyd and many more. But in the run-up to the title’s
release, it will be screening at various locations throughout the United
States, courtesy of distributor MVD
Entertainment Group.

In New York City,
for $5 admission, the movie will screen at Pioneer Theater, 46 Avenue A, on
Saturday, September 1 at 10:45 p.m.
In Portland, on Saturday, September
8 at midnight, it will screen free to
the public (21 and over) at the Bagdad Theater & Pub, 430 N. Killingsworth.
Boston screens the film for $3
admission on Friday, September 14 and Saturday, September 15 at midnight, both evenings at the Coolidge Center
Theatre, 290 Harvard St. in
Brookline. Contact your local venue
for specifics, and for more information on screenings in Phoenix,
Houston and Seattle,
check back later in the week.

Wild Hogs

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

I don’t want to overstate its merits, really, because Wild Hogs is driven by overly demonstrative sitcom-type acting, anchored by a number of flat, desultory set pieces and set to all the music cues you wholly expect, from Foghat’s “Slow Ride” and George Thorogood & The Destroyers’ “Who Do You Love” to AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” and The Allman Brothers Band’s “Midnight Rider.” But if one squints a bit, they can sort of grasp the appeal of these elements, which all mixed together helped make this road comedy one of the biggest hits of the spring of 2007, pulling in over $165 million domestically and another $85 million or so abroad.

John Travolta is Woody, a high-powered broker who’s lost both his wife and his white-collar lifestyle; Martin Lawrence is the hen-pecked Bobby, who quit his job as a plumber to write a book but now finds himself facing pressure to get back to work; William H. Macy, meanwhile, is Dudley, a pathologically shy computer geek who maps out every moment of his days.

That these four would ever be friends, let alone owners of motorcycles who nostalgically pine for riding days gone by, is of course a huge stretch. On the other hand, if a movie can ever be described as, say, a single notch greater than the expected sum of its disingenuous parts, that might be the best way to explain the fleeting entertainment that Wild Hogs provides. There definitely isn’t much in the way of insight into the “weekend warrior” mentality that purportedly serves as the movie’s narrative lynchpin, and the film certainly won’t provide memorable laughs that will stick with you much beyond the day of viewing. Still, through pure contrast of character, a very few unexpected avenues of brief exploration and a couple of comedic showcases which allow Lawrence and Allen to flaunt their demonstrative, small screen-fed personas, Wild Hogs plays as a pleasingly broad diversion, provided one’s level of anticipation is properly adjusted a good bit downwards.

There’s a strange and somewhat dispiriting undercurrent of gay jokes, embodied by John C. McGinley’s recurrent highway trooper, but the main thing the movie has going for it is some nice contributions from charming bit players. These include Ray Liotta as the menacing leader of a Hell’s Angels-ish motorcycle gang who provides the bulk of the film’s sneering antagonism, and Marisa Tomei (above left), who as small town diner owner Maggie serves as the object of Dudley’s affection.

Housed in a regular Amray case stored in turn in a cardboard slipcover with raised, embossed lettering and the like, Wild Hogs is presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, preserving the aspect ratio of the movie’s original theatrical presentation. English, Spanish and French subtitles complement a trio of Dolby digital 5.1 surround audio tracks in the same languages, all of which more than adequately handle the film’s straightforward sound design, which pumps up the bass on its motorcycle throttlings but otherwise sticks to the meat-and-potatoes approach of fairly discrete, hearty dialogue and music mixes. Apart from bonus trailers, the DVD’s copious supplemental material consists of a feature-length audio commentary track with director Walt Becker and writer Brad Copeland; a 16-minute making-of featurette with plenty of back-slapping cast and crew interviews; an alternate ending and two deleted scenes; a clutch of genial flubs and outtakes; and a three-minute primer on chopper ownership for the family man, narrated by Jack Gill, the movie’s stunt coordinator. There’s also a 90-second Easter egg that looks at the contributions of the bickering American Chopper guys to the film. To order Wild Hogs via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)

David Lynch Does Westwood

Ephemera

For those in the Los Angeles area, David Lynch will be feting the DVD release of his latest film by autographing copies of Inland Empire at the Borders Bookstore in Westwood tomorrow, August 14, beginning at 7 p.m. Naturally, “due to limited time with the featured guest,” only Borders-purchased copies of prior
titles will be allowed to be signed. For a map of this location and this store’s event list, click here.

