Daily Archives: July 8, 2008

License to Drive

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Swelling the back catalogue (something we haven’t done quite enough of recently), I thought I’d slap up this DVD review, in honor of the 20th anniversary of License to Drive‘s theatrical release… wait, really?! Sure, why not? It’s of Anchor Bay’s special edition DVD release of the film from the summer of 2005, and was originally penned for Now Playing Magazine. To wit:

Ahh, the 1980s — an era when a nation came of age with fast food combo meals. With largesse, redundancy and mass appeal on the cultural menu, it should serve as no surprise, then, that this thinking was quickly applied to Hollywood, where studio executives decreed that no mere single Corey could satisfy youngsters’ teen heartthrob requirements. Ergo, Feldman and Haim — one a little nutty and rowdy, the other… well, still nutty and rowdy off screen, but more a boy-next-door-type on screen. Yes, 1988’s License to Drive represents the second pairing of the erstwhile (and current, some might argue) Lost Boys, and still stands 17 years after its release as a tolerable if very dated slice of teen fantasy.

After failing his driving test, Les (Haim) doesn’t know what he’s going to do to impress Mercedes (a 17-year-old Heather Graham, in her first movie role), who he’s already told he has his license. Spurred on by his raucous buddy Dean (Feldman), Les borrows his grandfather’s Caddy to keep a date and of course ends up on a wild and woolly adventure. The movie is in many respects formulaic as all get-out, of course, but what makes it work, in no particular order, is the chemistry between its two leads (Michael Manasseri also costars as the Corey’s third wheel pal), an assortment of ripe, enjoyable supporting characters (including Richard Masur, Carol Kane and Michael Ensign) and highly imaginative fantasy sequences that capture the heightened absurdity of adolescence. It may have also loosed Billy Ocean’s “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car” upon us, but the song’s Corey-endorsed prominence gave it Top 40 legs.

Anchor Bay’s special edition DVD release kicks off with a nice insert booklet and a self-effacing audio commentary from writer Neil Tolkin and director Greg Beeman, who says, tongue in cheek, “It was early in my career, it was my first job… but I was working already at genius level.” The pair also relentlessly but good-naturedly hammer the movie’s fashion and wardrobe sense, while also offering up a few sparse trivia tidbits (the film’s genesis came from a failed National Lampoon’s article by Tolkin, and the production junked nine 1974 Cadillacs during filming). There’s a single deleted scene — which is actually more of an extended/alternate take of a sequence already in the movie — as well as two trailers, two TV spots (including one hilarious time capsule testimonial) and a copy of the film’s third draft screenplay on DVD-ROM.

The biggest bonus feature hook, though, is of course the new interview material with Haim and Feldman — 27 minutes in total, chock full of reminiscences and elliptical references to (drug-fueled?) production partying, something also present in Beeman and Tolkin’s commentary. The funniest moments come when Haim, now strangely puffy-faced, recalls his on-set bout with mono and makes fun (rightly so) of his perpetually agape mouth, against a montage of said slack-jawness. While I don’t quite give him credit for this as an “acting choice,” Haim at least comes off as more aware and grounded than Feldman, who is by turns apologetic, candid and delusional (“There were 1,500 kids surrounding our dressing rooms, rocking our trailers…”). License to Drive isn’t high art by any stretch of the imagination, but nostalgia buffs can revisit with confidence and enjoyment this treatment of the film that launched a thousand Tiger Beat pin-ups. For more on Haim and Feldman, meanwhile, click here. B- (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Guillermo del Toro on Special Effects, Impressing a First Date

Interviews

In 2004, two years after the $800 million-plus worldwide gross of Spider-Man confirmed the viability of all things comic book-related, director Guillermo del Toro brought Mike Mignola’s Hellboy to the big screen, starring Ron Perlman as a gruff, reluctant, occult crime-fighter who just happens to be a giant, red harbinger of the apocalypse. A fantastically imagined mid-size commercial hit, the movie was the lead punch in a one-two combo — the other being 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth, which racked up six Oscar nominations, including one for Best Foreign Language Film — that landed del Toro the plum assignment of following in Peter Jackson’s footsteps with an adaptation of The Hobbit. In advance of the release of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, del Toro talks about his surprisingly personal connection to the franchise, striking the right balance in practical effects work and CGI, and the difference between climbing Mount Everest and driving on the freeway. For the full read, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here.

