A full review will be dropping later in the week, but it’s worth noting that John Cusack’s War, Inc., releasing this weekend in New York and Los Angeles, is a hot mess. The film is a sprawling, alleged satire about a shadowy gunslinger-fixer (Cusack) who trips to a fictional Middle Eastern country that the United States has invaded — and is now being occupied by a private army fronted by a corporation run by the former American vice president (Dan Aykroyd) — to both bump off a foreign dignitary who has the temerity to want to build his own oil pipeline and, for some reason never quite made clear, preside over the impending marriage of a Middle Eastern pop star played by Hilary Duff.
There are a few pockets of very small intrigue here, mostly owing to the charmed participation of Marisa Tomei, as a hard-driving, liberal reporter who is out to expose the corruption of this massive exercise in American “branding.” When the movie stoops to contrivances to advance the relationship between she and Cusack beyond spitfire head-bumping, however, what little air there was there goes completely pfft. Apart from its simply awful construction, the most surprising thing, however, may be how tedious the film is — there’s not even the piercing, occasional amusement of diamond-brilliant, unpolished righteous anger. If capital-I indignation were going to make a scathing, satirical rebuke of American military/capitalistic arrogance, but then had a few beers, fell asleep on the couch, woke up with a start four hours later with nachos all over its shirt and MSNBC on the TV, and then just yawningly agreed with whatever Rachel Maddow was saying, and muttered, “Fucking Bush administration” under its breath, that would be this movie. It doesn’t feel thought through, honed or even self-assured, and certainly not very smart.
Billed as a Belgian underground sicko classic, writer-director Johan Vandewoestijne’s Lucker: The Necrophagous, from 1986, has the “controversial” advantage of being shocking to the film establishment of that particular place and era, but little else working in its favor. Gory but entirely thoughtless in its construction, the shoestring-budgeted, low-grade horror flick is a niche-market relic of ’80s slasher cinema that could have easily been left behind by the digital revolution, and not much missed.
The story centers around John Lucker (Nick van Suyt), a deeply disturbed serial rapist and killer locked up in a clinic after committing eight murders. After managing to escape (in a sequence owing a debt to John Carpenter’s Halloween) and dispatching a nurse and her doctor boyfriend (Carry van Middel and Frank van Laecke, respectively) in the process, Lucker flees to the city, searching for the one lone survivor, Cathy Jordan (Helga Vandevelde, above), of his previous killing spree. His disgusting rampage continues, and so more people — including a drug-peddling woman at a bar who strangely, aggressively comes on to him — all die, mostly by way of shivs to the head, eyes and gut.
The rub in all this? Lucker’s psycho-sexual kink is that he prefers his victims dead… like, way dead — rotted, skeleton-dead. There’s no back story or attempt at psychological explanation here, but neither is Lucker a lurking boogeyman-type flick, in the vein of something like When a Stranger Calls. Much of the film unfolds from arguably Lucker’s point-of-view, but because the story is so brazenly designed to air-quote shock and only shock — as much as William Castle’s old vibrating seat cushions — one feels nothing, except for the impulse for this to pass. This paper-mache construction, as much as its middling to very poor execution — save for some nice musical touches — render the entire affair a big yawn.
For many years, Lucker — owing as much to a reputation earned by its absence as anything else, it seems — was one of the more sought-after and widely distributed films on the “grey market.” The quality of the movie notwithstanding, distributor Synapse Films has done a fine job bringing marginalized foreign genre titles and alt-cinema to DVD, and their treatment of Lucker is no exception. Housed in a regular Amray case and presented in a brushed-up, if still a bit grainy 16:9 anamorphic widescreen transfer, the film’s DVD debut comes with Vandewoestijne’s full participation in restoration, as well as a new director’s cut, running a trim 68 minutes. Additionally, there’s the original, 74-minute VHS version of the movie, presented in English with Dutch subtitles. This latter version basically has a few more “socially redeeming”-type environmental inserts, like Lucker attempting to hitchhike, and wandering about the city, which are the most (read: only, even vaguely) interesting part of the movie to begin with.
Apart from this, there’s also a 36-minute making-of featurette built around a present-day interview with Vandewoestijne, who more than a bit resembles Jon Lovitz’s character from The Critic. The writer-director snickeringly admits the purely naked shock motives of his story’s inception (other various projects he pitched were turned down for government-financed funding), and intimates that he misled a bank into providing the bulk of the movie’s $30,000 budget by being less than forthcoming about the film’s script. Vandewoestijne shares a few anecdotes about the eight-day, April 1985 shoot, but a fair portion of the chat is dedicated to the film’s post-production hang-ups (“The distributor was only producing films in order to find girls, and to fuck them,” he says, charmingly) and its clean-up two decades later. Interspersed throughout are a handful of out-of-focus set photos, as well as some deleted scenes. Vandewoestijne makes a case that there are various artistic as well as business reasons for their exclusion, but it doesn’t take a genius to know that a sequence in a video store with a prominently displayed poster of Return of the Jedi, plus other movie paraphernalia, wouldn’t have passed clearance for theatrical distribution, even in France, where the movie initially played. For more information, or to purchase the film on DVD, click here. F (Movie) B (Disc)
The success of 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give, which grossed $125 million domestically en route to a worldwide haul of $267 million, is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it reminded audiences — and especially casting directors, filmmakers and film executives looking to tap back into the lucrative, upscale boomer market — what they loved about Diane Keaton. On the downside, it spawned wearying mock-entertainment like last year’s Because I Said So and, now, Mad Money.
