Stop me if you’ve heard the one about a 14-year-old (Spencer Breslin), suffering from early-onset male-pattern baldness and bunions, who moves to a new town with his single mom (Ally Sheedy) and older sister; befriends a strange janitor, Cromer (Cuba Gooding, Jr.); faces down a bullying nemesis and needlessly cruel gym teacher; gets arrested for buying high school kids beer; and enters a go-kart race for revenge, glory and the heart of a girl. Yes, teen movie boilerplate gets skewed plenty good in Harold, co-written and directed by T. Sean Shannon, a Saturday Night Live veteran who manages to even work in a fantasy sequence highlighting his longstanding predilection for bears.
It’s intriguing for a movie built around hair that one of its wig works so well (Breslin’s chrome dome is sleek and realistic) and one doesn’t (Gooding’s asymmetrical ‘fro renders him a most curious Chia Pet). No mind, though. An assortment of cameos (Chris Parnell, Rachel Dratch, Dave Attell, Fred Willard and Colin Quinn — the latter the funniest) ups the intrigue factor here, but it’s Breslin who really carries the day, showcasing crackerjack comic timing throughout. There isn’t a lot of explanation as to why Harold is a crotchety fan of Murder, She Wrote if, in fact, the small town in which he originally lives is so accepting of his condition, other than it makes for simple visual amusement — a kid reading a newspaper in a Barcalounger, and hassling other, younger kids about their baseballs in his yard, messing up his vegetables. There’s also the lingering question of audience — for most of its running time, Harold isn’t quite barbed enough to truly be a film about adolescence yet aimed mainly at adults, though several late plot twists and double entendres up the ante. Sometimes, though, strange is just good, and the players here are good enough to sell the premise and milk some easygoing laughs, even if Harold is just an elongated comedy sketch. For more information on the movie, click here. (City Lights Pictures, PG-13, 93 minutes)
It’s been said that no matter how crowded it gets, there’s always more room in hell. That may or may not be true, but the Hellboy movies sure have proven to be inclusive ensembles. Though sprung from the imagination of Mike Mignola‘s mid-1990s graphic novel series — about a giant red demon spawn rescued from occult Nazi forces during World War II, and raised as part of a clandestine, paranormal crime-fighting organization — the movies are of course largely the product of the expansive imagination of Guillermo del Toro, who has written and directed both feature films. Though he takes Hellboy, his pals and some other characters straight from Mignola’s work, others are tweaked mightily, and still more created from scratch. The result, especially in this week’s Hellboy II: The Golden Army, is a dizzily detailed world, crammed with creatures both gorgeous and grotesque. For a fun, handy primer on some of the movie’s major supporting players, from Reelz Channel, click here.
Another sprawling ensemble tale about the hearty, equal portions of
hard knocks and moral nondiscrimination that Los Angeles dishes out, Garden Party centers on a bunch of dreamers and schemers looking for
their next fix — which is sometimes emotional, and sometimes illicit.
Among others, there’s 15-year-old runaway April (Willa Holland), who
poses nude for the Internet; sexy, pot-dealing realtor Sally (Vinessa Shaw, below right), and her dense, live-in assistant, Nathan (Alexander Cendese);
Todd (Richard Gunn, below left), a well-off, porn-addicted painter; and Sammy (Erik
Smith), a just-off-the-bus aspiring rocker who isn’t above trading his
way up to get his talents recognized. Naturally, their stories all
intertwine in kinky, twisted fashion.
Writer-director
Jason Freeland (who gave good crime in his last screen credit, a
little-seen, criminally under-regarded 1998 adaptation of James
Ellroy’s Brown’s Requiem) here seems to be reaching for early Paul Thomas Anderson by way of Tom DiCillo. Garden Party
never really strikes you as real, per se, and neither is it some
fantastically canted satire. The metaphorical perspicacity of the title
is a real stretch, to say the least, and there are plenty of moments
where one is laughing (albeit silently) for reasons probably
unintended. And yet, oddly, it doesn’t totally matter. Garden Party
may have the diverse colors and tonalities of a bank of wildflowers by
the side of the road (there’s an impromptu gay club dance-off here, a
ball-gagged home invasion there), but there are discrete pleasures to
be found, especially in Shaw’s wry, devilishly alluring performance.
She steals the film, in bewitching fashion — though one gets the feeling
she’d leave you saddled with a mortgage you couldn’t begin to afford. For more information on the film, click here. (Roadside Attractions, R, 89 minutes)
Another week, another film with an actor behind the camera. This time it’s Hart Bochner, forever known as the sniveling Harry Ellis from Diehard. An unconvincing, willfully quirky, dryly comic tale of ensemble empowerment, Just Add Water doesn’t represent Bochner’s directorial debut (he also helmed 1994’s PCU and 1996’s High School High), but it is the first produced feature film he’s written, and it mainly shows considerable evidence that he’s seen a lot of movies, given the smooth, plastic lines of its construction.
The story unfolds in Trona, California — a dead-end desert town for people with dead-end lives, a place run by a foul-tempered young meth dealer named Dirk (Will Rothhaar, looking like the president of the Ryan Gosling Look-Alike Fan Club). Going nowhere fast is Ray Tuckby (Dylan Walsh), a mild-mannered underground parking lot attendant saddled with a neurotic shut-in wife, Charlene (Penny Balfour), and an ill-mannered, sexually frustrated, mostly silent son, Eddie (Jonah Hill). Ray’s life totally bottoms out when he finds out his wife is cheating on him (with his brother, natch), and Eddie, who might not be his son after all, is working for Dirk.
