In 1997, Radiohead famously, if quietly, described the process of producing their album OK Computer as an act of deconstruction and defiance — necessarily destroying the more comfortable parameters of radio-friendly rock ‘n’ roll, and the distinction afforded them by the success of their previous album, The Bends, in order to “save themselves.”
For 66-year-old French writer-director Michael Haneke, film is a similar medium of confrontational statement more than corporate-vetted entertainment. Many of his movies are, in whole or part, sociocultural critiques foremost — labyrinthine morality tales, goosing psychological inquiries and jabs to the solar plexus that just happen to unfold on celluloid.
A painstaking recreation of his own 1997 film, Haneke’s Funny Games, starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, is at once buttoned-up and brutal, a provocative drama of domestic kidnap and torture in which an idyllic holiday turns nightmarish for a well-off married couple. Ann (Watts) and George (Roth) arrive at their vacation home with their young son (Devon Gearheart) in tow, and notice that their neighbors are acting strangely. They soon find out why when they’re visited by a faux-simpleton (Brady Corbet, above right) and his friend/possible brother (Michael Pitt, above center), who are dressed in preppy tennis-whites and alternately address one another by names actual and fictional (e.g., Peter, Paul, Tom, Tubby). A feigned dust-up, over dropped eggs and perceived discourteousness, gives way to a stand-off, with the boys’ sing-song politeness belying their true psychopathic nature.
Spiked with a few dark streaks of morbid humor, Funny Games is chiefly powered by lingering menace, both out of frame (that the family dog is going to meet a bad end is a queasy certainty, especially when one character borrows a golf club to try out) and especially on screen (most notably in an excructiatingly long take in which a bound, beaten Watts eventually tries to wriggle free from her awful predicament). Just don’t call it a psychological “thriller.”
Haneke likes aerial and topographical framing, which early on gives the movie the cool, detached sheen of a high-end linens catalogue, with its discrete shots of unviolated domesticity (shoes, a staircase, the refrigerator and the like). As the nasty chess game between captors and captives unfolds, though, the film becomes a series of isolated single- and two-shots.
There are any number of examples of siege films that Funny Games recalls, from Straw Dogs and Bruce Willis’ Hostage to a throwaway thriller like Unlawful Entry and, believe it or not, 1994’s underrated The Ref — all if mostly in formal antecedent rather than execution. Yet to try to comparatively experience or air-quote enjoy the film on this level is to miss Haneke’s point. To him, the story itself here is almost incidental. The story serves as an elongated exercise in demasculinization — George is forced to watch as his child is imperiled, his wife forced to strip, etcetera — and a case could be made that the movie is partly about the folly of denying an animalistic side to humanity. But Funny Games is mostly about the consumption of violence for entertainment’s sake, its commodification, and how in turn this warps our expectations of it, and relationship with it in the real world.
Haneke addresses this by breaking down the fourth wall in a few moments, not in a radical, Ferris Bueller-type of way, but rather with an unnerving, offhand line or two from our psychopathic ringmasters (“You’re on their side, aren’t you?”). For Haneke, violence is undeniably a virus, as it moves here quite literally from one house to another. Without any of the normal sort of shock, gore or jump-scares lurking in the camera movements, though, a new type of grim uneasiness develops: that of the nasty and brutish reality of violence as it exists off the edges of the screen. Funny Games posits that we are a persuadable lot, humanity — willing to accept almost anything in the name of entertainment.
That the movie is being sold in furtive, mock-thriller clips set to the “William Tell Overture” (a classical tune popularized as the theme of The Lone Ranger) only reinforces and highlights the irony on display here. A button-pushing, master-class example of manipulation, the designed-to-divide Funny Games is a fascinating indictment of what a lot of film has become. It feeds on audience discomfort, and even, to a certain level, distaste. That it’s getting a theatrical release at all, let alone from a major studio (albeit via its boutique label), is a strange thing indeed. (Warner Independent, R, 108 minutes)
Monthly Archives: March 2008
Doomsday Is Bad
A full review will follow soon — definitely tomorrow, maybe sooner — but Doomsday is stupid bad, just one of those theatrical experiences that leaves you cross. It’s poorly written, sure, but it doesn’t even succeed as a throwaway apocalyptic romp, mainly because writer-director Neil Marshall can’t make sense of even the simplest of spaces. A lot of times… well, OK, sometimes, studios miscalculate when they don’t screen movies, thinking critics aren’t going to give a fair shake to a certain genre (or toxic actor or actress, perhaps). This time they had it right, though; Doomsday is just a stupid, steaming pile of crap.
