Just observationally, an interesting thing about The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 is all the ethnic cross-pollination on display in its romantic relationships, which would surely irritate Samuel L. Jackson’s character from the forthcoming Lakeview Terrace, as well as bigots… or, I’m sorry, “those of a certain generation” everywhere.
Summoning up fleeting memories of Mandingo, Alexis Bledel’s character falls for an African-American nude model (Jesse Williams) from her figure-sketching class, complicating a potential reconciliation with her Greek national crush (Michael Rady) from the first movie. Amber Tamblyn’s character does the deed with her Asian boyfriend (Leonardo Nam, returning from the first film) while, in a racial inversion of the previous couplings, America Ferrera’s character goes to a summer theater program and develops feelings for a British actor (Tom Wisdom). (Blake Lively’s character is conspicuously out of commission on the crushes in this flick, after having pursued a disastrous, self-destructive relationship in the first film.)
I don’t profess to know what this all really means, as these castings, if different in a few specific details, are still true to the source material — four hit books. So it’s not part of a secret Hollywood agenda. It would seem to highlight, however, the increasing indifference toward race among young people that has helped power and lift the candidacy of Barack Obama. We like what we see and know, and as more and more kids grow up and pursue educations in integrated environments, it’s not a big deal to date outside of one’s ethnic group, and/or have friends that do the same.
He’s become known for playing himself, and lowering the satirical boom as the “Middle Eastern correspondent” on Comedy Central’s hit, Peabody Award-winning The Daily Show, but Aasif Mandvi is also an OBIE award-winning actor with a successful, decade-long career that’s spanned film, television and stage. In addition to assaying the 2008 presidential election on the small screen, Mandvi will next be seen in David Koepp’s Ghost Town, with Ricky Gervais and Greg Kinnear.
I had a chance to catch up with Mandvi recently, and even share a mildly racist-sounding anecdote involving him. Phoning from New York, after a muggy morning of filming on his new movie, 7 to the Palace, Mandvi gamely talked about the “different kinds of brown people in the world,” dentistry, and telling off comedy superstars. For the full Q&A feature, from H Magazine, click here.
When is a vote really not a vote? Well, plenty of the time, it seems, sadly and frighteningly. A sort of political companion piece to Alex Gibney’s Sundance-minted 2005 documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which at its most basic level shrewdly tackled the inanity and insanity of corporate culture, Stealing America: Vote by Vote looks at the ludicrousness of the election process, and its extreme, and increasing, fallibility in the digital age.
Bringing together behind-the-scenes perspectives from the U.S. presidential election of 2004 — plus startling stories from key Congressional races in 1998, 2000, 2002 and 2006 — the film sheds light on almost a full decade of vote counts that don’t match votes cast (3.4 million from the 2004 election, or a total of 2.7 percent of the total number of ballots cast). In the shadows of another hugely important national election — and one seemingly destined to be close, at least electorally — it’s hard to imagine a more topical, important documentary.
Narrated by Peter Coyote, the film cold-starts rather awkwardly, and for a while seems merely a timely yet staid classroom filmstrip. Eventually, though, as anecdotal incidents scattered like marbles seemingly reveal a larger behavioral pattern, Stealing America gathers energy, focus and an angsty head of steam. Director Dorothy Fadiman has the natural advantage, of numbers and narrative, on her side, so she doesn’t need to really take an antagonistic stance or pump too much showmanship into her project. And she doesn’t; she’s the anti-Michael Moore in this regard. Unfortunately, Fadiman also has some trouble initially locating the pulse of her tale, and structuring things to make the big picture clear. In the end, though, Stealing America still swings a heavy bat — the issue wins out, and carries the day, and because of that the movie’s not inconsiderable shortcomings matter a lot less than they would were the subject matter different. For the full review, from H Magazine, click here. More to follow next week, in the form of interview tidbits with Fadiman and Leon County Florida State Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho. (Direct Cinema Limited, unrated, 90 minutes)
I’ve now twice watched the trailer for Lakeview Terrace, a September flick about Samuel L. Jackson’s problems with a young couple that moves in next door, and apart from the major themes of discord there’s little to suggest it as the work of director Neil LaBute, whose career has taken a decidedly bizarre turn ever since 2003’s The Shape of Things. It feels more like a film for Gregory Hoblit (Fracture, Untraceable) or someone of that ilk, a respectable genre hand who has a touch of “thriller” experience. Maybe Harold Becker, if he’s still working. In short, it doesn’t seem like a work that allows for the imprint of much of a worldview, or sense of personality. Who knows, though — maybe that was part of the appeal for LaBute, after the commercial washout of The Wicker Man, abetted by Warner Bros.’ snuff publicity campaign.