Kabluey

Film Reviews

Hey, ever wonder about the secret lives of those guys dancing around in the Subway sandwich outfits in 100-degree summer heat, and all that brought them to that point? Then Kabluey might be for you. Unemployed, socially inept, 32-year-old Salman (Scott Prendergast, also the writer-director here) is dispatched to Texas by his mother to help his sister-in-law Leslie (Lisa Kudrow) tend to her two hell-raising youngsters while his older brother is off fighting in Iraq. Forced to pitch in, Salman takes a humiliating job as the costumed corporate mascot — a sort of cross between a giant faceless Smurf and Marvin from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — of a gone-bust Internet company, passing out fliers on a lonely highway outpost. In the process he learns a dark secret about his sister-in-law, gets hired as the entertainment for a children’s party by Christine Taylor (below left) and experiences an unlikely blossoming of confidence.

So, is Kabluey, with its emotionally stunted, man-child protagonist, a complex, seriocomic metaphor about life in wartime? Not really. There are a few obvious if unstated connections made to why Leslie’s boys are acting out so, but mostly this is a tale of minor-chord transcendence that’s willing to trade on the time-honored comic value of padding about in giant foam suits. And that works, by and large… that’s good enough. The film’s nagging problem, though, is how thinly Salman is sketched, and the fact that as an actor, Prendergast plays his lead as too much of a collection of self-negating tics. As a filmmaker, though, he’s great at capturing varying states of agitation and anxiety with idiosyncratic brush strokes, so the movie, after a chaotic opening third, still achieves a pleasant hold. For more information, click here. (Regent Releasing, PG-13, 87 minutes)

The Ruins

Blu-ray/DVD Reviews

Starring Jonathan Tucker, Jena Malone, Laura Ramsey and Shawn Ashmore, The Ruins is based on Scott Smith’s best-selling novel about a group of college friends
whose leisurely Mexican vacation takes a turn for the worse when they
head off to explore an ancient, off-the-beaten-path Mayan temple,
and end up trapped in a terrifying situation when some evil vines (yes, you read right) put the clamps on them. With their escape sealed off by bow-and-arrow-toting locals who don’t want to let the contained, long-dormant evil spread further inland, fear and paranoia start to eat away at their sanity.

That set-up may sound ridiculous, admittedly, but within the genre-play parameters of its construction, The Ruins performs quite capably. Beautifully shot, the movie has several things going for it, most notably a committed, focused cast who deliver solid performances (Joe Anderson also co-stars as Mathias, a friendly, slightly mysterious fifth wheel who first talks up the Mayan ruins), and a script and set-up that allows for small fissures to come into play in interesting, believable ways. The main quartet are vacationing as two couples, but it’s the females who are good friends, which of course shades the relationship between the guys, and also figures into later bickering, competitive dissent between the ladies.

There’s also a bit of narrative edginess, in the form of an oral sex bet between one of the couples, and another late-night reach-around that points up the direct line between physical and psychological anxiety and sexual neediness — not something you’d typically expect in such, ahem, toss-off entertainment. A great sound design further benefits the film, and if one or two moments of slight hokiness still poke through, The Ruins for the most part succeeds in pitching itself as an exotically flavored case study in downward-spiral-to-base-impulse thrills — sort of like Cabin Fever by way of Turistas, though without quite the gore factor of either of those flicks.