Lost Further Expands World of Self-Reference
Not my bag, really, in several ways, but Lost fans can now enter a contest to delve even further into their already-labyrinthine favorite show. Copies of the new Lost: Via Domus videogame and the third season of the series will be given away, along with a grand prize of both the aforementioned titles and an XBox 360 Pro. What’s next — a tie-in cookbook? Damn… that’s actually a pretty good idea. At any rate, for more information, click here.
Photo Debut: Monsters Vs. Aliens
In addition to a private event party for
their forthcoming Tropic Thunder,
where Paramount Pictures Vice
Chairman Rob Moore introduced the debut of the action comedy’s
trailer and brought out two of the film’s stars, Ben Stiller and Robert
Downey, Jr., to introduce a couple scenes from the August 15 release, Paramount/DreamWorks used ShoWest to debut art for another film. A keynote address
from DreamWorks Animation head Jeffrey Katzenberg announced the voice
cast for the upcoming 3-D animated feature Monsters vs. Aliens, slated for theaters on March 27, 2009.
Looking, at least courtesy of the single shot above, very much like Monsters, Inc. crossed with The Incredibles, Monsters vs. Aliens is the studio’s first film produced in Ultimate 3-D technology, and will be co-directed by Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon. According to Katzenberg, the movie “reinvents the classic ’50s monster movie into an irreverent modern day action comedy.” With Earth under attack by an unstoppable alien, it’s up to the monsters (top to bottom, Insectosaurus; Ginormica, voiced by Reese Witherspoon; Dr. Cockroach, voiced by Hugh Laurie; the Missing Link, voiced by Will Arnett; and B.O.B., voiced by Seth Rogen) to overcome their misfit status and save the world from the pending imminent destruction. In addition to the aforementioned stars, other members of the voice cast include Rainn Wilson, Stephen Colbert, Kiefer Sutherland and Paul Rudd.
Keith Olbermann Slams Clinton Campaign
Peter Finch would be proud. MSNBC Countdown host Keith Olbermann put an impassioned, cinematic/oratorical spin on his “special comment” direct address to Senator Hillary Clinton last night, stemming from Geraldine Ferraro’s comments about Senator Barack Obama only being in the position he was because he was a black man, and it was a pretty powerful thing (“Voluntarily or inadvertently, you are still awash in this filth”). Whatever you think of the man, the Democratic candidates or this controversy, Olbermann can write. And to me, his points are pretty much on point: the serpentine, surreptitious courting of casually prejudiced voters — the sort of folks who might not forward along the email touting Obama as a closet agent of Muslim, but silently nod to themselves in clucking acceptance when hearing about its reportage — has gotten a lot more advanced and, dare I say, intelligent over the years. And the Clintons don’t have their doctorates in hardball by accident. They play to win, and a vote is a vote, no matter if it’s in the positive or negative. Ergo, the Clinton campaign has been remarkably adept at maintaining plausible deniability. You can’t reasonably assign intent to any single one of these statements or controversies Olbermann addresses. But once the “pattern” cat is out of the bag… well, you’ve really irritated if not forever lost those who care most deeply and sincerely about equality, and abhor political ploys of cheap division.