While everyone else dithers, Ray starts feeling his oats, and like he should make a stand. (For a clip from the movie, click here.) With the help of new-to-town gas station owner Merl Stryker (Danny DeVito) and childhood sweetheart Nora (Tracy Middendorf), a retail clerk who hides instant banana pudding for him, Ray rallies the oppressed and bullied townspeople of Trona to get even with Dirk, and prove that it’s never too late to grow, even if you’re all grown up. Justin Long, Anika Noni Rose and Brad Hunt also costar.
Bochner sketches a convincing enough backdrop through his setting, but the (chief) problem is that all his dialogue is hopelessly on the nose. Scenes play out to move the plot forward, but with little or any actual emotional impact. Case in point: when Ray confronts Charlene about her affair, moments after having walked in on her having sex with his brother, she tells him it’s been going on “about nine months before Eddie was born,” to which Ray blinks, and replies, “Does the boy know?” Does the boy know? I’m not sure any father or husband in the history of mankind has replied like that. There are other problems with casting, too (I’ve been less than enamored with Walsh ever since he got out-acted by the animatronic gorillas in Congo, and Hill and Long seem to have wandered over from the set of Accepted to do some pointless, vanilla character work), but mostly this is just a yawning, flatly drawn tale.
Housed in a regular Amray case and presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen with an English language 5.1 Dolby digital audio track and optional French and English subtitles, there are no supplemental extras on this release, save the inclusion of preview trailers for American Crude, Married Life, 21, Rescue Me, Kabluey and a half dozen other titles. Given that it is, in theory, a somewhat personal statement from Bochner (however little known he is as a screen commodity), that’s damning. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. D+ (Movie) D- (Disc)
I don’t know what’s more amusing — the fact that Warner Bros., less than two weeks before its release, is still printing out lot passes with a code name, Rory’s First Kiss, for The Dark Knight, or the fact that it already has over 800,000 search hits on Google, since that was the phony working title for the movie during its Chicago shoot last summer. (Rory is the name of director Christopher Nolan’s son, for what it’s worth.)
More soon on the film, which is going to be huge. But in case you were wondering… yes, Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy does have a cameo in the movie, even getting manhandled by Heath Ledger. Apparently he saw what that Wedding Crashers cameo did for colleague John McCain, and is working on getting his.
Swelling the back catalogue (something we haven’t done quite enough of recently), I thought I’d slap up this DVD review, in honor of the 20th anniversary of License to Drive‘s theatrical release… wait, really?! Sure, why not? It’s of Anchor Bay’s special edition DVD release of the film from the summer of 2005, and was originally penned for Now Playing Magazine. To wit:
Ahh, the 1980s — an era when a nation came of age with fast food combo meals. With largesse, redundancy and mass appeal on the cultural menu, it should serve as no surprise, then, that this thinking was quickly applied to Hollywood, where studio executives decreed that no mere single Corey could satisfy youngsters’ teen heartthrob requirements. Ergo, Feldman and Haim — one a little nutty and rowdy, the other… well, still nutty and rowdy off screen, but more a boy-next-door-type on screen. Yes, 1988’s License to Drive represents the second pairing of the erstwhile (and current, some might argue) Lost Boys, and still stands 17 years after its release as a tolerable if very dated slice of teen fantasy.
After failing his driving test, Les (Haim) doesn’t know what he’s going to do to impress Mercedes (a 17-year-old Heather Graham, in her first movie role), who he’s already told he has his license. Spurred on by his raucous buddy Dean (Feldman), Les borrows his grandfather’s Caddy to keep a date and of course ends up on a wild and woolly adventure. The movie is in many respects formulaic as all get-out, of course, but what makes it work, in no particular order, is the chemistry between its two leads (Michael Manasseri also costars as the Corey’s third wheel pal), an assortment of ripe, enjoyable supporting characters (including Richard Masur, Carol Kane and Michael Ensign) and highly imaginative fantasy sequences that capture the heightened absurdity of adolescence. It may have also loosed Billy Ocean’s “Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car” upon us, but the song’s Corey-endorsed prominence gave it Top 40 legs.
Anchor Bay’s special edition DVD release kicks off with a nice insert booklet and a self-effacing audio commentary from writer Neil Tolkin and director Greg Beeman, who says, tongue in cheek, “It was early in my career, it was my first job… but I was working already at genius level.” The pair also relentlessly but good-naturedly hammer the movie’s fashion and wardrobe sense, while also offering up a few sparse trivia tidbits (the film’s genesis came from a failed National Lampoon’s article by Tolkin, and the production junked nine 1974 Cadillacs during filming). There’s a single deleted scene — which is actually more of an extended/alternate take of a sequence already in the movie — as well as two trailers, two TV spots (including one hilarious time capsule testimonial) and a copy of the film’s third draft screenplay on DVD-ROM.
