The $20.1 million opening weekend gross, and second-place finish, of What Happens in Vegas, starring Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz,
could and probably should be viewed as a success. Partly because this
battle-of-the-sexes romp based on a marketing line isn’t very good; its
humor is forced and desperate, and the movie (like Sin City itself) seems
born of the operating philosophy that more is more. While
Kutcher and Diaz generally evince a nice shared chemistry — both have
wide, easy smiles, and Diaz in particular that explosive, inside-out
laugh of hers — one of the interesting things is the manner in which What Happens in Vegas
unfolds, on an almost subliminal level, as an age-gap affair. It’s
something that could be felt in the theater, amidst kids who feel like
they know Kutcher more personally from his television work on Punk’d and That ’70s Show, and who know Diaz, apart from her recent SNL appearance in a “cougar” sketch featuring Kutcher, mainly from cable screenings of There’s Something About Mary… which is now an astonishing 10 years old.
Also contributing to the film’s slippery traction was the general
impression — confirmed by several of my regular, mainstream film fan
friends — that this Vegas pairing just didn’t seem quite
right. Kutcher, who just turned 30, is of course married to Demi Moore,
who is 16-plus years his senior. He seems a bit younger, though, no
matter the facial scruff he frequently sports between films. Diaz, on the other hand, who will be 36 this August, sometimes comes across as a bit older than she actually is. Of course, when A Lot Like Love
came out in 2005, five months before his marriage to Moore, Kutcher was
27 and Amanda Peet was 33 — in other words, more of an age difference
than the one separating Kutcher and Diaz. That film, though, seemingly
faced no such similar silent advance judgment from audiences. For the full piece, from FilmStew, click here.
Dan Brown’s bestselling The Da Vinci Code popularized, in discussion if not belief, the theory that Jesus Christ escaped his crucifixion, married Mary Magdalene, and had a child, and that the Catholic Church and others have engaged in a conspiracy to suppress this fact. The ample, worldwide commercial shadow of that book and its subsequent film adaptation provide the necessary cover for mushroom cinema like this documentary, which includes interviews with a mysterious, finger-tenting, alleged Priory of Sion member and investigates archaeological proof of said theory in southwest France via amateur English adventurer Ben Hammott.
Directed by Bruce Burgess — whose other credits, it turns out, include movies about Bigfoot, the Ark of the Covenant, and the Bermuda Triangle — Bloodline is unfortunately the type of film that confuses investment of time with insight and evidence. Burgess’s refusal to put Hammott and his many discoveries through the wringer (despite, say, the mostly empty bottle of vodka lingering in the corner of a frame during one morning interview) at first comes across as curious and then just increasingly negligent, finally culminating in a passage which confirms a piece of Hammott’s evidence using … other pieces of Hammott’s own evidence. It’s shoddy filmmaking like this — no matter the high inherent intrigue factor here, especially for docu-philes — that makes Bloodline ridiculous, no matter how much one may want to believe what it’s peddling. For the original review, from CityBeat, click here. (Cinema Libre, unrated, 118 minutes)
A specialized slinger of sardonic asides, and a multi-hyphenate talent in the truest sense, Larry Miller is one of “those guys” — a familiar face whom audiences recognize from other movies, and lean forward in pleasant anticipation of, yet might not be able to immediately place. Miller’s latest acting turn comes in the direct-to-DVD comedy Senior Skip Day, where he plays a principal with a near-sociopathic dedication to killing the buzz of his carefree students. The grateful and gracious Miller took some time recently to talk about that movie, as well as his other projects, and the conversation is excerpted below.
Brent Simon: Hi Larry, I appreciate your time. I know you’ve had a busy week.
Larry Miller: Well thank you, but don’t be silly, we’re in each other’s lives here. I’m lucky because I’ve had a couple jobs come in, and I work pretty steadily.
BS: I believe I first interviewed you for 1999’s Pros & Cons, which you wrote. Is that something you see yourself returning to, screenwriting? Because I think you have a distinctive comedic persona, and I imagine a lot of times you’re cast for that, but do you have the desire to strike out and create something new for yourself, all your own?
LM: Absolutely, that was the first thing I wrote! First of all, writing is a big part of my life. When I just got started I said I want to be a writer or an actor or a comic, and it’s unbelievable, that’s what I am. There are a thousand things you don’t get, but a bunch of things you do get. And as far as writing goes, I never left it. I have a book out now called Spoiled Rotten America, which is a bunch of essays, and I love that. I’ve written many, many scripts since, and some TV shows, and some get made and some don’t. And right now I’m doing more stand-up, so I have a chance to write more things for that and go back out on the road. It suddenly hit me after years that I’ve been very lucky as an actor and a writer, but I didn’t want to stop being a comic. And I mean that in the sense of not theaters or corporate jobs, but being a real comic, to me anyway, in two, three, 500-seat clubs, and really knocking it out there. So I’ve always been writing, and I couldn’t pick one over the other. If you asked me if it was more rewarding to write and sell a script, and see it get made… it’s not more rewarding where it counts, meaning in the head and the heart.
BS: That always struck me as among the laziest questions from a lot of journalists — what do you prefer, theater or movies, or TV or film, etcetera? Because the truth is, of course, if you’re a creative-minded person then you enjoy the variety of that kind of life.
LM: Boy, I tell you what, pal, exactly. I mean, come on, look at all these things. I can’t understand how people don’t get up everyday, if they have a chance to make something creative, not skipping around giggling. I know sometimes people like to have a bleak, empty attitude about life, but there’s a great quote of Emerson’s — “give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors insignificant.” And I think that’s fantastic. I mean, health and a day! Anyone who’s looking to beat that is I think missing life.
BS: As a quick interjection, I had a friend in college and we were doing peer critiques of things we’d written, and I’ll always remember that he read something I wrote and said, “You met some good writing that day,” which I thought was so striking and perfectly descriptive because when you’re writing that’s all you’re trying to do — you’re trying to do it to the best of your ability, to advance this thought or argument.