Aero Double-Dips Audrey Tautou
The American Cinematheque at the Aero Theatre presents a sneak preview of the new film Priceless, starring Audrey Tautou (Amélie, The Da Vinci Code), as part of a special double-dip of her work on Wednesday, March 19 at 7:30 p.m. A fresh re-imagining of Breakfast at Tiffany’s from director Pierre Salvadori, French import Priceless stars Gad Elmaleh as Jean, a shy young bartender who is mistaken for a millionaire by a beautiful, scheming opportunist named Irene (Tautou). When Irene discovers his true identity, she abandons him, only to find that a love-struck Jean has no intention of letting her get away. Jean’s comical attempts to gain her affections gradually evolve into setting himself up as a gigolo at a luxury hotel, until Irene finally starts to warm to her persistent, persuasive suitor. Following Priceless, at 9:30 p.m., is a special screening of Tautou’s breakthrough international hit Amélie, from filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
The Aero Theatre
is located at 1328 Montana Avenue in Santa Monica
information on directions and the Aero’s upcoming schedule,
phone (323) 466-FILM.
Trailer Watch: The Incredible Hulk
So the trailer for The Incredible Hulk, starring Edward Norton and releasing June 13 from Universal, is online. Oh, I get it. He’s now “a hero for our times.” Reluctant rage and all that, ultimately channeled into one of those Matrix-esque, mano-a-mano head-on dives. Yawn. I actually dug the Transporter flicks, also helmed by director Louis Leterrier, but based on this trailer I’d probably be more stoked about this movie the less effects-oriented action there was. Another note — is it just me, or is Norton making a smoldering, make-out face at that vial, above?
Photo Debut: Kung Fu Panda
It’s the year of Jack Black over at Paramount, where the whirling dervish comedian has both Tropic Thunder and the animated flick Kung Fu Panda on the release schedule. The latter hits theaters June 6, and saw the release of this new photo at ShoWest.
Man, it’s too bad pandas can’t make films about humans. I’d love to see what they’d come up with…
Doctor Parnassus Re-Casts, Resumes
Per Variety, director Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus — whose title already unpleasantly connotes Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium — has resumed filming in Vancouver this weekend, with Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law all stepping into the void created by the death of star Heath Ledger. “What, what, what?” you ask. Well, apparently the decision to use three actors to replace Ledger was made possible
because of the typically Gilliam-esque fantastical nature of the story, in which characters
pass from contemporary London through a magic mirror into parallel realms of the imagination. For more, click here.
Set to Not Screen for Critics in Early 2010…
In advance of its apocalyptic, not-screening-for-critics Doomsday, which I’ll now likely be catching opening day, comes word, per Variety, that The Descent writer-director Neil Marshall has been inked by Doomsday‘s distributor and Universal’s genre arm, Rogue Pictures, to write and direct a Western-horror hybrid entitled Sacrilege. Marshall grew up in England watching oaters and horror films in equal measure, and calls his movie “Unforgiven by way of H.P. Lovecraft, with that grim, gritty setting and a horror element nobody has seen before.” One thing is likely… critics won’t see that horror element in advance, either.
New Tropic Thunder Pics Released
On the heels of its first photo and red-band teaser trailer releasing in the past week, Paramount/DreamWorks’ Tropic Thunder has released a couple more pictures, courtesy of its big promotional unveiling at the annual ShoWest exhibitors convention in Las Vegas, where footage from the movie was screened at a private event hosted by two of its stars, Ben Stiller and Robert Downey, Jr.
The film’s story centers on a group of actors shooting a big-budget war movie who, through a series of freak occurrences, are forced to become the soldiers they are
portraying. Left to right, above, Jay Baruchel plays novice actor Sandusky; Brandon T.
Jackson portrays rap star Alpa Chino; Stiller plays pampered action superstar Tugg Speedman; Downey, Jr. plays Kirk
Lazarus, an over-the-top, Australian-born method
actor who goes to extremes getting into character; and Jack Black portrays gross-out comedy
star Jeff Portnoy. Steve Coogan (far right), meanwhile, plays the film’s director, Damien Cockburn.
Things We Lost in the Fire
I didn’t get around to a proper review of Things We Lost in the Fire last autumn, when it opened theatrically, though it wasn’t for lack of admiration for the movie. I guess I just knew, in my heart of hearts, that it was a certain commercial non-starter, and when Benicio Del Toro’s mesmerizing lead performance didn’t critically catch fire en masse and spark much awards talk, I unfortunately let it kind of drift away. My shameful mistake, really.
