Daily Archives: October 15, 2007

Sylvester Stallone on Rambo IV

Amusements, Musings

A few pictures from the fourth Rambo flick have been released, but Sylvester Stallone is finally getting out there and pressing a bit of long-lead flesh for the film… well, still without saying much. At the Las Vegas premiere of Resident Evil: Extinction, Stallone talked, in this short video clip, about (what is ostensibly) the final installment of the franchise, saying, “It’s a lot more realistic and hardcore than the last one,” before adding, “He’s in a grumpy mood and going to let it all out.” Probably not in a break-through therapy session, one imagines…

Sure this smacks of going to the well one time… well, several times too many, but Stallone, against long odds, pulled off a marvelous feat with Rocky Balboa; he showed that he really grasped the base appeal of the character, and went back to his roots in an interesting way. While there’s a bit less to work with in John Rambo, and the whole action pitfall trap of trying to make sure a suitable explosions quotient is met, some budgetary constraint might actually result in a halfway thought-provoking revisitation of the character. Certainly this is generally preferable to other career twilights for Stallone, be it continued straight-to-video teamings with Renny Harlin, entering politics or ending up the glad-handing celebrity judge on some reality show.

The Invisible

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

A teenager must try to unravel his own death in David Goyer’s The Invisible, an enervated but for the most part artful tone piece of teen estrangement. Decently sketched and acted, the film’s chief problem is that the race-against-time elements aren’t always quite galvanizing enough to elicit and hold the attention and appreciation of younger audiences wanting or expecting a goosing supernatural thriller. This is much more a character-rooted, sustained mood piece than a commercially geared film, but since it’s about and chiefly marketed toward teenagers, well… it faces an uphill climb in wooing its target demographic, on DVD as much as it did in theaters.

Margarita Levieva). Sullen and troubled by her own unhappy home life, Annie lives out of control, committing smash-and-grab robberies with her older boyfriend, ex-con Marcus (Alex O’Loughlin). Believing Nick to have already left town for a writer’s program abroad, Pete feeds Annie Nick’s name in an attempt to extricate himself from a sticky situation. In a fit of rage, Annie then beats Nick, apparently to death, and hides his body in the woods.

Caught in a state of bodily limbo, Nick reappears in ethereal form, able to see all those around him but powerless to affect their actions. While Detective Brian Larson (Callum Keith Rennie) searches for answers, Nick — instead of consulting The Ghost Whisperer — tries in parallel fashion to lead authorities to his body, and finds himself learning more about Annie in the process.

An evocatively gloomy, elliptical drama of redemption that pretty nicely captures the palpable disconnection of youth, The Invisible has a nice anchor in Chatwin, who has now showcased varying degrees of hot and cold in War of the Worlds and The Chumscrubber. With his icy glare, Chatwin conveys a quiet intensity that is in smart lockstep with Goyer’s tone, which convincingly digs into the loneliness and despair of adolescence. The Invisible also refreshingly uses uninterrupted takes and in-camera editing tricks to convey Nick’s frustrated attempts to unsuccessfully communicate with those around him. Emo soundtrack tunes by Snow Patrol, Death Cab For Cutie and Mellowdrone, meanwhile, further feed the movie’s tone of wistful plaintiveness.

Housed in a regular Amray case, the movie’s DVD presentation features a 2.35:1 widescreen transfer, enhanced for 16×9 televisions, and a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound track, in English, French and Spanish. Two feature-length audio commentary tracks — one from Goyer and co-writer Christine Roum, the other from originating co-writer Mick Davis — offer up a mix of anecdote and thematic analysis, complementing music videos from 30 Seconds to Mars (“The Kill”) and Sparta (“Taking Back Control”). The real highlight, though, comes via 13 minutes of deleted scenes, which offer further parallel tidbits of Nick’s home life and Annie’s fractured domestic situation. B (Movie) B (Disc)

Bee Movie Swarms

Musings

The promotional assault for Paramount/DreamWorks’ Bee Movie has kicked into full gear, with a lot of the cardboard character stand-ins and other parallel market work I glimpsed almost a year ago while wandering around its production offices waiting for an off-the-record chat with someone I can’t currently remember (big impressions must’ve been made there, on both ends) now seeing fruition.

Renée Zellweger),
he breaks one of the cardinal rules of beedom — he talks to her. A
friendship soon develops, and Barry gets a guided crash course in the
ways of the human race. At press time, however, it was yet to be determined if Barry stings Vanessa, causing her squinty eyes to wholly disappear into her face.

The ubiquitous marketing will make this movie a commercial player, no doubt, and the perspective/in-flight animation (seen in its trailer here) seems pretty cool. Still, there’s a lack of Shrek-style bodily function humor, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing for you or I, that tells me (along with the end bit, in which Barry flies repeatedly into a window) that the movie might have some difficulty carving out mondo repeat kiddie viewership. The question, then, is whether long-parched Seinfeld fans will want to get their fix of the comedian in animated fashion.

Richard Shepard on Test Screenings

Ephemera, Interviews, Screenings

I met up with writer-director Richard Shepard
at a hotel bar maybe six weeks back to talk about the spry, post-war, investigatory
caper flick The Hunting Party — currently getting a half-hearted release shaft job from the Weinstein Company — and
while he touched on the phenomenon of test screenings in this separate tidbit, he also talked more directly about their merit, even
to filmmakers who trade in varying tonalities. To wit:

“Test screenings can go horribly wrong. If the studio
listens to every inane comment then you’re screwed,” Shepard relates. “If
you’re spending $100 million and making an action movie, then you want to reach
the biggest possible audience you can. But if you’re making an under-$20
million movie that mixes… this and that, it’s a particular type of movie, and
if you try to steer it to everyone, it’s going to fail. There’s a
nerve-wracking element if the studio is listening to the notes in a manifestly
different way than the filmmaker is, but as a filmmaker if you listen to what
real people have to say about your movie, it can be really helpful. It can help
clear up confusion, you can tighten the movie. You can see a scene hundreds of
times in an editing room and think that it’s fine, and then you see it in front
of an audience and you can just feel that people are a little bored. …Sometimes
you have to say, ‘I have to be bored there, because I can’t cut anything out of
it.’ At a certain point, especially if you’re making a movie that mixes tones,
you’re never going to please everyone — the best thing that you could hope for
in those test screenings is to please yourself by making the best movie that
you can.”