On the plus side, I dig the matter-of-fact manner in which it presents the interracial marriage between Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington, which is more than heavily implied as being at the core of Jackson’s problems with his new neighbors. That’s refreshing. Halfway through the film’s trailer it also plays the “color” card — as in blue, since Jackson’s character is a cop — which would seem to be a really effective second act twist played too soon (a la Ransom‘s ante-upping bounty), though there’s no evidence that the script is that intelligently withholding, since a few intercut scenes seem to show Jackson engaging in workplace shootouts and/or skull-cracking, which are probably an introduction to his character. I’ll be seeing the film fairly soon, and might revisit some of this in non-spoiler-ish fashion, we’ll see.
Based on a true story, and set in 1976, ensemble dramedy Bottle Shock weaves together the stories of a novice California vintner, Jim Barrett (Bill Pullman), his unfocused son Bo (Chris Pine, below right, laboring under a ridiculous wig that marks him a cousin of Garth Algar), and struggling Parisian wine seller Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman). Seeking a way to boost his business and reputation, Spurrier strikes upon the notion of a blind taste test for the French cognoscenti, and heads to California’s then-nascent vineyards, whose purveyors he regards as dilettantes, as a mere formality, to round out his offerings. What he discovers alters the history of wine-making forever.
There’s a deeper, more interesting movie to be made here about the Napa Valley boom, but co-writer-director Randall Miller (Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School) seems happy to aim lower, and play for lightweight delights and diversions. This is most embodied in Jim and Bo’s penchant for sparring in a homemade outdoor boxing ring — an easy, air-quote funny externalization of conflict that masks a great deficiency in storytelling. Miller also stupidly foists a love triangle upon the proceedings, and burns a lot of screen time on scenes that drag on well past the point at which they’ve stopped serving the greater narrative.
That said, the movie looks gorgeous — even on a budget, Mike Ozier’s cinematography captures the caramel-dipped hues of the Golden State’s great outdoors — and for every utterly frustrating or stillborn scene, there are one or two good ones, particularly involving Rickman, as a snobby Englishman in an even snobbier French game. He’s at home in neither world, and watching him explore the mysteries of first encounters with Kentucky Fried Chicken, or guacamole, offers its own amusement. Would that the movie just followed him, and cut out Rachael Taylor’s sassy intern and/or Freddy Rodriguez’s noble, but underwritten Mexican hired hand, who “knows” the grapes because he’s, you know, of the land. For more information, click here. (Freestyle Releasing, PG-13, 108 minutes)
Man, I could have fun with these casting update headlines until the polar icecaps refroze. While Michael Madsen may or may not be on the outside looking in, Eli Roth will join Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards as a “baseball bat-swinging Nazi hunter,” according to Variety. No word yet on who will have the chainsaw, tire iron or candlestick.
If cigarettes didn’t already exist, they’d have been invented for Michael Madsen. The raspy-voiced actor — known to a generation as the razor-wielding, feet-shuffling, psychotic Mr. Blonde — has over the course of his career, and its almost 150 movies, cultivated a screen persona that frequently makes use of his quiet gravitas, low growl, thousand-yard stare and penchant for flipping pinched cigarette butts out of frame. Madsen’s most recent film is the chopper opera Hell Ride, a dusty, very stylized motorcycle gangland drama, produced by Quentin Tarantino, in which he plays a gun-toting good guy known as The Gent. In advance of its release, Madsen graciously took the time to chat about the movie, his career as a whole, and his history with fisticuffs, among other topics. The conversation is excerpted below:
Brent Simon: So Larry Bishop says that the role of The Gent was written for you, or with you in mind.
Michael Madsen: Larry asked me to be in it, and the first time
he gave me the screenplay it wasn’t really a script, it was like a
dictionary. It was way too thick for me to read it, so I pretended that
I read it, and told him I loved it; I knew it was a motorcycle movie,
that’s all I really needed to know. And I also knew that we were a
long, long way from being able to make it, and that I had plenty of
time to read it. So I waited until I got a condensed version of it,
then I asked him if I could wear a tuxedo, because the character was
named the Gent and I thought that it would be interesting to put my own
little spin on it. I kind of figured that he would say no, but when he
said that I could I knew that we were on the same page with each other,
and I knew then that the movie was going to be really cool. But it took
almost two years to get done — it wasn’t like suddenly Quentin came
along and we made Hellride. It doesn’t really work that like. It takes a lot longer to get these things done.
BS: Was it a matter of scraping up financing money?