On The Brave One’s Poster, Trailer

Posterized!, Trailer Watch

Why not more advance word yet on Neil Jordan’s The Brave One, starring Jodie Foster and releasing on September 14 from Warner Bros.? It’s playing at the Toronto Film Festival,
I gather (their official play list releases August 21), but one
would’ve thought that some long-lead, sow-the-fields screenings in Los
Angeles would have started to take place. Maybe they have, I don’t know.

The film’s trailer, meanwhile, is also fairly solid; powered by a fantastic score from Dario Marianelli, it puts a tonier spin on all those Ashley Judd movies of revenge and empowerment. But the end touch… “I want my dog back”? I almost spit my coffee out. Seriously, you can’t end the trailer on that.

Naveen Andrews, the ubiquitous Terrence Howard — who costars in the excellent forthcoming The Hunting Party — and Mary Steenburgen also appear in the film.

Circle of Iron

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Circle of Iron,
also known as The Silent Flute, has
over the years gathered some cultish acclaim, chiefly since it was a
labor-of-love project that was to be Bruce Lee’s English-language breakthrough.
While Lee was still a struggling actor and martial arts dayplayer, he and
friends James Coburn and Stirling Silliphant (the Oscar-winning writer of In the Heat of the Night) developed a
mystical epic about the quest for enlightenment and peace; it blended thick
religious symbolism, surreality, complex location shoots and, of course,
head-cracking action. It was also abstruse and un-filmable.

In the intervening years, Lee went on to international
acclaim in Enter the Dragon, and when
his friends raised the necessary capital to lens their passion play, a haughty
Lee informed them that they could no longer afford him. (So much for that
all-for-one, one-for-all dream…) Five years after Lee’s mysterious death,
however, the vision would finally be realized, though this time with David
Carradine as its star.

The movie — about a young man named Cord (Jeff Cooper, above right, possessing
one of the largest, most unusually shaped craniums I’ve ever seen) searching
for clarity via a “book of enlightenment” and occasional conversations with a
wise old blind man named Ah Sahm — is still a wildly mixed bag of
Eastern-tinged esoterica, action and weird humor. Eli Wallach (above left), for instance,
pops up as a man in a large pot in the desert who is trying to dissolve his own
testicles in hot oil. Still, Carradine’s multiple performances (he co-stars as
Ah Sahm, Monkey Man and Death) and some simply gorgeous location shooting makes
for riveting retro-showcase theater for appreciative zen-martial arts fans, if
not mainstream audiences.

The superb supplemental extras on this special edition DVD
also elevate the release from Blue Underground, their second treatment of the
title. They include an audio commentary track with director Richard Moore, the
film’s theatrical trailer, an alternate title sequence, a mini-documentary
tracing the project’s strange history to the screen, the first draft of the script
on DVD-ROM and a fantastic new interview with Carradine in which he reminisces
about the film and its special place in his heart — he rates it “probably his
favorite,” especially for the ideas it espouses. Hmmm… okay. C (Movie) A- (Disc)

Charlie Cox on Stone of Destiny

Interviews

Relaxing at the recent press day for Stardust in a
T-shirt emblazoned with an iconic photograph of the famous meeting between Andy Warhol
and Bob Dylan, young actor Charlie Cox had plenty of time to reflect on his
meteoric rise from near-obscurity (he’d appeared in Casanova prior to being plucked for the lead role in Stardust by director Matthew Vaughn) as
well as his next movie, Stone of Destiny.
Written and directed by nebbishy actor Charles Martin Smith (The Snow Walker, Air Bud), the film is a rooted-in-truth caper comedy, in which Cox stars
opposite Kate Mara (We Are Marshall, Shooter), Billy Boyd and Robert Carlyle.