The biggest bonus feature hook, though, is of course the new interview material with Haim and Feldman — 27 minutes in total, chock full of reminiscences and elliptical references to (drug-fueled?) production partying, something also present in Beeman and Tolkin’s commentary. The funniest moments come when Haim, now strangely puffy-faced, recalls his on-set bout with mono and makes fun (rightly so) of his perpetually agape mouth, against a montage of said slack-jawness. While I don’t quite give him credit for this as an “acting choice,” Haim at least comes off as more aware and grounded than Feldman, who is by turns apologetic, candid and delusional (“There were 1,500 kids surrounding our dressing rooms, rocking our trailers…”). License to Drive isn’t high art by any stretch of the imagination, but nostalgia buffs can revisit with confidence and enjoyment this treatment of the film that launched a thousand Tiger Beat pin-ups. For more on Haim and Feldman, meanwhile, click here. B- (Movie) B+ (Disc)
In 2004, two years after the $800 million-plus worldwide gross of Spider-Man confirmed the viability of all things comic book-related, director Guillermo del Toro brought Mike Mignola’s Hellboy to the big screen, starring Ron Perlman as a gruff, reluctant, occult crime-fighter who just happens to be a giant, red harbinger of the apocalypse. A fantastically imagined mid-size commercial hit, the movie was the lead punch in a one-two combo — the other being 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth, which racked up six Oscar nominations, including one for Best Foreign Language Film — that landed del Toro the plum assignment of following in Peter Jackson’s footsteps with an adaptation of The Hobbit. In advance of the release of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, del Toro talks about his surprisingly personal connection to the franchise, striking the right balance in practical effects work and CGI, and the difference between climbing Mount Everest and driving on the freeway. For the full read, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here.
Hey, ever wonder about the secret lives of those guys dancing around in the Subway sandwich outfits in 100-degree summer heat, and all that brought them to that point? Then Kabluey might be for you. Unemployed, socially inept, 32-year-old Salman (Scott Prendergast, also the writer-director here) is dispatched to Texas by his mother to help his sister-in-law Leslie (Lisa Kudrow) tend to her two hell-raising youngsters while his older brother is off fighting in Iraq. Forced to pitch in, Salman takes a humiliating job as the costumed corporate mascot — a sort of cross between a giant faceless Smurf and Marvin from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — of a gone-bust Internet company, passing out fliers on a lonely highway outpost. In the process he learns a dark secret about his sister-in-law, gets hired as the entertainment for a children’s party by Christine Taylor (below left) and experiences an unlikely blossoming of confidence.
So, is Kabluey, with its emotionally stunted, man-child protagonist, a complex, seriocomic metaphor about life in wartime? Not really. There are a few obvious if unstated connections made to why Leslie’s boys are acting out so, but mostly this is a tale of minor-chord transcendence that’s willing to trade on the time-honored comic value of padding about in giant foam suits. And that works, by and large… that’s good enough. The film’s nagging problem, though, is how thinly Salman is sketched, and the fact that as an actor, Prendergast plays his lead as too much of a collection of self-negating tics. As a filmmaker, though, he’s great at capturing varying states of agitation and anxiety with idiosyncratic brush strokes, so the movie, after a chaotic opening third, still achieves a pleasant hold. For more information, click here. (Regent Releasing, PG-13, 87 minutes)
Starring Jonathan Tucker, Jena Malone, Laura Ramsey and Shawn Ashmore, The Ruins is based on Scott Smith’s best-selling novel about a group of college friends
whose leisurely Mexican vacation takes a turn for the worse when they
head off to explore an ancient, off-the-beaten-path Mayan temple,
and end up trapped in a terrifying situation when some evil vines (yes, you read right) put the clamps on them. With their escape sealed off by bow-and-arrow-toting locals who don’t want to let the contained, long-dormant evil spread further inland, fear and paranoia start to eat away at their sanity.
That set-up may sound ridiculous, admittedly, but within the genre-play parameters of its construction, The Ruinsperforms quite capably. Beautifully shot, the movie has several things going for it, most notably a committed, focused cast who deliver solid performances (Joe Anderson also co-stars as Mathias, a friendly, slightly mysterious fifth wheel who first talks up the Mayan ruins), and a script and set-up that allows for small fissures to come into play in interesting, believable ways. The main quartet are vacationing as two couples, but it’s the females who are good friends, which of course shades the relationship between the guys, and also figures into later bickering, competitive dissent between the ladies.
There’s also a bit of narrative edginess, in the form of an oral sex bet between one of the couples, and another late-night reach-around that points up the direct line between physical and psychological anxiety and sexual neediness — not something you’d typically expect in such, ahem, toss-off entertainment. A great sound design further benefits the film, and if one or two moments of slight hokiness still poke through, The Ruins for the most part succeeds in pitching itself as an exotically flavored case study in downward-spiral-to-base-impulse thrills — sort of like Cabin Fever by way of Turistas, though without quite the gore factor of either of those flicks.