MM: I wouldn’t say scraping — I’d say that they were very, very careful about getting the money together, because it’s been a long time since anyone’s made a motorcycle picture and I think they were a little scared of it. Both Larry being more or less a first-time director, and the screenplay — I’m not so sure that they really understood what it was about, and I think that it was a long time before he was able to convince anyone that he did know what it was about. But Quentin hung in there. You know, Quentin was originally going to be in the movie, he was going to play Comanche. And when he bowed out the whole thing went up in smoke for a while. But it came back together.
BS: You said the script was dictionary-thick — was it language about the style and look of movie, which is very distinctive?
MM: I think that some people are scared to death of that because they’re not sure whether or not the filmmaker can pull it together, and you have to have so many people lined up that know what he’s trying to do, and make sure that everyone — even on down to the bike builders — knows exactly what the intentions are. It’s hard to get a group of people together like that. And it was a very time-consuming thing, but thank God it came together.
BS: Your bar brawl scene with Eric Balfour was pretty intense —
MM: Yeah, considering the fact that we didn’t have any break-away furniture, and we didn’t find that out until the day we were actually going to do the fight, and by that time we didn’t have much of a choice except to just break the real shit. So we just had to trust each other and realize that we didn’t want to hurt each other — that it was only a movie.
BS: It gives me the impression that you might have had some personal experience with bar fights. Is that true?
MM: Well, I’d hate to admit it, and I don’t need to incriminate myself, but (pointing) I have a dent in my forehead right here from being knocked unconscious by the butt end of a pool cue riding my Triumph into a saloon in Arizona.
BS: Was this days of misspent youth, or was this after you’d become an actor?
MM: Misspent youth that actually later came to help me understand some of the things I was being asked to do.
MM: Yeah, I had a thing that went down with some guys in a hotel lounge in Baltimore, and they sued me for a $1.5 million but they lost the case. A couple guys started some shit with me and my assistant. And they came after me with a baseball bat, but we outfoxed them in a chase through the hotel, and they were done in. They made a big deal out of it and tried to get a bunch of money from me, but in the end their lawyer was a buffoon who ruined the whole case, and that was the end of that.
BS: Good Lord. Are most location experiences much more pleasant than that, or is there always some sort of wild and woolly war story?
MM: I mean, there’s always some things that go on, and they’re not necessarily good or bad. Making movies is a really bizarre experience, and it’s really hard — you never know what really is going to happen. I suppose that’s part of the attraction of doing it.
BS:Hell Ride is all about these guys who live for one another, but also love their motorcycles. You’re a big car and bike guy in real life, too, right?
MM: Well, when you grow up with nothing and then suddenly you have a little bit of money, the first thing you have a tendency to do is start buying all the shit that you never had as a kid. And then once you get all that stuff you realize that you don’t really have anything but a bunch of dead batteries and flat tires, and no place to keep them. And then you realize that you probably should have spent your money on the stock exchange, or maybe you should have invested in a restaurant, or maybe you should have spent your money in a wiser way. But it’s too late, and then you have to sell all your cars and motorcycles to pay the IRS, and everything else that may be held against you. And then reality kicks in.
BS: So when did the acting bug bite?
MM: At the moment of birth, when I had to pretend like I was happy to be here. (laughs) Well, look, I can honestly say that when I was babysitting for my mom’s sister’s kids and I was about… I think I was 14 or 15. There was a movie on TV called Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, with Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr, and Mitchum was playing a Marine trapped on an island with a nun. And his performance was so compelling to me, I remember sitting there going, ‘Wow.’ I couldn’t believe how somebody that looked like that and had that personality could do that in front of a motion picture camera and maintain humility. I just found it to be fascinating. I think that’s the first time it ever crossed my mind, and it wasn’t until years and years and years later that I actually had the opportunity and wherewithal to try it.
BS: You have a hell of a lot of movies to your credit — are you a workaholic?
MM: I’ve been off for the entire month of July. I have five sons and I stay home with them and take everybody to school and play Mr. Fix-It at the house. My kids ride motorcycles, and I spend time with my family and do the dad thing, and I’m very happy and blessed to be able to do that. But at the end of the day I’m not really happy unless I’m working, and also if I don’t work then I’m not going to be able to keep my family in the lifestyle that they presently enjoy. I mean, what am I supposed to do? Are we all supposed to move to a trailer park while I wait to get that one great role? I mean, that’s never gonna happen. I wanna stay busy and keep working and keep everyone in clover. I like to have everybody happy, and have what I never had, and that makes me happy, to know that they’re happy. That’s what drives me to go on. I work a lot because I have to pay the mortgage, not because I’m trying to be a big shot, or I’m secretly stuffing bundles of cash in a mattress. My money is spent before I make it. I’m trying to maintain the lifestyle that I already have, and it’s tough.
BS: Wrapping up, you’ve written a book of short stories and poems, Burning in Paradise — is that something that you do with consistency, or is it a different creative outlet that you dabble in and come to as need be, as a sort of pressure release valve?