LM: Sure. And the phrase that day is very important. The world is brand new every single day! If I come home tonight and everyone’s well, and I can have a drink with my wife, what’s better than that? Would we be happier if we had a 50-room house? You’d have to be a lunatic to need that.
BS: Well, on to Senior Skip Day. Your character, Principal Dickwalder, is sort of an Ed Rooney-type character. He is driven to inflict misery, isn’t he?
LM: And in a way, aren’t we all? You know what was so much fun about that was that — very early in the process, with all these people I loved working with — I had an idea, and we just ran with it. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a great movie, and it’s going to be great for a long time. But I said, and this is what we wound up doing, that Ed Rooney gets weaker and is destroyed more as the movie goes on. Every bad thing that happens to him knocks his spirit apart until at the end he’s just sitting on that bus like, “I can’t take it, I just can’t take it.” He’s destroyed physically and emotionally. And I said, “Why don’t we take this guy and go the exact opposite direction with him? That every bad thing that happens to him makes him break out of this reptilian shell into some kind of dark criminal lord.” Each time he gets beaten up he gets stronger and more horrifying in a way. So when the guy beats him up on his lawn, I kill him. That was the idea, and it was really neat to put it in place and have everyone creatively say, “Yeah, let’s do that!” Even though it’s not a high-budget movie, and there’s certain shots you can’t get, to get there and create it and get as much of it as you can out there is pretty fun.
BS: You’ve played principals and college deans a number of times. Do you think there’s something about you that lends itself to these authority figures?
LM: Hey, fine with me, I guess John Wayne didn’t just play one sheriff. You know what I mean. That’s obviously reaching pretty high, but you know what — CIA guy, head of a corporation… that’s part of what’s worked out for me, and that’s fine. I’m not necessarily going to be up for the remake of James Bond. You know when you see a movie as a kid you think you’d like to be the hero, but you never know in life. There’s a friend of mine, Richard Jenkins, who’s just the lead in a movie now (The Visitor) that’s getting a lot of attention, so you never know where your chance to really bring yourself out is really going to come from. But I have that stand-up too. And if I worked a ton more as an actor, and it was all in comedy, and it was all being a principal or an annoying or a corrupt this-or-that, I’d still have a chance to do these things I love.
BS: Was your own high school principal a memorable character in any way? LM: No, like most folks, and like you and me too, by the way, he was just a decent enough man who’s trying to get by and figure out what life is all about. We had an attendance officer… what was his name? Oh, Mr. Sykes! It’s like a name out of Dickens. He was fearsome! And the weird thing was that at that point, in the 1970s, that was actually something kids were scared of. Today you wouldn’t be scared, because he never actually did anything to you. But just to get called into Mr. Sykes’ office was gigantic. Tough kids who were in fistfights a lot would sit there with their knees shaking.
BS: When did the performance or creative bug strike? Was it a love of comedy or film that you got into as a consumer of that stuff, or was it something early on that you remember very much more feeling like, “Oh, I want to do that for a living”?
LM: No, I think you hit it right on the head with the word consumer, and I think that’s a great word, by the way, because that’s what we are. I think we misuse the word entertainment a lot, because it’s a great and honorable word — even drama entertains, it’s not that things are high art or low art. And I think being a consumer is true. So when you’re 4 years old, and 7, 9, and then 14, and the first time you see Casablanca on TV and you think it’s first fantastic, to when cartoons really thrill you, and sitcoms are great, and then you start listening to music on the radio, you see a play — you absorb all this stuff in the world. I never thought about doing it when I was young, I just thought it’s great that this stuff is around. In college I was a music major, but I was still just being with my friends and drinking beer. And then, when I got out of college, I thought, “Well, I guess I’ll have to think of something.” And that was when I really first thought of being an actor and a writer and a comic. And look at this! It’s what I am. I feel like the luckiest guy on the face of the Earth. Though I think the last one to say that was Lou Gehrig.
BS: Right before he went, God bless him. How long was the shoot for Senior Skip Day?
LM: I think it was 25 days, which is not long. You’re chasing the day every day, but that’s fun in a way. That’s a kind of storytelling. Sometimes, gigantic movies have a ga-jillion dollars for their budget, and they’re off for seven months in Calgary, shooting this and that. But you know this too — sometimes those movies get over-shot, over-directed, over-acted and over-produced, over-wardrobed, over-everything. So with this, is it the smoothest, most fully shot thing in history? No, but we got a lot of good stuff in there. People can see this movie and say to themselves after an hour and a half, “You know what, I had a lot of laughs there.” And that’s not a small thing. I’m very pleased with this thing.
BS: So, before they get you out of here I wanted to ask you about Blonde Ambition, and specifically a line that caught my attention: “That horsey grin insults us both,” your character says at one point. “And what’s with those teeth? They’re too white,
like an artist’s rendering of teeth.” That’s all yours, right?
LM: That’s mine. That’s another one that didn’t get released, I think, but it was a good movie. And there are people I love in that… Penelope Ann Miller, Penny Marshall. And by the way, let me tell you something about Jessica Simpson — she was a good sport every day and a good pro. She was there every day, and she really dug Scot Marshall, the director. She was up for everything.
Ross Douthat (“Doubt That?”) assays the film industry’s response to the Iraq War, in a piece for The Atlantic entitled “The Return of the Paranoid Style.” There’s a lot of labyrinthine, sludgy generational horse-trading to go along with the illuminating bits of back story (remembrances of Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter’s famous remark that the events of Sept. 11 had
slain irony, and conservative columnist Peggy
Noonan’s prediction that the attacks would resurrect the spirit of John
Wayne). All in all, though, I wouldn’t call this modern, conflicted style an exercise in paranoia; I’d dub it an exploration of heartier shades of grey. Much more interesting than most of the piece is the mostly unstated-until-the-end assertion that the response of the Bush Administration to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 has likely colored a certain brand of mainstream Hollywood genre cinema far more greatly and deeply than terrorism in general, or the war in Iraq. This is the real hypothesis worth exploring, and subjecting to scientific method.
