Full review goes live at midnight or so, but Year One is better than expected, at least based on the bulk of its TV advertising. Well, let me qualify that somewhat: the pairing of Jack Black and Michael Cera gives the movie some punch, and a pleasant enough vibe, and the joke writing is pretty strong. The story, about two wayward, primitive age villagers who embark on a weird sort of road trip, is unfocused, and kind of a mess, mainly because it doesn’t unfold in one discrete time period and there’s not a codifying interior logic with respect to what sorts of human inventions and modes of behavior with which its characters are and aren’t familiar. (Black’s Zed, when confronted with a woman who “likes girls,” responds with a blank smile that he doesn’t even know what that means; later, Cera’s Oh pointedly uses the word “gay” when explaining away to his crush an incident where he was caught rubbing oil onto the chest of a priest played by Oliver Platt.) Still, The Office writers Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, along with cowriter-director Harold Ramis, stuff the movie’s edges with an above-average amount of ADR riffs and other scene-capping quips. My favorite line might just be Zed, bargaining for his life after having entered a supposedly forbidden chamber and not being struck dead, trying to save Oh by dint of executive privilege, claiming, “Everyone knows the Chosen One gets a plus-one!”
Monthly Archives: June 2009
Studios Increasingly Look to Lead with Foreign Foot
Screen International‘s Mike Goodridge takes a nice swing at the new studio calculus of foreign theatrical gate when it comes to greenlighting certain films, using as a case study Angels & Demons, among a few other movies. This new slide-ruler will continue to play a more and more prominent role in Hollywood decision-making, which on a certain level has to mean even less support for original spec drama and comedy scripts, since — absent the pre-sale attachment of big stars and directors — there’s more X-factor variability in those types of production go-aheads.
Happy Birthday, Emma Heming
It’s a happy 31st birthday to Emma Heming, aka Mrs. Bruce Willis, a leggy Maltese falcon if ever there were one.
I don’t know whether they met on the set of the perfectly awful Perfect Stranger — one of Heming’s few acting credits — or that’s a later gig Willis helped her get, but either way that’s not something they should ever really spend much time discussing. Which then begs the question: what do they discuss? How she was 10 years old when Die Hard came out?
Trailer for Fame Remake Doesn’t Sport Leggings, Headbands
The trailer for the remake of Fame is up now, on Yahoo, and it seems a fairly sincere and earnest thing, a reworking that can at least hold its head up in the company of Step Up 2 the Streets and its predecessor, and maybe even something like Rent. Yeah, at its core some of the same familiar aspirant-performer trappings that helped make the High School Musical franchise such a huge tween hit are there, but there seems to have been a concerted effort here to ground this puppy in the real world, or at least something approximating it. Gone are the fuzzy leggings and headbands — probably a good call. Good to see Charles Dutton grab some work, too.
I have no idea how this will do at the box office, but presumably distributor MGM has carved out a parcel of autumnal land to help woo school audiences. If nothing else, the Step Up movies (with their $114 and $150 million worldwide theatrical grosses, respectively), plus a so-so $24 million gross for spoof movie Dance Flick, prove there’s a teen-plus audience for performing arts school films, even if a lot of those teens probably made/make fun of overtly arty types at their own schools. Ahh… teenage contradiction and incongruousness. Fame releases nationwide on September 25.
Lavender Limelight: Lesbians in Film
From Los Angeles’ Outfest and the annual San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival to far beyond, and almost every corner of the globe, film festivals have been a notoriously friendly and receptive place for gay and lesbian cinema, generally speaking. It makes perfect sense, of course, given that most festivals’ charters include attempts at expanding social and cultural horizons. For those in large metropolitan areas, or who have the good fortune to travel to some of the major international festivals, there exists a panoply of screening options that extends beyond the normal “coming out” stories that casual mainstream heterosexual viewers might most associate with gay cinema.
Unfortunately, a lot of these movies — more interesting fare, but stuff that exists on the fringes — don’t receive theatrical releases beyond a handful of theaters, and must make their impression in the rough-and-tumble DVD marketplace. So what of the personalities behind some of these films? If their makers were better known, would they be storming the studio gates and cranking out transformative, socially inspired genre fare? Well… probably not (unless said fare involved a comic book figure), but the documentary Lavender Limelight attempts to throw a little publicity their way regardless.
Directed by Marc Mauceri and co-produced by Becky Neiman and Carol A. Ross, this candid, breezy, hour-long title goes behind-the-scenes in an effort to shine a spotlight on seven successful lesbian directors. The subjects: Rose Troche (Go Fish, The L Word), Cheryl Dunye (The Watermelon Woman), Su Friedrich (Sink or Swim, Hide and Seek), Jennie Livingston (Paris is Burning), Monika Treut (Virgin Machine, Female Misbehavior), Maria Maggenti (The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love, Puccini for Beginners) and Heather MacDonald (Ballot Measure 9, Kiev Blue).
