“I’ve never seen such a rude awards show,” said Bay. “Could you believe that? I’ve
never seen a show where everyone talks through the first seven awards.” If they were anything but purchased, I suppose people might care a bit more. Still, points for calling a spade a spade. I guess $700 million in worldwide box office will put a little swing in your dick…
E. Paul Edwards’ directorial debut, Fighting Words,
begins with these words: “Here’s a recipe for poetry: begin with a healthy
portion of heartache — thick and juicy. Add a pinch of death, a dash of
despair. Allow to rise.” Well, the death isn’t there (at least literally) but
all other manner of specters of negativity hover like unseen characters just
out of frame. A loquacious recasting of the underdog Rocky tale set
against a fresh, contemporary backdrop, Fighting Words is about one
man’s quest to locate the requisite courage and discipline to match his
passion. He has a foil, yes, but it’s also a story about a young man’s battle
with himself.
The success of Fighting Words lies in its
savvy blend of the familiar and novel. The underlying love story is almost
primal and subliminal; Jake and Marni’s star-crossed fate isn’t one of feuding
families but rather their own hang-ups and the nasty reality of the 21st
century sexual landscape.The setting, meanwhile, provides a rich and modern
tableaux of twentysomething anxiety and uncertainty. After the sudden cultural
ascendance and almost as quick withdrawal of the beats, poetry for an entire
generation, maybe more, basically returned to the shadows. It was a form of
expression ceded to rock ’n’ roll lyrics.
In the 1990s, though, the
first-person narratives born of rap music fused with raw, emotional new wave
literature in an exciting and innovative way, and a bastard child was born —
slam poetry.Part public plea, part personal confessional, part
braggadocio, spoken word open mike nights and contests sprung up in college
campuses and large urban centers around the country. Poetry was no longer the
weak, thin-armed younger brother of the artistic world, it was a loud, proud,
ready-to-rumble primetime player.
Brimming with the same passion for wordplay,
expression and connectivity that its characters display, Fighting Words
features fine work from big screen newcomers Stearns and D’Agostino, and boasts
supporting performances from a diverse cast that includes Fred Willard, Fred
Williamson, Michael Parks and Edward Laurence Albert. Housed in a regular Amray case, the film — which played in competition at Method Fest 2006 — is also available on DVD in a 1.85 flat aspect ratio, with a Dolby surround sound audio track. To purchase the film via Amazon, click here. (Indican Pictures, R, 89 mins.)
The same reason that I could never be a habitual smoker is the same reason that I wouldn’t make a good big screen vampire.
This occurred to me while watching 30 Days of Night, the latest adapted entry in Hollywood’s favorite source material of the moment, the graphic novel. The film’s
vampires are really inefficient when one gets right down to it. After
all, if it’s blood one craves, why would you puncture a jugular, enjoy
only a quick pint (or less) in orgiastic fashion, and then simply leave
the body? This, to me, seems terribly wasteful — the genre equivalent
of lighting a cigarette and flipping it away or stubbing it out after a
quick, single drag. While 30 Days of Night doesn’t exactly encourage such pause
for thought, the fact that I had time to reflect on such matters is
indicative of how at least somewhat botched a rendering of a great
concept the movie is.
It’s a time of hunkered-down communal survival,
with liquor and beer taps turned off at the local bar in order to temper tempers. Relishing this
free rein, a group of bloodthirsty vampires, led by Danny Huston,
arrive to take advantage of the situation by feeding on the helpless
residents. It’s up to Sheriff Eben Olemaun (Josh Hartnett, above right), his estranged wife Stella (Melissa George, above center) and an ever-shrinking group of survivors to do everything they can to
last until the next daylight. If this means going Anne Frank and holing
up in an attic to much bickering discord, so be it.
30 Days of Night is directed, improbably enough, by David Slade, who most recently made the indie two-hander Hard Candy. As in that film, Slade trades heartily in tight close-ups, though of
course dialing down the color saturation to play up the surrounding
darkness. Early on, this tack suits the material, as the movie is a quickened-pace, Dawn of the Dead-style
re-imagining of pure, streamlined genre material, with its vampires
swooping around in quick bursts and speaking in a subtitled dialect of
phonetic clicks and high-pitched shrieks. Much more an exercise in
horror than action, the movie dashes through its moral quandary
checklist — a violent attack by an infected kid, the assisted suicide
of another infected person — and gets some of its ya-yas out via the
group assault of a young woman used, to no avail, as bait to try to
lure humans out from hiding.
Diehard vampire aficionados and source text fans will appreciate much of the film, and it definitely earns points for a bleak ending that doesn’t try to have it both ways. Still, 30 Days of Night remains essentially a somewhat
shrug-inducing vessel of unfulfilled potential, consisting of solidly
executed attack passages followed by great stretches of relative
tedium, or at least overly familiar genre dawdling (the waylaid
re-supply trip, the infected survivor). The great potential of its concept (“We should have come up here ages
ago!” even one of the vampires admits) never takes full bloom, partially because of wanly sketched supporting characters, but chiefly
because the restrictive conditions of space and passing time are
communicated in such a fuzzy, haphazard fashion. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.