Written by Allan Loeb and directed by Susanne Bier, the movie centers on Audrey Burke (Halle Berry) who, after her husband Brian (David Duchovny) dies unexpectedly, develops and nurtures a symbiotic relationship of need and guilt with an old childhood friend of Brian’s, a recovering drug addict named Jerry Sunborne (Benico Del Toro). For reasons even she can’t fully articulate, Audrey invites Jerry to move out of the flophouse in which he’s staying, and come live with she and her two children. Still wounded by their dad’s sudden departure, 10-year-old Harper (Alexis Llewellyn) and 6-year-old Dory (Micah Berry) latch onto Jerry, and he to them. Jerry even gets help and a job offer from one of Brian’s friends (John Carroll Lynch), and strikes up a casual acquaintanceship with a fellow recovering addict (Alison Lohman) whom he crosses paths with in a 12-step meeting. And then… other stuff happens — big, yes, but mostly small. That logline suffices, since Things We Lost in the Fire is chiefly about coming back to life after loss, the unlikely blooms that develop after fields have been burned low.
It sounds weird, I realize, but one tangential, if esoteric, way to analyze/praise Things We Lost in the Fire is to say that it feels like an adaptation of one of Bier’s superlative Danish films (Family Matters, Open Hearts, Brothers, After the Wedding). It’s a movie that has the same intimacy and disarming honesty as much of her previous work, and that’s how easy and form-fitting the union of material and helmer feels.
The fractured structure of the film works to its advantage in that we don’t see “user Jerry” early in the movie; when he inevitably backslides (this is what addicts do, after all), it’s almost more of a shock than it should be. There’s not much here narratively that’s formally shocking, though it is intriguing to witness the movie indulge Audrey’s foregrounded resentment and anger toward Jerry to the hearty degree that it does. This is a bit of a change-up from the films of weepy, lean-on-me reconciliation that we’ve come to expect from Hollywood, and something I appreciated even if I found the character of Audrey still a bit of a cipher. Chiefly, though, Bier has the great benefit of Del Toro, whose eyes convey the force of an inner turmoil. There’s a whole other off-screen story in those eyes, and Jerry’s tale, while an uncomplicated one (a smart guy who dabbled in drugs and quickly got in over his head), is what gives this movie its pull. We witness how fragile and slippery the nature of recovery truly is, as well as how helping others heals ourselves.
Housed in a regular Amray case with snap-shut hinges, Things We Lost in the Fire comes presented in anamorphic widescreen, with its theatrical trailer and 12 minutes of previews for other Paramount titles, including Margot at the Wedding, Into the Wild, Beowulf and The Kite Runner. A collection of seven deleted scenes runs about nine-and-a-half minutes in total, including one big sequence that feels like it should’ve been left in — a scene where Audrey gives Jerry the cabinet she was working on before her husband’s death, and confesses an argument in which she believed him to have stolen money out of her car. The only other supplemental bonus feature is a 20-minute “discussion” about the movie with interview snippets from all of its principal players, including Berry, Duchovny, Del Toro and Bier, as well as writer Loeb and producers Sam Mercer and Sam Mendes. There are plenty of insights and interesting tidbits herein (Berry talks about trying to find “different levels of shock” for her character, which I’d argue that perhaps she doesn’t do), but the Achilles heel of this piece is that too many clips from the movie — far more than necessary for illustrative purposes — are interspersed between the interviews, ruining any delicate sense of flow or momentum. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Movie) B- (Disc)
Righteous Kill Trailer Disappoints
The trailer for Righteous Kill, aka the Al Pacino-Robert De Niro cop drama from director Jon Avnet and Overture Films, is online, and it’s a real mixed bag that doesn’t necessarily give one hope that the movie is much more than an angular punch-card genre flick with a few hoo-ah! interactions between the two screen legends, who play police partners. It starts out strong enough, with the pair butting heads with an on-trial perp sprung from rape charges, and typically wry, on-the-job voiceover narration from De Niro (“Most respect the badge… everybody respects the gun”), but the preview’s musical choice of a loose-limbed version of “Sympathy for the Devil,” remixed by the Neptunes, is wrongheaded. It’s effectively lean, but this trailer whiffs on all the necessary menace and edgy cool that should be here. This would-be red-band trailer (self-made?) is much preferred, even if the punch of the voiceover from De Niro is dialed down a bit. Righteous Kill is set to release nationwide on September 12.