MM: Oh, it’s definitely a creative outlet, and it’s something that’s given me a great deal of solace. Making movies is a very lonesome profession sometimes, so I took up writing, an
d writing about things that I saw around me. And I never intended it to be in a book, but it ended up being so. It’s not for everybody and some of it I wish I hadn’t written, some of it’s a little too personal. But then again, you can’t unring the bell, and it is what it is. I’m happy that some people like it, and some people don’t. I wrote down a lot of stuff that was true, I wrote a lot about growing up, and I haven’t written anything in quite some time. I have a writer’s block, I suppose. But I would call it social observance, not poetry. But I would hope to keep doing it, and I will. The greatest gift to me is that my son is reading Burroughs and Kerouac and Ginsberg, and reading about the Hell’s Angels. It’s wonderful, to me, that my son is studying and learning more about the people that I grew up reading, and knows more about it than I do, for God’s sake! All that literature is very important, and it’s really insightful stuff.
After having been dragged into the fray by “that wrinkly, white-haired guy,” Paris Hilton responds to John McCain’s bizarre use of her in his presidential advertising with her own campaign ad. A bit begrudgingly, I have to admit it’s kind of awesome. This sense of humor is what will keep cameras on her, and help give her a leg up on other vacuous, fame-whore starlets in a play for longevity.
A carefully observed autumnal character study loosely in the vein of last year’s Starting Out in the Evening, Elegy is based on Philip Roth’s novel, and directed by Isabel Coixet (My Life Without Me). The film charts the relationship between a celebrated college professor, David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley), and Consuela Castillo (Penelope Cruz), a gorgeous student who punctures his wry, protective veneer. As their affair ignites, frays and recommences, Kepesh must come to grips with the possibility of a deeper love.
As adapted by Nicholas Meyer, Elegy alternately gallops and yawns. Even at 112 minutes it doesn’t feel built to cover quite this much ground, to fully keep up with the ambition of its narrative roots, which include assaying the loss of a good friend and Kepesh’s estranged relationship with his married son (Peter Sarsgaard), who feels compelled to act out in the same ways that his father did years before. The leg up that Elegy has on a lot of thematically similar tales of power-imbalanced romance is that Kepesh is of course a very literate and self-aware figure, so we enjoy an articulated sense of how one no-strings-attached lover (Patricia Clarkson) is merely a comfortable point of contact with past self-confidence while a similar arrangement with Consuela scares him so. The performances here are committed and quietly engaging, and Coixet, serving as her own camera operator, beautifully captures the lingering, jangled spaces between all parties, and how even the most intelligent among us can build up a justification for walls of isolation. (Samuel Goldwyn, R, 112 minutes)
After cycling through a couple long-lead teasers early on, the main theatrical poster for Lionsgate’s forthcoming Disaster Movie, which of course echoes back to the crammed visual-gag posters for Superhero Movie, Scary Movie and all the other spoof flicks of the past half-dozen years, just goes kitchen-sink character collection, under the tagline, “Your favorite movies are going to be destroyed.”
I suppose I get all the superhero inclusions (The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Hellboy), but then there’s visual riffs on… Juno, Enchanted and High School Musical? Plus animated flicks like Alvin and the Chipmunks and Kung Fu Panda? Am I the only one confused, and disheartened? Ever since Not Another Teen Movie, which actually had some smarts, these genre-spoofing titles have, broadly speaking, been on a big-time downward slide, from an already middling perch. And sure, cheats have been part of the last couple Scary Movie flicks, but are filmmakers (and I guess I’m thinking chiefly, though not exclusively, of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, who’re jointly responsible for Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans and now this latest flick) even trying anymore? Hell, are executives even reading scripts anymore, or are these things greenlit solely on a title and coverage written up by a 22-year-old intern fresh off the bus from Ball State?
I assume (hope?) there’s at least some tossed-off plot contrivance that serves as a tip of the cap to the title, but if you’re not trying first and foremost to lampoon genre conventions why call it Disaster Movie, I guess is my point — why not just Popular Movie, or Money-Making Movie? And, more to the point, can flat-tire “satires” of this ilk — which seem to consist of people dressed up like characters from other movies, doing bad impressions and getting hit in the balls or plowed over by speeding vehicles — be long for a world in which any number of YouTube creations can offer the same sort cheap, dumb, double-F laffs, and often do it much better?
I missed it, from a few weeks back, but over at FilmStew, from the “keep on keepin’ on” files, Richard Horgan has up a nice happenstance-encounter riff about Dennis Woodruff, the wildly colorful and self-promoting aspirant actor-filmmaker whose armada of intricately decorated and customized automobiles are familiar to most Los Angelenos. It seems Woodruff has a new 36-minute documentary, Surfin’ in the USA, available via his web site (it sounds like his Heavy Metal Parking Lot), and is otherwise just still exercising his creativity in nutty, idiosyncratic fashion.