Over the course the course of his career of almost half a century, Michael Caine has, by his own estimation, been the lead in 80 to 85 movies —
this on top of nine years of near-exclusive work in the theater. So when the
actor — now 74, but still sprightly and intellectually playful — holds forth on
the differences between comedy and drama, or Hollywood then and now, it’s with
a considerable insight born of a unique combination of talent and experience. If
it seems like Caine could conduct a master class on acting, it’s not without
good reason; in fact, he already has, in the form of a best-selling DVD called Acting in Film.
Master Class on BBC2, which is the more esoteric channel,”
recalls Caine in a recent one-on-one interview, “and they asked me
for two years to do this thing on cinema. But I said, ‘I
don’t know how to tell you anything about it. I could do movie acting of a
certain standing, but I don’t know how to tell you how to do it.’ They said
well why don’t you try? So they gave me four cameras and four young actors, all
of whom were doing my roles in the theater — it was Sleuth, Educating Rita, Alfie and one other. And so they then did their stage performance, and I had to change it to a movie
performance, and that’s what I did. That’s sold lots of copies in America,
and it’s just been released in England
and is doing very well there. …There are some good tricks in
there that one can use.”
They’re tricks that have continued to serve Caine well throughout
his own career, even though his theater work — something a lot of younger
actors of today lack — gives him a rooting and structure that he finds
invaluable, especially in comedy. “I can’t think of how you do comedy in a
movie without the sense memory and timing of a live audience,” Caine says. “No
one can laugh in the studio. So I will deliberately rehearse in front of the
unit to see whether they laugh at certain things, and I’ll do it very loud. But
if you’re doing it for the camera and the crew laughs, then you’re doing it too
big.”
“Big” is just the opposite of Caine’s latest film, Sleuth, a slick, slippery,
intimate two-hander in which he, a cuckolded novelist, and Jude Law, a
struggling actor, wage psychological warfare against one another, all in the
pursuit of a woman. If it sounds familiar, it’s because Caine played Law’s
role, opposite Laurence Olivier, in a 1972 production from filmmaker Joseph
Mankiewicz. Directed by Kenneth Branagh, this Sleuth is a from-the-basement-up re-imagining of its
concept, rewritten and reconceived from Anthony Shaffer’s stageplay by legendary
scribe Harold Pinter. Caine, for one, is tickled pink over the chance to tackle
the role he always regarded as best anyway. “I like this part, it’s a good part,”
he says with a grin. “I don’t want to play the other one — anyway, Jude’s
prettier than I am. It would be very hard to do a story where I took a wife
away from Jude, you see what I mean?”
Writers Digest has up a solid interview with Tom Perrotta, the author of Little Children, in which he talks about his writing process, as well as his adaptation of The Abstinence Teacher, which he’s working on for Little Miss Sunshine co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Ferris.
Also, surprising exactly no one in the know, the New York Times is reporting that when The Darjeeling Limited, which opened in about 200 theaters in late September, expands nationwide this Friday,
moviegoers will first see a short film, Hotel Chevalier, which distributor Fox Searchlight hopes will boost ticket sales. The thematically linked piece, starring Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman, is available online, and was originally not going to be shown with the film. At the movie’s press day in Los Angeles a couple weeks ago, though, director Wes Anderson admitted that it would be pegged to later prints of the movie.
And finally, it’s happy birthday wishes today to Ryan Reynolds and Ang Lee, who turn 31 and 53, respectively.
So if there wasn’t enough troubling news in the world, now comes word that Transformershas sold 8.3 million DVDs in North America alone since its debut on October 16, with 4.5 million of those coming in a single day. After pulling in over $315 million domestically at the box office ($700 million-plus worldwide), the movie has already become the top-selling October DVD release of all time, as well as the best-selling HD-DVD ever, with 190,000 copies of the latter now sitting on coffee tables next to recently popped copies of Halo 3 and Maxim Magazine.
Just as Lars and the Real Girl gathers a bit of heat (all things being relative) from its national expansion comes word that star-to-be Ryan Goslinghas dropped out of Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, per Variety, one day before shooting was to commence. The film, of course, is based on Alice Sebold’s award-winning novel about a grieving
couple (Rachel Weisz is the other half of the equation) whose world is
shattered after their daughter is murdered. Subsequently, the girl
watches over both her family and her killer from heaven. Mark Wahlberg will replace Gosling.
The age-old adage “creative differences” is naturally being deployed, but in this instance it’s something that I can actually fathom, even if the timing is suspect and problematic, from a damage standpoint. Genial/sensitive exteriors aside, Jackson and Gosling are both strong-willed, stick-to-their-guns creative types, and the 26-year-old Gosling especially has been resistant to the star-making Hollywood apparatus — think of him as an early-era Johnny Depp in this regard, minus the rock band, drug dabbling and Winona Ryder. After gaining 20 pounds and a beard for the role — all in an effort to age himself — one has to guess this was the major sticking point of a few other character bits that Gosling and Jackson just couldn’t see eye to eye on. I can’t imagine it was extremely protracted and marked by screaming matches or anything quite as delicious.