Housed in a regular Amray case, the special unrated version of The Ruins is presented in widescreen enhanced for 16×9 televisions, with Dolby digital
5.1 surround audio tracks in English and French, and optional French and Spanish subtitles. Kicking off a nice slate of supplemental material is an audio commentary track with director Carter Smith and editor Jeff Betancourt, in which the pair talk about the issues cell phones present in modern moviemaking, the compression of time in the movie versus the novel, and in particular the laudatory work of production designer Grant Major. Betancourt acts as the goosing moderator throughout this chat, prompting Smith, and correcting him with regards to how much of the movie’s actual temple ruins were built on-site (two-thirds were constructed, with the final third being added via CGI). Both gentlemen are conspicuously silent, though, during the movie’s aforementioned handjob scene. Hmmm…
A 14-minute making-of featurette provides insight
into the transformation of Smith’s novel to the screen, and includes interviews with executive producers Ben Stiller and Chris Bender. The six-minute featurette “Building the Ruins” gives viewers a detailed look at the set and location for the film, with producer Stuart Cornfeld talking up the production design, and the aforementioned Major offering some interesting thoughts. Most interesting, though, might be a 15-minute featuerette on the process of bringing the movie’s deadly
vines to life, and the combination of practical special effects and (minimal) CGI that were used. Gary Cameron, the film’s “head vine maker,” walks the audience through the trial-and-error process of achieving the right look for the movie (they’re modeled after the pumpkin vine), and how each hand-crafted bloom and leaf was eventually narrowed down to one-fifth of a millimeter in thickness, to allow for the sort of translucence that really sells the look on screen. Finally, a collection of five deleted scenes with optional commentary by Smith and Betancourt runs around 12 minutes in total, and includes both a never-before-seen alternate ending and a slightly tweaked version of the theatrical conclusion. The movie’s theatrical trailer, and other previews for Drillbit Taylor, Sweeney Todd and Cloverfield are also included. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B+ (Disc)
A hodgepodge of sci-fi, swashbuckling adventure, wry comedy and larger-than-life comic book action, 2004’s Hellboy was one of those rare mid-sized comic book adaptations that exuded a vision and spirit bigger than its (relatively chintzy) budget. Based on Mike Mignola’s mid-1990s graphic novel series — about a giant red demon spawn rescued from occult Nazi forces during World War II, and raised to be a most unlikely hero, as part of a clandestine, paranormal crime-fighting organization — the movie benefited from the guiding influence of writer-director Guillermo del Toro, who returns in both capacities on Hellboy II: The Golden Army. The results this time around are a bit more mixed, but still for the most part engaging and entertaining, an eye-popping rendering of some unabashedly bubblegum material.
There’s no tortured superhero back story to Hellboy II, only a brief textual prologue that reminds viewers of the above-mentioned inception, and the fact that Hellboy (Ron Perlman) really likes both cats and television. After a brief scene in which a teenage Hellboy’s father-figure and mentor, Professor Broom (John Hurt), relates the bedtime story of an army of unstoppable killing machines, we’re thrust forward into the present day, where Hellboy lives in secluded semi-secrecy with his pyrotechnic girlfriend, Liz Sherman (Selma Blair, above right).
Earth is threatened when an anarchical underworld elven prince, Nuada (Luke Goss, looking vaguely like a cousin of those albino twins from the Matrix sequels), plots to awaken the name-checked, long-dormant mythical army, and disrupt a truce with humankind, whom he abhors. Nuada’s twin sister, Princess Nuala (Anna Walton), escapes with a piece of crown that he needs to enact his scheme, and Hellboy and Liz, along with aquatic empath Abe Sapien (Doug Jones, above left) and gaseous medium Johann Krauss (voiced by Seth MacFarlane), set out to save her and thwart Nuada.
Del Toro’s project between the two Hellboy movies, the multiple-Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth, gave him a bump in profile amongst serious cinephiles, but more importantly a bump in self-assurance. The stamp of that blooming confidence is felt everywhere in Hellboy II, from the rich, woozy background detail and character design to the film’s ending, which… well, let’s just say I didn’t expect a Barry Manilow tune over the end credits when I first strolled into the theater.
In a way, that odd combination of auteurish swagger and vulnerability perfectly matches the material. Just as del Toro yearns for both artistic and commercial embrace, there’s a certain pleasure in the airy, parenthetical nature of Hellboy’s quest; he’s searching for the love and acceptance of the entire world, but the actual saving, the physical feats of derring-do, are entirely incidental. He just wants to fit in, to not be regarded as a freak or outsider, and that’s very relatable.
Still, the tremendous appeal of the character notwithstanding, there are a few bumps in the road. More than its predecessor, which had the advantage of chewing up fresh new ground at almost every turn, the action sequences here seem as obviously set up as hugely marked highway exits. They’re part of the ride, but you sometimes question the forthrightness of the directions. There’s some choppy editing, too. If these bits sometimes disrupt the flow of Hellboy II, the movie’s visual imagination and hand-crafted feel is still huge, and alluring. And there’s no self-importance or angst, either — just streamlined, B-movie kicks, the type for which popcorn is popped. For the full review, from Reelz Channel, click here. (Universal, PG-13, 114 minutes)
In chatting with the lovely Jenna Fischer recently I had a chance to ask her if her experience on Lollilove — which she wrote, directed and starred in, with then-husband James Gunn — had really soured her on directing as much as it was made out to be in some other interviews. In a word, yes.
“I just learned from doing that film that I’m an actor,” she says. “I approach work very emotionally — like, what’s the emotion, what’s the relationship here? And that’s a part of being a director, but the director is also supposed to think about how things look, how to place things and visually paint a picture. And my brain just did not want to do it, it couldn’t paint the picture. Also, I didn’t want to think about it, because then when I had to go in and act, it made me very self-conscious. So I like having the tunnel-vision of just focusing on character and relationship and emotion. Directing hurt my brain; it’s just not big enough for it.”