“I playing a guy called Ian Hamilton who’s a real guy,
still alive, and he’s amazing,” says Cox, who on his arm sports a butterfly tattoo
comprised of two skulls, created by New York
tattoo artist Scott Campbell. “It’s the story of him and three of his mates
during their university years in the 1950s, 1951 actually. They drove down to Glasgow
from London in the middle of the
night on Christmas Eve, and they stole a very famous Scottish relic out of
Westminster Abbey. …It’s called the Stone of Scone, but
it’s better known as the Stone of Destiny. I’ll tell you what
it was — Jacob had his vision of the ladder where he fell asleep with his head
on this stone. And so the stone become the throne of Scotland,
and the Scottish monarch would sit on it. So what happened was, when the
English got rid of the Scottish monarchy, they took it away and they placed it
under the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey, therefore symbolizing by
Scotland’s own rule that whoever sat on the throne of England was sitting on
the throne of Scotland as well. So it was kind of a massive gesture to steal
it.”

“But it’s actually very funny as well,” Cox continues. “I like to call it
the worst successful heist of all time, because it’s so badly thought out and
everything went wrong, but they did it. Somehow they broke this big stone, they
lost it — all sorts of things went wrong. But they still pulled it off.”

UPDATE 8/16: In regards to the comment below, there was a slip of the tape, and it was somewhat mangled. I assumed “Field” was a nickname, but upon further review, I tend to doubt that. I believe it was just “Ian,” garbled. Ergo, corrected above…

Death Race Satisfies Joan Allen?

Interviews, Musings

In light of her recent, rumored casting in Paul W. S. Anderson’s remake of Roger Corman’s Death Race, originally reported by The Hollywood Reporter last week, I thought it would be interesting to reflect on some of Joan Allen’s comments regarding her career and the path of women in Hollywood in general at the press day for The Bourne Ultimatum a few weeks back. To wit:

“I feel fortunate because I’ve gotten to do some interesting things in the past four or five years. But it’s not like I’m getting 50 scripts
a week and turning down all of them, or 49 of them — it’s really not like that,” says Allen.
“I’ll go through periods where I get a few scripts a week and then I go no, this
isn’t the right thing. So it’s not like the choices are voluminous. But within
that I still have gotten enough to satisfy me. I have a 13-year-old daughter, I
can’t work back-to-back, I can’t be away from her that much. It’s kind of great
for me if I do one film a year or even one film every two years, or year and a
half. Because I spend all my time with her then. I save my money and I put
it away and I don’t overextend myself, and I’m sort of personally gratified that
way.”

“And I’m noticing a trend that’s changing with women in
television series, with Glenn Close and Holly Hunter and Kyra Sedgwick, and I
think that’s very exciting, because I think a lot of them are more interesting
parts for them,” continues Allen. “I see that as opening up more, for women of a certain age to
have another… employment opportunity. Because sometimes the roles you get
are someone’s mom, and it’s not very interesting, or you’re getting dumped by
your husband so he can go off…”

Or sometimes those roles are in Death Race, you know? Allen supposedly joins Jason Statham, Tyrese Gibson and Ian McShane in what seems to be an exceedingly well cast piece of Hollywood rib-nudging, however desultory it may turn out to be. (After all, Rollerball didn’t exactly wow dystopian futurists.) It remains to be seen whether the film can top or add anything to the social commentary provided by Daniel Minahan’s Series 7, which came out six years ago, seven by the time Death Race sees the light of day.

Julie Delpy Dumped Adam Goldberg, I Guess…

Amusements, Interviews

2
Days in Paris — which she wrote, directed and stars in — is significantly
different than Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, the two chatty,
European-set relationship pictures she’s made with Ethan Hawke and director
Richard Linklater.

After all, 2 Days in Paris follows a
New York couple, French
photographer Marion (Delpy), and American interior designer Jack (Adam
Goldberg, above right), as they attempt to re-infuse their relationship with romance on the
end leg of a European vacation. But the combination of Marion’s
offbeat parents and a number of flirtatious ex-boyfriends, along with the
natural language barrier, make for choppy waters.

Now Delpy’s working overtime to maintain that the film isn’t
autobiographical, even though she and Goldberg used to date. “We were together for
a short time, [but] truly, to me, it didn’t have much influence on the film — maybe
more for him than me,” Delpy says. “For me, I’m very detached. When it’s over,
it’s totally another world,” she says, adding a swooshing sound for emphasis.