For all his prodigious talent, Gosling has always struck me as having an inherent air of melancholy. He was notably miserable on Murder by Numbers, and had to be basically talked into doing his two other most overtly commercial films, The Notebook and Fracture. Hollywood can’t afford to give up on this guy, but at the same time Gosling just gave reason to give them pause when it comes to casting him in high-profile productions.
The running time on Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs — i.e., a few minutes short of an hour and a half — is feeding negative buzz on the film as little more than a piece of agitprop, the reasoning being that nothing that short and ostensibly heavily political can also be of legitimate substance. We’ll soon see; I’m screening the movie, Redford’s first film behind the camera since The Legend of Bagger Vance, this week. After kicking off AFI Fest on November 1 in Los Angeles, the movie opens nationally November 9.
The horror genre is always looking for new animals to exploit.
After all, spiders, killer dogs, rage-infested monkeys and killer microbes can
only go so far. Reaching back to the rich legacy of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, director Sheldon Wilson’s Kaw offers up an elemental slice of
man versus nature, in the form of a gruesome battle for survival against a
flock of vicious ravens.
The Company’s Kristin Booth, above), to
begin their new life. What begins as a quiet day in Wayne’s
isolated rural hometown quickly turns into a dark day of terror and death, however.
Phone calls roll in about marauding ravens, first from town drunk and military
veteran Clyde (Stephen McHattie, of A
History of Violence, and the small screen’s Guiding Light). Wayne
is understandably skeptical, but do you know what changes his mind? Reasoned
reflection and/or the impassioned pleas of his wife-to-be? No — attacks by
thousands of blood-thirsty ravens who also possess a high level of
intelligence.
When the local girls’ soccer team comes under siege by the
killer birds, who dive bomb their bus with large rocks, everyone desperately
fights their way towards the town diner. There Wayne, town doctor Doc (Rod Taylor)
and a few other remaining townspeople make a stand, fighting the birds off
before they kill off the entire community. Along the way, a schism between the most
of the town and a Mennonite sect nominally headed up by farmers Jacob (Vladimir
Bondarenko) and Oskar (John Ralston) sheds some light (or does it?) on the explanation
for the attacks, if not the disturbing lack of poop runs.
His involvement in the execrable The Boondock Saints
notwithstanding, Flanery is a serviceable enough actor, albeit a sort of budget
Christian Slater. He has a believable world-weary quality that serves him well,
especially in genre fare like this. Director Wilson (Shallow Ground), meanwhile, keeps things moving at a decent pace, and Kaw’s CGI effects are decent, at
least until the requirements of bigger-better-more start to weigh down the movie’s
plausibility (I know, I know…) even further than the story inherently might. From the second act on, things
trend predictably gory and goosing more so than menacing, but genre fans
looking for a movie about killer birds will be more or less sated with this
entry, even it doesn’t quite match the dusty avian siege sequence in Resident Evil: Extinction.
Kaw comes housed in
a regular plastic Amray case, and is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen,
to preserve the aspect ratio of the movie’s theatrical exhibition… if there had
been one. Its audio, with English and French language tracks, comes in a
decently mixed Dolby digital 5.1, getting some value out of its high-end
register. French and English subtitles are also available. Since he appeared opposite
Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s The Birds,
Taylor makes for a nice bit of referential casting, if one cares about the matter;
it’s for this reason that he sits for a special 22-minute interview here,
discussing his memories of both movies, and comparing and contrasting them. It’s
a nice chat, also covering other elements of his career. There’s also a 24-minute
making-of featurette, with lots of time appropriately devoted to the bird
wrangling and effects work. While there is referential (and reverential) mention
made of Hitchcock and The Birds, it’s
also clear that some of the attacks were very similarly storyboarded; more
transparency about this would have been appreciated, without greatly
distracting from Kaw’s nominal
merits. C (Movie) B- (Disc)
The Los Angeles Film Critics Association announced yesterday that director Sidney Lumet will be honored with the group’s 2007 Career Achievement Award at their annual awards dinner, to be held January 12, 2008. Previous winners include Jerry Lewis, Andre de Toth, Arthur Penn, Billy Wilder and Conrad Hall, among others; in 2005, Richard Widmark was spotlighted for his work, while Robert Mulligan was honored last year. Lumet’s long and distinguished career spans more than five decades, and includes Fail-Safe, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City and The Verdict, as well as this fall’s buzz-heavy Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, starring Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Marisa Tomei.