Perhaps the last person one would expect to be following in the activist-filmmaking footsteps of George Clooney and Don Cheadle is a filmmaker being
rabidly petitioned online to get out of making movies altogether. And yet Uwe Boll is hoping to exercise his social conscience by making a “very brutal” movie about the Sudanese genocide, “in the style of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto.” For more, from FilmStew, click here.
To say that Strange Wilderness offers up no laughs whatsoever is an overstatement, of course. But not much of one. Part road movie, part stoner comedy, part gross-out set-piece collection of loosely strung-together and half-reasoned sketch ideas, the movie by and large wastes the talents of a game ensemble, and stands ready to slip into lasting cinematic anonymity except as the answer to the following trivia question: In what film does Steve Zahn find his member latched onto by a giant, angry, animatronic turkey?
Zahn stars as Peter Gaulke, the somewhat dimwitted host of a PBS nature show that he inherited from from his now deceased father. Faced with cancellation and desperate to stay on the air, Peter hatches a plan to purchase a map purporting to show the location of Bigfoot from Bill Calhoun (Joe Don Baker), a friend of his dad’s, and squeeze out several whatever-we-find-along-the-way episodes of his show en route to South America. Peter’s crew of misfits includes serious stoner Junior (Justin Long), tubby nutjob Cooker (Jonah Hill), idiotic soundman Fred (Allen Covert), newly hired animal trainer Whitaker (Kevin Heffernan), map master Cheryl (Ashley Scott) and driver Danny (Peter Dante).
Along the way, Peter and his crew discover themselves in a race with rival TV animal show personality Sky Pierson (Harry Hamlin), so they enlist the assistance of expert tracker Gus Hayden (Robert Patrick), a friend of Bill’s. Nutty misadventures ensue, involving shark attacks, angry gang-bangers with low-riders, stolen nitrous oxide, killer pygmies and guys named Dick. Jeff Garlin and Ernest Borgnine also figure into the proceedings.
The penile humor factor here is high; a bit involving Patrick’s mangled junk joins the aforementioned turkey bit, which may be the surreal high of the movie. There are also increasingly tedious voiceover narrations of nature footage, seemingly designed to pad out the movie’s already slim 84-minute running time. So things are pitched at a lowbrow degree — that’s fine. A big part of
the problem, though, is that the movie never decides on a fixed, firm point-of-view for the character of Peter; sometimes he’s smarter than his charges, other times he recedes into the background, letting their stupid antics or decisions decide the course of events.
Strange Wilderness (which for a while had the brilliant spec title of of The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang) is actually scripted by Peter Gaulke (yes, the name of Zahn’s character) and director Fred Wolf (Without a Paddle, Joe Dirt), who waste a decent enough concept (or at least backdrop for a comedic story) on jokes and set-ups that are dispiritingly obvious. Wolf, meanwhile, doesn’t elicit any consistent tone; sometimes his actors wildly overact (Hill affects a nutty accent, to wearying effect), sometimes they play a scene fairly straightforward. That the movie just ends by letting its last scene unwind into a giggly blooper says everything one needs to know about the care and thought put into this flick. “Stupid” is quite fine in comedy, as long as it’s thought through, and presented consistently, establishing the parameters of a silly world (as in, say, Billy Madison). Strange Wilderness doesn’t do that, though. It’s dumb and lazy, a tiring combination, especially since there’s enough talent here to make the movie a much, much better thing.
Putting an awful lot of lipstick on this pig, the DVD release of Strange Wilderness comes with a solid slate of bonus material, at least quantitatively. Housed in a regular Amray case with snap-shut hinges, the DVD is presented in 16×9 widescreen, preserving the aspect ratio of the movie’s original theatrical presentation. Audio comes in Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound tracks in both English and Spanish, with optional subtitles in each of those languages, as well as French. A featurette billed as “Cooker’s Song” is actually five-minute-45-second extended take of a musical sequence with Hill and Long, including long lead-in before filming begins. A seven-minute bit on the movie’s turkey sequence starts out with a look at the effects work involved, but then just spends its last four minutes or so loitering between takes, with Hill and Long goofing around. There’s also a 21-minute “Reel Comedy” episode with Zahn, hosted by Lisa Arch. The high point probably lies in some of the movie’s 13 deleted scenes, running 22 minutes in total; many of these feature improvisations that are much funnier than what’s in the movie, and there’s even a scene where Long (who gets his eyelids tattooed in one bit in the movie, doted on in a six-minute featurette/extended rehearsal sequence) reveals fake boob tattoos as well — an attempt to woo back his girlfriend after she left him for another woman, he explains. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) B- (Disc)
In a White House interview with Politico and Yahoo News — a president’s first for an online audience — George Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families: he has given up golf. “I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the
commander in chief playing golf,” the president said. “I feel I owe it to the
families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think
playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.” So… umm, yeah. There’s that. I guess he must have seen the clip of him from Fahrenheit 9/11, also lampooned in Fun with Dick and Jane. Or maybe he read about those in a briefing.
For more than 2,500 years, the Parthenon has been shot at and set on fire by marauders, looted for its sculptures, rocked
by earthquakes, weathered by wind and disfigured by misguided
attempts at restoration. Now, a team of architects and engineers is investigating the many mysteries of this icon of Western civilization: How did the
ancient Greeks design and build their masterpiece so quickly — in a
span of just eight years? And how did they achieve such precision and
perfection without modern tools and architectural aids that we take for
granted today, such as comprehensive plans or drawings?
