Daily Archives: June 30, 2008

City Slickers

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Coming two years after Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams, 1991’s City Slickers tapped into some of that big screen hit’s same listlessness and ennui, deeply felt by an aging boomer population. The story centers around New York City family man Mitch Robbins (Billy Crystal), who finds himself sort of going through the motions — he’s unhappy with his advertising job at a radio station, frets that his kids don’t respect him (little Jake Gyllenhaal makes his screen
debut as Mitch’s youngest, while Crystal’s real-life daughter Lindsay
plays his eldest screen kid), and generally feels the soul-deadening crush of impending middle-age. His wife Barbara (Patricia Wettig) wonders where the smile and spring in the step of her husband have gone.

Things are similarly screwy for Mitch’s friends: Grocery store manager Phil Berquist (Daniel Stern) finds himself teetering on the edge of divorce, while commitment-phobe Ed Furillo (Bruno Kirby) keeps intimacy at bay through habitually dating a string of much younger women. Trading their briefcases for saddlebags, the three longtime pals decide to beat a retreat from the hustle and bustle of big city life, and take a vacation together at a New Mexico theme ranch where people can live on the land and take part in cattle drives. There, under the tutelage of grizzled cowhand Curly Washburn (Jack Palance), the men locate a pinch of the wonderment of adolescence. Out of place but enthralled, they, along with an array of other vacationing city folk, learn about the Old West and themselves.

Crystal may have still been in his early 40s when City Slickers was made, but the idea of him playing a 39-year-old may be among the biggest stretches of credulity on display in this film (hence the ubiquitous Mets baseball cap his character wears, to cover his chrome dome and aid in this regard). Still, despite a few obvious set-ups (Helen Slater guests as a single gal on the same ranch trip), the script offers up a quotable skewering of colliding cultures. As directed by Ron Underwood (Tremors, The Adventures of Pluto Nash), the movie also has the benefit of solid pacing and staging; known-commodity jokes don’t linger too long, which helps still give City Slickers, all these years later, a bit of a leg up on most of its masculine-angst brethren — like Wild Hogs, which was obviously based upon this movie, at least in the loosest sense.

The special edition presentation of City Slickers, housed in a regular, plastic Amray case with cardboard slipcover, comes with a nice array of bonus material. Presented in a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen aspect ratio, it come with English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and Dolby digital stereo surround audio tracks, a Spanish language Dolby stereo surround track and a French mono mix, as well as optional English and Spanish subtitles, the latter of which instantly make the urban cowboy kvetching even funnier, in bits and spurts. An audio commentary track with director Underwood, Crystal and Stern kickstarts the affair, and it’s a genial, all-inclusive affair. Naturally, lots of kind words are reserved for Palance, who of course would go on to stake his claim on AARP virility with his famous Oscar telecast performance of a bunch of one-armed push-ups.

Four featurettes follow, all running around 10 minutes, give or take. Though all feature interview segments interspersed with clips from the the movie, one is more of a generalized making-of, with the cast and crew reminiscing specifically about production. In another, longtime writing tandem Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel also revisit their experiences, and chart how they came to be involved in the project. The remaining two featurettes are a bit more out-of-field, with “A Star is Born” showcasing the baby calf (actually several calves, of course) used in the movie, and “The Real City Slickers,” slickly packaged self-congratulation as only Hollywood can, throwing a spotlight on people who were inspired to go on a real-life cattle drive after seeing the movie. One’s mind might wander here, wondering why there wasn’t a similarly canted featurette on Must Love Dogs, about all the women inspired to try online dating when shown Diane Lane‘s hook-up with John Cusack. A clutch of deleted scenes rounds out the collection, in fine form. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B (Disc)

Andrew Stanton Talks Wall▪E

Interviews


Robotic loneliness, love and yearning
may not seem like the most natural jumping off points for an animated
film, or any movie for that matter, but those questions were at the
heart of Wall▪E, according to director Andrew Stanton. “We
had this lunch around the time of Toy Story, in 1994, where we
were batting around any idea we could think of to try and come up
with what the next movie would be,” recalls Stanton. “One of the
half-brained sentences tossed out was, ‘What if we did the last robot
on Earth — everybody’s left and this machine just doesn’t know it
can stop?’ All the details weren’t there, there
wasn’t a name for the character and we didn’t even know what it would
look like. But it was just the loneliest scenario
I’d ever heard and I just loved it; I think that’s why it stayed in
the ether for so long.”

The yawning interim between Wall▪E‘s
inception and release, marked by some noodling around and roughly
four years of production work, have of course been filled with
animated hit after hit from Pixar — nine theatrical releases in all,
and around $5 billion in ticket sales. Still, there’s no simple
formula. “We’re always trying to be different with every movie,”
says Stanton. “We’re a director-driven studio and we’re trying to
encourage and support the (director’s) vision so that every film will
be unique, and have its own taste and slant. But I knew going in that
this was more of a major unconventional film, even when we just had
the character conceit and nothing else.” For the full interview feature piece, from Reelz, click here.

Wall▪E, Wanted Rule Box Office

Box Office

A G-rated robot did battle with a slick actioner with a hard R rating this past weekend, and there was plenty of business for both. Pixar’s latest animated effort, Wall▪E, debuted to $62.5 million, while hyper-kinetic action vehicle Wanted, starring James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, tallied $51.1 million. Both films should continue to woo large audiences throughout the week and over the extended July 4 holiday, though with Will Smith’s Hancock set to invade theaters tomorrow night, in advance of its official Wednesday opening, the drop-off for Wanted could be a bit steeper.

Placing third for the weekend, Steve Carell‘s big screen action-comedy adaptation of Get Smart, which topped the box office last week, added $20 million to its coffers, pushing its domestic total to $77.3 million. Rounding out the top 10 were the animated family flick
Kung Fu Panda ($11.7 million, $179.3 overall); Universal’s Edward Norton-starring reboot of The Incredible Hulk ($9.2 million, $115.6 million overall); Mike Myers’ The Love Guru ($5.4 million, $25.3 million overall); Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ($5 million, $300 million overall); writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening ($3.9 million, $59.1 million overall); Sex and the City, starring Sarah Jessica Parker, ($3.8 million, $140.1 million); and Adam Sandler’s You Don’t Mess with the Zohan ($3.2 million, $91.2 million overall).

In limited release, Kitt Kitredge: An American Girl, starring Abigail Breslin, held on five screens in advance of its nationwide bow this week, and picked up $106,000, pushing its two-week total to $449,000. The Last Mistress and the documentary Trumbo opened on a handful of screens, grossing $35,200 and $28,500, respectively. John Cusack’s sprawling satire War, Inc., meanwhile, added another $50,000 to its limited, six-week domestic haul, pushing its total theatrical gross to date to just under $410,000.

John McCain Muzzles His Mom, Sort Of

Politics

The John McCain campaign doesn’t really want his 96-year-old mother, Roberta, talking with the press, according to this James Rainey piece in the Los Angeles Times — a warm-and-fuzzy write-around that still intimates the generalized worry that old people are more likely to go off the reservation and say something crazy, or so wildly out of step with modern convention and language that it makes them seem unhinged or unkind. “They’ve got me muzzled,” says the (truly) elder McCain at one point, then adding with a chuckle: “Now, don’t you print that… I
really don’t like to be interviewed.” Later she tells Rainey, who relied on a preexisting relationship to circumvent the normal channels of interview arrangement, “Well, hon, they never said so, but I just don’t think they’re crazy about me talking to anybody.”