A roguish, spry and darkly comedic caper, director Lasse Hallström’s The Hoax is a smartly sketched, enjoyable movie that milks high
drama out of low-key stakes before then folding the secrets and lies at the
core of its story into an even grander conspiracy than its blithely egotistical
protagonist could have initially imagined. It unfortunately flailed at the box
office earlier this spring, pulling in just over $7 million domestically, but
gets reincarnated here in DVD form with a cover whose bright shades of red and
yellow play up its sparkle and energy.
one of
the most audacious and outrageous deceptions of all time jointly perpetrated on
the media and American public. Bummed by the last-minute cancellation of his
latest novel, writer Clifford Irving (Richard Gere) dreams up a work of
non-fiction that he knows would be sure to be an instant bestseller. He claims
to have obtained — via a mysterious, handwritten communiqué — the memoirs of
reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. At first, Irving’s
idea is just a savvy artistic prank, designed as much to salvage his own
wounded self-esteem as anything else. Irving,
though, believes he can take it even further. Pitching his agent (Hope Davis)
and publisher McGraw-Hill on an exclusive, tell-all autobiography, Irving
finds fresh ears. His stature instantly enhanced, Irving teases up the lie even
more, works out arrangements for an lucrative advance, and recruits friend and
fellow writer Dick Suskind (Alfred Molina, in a superlative supporting
performance) to help carry out the particulars of his scheme. When a few
associates of Hughes assail the veracity of Irving’s work, it hardly seems to
matter; using the business leader’s legendarily hermetic nature to his
advantage, Irving fends off these frontal attacks with spin, head feints and,
of course, good, old-fashioned fraud.
In real life, Irving
pulled the wool over the entire publishing industry’s eyes for more than a year
until his clever yarn unraveled into a haze of serious crimes and corporate
embarrassment. (In a delicious irony alert that would surely be derided as bad
fiction in its own novelistic form, Irving
had, in fact, previously written a book about art forger Elmyr de Hory,
entitled Fake, which could have tipped off dubious minds much earlier.) The
Hoax, meanwhile, uses the facts surrounding Irving’s
ruse as a springboard to even more fanciful and controversial reverie. It
mischievously and imaginatively explores the alleged connection between
Irving’s meticulously researched but frequently conjectural tome, Hughes’
eventual quasi-complicity in the project — in a plan of grudge-settling and
payback that would still allow for plausible deniability — and the burgeoning
paranoia in the Nixon White House that would eventually lead to Watergate and
the downfall of a President.
What William Wheeler’s superb script smartly taps into is
not just the outlandish and colorful surface intrigue of its story — the nuts
and bolts of the faking of the biography — but the secret, unexplainable thrill
that all of this gives Irving. Even
if it’s heretofore been dormant, it’s hardwired to his soul, this need for
attention and respect. This is conveyed through the listless, almost reflexive
manner in which Irving commits
adultery on his wife (Marcia Gay Harden) with an old flame (Julie Delpy) he knows to be untrustworthy and capricious. What we’re actually watching is
the implosion of an addictive personality, and the adrenaline rush that piling
lie on top of lie gives Irving.
Knowing that only the most bizarre and outlandish ones will work, to match
Hughes’ eccentric and impulsive personality, the author’s spiraling deception
is the fuel on which The Hoax runs.
So potent is its force, too, that by the end of the movie,
one is improbably siding alongside Irving,
waiting on a rooftop for a helicopter visit from Hughes that one knows can’t possibly
be coming. The Hoax toes the line of the “unreliable narrator” subgenre
of pictures, but never tips over into malarkey or complete self-obsession.
Magnificently constructed and manipulated by Hallström, the film presents a
Gere that we haven’t seen in a long time, if at all. Along with his turn in this
fall’s similarly smart and engaging The
Hunting Party, from writer-director Richard Shepard,
Gere finally, blissfully, seems to be loosening back up on screen, and not a
moment too soon.
Presented in 1.85:1 widescreen, preserving the aspect ratio
of its original theatrical exhibition, The
Hoax comes with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track, and is housed
in a regular Amray case. A nine-minute making-of featurette provides an
overview of the production, courtesy of EPK-style cast and crew interviews; Hallström
and writer Wheeler, meanwhile, provide optional commentary over 13 minutes of
deleted scenes, while an additional six-minute extended scene showcases the framework
of lively interplay that smart actors and character rootedness affords. Veteran
newsman Mike Wallace sits for a five-minute chat about his interview with the
real-life Irving for the television news magazine show 60 Minutes, though the full inclusion of this report, rather than
just clips, would’ve been nice too. Still, on top of these bonus features there
are also two feature-length audio commentary tracks — one from Wheeler and Hallström
and the other from producers Leslie Holleran and Joshua Maurer, who are equally
knowledgeable about the real-life Irving case, offering up anecdotes aplenty.