Directed by Callie Khouri (the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Thelma and Louise), and starring Keaton, Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes, Mad Money tells the story of three ordinary women who decide to do something extraordinary — rob the Federal Reserve Bank. White-collar Kansas City suburbanites Bridget and Don Cardigan (Keaton and Ted Danson) have racked up an immense debt ever since he lost his job as a consultant, or whatever it is rich, white-haired dudes do, so Bridget — heretofore blind to the financial particulars of the household — gets a job as a janitor at the Fed, where old money is shredded, in order to avoid foreclosure on her home.
There she meets Nina Brewster (Latifah), a single mother of two boys, and Jackie Truman (Holmes), a flighty, gum-chewing… idiot? I don’t know — Jackie’s defining characteristic seems to be the fact that she likes to wear headphones, lots of flair, and daaaaaance to the music. At any rate, money at the Fed is destroyed through a labyrinthine process, but Bridget figures out that using a store-bought padlock and some well-planned timing, there’s a way to “liberate” old bills about to be destroyed, and smuggle them out with the trash. Working to outsmart their haughty, uptight supervisor, Mr. Glover (Stephen Root, of Office Space), so begins a slow-bleed robbery, with each of the women’s men (Don, plus Jackie’s boyfriend and Nina’s new crush, a shy guard at the building) eventually getting in on the action.
Mad Money is a sort of deranged cocktail of Set It Off, Fun with Dick and Jane and The First Wives Club, if only the worst parts of those films were stitched together, around some loosely defined, femme-centric, Up with People! idea. The movie doesn’t really ever take the specifics of its plotting very seriously, not to mention the fact that Bridget’s utter naivete at her family’s dire straits renders her later criminal masterminding more than a bit unbelievable. No, Mad Money is instead more concerned with merely taking contrasting comedic styles and rubbing them up against one another, willy-nilly. An ill-conceived framing device only makes things worse, more tedious.
Tone is a big problem here. Latifah’s demeanor is more or less understated and — apart from the
wincing harping on her seven-year sexless streak, which comes off as an
unintentional commentary on race, big-boned girls, or both, since she’s
by far the closest thing to a real gal on screen — she nominally roots
the movie in something approaching a tangible carbon copy of reality. All gassy, wide-eyed, kewpie doll confusion, though, Holmes just offers up a wince-inducing catalogue of ditzy mannerisms, which makes the fact that Jackie suddenly becomes a MacGyver-esque bomb expert in a third act sequence all the more baffling. Then there’s Keaton’s wheel-spinning shtick, an appropriation of wildly pantomimed signposts of emotional constipation and sped-up Jeff Goldblum-esque verbal detours. “Improvisation,”
as it were, was clearly encouraged during the film’s making, but what
it mostly results in are all the characters merely talking over one another
in wound-up, oh-no-you-didn’t style. This gets old — fast.
From frame one, Glover, too, is presented as strangely antagonistic, even if his oft-repeated admonition of watchful warning (“Everyone, everywhere, every minute…”) doesn’t really make much sense. Surprisingly, though, the movie doesn’t really satisfyingly coalesce around him as a villain, which could have given the proceedings a nice little 9 to 5-type kick. Alas, it’s too busy trying to somehow argue that its protagonists have been squeezed out of the American dream, despite all evidence to the contrary. I know what you’re thinking, though: Does the movie have a scene in which its characters dance, and roll
around on a bed in piles of money after having thrown them up into the
air in celebratory fashion? You bet your sweet ass it does. If that and that alone makes you cackle in delight, no words from me can save you from this, or dissuade you from thinking it’s deliriously witty.
Housed in a slightly-thinner-than-normal fold-out case, Mad Money comes with a solid video transfer and choice of two video presentations — cropped full-frame or 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, which preserves the aspect ratio of its original theatrical presentation. There are also English language Dolby digital 5.1 and 2.0 surround sound audio tracks. Apart from the theatrical trailer and previews for other Anchor Bay releases, there are two other supplemental bonus features — a feature-length audio commentary track from director Khouri, in which she ladles praise on the cast and mentions
that the movie has its roots in a true, albeit dramatically altered, British story; and a nine-minute behind-the-scenes featurette peppered with interviews with cast and crew. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) C+ (Disc)
How did this escape my attention for so long — the fact that someone actually created Barack Obama shoes?
Kinda funny. I guess it might risk being considered condescending if someone came out with Hillary Clinton-inspired business high heels. Flats, maybe? I don’t know, but one thing’s for certain — any John McCain kicks would have to rock the velcro.
I thought about setting up a couple typewriters and letting a gaggle of monkeys (I have some that apparently live nearby, since I frequently hear their shrieks at my pool) pound out a review for Ape Genius, but in the end I didn’t, because I couldn’t be assured they could meet a deadline.
I know what you’re thinking: “Do I have enough weed to get me through the rest of the month?” I know what else you’re thinking: “A gaggle of monkeys? Isn’t that geese?” Aha — my point precisely! Do monkeys and their ilk have the same grasp with word association that humans do? Questions like these are addressed in Ape Genius, an hour-long NOVA special that plumbs the connections between humankind and our nearest relatives in the animal world.