An hour-long NOVA special directed and produced by Gary Glassman, Secrets of the Parthenon delves into the 20-ton marble jewel of the Acropolis, a 70,000-piece jigsaw puzzle with virtually no right angles or straight lines. With unprecedented access to the Greek government’s decades-long, $100 million restoration project, this documentary aims to take viewers back in time and inside the minds of the ancient Greeks as they created their most enduring architectural miracle, a publicly endorsed monument to democracy, the goddess Athena and Greek glory in general. While the 46-column Parthenon may be “just” a building, it has inspired the architecture of dozens of state and government structures around the world, from the French Parliament to the United States’ Supreme Court, and it’s almost as much for this reason as its subtle, illusory lines that it’s notable.
As with many academic short-form titles, Secrets of the Parthenon feels it necessary to repeat its central query and thesis over and over, but it eventually gets to the point. Using interviews with Charalambos Bouras, the restoration project’s president, as well as University of Florida professor Barbara Barletta and University of Oregon professor Jeffrey Hurwit, the movie shows Greek master craftsmen struggling with 10-ton blocks of marble (think of some of their work as carefully constructing a huge cap for your back molar) and striving to rediscover the lost tools and techniques of their ancestors. It also elucidates the aesthetic considerations that informed the structure’s construction, during the reign of Pericles. Secrets of the Parthenon is perhaps most interesting, however, in its last third, when it delves into the competing systems of measurements (Doric, Common and Ionic) that had to be juggled while using masonists from all over different parts of Greece. It’s math, sure, and wonkish at that, but still pretty fascinating.
Housed in a regular Amray case, the hour-long Secrets of the Parthenon is presented in 16×9 anamorphic widescreen, and comes with scene selection, closed captions for the hearing impaired and video descriptions for the visually impaired. Apart from downloadable materials for educators, though, there are no supplemental special features, which is a major bummer for the average consumer perhaps looking for a thoughtful, and thought-provoking, DVD diversion for their kids. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) D (Disc)
Meeting Resistance, a documentary releasing May 20 from First Run Features, reveals a wholly different narrative about the Iraq War than the one portrayed by many in the mainstream news. In the only-slightly-redacted first-person-plural statement below, co-directors Molly Bingham and Steve Connors talk about their movie, which will be reviewed later in the month:
Meeting Resistance is about the people and make-up of the Iraqi resistance. Since it was released in theaters last fall, we have shown the film in more than 80 U.S. cities, as well as to several key military audiences. We’ve made more than 200 appearances with the film to talk about our understanding of the conflict in Iraq and take questions from the audience. When the lights come up, we are greeted with the kind of silence associated with people trying to reconcile what they thought they knew with what they now understand. We’ve come to realize that our film is delivering a paradigm shift about the Iraq conflict — one audience at a time.
There are two wars in Iraq, and Meeting Resistance explores the first war — the popularly supported resistance to occupation, which contains the majority of the organized violence that is happening in Iraq. Using primary source material, critical analysis and cross-referencing, we crafted a film that tells the story of that conflict. The second war is the civil war — an internal political struggle being waged over competing visions of Iraq’s future, of which the country’s sectarian violence is a symptom, not a cause. Meeting Resistance is a journalistic documentary, not an advocacy or polemic film. Although we did not set out to challenge the narrative of the Iraq conflict — the one that has been constructed in Washington — our reporting eventually led us to do so.
U.S. military briefings in the Green Zone during 2003 and 2004 told journalists that the violence against American troops came from “dead-enders” and “Ba’athi die-hards,” from common criminals, religious extremists, foreign fighters, and al-Qaeda — characterized as “fringe elements.” While some might fit some of these descriptions, the vast majority of those involved are citizens from the core of Iraqi society. In time, we came to see the U.S. military’s misnaming of the “enemy” as an intentional act — as a key part of their objective to control the “information battle space.” They aspire to control the perception of the enemy’s identity, and through the news media persuade the American public that these “fringe elements” of Iraqi society are the only ones who oppose the U.S. presence in Iraq. A military push (or surge) to isolate and eliminate them would accomplish a perceived “victory.”
The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq delivered to the White House in October 2003 was leaked in February 2006 by Robert Hutchings, the 2003-2005 chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Speaking in interviews, Hutchings revealed that the report said that it is composed of nationalists fighting for their country with deep roots in the society and that the U.S. military, if it remains in Iraq, will be fighting a counterinsurgency war for years to come, a conclusion that echoed what we had found in our on-the-ground reporting for Meeting Resistance.
This spring, a front-page investigation by the New York Times revealed the Pentagon’s well-oiled “briefing” system for retired military analysts who are working for TV outlets and writing op-eds in ways that reflect and amplify the U.S. government’s narrative. The reporting done by the Times underscores the critical importance the Pentagon ascribes to its efforts to control the “message,” including how it defines the enemy.
If the predominant narrative about the Iraq conflict was truly based in reality, it would involve pointing out that the majority of Iraqis want a withdrawal of all foreign forces, and that the Department of Defense’s quarterly reports to Congress, on average, show that from April 2004 to December 2007, 74 percent of significant attacks initiated by Iraqis targeted American-led coalition forces. Americans would also find out that half of registered marriages in Baghdad in 2002 were mixed marriages between Sunni and Shia, Kurd and Arab, Christian and Muslim, and many of the tribes and clans and families are, in fact, mixed between Sunni and Shia. Also, nearly all of the Arab Iraqis polled oppose dividing the country along ethnic and sectarian lines, and the vast majority demands that Iraq have a strong central government, not the decentralized powerlessness imposed by the American-influenced constitution.
It is not that these points have never been reported, but the booming voice of “disinformation” — from which the Pentagon wants the American public to view the conflict — drowns much of this information out. Ultimately, our film has helped reveal the success of the Pentagon’s strategy to obscure the real nature of the war in Iraq. Unfortunately, too many in the news media have been willing to allow that to happen. Throughout the world’s history, there have been occupations — and resistance to those occupations. Why then do Americans have such a difficult time grasping that our troops are unwelcome by the vast majority of the Iraqi population? And why has reporting by our mainstream news media generally failed to recognize and draw our attention to this central, core aspect of the violence?