Overall, it’s a superlative packaging of a film that unfortunately fell through
the cracks in theaters. To purchase the film via Amazon, click here. A- (Movie) B+ (Disc)
Patty Fitzgerald surely wasn’t the first black-haired girl I
encountered, but my memories of her are strong, probably because we started a
new school together in the sixth grade. It wasn’t that she was drop-dead
gorgeous or anything like that, just that her height, grace, fair skin and
raven locks made for a striking combination — something that just held one’s
attention in a way that Mrs. Cooke’s science class couldn’t. I say this because Hallowed Groundhangs its fortunes totally on up-and-comer Jaimie Alexander (Kyle
XY), who is able to spellbind to a now lesser degree for me certainly, but perhaps still quite a bit for 12- to 17-year-old guys out there.
Alexander,
who cut her genre teeth on the thriller Rest Stop,
featuring the obligatory moment of lingerie-clad imperilment, is otherwise, from
the right angle, a decent look-alike for Sophia Bush, but it’s her ability to conjure both repulsion and fear in equal measure that definitely bumps this otherwise somewhat rigidly plotted tale up a half notch or two. The film’s story? Built on sacred ground in the late 1890s, the
town of Hope was founded by fanatical
preacher Jonas Hathaway (Nick Chinlund). To protect the harvest and livelihood
of his new burgh from Satan’s evil reach, the preacher sacrificed the town’s
sinners — a plot device somewhat similar to The Reaping, albeit
done more imaginatively than any stone altar (Jonas dresses them up as
scarecrows, crucifies them on crosses, and lets the birds do the rest of the
work). When the town ultimately turns against Jonas, it leads to his ultimate
demise.
A century later, Liz Chambers (Alexander) finds herself
stranded in Hope when her car breaks down. She meets up with tabloid reporter Sarah
(Xena: Warrior Princess’ Hudson
Leick), who’s in town to do a profile on the community’s history (or maybe just
search down a lead on Bat Boy). Jonas’ vengeful spirit returns, however, and Liz
soon discovers that her arrival was foretold by the town’s founding preacher a
century ago, and is eagerly awaited by a bloodthirsty townspeople who view her
sacrifice as the first, necessary step in a planned rebirth and sanctification
of their community.
Helmed by debut director David Benullo, the writer of Frank
Coraci’s Around the World in 80 Days remake, Hallowed Ground is a movie very much
in the vein of rural-set stories of limited scope like Children of the Corn, The Hitcher as and Jeepers
Creepers. While its production means are at times evident and its CGI
effects work only fair by most horror buffs’ standards, Benullo for the most
part keeps things moving forward in a solid fashion, and doesn’t over-rely on
the desultory smash-cut jump scare, as with many first-time genre directors. He’s
aided by his cast, certainly: square-jawed Chinlund (Tears of the Sun) is effectively loathsome, and Alexander, as
mentioned, holds your attention, even if it’s not always in character.
Housed in a regular Amray case, Hallowed Ground comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen,
free from grain or problems with edge enhancement; a Dolby digital 5.1 sound
track anchors the aural presentation. Apart from a collection of trailers for like-minded
genre flicks, there are no supplemental features. C+ (Movie) C- (Disc)
Built around the case of a missing little girl, Ben Affleck’s directorial debut — based on a novel of the same name by Dennis Lehane, the author of Mystic River — delivers a topical story while avoiding pat moral judgments, weaving a labyrinthine and effectively melancholic tale of warped responsibility and justice.
Gone Baby Gone unfolds in tight-knit, working class South Boston, the sort of neighborhood where, as the opening narration informs us, “people started in the cracks and slipped from there.” Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) is a bail bondsman and private investigator who chases down stolen property and the like with his girlfriend/lesser partner Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan). When the four-year-old daughter of neighbor Helene McCready (Amy Ryan) goes missing, distraught relatives tap Patrick to augment the investigation, leaning on informants who might not be inclined to talk to the police. Patrick’s convoluted search leads him to various drug peddlers, crime bosses, pedophiles and compromised law enforcement, many of whom it seems he went to high school with. (How’s that for a small world?) Just when it seems the case has wound down, a new lead sparks up, causing Patrick and Angie to question their previous read on matters.
Some of the taut, downhill energy of the first act flags some as the movie wears on, lost to a daisy chain of reversals and upturned assumptions. But Gone Baby Gone never succumbs to outright murkiness, and its detail is absolutely spot-on. Affleck’s familiarity with and obvious affinity for the setting — with its heavy accents and piss-ahhff attitudes — enhance both the film’s novelistic richness and sense of rootedness. Special mention should go to Ryan, a twice-Tony-nominated stage actress with a slate of film roles forthcoming. She plays white-trash Helene with an unapologetic self-involvement — the unblinking victim of her own shattered childhood, who now knows no choices other than poor and self-indulgent.
If, in the end, Gone Baby Gone is just a bit over-plotted, the movie comes to the questions it raises honestly, and has the guts to present an ending that is both “right” while also alienating to at least half an audience. It also embraces an abrasive, bruised, combative quality that far too many genre pictures of its ilk attempt to avoid — all very good signs for the older Affleck’s career behind the camera. For the full review, from Reelz, click here. (Miramax, R, 114 minutes)
The creation of Grindhouse, from directors Robert
Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, gave home video distributors a nice way to
repackage and exploit the value of some of their library titles, but that film’s
less than stellar commercial reception no doubt somewhat put a dent in those
plans. Released this month under a “Welcome to the Grindhouse” banner that doesn’t
totally jibe with its actual product are two old flicks from Crown International
Pictures’ library, The Beach Girls
and Coach.