And the writing? “I’ll never do that again as well,” she says, sweetly serious. “It was horribly painful as well, I didn’t like it. What was great about doing the movie was how much I appreciate anybody who can conjure up something from nothing, anybody who can write or direct and tell a story visually, and any crew member, too. Directing a movie, you gain such an appreciation for what every person on the set is doing, and how things don’t happen in a vacuum, and that the actor isn’t the most important thing to the movie. They just aren’t. Sometimes you get treated like you are, but that’s just a way to baby you so that you stay calm and sedate. But you aren’t actually very important. And that’s a really good thing to know in Hollywood, to keep some perspective.”
Filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is no stranger to fantasy and adventure — his imaginative art and production designs and knack for breathtaking practical effects have helped anchor and inform the Hellboy franchise, whose sequel opens next week, as well as the politically-tinged, Spanish-language films, including 2001’s The Devil’s Backbone and the Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth, that have made him an arthouse darling and critics’ favorite. For his next big screen endeavor, though, del Toro is of course tackling the biggest fantasy adventure of them all — following in the footsteps of Peter Jackson’s blockbuster The Lord of the Rings trilogy by adapting J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit into not one, but two films.
While the established level of craftsmanship might be daunting to some, del Toro seems not only emboldened by the opportunity, but downright enthused by the challenge. “The way I see the five films, provided we do everything right, is as a symphony, and what I’m doing is an overture,” he says. “Therefore it can be a different color and energy, and lead you into something that is already filmic legacy. All we’ve got to do is create an almost freestanding piece that can then, if viewed together, make sense as a symphonic whole. If the two first pieces are crafted with their independent merits, but also the second film leads seamlessly into the first film of the trilogy, we would have created perhaps one of the most beautiful symphonies, filmically, that has been done. The idea that I’m going to have the tools that exist in Weta, that exist in New Zealand, to create those films…” Here del Toro pauses briefly, a wide grin breaking out across his face. “I am ready to build the Pyramids, or the Temple of Ra!” For the full read, from Reelz Channel, click here.
Filed under “C,” for Complete Lack of Surprise, Will Smith’s Hancock topped the July 4 weekend box office, with an estimated $66 million gross over the three-day holiday, and around $108 million since its sneak debut on the evening of July 1. Last weekend’s big debuts certainly had solid enough holdovers, though. Wall▪E, the latest collaboration from Pixar/Disney, added $33.4 million to its domestic tally, which nows stands at $128.1 million; the hyper-kinetic action vehicle Wanted, starring James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, pried loose another $20.6 million from wallets, bringing its two-week total to $90.8 million. That’s apparently good enough, when combined with sure-to-be-solid international returns, to guarantee a sequel or two.
Placing fourth for the weekend was Steve Carell‘s big screen action-comedy adaptation of Get Smart, which added $11.1 million to its coffers, pushing its cumulative domestic haul less than two million short of the $100 million line. Rounding out the top 10 were the animated family flick Kung Fu Panda ($7.5 million, $193.4 overall); Universal’s Edward Norton-starring reboot of The Incredible Hulk ($5 million, $125 million overall); Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ($4 million, $306.6 million overall); Abigail Breslin‘s Kitt Kitredge: An American Girl ($3.6 million in its first weekend in release, $6.1 million overall); Sex and the City, starring Sarah Jessica Parker ($2.3 million, $144.9 million); and Adam Sandler’s You Don’t Mess with the Zohan ($2 million, $94.8 million overall). In limited release, The Wackness and the Hunter Thompson documentary Gonzo grossed $145,000 and $190,000, respectively, with expansions planned in the coming weeks.
Filmmaker David Lynch — whose interest in transcendental meditation is well chronicled, and the subject of a documentary film he’s working up — talks about his experience with the technique in a first-person piece penned for The Guardian, writing, “I sat down, closed my eyes, started this mantra, and it was like I was
in an elevator and they cut the cable. Boom! I fell into bliss, pure
bliss. And I was just in there. …It takes you to an ocean of pure consciousness, pure knowingness. But
it’s familiar, it’s you. And, right away, a sense of happiness emerges — not a goofball happiness but a thick beauty.” That was 1973, and he hasn’t missed a meditation in 34 years, says Lynch, which in its own way is easy to believe, given his love of rituals. For the full read, click here.
The quality and production value of the trailer for Harold, Spencer Breslin’s new movie, makes it at times look like it was shot by me, or some knucklehead friends, as part of a high school A/V Club assignment, but the kid’s comic timing undeniably pushes it along — the story of a high school kid with premature male pattern baldness. Breslin’s wry delivery on lines like, “I’m going over the nerd wall” more than makes up for the presence of Cuba Gooding, Jr., who really shouldn’t be allowed to ever be shown dancing in another trailer. Ally Sheedy and Nikki Blonsky also co-star. Harold opens July 11 in Los Angeles and New York, with a top 20 market roll-out tentatively planned after that.
I didn’t used to have a bone to pick with actor Craig Sheffer, but I now want to punch him in the balls. His feature directorial debut, American Crude, is, to put it politely, a big, steaming pile of crap.