While the running time understandably doesn’t allow for in-depth explorations of their work, Mauceri folds in a bit of edifying biography, but mainly just steps out of the way and lets the filmmakers entertain with anecdotes about their blossoming adolescent awareness of their respective sexualities, growing up gay, and how in their view that shaped their outside inspirations, areas of interest and future techniques. Clips from the women’s work helps underscore their points, and obviously makes all the difference in the world with an educational/biographical offering like this. For those land-locked in the continental United States, and unable to dive headfirst into the arthouse theatrical offerings of New York City or Los Angeles, this title offers a valuable look at some of the personalities shaping the next wave of lesbian filmmaking.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Lavender Limelight: Lesbians in Film comes to DVD via First Run Features in 1.33:1 full screen. There are trailers for other First Run releases, but no further bonus features. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) C- (Disc)
Pick Up the Mic
Hip hop, more than most musical genres, seems built on and around machismo, but of course there are plenty of gay fans of rap, too. It’s with that fact in mind that director Alex Hinton set out to shine a spotlight on the so-called modern revolution of “homohop” with his superb, festival-minted documentary Pick Up the Mic, which features gay, lesbian and even transgender emcees both rapping about issues important to them and talking about their place, collectively and individually, within a music world that still marginalizes them.
Shot over a three-year period in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Houston and even the Ozarks, Hinton’s movie captures the birth of the homohop movement, and chronicles its growth into a global if still somewhat understated and underground community of artists that has managed to thrive despite improbable odds. Rainbow Flava’s Deadlee and Dutchboy open the film, performing their radical, thumping ditty “No Fagz Allowed,” which seeks to wrest back control of the title-checked epithet in much the same way that urban trailblazers N.W.A. did with the word nigger a couple decades back.
Before long, though, we’re launched back to the late 1980s and early ’90s, and a thumbnail history of how homohop sprouted up in the Bay Area of Northern California. Current A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. Records head Matt Wobensmith talks about his move to San Francisco nearly 20 years ago, and the launch of his self-published ‘zine, Outpunk. After learning that he didn’t need to actually pay for all his publishing costs (a friend within Kinko’s would let the publishers of various fringe ‘zines run off free copies after closing time), Wobensmith expanded his operation a bit, and served as a sort of catalyst for the uniting of all sorts of gay men currently dabbling in various forms of indie and underground music. Combining their creative passion with his business acumen, a legitimate community was born.
Owing to the fact that their personal experiences often stand in contrast to many of their heterosexual rap brethren, gay rap, on the whole, has an understandably steep political and sociological bent, with everything from personal coming-out stories and lingering issues of prejudice informing the rhymes. Still, those thinking that was the end-all, be-all of homohop subject matter would be mistaken, as Rocco Kayiatos, lesbian rapper JenRo and others prove, sharing wild stories of dating and boozy hook-ups that would certainly rival any straight rapper.
At its heart, though, Hinton’s film has a sociopolitical streak, because homophobia continues to stain a lot of hip hop. In this vein, perhaps most interesting and eloquent is spoken word artist and Deep Dickollective emcee Timm T. West, who talks about many in the African-American community rejecting the tags of gay and lesbian as being too part of and associated with the dominant, mainstream culture, and instead referring to homosexual individuals as “same-gender loving” or “in the life.” This articulation of this perceived cultural split — with Ellen DeGeneres, Will & Grace and Queer as Folk for largely white audiences, but little to no correlative national mainstream figures for black gay and lesbian audiences — is an interesting thing to ponder, and makes one wonder if sub-cultural prejudices or detentes ultimately do more to advance overall equality for gays and lesbians. In a related strand, there’s also an interesting exchange where West gets hailed down on the streets of New York by a would-be rapper intrigued by the camera following West around; after a while it comes out that West is gay, and the dialogue that follows runs refreshingly counter to expectations. Just like much of Hinton’s film, overall, actually; one needn’t be a huge hip hop-head to enjoy Pick Up the Mic, such is the universality of its story of growth and connection.
Housed in a clear plastic Amaray case with a striking red cover, Pick Up the Mic releases to DVD next week; it’s presented in 1.33:1 full screen on a region-free disc, and comes with more than 40 minutes of deleted scenes. Included in this mix are several musical performances — perhaps most stirring being Deadlee’s “Suck My Gun” — but also a collection of coming-out stories from interviewees like Cazwell, Paradigm, QBoy and Soce. There are stories of parental arguments, screaming and tears, but perhaps most amusing is a story that evokes Anne Rice’s blood-sucking Lestat as triggering a moment of inwardly blossoming revelation. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; for more information on the film, click here. B+ (Movie) B (Disc)
Food, Inc.
That point is still valid, I think. And yet, watching Robert Kenner’s powerhouse, revelatory documentary Food, Inc., one comes to realize just how much of our diet is outside our personal control, almost no matter how healthy we aim to be. Unless you grow and locally source all of your own food, we are each, to varying degrees, prisoners of a system in which mega-companies like McDonald’s — to use but one example, since it’s the world’s largest purchaser of beef — can virtually dictate the terms by which cows are raised all across the United States. This means that even if you’re not pulling into the drive-thru for a Big Mac, you’re apt to buy ground beef from cows fed with corn, something they weren’t biologically designed to eat.
The astounding ubiquity of corn and its many spin-off uses, including high-fructose corn syrup (all deliciously subsidized by governmental policy), serves as the leaping-off point for Food, Inc., which features interviews with author-experts such as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), as well as forward-thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield Farms’ Gary Hirschberg and Polyface Farms’ Joe Salatin.