So Hillary Clinton is already — and unsurprisingly — being awarded a primary victory in West Virginia, and it’s due in no small part to voters like this, I’m sad to say: “He’s a Muslim and, you know, that has a lot to do with it. I just rather have, you know, Hillary.” Ugh. In a certain way, her ilk are worse than those who promulgate this stuff, because she chooses to believe in a vast conspiracy that reinforces her prejudice.
German-born director Uwe Boll is a filmmaker in the grand, throwback tradition of the snake-oil showmen of the medium’s traveling circus infancy. Derided by some (okay, many), he’s made 10 genre flicks in the last eight years, challenged dissenting journalists to boxing matches and inspired an online petition to ban him from cinema. In his latest movie — a freewheeling adaptation of the videogame Postal, his first (intentional) comedy since his 1991 debut, German Fried Movie — Boll slaughters dozens of sacred cows, mocks himself by claiming his films are financed with Nazi gold, and finally commits to celluloid the scene that Mike Meyers has been too cowardly to include in any of the Austin Powers films: Verne Troyer being sexually assaulted by monkeys. For New York Magazine‘s Vulture, I spoke with Boll last week about Postal, his failed bid to box Michael Bay and why he’s exactly the right guy to direct the inevitable Grand Theft Auto movie. A sample of the conversation:
Brent Simon: Even though it takes place a very heightened and exaggerated world, Postal has a lot of radical things in it — not just of the gross-out or outrageous variety, but also, say, complicity between George Bush and Osama bin Laden. Was that a sticking point at all for Running With Scissors, the videogame’s production company, and/or potential domestic distributors of the film?
Uwe Boll: Yeah, it was. Running With Scissors in the beginning wanted only a hard rampage movie where a guy flips out, basically, a little like Falling Down meets Taxi Driver. And then I said, “I think that the videogame is cultish and funny, because you can [play as] Bush or bin Laden, and the guy lives in a trailer park with his 500-pound wife, you can use cats as silencers.” I mean, it’s totally absurd, in a way. And I felt that it was an opportunity for me to first of all make something that was funny, but secondly put also a lot of my frustration in the script. So there’s the frustration about myself, and how I get bashed in the Internet about my career and about the reviews, and I used that to put myself in the movie. Then there’s the frustration about the whole political landscape since Sept. 11, like we’re all running in between fundamentalist terror and George Bush craziness, in big danger — not only financial disasters, but who knows what will happen? When I wrote the script, we were almost on the edge of a war with Iran after the unsolved Iraq war. At this point, we all felt like if the Iranian president [says] one wrong thing, there will be the next war starting, and this will end. And at the same time, I wanted to make a comedy like some of my personal favorites, which are all a little bit older, like Naked Gun or Life of Brian, Monty Python-type of stuff. Or Blues Brothers. And I felt like this is all missing in the last few years — that everyone wants to be so politically correct, and all the Ben Stiller or Will Ferrell comedies have their moments, but overall they are all kind of clichéd, they have happy endings where families are back and weddings are the best, and it’s all about being nonpolitical or whatever. I wanted to make a ruthless movie and hit everybody with a hammer. This is what I went for.
For the full New York Magazine piece, click here. More from the interview later in the week, including Boll’s thoughts regarding the American political landscape, and his pending litigation against Billy Zane.
All the blood, puke, boobs and casually misogynistic patter you love are back for the collected third and final season of Comedy Central’s Drawn Together on DVD. An animated series built around the Real World-esque conceit of a disparate group of cartoon characters thrown together in a house, Drawn Together, is a wildly uneven execution of a promising premise.
Actually, citing The Real World as precedent or inspiration for this show might invoke some confusion, so just to be clear Drawn Together is of the latter-day Real World genus, when virtually any arguably high-minded notions of social experiment have been thrown out the window, and replaced with Jack Daniels and Boone’s Farm. In fact, that’s the most disappointing thing about this series — that it doesn’t, at least in its third season, so much capitalize on the clash of personalities here as just attempt to mock entertain through the air-quote shock of scrambled cartoon nudity and politically incorrect asides. In this regard, the show, co-created by Dave Jeser and Matt Silverstein, is like a cross between South Park and Family Guy, though minus almost all of the cleverness that might imply; it outstrips the former in lewdness, and is as predicated on randomness as the latter.
Despite its catchy central premise — and the zeitgeist success of other animated programming — Drawn Together seemingly never could get major traction, perhaps because of uneven nature of the program. Nowhere is that more apparent than here, in the show’s junior run, which feels at almost every turn like a desperate, last-gasp grab at relevance and audience. The characters themselves (clockwise from top left: Toot Braunstein, Princess Clara, Captain Hero, Xandir, Foxxy Love, Wooldoor Sockbat, Ling-Ling and Spanky Ham) offer up plenty of opportunity for comedy of stark contrast (which you can pretty much guess just by looking at them), but the imperative here is one of gross-out shenanigans. Dipping even further in funky, sleazy ephemera, plot strands here find
Captain Hero torturing his 12-year-old self, Ling-Ling getting put into
foster care (a story that somewhat recalls that of Toot being shipped
off to a nursing home, in season two), and Toot finally gets worshiped as the “cow” she is.