It’s easy to feel empathy for the great apes: chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and gorillas. For decades we’ve known that some of them can use simple tools and even be trained to communicate with us in sign language. Their faces and eyes are expressive, they have a social component to their interaction with the world, and they have some of the largest brains in proportion to body size of any animals. But just how smart are these animals?
In co-production with National Geographic, this mini-documentary explores the secret mental lives of apes, and specifically the small yet crucial gap between ape intellects and our own. Every time we’ve defined a mental ability that we think is uniquely human — everything from culture to simple math — the great apes have it too. But now scientists are zeroing in on tantalizing hints of what that essential difference may be. Besides its hugely entertaining sequences of chimps staging pool parties and working vending machines, Ape Genius reveals a new and deeper understanding of our profound kinship with our primate relatives. Naturally, Ape Genius is fascinating in no small part because of the manner in which it points up the complex nature — at once defined and elusive — of exactly what it means to be human. In this respect, writer-director John Rubin’s film works for both high- and lowbrow audiences, entertaining and engaging them, and allowing them to reflect only as much as they want.
Housed in a regular Amray case, Ape Genius is presented in 16×9 anamorphic widescreen, with closed captions, video descriptions for the visually impaired and downloadable, printable materials for educators. There are, alas, no other supplemental DVD features. For more information, or to purchase the disc, click here. B+ (Movie) D (Disc)
Acting is of course a hard-knock lifestyle, with daily judgments from casting directors, filmmakers, audiences, and then finally the actual critics. But debut directors also have it tough. First they have to compete in tooth-and-nail fashion for one of a limited number of studio jobs, and then hope the movie does well enough to book another gig. Nicholas Stoller though, had a not-so-secret weapon. A writer on TV’s Undeclared and a collaborator with Judd Apatow on the script for Fun with Dick and Jane, Stoller is the first-time helmer of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, one of a dozen movies produced by Apatow since 2005’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin hit it big at the box office. On the eve of his film’s release, we met up for a chat over coffee, which is excerpted here, for H Magazine. For separate talk about the movie’s 83 frames of penis, meanwhile, click here.
It’s never really a good idea to have a character, late in your movie, say, “I don’t understand,” and then have that followed by a lengthy recap explanation of what’s just happened. It rather needlessly and obviously opens one up for all sorts of exasperated cracks about shoddy, tangled storytelling. And yet that’s just what happens at the end of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the hotly anticipated latest installment in the whip-cracking, period piece adventure trilogy.
When we last saw Harrison Ford’s globe-trotting archeologist Indiana Jones nearly two decades ago, the year on screen was 1938, and the world stood on the brink of war as Dr. Jones chased down evildoers to find the Holy Grail. Nineteen years later, he’s cracking his whip again, and many things have changed but some have remained the same. Again the world is at a precipice, this time caused by the specter of nuclear annihilation, and Indy’s struggle is to once more ensure that a precious, mysterious object remains safe from those bent on destroying humanity.
The early scenes find a captured Indiana Jones grappling with “Stalin’s fair-haired gal” Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett, exercising a severe accent and an even more severe hairstyle), a brilliant and ruthless Russian scientist intent on scooping up items of paranormal interest, with an eye toward their potential military application. So when the movie opens, we’re back in the same massive government warehouse glimpsed at the end of 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the spoils of unearthed civilizations and all sorts of other secret artifacts are kept.
With both his father and good friend and colleague Dr. Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott) having passed away, Indiana is now a bit more isolated and alone in the world, even though new dean Charles Stanforth (Jim Broadbent) has his back, and is a trusted friend. Pal George “Mac” Michale (Ray Winstone) is a bit more suspicious, though; he sells Indy out, then much later claims it was a game of play-acted double agent, which seems curious given all the very real bullets flying around in the opening act.
After escaping both Spalko’s grasp and a nuclear test blast (more on this in a moment), Indiana is approached by Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf, above right), a young, headstrong biker kid who apparently took all his clothing and grooming cues from Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Mutt pitches a tale of woe related to an old mutual friend, Professor Oxley (John Hurt), and after escaping some more Ruskies, he and Indiana set out for the jungle in search of the title’s crystal skull, eventually reconnecting with Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), spitfire leading lady of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
All the proper details of nostalgia are pretty much spot on, and Ford’s well-worn embodiment of the timeless adventure hero is equally enjoyable, particularly for boomer audiences who may have long ago dragged their kids to see the original trilogy. Part of the problem here, though, lies in the updating of the character and the passage of time. Director Steven Spielberg and his cohorts wisely acknowledge Indiana’s advanced age, in both word and deed, and yet also cling strongly to the same B-movie logic that allows for cartoonish set pieces and escapes. These sequences are technically of a piece with the rest of the series (after all, who can forget Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom‘s airplane dive on an inflatable raft, down a snowy mountainside, and then into a river?), but come off as cheats in a sense, because what’s the point of exposing Indiana’s fallibility if it doesn’t translate to some degree to his feats of derring-do? This credibility gap is exposed early on when Indiana Jones ducks into a lead-lined refrigerator to protect himself from a nuclear test. The lesson: if you don’t accept this, here, as a sort of live-action Looney Tunes cartoon, you’re going to have issues with how things unfold. (On the other hand, now we have a good idea of how Indy will die — from cancer from radiation poisoning.)