Still, their relationship might have been grist for the creative
mill. “I’ve always liked Adam for the idea of putting him in a movie more than
being with him,” Delpy adds with a laugh. Then there’s a small pout of
reflection. “I shouldn’t say that. He’s not going to be happy about that.”

Jesus. And one wonders why some folks are leery of dating actors
and actresses…

Cory in the House/The Suite Life of Zack & Cody

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews
Know thy audience is one of the commandments of entertainment, and the Disney Channel certainly takes that to heart, as evidenced not solely by the recent smash success of High School Musical and its sequel, but by some of the original series they’ve been cranking out over the last several years. Releasing on DVD this week are compendiums of two such titles, The Suite Life of Zack & Cody and Cory in the House, the latter a spin-off of sorts of Raven Knows Best.

NBC’s affably gape-mouthed Ron Mott) becomes the personal chef to the president (John D’Aquino). Alongside his friends (Jason Dolley and Maiara Walsh, above left), Cory works up a few money-making schemes while also chatting up the president, who seems to have a lot of free time.

Co-created by Marc Warren and Dennis Rinsler, Cory in the House treats its setting with just the right blend of irreverence and oh-my-bad deference. It also has a nice anchor in the very personable Massey, who conveys confidence, sputtering enthusiasm and youthful gullibility all at once. This DVD includes “Air Force One Too Many” and “Just Desserts,” along with two other commercial-free episodes. Likewise housed in a regular Amray plastic case, and presented in 1.33:1 full frame with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track, this DVD comes with two brief supplemental featurettes — a 150-second look at guest star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and his time on set, and a four-minute-plus showcase for Raven Symone, who plays Cory’s fashion design-inclined sister in an episode that centers around a makeover for the uniforms of the White House tour guides. To purchase the above The Suite Life of Zack & Cody title via Amazon, click here; to purchase the aforementioned Cory in the House title via Amazon, click here. C+/B- (Z&C/Cory) C+ (Discs)

The King of Kong Thoughts

Musings

Chiefly because I have yet to find a way to create an extra
24 hours within a single day, I’ve been remiss in dropping advance nuggets on
some of the best in forthcoming indie flicks. One standout in particular,
though, is The King of Kong: A Fistful of
Quarters, a documentary about the battle for the Guinness Book of World Records-recognized high score on the arcade
classic Donkey Kong, chiefly between an unassuming middle school science
teacher and a smarmy hot sauce mogul. (I personally think the filmmakers should
have gone with just the last title, but I understand both the relevance and the
zeitgeist pop of the former tag as well.)

Though it sounds wonkish and severely defined by its subject
matter, director Seth Gordon’s movie is anything but. Family man Steve Wiebe (above right) is
the upstart hero of the piece, a straightforward, earnest guy who sets the
record for Kong — notoriously the most difficult of all the early arcade games
— and submits it via videotape, to a recognized governing body. The old
record-holder, though, doesn’t plan on going quietly into the night. That would
be Billy Mitchell, a silver-tongued and (frequently) self-proclaimed Jedi
Master of gaming, who unleashes a fascinating scheme of proxy psychological
warfare. I’ll get into it more next week, but the movie is quite funny and even a bit heartrending at times — and
consequently, like the fascinating cultural curio Dogtown and Z-Boys before it, it’s already been tapped to be remade
into a narrative feature film. The King of Kong releases from Picturehouse on August
17 in New York and Los
Angeles; look for its expansion in the coming weeks. For just a bit more on the movie, click here.

On Lars and the Real Girl’s Trailer

Musings, Trailer Watch

The trailer for Lars and the Real Girl, starring Ryan Gosling, is up, and it looks to be a quirky little affair. Penned by Six Feet Under scribe Nancy Oliver and directed by Craig Gillespie (the mysteriously shelved Mr. Woodcock), the movie is described as a
heartfelt comedy, centering around Lars
Lindstrom, a loveable introvert whose emotional baggage has kept him
from fully embracing life. After years of almost complete solitude, he
invites Bianca, a friend he met on the Internet, to visit him. Lars even introduces Bianca to his brother Gus (Paul Schneider) and his wife
Karen (Emily Mortimer). The catch? Bianca is a life-size doll, not a real
person.