In revealing surprising truths about what goes into the foods we eat and how they’re produced, Food, Inc. not only makes obvious links between our high-caloric modern choices and rising obesity, heart disease and adult-onset diabetes rates, but also the relative collective impotence of our government’s regulatory agencies, the USDA and FDA. In clear, concise terms, 
Perhaps most chillingly emblematic of this is Monsanto, whose genetic modification of a soybean resistant to the weed-killing chemical spray Round-up has given them a patent on the seed. With skull-crushing efficiency, including lawsuits and private investigator enforcers, the company has driven small farmers who don’t adopt their seed out of business, growing their market share from two to 90 percent in just over a decade. In a few years, it may be possible that regular soybeans won’t be domestically available
Twitter Film 140 Nears Date with Production
Irish filmmaker Frank Kelly is only two directors away from the final bookings on his Twitter compilation film, to be shot simultaneously, on June 21, by 140 different directors. In true entrepreneurial fashion, though, he already has a design… and T-shirts, even. Should be interesting to see how this turns out; hopefully I’ll have an interview with Kelly shortly after completion.
Technology Can Still Suck It
Long story, but apparently the past week’s entries have to be manually re-posted, since I’m for the moment lacking code from other laptop. Sigh. I’ve made the determination that this doesn’t rise to the level of an emergency, though. Que sera sera. It’ll take more to ruin my weekend. Like a bullet.
Old Dogs Trailer Takes Piece of My Soul
Beware: the trailer for this fall’s Old Dogs, starring John Travolta, Robin Williams and Seth Green, is more than just unfunny — it steals a part of your soul. Seriously, it reminds me of Joaquin Phoenix’s line to Nicolas Cage in 8MM, about not being able to unsee things. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Poisoned Waters
Water isn’t just something that sweeps in from the sky and swelling ocean, causing massive destruction in our port cities, it turns out. More than three decades after the landmark Clean Water Act, two iconic American waterways — the great coastal estuaries of Puget Sound and the Chesapeake Bay — are both in perilous condition. With polluted runoff still flowing in from industry, agriculture and massive suburban development, many scientists fear contamination to drinking water for millions of people, and the food chain in general.
This PBS Frontline documentary, running approximately two hours, examines the rising hazards to human health and the surrounding ecosystem, and why it’s so hard to keep our modern water clean. Director Rick Young knits together a compelling work, interweaving interviews, archival footage and newly collected comparative images. At the core of the movie’s success, though, is the fact that Young and co-writer Hedrick Smith do a good job of streamlining information in a way that imparts facts without losing viewers in a sleeve-tugging swirl of exclamatory, quantitative analysis. While addressing the growing list of endangered species also threatened by the rate and reach of man’s development and action, the film doesn’t come across as advocating for animals over or more than man; it presents a persuasive case for shared fate, which helps Poisoned Waters strike a chord across any mere political divide, at least with most reasonable minds.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Poisoned Waters is presented in 16×9 widescreen, with an English language stereo audio track that more than adequately handles the meager, talking-head aural demands of the program. Unfortunately, there aren’t the sort of get-involved bonus features that mark many other threatened-climate documentaries, like An Inconvenient Truth. Still, this far and away trumps most of the educational/scholastic viewing of my day; ergo, to purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) C- (Disc)
David Lynch’s Interview Project Enters Second Week
The third and fourth entries from David Lynch’s short-form, 121-part Interview Project are online, with suitable intrigue naturally attached.
Technology is a Fickle Mistress, or Perhaps Just a Bitch
Well, it seems like an entire week’s worth of posts are missing. That’s decidedly uncool. Working to resolve and rectify that. Meanwhile, some information which might help expedite this is held hostage on old laptop. Major suckage all around, and a reminder again of how things are going to end for humanity, or at least modernity.
Army Wives: The Second Season
When it bowed in June of 2007, Army Wives had the twisted benefit of unfolding while things in Iraq were looking fairly grim. Owing to its topicality, especially for military families, the show quickly became the most successful original series in the history of the Lifetime Television network. Billed as a patriotic and thought-provoking serial drama, Army Wives takes place at fictional Fort Marshall in Charleston, South Carolina, and centers around five military spouses who share friendship, fellowship, secrets, home and heartache. It’s essentially a quasi-wholesome soap opera without a lot of wild surprises, but for the most part the series does a decent job — certainly better than it did in its initial run — of balancing the potentially sticky, at-odds acts of honoring the brave men and women it portrays with creating plausible, engaging dramatic storylines.
The show’s talented ensemble cast includes Emmy winner Kim Delaney, ex-JAG looker Catherine Bell, Sally Pressman, Brigid Brannagh, Brian McNamara, Commander in Chief‘s Wendy Davis, Sterling Brown and Drew Fuller. Fugate originated the series using as a blueprint Under the Sabers: The Unwritten Code of Army Wives, by journalist Tanya Biank, who also serves as a consultant on the show. Meticulous Grey’s Anatomy fans might also notice some of the shaping influence of executive producer Mark Gordon, who helps fussy up the edges of some of the show’s interpersonal relationships.