Housed in a cardboard case with slimline cases, the 14 episodes collected here are presented in full screen, in extended (read: un-bleeped and un-blurred) fashion. This gives the program a bit of an extra naughty kick (as well as lots of extra male genitalia), but it doesn’t much change the bottom line. Unlike the series’ previous sets, there are only a quartet of feature-length audio commentary tracks this go-round, from Jeser, Silverstein, composer Evan Schletter, actress Abby McBride and others. There are also a half dozen karaoke sing-alongs, giving one the opportunity to participate in the show’s filthy musical segments, should they desire, accompanied by the usual galleries of promotional material and preview trailers. To purchase the set via Amazon, click here. C (Show) B- (Disc)
It’s a happy 30th birthday to erstwhile pie fucker Jason Biggs today, who will have to do plenty of penance this year to wash off the saturating stink of Over Her Dead Body. Even if his was only a co-starring turn, God still saw…
Forgetting Sarah Marshall has been a solid hit ($51 million and counting, domestically) for debut director Nicholas Stoller, who helped screenwriter-star Jason Segel get the story on its legs. Their off-screen friendship will bear more professional fruit, too, in the form of the comedy spec script Five-Year Engagement, which he is attached to helm for Universal.
“It’s kind of an Annie Hall or When Harry Met Sally-type story,” says Stoller. “With Sarah Marshall, a lot of what was a little bit frustrating about the narrative of that was that we couldn’t really get into the relationship as it was happening, we were sifting through the wreckage of the relationship. With Five-Year Engagement, we want to watch it implode in real time. It’s kind of that couple we all know that gets engaged and then takes five years to get their shit together and get married. Both myself and Jason, we’d been in relationships — I’m married now, and this is not my wife I’m talking about — for years where it didn’t go anywhere, and it was just almost right. So we kind of wanted to make the movie about a relationship that’s 60 percent right.”
A friend clued me into Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, a shot-by-shot, Son of Rambow-style recreation (or “sweding,” if you will) which three
Mississippi 12-year-olds began filming in their backyards shortly after the release of the original Indiana Jones movie in 1981. Seven years later their film was in the can, and this Wednesday, it’s screening at the Mann Chinese 6 in Hollywood, at 8 p.m. For the diehards this is old news, I guess, but somehow this had all escaped my attention up until now, even though producer Scott Rudin purchased the trio’s life rights years ago, and Daniel Clowes is at work on a script for a big screen adaptation about their pubescent odyssey. By the way, shouldn’t Paramount have pushed that into production, and have it locked and loaded to come out at least around the same time as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Or shall it eventually suffer the same ill-timed fate as the Weinstein Company’s Fanboys, which I think finished filming eight years ago?
In 1999, a landmark year for American cinema all around, but especially with regards to studio filmmaking, Andy and Larry Wachowski — who had previously scripted Assassins and directed only 1996’s small-scale crime thriller Bound — set the sci-fi adventure genre on its head with The Matrix, a labyrinthine, parallel-world shoot-’em-up in which Keanu Reeves’ office drone unlocks the power within in a manner in which Tony Robbins could have never dreamed. Their latest movie is Speed Racer, a colorful, golly-gee-toned adaptation of the old Japanese import cartoon series.
The technical proficiency of the film is never in question; from frame one, the Wachowskis succeed in crafting an ecstatically eye-popping spectacle, buoyed by neon-tinted primary colors, extreme close-ups and wild, desert-set car chases in which automobiles pogo over one another to cool sound effects. All in all, I’m pretty sure Hunter S. Thompson had hallucinations like this.
Yet there’s an ineffable but chokingly pervasive sense that Speed Racer is, well, sort of a cop-out. Sure, it’s a family flick first and foremost, and not fair to judge based mostly on what it isn’t. Yet anyone in their teens or older is almost certainly going to have seen one or all of the Matrix movies before this, and the chief, whispering thought lodged in their brain, irrespective of whether they’re pleasantly surfing along on Speed Racer‘s surfeit of “cool,” is going to be, “Hmmmm… this is kind of tame.”
While its two 2003 sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, both met with lukewarm-to-stinging critical reaction and more than a bit of fan-boy howling, they were undeniably of a piece with the original movie, stylistically and tonally. All three films were rated R, and dealt in explosions and hand-to-hand combat. The mixing of these base elements along with ample portions of armchair psychology and religious theory gave the movies a pop, a certain contrast to other genre flicks of their ilk.
The PG-rated Speed Racer, on the other hand, feels safe, and made of prefabricated parts. While sabotage and subterfuge are the name of the game within the plot, there’s nary a gun in sight. Which got me to thinking — unless it’s inherently part of the narrative (see David Lynch’s The Straight Story, or David Mamet’s The Winslow Boy), it’s nearly impossible for filmmakers with some sense of auteurish branding to go forward or backwards in rating by more than a single classification. It’s just inviting ruin, in a way. That’s why, rightly or wrongly, after the splash of cold water to the face that was bullet-time, Speed Racer feels like a water-treading ploy by the Wachowskis for wide-scale embrace. For the full piece, from FilmStew, click here.
U Turn and Undercover Brother screenwriter John Ridley has weighed in against exit polls in a Huffington Post piece, saying, “The conclusions drawn from these excavations usually reflect the
media’s own bias” and “with each round of voting the media echo chamber tends to
magnify the disparities of each subset. Again and again we are told the
black vote has abandoned the Clintons, older white women don’t connect
with Obama. This repetition breeds resentment; how dare ‘those people’
not support my candidate? In short order our own opinions about those
who abandon and those who refuse to connect calcify into animosity,
making it hard for us to see the ‘other’ candidate as potentially ‘our’
candidate.” For the full piece, click here.
There’s a nice short piece in the Los Angeles Times today, by Paul Davidson, which focuses on costume designer Bernie Pollack (yes, brother of multi-hyphenate Sydney) and his work for the forthcoming Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Not surprisingly, the film presented some unique challenges. “The last film was made 18 years ago,” says Pollack. “Everybody that worked on it was out of business. The hat maker was gone. The costumer was gone. So I had to start from scratch. I had to find fabric, find people who could make it. I mean, I’m making an iconic movie. He has got to look as good or better than in the other films in the series. If he looks less than that, I’m an ass.”