Housed in a regular Amray case, the special unrated version of The Ruins is presented in widescreen enhanced for 16×9 televisions, with Dolby digital
5.1 surround audio tracks in English and French, and optional French and Spanish subtitles. Kicking off a nice slate of supplemental material is an audio commentary track with director Carter Smith and editor Jeff Betancourt, in which the pair talk about the issues cell phones present in modern moviemaking, the compression of time in the movie versus the novel, and in particular the laudatory work of production designer Grant Major. Betancourt acts as the goosing moderator throughout this chat, prompting Smith, and correcting him with regards to how much of the movie’s actual temple ruins were built on-site (two-thirds were constructed, with the final third being added via CGI). Both gentlemen are conspicuously silent, though, during the movie’s aforementioned handjob scene. Hmmm…

A 14-minute making-of featurette provides insight
into the transformation of Smith’s novel to the screen, and includes interviews with executive producers Ben Stiller and Chris Bender. The six-minute featurette “Building the Ruins” gives viewers a detailed look at the set and location for the film, with producer Stuart Cornfeld talking up the production design, and the aforementioned Major offering some interesting thoughts. Most interesting, though, might be a 15-minute featuerette on the process of bringing the movie’s deadly
vines to life, and the combination of practical special effects and (minimal) CGI that were used. Gary Cameron, the film’s “head vine maker,” walks the audience through the trial-and-error process of achieving the right look for the movie (they’re modeled after the pumpkin vine), and how each hand-crafted bloom and leaf was eventually narrowed down to one-fifth of a millimeter in thickness, to allow for the sort of translucence that really sells the look on screen. Finally, a collection of five deleted scenes with optional commentary by Smith and Betancourt runs around 12 minutes in total, and includes both a never-before-seen alternate ending and a slightly tweaked version of the theatrical conclusion. The movie’s theatrical trailer, and other previews for Drillbit Taylor, Sweeney Todd and Cloverfield are also included. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B+ (Disc)

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Film Reviews

A hodgepodge of sci-fi, swashbuckling adventure, wry comedy and larger-than-life comic book action, 2004’s Hellboy was one of those rare mid-sized comic book adaptations that exuded a vision and spirit bigger than its (relatively chintzy) budget. Based on Mike Mignola’s mid-1990s graphic novel series — about a giant red demon spawn rescued from occult Nazi forces during World War II, and raised to be a most unlikely hero, as part of a clandestine, paranormal crime-fighting organization — the movie benefited from the guiding influence of writer-director Guillermo del Toro, who returns in both capacities on Hellboy II: The Golden Army. The results this time around are a bit more mixed, but still for the most part engaging and entertaining, an eye-popping rendering of some unabashedly bubblegum material.

There’s no tortured superhero back story to Hellboy II, only a brief textual prologue that reminds viewers of the above-mentioned inception, and the fact that Hellboy (Ron Perlman) really likes both cats and television. After a brief scene in which a teenage Hellboy’s father-figure and mentor, Professor Broom (John Hurt), relates the bedtime story of an army of unstoppable killing machines, we’re thrust forward into the present day, where Hellboy lives in secluded semi-secrecy with his pyrotechnic girlfriend, Liz Sherman (Selma Blair, above right).

Earth is threatened when an anarchical underworld elven prince, Nuada (Luke Goss, looking vaguely like a cousin of those albino twins from the Matrix sequels), plots to awaken the name-checked, long-dormant mythical army, and disrupt a truce with humankind, whom he abhors. Nuada’s twin sister, Princess Nuala (Anna Walton), escapes with a piece of crown that he needs to enact his scheme, and Hellboy and Liz, along with aquatic empath Abe Sapien (Doug Jones, above left) and gaseous medium Johann Krauss (voiced by Seth MacFarlane), set out to save her and thwart Nuada.

Del Toro’s project between the two Hellboy movies, the multiple-Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth, gave him a bump in profile amongst serious cinephiles, but more importantly a bump in self-assurance. The stamp of that blooming confidence is felt everywhere in Hellboy II, from the rich, woozy background detail and character design to the film’s ending, which… well, let’s just say I didn’t expect a Barry Manilow tune over the end credits when I first strolled into the theater.