Judd Apatow Will Not Look at Your Headshot
Shocking, really, the announcement, per Variety, that Judd Apatow has tapped wife Leslie Mann and part-time boyfriend and frequent collaborator Seth Rogen as the stars of his next movie, an under-wraps, originally scripted picture that will start shooting in late fall or early spring. Adam Sandler, with whom Apatow co-scripted this summer’s You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, will also appear in the movie, a Universal and Sony co-production to be released theatrically worldwide by Universal.
Aero Hosts Overlooked Kings
Missing a movie in its first theatrical run usually means consignment to one’s Netflix queue, or that messy, scrawled list on the side of the refrigerator of DVDs to eventually rent, but for those in the Los Angeles area the American Cinematheque at the Aero Theatre presents a special double-feature of two kingly works from last year on Sunday, March 16 at 7:30 p.m., as part of its screening series of underrated 2007 flicks. Kicking things off is The King of California, a canted coming-of-age tale, starring Evan Rachel Wood and Michael Douglas, in which a young girl takes in her grizzled father, fresh out of a mental institution, and gets caught up in his improbable quest for buried treasure. Second on the bill is The King of Kong, a fascinating and very funny documentary about the very strange and insular world of classic video game playing, and a back-and-forth quest for the world record of Donkey Kong.
The Aero Theatre
is located at 1328 Montana Avenue in Santa Monica
information on directions and the Aero’s upcoming schedule,
phone (323) 466-FILM.
Tropic Thunder Teaser Goes Live
A red-band trailer of Tropic Thunder, releasing August 15 from Paramount/DreamWorks, has now gone live online, and it’s a nice, short piece of gung-ho war parody, even if all it does is basically slap up costumed pictures of the cast and have them yell and/or fire a weapon. Be advised, though, that you’ll have to access the stumper question of your birth date. Tricky, that…
Sharon Stone, Vagina Turn 50
Ahh, it’s a happy 50th birthday to Sharon Stone and her celebrated vagina, which helped propel 1992’s deliciously demented Basic Instinct to a whopping $350 million worldwide, inclusive of $117 million Stateside, a phenomenal figure for an R-rated non-action flick. Let’s not talk about 2006’s sequel, meanwhile, which I’d like to pretend doesn’t exist, for many reasons.
Oh, and roundhouse kick enthusiast and Mike Huckabee supporter Chuck Norris turns 68 today, too. So beware knocks on your door, because it could be a roundhouse-kick-o-gram. Disguised as Stone’s vagina. Granted, those odds are pretty slim, I guess. But who wants to tempt fate?
Karl Rove Mocked at Iowa Speech
So I don’t feel bad at all about erstwhile Republican kingmaker Karl Rove being fairly righteously taunted during a speech yesterday
at the University of Iowa (a speech for which he was paid $40,000, incidentally), but I do give him solid smack-retort credit for part of his response — “Worse than the person who introduced aluminum
baseball bats?” — after being told by an audience member that MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann named him the “worst person ever.” Well played, Karl. Though I don’t know if this guy, on the left, finds it quite as funny…
When Kittens Attack
Nice clowning of Cloverfield, this photo. Either that, or the cat just really hates liberty.
That. Just. Happened!
So this monster shot of Danny Green janking on Greg Paulus, taken by Inside Carolina’s Jim Hawkins during UNC’s righteous dunking of Dook last night, 76-68, at Cameron Indoor Stadium, gives proper meaning and heft to the “Posterized!” section here at Shared Darkness. Oh, it’s a good day. The only bad news is that Dookies get one less hour of wallowing in the misery and despair that they so richly deserve. Spring forward, my ass…
First Descent
One day soon we might run out of extreme sports subjects about which to make documentaries, but that day is not yet upon us, so into the pipeline with a heady swoosh! rushes First Descent, a gorgeously photographed snowboarding solicitation. A direct and very derivative descendant of modern genre forebear Dogtown and Z-Boys, the movie traces the story of snowboarding from its roots as a backyard hobby to its current status as a billion-dollar recreation and licensing industry, as well as the staple of the hugely popular, ESPN-broadcast X-Games.