All’s well that ends well, of course, and eventually Pollack found his perfectly distressed archaeologist gear, he claims. Of course, as insurance against damage from water, fire, dirt, blood (fake and otherwise), stunts and anything else that might happen, Pollack wanted to play it safe and order in bulk, and the not-quite-cash-strapped production was happy to oblige. The final tally for Harrison Ford’s character: 30 identical fedoras, 30 leather jackets, 60 pairs of khaki pants and 72 shirts.
Character actor Andy Serkis (below right) is best known for the computer-generated creatures he lent physicality in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films, and King Kong,
but in his latest movie he meets perhaps his most formidable screen challenge to date — a
psychopathic farmer with a penchant for masks made of skin. Written and directed by Paul Andrew Williams, The Cottage is a strange little British cocktail of horror and bickering comedy, a movie done a grave disservice by a grisly DVD cover that sells it as something it’s not entirely.
Forced into hiding after their kidnapping of bratty spitfire Tracey (Jennifer Ellison, above center) goes awry,
at-odds siblings David (Serkis) and Peter (Reece Shearsmith, above
left) find themselves fighting for their sanity while they hole up in a
secluded country cottage. Refusing to stay quiet, foul-mouthed,
sweatpants-clad Tracey puts up quite a
ruckus, and once she susses out the involvement of her oafish stepbrother Andrew (Steven O’Donnell) in the $100,000 ransom plot, turns the tables on the guys, who find themselves somewhat held captive by their own
victim. That’s only half the story, though, as everyone’s problems soon go from bad to much worse when they all come
face-to-face with a towering, axe-wielding monstrosity who would feel very much at home with the families of The Devil’s Rejects and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
The Cottage is essentially two films mashed together — one part screwball character-rooted caper, one part goosing, self-aware horror flick — and how one feels in gut-reaction fashion about that prospect very much informs one’s take on the movie as a whole. The first 30 to 35 minutes is very much about David and Peter’s complicated relationship, and the chemistry between Serkis (who gets to play hectoring and exasperated) and Shearsmith is a pleasure, reminding me, perhaps strangely enough, of Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane from The Producers. When things turn violent, though, director Williams doesn’t skimp on the gore, even as he plays things with a wink and a nod, tossing in amusing character bits (Peter is terrified by moths) and setting one frightened-flight sequence to Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony in D Minor.” Powered by this weird, anything-can-happen vibe, The Cottage feels reminiscent (at least emotionally, hopefully not in any specifics) of the way bedtime stories mattered so much as a kid, when even boilerplate characters and silly twists could make you squirm in feeling delight. Trying to parse and make sense of some of the story choices and twists is a losing proposition, but The Cottage at least has an idiosyncratic stamp of personality, and that’s a welcome enough thing to make it a fun rental.
The Cottage comes in a regular Amray case with a cardboard slipcover, and is presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English, French, Spanish and Portuguese language Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks, and optional subtitles in all the aforementioned tongues. Five minutes of outtakes highlight mangled lines and missed cues, while 12 minutes of deleted scenes, nine in total, showcase among other things a third, dead brother, “Smoking Joe,” who was excised from the movie early on, apparently during filming. There are also 11 preview trailers and two storyboard galleries, both involving Peter and Tracey crossing paths with the psychotic killer. Finally, as with Sony’s recent release of Hero Wanted, there’s also a free digital copy of the film,
which purchasers can transfer to their PC, PlayStation 3 or PSP
(PlayStation Portable) system, pending minimal memory requirements. The only thing missing, unfortunately, are some cast and/or crew interviews, which would seemingly be of extra interest given the wild-and-woolly tone of the material. For a couple sample clips of the movie, click here and here, respectively. To purchase the film via Amazon, meanwhile, click here. B- (Movie) B (Disc)
It’s neither my best nor most handsome work, and yet there I am on the new, fifth episode of That Indie Film Show, talking about Jeremy Podeswa’s Fugitive Pieces and Garth Jennings’ Son of Rambow, as well as a couple new-to-DVD titles. It’s a couple minutes into the show, which can be accessed on IKlipz.com or by simply clicking here.
It’s a happy birthday to Cloverfield cutie Odette Yustman, who turns 23 today, and certainly looks a lot better without a steel rod sticking out of her shoulder.
Time and the cruel crucible of young starlet turnover will tell if Yustman has the chops to carry other movies, or if the general effectiveness and affecting nature of her turn in Cloverfield was more a product of its verité construction. Regardless, she seems really naturally charming and pleasant, and I’m both surprised and stoked that actually that’s her given birth name.
A hearty slice of pre-code cinema screens at the Egyptian Theatre Thursday, May 22 and Friday, May 23, with double- and triple-features of films not yet released to DVD, alongside documentaries that cast an illuminating light on movies that flagrantly flaunted their vice-laden pedigree.
Harnessing the wilder impulses of Hollywood cinema at the end of the silent era was one of the prime items on the agenda of every politician and crusading do-gooder in America. A production code was actually drawn up circa 1930, supposedly severely limiting some of the sexy, saucy and ultra-violent antics cropping up in the movies. But things still continued apace, with little real censorship beyond nod-and-a-wink lip service to the new standards. In the wake of Prohibition in the early 1930s, though, public and political outcry forced the appointment of Joseph Breen to preside over enforcement of the code in 1934, finally putting some teeth into the new criteria.
As numerous films from the era have been restored, most notably by Sony
Repertory’s Preservation Department, Warner Bros. (in conjunction with
their recent “Forbidden Hollywood” pre-code DVD releases) and the UCLA
Archive (in conjunction with Universal Pictures), a fascination has evolved among current movie fans for the pre-code Hollywood phenomenon, especially for the talkies from the early 1930s. Several excellent documentaries on the subject have been made, including Why Be Good? Sexuality and Censorship in Early Cinema, executive produced by Hugh Hefner and directed by Elaina Archer.