The first season acquainted viewers with the intertwined stories of four women and one man tied to career members of the armed forces. Married to earnest officer Michael Holden (McNamara) is the elegant, educated Claudia Joy (Delaney), who serves as den mother to a disparate group that includes Roxy (Pressman), a raucous, fun-loving bartender; radio show host Pamela (Brannagh), a surrogate mother trying to solve a financial crisis; dyed-in-the-wool conservative Denise (Bell); and Roland Burton (Brown), a psychiatrist whose most important patient is his PTSD-afflicted wife (Davis). Far from family and old friends, the five turn to each other for emotional support, companionship and advice, as their loved ones tackle the dangerous business of defending the country. Bound together by pressures familiar to many military spouses, they build a bond that sustains them through sacrifice, loneliness and unforgiving conventions of Army life. Specifically, Denise starts to loosen up and rebel a little bit, something that Roxy opening up her own bar certainly doesn’t put the skids on. Meanwhile, Pamela begins to fray under the stress of raising two children almost by herself, while also fretting over what she views as increasingly censorious micromanagement of her radio show.
Though it’s decidedly better shot than the first season, the framing, editing and musical cues used in Army Wives are still mired in conventionality. The clean lines of dramatic friction are well captured in the plotting over the course of 19 episodes, though, and the actors all bring a dedicated professionalism to their roles that convincingly showcases the burdens of sworn duty to one’s country, for soldier and spouse alike. Perhaps most surprisingly, it’s this macro-level on which the series most succeeds — catching you up slowly, then, in the day-to-day drama, problems and tribulations of its characters.
Housed in a clear plastic Amaray case with two snap-in trays that is in turn stored in an attractive cardboard slipcase, Army Wives: The Second Season comes spread out over five discs. The trays worked fine in protecting the discs for my set, but others may not be so lucky, as I’ve heard of complaints from folks about this type of packaging. The show is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional French and Spanish subtitles.
The set’s array of bonus material is quite impressive, starting with three full-length audio commentaries that allow writers and actors to share time and stories in warm, winning fashion. A collection of 13 deleted scenes with additional optional audio commentary from executive producers Deborah Spera and Marshall Persinger also comes with title cards, nicely, and three minutes of bloopers showcase a falling magnetic license plate as well as other production gaffes. Most engaging, though, are a series of featurettes that chart the lengths to which the production has gone to root its show and school its actors as much as possible in the realities of military life on the homefront. A 20-minute featurette looks at a March 2008 cast bus trip to Fort Bragg, and includes material with Angela Yates, a Family Readiness group leader who talks about deployment and return issues. There’s also footage from a 34-foot “jump tower” that the cast tests out. Two other, shorter featurettes, each running around 10 minutes, look at the material support provided by the Army and one of its entertainment industry liaisons, Todd Breasseale, as well as fluffier chats with the actors about their characters. Finally, five two-minute “Giving Back” segments nicely spotlight special gifts and wish-granting outreach that the cast took part in with some of their real-life, in-need counterparts. To purchase the DVD set from Amazon, click here. B- (Show) A (Disc)
Fired Up!
So Fired Up! (yes, inclusive of exclamation point), with its glossy colors, horndog conceit and middling theatrical PR campaign, is not on the surface the type of movie one expects much from. Perhaps that’s part of its appeal. Or it could be Philip Baker Hall’s repeated exclamations of “Shit!”, if that’s your thing. Either way, there’s much more good than not here, with sly jokes abound. And girls in cheerleading uniforms, too. What’s not to love about that?
Understandably under-enthused at the prospect of another sweltering summer of football camp, randy Gerald R. Ford High jocks Shawn Colfax and Nick Brady (Nicholas D’Agosto and Eric Christian Olsen, respectively) enlist the assistance of Shawn’s little sister Poppy (Juliette Goglia) and come up with a plan to pose as cheerleading fans, all in order to infiltrate a weeks-long cheer camp and run up their headboard-notch count. It works, too. The guys are having the time of their lives, using a simply favorable ratio and their new reputations as “sensitive guys” to talk various hotties into skinny-dipping and hooking up. But when Shawn falls for his school’s cute head cheerleader Carly (Sarah Roemer, above center, aka the chick from Disturbia), who is understandably suspicious of their motives, the two players must change their game in order to prove Shawn’s true intentions and thwart Carly’s jerky college boyfriend, Rick (David Walton), all before the thrilling cheer competition finals.
Some of the movie’s rhyming patter doesn’t necessarily work (“You’ve gotta risk it to get the biscuit!”), but a goodly portion of the other slang and put-downs connect (Shawn and Nick are derided as “soulless beave-wranglers), and the movie also has the benefit of being self-aware, as captured in a scene in which the cheer campers watch an outdoor screening of Bring It On. There’s also a funny, relatively subtle plot thread in which one of the cheerleaders longs in sapphic fashion for one of her pals. Mostly, though, it’s D’Agosto and Olsen’s breezy, engaging rapport that effectively anchors the movie in winning fashion; they come across as both realistically guided by teenage libido and honest friends, no small feat for a studio teen movie. All these positives help Fired Up! score as basically a reworked Wedding Crashers (an influence to which the filmmaker cops) for the early-twentysomething set.