Gosling, of course, plays it straight and sincere in the trailer, and so a lot of the comedy lies in the reactions of those around him, chiefly Schneider, whose All the Real Girls, in all its small town quietude, seems somewhat of an influence here. The comedic elements will help this play a bit more broadly, but these dinged, nervous-guy protagonist movies — like James Mangold’s Heavy, Wayne Kramer’s The Cooler, and the forthcoming Dedication, off the top of my head, though I know I’m forgetting a couple better examples — are uphill slogs commercially without a mitigating plot point.

Now would seem to be the time where I say something like the clock is ticking on Gosling, and that he has to embrace more overtly commercial fare (what about one of these half dozen goddamned brooding comic book hero parts?) if he wants to capitalize on chance and jump aboard the stardom train. The thing is, that’s what the rather excellent Fracture was, after all — a piece of commercial work — and where did it get him? Even costarring Anthony Hopkins, the movie didn’t crack $40 million, domestically. Ergo, I’m totally on board with Gosling’s plan of avoidance. As he told me in an interview earlier this year, “My representation has pretty much given up on ever making much money on me.”

For Gosling, his choices matter heartily. He’s prepping his own directorial debut and he’s got Peter Jackson’s King Kong follow-up, an adaptation of Alice Sebold’s spare, haunting The Lovely Bones, coming up next year. Just like Johnny Depp, stardom will find Gosling when it’s damn well ready; he’s that talented. Thanks to the conviction of his performances, word-of-mouth on the guy
is sincere and lasting, so mainstream audiences will eventually come
around. And in the interim, I certainly don’t mind the adventurousness of his choices. Lars and the Real Girl releases October 12.

Daddy Day Camp DOA

Box Office, Ephemera, Musings

I’ve written before about Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s ongoing debasement, and this was without even seeing Daddy Day Camp, which a couple publicists made repeated (and unsuccessful) entreaties for me to cover — even going so far as to (gasp!) phone, an extreme rarity in this digital age, and certainly so after a chain of email correspondence. Apparently, America pretty much agrees with my no-need-to-see assessment, as the aforementioned film arrived in theaters Wednesday with a thud, delivering just over $770,000, a $354 per screen average. It’ll conceivably pull in some family business this weekend, but the Wednesday opening was an attempt to expand and tap that market, to get them into theaters on less crowded off days before school started back up, and it failed miserably.

As for Gooding, deserved or not, he’s toxic, quite frankly. He has a dramatic supporting role in this fall’s hotly anticipated American Gangster, but the commercials and all the down-market crap are killing him. In fact, I had a fairly respected comedic actress tell me last year — off the record, but in no uncertain terms — that she pulled out of a project that turned an eye toward casting Gooding, tendering him an offer.

Rocket Science

Film Reviews

Rocket Science isn’t
jet-propelled, that’s for sure. The very
loosely autobiographical narrative feature debut of Jeffrey Blitz, the director
of the Academy Award-nominated documentary Spellbound,
the movie is a slow-burning comedy of coming-of-age frustration — though like
its predecessor, it’s a work interested in the weight of words, and the power
attached to them.

The quick wit of lanky high school introvert Hal Hefner
(Reece Thompson, above) is masked by his stuttering problem, which dooms him to
outcast status. Ambitious, hyper-articulate Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick) senses
something in him, though, and recruits Hal to the school’s high-powered debate
team. A warped romantic awakening ensues, though Ginny eventually manipulates
Hal to her own ends, leading him to team up with an older, brilliant dropout —
Ginny’s ex-partner, Ben (Nicholas D’Agosto) — in an effort to wow the judges at
the New Jersey state championship.

Canted tales of adolescent angst like these are a festival
circuit staple (see Thumbsucker, The Chumscrubber, et al), but what Rocket Science most has going for it is
its own strong sense of style and identity and a great, deadpan lead
performance from Thompson. Tossing aside the typical pat conventions and
rigidly defined solitary motivations of such stories, Blitz conjures up a rich world
of pubescent bewilderment and ecstatic agony. The flip side of something like
the forthcoming Superbad, which
presents its characters as walking bags of surging hormones, Rocket Science doesn’t completely shortchange
hormonal hijinks and acting out (at one point a character puts a cello through
a window… just because), but it does more fully present the awkwardness and
uncertainty that go hand in hand with teenage years, and shows how that as
often as not informs impulsive decisions and behavior that, on the surface, isn’t
necessarily sexual.

