Shadows and trenchcoats get their day this April. For those in the SoCal area, the Egyptian Theatre’s 10th annual festival of film noir unfolds, with a bounty of rarities, not-yet-released-on-DVD gems and restored prints, hosted by the Eddie Muller and Alan K. Rode of the Film Noir Foundation. Dozens of titles, starring almost all the Hollywood luminaries of yesteryear, screen in all sorts of double-feature combinations from April 3 to 24. An opening night Lizbeth Scott two-fer, in the form of Desert Fury and Dead Reckoning, both from 1947, kicks things off, and continues throughout the month with a rare print of Delmer Daves’ The Red House, new 35mm prints of Jules Dassin’s Night and the City and Michael Gordon’s Woman in Hiding, and many more films, classic and undiscovered alike.
The historic
Egyptian Theatre is located at 6712
Hollywood Boulevard,
between Highland
and Las Palmas,
in Hollywood.
Tickets for all events are available through Fandango, but for 24-hour recorded information on screenings,
directions and other matters, phone (323) 466-FILM, or visit the Cinematheque’s eponymous
Web site by clicking here.
The remake of a same-named 2004 Thai film, enervated horror flick Shutter, which opened last week without benefit of advance screening for critics, tells the story of a young American couple vacationing in Japan who cope with a vengeful ghost and try to unravel the mystery of a woman they may or may not have hit with their car. Listless performances, overly familiar visual iconography and unimaginative set-ups render the movie worthy of nothing more than a shrug — even from the less demanding under-15 set for which it was chiefly designed.
Among wide new releases, Shutter placed third for the weekend, pulling
in $10.4 million at just over 2,750 theatres. That total fell well
short of fellow freshman entry Meet the Browns, but somewhat
surprisingly edged out the more aggressively marketed Drillbit Taylor,
starring Owen Wilson. Steep fall-off and a lack of positive
word-of-mouth will hardly matter with this modestly budgeted picture, designed from the get-go to earn a quick, quiet buck. Two or three more
overshadowed weekends in theaters will eventually yield to modest, par
pay-cable and DVD earnings, placing Shutter even or slightly ahead of
2006’s Pulse ($20.2 million domestically, $9.5 million
internationally), another PG-13 horror film remade from an Eastern
property.
Following their wedding, Jane (Rachael Taylor) and Ben Shaw (Joshua Jackson) head straight to Japan, their honeymoon doubling as a work
assignment for Ben, a fashion photographer. En route to Tokyo by car at
night, the pair suffer an accident on a snowy back road; Jane insists
they struck a woman. Plagued by both unnerving visions and spectral
distortions in photographs they’ve taken, Jane and Ben deduce the woman
to be Megumi (Megumi Okina, above right), a translator and former needy girlfriend
of Ben’s from a previous work stint in the country. More havoc ensues,
and Jane, already a bit grabby and needy, begins to wonder if Ben is
telling the full truth about the extent of his relationship with Megumi.
For a fleeting moment or two early on, Japanese director Masayuki
Ochiai (Infection) seems committed to at least crafting a movie with a
definitive sense of style, but a small handful of in-frame effects and
interesting compositions quickly give way to pedestrian framing and
desultory jump-scares.
That the film’s signature moments of dread and shock come via another
pale-faced, wet, dark-haired girl — a figure of menace already roundly
skewered by the Scary Movie series, among others — is perhaps
unfortunate, but not an insurmountable impediment to tension. The
sociocultural isolation of the setting could be used to the story’s
advantage, to feed especially Jane’s sense of unease and
discombobulation. Instead, though, Luke Dawson’s script offers up lame set-ups (visits to
a psychic investigator and Megumi’s house) and perfunctory dialogue
that requires Jackson’s character shift back and forth in sympathy to
his new wife. As such, even the nominal twist in the film’s final third
feels tacked on, and silly.
As in last summer’s Transformers, which at least had the excuse of
giant, clamorous robots distracting one’s attention, Taylor utterly fails to make an impression one
way or another. Former Dawson’s Creek star Jackson, meanwhile, invests wholeheartedly in exactly
one emotion for each scene, and otherwise just lets his stubble shade
the characterization. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here.
The Fast and the Furious franchise has alreadyponied up for a fourth installment, so it should come as no surprise — in totally old news, industry-wise — that Universal has struck deals with Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass on a fourth Jason Bourne picture. Last summer’s The Bourne Ultimatum did so well — $227 million domestically, and another $215 million abroad — that it was pretty much a no-brainer, even though the narrative arc of the current trilogy is pretty well settled.
The Bourne series is that rarest of commodities — a genre series with downhill, increasing commercial momentum and upmarket critical appeal. The first flick did $213 million theatrically worldwide in 2002, and played as particularly fresh and real the first summer after the September 11 attacks; two years later, with Greengrass subbing in for the crazy… err, idiosyncratic originating director, Doug Liman, the second film did just under $290 million. Each film sold butt-loads (that’s a measurable unit of sale in Hollywood, for the record) of DVDs too. Add in the fact that distributor Universal is a total whore for anything with a faint whiff of franchise appeal (see the Mummy flicks, the execrable Evan Almighty, and this summer’s The Incredible Hulk reboot, the latter coming less than five years after Ang Lee’s version), and you have all the reasons in the world (or at least in Hollywood) one needs to back a couple trucks full of money up to the houses of the guys who’ve actually made Universal some consistent coin the last half dozen years. No word yet on the release date for the fourth Bourne flick (summer 2009, I assume), but here’s hoping they, in the words of Bono, “go away and dream it all up again.”
Veteran character actor Michael Madsen will be honored at the ninth annual Malibu Film Festival, it was announced today. “Like many filmmakers, I started my adventures in independent filmmaking writing charters into my screenplays in hopes that Michael Madsen would be in the cast,” said festival founder David Katz. “Michael is an inspiration to the independent film world and we are proud to honor one of Malibu’s own.” As part of the ceremonies, Madsen’s Strength and Honour will close the festival, screening on Sunday, April 6 at 5 p.m. For more information, click here.