Released in 1982, The
Beach Girls is much more of a grabby, classic T&A comedy, told from a more
decidedly female perspective. The film’s opening montage of sunny non sequiturs,
set to the strains of “I Wanna Go to Paradise,” establishes the currency of naughtiness
and double entendres, and sets the bar quite high; in the first three minutes
alone, there’s a dog stealing a bikini top, a nun (in full habit) waxing her
surfboard, chesty women playing volleyball in slow-motion and a guy squeezing
mustard and a hotdog out of its bun when he sees a topless gal.
Then the air-quote story kicks in. Free from school, fun-loving
brunette Ducky (Jeana Tomasina) and blonde Ginger (Val Kline) head to the coast
to hook up with their virginal, bookworm friend Sarah (Debra Blee), who’s
house-sitting for her uncle, Carl (Adam Roarke). Along the way, they pick up handsome
hitchhiker Scott (James Daughton), but instead of turning out to be a serial
killer, he’s actually a decent guy, and strikes up a flirtation with Sarah, in
an arc that will span the entire movie. Partying and hook-ups ensue, much to
the chagrin of various neighbors and Carl’s fiancée Julie (Fern Fitzgerald). There’s
some peek-a-boo, and also a plot strand involving a crooked Coast Guard cabal,
which leads to the hilarious display of a giant bag of weed,
the worst fake marijuana ever depicted on screen. (It looks like moss, fake
moss from an art shop.) While the acting is uneven (Kline’s sing-song line
delivery is more than a bit grating), director Bud Townsend keeps things light
and airy, and the over-under on entendres is surpassed sometime after the
salami in a delivery boy’s pocket, exploding fireworks, uncorked champagne and squirting
garden hose.
Also directed by Townsend (who went legit after 1976’s X-rated
musical comedy adaptation of Alice in
Wonderland), 1978’s Coach,
meanwhile, is a loose-knit romantic comedy that presages the Title IX
revolution in sports. A losing high school basketball team hires a new coach chosen
by computer, then blanches when it finds out their number-crunching efforts and
selection of “Randy Rawlings” have actually produced a woman (erstwhile That’s Incredible co-host Cathy Lee
Crosby). As Randy goes about quelling the adolescent instincts of her hornball
charges and instilling in them discipline and the basics of rebounding, she
also falls for one of her players, Jack Ripley (a young Michael Biehn), and
shows some fleeting side-boob. Well, that’s inappropriate. The relationship, that
is, not the side-boob. Still, Coach —
with Craig T. Nelson nowhere in sight — plays it straight and sincere, and Biehn and Crosby have a nice, easy-going chemistry. While this flick has more of a schematic
axe to grind than The Beach Girls, each
movie is well constructed and ably directed, proving that even filmmaking
talent of that era lies even in the margins.
Housed in a single Amray case, both The Beach Girls and Coach
are presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, and their superb transfers belie
the widely held assumption that older films of this era inherently have to look
like crap. While the colors don’t necessarily pop with modern lushness, each of
these movies looks great, and is almost totally free from any grain whatsoever.
There are also no problems with edge enhancement or other artifacts. Apart from
a single-play gallery of collected trailers for titles like The Van and other low-budget genre
flicks of the era, though, there are no supplemental features herein. That’s a bummer, somewhat, but it can’t be stressed enough — these movies look fantastic. A
separate two-fer October release from distributor BCI, meanwhile, groups 1974’s The Hellcats and 1971’s Chain Gang Women, starring Barbara Mills,
Linda York and Michael Stearns. To purchase the film(s) via Amazon, click here. B- (Movies) B- (Disc)
Fraternal relationships were under the microscope on The Daily Show last night, when Jon Stewart rightly questioned this statement from a bearded Ben Affleck, about his relationship with younger brother Casey: “When we were younger we kind of grab-assed around a little bit, like most people probably do with their siblings.” Errr… what?
Affleck was more than a bit off his game; unlike Matt Damon’s appearance earlier this summer, this chat had little wing-ding charm, though it was funny when Affleck mentioned how he was being asked the same junket questions about sibling fights, and had thus concluded that all journalists have horrible relationships with their brothers and sisters. Not so, Stewart insisted. “We just don’t think very hard about our interview questions. We’re not very good at what we do…”
The notion of art as an imitation of life is certainly bolstered by the
wave of documentaries and politically-infused dramas and even action
flicks making their way to theaters this year. Many are the product of
an anxious world climate in general and a four-years-and-counting war
and foreign occupation with no end in sight in particular. The latest
of these films is director Gavin Hood’s Rendition. Cross-cutting between continents, the movie tells the story of Isabella El-Ibrahimi (Reese Witherspoon),
the American wife of an Egyptian-born, domestically educated chemical
engineer named Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally) who disappears on a
flight from South Africa to Washington D.C.. Plying an ex-boyfriend (Peter Sarsgaard),
now the senior staffer of a senator, for help, Isabella desperately
tries to track her husband down, while a young CIA analyst (Jake Gyllenhaal) at a secret detention facility outside the United States is forced to
question his assignment as he becomes party to some unorthodox
interrogation techniques. The South African-born Hood came to acclaim
with the Oscar-winning Tsotsi,
about a week in the life of a young thug who eventually tries to set
right his errant ways. While the filmmaker admits to having a
longstanding interest in matters political, he says he didn’t have a
strong knowledge about the particular interstices of U.S. detention and
intelligence-gathering prior to tackling this project.