More of a suitably worshipful primer-level celebration than an enduring dissertation, the divertingly entertaining First Descent tracks a motley crew, ranging in age from 18 to 40, of top current freestyle snowboarders and aging legends as they chuck endorsement deals and perfectly machine-carved half-pipes to tackle the foreboding thrills of the Alaskan wilderness.
Lacking a natural arc other than a chronological one (which is apparently deemed too boring for the Mountain Dew generation), First Descent jumps around, mixing together three disparate storytelling strands. The first is a loose history of the sport, while the second is comprised of actual expedition footage from the aforementioned group as they hit the tucked away Chugach Mountain range of Valdez (no drunken Exxon captains in sight, thankfully). The third sketches the personal histories of its participants, which includes impassive 30-year-old godhead Terje Haakonsen, hot teen up-and-comers Shaun White and Hannah Teter, and father figures Shawn Farmer and Nick Perata, the latter of whom opines that it “would really bum [him] out if someone died or got hurt” on the trip, because he views it as being his backyard.
That the footage captured here is breathtaking to laymen is a given. The imponderables of the great outdoors, though, create a whole new set of challenges that it’s interesting to see pro-level snowboarders grapple with, particularly neophytes Teter and White — the latter of whom just scored gold at the Turino Winter Olympics. Still, First Descent can’t compete — and doesn’t try, really — with the psychological self-examination of the skateboarding doc Dogtown and Z-Boys, which was scripted by ground-zero participant Stacey Peralta and had the feel of a wised narcissist coming to terms with his highlight-reel past. It instead pours its resources into the production side of things, capturing the sheer visceral thrill of its sport with ace cinematography from Scott Duncan, Matt Goodman, Mark Hyrma (responsible for some astonishing aerial work) and others.
The relatively sparse narration may be at times overblown (vague, chest-thumping talk of “fighting the establishment” and “battling for souls” and what not), but its interviewees are personable to the man, and you enjoy their company even if co-directors Kevin Harrison and Kemp Curley don’t truly plumb the common threads of their attraction to snowboarding. Such enlightenment is generally left to anecdotal deduction. There’s also a telling glimpse of the fiery rebel spirit of the pursuit when the film details how, in its Olympic debut at the 1998 games in Nagano, the gold medal winner was almost stripped of his decoration for (shock) testing positive for marijuana, and a fellow ‘boarder in turn says he wouldn’t have it any other way for snowboarding’s introduction to the world at large.
The movie works best if one is able to sublimate the desire for academic illumination and instead get off on the vicarious pop kick — including a great collection of vintage clips and tracking handheld material that puts you there on the slopes — of massive plumes of white stuff and contortionist feats of airborne derring-do. It presents a history of snowboarding, but doesn’t ask the important questions of why that in turn inform a greater understanding and appreciation of the sport. To this end, First Descent doesn’t break the new ground its allusive title might like to claim — it’s more ornamental gospel to the unruly choir — but it still gives you slight entr¿e to a different world.
A single disc DVD presented in an Amray case with additional safety snaps,
First Descent‘s supplemental features include a messy clutch of
extraneous material that wins points for its presence but a few
demerits for its formlessness. The movie itself, though, is presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, and the picture — so integral to the feeling and thus success of the movie — is clear, with no trace of artifact or grain, and no compression problems. Given that the film features so many blindingly bright whites, one might suppose there’s a chance of oversaturation, but that’s not the case. A solid English Dolby digital 5.1 track anchors the audio presentation; not only is dialogue ably captured, but the track also impressively highlights the subtle sounds of “cut” snow as White, Haakonsen and others shred the slopes. Some great music by ex-Devo and current Rugrats and Rushmore maestro Mark Mothersbaugh is also put to good use, further engaging you in the proceedings. Subtitles are available in English, Spanish and French.
