New Line will jump-start 2008 with a celebration of its biggest smash of last year, reopening Hairspray exclusively at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in
Angeles
One of the more buoyant films in recent memory, Hairspray has earned numerous accolades this
awards season, including three Golden Globe nominations — Best
Actress for Nikki Blonsky, Best Supporting Actor for John Travolta, and Best Picture: Musical or Comedy.
In a Beverly Hills hotel suite, filmmaker Danny Boyle is scarfing down
a sandwich and sipping on tea while also holding forth on some of the
particulars of theoretical physics, notably non-topological solitons
and the self-reinforcing pulse waves that maintain their own perfect
shape while traveling through space at constant speeds. “These Q-balls,
as they’re called, are enormous forces of matter that just fly around
the universe,” Boyle explains.
“The only thing that stops them are incredibly dense stars. They just
pass through planets. When you go into this stuff, it’s mind-boggling
what you don’t understand.” Another quick bite, and he dives back into
his explanation. “If they hit something as dense as a star, though,
they stick,” he adds, smacking his palms together for effect. “And then
they start to eat the star from the inside out. That could happen, and
if it does the sun would begin to die.”
Boyle’s doomsday offerings are intimately sketched out for good reason. Scripted by frequent collaborator Alex Garland and shot largely at London’s famed Three Mills Studios, Sunshine — which arrives Tuesday, January 8 on DVD — stars an intriguing
international cast, including Rose Byrne, Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans,
Troy Garity, Cillian Murphy, Cliff Curtis and Hiroyuki Sanada. Set in
the year 2057, the movie concerns the dying sun, as loosely described
above. The spacecraft Icarus II, with an eight-person crew aboard, sets
out with a nuclear device in hopes of resuscitating the fading heat
source, seven years after the disappearance of Icarus I while on a
similar mission.
Though it made $28.2 million overseas, Sunshine scrounged up only $3.7 million stateside when it opened in July. The movie was essentially eclipsed by the likes of Transformers, the latest Harry Potter, Hairspray and The Simpsons Movie,
which opened a week later.
While Boyle’s roots in theater and own
intellectual curiosity have fed an admirably diverse filmography, this
genre wasn’t one that, on the surface, he was looking to tackle. “I
didn’t realize quite how much a fan of sci-fi I was until I looked at
my track record and I realized I’d watched everything, and that makes
me a bit of a geek,” says Boyle, whose previous film credits include 28 Days Later and Trainspotting. “But I love them, and so the chance to make one with an original idea was fantastic.”
“I tend to make high-energy pictures that disrupt things with odd
camera angles and things like that,” Boyle offers. “Sci-fi tends to be
much more classical, and this kind of sci-fi — which is classic,
serious, ’70s sci-fi, which [is rooted in] philosophical ideas — isn’t
like a playground, it’s very serious. It’s much slower, it’s the
slowest film I’ve ever made in terms of the first half hour. But you
can’t speed it up. I tried, and you have to go at that pace. It’s
something about the eternity of the distances involved. That was a big
difference for me, how elegant that first part of the film has to be to
convince you that they are weightless in space, and traveling.”
Naturally, pictures set chiefly in outer space have their own notable
big screen ancestors, and for Boyle it was a matter of embracing rather
than fleeing from those influences. “There are three in particular that
are there at every turn,” he says. “Every time you think you’re being
original, they’re there waiting for you, and they are 2001, the first Alien film and (Andrei) Tarkovsky’s Solaris,
for different reasons with each of them. But they’re all there, and in
the end you have to either stop filming and give it up or you have to
acknowledge, ‘OK, nope, this is borrowed from Alien.’” For the full interview feature, from FilmStew, click here.
If there’s a notable silver lining to be found for cineastes
in the third installment of the Resident
Evil franchise, it’s that a bravura, mid-film zombie crow sequence may have
squelched the need for Michael Bay’s long-rumored remake of The Birds.
Milla Jovovich returns as dispassionate butt-kicker
the former head of security for the shadowy, powerful Umbrella Corporation. In
a land where an experimental virus has spread from
population into a mass of shambling flesh-eaters, Alice herself is marked by
biogenic experimentation that has left her genetically altered. While a shady
Umbrella scientist (Iain Glen) still works to capture and/or kill Alice for his
own purposes, she hooks up with a roaming band of survivors (including
returnees Mike Epps and Oded Fehr, above center, and newcomer Ali Larter, above left). A planned escape to
is scotched by a pit stop gone awry in
where O.J. Simpson shows up and angrily demands the return of his sports
collectibles.
OK, not that last part, but something so deliciously
arbitrary might have helped, given the overly familiar track the rest of this
movie runs on. Intermittent action
catharsis and reliably deafening sound design punctuate Extinction, but with little to no reset explanation of the
particulars of Alice’s powers (sometimes she can summon a massive force field,
sometimes not) each set piece becomes more emotionally inconsequential than the
one prior, leading to a denouement that nicely echoes a slice ’em, dice ’em bit
from the quite fun and engaging original film in the series, but still leaves
one feeling a bit empty. Resident Evil
might have finally run out of gas, after all, at least as currently configured.
Its DVD presentation, though, suffers no such problems. Loaded with special features, the film comes presented in a
regular plastic Amray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcase. The video
transfer for the movie’s 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation is superb,
with strong blacks and consistent flesh tones, and only very mild edge
enhancement in a couple scenes. English, French and Spanish Dolby digital 5.1
surround sound tracks dictate a compelling aural experience, and subtitles are
additionally available in each language.
Sitting for a feature-length audio commentary track, director
Russell Mulcahy, producer Jeremy Bolt and producer-writer Paul Anderson talk
about the movie’s
location shoot. It’s an anecdote-laden chat, but of course filled with all
sorts of spoilers and arcing stories, so if you haven’t seen all three films,
you might be advised to skip this track and come back to it later. Eleven
deleted scenes, running about eight-and-a-half minutes in aggregate, add a bit
of welcome character detail and reset from prior films, even if some of the
dialogue is occasionally awkwardly worded and arranged. Four making-of
featurettes run, in total, just over half an hour. In the pre-production
segment, writer and originating director Anderson talks about his inspirations
for the series (Lucio Fulci and George Romero, naturally), and how he wanted to
tackle something with post-apocalyptic scale for this installment. The bit concentrating
on the actual physical production is the longest segment, logically, and offers
up some good tidbits from cast and crew about dealing with the winds and sand
of the desert location. The two most interesting and informative sections,
however, might be the last two featurettes, which look at the actors portraying the film’s
zombies, and the movie’s make-up, miniature models and CGI effects work. For a genre flick with so many working, interfacing parts, it’s nice to get a glimpse at all the components. C- (Movie) B+ (Disc)