Where to begin? I could (and probably should) have devised a review of this movie based solely around its howlingly awful, PhotoShopped DVD cover, which crams the head of Michael Clarke Duncan onto a body so skinny as to defy notions of logic and gravity, and throws into the mix a picture of Jennifer Esposito seemingly snapped at the premiere of some other, much better film. That would have saved me the pain that awaits when one spins the disc contained inside.
This movie’s “plot,” as it were, is little more than a wheel-spinning excuse for a bunch of crass, clanging stereotypes and outlandishly uninteresting oddballs to run around and into one another, spouting inanities. All tell and no show, the Los Angeles-set movie’s thunderously stupid opening montage (“The past will catch up to all of us before the night is through…”) introduces us to the fact that married schemer Johnny (Ron Livingston) has somehow ended up in prison, after throwing a bachelor party for his best friend Bill (Rob Schneider), who’s engaged to his ex-girlfriend Olivia (Amanda Detmer). Flashing back through the frantic evening, all best-laid plans come crashing down as a bunch of highly eccentric characters converge, with no deed, good or bad, going unpunished.
In addition to Cynthia Watros as Johnny’s wife, Jane, there’s Scrubs‘ John C. McGinley as a nutty plumber who accepts sexual favors from a transsexual prostitute (Missi Pyle), and the aforementioned Clarke and Esposito as a pimp-and-ho combo with a role-reversed power dynamic. Oh, and there’s Raymond Barry as Johnny’s dad, a pornographer who draws the line at filming a gangbanger fucking a sheep, and instead sets his sights on coercing into action a runaway virgin teen (Sarah Foret) he befriended over the Internet.
So… yeah. It’s as if Sheffer watched fellow actor Peter Berg start with Very Bad Things and then skyrocket to consequentiality as a director, took as the lesson of that to come up with as outrageous and testosteronized a conceit as possible, and then just squared everything. Working from a script he rewrote himself (sharing story credit with Jeff Winiski and Michael Diiorio, who are credited as a team), Sheffer drives this sucker totally into the ground, evidencing no particular grace or skill with set-up, editing or direction of performance. The dialogue is certainly no better, with lame, awkwardly scripted debates about Ebonics, silicone (“the good shit”) versus saline breast implants and vegetarianism filling out scenes in yawning fashion. Livingston, so great in Office Space, can’t escape the sucking downward pull of the material here, and what starts off as sympathy for him eventually morphs into a sort of jailbreak rage — you want to break into this movie and just pull him out of it, rescue him (and yourself) from the dulling, idiotic pain of it all.
Housed in an Amray case that must somehow be extra-strength and airtight, to keep safe the potent stench and near-lethal acidity contained within, American Crude is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English, Thai, Spanish and Portuguese Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks, and a Dolby surround French track as well. Good to know that this title is built for easy international export. Really putting our best creative foot forward, there. The only additional material comes in the way of three more deleted scenes… oh, and a gallery of preview trailers, for Wieners, First Sunday, Hero Wanted, Diamond Dogs, The Boondocks and a half dozen other flicks. To view a scene, click here, and if for some reason after reading this you still want to purchase the film, via Amazon, click here. F (Movie) D (Disc)
The trailer for My Best Friend’s Girl, the latest wrinkle-nosed rom-com confection starring Kate Hudson, is online, and it could not possibly seem like more of a bland, corporate-manufactured piece of fluff.
It’s all there — the totally anonymous title (bonus points for nipping it from an old pop song); the scene where a ruckus is created at a wedding; the presence of Jason Biggs, who still has the rot of Over Her Dead Body, not to mention the general stench of inconsequentiality, hanging over him; and a guy like Howard Deutch directing. The brief flash of bra from Hudson should fool no one, this is a movie that asks nothing of its audience, just as it asks nothing of its actors. No nuance, no semi-relatable real-world angst or moments of reflection, nothing. But, hey, whatever. It’ll do what it does, which is probably around $50-70 million domestically (I’m erring on the side of generosity), with steady ancillary revenue for the foreseeable future. Movies like this were made to play on airplanes. I’ll say this, though — best to dial down the Dane Cook, and dial up the Lizzy Caplan and Alec Baldwin, no matter their actual (in)significance in the finished product. My Best Friend’s Girl opens nationwide on September 19, from Lionsgate. For more information, click here.
The cover text size differential between the various words in the title of Sex and Death 101 tells potential viewers exactly what it wants them to be thinking about — namely, bump-and-grind couplings and the possibility of a naked Winona Ryder.
There’s a lot more going on here than one might at first glance expect, though. After all, the movie represents a reunion between Ryder and Daniel Waters. In 1989, Ryder appeared alongside Christian Slater in Heathers,
written by Waters and directed by Michael Lehman, and the result
was akin to a bunker-penetrating bombshell — something that bore
results with a bit of time. A darkly comedic attack on the cozy pieties present in most teen flicks, Heathers remains an even more wickedly canted take-down of adolescent social cliques than its most recent descendant, Mean Girls. It assayed popularity, teen suicide and downright sociopathic behavior
with equal, cold-water-to-the-face irreverence. Though the film grossed
only a bit above $1 million in theaters, it became a sensation in the
rental and nascent sell-thru market — the very definition of a cult
hit.