In a way, that odd combination of auteurish swagger and vulnerability perfectly matches the material. Just as del Toro yearns for both artistic and commercial embrace, there’s a certain pleasure in the airy, parenthetical nature of Hellboy’s quest; he’s searching for the love and acceptance of the entire world, but the actual saving, the physical feats of derring-do, are entirely incidental. He just wants to fit in, to not be regarded as a freak or outsider, and that’s very relatable.

Still, the tremendous appeal of the character notwithstanding, there are a few bumps in the road. More than its predecessor, which had the advantage of chewing up fresh new ground at almost every turn, the action sequences here seem as obviously set up as hugely marked highway exits. They’re part of the ride, but you sometimes question the forthrightness of the directions. There’s some choppy editing, too. If these bits sometimes disrupt the flow of Hellboy II, the movie’s visual imagination and hand-crafted feel is still huge, and alluring. And there’s no self-importance or angst, either — just streamlined, B-movie kicks, the type for which popcorn is popped. For the full review, from Reelz Channel, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 114 minutes)

Jenna Fischer Hates Directing, Writing Too

Interviews

In chatting with the lovely Jenna Fischer recently I had a chance to ask her if her experience on Lollilove — which she wrote, directed and starred in, with then-husband James Gunn — had really soured her on directing as much as it was made out to be in some other interviews. In a word, yes.

“I just learned from doing that film that I’m an actor,” she says. “I approach work very emotionally — like, what’s the emotion, what’s the relationship here? And that’s a part of being a director, but the director is also supposed to think about how things look, how to place things and visually paint a picture. And my brain just did not want to do it, it couldn’t paint the picture. Also, I didn’t want to think about it, because then when I had to go in and act, it made me very self-conscious. So I like having the tunnel-vision of just focusing on character and relationship and emotion. Directing hurt my brain; it’s just not big enough for it.”

And the writing? “I’ll never do that again as well,” she says, sweetly serious. “It was horribly painful as well, I didn’t like it. What was great about doing the movie was how much I appreciate anybody who can conjure up something from nothing, anybody who can write or direct and tell a story visually, and any crew member, too. Directing a movie, you gain such an appreciation for what every person on the set is doing, and how things don’t happen in a vacuum, and that the actor isn’t the most important thing to the movie. They just aren’t. Sometimes you get treated like you are, but that’s just a way to baby you so that you stay calm and sedate. But you aren’t actually very important. And that’s a really good thing to know in Hollywood, to keep some perspective.”

Hobbit Talk with Guillermo del Toro

Interviews

Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is no stranger to fantasy and adventure — his imaginative art and production designs and knack for breathtaking practical effects have helped anchor and inform the Hellboy franchise, whose sequel opens next week, as well as the politically-tinged, Spanish-language films, including 2001’s The Devil’s Backbone and the Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth, that have made him an arthouse darling and critics’ favorite. For his next big screen endeavor, though, del Toro is of course tackling the biggest fantasy adventure of them all — following in the footsteps of Peter Jackson’s blockbuster The Lord of the Rings trilogy by adapting J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit into not one, but two films.

While the established level of craftsmanship might be daunting to some, del Toro seems not only emboldened by the opportunity, but downright enthused by the challenge. “The way I see the five films, provided we do everything right, is as a symphony, and what I’m doing is an overture,” he says. “Therefore it can be a different color and energy, and lead  you into something that is already filmic legacy. All we’ve got to do is create an almost freestanding piece that can then, if viewed together, make sense as a symphonic whole. If the two first pieces are crafted with their independent merits, but also the second film leads seamlessly into the first film of the trilogy, we would have created perhaps one of the most beautiful symphonies, filmically, that has been done. The idea that I’m going to have the tools that exist in Weta, that exist in New Zealand, to create those films…” Here del Toro pauses briefly, a wide grin breaking out across his face. “I am ready to build the Pyramids, or the Temple of Ra!” For the full read, from Reelz Channel, click here.