Another, less positive revelation of the movie? John Michael Higgins is now officially a scene-killer. A staple of Christopher Guest’s improv-laden films who parlayed those gigs into The Break-Up, Fred Claus and all other sorts of comedies — including a series of DirecTV commercials in which he plays a clueless cable television executive — Higgins sucks the funny out of every scene in which he appears in Fired Up!, as a hard-line cheer instructor with a seeming thing for Shawn and Nick. And it doesn’t help, or even really make sense, that his character is supposed to be involved with Molly Sims. (As a side note, Sims seems none too amused when Higgins gropes her in a flubbed scene in the outtakes.) Feel free to fast-forward through his several scenes, and you won’t be missing anything.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, the unrated version of Fired Up! comes to DVD with a bevy of bonus materials. First up is a feature-length shared audio commentary track with director Will Gluck and his two lead actors. Gluck makes plenty of jokes at his movie’s expense (joshing that the movie “is gonna be studied at the USC Film School for years”), but the continuous mocking references to it grossing $100 million eventually start to become a bit tiresome. Otherwise, the work of choreographer Zach Woodlee receives props, and Gluck jokes about both “complexion fixes” for Olsen (13 years removed from high school) and his affection for Edie McClurg, with her frequent John Hughes work being behind the inspiration of casting her as Mrs. Klingerhoff, one of the cheer crew’s faculty advisers. Other tidbits out Roemer as an accomplished swimmer, and credited writer Freedom Jones as actually being a cooperative quartet of writers, inclusive of Gluck. The director also elucidates the differences in vocal/performance payouts for music cues, since Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” is actually sung in the film by a crew of carousing douchebag antagonists.
Other DVD extras include an 8-minute gag reel in which many F-bombs are dropped, and crowing peacocks disrupt shot after shot on location at the Los Angeles Arboretum; a less amusing, two-minute staged bit in which Olsen and D’Agosto are questioned by American Pie‘s Eddie Kaye Thomas at the end of a long press junket day, and erupt in mock anger over being repeatedly asked about the film being “a cheer movie”; and a 16-minute making-of featurette which includes a solid array of cast and crew interviews, as well as more information on the disruptive peacocks. Previews for The House Bunny, Balls Out and 15 other Sony releases round out the title. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Movie) B (Disc)
Sherlock Holmes Trailer: It’s All Been Done
The trailer for this fall’s Sherlock Holmes is out and about online, and while I generally support all endeavors in the professional resurgence of Robert Downey, Jr., I don’t know that this winking mash-up whets my appetite much for Guy Ritchie’s film. The slow-motion bare-knuckle boxing stuff, the mock-cute spitfire stuff with a corseted Rachel McAdams (perhaps it’s trace memories of Salma Hayek‘s turn in Wild Wild West), the cut-rate banter (from three credited writers)… it just feels all stitched together from previously seen parts. We’ll see, I suppose…
The Taking of Pelham 123
A relatively straightforward hostage thriller with the benefit of two A-list leading men in John Travolta and Denzel Washington, The Taking of Pelham 123 is a professionally mounted genre exercise which tries to please both thriller and social drama crowds, and suffers mightily as a result. A streamlined update of Joseph Sargent’s 1974 original, director Tony Scott’s film ultimately collapses under the weight of its clashing, disparate styles of storytelling and acting.
Eschewing title cards or lengthy opening credits, Pelham‘s set-up is efficiently handled: preening thug Ryder (Travolta) and three gun-toting pals seize control of the front car of a New York subway train in the middle of an afternoon, demanding a multi-million dollar ransom for 19 hostages. Walter Garber (Washington) is the city employee who first fields their call. Ryder sets a deadline of one hour, threatening to kill a single passenger for each minute his pay-off is late. With time ticking and options limited — the titular subway car is isolated underground in an area that precludes police response — the mayor (James Gandolfini) and his aides scurry to secure the necessary funds. Meanwhile, Ryder refuses to speak to hostage negotiator Camonetti (John Turturro), drawing Garber back into the proceedings and eventually coaxing out personal details — Garber is the target of a bribery investigation — that may compromise his professional future.
Screenwriter Brian Helgeland’s adaptation scores some points for some of its subtle tweaks in characterization; Gandolfini’s mayor, unburdened by the niceties of potential re-election, is particularly well drawn and acted. There are also certain narrative parallels to Phone Booth, in which a man is manipulated by a killer and similarly held in limbo for his sins — nominally the fate of Garber, once Ryder gets into his head. But several plot points both small and large fail to connect, whether it’s the misguided attempt at human connection with a hostage talking to his girlfriend on a laptop webcam, or Scott’s decision to intercut the unfolding subway drama with a high-speed police escort of the ransom cash.
Crucially, Pelham‘s script also raises the issue of a limit on the amount of money that can be readied for a situation like this, then has Ryder initially, and pointedly, ask for a penny more. Despite the fact that this knowledge might help investigators source Ryder’s true identity, it is never communicated to Camonetti, or indeed, further discussed at all. It’s a wink for the audience, but makes everyone working to solve the hostage crisis look incompetent.