Similarly, Sex and Death 101 is a doozy of a concept flick that’s sure to matter an awful lot to a small, film-savvy audience, even if it doesn’t quite live up to the ripest imaginations its premise inspires. And while she isn’t the
lead, per se, the movie does represent the best opportunity many longtime fans will have had to
see a “real” Ryder in some time, after several indie flicks, a
small role in the anthology comedy The Ten and a prominent role in Richard Linklater’s rotoscope-animated A Scanner Darkly. Weird, funny, engaging and spiritedly thoughtful even if not always
successful, the pairing of Ryder and Waters seems to celebrate a certain reunion of like
minds.
Waters’ first film behind the camera since 2001’s Happy Campers, his only other directing credit, Sex and Death 101 centers around Roderick Blank (Something Different‘s
Simon Baker), a successful advertising executive who, just weeks before
his marriage to Fiona (Julie Bowen), gets a mysterious email that
contains the names of everyone he’s ever had or will have sex with, 101 women in
total. The rub is that it doesn’t end with his wife-to-be — in fact,
she’s nowhere near the last name. In the midst of this “sacrilegious
epiphany,” and finding no relief from a trio of bizarro-world
comptrollers (Robert Wisdom, Patton Oswalt and Tanc Sade) from whom the
list originated, Roderick throws himself headlong into the sheer,
delicious variety (centerfolds, bisexual astronauts) of his predicted
future, but soon finds matters dulled without the thrill of the chase. Even worse, a new, true love (Leslie Bibb) turns out not to be
on the list, leaving Roderick devastated. All this is crosscut with and eventually complicated by
the story of a woman, known only as “Death Nell” (Ryder),
who’s gaining a media following as a murderous femme fatale, putting
all sorts of bad men in comas.
From start to conclusion, Sex and Death 101
is an exercise in wheel-spinning hijinks much more than any analysis.
(“I’m sure there’s some logical explanation for all this, but I’m not
going to wait around for it,” says Roderick at one point.) Waters has
in the past described his personal sensibility as “Bunuel meets Caddyshack,” and that description aptly captures some of the wild tonal shifts that mark Sex and Death 101
— a movie that includes a gross-out bait-and-switch reminiscent of
Stifler’s clandestine closet hook-up in American Wedding, but also
sincere questions and insight about the existential crises to be found
in knowing beforehand one’s lovers (and, by extension, non-lovers). How
much of life, and the appropriation of our time, is in pursuit or
purchase of these tangible acts? While Baker is the lens through which
the story is told, Ryder is its scythe-bearing, no-BS conscience, and a
late diner scene in particular offers up powerful proof of (no pun
intended here) her ability to kill softly.
In the end, Sex and Death 101 isn’t so much profound in and of itself as it is a fun, sloppy
treatment of a profoundly interesting premise. At just under two hours, it lurches to and fro, with certain passages (the story strand with Bibb) coming across as much more interesting than others (the aforementioned quasi-omniscient but not omnipotent guys, who advise Roderick to simply get rid of the list, and vaguely hint of consequences should he not). As scripted by Waters — loosely, with a flitting, highly distractible nature — the movie feels both bold and not fully thought out, like it should
be reverse-adapted into a book. As a reunion project between Waters and
Ryder, though, it feels more or less right, leaving one wanting for thirds.
Housed in a regular Amray case with an accompanying cardboard slipcover, Sex and Death 101 comes presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English language 5.1 Dolby digital surround and 2.0 surround audio tracks. Anchoring the supplemental material is an audio commentary track with Waters in which he talks about juggling the many different acting styles of his ensemble cast, and points up the film’s many references and sources of dialogue inspiration, which range from Shakespeare, sex comedies of the 1970s and Woody Allen films to adult flicks and contemporary sports figures. There’s also a 17-minute making-of featurette with cast and crew interviews, though even more with Ryder about her thoughts on Waters and her character would have certainly been welcome. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) B (Disc)
It’s a happy birthday to Parisian-born Bond babe Eva Green, who turns 28 today, and probably celebrates with a baguette. I didn’t (yet) catch The Golden Compass, but in everything else I’ve seen Green in she radiates a certain dangerousness. She’s the girl in high school that knows something about you that you don’t even know about yourself, and the uncertainty over her intentions with that information inspires a certain intimidation. Cruel? Kind? Vamp? Vixen? You’re not quite sure.
If you require more skin, go do a Google search for Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, not to be confused with The Others or The Strangers.
Yes, the poster, in its naked grab at the John Mellencamp set, has a certain and unfortunate desperate similarity to Varsity Blues — unfortunate mainly in the sense that there’s no whipped cream bikini scene with Ali Larter. Still, the Iraq War homeland drama Stop-Loss, co-written and directed by Kimberly Peirce [sic], the director of the Oscar-winning Boys Don’t Cry, is a decently stirring portrait of shattered, modern American masculinity.
At once raw and still a bit artsy, the film centers around Staff Sergeant Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe, above left), a small town Texas twentysomething who’s done a couple tours in Iraq with his high school pals — a group that includes best friend Steve Shriver (Step Up‘s Channing Tatum), Isaac Butler (Rob Brown) and Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). The movie opens with hand-held home movies from their time overseas, then returns our guys Stateside. Haunted by the wounding of a soldier, Rico Rodriguez (Victor Rasuk), under his command, Brandon is preparing to leave the Army behind. He’s thrown for a loop, though, when he receives a “stop-loss” order, scotching his plans of a new life.