Spielberg, of course, is a technical maestro on many levels, so the movie more or less quickens pulses when it should — you can easily envision the theme park ride, complete with wild jungle chase and CGI ants — and there’s some pithy, whip-crack enjoyableness to some of the dialogue (“You fight like a young man — eager to begin, quick to finish!” says Spalko to Mutt at one point, during a sword fight set on speeding jeeps). But if anything, the script here — credited to David Koepp, from a story by George Lucas and Jeff Nathanson — seems a bit bored with its own labyrinthine back story. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull introduces the tantalizing possibility of aliens, or “inter-dimensional beings,” which would seem an interesting way to bridge the E.T./Close Encounters of the Third Kind/A.I. branch of Spielberg’s canon with his swashbuckling instincts, but gets too bogged down with Hurt’s catatonic Professor Oxley, a yawning connective plot element.
Indiana Jones is at his best as a character when grappling with or confronted by something parallel to his own nature — be it amoral plunderer/shadow self Rene Belloq (Paul Freeman) from the first film, or the complicated nature of his bickering relationship with his father (Sean Connery) in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Marion and Mutt are meant to provide that here, but — while offering some fitful fun — that strand doesn’t sing as a legitimate throughline. That fact, combined with the aforementioned criticisms, creates somewhat of a strange generational gap — and probably still the first wholly nostalgic action adventure blockbuster. (Paramount, PG-13, 124 minutes)
A decently sourced tip came my way that 20-year-old adult film star Sasha Grey (below) is possibly set to star in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience — his next down-and-dirty, HD-lensed flick, shot in the same seat-of-the-pants fashion as Full Frontal and Bubble.
I say possibly because depending on whom you believe she’s either already been cast, and the announcement is under wraps for reasons of publicity control, or it’s yet to be finalized. Either way, the fact that Grey is even under serious consideration for the role (Soderbergh previously indicated a desire to go with unknowns, while also mulling over an adult film starlet for the lead) while at the same time in the midst of what by all accounts is an ascendant career path in the flesh-pic biz makes for interesting theory and speculation. Other porn stars (notably Traci Lords, Ron Jeremy and of course now Jenna Jameson) have gone “legit,” but mostly toward the tail end of their on-camera careers, and with limited success or mainstream penetration. (Yeah, I went there.) Appearing in a movie for an Oscar-winning director — no matter how much of a niche market one-off it is — is a no-brainer for Grey, I get it, but this is all perhaps most interesting for the manner in which it actualizes the merging of American narrative film and the sensory-overload pleasures of adult flicks, which long ago pervaded Hollywood action cinema.
Set for simultaneous distribution across various platforms, as with Bubble, the ultra-low-budget, Los Angeles-set movie will examine the world of a $10,000-a-pop call girl (presumably, Soderbergh pal Julia Roberts will not cameo), and the stable of regular clients who pay for her company. Soderbergh will shot the movie — hashed out with screenwriters Brian Koppelman and David Levien during the shoot for Ocean’s Thirteen — later this fall, after wrapping up the very Michael Clayton-sounding The Informant, starring Matt Damon, for Warner Bros.
For a Three Stooges preview clip from the forthcoming second volume DVD release of their voluminous archive of two-reel shorts, click here. For a review of the first volume, meanwhile, click here.
The 2005 Swedish fantasy thriller Storm, from co-directors Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein, hits DVD this week via TLA Releasing’s “Danger After Dark” imprint. Starring Eric Ericson, Eva Rose, Lina Englund, Karl Norrhall and Sasha Becker, the film is described as a cross between The Matrix and Nightwatch — a thrill ride with gut-punching action and gory murders, but presumably no Keanu Reeves. Ericson stars as Donny, a slacker whose life takes a terrifying turn when a fiery-haired woman enters his life possessing a box which may hold the answers to the mystery of human existence. Plunged into a harrowing adventure, the pair travel through time and fight off dangerous assassins bent on claiming the mysterious object. But time is quickly running out for Donny, and soon he’s caught up in the battle between good and evil, leaving the very future of mankind in his bloody hands. Housed in a clear Amray case, the DVD comes in 1.85 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby 5.1 surround sound Swedish language track with optional English subtitles, as well as an English language dubbed version. To watch the movie’s trailer, click here.
For those in the Los Angeles area, a restored and uncut version of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate will screen at the Aero Theatre
on Thursday, May 22, at 7:30 p.m., as part of the venue’s ongoing series of the favorite films of quasi-retired Los Angeles Times film critic Kevin Thomas, who will introduce the screening — presumably not raving in foaming-mouth fashion about how he needs production notes before it can begin. Cimino’s sprawling, epic anti-Western, from 1980, was one of the most hotly debated films of its time, a blockbuster whose budget spiraled out of control, nearly bankrupting United Artists and hastening the embattled company’s sale to MGM. Did that color its reception? Sure, you bet. Is it still a hot mess? Yes, indeed. The uncut version, by the way? Three hours and 39 minutes, for those counting.
The Aero Theatre
is located at 1328 Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. Tickets for this movie, as well as other special events, are available through Fandango, but for 24-hour recorded
information on directions and the Aero’s upcoming schedule,
phone (323) 466-FILM.
According to the American Film Institute he’s the greatest action-adventure hero of all time, so it only stands to reason that in advance of the theatrical release of the fourth installment of the franchise later this week, fans can relive the unforgettable exploits of Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones, with the collected special edition DVDs of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, boasting all-new, exclusive bonus features that dig deeper into the making of these cinematic milestones than ever before.