“The script came across my desk and I started reading,” Hood recalls during a recent interview. “I read Rendition on the cover and it could have been Beethoven’s Ninth. I dunno, maybe
it’s a rendition of a song? But I started reading and I just found
that I was captivated,” he continues. “I kept turning the pages. I
wanted to know what happened next and I thought that [screenwriter
Kelley Sane] had drawn some incredible, and incredibly diverse,
characters that were all emotionally rooted and real.” With this
initial fascination came a lot of questions. But for Hood, who grew up
in a country without a constitution and where, in the 1980s, people
were detained without trial, it was almost as if he was dealing with
the makings of a South African political thriller. “When I was a young
law student, we looked at the American Constitution as a document that
we felt our country desperately needed,” Hood explains. “And to see
chipped away that great document — and the principles of the Geneva
Convention, which America was largely behind writing after the horrors
of the Second World War — was quite a shock.”
“Now that I have American kids, albeit very recently, I feel even more
strongly about the subject matter,” he adds. “I believe in the
founding principals of this nation and I felt that this film would
perhaps contribute to a discussion that I feel is important. Principals
should not be abandoned without serious discussion, and patriotic
Americans should stand up for what America stands for.” For the full feature piece, from FilmStew, click here.
Rooted in sub-cultural specificism and the clash of both family
and public and private lives, writer-director James Gray’s We Own the Night sets itself up as something familiar — a gritty
genre shuffle through cops-and-goombas territory. While it doesn’t necessarily
break many molds, the movie does take enough interesting turns and twists (there are several moments early on which, in their own way, could qualify as
third act breaking points) to earn and keep your attention, all before an
ending that sacrifices emotional credibility for the sake of convenience.
We Own the Night
unfolds in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach area in 1988 (strange, then,
the Blondie and David Bowie soundtrack), against the backdrop of a rising tide
of drug trafficking and ethnic, organized criminality. As the popular manager
of Russian-owned nightclub El Caribe, Bobby Green (Joaquin Phoenix) has
reverted to his deceased mother’s maiden name in order to conceal both his Polish-American
heritage and his connection to a long line of distinguished police officers,
including older brother Joseph (Mark Wahlberg) and father Burt Grusinsky
(Robert Duvall), from whom he is partially estranged. While Bobby’s Puerto
Rican girlfriend, Amada Juarez (Eva Mendes), knows about his family, his boss (Moni
Moshonov) and other friends don’t.
Bobby is sort of floating through life in a haze of booze,
smoke — some from cigarettes, some from the hippie lettuce — and, occasionally,
harder substances, but he doesn’t seem a particularly bad guy, and the rift
with his family of one of petty disagreement and hassle, not necessarily
overblown argument. Bobby has dreams of opening a club in Manhattan,
and to this end he tries to keep a friendly distance from the drug-peddling
gangster — Vadim Nezhinski (Alex Veadov), the nephew of his boss — who’s
essentially operating out of his club. When his brother’s sting operation inevitably
throws his policy of blithe non-engagement into violent disarray, Bobby is
forced to choose sides and take a stand.
Coming just in advance of his turn as a bereaved father in Reservation Road,
opening next week, Phoenix’s work deserves
special mention here, for We Own the
Night works best for much of its running time as a modest vehicle for him. When
he got his start, in films like Gus Van Sant’s To Die For and even something like Clay Pigeons, Phoenix was never an actor that one would assume had
the brio to pull off strident moral awakening — he seemed just as likely to
wander off into mumbly, Jeremy Davies-esque wallflower territory, and forever
play sensitive guys who get shit on by women and rescued or aided by the hero.
That Phoenix so beautifully and yet subtly conveys both the pain — wanting to
be accepted, but feeling like he can never catch a break — and burgeoning guilt
that drive Bobby to action is a testament to his talent.For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.
Michael Caine was on The Late Late Show last night, and his shared across-the-pond heritage with host Craig Ferguson made for two delicious segments, in which he didn’t even mention his work on The Dark Knight, as he did here. In addition to a very funny taped bit in which Ferguson reenacted the diner scene from When Harry Met Sally…, in costume, as Caine and Sean Connery (the latter showcasing his “O face,” for what it’s worth), Caine made his pitch for a gender-inverted Alfie remake (Alfina, with his cad recast as the strict father of an out-of-control daughter). He also shared some great memories about Connery, and waxed philosophical about the nine years of theater at the beginning of his career (more on this later this week, from a chat I recently had with Caine), saying he didn’t miss it since he regarded “theater as a woman who didn’t give a damn about me and movies as a mistress who I could do anything with.”