As for the bonus material, first up is “AK and Beyond,” a 21-minute, loose-limbed making-of featurette that gives voice to many of the various cameramen working on the project. Of a similar vein is the five-and-a-half-minute “Top of the World,” in which aerial DP Mark Hryma and others detail the gyro-stabilized, 600-pound, front-mounted camera used to capture B-roll footage and topographical establishing shots. This would be more interesting with a little bit more of a divorced perspective, in which perhaps artistic pre-planning was discussed. As is, it’s just more collected footage from the shoot, loosely sorted. The same holds true for four additional minutes of extended snowboarding action (honestly, who hasn’t had their free-form fill after the 110-minute feature?) and two deleted scenes, one of which is more anecdotal and the other of which details the inclement weather that initially postpones one run. Additionally, a five-minute, music-set photo gallery, “A Thousand Words,” rounds things out.
Overall, First Descent isn’t the movie that’s necessarily going to open many older minds to snowboarding, but it is a wonder to behold visually, and those who’ve dabbled in the field — either avocationally or more seriously — will definitely spark to the sights of these legends challenging some of the most dangerous mountain runs in the world. If, for some reason, you want to see the review as originally published and archived at IGN, click here. Though I don’t believe they paid me for it, so why would you do that? Instead, just laugh silently to yourself, and if you’re interested in purchasing the film via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) C+ (Disc)
Happy Birthday, Brittany Snow
It’s a happy birthday to Brittany Snow, who turns 22 today, and perhaps celebrates by rocking this same, red bra-and-panties set, from John Tucker Must Die. Or maybe there’s new lingerie I don’t know about. At any rate, capitalizing on the Hairspray moment has thus far been tough for Snow, but she’ll be back onscreen in a few weeks in Prom Night (Sony/Screen Gems, April 11), even if that looks mostly like a blink-and-forget-it teen-money-grab affair. After that, the slate is even more iffy. Peter Tolan’s Finding Amanda, with Matthew Broderick and Peter Facinelli, at least sounds like it has the possibility of providing Snow new shadings, though the fact that it’s been hung up for so long after wrapping production doesn’t bode extremely well. An ensemble indie from Tony Kaye, Black Water Transit, has high intrigue value, but could just as easily disappear into the gaping void of one-week releases. I suppose, for right now at least, Snow’s firewall is the more commercial sounding The Vicious Kind, about a guy who falls for the girlfriend his brother brings home for Thanksgiving. Last fall’s Dan in Real Life played that narrative up to the tune of $47 million, so there’s obviously a bit of an audience, though a tweaking of that awful title will have to happen if the shopping mall set is to be at all wooed…
Be Forewarned, Splinter and Your Ilk…
Oh, it is on, Dook. And no amount of gouda or mind games can save you…
Why Owen Wilson Can’t do Roundtable Interviews…
FilmStew’s Richard Horgan has up an amusing little piece which tweaks some of the problems facing Drillbit Taylor, Owen Wilson’s first big mainstream studio flick to open since his suicide attempt last autumn. It’s foremost a speculative goosing of the glad-handing Hollywood junket train (conforming to Wilson’s code of silence, Drillbit Taylor had no big press day), but lurking underneath is the million-dollar question: It’s one thing for an actor to be dark and troubled, and maintain the ability to project something else, but what happens when everything about that actor’s appeal flows from a sunny countenance and smirky, laissez-faire attitude?
Happy Birthday, Jenna Fischer
It’s a happy birthday to The Office‘s Jenna Fischer, who turns 34 today, and probably doesn’t celebrate by watching Lollilove. It seems a bit dismissive to call a grown women cute, but that’s the nut of her appeal, since Fischer so robustly embodies the wry-perky-cool high school girl for whom guys wistfully pine when they hit their late 20s or 30s. Women may not like to hear it, but it’s the truth. Having tried in vain to hip-pocket said girl while chasing hotter (read: looser) tail in their oat-sowing days, and then subsequently having fallen out of touch with her after college, a lot of men will try to work their way back to this ideal, in either idealized or actual form — women with high-but-not-off-the-charts marks in relatability, intelligence, humor and attractiveness, and super-low maintenance requirements. Settle for the highest aggregate score, in other words. That’s Fischer. Of course, shots of her rocking out in lingerie in Blades of Glory don’t hurt, either. For some of that, click here.