The films themselves, of course, don’t need much introduction, having collectively earned a half dozen Academy Awards, as well as nearly $1.2 billion worldwide. Released in the summer of 1981, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark is a 1930s-set archeological adventure tale rooted in the shared affection of its makers for the old, black-and-white Republic serials of the era of its setting, and stretching into the 1940s and ’50s. Directed by Steven Spielberg, from an idea developed with executive producer George Lucas and a script penned by Lawrence Kasdan, the original film finds the rakish title character, an archeology professor with a taste for hands-on exploration and artifact rescue, battling distasteful Nazis and reconnecting with feisty ex-flame Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) while chasing down the biblical Ark of the Covenant.
Powered by sinister mysteries, a search for the legendary Ankara Stone and an exploration of the Thuggee cult, 1984’s Temple of Doom (above), actually a prequel in the chronology of the series, is much debated by fans of the trilogy — held at a certain distance by some for its bleakness, embraced by others for exactly those reasons, as well as Kate Capshaw’s deliciously irascible performance as spoiled crooner Willie Scott. 1989’s The Last Crusade, meanwhile, brings back the Nazis as foes, finding its roots in a quest for the Holy Grail, and adding Sean Connery to the fold as Indiana’s father (even though he’s less than a dozen years older than Ford). It also explains the roots of Indiana’s famous fedora and his fear of snakes, as well as his (which is to say Ford’s) small chin scar.
Housed in a sturdy, inch-thick, white cardboard slipcover with a paper insert backing, Indiana Jones: The Adventure Collection relegates each film to its own plastic slimline case, though again, each is also available individually. (Previously available only in a trilogy box set, the three Indiana Jones films were all originally restored and remastered in 2003.) Created with
fans of all ages in mind, the all-new bonus features here provide never-before-seen
explorations of the making of these classic movies and showcase the
characters, action and extraordinary visual effects that have made the
films indelible cinematic treasures. All three films are presented in
widescreen enhanced for 16:9 TVs with Dolby digital English 5.1
surround sound, French 2.0 surround and Spanish 2.0 surround audio tracks, and optional English,
French and Spanish subtitles. While there’s a bit of general digitization in some of the action scenes, the picture is otherwise fairly sharp and clean, with consistent blacks and color saturation; the sound, too, is solid and deep, with each whip crack and feat of derring-do getting its own punctuated flavor.
New introductions to each film by Spielberg and Lucas headline the supplemental extras; the first one, running seven-plus minutes, is perhaps most interesting, because Spielberg talks about having gone over budget and over schedule on Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1941, and therefore wanting desperately to prove his fiscal responsibility with a slick, “simple” picture. After an initial rap session in 1977 with Lucas gave way to January 1978 story meetings, Spielberg says he felt that they “had the template for the series, but not the carrier pigeon.” That would prove to be Ford, who was of course cast — against Lucas’ initial mild protestations — only after Tom Selleck was cast, but couldn’t get out of his Magnum, P.I. small screen duty.
The Last Crusade introduction is also interesting for the behind-the-scenes laughs it details with Connery, and how the story was conceived. Spielberg notes that the two big character-moment tent-poles, for him, were Indiana’s “Yes sir!” greeting to his father in the scene which introduces him and the end-game moment where his father finally addresses him as Indiana, snapping his focus away from trying to retrieve the Holy Grail, and to the fact that he has reconnected with his dad. These moments left “a lot of abyss to be closed,” says Spielberg, but were integral to why he wanted to tackle the film.
While the introductions are specific to each movie, the bulk of the bonus material on each disc isn’t necessarily related solely to that film, which sometimes makes for some jumping around or out-of-order viewing, if one’s trying to watch things sequentially. An exception comes in the form of three storyboard sequences — one from each movie — which highlight,
respectively, the Well of Souls scene, the mine cart chase and, lastly, the
opening, train-top chase sequence from The Last Crusade.
The cast and crew of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
also pay tribute to the original trilogy in a 12-minute segment, which makes for some
interesting anecdotes, particularly from the franchise’s new additions.
Screenwriter David Koepp talks about seeing the original movie in
Milwaukee as a teenager, after arriving to see something else that was
sold out; John Hurt, meanwhile, admits that he was dragged to see it
against his will. Finally, Lucas says that everything flowed from the truck chase of Raiders of the Lost Ark — that that sequence was the genesis of the entire enterprise.
Other supplemental features include a recreation of the (at-the-time) amazing physical effect of the Nazi villain’s melting face in Raiders of the Lost Ark, with Spielberg and Lucas commenting on the evolution of visual effects and CGI. A couple location featurettes span the globe to spotlight where the films take place and where they were shot, while “Creepy Crawlies” reminisces about the series’ living, unbilled costars — snakes, bugs and rats. In the 10-minute featurette “Friends and Enemies,” introduced by Marshall, he, Spielberg, Lucas and Indiana Jones‘ writers look back at the series through the prism of its iconic supporting characters. Another nine-minute segment, from a 2003 American Film Institute tribute, gathers the franchise’s leading women (Allen, Capshaw and Alison Doody) for a discussion with Jean Firstenberg.
Finally, spread throughout, there are also a healthy number of galleries depicting
production photographs, portraiture, illustrations, posters, props and
other marketing material, as well as effects work on the movie and, on each disc, a game demo and trailer for Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures, one of Lucas’ many ancillary spin-offs. To purchase the DVD set via Amazon, click here. For even more information about Indiana Jones and his adventures, meanwhile, click here. A- (Movies, collectively) B+ (Discs)
It’ll be interesting to see how Kevin Costner’s Swing Vote (Touchstone, August 1), the apparent mixed-feeling story of an apathetic, apolitical (read: American) loser who ends up casting the tie-breaking vote in a presidential election, plays in a such a momentous election year.