Apart from their characters’ antagonism, even Washington and Travolta seem at odds, as if acting in different films. The former is cool and collected; Travolta, though, is flamboyantly unfocused and over-the-top, which doesn’t seem to match up once Ryder’s true identity is revealed. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Columbia, R, 107 minutes)
StagKnight
British import StagKnight is a low-budget, medievally-inflected comedy-horror hybrid that has the unfortunate distinction of, A) not being very good, and B) releasing close to The Hangover, so that it suffers even further in guys-gone-wild comparison. And no, despite the lovely ladies pictured below, it’s not even that laden with gratuitous nudity. In fact, there’s barely any, hornballs.
A “cold open” segment set 100 years in the past, on Lammas Day, establishes the mythology that director Simon Cathcart and co-writer Rob Mercer seek to exploit. Flash forward to present day, where a pitiful, motley group of guys celebrating the last weekend of unwedded bliss of pal Brian (Simeon Willis) head out into the country, for some remote paintball and assorted carousing. They’re greeted at their accomodations by a witch-like groundskeeper (Sandra Dickinson) and her giant younger brother, a man of few facial expressions and fewer words. As night falls, Brian and a couple of the weekend warriors wander out into the woods, where they seemingly witness a satanic ritual to raise a dark knight from his 1,500-year slumber.
Running a scant 80 minutes, the film bills itself as “babes, booze and one killer knight out” (again with the pun!), but neither its makers nor performers seem to have a firm grasp on how to effectively blend tone like, say, Sam Raimi, or even how to effectively marry the notion of chivalrous protection to a bunch of lewd, mouthy guys, some of whom are more offensive than others. Eventually, in its final third, StagKnight makes a headlong dash into role-play questing, with the aforementioned groundskeeper sketched out as a villain. None of the characters particularly help convincingly bridge that gap, though.
Small pinches of the dialogue are moderately clever (“When I meet a guy, I think, ‘Is this the man I want my kids to spend their weekends with?'” says one of the strippers), but too frequently it’s buried under thick accents and flat-out terrible ADR work. (Other parts just don’t make sense at all, as when a ritual participant intones, “In the name of the ancient gods, this is a time that isn’t a time, and this is a place that isn’t a place.”) In short, it’s not the lack of production means, or the low-fi inclusion of a knock-off of Predator vision for some of the chase/pursuit sequences that dooms StagKnight, it’s simply the breathtakingly subpar editing, framing and unengaging performances. For those interested, Jocelyn Osorio and Danielle Mason provide the babe-age here; the former as a bit more of an assertive player, the latter as a bewigged party dancer who may or may not be part of a in-joke hoax.
Housed in a bright green Amaray slipcover, StagKnight comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, and divided into nine chapters. Its supplemental bonus features consist of a four-minute, non-scrollable photo gallery and five minutes of deleted scenes and outtakes, which include the destruction of an outhouse. To purchase the DVD from Amazon, click here. D (Movie) C- (Disc)
Land of the Lost
More rudely silly than funny, action-comedy Land of the Lost is staged with color and a fair amount of forward-moving energy, but not much in the way of inventiveness or surprise. A big screen adaptation of the mid-1970s time-traveling children’s show of the same name, the movie is scant on plot but heavy on scatological humor, and over-relies on the well-worn performance shtick of star Will Ferrell. Like an early morning mist from its quasi-primordial setting, the result — tonally consistent, but consistently underwhelming — dissipates immediately upon conclusion, and doesn’t hold a candle to its star’s stronger efforts, like Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.
Three years after a flame-out on an early morning TV show, Dr. Rick Marshall (Ferrell) finds himself teaching middle school, his outlandish theories about time travel discredited. Graduate student Holly Cantrell (Anna Friel) finds him, and questions Rick about a particular unrealized invention. Rick slaps together a prototype machine, and he and Holly head to a dusty tourist-trap cave in the desert to test it, where they meet hillbilly proprietor Will Stanton (Danny McBride).
On their tour, the trio plunge down a waterfall and into a sort of hybrid alternate dimension, neither fully past nor present, where dinosaurs roam an apocalyptic wasteland littered with artifacts both historical and incidental. Stalked by a Tyrannosaurus Rex they call Grumpy (for his murderous disposition), the group finds an unlikely friend in a primate named Chaka (Jorma Toccone), whose primitive language Holly happens to speak. Standing in their way of finding Rick’s machine and getting home is a mass of reptilian Sleestaks, including one with designs on world domination.
If there’s a unifying success to Land of the Lost, it comes from the manner in which director Brad Silberling ably juggles its action mayhem with comedy, all under the banner of a single visual scheme. For all the intensity of its dino-rampaging, the movie’s visual effects all have a similarly shimmery, slightly welcoming feel — neither totally terrifying nor kitschy. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t give Silberling much with which to work. The television experience of scripters Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas shows in a number of dawdling sequences. Changing the dynamic of the three main characters (it was a father and his two children on the TV show) would seemingly open up rich new avenues for comedic tension, but instead seems only designed to allow for the groping of Friel’s breasts. There’s neither enough rooted bickering friction nor cohesive cooperation to form a substantive connection to this motley crew; the characters are merely collective prisoners of a field trip through special effects.