A stylishly photographed but woefully thinly characterized slice of stalking terror, The Midnight Meat Train is a grim, bloody genre offering purely for hardcore horror fans. An adaptation of Clive Barker’s same-named short story, the movie can’t hold up in comparison to The Strangers, a far more skillful evocation of dread from earlier this summer, but it does possess a passably intriguing blend of artfulness and intensity, courtesy chiefly of director Ryuhei Kitamura.
Though they have the fifth installment in the lucrative Saw franchise not too far around the corner, distributor Lionsgate seems to be looking to distance themselves a bit from the horror game by fulfilling the contractual obligation of a theatrical release for this film, but dumping it in a scattered assortment of discount to mid-range theaters nationwide, including no single major venue within the greater Los Angeles area.
The English language debut of Japanese filmmaker Kitamura, The Midnight Meat Train finds a way to tweak and enliven standard-issue genre visuals much better than did fellow Japanese director Masayuki Ochiai in Shutter. The film’s cinematography and creative framing mitigates, or at least masks, much of the depravity of the narrative, which is the difference between this and mental rot like last summer’s Captivity, which was merely the nasty playing out of a string, a series of strung-together, artificially flavored torture sequences. There’s still a good bit of that grim sadism here, but The Midnight Meat Train has a certain tonal authenticity, not unlike Rob Zombie’s The Devil’s Rejects. For the full review, from Screen International, click here.
Old news, but filmmaker David Lynch is selling his own signature blend brand of organic coffee, don’t you know, and it’s now available on Amazon as well as through his own eponymous site. It makes me stop and think of the edible/drinkable promotional opportunities of other directors, and what a bullet’s been dodged with Oliver Stone.
He’s already teaming up with Werner Herzog for a remake of Abel Ferrera’s dark, druggy, schlong-baring Bad Lieutenant, but Nicolas Cage may also be joining forces with director John Carpenter to explore life behind bars. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the pair are in final negotiations to team up for a prison thriller titled Scared Straight, produced by Avi Lerner and others. The movie centers around a delinquent teenager who’s sent to prison for a short period of time as part of the same-named crime-prevention program, which angles to deter wrong-track kids from a life of crime. While the teen is there, a riot breaks out and prisoners take him hostage. A lifer, to be played by Cage, is forced to help the young man out. Let’s hope the title reaches and applies to this guy, too.
Conspiracy, which certainly wouldn’t please John McCain as an emblematic filmic greeting card for his home state of Arizona, is the latest movie in a new trend — straight-to-video works of formerly bankable (or at least consistently employable) leading men stars. The top-liner here is Val Kilmer, who gives his thousand-yard stare a workout as a stoic former Marine who helps bring justice to a small, burgeoning border town. A Walking Tall-type story co-penned by Debra Sullivan and director Adam Marcus, the movie doesn’t necessarily score very high for originality, and neither do the dusty, budgetary constraints work much in its favor. Still, Marcus elicits good work from his cast, and for the most part resists pressing and pulling all the story levers with too much force.
The story centers around “Spooky” MacPherson (Kilmer), a broken ex-military man who worked as an embedded contractor in Iraq. After he’s wounded during combat, MacPherson reluctantly agrees to join a fellow soldier, Miguel Silva (Greg Serano), in Arizona, and help him get his ranch in small, up-and-coming New Lago in shape. But when MacPherson arrives, his friend has mysteriously disappeared, and no one will admit to even knowing him. When he discovers that a corporation named Halicorp (yep, very subtle) is running illegal aliens out of town by any means possible, MacPherson becomes determined to find out the truth, and he will not be stopped until all those involved are punished.
As John Rhodes, a self-styled patriot-businessman loosely in the mold of real-life Blackwater founder Erik Prince, Gary Cole displays some fine ambling and unctuousness; he hits just all the right loathsome notes as the white-collar sleazeball that gives this movie its good-ol’-boy heart of darkness. Jennifer Esposito’s single mother, Joanna Hollis, is more problematic — shoehorned in to provide an awkward love interest (she’s reluctantly dating Rhodes, but of course finds MacPherson’s quiet nobility a huge turn-on), she’s an idea, not a realistic, fully dimensional character. Much of Conspiracy‘s intrigue lies in its first half to two-thirds, in the slow-played set-up. Once its trigger-wire is tripped, and shotgun-style revenge comes into play, it’s a lot less interesting. Still, there’s no denying that the setting and sociopolitical content of the movie reflect an undeniably modern anxiety about security, family and community in an increasingly diverse (read: “browning”) America, and for that reason, as much as Kilmer’s dispassionate glare, Conspiracy mostly holds one’s interest.