Watching the trailer, one goes through a few sea changes in emotion. If this is being played in something approaching only slightly canted reality, which it seems to be, there seems to be an awful lot of hoops to jump through to set up this conceit, and I still have a bad taste in my mouth from Barry Levinson’s Man of the Year, which terribly fumbled away a somewhat similarly interesting socio-political concept. The notion of a national election being held hostage by a single vote — especially post-Florida 2000 — may be too big of a bite to chew.
A nominal tick in Swing Vote‘s favor is that it’s co-written and directed by Joshua Michael Stern, who did decent things with Neverwas; a big shrug comes in the form of the casting of Dennis Hopper and Kelsey Grammer as the candidates, though the trailer presents them as little more than ciphers. The participation of Paula Patton — so good in Idlewild and Déjà Vu — as a reporter has me intrigued, especially with regards to her billing; the participation of Nathan Lane, though, does not. On the other hand, Madeline Carroll, the naturalistic young girl playing Costner’s 12-year-old daughter, seems pretty good, less Abigail Breslin-y than I would have expected.
Costner took a crazy-hard swing for the fence with last summer’s serial killer flick Mr. Brooks, which I guess in a way I do sincerely appreciate. Costner every two years in rumpled, angry and/or weirded out fashion (e.g., The Upside of Anger) is better than him every year in something for which he doesn’t have any passion (e.g., The Guardian), no matter how much the movie works on its own merits. The question with Swing Vote, though, is how much Edtv — which is to say toothless satire masquerading as wacky, fun-time hijinks — is there? That will determine whether I break enthused or irritated, even if the movie likely won’t crack $35 to $40 million. Again, to view the trailer, click here.
Millions of people remember the countdowns, launchings, splashdowns and parades as the United States raced the Soviet Union to the moon in the 1960s, but few know about the “shadow space race,” in which both superpowers ran parallel covert space programs to launch military astronauts on spying missions. New to DVD, the NOVA program Astrospies explores that rich, hidden history of otherworldly exploration.
Directed by C. Scott Willis, this 54-minute program expertly resets the scene of the Cold War in economic fashion, by detailing the new Soviet missile base east of the Arctic that would first inspire the 1964 creation of the top secret MOL (Manned Orbiting Laboratory) program. Figuring — domestically, at least — that the best way to “hide” the $1.5 billion program would be out in the open, President Lyndon Johnson announced it in a news conference, tabbing it a program of essential scientific experiment; selection quietly began as an offshoot of the Aerospace Research Pilot School run by Chuck Yeager, with even the military pilot students having no idea of the true agenda of their matriculation and endless testing. Several of the survivors of this elite corps of ex-military astronauts — including Albert Crews, Donald Peterson and C. Gordon Fullerton — tell their story here. While the Apollo astronauts enjoyed ticker-tape parades, these astrospies trained in total obscurity.
Astrospies is so interesting, however, because it takes the time to tell the other side of the story, as it were. Perusing the specs for the program, the Soviets knew what the United States was up to, and set out to actually built three manned, permanent and re-stockable spy stations. Vladimir Polyachenko and Anatoli Blagov, two of the heads of their Almaz (Russian for “diamond in the rough”) project, talk about Russian space facilities, and even demonstrate the high-powered spy cameras that were trained on American cities. With a cannon designed to destroy hostile satellites (or attack American astrospies), Almaz was probably the only manned spacecraft ever equipped for space war.
This is the sexy-scary historical intrigue factor that most recommends Astrospies — it’s like the outer space documentary companion piece to Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd. Yet there’s also some fascinating technological nuggets herein — particularly when it comes to the development of rudimentary motion-tracking systems. All in all, the primary source chats — and declassification of all this material, post-Cold War — make for a fascinating peek behind the historical curtain. Interviews with retired General Lawrence Skantze and authors Asif Siddiqi and James Bamford (the latter of whom takes a writing credit on this program, since it was inspired by his original investigative research) round out the streamlined program.
Housed in a regular Amray case, Astrospies comes presented in 16×9 anamorphic widescreen, with closed captions, video descriptions for the visually impaired and downloadable materials for educators. There are unfortunately no other supplemental features. For more information on the movie, click here. B (Movie) D (Disc)
There was little guesswork with respect to box office prognostication this week, as The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian was the only new release opening wide. It grossed $56.6 million at over 3,900 screens, and dutifully inherited the top spot from Marvel comic book adaptation Iron Man, which released its iron grip only nominally. The comic book adaptation still pulled in $31.2 million in its third week of release, and has now grossed an estimated $222.5 million.
Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher’s What Happens in Vegas held onto the third spot, adding another $13.9 to its coffers, good for $40.3 in its second week of release. The story of the Wachowski brothers’ Speed Racer as the box office bust of the spring continued, though; in its sophomore frame the gumball-colored family flick added a meager $7.6 million to its $29.8 million cumulative haul. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s Baby Mama held strong in fifth place — nudging out Made of Honor, which grossed $4.5 million for the week, and $33.7 overall to date, on the strength of Michelle Monaghan (three percent of its audience) and Patrick Dempsey’s stubble (the other 97 percent) — by delivering another
$4.6 million for distributor Universal, good for $47.3 million overall.