Few actors do blithely self-centered, not entirely earned confidence as well as Ferrell, and that familiar spin he puts on Rick brings a few fitful smiles. Much of the film eschews his penchant for serial physical debasement, but, as if satisfying the request of a besotted audience member at an improv show, the filmmakers cram in a scene where Rick rolls up his shorts and tiptoes by pterodactyl eggs. Later again, there’s Ferrell in familiar shirtless mode, this time during a puzzlingly elongated poolside sequence which feels like a narrative placeholder for some other action, accidentally never actualized. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 103 minutes)
David Lynch’s Interview Project Spotlights Old Coots
The first two subjects from David Lynch’s short-form, 121-part Interview Project series, 64-year-old Jess and 54-year-old Kingman, Arizona resident Tommie, are online and available for viewing, and they both look a bit like crazy prospectors, which I suppose is a casualty of the road trip production starting west and moving east. Though only three minutes apiece, there’s some real, honest heartbreak here (“I ain’t proud of nothin’ except being alive,” says Jess), a reminder of just how hard a series of knocks life can deliver, especially to the young. There’s also a revelation totally deserving of the adjective “Lynchian.” Because, you see, it seems parolee Tommie is separated from his girlfriend for helping her bury a man without a permit.
Van Wilder: Freshman Year Trailer Promises Beer, Boobs
Through almost sheer, Herculean personal effort, Ryan Reynolds elevated the original Van Wilder into something moderately funny and attractive, despite the presence of Tara Reid; its spin-off sequel, Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj, took the anarchic collegiate party-planning overseas, focusing on Kal Penn’s character, Wilder’s protégé-turned-playa. It was a down-market blend of pretty much exactly the sort of set
piece comedy and very occasional flashing of boobs that one would expect, and I don’t remember it doing well enough either in theaters (where it received an abortive release) or on DVD to give anyone the idea that another movie was in high demand.
Yet the name still has some cachet, I guess. So that leaves us with the trailer for the direct-to-DVD prequel, Van Wilder: Freshman Year, starring the improbably eyebrowed Jonathan Bennett (Mean Girls) and Kristin Cavallari. Flatly scripted, unimaginatively staged and weirdly framed/edited (though perhaps to cut around audience-pleasing nudity?), this clip really does nothing except make one pine for the original, and appreciate Reynolds even more. If it delivers on the baser elements its base desires, it could prove tolerable. But there isn’t much manifested evidence of cleverness and, you know, we don’t even seem to find out why Van first wears the mask, or kills his sister, or… oh, sorry, wrong prequel. Bennett (above left) does seem to be having a go at channeling Reynolds’ vocal rhythms, though. That might either work, or become annoying in fairly short order. Van Wilder: Freshman Year hits DVD on July 14.
Fast Company (Blu-ray)
Before filmmaker David Cronenberg’s fascination with the intersection of the biological and mechanical became more fully realized in works like Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly and eXistenZ, he directed this wild 1979 racing flick, set in the gritty world of top-fuel dragsters. Lonnie “Lucky Man” Johnson (William Smith) is a racing circuit pin-up star who sells lots of motor oil for sponsor FastCo. When his car suffers an explosion that upsets the timetable of upcoming races, marketing guru Phil Adamson (John Saxon) moves him to another car, setting off a chain of events that prompts Johnson to start questioning the company’s motives, and taking a more active role in his own professional future. Naturally, this rubs some folks the wrong way.
Cronenberg made Fast Company in between horror hits Rabid and The Brood, and there seems to be a base-level delight in the filmmaking here, even if the execution — functional, but hardly visionary — doesn’t necessarily seem to augur greatness. Genre-bound through and through, with some rote dialogue, trashy subplots and boilerplate corporate villainy, this isn’t the movie for fans only of Naked Lunch or Cronenberg’s more envelope-pushing films. Still, it’s interesting to see Cronenberg work in a more streamlined fashion, and Fast Company also serves as the last film of erstwhile Playboy model and drive-in goddess Claudia Jennings, who would die in a tragic car crash after the movie’s completion.
Housed in a regular Blu-ray snap-shut case, Fast Company is presented here in 1.85:1 widescreen in stunning 1080p HD
resolution on a 50GB dual layer disc, with three audio options — English 7.1 DTS-HD, English 7.1
Dolby True HD and English 5.1 Dolby digital surround EX — as well as optional English SDH, French and Spanish subtitles. A thoughtful feature-length audio commentary track from Cronenberg anchors the bonus materials. Also included is the movie’s theatrical trailer, interviews with Smith and Saxon from Inside the Actor’s Studio, an interview with director of photography Mark Irwin, and — perhaps most pleasantly of all — two hour-long short films, Stereo and Crimes of the Future, that are perhaps much more indicative of the future direction of Cronenberg’s work. It’s worth noting, too, that the disc is also enabled for D-Box motion control systems, for those with that capability. To purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) A- (Disc)
Man, Woman and the Wall
Erotic obsession, dark comedy and a pinch of crime thriller get whipped up and served in marginally titilating fashion in the awkard, very literally titled Eastern import Man, Woman and the Wall, which puts modern sexual fixation under the microscope in a manner out of step with much of contemporary Asian cinema.