Housed in a regular Amray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, Conspiracy is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a decently crisp transfer free from grain or edge enhancement. Apart from bonus trailers for other Sony releases, there are unfortunately no other special features. What?! I thought for sure there would at least be a detailed explanation of how the writers came up with the name Halicorp. To purchase the DVD, via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) D (Disc)
John McCain has concluded a strange week of brush-back pitches against Barack Obama, dropping three different attack ads, each seemingly designed to scare up as much mainstream news coverage as anything else. The first, a blistering rebuke of Obama for failing to visit wounded troops at Landstuhl Air Force base during the return from his European swing, is undercut by, you know, a lack of facts on the ground.
The second ad — a weird poke at Obama’s celebrity, visually comparing him to both Paris Hilton (whose parents, ironically, are max-donors to the McCain campaign) and Britney Spears, i.e., “an empty vessel” — seems to suggest it’s a bad idea to support an American leader who might also be able to capture the imagination of anyone overseas. (Picking up on this assault on optimism, advocacy group MoveOn.org responded with an ad buy of their own, directed by actor Rider Strong, which mockingly presented hope as a communicable disease.)
Upping the strangeness quotient even further, McCain’s latest ad, titled “The One,” features out-of-context clips of Obama talking up his campaign as part of a movement greater than him, and then closes with a comparison to Charlton Heston’s Moses from The Ten Commandments, ceding, “Obama may be ‘The One,’ but is he ready to lead?”
To me, this isn’t so much a “kitchen sink strategy” as it is the farcical, kids movie version of this scheme, where plastic toys, sofa cushions and a blanket are thrown at a rampaging sibling in an effort to slow his or her momentum. The first ad was a bit scummy (though still fairly mild by the Karl Rove-ian standards of recent electoral politics), but mainly it’s just stupid; this belies the claims of high-road, issues-oriented outreach, and kind of underscores the arm’s-length disdain and condescension with which the McCain campaign has treated the Obama campaign. I know this, though: Treating hope as a piñata, and mocking or questioning as somehow insincere or dubious the optimism and sort of desperate desire to reconnect and repair that a lot of people — many of whom haven’t given two shits about a national political election in decades, if their lifetimes — feel is on a very basic level a bit despicable, and probably a bad political play, too. I know they’re running behind and don’t have the advantage of many intangibles, but this tack didn’t work out very well for Hillary Clinton, in case the McCain camp didn’t notice.
On August 7, 1974, a wiry, 24-year-old Frenchman named Philippe Petit climbed out on a cable extended between the as-yet-unfinished, 110-story World Trade Center towers, 1350 feet above the ground. With no harness or safety net, he pranced about for 45 minutes, crossing back and forth across the chasm eight times, even pausing to lie down on the wire and feign a nap.
In chronicling this audacious sociological art prank, the thrillingly engaging documentary Man on Wire pulses with the brio and whimsical bravado of misspent-weekend adolescence, when outrageous things were attempted “just because.” Powered by Petit’s sly charm — a strange, mischievous mixture of caginess and circus clown showmanship — the movie has the spirit and soul of a noir-soaked, flashback thriller, in which much is already given, and the roughly five percent mystery is chewed over in tantalizing fashion.
Director James Marsh — an eclectic filmmaker who’s given audiences both the trippy, non-fiction Wisconsin Death Trip and The King, a Southwestern American pastoral of dormant menace, starring Gael Garcia Bernal — interweaves dramatic reenactments with both amazing home video footage from the era and present-day interviews. Even these latter bits aren’t straightforward, though; a high emphasis is placed on image (a la Errol Morris‘ moody, artistic recreations), and even the recruited crew member who flees the scene has a theatrical recounting of Petit’s feat.
Winner of both the Audience Award and Grand Jury documentary prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Man on Wire (not to be confused with Man on Fire) is structured like a heist film, and that to a certain degree we know the outcome — because here’s Petit talking to us, quite alive — paradoxically only colors and deepens the experience. The scene set, a bit of early biography gives way to an introduction to all the players, and several of Petit’s other feats of high-wire derring-do, like walks between towers at the Notre Dame Cathedral and Sydney Harbor Bridge. In New York, Petit and a few acquaintances — one good friend, really, and a haphazardly recruited bunch of pot-smoking loafers — began conducting reconnaissance and surveillance work that would of course these days be taken as terrorist advance scouting. Figuring out a way to game the site’s security measures was only the beginning, though; there were also mathematical calculations to account for wind variables, for which exacting replica models helped.