The supporting characters around Hal — from his perpetually
sweaty, snarling, obsessive-compulsive brother Earl (Vincent Piazza), to his
fractured mom’s new boyfriend (Stephen Park), the father of a classmate — are
all terrifically sketched, and the underplayed exchanges give the movie the
feel of a slowly developing Polaroid. It grows more substantial and rewarding
as it goes along. Funny, too, are the teasing, purposefully cornball
instrumental versions of the Violent Femmes’ “Add It Up” and “Blister in the
Sun” that eventually explode into the cathartic renditions that have become alt-rock
radio staples. For the original redacted capsule review, from CityBeat, click here and scroll down.

No Sleep ’til Madison

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Jim Gaffigan has made his supper via supporting film roles
and as a go-to guy in a variety of sitcoms, including The Ellen Show.
He’s front and center in this familiarly plotted but diverting little feature,
however — a road movie about a quartet of thirtysomething guys who attempt to reclaim some of
their youthful mojo with an annual trek to take in as many high school hockey
games as possible.

No Sleep ’til
Madison is set in Midwest (this allows for frequent
use of the word Sheboygan), and
stars Gaffigan stars as 30-year-old Owen Fenby, the enthusiastic and compulsive
planner of the group. Owen loves his girlfriend Loretta (Molly Glynn Hammond),
but he loves high school hockey more. So, forced to choose between his
girlfriend and his annual pilgrimage to the Wisconsin High School Hockey Tournament,
he picks the latter. Accompanied by 18-year-old videographer/protégé, Dave (Ian
Brennan), Owen meets up with three former teammates who now live out of state.
There’s Greg (T.J. Jagodowski, of the ubiquitous Sonic commercials),
who’s bored with married life with his wife Beth (Rebekah Louise Smith).
There’s Tommy (Michael Gilio), also married, who sings karaoke in French to
help impress some ladies. And then there’s Vern (Jed Resnik), a stocky St.
Louis district attorney who suffers from gout, and is
the requisite single guy in the group.

The trip, unfolding in a recently procured laundry truck, gets
off to an inauspicious beginning (the T-shirts that Owen ordered read, “No
Sheep ’Til Madison”), and proceeds through
a wide array of obstacles as the guys careen from one location to another. Crises
both personal and professional infect the trip (no gay jokes or bird crap,
though, unlike Wild Hogs),
and, worst of all, a mysterious black pickup truck seems to be stalking them. Finally,
one by one, friends drop out, leaving Owen to face some hard truths about his obsession
and arrested development.

The story here is one of a comfortable template, certainly,
but what makes the film so pleasant is the relaxed chemistry between all of the
guys. If the direction is sometimes a bit slipshod, and the character of Dave seemingly
chiefly on hand to allow the filmmakers to cheat a bit and slip back and forth
between film and digital video, one doesn’t mind too much because of the warm glow
that the main actors’ rapport creates. It’s enough to make you want to set out
on a roadie with your old high school chums… and also enough to remind you why
that might not be such a good idea.

Presented in 4:3 aspect ratio, with a Dolby 2.0 AC3 stereo
soundtrack, No Sleep ’Til Madison
comes housed in a regular Amray case, and with an engaging audio commentary
track from the directors. Other bonus materials include 15 minutes of cast
audition tapes and an extremely cursory behind-the-scenes clip (that would be
70 seconds worth of material) that actually includes its own credited director!
The randomly strung together footage is chiefly just a bunch of on-set cutting
up, a good bit of it with people kidding Gaffigan about his weight. For more
information, click here. B- (Movie) C+ (Disc)

Recount Yields (to) New Helmer

Casting About

So it’s a few days old now, but according to Reuters and other outlers, Sydney Pollack, 73, has backed out of directing the HBO election drama Recount, citing unspecified health concerns. “He’s got some medical issues,” spokeswoman Leslie Dart told Reuters.
“He’s not feeling well right now. It would be unrealistic for him to go
into production right away.” Pollack will stay on board as a producer, and, in a somewhat unlikely switcheroo, Jay Roach (Austin Powers, Meets the Parents) will step in to direct.