Fellow laffers Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay,
meanwhile, placed seventh and eighth for the weekend, grossing $2.5 and $1.8 million, respectively. The former film has now made $55 million, while the Harold & Kumar sequel has made $33.9 million to date.
Placing ninth was the time-spanning martial arts flick The Forbidden Kingdom, starring Jet Li, Jackie Chan
and that noodle-armed kid whose last name sounds like a disease,
with $1 million, and now $50.3 million overall. In the final spot was Tom McCarthy’s well-reviewed The Visitor, which pulled in $687,000 on only 224 screens. Falling out the top 10, meanwhile, were critically embraced Swiss Family Robinson-esque family flick Nim’s Island (which has grossed $45.2 million to date) and the critically maligned Prom Night
($43.5 million to date), featuring Brittany Snow. In other limited expanded releases, and Fox Searchlight’s Young @ Heart and Paramount Vantage’s Son of Rambow added 25 and 55 theaters, respectively.
A new feature-length documentary and a hearty helping of double-feature retrospective screenings celebrate Hollywood legend Clint Eastwood‘s life in film June 5 through 11 at the Aero Theatre
in Santa Monica. Using the post-production of Eastwood’s World War II diptych as a springboard, director Michael Henry Wilson’s Clint Eastwood: A Life in Film engages the notoriously reticent multi-hyphenate in a surprisingly easygoing and intimate dialogue about art and life, illuminating his human side as well as his untamed creativity. In addition to obvious fare like 1971’s Dirty Harry, High Plains Drifter and the Oscar-winning Unforgiven, meanwhile, other films screening during the Aero’s week-long retrospective include The Beguiled, A Perfect World, Breezy and Honkytonk Man. Wilson and editor Joel Cox will also appear in person at select screenings for Q&A sessions about their work.
The Aero Theatre
is located at 1328 Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. Tickets for its screenings, as well as other special events, are available through Fandango, but for 24-hour recorded
information on directions and the Aero’s upcoming schedule,
phone (323) 466-FILM.
“I think the whole thing with Romar Entertainment, where Billy Zane was a partner, was totally a disaster for me,” says Boll. “I was very damaged because we had a contract for 2,000 screens and we got 800, and the 800 screens were not the best screens. And everybody who looks into the box office performance in North America knows that there are around 1,000 screens or theaters that make money, and the rest of the theaters are disasters, let’s say it this way. So if you run in New York in the E-Walk or in the Empire, you make $30,000 or $40,000 the first weekend, even with a weak movie. But you run elsewhere and you make maybe $500. And the theater is actually happy that they made $500 with you, but with a first-screen average of $500 on a new release, you’re dead. And the major companies, of course, are running their movies everywhere at the same time, so it evens it out, but in the case of BloodRayne we had maybe 100 good screens and 700, like, really bad screens. So then it turned out that Billy Zane took $450,000 out of the P&A budget as his private commission. And I told him, look, I want that money back. And he didn’t want to pay it back, so I had to sue him, and now we see in court what will happen. But I don’t think that he has any chance to win that lawsuit. I think he should pay me the money back.”
Ascendant funnyman Danny McBride stars in this comedy about a small town martial arts instructor struggling with a couple life crises, an amiable but meandering tale that wears out both its threadbare premise and welcome long before the end of its running time. The micro-budgeted The Foot Fist Way — its title the literal translation of tae kwon do — shot in three weeks as a self-financed feature, premiered at Sundance in 2006, and saw the addition of new material after Will Ferrell’s production company finally picked up the film for distribution via Paramount Vantage. In much the same manner Napoleon Dynamite did in 2004, The Foot Fist
Way angles to position itself as the low-fi, counter-programming
alternative to clamorous summer genre product. But middling
word-of-mouth and the relatively low current profile of McBride — who
costarred in last fall’s Hot Rod, and appears in this August’s Tropic Thunder — likely won’t be enough to push domestic returns into eight
figures.
Set in small town North Carolina, the movie centers around tae kwon do
instructor Fred Simmons (McBride, above left), who owns and operates a strip mall
martial arts business, and lectures his students, adults and kids
alike, about focus, self-control and perseverance. Fred’s wife Susan
(Mary Jane Bostic), though, doesn’t respect what he does, and starts to
cheat on him. This rocks Fred’s world, and things don’t get much better
when Fred eventually meets his idol, competition champion turned
preening, entitled movie star Chuck “The Truck” Wallace (Ben Best), and
finds his hero not all he’s imagined.
Somewhat interestingly, and to its credit, The Foot Fist
Way doesn’t
infantalize Fred or portray him as a loser for his occupation. The script, though,
co-written by McBride, Best and actor-director Jody Hill, never locates
a convincing, persuasively amusing tone. It isn’t rooted in a specificity of character, and none of the
supporting players have the arcs or depth of quirk that comprised Napoleon Dynamite‘s amusing background tapestry. Whereas that film — another zonked comedy centered around a strange, headstrong character —
located something approaching universality in its portrayal of seething
nerd petulance, The Foot Fist
Way never particularly seems anchored to
anything other than its makers’ passing fancies. It floats, and flits
by. It happens. And then it’s over.