With these and all sorts of other outrageous details, Man on Wire‘s tale somehow becomes even more jaw-droppingly unlikely. Forget about the act itself. Between the years-spanning research, hiding quietly from guards for hours on end, and using a bow and arrow to launch a mono-filament wire across the 200-foot chasm between buildings, so that the cable could then be reeled across… well, it’s downright tiring, and makes you appreciate the view from the ground even more. For more information, click here. (Magnolia, unrated, 94 minutes)
In contrast to its snowy environs, the Sundance Film Festival has been responsible for a lot of heat over the years, helping launch, solidify and re-brand the careers of any number of filmmakers and actors. This year’s belle of the ball might have been writer-director Courtney Hunt, whose debut feature, Frozen River, is about a struggling mother of two (Melissa Leo) who gets caught up running illegal immigrants across the border through a secluded Mohawk reservation along the edge of Quebec and upstate New York. The film wowed audiences and won the Grand Jury Prize, with jury member Quentin Tarantino famously confessing that it “put his heart in a vice.” In advance of the movie’s release, I spoke with Hunt recently about the sanctity of the festival experience, the hoity-toity nature of film criticism, and what to do when you fall asleep with the camera rolling. For the full read, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here. More from the interview, and on the movie, next week.
More soon on the film itself, but the poster for multi-hyphenate Larry Bishop’s Hell Ride — a chopper opera from the Weinstein Company opening August 8 in top 20 markets, and starring Michael Madsen, Eric Balfour, Dennis Hopper, Vinnie Jones, the aforementioned Bishop and a bunch of naked chicks — is a beautiful, effective, sun-burnt thing that captures the dusty, Western-sun tonality and open-road throwback mentality of the flick as a whole.
It reminds me of one of those old, giant color-by-numbers posters that you get a kid to keep them quiet for an entire afternoon, and that are still on sale in truck-stops across the country… if someone lost all the accompanying markers save the orange, yellow and black ones.
A sequel to the 2005 big screen adaptation of Ann Brashares’ novel about a quartet of young girls who discover a pair of jeans that mysteriously fits each of them perfectly, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 is a painted-within-the-lines drama that skates innocently by on its charisma, color and solid casting. Even more so than the original film, which was about the girls’ first, fretful summer apart, this movie plays out, though not unpleasantly, as a quartered anthology about the awkward bridge between adolescence and adulthood.
Interweaving the jeans as a symbolic chit, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 is basically four mini-movies taped together, with a fair bit of connective tissue. On soccer scholarship at Brown, Bridget (Blake Lively, of Accepted and Gossip Girl) goes on a summer archaeological dig to Turkey, then reconnects with her grandmother in Alabama. An NYU film school student who works part time in a video store, Tibby (Amber Tamblyn) suffers a pregnancy scare with her boyfriend. Carmen (America Ferrera) heads to Vermont with a Yale drama department friend, and finds herself cast, in unlikely fashion, as Perdita in a production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Lena (Alexis Bledel), meanwhile, attends art school. Caught up with new friends and problems, and flames both old (Michael Rady, Leonardo Nam) and new (Jesse Williams, Tom Wisdom), the girls find their commitment to keeping in touch, and mailing the jeans off after one-week shifts, tested.
In trying to peddle the discrete stories of each character, the movie loses the major throughline that would tie this all together — that of trusted old friendships fraying, and slipping apart. Screenwriter Elizabeth Chandler, working solo after receiving shared credit on the first film, succeeds early on in capturing some of the “can’t-go-home-again” feeling of college-age kids — of trying to share new experiences with people who have moved on in their own way. A big part of the problem, though, lies in the compression of three novels (there are four books in all, chronicling successive summers) into a single tale. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 118 minutes)
Alyson Stoner, already a Disney Channel staple from five years on Mike’s Super Short Show, as well as a recurring bit on The Suite Life of Zack & Cody and guest-starring roles on That’s So Raven and Nickelodeon’s Drake & Josh, headlines her first movie in Alice Upside Down, a sweet and poignant flick aimed squarely at tween females.
Based on the popular best-selling Alice McKinley books by Newbery
medalist Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, and directed by Sandy Tung (Saving Shiloh), the movie tells the story of
11-year-old Alice, who has recently moved to a new town with her
widowed dad Ben (Luke Perry) and teenage brother Lester (Lucas Grabeel), leaving her the only
girl in an all male household. Alice imagines herself cool, confident
and popular, but in reality her life is full of anxiety, awkward
moments and overwhelming challenges. Missing her mom more than
ever during these confusing pre-teen years, Alice feels like she
can’t do anything right. Can Alice survive the embarrassments of being “the new girl” at school, as well as the
miseries inflicted by her stern sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Plotkin (Penny Marshall), and the dramas of her school musical?