When young magazine reporter Ryo (Keita Ohno) moves into a new apartment building, he’s greeted by the passionate sounds of his astonishingly beautiful neighbor Satsuki (Sola Aoi). Realizing the wall dividing their two apartments is paper thin, the captivated Ryo begins to eavesdrop on every detail of the life of the girl next door, from her conversations to her bubble baths. While Ryo’s fantasies slowly start to escalate into something halfway between puppy love and creepy obsession (he starts sifting through her trash and collecting her toenail clippings), Satsuki becomes increasingly hysterical over a series of bizarre, dirty phone calls plaguing her every evening. Her boyfriend Yuta (Hiroto Kato) shows up to reassure her, but things remain mysterious. When Satsuki and Ryo’s lives finally converge, delusions and reality further blur.
Written and directed by Masashi Yamamoto, Man, Woman and the Wall fitfully recalls all sorts of American touchstones, independent and otherwise — everything from The Conversation and sex, lies and videotape to even James Mangold’s Heavy — mainly owing to its subject matter, and frank inclusion of sex. Some of the movie’s small touches and moments translate surprisingly well (Ryo excitedly talks about his new apartment having a bathtub, inviting the derision of a coworker), and others are simply a surprise (scenes set at… Outback Steakhouse?). Still, there isn’t quite enough of a sadsack heart here — a sense of
inwardly imploding, swallowed doom.
The film appears shot on video, which could have been more imaginatively interwoven into the story, given the many opportunities for tongue-lolling luridness that both Ryo’s obsession and Satsuki’s phone calls present. In fact, Ryo seems at times a slightly goofy
character, and other times potentially dangerous or tragic. Narratively, Yamamoto’s use of an imaginary Satsuki (Sho Nishino) only further complicates matters, since the movie as a whole isn’t an explicitly subjective experience.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Man, Woman and the Wall comes to Stateside DVD via Ricochet Releasing, TLA Releasing and Eleven Arts, and is presented in 1.78:1 widescreen with a 2.0 stereo audio mix. For a film built around eavesdropping and other whispery intercepts, the latter is honestly a bit sub-par and problematic at times. The marginal graininess of the video transfer doesn’t offend too greatly, but this isn’t a superb transfer by any means. Special features include a minute-long, non-scrollable photo gallery montage, trailers for Man, Woman and the Wall and three other TLA features, and a 21-minute making-of featurette. In this subtitled segment, Yamamoto and his cast share their thoughts on production and explored themes, and Aoi confesses that she got into character by eavesdropping on cast and crew, with the assistance of some of the movie’s soundmen. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) B- (Disc)
My Life in Ruins
In 2002, Nia Vardalos’ My Big Fat Greek Wedding was The Little Film That Could, an ethnically specific romantic comedy that mainstream audiences discovered and celebrated as their own. It played in theaters for a full year, en route to a $240 million domestic gross and a cumulative $370 million box office haul. The question surrounding Vardalos’ latest film, then, the Greece-set My Life in Ruins, is whether one can ever really go home again. The answer, it turns out, is kind of, but not really.
A mostly hired gun here (though she does rate a producer credit), Vardalos stars as Georgia, a thirtysomething singleton who’s lost her job as a history professor and works in disgruntled fashion as a travel guide at Pangloss Tours in Athens. On the precipice of considering another life change, she struggles leading around a motley crew of tourists (a group that includes Richard Dreyfuss, Harland Williams and Rachel Dratch), trying to show them the beauty of her native country even as they seem more concerned with air conditioning, ice cream and shopping time. Worn down by their disinterest and a rival colleague out to show her up, Georgia eventually begins to let go and see things in new ways. After some mistaken identity shenanigans involving a secret admirer, the lovelorn Georgia even comes around to the possibility of a relationship with carefree, crush-worthy bus driver Poupi (Alexis Georgoulis, above right), whose mullet magically becomes acceptable once he simply shaves.
Written by Mike Reiss, a scribe on The Simpsons, and directed by Donald Petrie (Miss Congeniality), My Life in Ruins is a relatively sweet and well-meaning film nonetheless done in by its own wild unevenness and over-the-top characterizations. A mirthless opening 15 or 20 minutes, full of painfully telegraphed shtick, finally gives way to some passably funny if very small moments, including a mispronunciation of the word “stick” and Dratch coining the collapsed slang “sh-load.” Vardalos, too, has a certain unvarnished charm, particularly in a few scenes with Dreyfus, that remind you of her breakthrough role.
Still, the film doesn’t arrive at most of its emotional moments honestly. There’s lots of talk about “kefi” (Greek for passion, spirit or mojo), and certainly enough beautiful scenery to root the movie as an exotic travelogue bauble, but Vardalos’ character isn’t strongly sketched enough to make it all work as a sort of How Georgia Got Her Groove Back. The supporting characters, meanwhile, are by turns so wacky, rude, sullen or spiritedly helpful (whatever the moment’s situation dictates) as to become wearying. Essentially, My Life in Ruins is just a series of moments aping other film moments we’ve all seen before. That it tries to piggyback so blatantly on the success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding of course isn’t surprising, but it certainly proves that cinematic leftovers don’t always keep well. (Fox Searchlight, PG-13, 96 minutes)
New Jack Hustle? More Like New Jack Hassle…
Seven months, six to eight phone calls and probably around 45 emails later, I finally extricate last fraction of overdue payment from a now deceased outlet. Still ongoing: one lawsuit and three minor skirmishes, including a missing, month-plus-old wire transfer. Welcome to the glamorous writer’s life!