An overly distilled slug-line — guy orders plastic woman over the
Internet, and introduces her to his family as his new girlfriend —
could easily have made for a one-note comedy of limited inspiration.
But fast rising star Ryan Gosling’s participation in Lars and the Real Girl immediately demands that it be taken a little more seriously. There’s
also the title’s implied tug between the sardonic and the sincere, one
that director Craig Gillespie uses as a springboard for a film that’s
at once funny and surprisingly poignant. “When I first heard about this
project, I thought it was wacky,” admits Gosling during a recent
interview.
“But there is a whole community of guys out there that have these dolls
and have very complicated relationships with them. For me, it was not
dissimilar from a kid’s relationship with his teddy bear; you love it
and you go through really important parts of your life with it, you
talk to it, and if you were ever to lose it, it would be heartbreaking.”
In an interesting, subdued way, Lars and the Real Girl is
actually a parable about emotionally ambivalent individuals; more
specifically, a generation plus of prosperous, peacetime beta males
thrown into turbulent, uncertain times and struggling to make choices
period, let alone make peace with those decisions. “He could have been
a part of my family or something, I felt like I knew him,” says Gosling
of his character. “It was a really great experience for me because a
lot of the other things I’ve done, I’ve been investigating the
self-destructive part of my nature.” Lars, though “is kind of like a Don Quixote-esque character,” Gosling
continues. “He is the power of belief, and whatever he believes is
true. When Quixote goes into the courtyard of the castle and he’s
talking to the prostitutes, he thinks they are royalty. And for that
moment that he thinks they are royalty, they think they are too. They
play along, and for that moment it becomes true.”
While he’s played characters both more intense and seemingly rooted in
personal experience, Gosling says that Lars, of all the roles he’s
played, has most stuck with him. “I feel like what I learned from Lars is that you can never go far enough,” he explains. “What Lars and the
movie did break down in a way for me was the
difference between who we are, who we think we are, and who we think
people think we are — how you kind of turn into five different people,
[with] one person trying to navigate all of those different agendas. For me, it was such fertile creative ground that the ideas
for him were endless. I could do a scene a million times for him and do it differently
every time, because he exists in such a positive place that so much can grow
there.”
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.
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)
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.
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.”
What About Brian, so that makes her an actress, right? If not, that prodigious posterior does, in its own way. Bouncing quarters, I would be… among other things.
The shenangians of the costumed panhandlers on Hollywood Boulevardcontinue to provide me no small amount of amusement, so naturally this trailer for Confessions of a Superhero, a documentary about their seemingly strange lives, whets one’s appetite for the full-length version of the film, directed by Matthew Ogens and presented by Morgan Spurlock. The self-delusion runs syrup-thick throughout, but for me, the best line may be, “I just sold my Super Nintendo, got me a Greyhound bus ticket and headed out here.”
 is, when we first see him, unable to<br />
foresee a world in which his innate aptitude ever translates to an audience<br />
beyond a few drunken barstool pigeons. The film centers around Jake’s<br />
burgeoning professional and personal relationship with admiring associate<br />
publisher Marni Elliot (Tara D’Agostino, above right), who harbors a painful personal<br />
secret, and eventually his competition against successful freestyle poet David<br />
Settles (C. Thomas Howell) in the highly lucrative Los Angeles Poetron, a<br />
tournament-style gathering of spoken-word poets.<o:p></p>
<p></o:p><span style=)
The success of Fighting Words
It’s a time of hunkered-down communal survival,
Master Class on BBC2, which is the more esoteric channel,”
The Company’s Kristin Booth, above), to
one of
Alexander,
Gone Baby Gone unfolds in tight-knit, working class 
We Own the Night
, a brooding, intelligent and well-to-do high-school student with a wounded soul. Still stung by the death of his father several years prior, <B>Nick lives in a state of emotional detachment</B> with his regimented mother Diane (Marcia Gay Harden). He wants to be a writer — and in fact makes extra money selling term papers to some of his classmates — but is unable to convince his mother of said occupation’s practicality.<BR><BR>Nick’s best and only friend, really, is Pete (Chris Marquette), a less well-off kid who runs up a debt with tough girl Annie Newton (<A href=)
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. wants more out of life than the inevitable career that<br />
awaits him and every other worker in New Hive City — that is to say, a job at<br />
Honex making honey. Barry jumps at the chance to venture out of the<br />
hive, and soon encounters a world beyond his wildest dreams. When Barry<br />
inadvertently meets a quirky florist named Vanessa (voiced by <a href=)
Renée Zellweger),
What About Brian, so that makes her an actress, right? If not, that