McBride, though, brings to bear
plenty of his wry, burly charisma. The roundabout manner in which
Fred assays his problems (indicating irritation with his wife’s
behavior, he leaves a rambling phone message, in part saying,
“Wondering why you haven’t called, I’m a little ticked off… and
super-pissed, so… change it”) attests to the fact that everyone is
the star of their own private narrative. With that canted cadence and steeled self-confidence, McBride acquits himself scene to scene. The performances of the mostly non-professional actors appearing as Fred’s students,
meanwhile, lend the movie a nice sheen of realism with respect to its
setting. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Paramount Vantage, R, 87 minutes)
I generally hate MySpace (and its beta TV site), but for a clip of Hilary Duff, as Yonica Babyyeah, performing “I Want to Blow You (Up)” for John Cusack’s character in the new film War, Inc., click here. One is reminded tangentially of Poe, and also not at all.
So Sean Penn is heading up the jury of the Cannes Film Festival, which kicked off this week, and he had some weird words for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama
at the festival’s opening press conference, when asked about the American political landscape, and whether he would be offering any endorsements.
“I don’t have a candidate I’m supporting and I’m certainly interested and
excited by the hope that Barack Obama is inspiring,” Penn said, according to the United Kingdom’s Telegraph. But Penn then went on to
accuse the junior senator from Illinois of a “phenomenally inhuman and unconstitutional” voting record, and added,
“I hope that he will understand, if he is the nominee, the degree of
disillusionment that will happen if he doesn’t become a greater man than he
will ever be.” Errr… OK, so… he has to be a superhero? Penn also then complained that he had been
“discouraged from smoking,
before lighting up and chain-smoking his way through the press conference.” Total bad-ass. Nutty, but bad-ass…
As the snap above by Steven White (or is that Shite?) amply demonstrates, Fox is a nice blend, and has herself set up nicely with a couple Transformers sequels, though she probably needs to back away from the text-passage tattoos and collagen. Big hoofers, too. And you know what that means… wait, what?
Don’t know what this means, but I had a dream last night where Jaws actor Roy Scheider was trying (twice!) to assault my late grandfather. The even more bizarre kicker? They passed away this year within one day of each other, by mere hours. I’m sensing some sort of direct line to the telepathic, though to my knowledge my grandfather wasn’t a 2010 or All That Jazz fan. Still, surreal connections like these are why dreams enchant us so, no?
In the mold of Stuff White People Like comes Things Younger Than McCain, the new word-of-mouth blog sensation. On a certain level inevitable, I suppose, but also nicely done; it advances its point, and it’s funny. And the Golden Gate Bridge and the area code — who knew?
I’d mentioned Ben Coccio’s Zero Day a while back, when reviewing the rampaging-young-lovers flick Jimmy and Judy, and happened to stumble across an old DVD review of the movie for Now Playing Magazine a shady outlet that left a trail of unpaid debts in its wake, so I figured I’d re-post it now — “just because,” as Perry Farrell might say. Of course, now this creates a whole new set of reviews of like-minded flicks I need to dig up and post. C’est la vie. To wit, slightly redacted from its original publication in April of 2005:
In the wake of the Columbine school shooting in Littleton, Colorado, in April of 1999 — the last and worst in a string of coolly plotted adolescent murders that captured the nation’s attention over the course of about 18 months — a number of movies, not coincidentally all staunchly independent productions, have delved into teenage isolation and violence, from Paul F. Ryan’s Home Room to Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, and to some degree Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen. Add Ben Coccio’s film debut, Zero Day, to this estimable list.
None of these movies laid siege to the theatrical box office (Zero Day didn’t even sniff commercial release), but that’s not an indictment of their quality, collectively or individually. Quite to the contrary, these movies are unnerving — perhaps none more so than Zero Day — because of their casual misanthropy or disaffection. They tell you that it’s not about one person who brutally antagonizes them like a bully from a 1980s teen comedy, it’s not about one event that made snap. They tell you the truth, in other words. It’s about the collective weight of teenagedom.
Zero Day takes as its two protagonists Andre (Andre Kreuk) and Cal (Calvin Robertson) and, much more than even Elephant, models its narrative around Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the real-life shooters from Columbine. Conceived as a random pastiche of self-recorded video diary moments meant to be locked in a safety deposit box before their ominous “big-ass mission,” the film tells the story leading up to the boys’ riddling their high school with bullets in their own words. This means it is by turns petulant, flippant, taciturn and well-expressed. (The biggest departure from details released from the Columbine investigation finds Andre and Cal leaving their schedule up to the weather — they will launch their attack, they decide, on the first day the temperature dips below zero degrees.) The movie’s strength lies in its young (non)-actors’ preternatural calmness and confidence. Coccio, too, establishes a laudable intimacy with his handheld camera; some of the film is shot by Kreuk and Robertson, but the bonus materials make clear his shaping influence in its look and feel.
Speaking of which, DVD extras here are considerable, anchored by an amusing making-of featurette that mostly consists of extraneous material and Coccio’s on-the-fly directions to his charges. While this would have the potential to be irritating and masturbatory for many films, with Zero Day it offers a telling glimpse at the collaborative process and cozy, informal attitude on the set. A storyboard gallery and screen tests for both Robertson and Kreuk show how well plotted out some of the seemingly improvised moments of the movie are, and Coccio and Kreuk share a genial audio commentary track. Rounding things out are a liner note essay by film professor Henry Jenkins and an additional photo gallery from the film’s festival run. A more structured interview with Coccio would have been interesting, but perhaps reductive. After all, adult bafflement at the intuitive bonds on display in this worthy rental is I guess part of the point. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) A- (Disc)