Housed in a regular Amray case with a cardboard slipcover, and presented in widescreen enhanced for 16×9 televisions with Dolby surround 5.1 and Dolby surround 2.0 audio mixes, Alice Upside Down includes interviews with Stoner and Grabeel, as well as a brief featurette on the movie’s costumes. To purchase the film via DVD Planet, click here.
Filmed at the London Forum over the final two nights of the group’s 2007 tour in support of their most recent album, Somewhere Else, this two-DVD concert release shines a light on one of the United Kingdom’s better-kept secrets — former prog-rock peddlers Marillion, whose blistering live shows leave an audience full of appreciative, beer-swilling blue-collar-types chanting along for more.
I confess to not knowing a great deal about the band prior to this DVD, but one needn’t consult their AllMusic.com entry to divine the Tolkien-esque roots of their name (Silmarillion), or the fact that their deft touch with lush balladry is originally born not of strict compositional discipline, but rather a jam-inspired love of noodling and experimentation. At once brooding and cathartic, many of their tunes blend symphonic flourishes with straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll — a bit like Pink Floyd or U2, without the high-confessional aspect or grand-scale gestures. This release captures the group in fine form. The track listing from the “main” portion of the concert is as follows: “Splintering Heart,” “The Other Half,” “You’re Gone,” “No Such Thing,” “Faith,” “Thankyou [sic] Whoever You Are,” “Fantastic Place,” “The Wound,” “A Voice From the Past,” “Somewhere Else,” “Man of a Thousand Faces,” “Between You and Me,” “King,” “The Release” and “Neverland.”
Hearteningly, there are plenty of bonus materials in the form of extra performances. First up are four surround-sound mixes of Somewhere Else album tracks — “The Wound,” “A Voice From the Past,” “No Such Thing” and the title tune. Next up is a 38-minute special sit-down performance in Buckinghamshire, where the band was originally formed. Winners of a special competition are picked up at the local train station, and driven to see the band work through an intimate rehearsal at the Racket Club; the tunes featured here include “The Last Century for Man,” “Estonia,” “Faith,” “Neverland” and “See It Like a Baby.” Finally, there’s an entire handful of other tunes performed in concert at the Forum, including “Ocean Cloud,” “Afraid of Sunlight,” “Beautiful,” “Most Toys,” “Estonia,” “Easter” and the poignant “Sugar Mice,” on which the crowd does most of the heavy lifting with respect to the singing.
Housed in a clear, plastic Amray case with inset trays on each side, this region-free, widescreen release has a slipcover featuring a shot of the London Tube, with song credits printed on the inside, along with a smattering of photos. The audio comes in both stereo and 5.1 surround sound, and the production is top-notch, with a variety of fades and overlays creating a nice, artistic tapestry. For more information, click here. B (Concert) B+ (Disc)
So with news swirling about studio suitors for Quentin Tarantino’s long-gestating, Nazi-scalping World War II epic Inglorious Bastards, which the filmmaker has of course promised to cast, shoot, edit and have ready to screen by next year’s Cannes Film Festival, I chatted Tuesday with Michael Madsen, the only actor who was ever “confirmed” to appear in the film — in the role of Babe Buchinsky, a part that no longer exists in the most recent draft of the script. A friend and frequent Tarantino collaborator ever since displaying one of cinema’s most enduring psychopathic jigs in Reservoir Dogs, Madsen certainly has the smoker’s growl to play a WWII grunt. But mo’ (studio) money may equal mo’ problems, it seems, at least for Madsen. For the full read, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here.
New York Magazine‘s Vulture craps on August movies, which seems especially appropriate this year since a lot of studios are running up the white flag because of the Olympics. I skipped out on screenings of Swing Vote and The Mummy: Attack of the CGI Wildebeests and Golden Emperor Played by Jet Li (or whatever it’s called), both because they were up against one another and I had another evening commitment, but there’s an extra ring of truth to all this since Lionsgate is currently busy stalling on even communicating to me the Los Angeles theaters in which their new, not-screened-for-critics horror flick, Midnight Meat Train, is opening this week. That’s a good sign.
It’s a happy birthday to Jaime Pressly, who turns 31 today, and could do wonders for Army recruitment, if only the photo below was used, instead of empty, and morally repugnant, threats of arrest.
A native of Kinston, North Carolina, y’all!, Pressly has segued nicely into small screen stardom with My Name Is Earl, but I’ll always hold special place for her original white trash incarnation, in… well, Poor White Trash, a little seen but entirely serviceable indie comedy from 2000. Oh, I guess there was 1998’s Ringmaster, too, but I never saw that. Somewhat interestingly, Pressly’s name is actually her given birth name, too — a semi-rarity in Hollywood.