That film, as well as a handful of some of the rarest yet most fascinating pre-code movies available, including Frank Capra’s Forbidden, Cecil B. DeMille’s Madam Satan and Charles Brabin’s Beast of the City (none of which have yet been released to DVD) will screen May 22 and 23 at the historic
Egyptian Theatre, which 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 favorite what-if scenario of ultra-right-wing nutters will get its day in Unthinkable, which centers on a major threat to the United States involving three nuclear devices whose locations are shrouded in secrecy by a single terrorist. With only two days before they are deployed, a black-ops interrogator and a female FBI agent have to decide how far they will go to find them. Variety reports that Buffalo Soldiers helmer Gregor Jordan will direct, and Samuel L. Jackson will star (presumably as the black-ops interrogator, not the female FBI agent, which will be, I don’t know, Julianne Moore? Rachel Weisz? Rachel McAdams?)
While this will surely, finally give the talking heads at Fox News something other than 24 and Jack Bauer to reference, given the conceit, the guy-and-gal commercial concession and, I’m sad to say, the involvement of Jackson, does anyone doubt that this movie is going to suck in dispiriting ways? Jackson only tries in approximately every fourth film (the last time was in Resurrecting the Champ… though I haven’t seen Renny Harlin’s direct-to-DVD Cleaner), and everything about this reads phone-it-in, gun-waving, loud-authoritative-voice-using Jackson, which we’ve seen approximately two dozen times before. Can’t wait for the water-boarding recreations set to Hans Zimmer music, though. Oh wait… yes I can.
There have been literally dozens of documentaries made about the war in Iraq, and almost without exception they’ve been rather famously ignored by a filmgoing populace seemingly too ground down by a combination of their own economic anxieties and generalized, numbed depression or despair to care about a cinematic rehashing of what they now overwhelmingly judge as a from-day-one fuck-up.
Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris, though, is mad as hell, and thinks others should be too. “I would often say when I was making this movie that I don’t know, really, whether Americans care about torture. I care about it,” he says, stressing the personal pronoun and leaning back in his chair, “but I don’t know whether most people care, in the sense that they tell themselves, ‘Well, it’s an implacable foe, a ruthless enemy, and you have to do what you have to do to win the war.'”
Among other works, Morris is the director behind The Thin Blue Line, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and, perhaps most eerily timely and insightfully, 2003’s The Fog of War, which used former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his decision-making in the waging of the Vietnam War as a prism through which to assay the missteps of American military aggression and intervention. His latest film — the “this movie” referenced above — is entitled Standard Operating Procedure. It’s about a series of photographs at Abu Ghraib prison that changed the world, changed the nature of the Iraq war and changed America’s image of itself, or at least dragged into the light of day the yawning gulf between a nation’s soaring rhetoric and its actions. A hundred years from now, these photographs in all likelihood will define the war in Iraq, in particular three iconic photographs taken by soldiers in the 372nd MP Company — soldier Lynndie England posing with a prisoner on a leash, a hooded man standing on a box with wires attached to his fingers, and a pyramid of naked prisoners.
In his perspicacious new film, Morris shows how the photographs served as both an exposé and a cover-up — the former because the photographs offered everyday Americans a glimpse of the horror of what was happening at Abu Ghraib, but the latter because they seduced people into thinking what they saw was an aberration limited to a few rouge soldiers working the night-shift. “The photographs became politicized immediately — the left would say one thing, the right would say something else,” Morris says. “And it very, very quickly devolved into an argument about rogue soldiers versus administration policy, without anyone ever really bothering to investigate the circumstances under which the photographs were taken. It became political football.”
“I wanted to make a movie about… the kind of bizarre misdirection created by the photographs,” Morris continues. “There are lots of other movies to make [and] other stories to tell, including those that involve the higher-ups. I think there’s so much anger and frustration about the war that [people] want some kind of superhero to come out of the wings and nail (former Secretary of Defense Donald) Rumsfeld to the wall, and if I haven’t done it they’re just pissed off, like, ‘That’s the job, guy! Why are you fucking around with a bunch of pictures?’ And it’s because I’m actually fascinated by those pictures, and photography, and I’m fascinated by the fact that there are things in front of our eyes that we can’t see. The scary thing about pictures to me is that they can be used to reveal and to hide. They can [both] make you think you know things that you don’t know, and they can certainly show you things that you cannot have seen otherwise.”
While it’s built chiefly around unblinking interviews with the actual subjects at the center of the controversy, Standard Operating Procedure, like most of Morris’ other films, also includes exacting reenactments. Because of this, and also because it’s in part about the inherent ambiguity of still photography — which after all captures only one moment in time, and in subjective fashion — it only stands to reason that the documentary arrives on the heels of Nonfiction, a 100-page book of photographs taken by Nubar Alexanian on the sets of Standard Operating Procedure and other Morris films.
The photographer, who has a relationship with Morris spanning more than 15 years, says he got a feeling early on that this project was different in substantive ways. “Errol created an exact duplicate of the cell block of Abu Ghraib. So all of us working on the set were in Abu Ghraib prison, and [yet] we were not,” says Alexanian. “Standard Operating Procedure is a movie about a subject we all know something about, that the press thinks it’s covered. But what Errol Morris has is the truth.” For a longer question-and-answer interview with Morris, click here.
Emile Hirsch was on Late Night with Conan O’Brien last night, to promote the cattle-prod to the senses that is Speed Racer. No matter that it’s a $100 million-plus movie; Hirsch still only pulled one segment, which made for a careening anecdotal ride, as he recounted his discovered-in-rerun love for the original cartoon (he’d watch while eating cereal at his dad’s, using A&W Root Beer instead of milk), the movie’s Berlin shoot (including a trailer misunderstanding in which a production assistant mistakenly inferred that Hirsch was/is gay), and audience reaction to the movie. Nothing about Larry/Lana Wachowski’s sexual reassignment surgery, though. Hmmm. Overall, good times, and a pretty smooth sales job — no sweaty desperation or shown seams.
