In a nice little recent, now-unlinkable interview with Screen International‘s Mike Goodridge, George Clooney talks about falling in love with Joel McCrea and the relatively obscure The More the Merrier as part of his screwball, classic Hollywood tonal research for Leatherheads, opening today.
Clooney says he was also inspired by his work with the Coen brothers: “What Joel and Ethan did when I did O Brother, Where Art Thou?
was to make fun of me and the movie star persona,” he explains. “I like
that, and I think it’s good to shake it up. It was especially good for
me after the last couple of years.” Yes, especially after The Good German.
The fact that Mark Pellington (Arlington Road, The Mothman Prophecies) is directing gives me some pause, and hope, but if I were fishing for irksome independent-flavored summer product, then Henry Poole is Here, a character ensemble being billed as “a modern day fable about the unexpected wonders of the everyday,” looks like it might fit the bill handsomely, perhaps largely because of the presence of Luke Wilson, and the visions of his well-worn, rumpled shtick that photos like the one below conjures up.
Starring Wilson, Radha Mitchell and Adriana Barraza (an Academy Award nominee for Babel), the film, opening in limited fashion on July 25 from Overture Films*, is described as being about a disillusioned man who, shattered by circumstances beyond his control, attempts to hide from life in a rundown, suburban tract home, only to discover he cannot escape “the forces of hope.” Those, one supposes, are embodied not by Barack Obama, but instead by Barraza’s well-meaning busybody neighbor, Esperanza — who drops by with a plate of homemade tamales and discovers a mysterious stain on Henry’s stucco wall that is seen to have miraculous powers — and Dawn (Mitchell), the beautiful young divorcée and single mom living next door, with an 8-year-old daughter who hasn’t spoken a word since her parents’ break-up.
This sounds very much like the sort of thing adapted from a novel, and yet the fact that’s actually not (debut screenwriter Albert Torres gets the credit) makes me feel as though it was written as a “statement” by a frustrated and/or unpublished novelist, and thus downgrade it accordingly. Does that make me cynical bastard? Perhaps. And yet, if I’m going to spend 90-120 minutes watching someone who’s threatening to sink in on themselves, and either drink themselves to death (e.g., Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas) or withdraw depressively from society, then it should be someone with some glimmer of an outwardly manifested engaging personality, the better to starkly highlight the snuffed flame. In short, it shouldn’t be Luke Wilson.
* UPDATE, 4/14:Henry Poole is Here is now scheduled to open August 15, 2008.
This poster for Street Kings is a nice enough Rorschach splatter of urban shoot-’em-up mayhem, with a pinch of bikini-clad temptation from 7 Dias‘ Martha Higareda (not a prominent component of the film, I can disappointedly tell you). It gets enough names and faces in frame, let’s admit, which is basically the thrust of Fox Searchlight’s entire marketing campaign for the film — to make it seem like it’s a really interesting, labyrinthine character ensemble cop actioner, like a gritty cross between Training Day and L.A. Confidential. The trailer for the movie, however, plays like a complete parody of testosteronized macho-cop bull-crap — which isn’t too far off the mark, I can tell you, having seen the finished product. More on this next week…
Adapted from Wendy Orr’s same-named children’s novel, Nim’s Island tells the story of 11-year-old Nim (Abigail Breslin, Oscar-nominated for Little Miss Sunshine), a precocious girl who lives alone on a remote island in the South Pacific with her widowed, marine biologist father, Jack Rusoe (Gerard Butler, of 300). The lack of human companionship doesn’t bother them, though — Nim plays with and talks to her pet lizard and sea lion, and enthusiastically devours a once-a-month shipment of adventure novels featuring a swashbuckling, fedora-sporting character named Alex Rover.
But when a storm unexpectedly sweeps her father out to sea, Nim finds herself truly alone, and scared. A series of research email queries from the real-life author Alexandra Rover (Jodie Foster), in actuality an agoraphobic recluse living in San Francisco, awakens, to degrees, adventurous and heroic impulses in both parties. As Nim looks to protect her island home from the intrusive tourism inroads of Buccaneer Cruise Lines — a company peddling virginal beach expeditions to their loud, gawking clientele — Alexandra faces up to her own considerable fears, packs a suitcase full of Progresso soup and Purell hand sanitizer, and embarks on a far-flung voyage to help her young fan.
More intimately scaled than a lot of other recent children’s book adaptations, the sweet-natured and light-hearted Nim’s Island nonetheless achieves a nice hold over its audience, courtesy in no small part to Barry Robison’s superb production design. Co-directed by Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin (Little Manhattan), the movie is pitched just a little to the left of naturalistic but it’s never so outlandish as to come off as completely unrealistic, as long as one is prepared to make a few acquiescences — mostly with regards to the interacting-with-animals bits.
The obvious touchstone here is Disney’s 1960 family adventure classic Swiss Family Robinson, a sick-day staple for many a kid courtesy of its theatrical reissue and subsequent VHS peddling in the 1980s. (There are a few brief allusions to that movie, and Nim and her father’s last name, Rusoe, is another nod of homage, to Daniel Defoe’s castaway tale Robinson Crusoe.) Many other movies, though — from Matilda and Zathura to Jumanji and even The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep — share the same sort of fantastical, flight-of-fancy imagination that powers this movie. While Nim’s Island is in the end far less explicitly effects-driven than some of those films, it does open and close with hand-crafted credit sequences that frames this tale as a metaphorical yarn as much as anything else.
As for the performances, Breslin is suitably bright-eyed, and energetic. Butler, meanwhile, has great fun portraying both Jack and the more rugged, roguish Alex, who appears both in Nim’s imagination during her reading and in several spirited arguments with Alexandra, who is the antithesis of the best-selling character of her own creation. The movie also benefits greatly from a pitch-perfect manic turn by Foster, who knows how to take formulaic bits of slapstick and uptight unease and make them ring amusingly true.
Nim’s Island isn’t without a few moments of over-familiarity, and in some ways it’s actually demure when compared to a lot of other movies aimed these days chiefly at kids — which may be a bit of a strike for those raised on the Harry Potter films and The Chronicles of Narnia. Its greatest success, though, is the manner in which it taps into the pleasurable feeling of awakened imagination that surges during adolescence. Rekindling fond memories of childhood is never a bad thing. For the full review, from Reelz, click here. (Fox Walden, PG, 94 minutes)