Brandon tries to argue with his immediate superior, Lt. Col. Boot Miller (Timothy Olyphant), but is basically told that he’s too valuable to let go, and that the Army is exercising its government-granted power of right-of-refusal on his enlistment term limitation, since they’re having trouble meeting new recruitment goals. In grand fashion, Brandon goes AWOL, hooking up with Steve’s longtime girlfriend, Michelle (Abbie Cornish), and hitting the road, pondering his options.
Released by Paramount earlier this spring, Stop-Loss underwent a pansification in its marketing, with early theatrical trailers featuring a hard-driving rock tune by Drowning Pool being replaced by lilting, uplifting alt-rock from Snow Patrol. This late-game tonal switch may or may not have ultimately had much to do with Stop-Loss‘ box office fate (it more or less tanked, to the tally of just under $11 million in 12 weeks of release), but it sure didn’t put the movie’s best foot forward. This is a personal story for Peirce (she recently had a brother who enlisted in the military at 18 years of age), and her steely dedication to detail and realism — both in the bravado and camaraderie of the grunts, and the bureaucratic hot potato that ensues Stateside — are what most mark Stop-Loss, and give it its punch.
Phillippe has big screen war experience in the form of Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers, and has the jaw, consistency of effort and general fortitude on which to hang a movie like this, but still comes across a bit stiff and mannered, which is problematic since he’s the protagonist that drives our pained, sympathetic embrace of the film. Rather than play the minor chords of a guy trying to swallow his demons along with his rising indignation, Phillippe always seems to give us just a little too much — too much glowering, too much thousand-yard-stare vacancy, too much flinty resolve — and the result is something that never quite fully slips free of the shackles of Hollywood conventions. Still, this is a movie that has the courage to say, quite literally, “Fuck the president, and in this regard it still feels bold and stirring… as well as understandably unresolved.
Packaged in a regular Amray plastic case, the Stop-Loss DVD is presented in widescreen enhanced for 16×9 TVs, with Dolby digital English 5.1 surround sound, French 5.1 surround sound and Spanish 5.1 surround sound audio tracks, and optional English, French and Spanish subtitles. The disc includes an audio commentary track with Peirce and co-writer Mark Richard in which they discuss the painstaking writing process, and heap praise on the movie’s actors. Peirce also talks some about her near-decade break between big screen features, saying she needed to feel the same level of passionate involvement that she did with her lauded debut.
Two featurettes are also included — a 21-minute making-of affair with cast and crew interviews, and a 10-minute look at the military boot camp that the young actors all went through. There are also 11 deleted scenes with optional commentary by Peirce, most of which she notes are trims for reasons of pacing. Though totaling around 19 minutes, there aren’t really grand subplots left out here, just mostly shading and details; the chief casualty is a bit expanding upon Brandon’s attempts to secure the assistance and political intervention of his senator, Orton Worrell (Josef Sommer), which would have helped flesh out the movie’s second and third acts some. Rounding out the DVD material are previews for The Ruins and Shine a Light, as well as Iron Man and a couple other, forthcoming Paramount theatrical releases. Overall, Peirce speaks her mind fairly forthrightly in Stop-Loss‘ supplemental extras, but even a bit more edge — some more real-world contextualization, in the form of a mini-doc on military policy, or an argumentative commentary track between left-and-right pundits — would have benefited this DVD release. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B- (Disc)
Holy crap — footage presumed lost from 1927’s Metropolis, from German director Fritz Lang, has been found in Argentina, in the vault of the Buenos Aires Film Museum. The director’s cut of Lang’s stunning, stylish sci-fi classic, containing an extra 30 minutes, was believed to have vanished forever
after it was trimmed by Paramount bosses because of bad reviews. Great news for film history, any way you slice it, after a string of recent setbacks and bad news.
The ancient Maya civilization of Central America left behind a riddle — an intricate and mysterious hieroglyphic script carved on stone
monuments and painted on pottery and bark books. Because the invading
Spanish suppressed nearly all knowledge of how the script worked,
until very recently unlocking its meaning posed one of modern archeology’s fiercest challenges.
That changes with this fascinating hour-long, new-to-DVD title. For the first time, NOVA presents the epic inside story of how the decoding was done, told by the experts at the center of one of archeology’s greatest detective stories. Cracking the Maya Code highlights the ingenious breakthroughs that opened the door to deciphering the elaborate and exotic script and finally cracked the code, unleashing a flood of dramatic new insights about the ancient civilization. Once thought to record the esoteric calculations of mystical astronomer-priests presiding over peaceful jungle cities, an utterly different, war-torn world is revealed, unveiling details of conquests, raids and dynastic rivalries spanning centuries. With lush footage of Maya temples and art, the program exposes the hidden face of the Maya and highlights the brilliant leaps of insight that opened the door to deciphering their elaborate and exotic script. For armchair linguists and cultural historians, this is a fascinating and revelatory documentary, and the painstaking investigatory details examined and explained give the movie a nice thrill-of-the-chase subtext only glancingly related to its primary focus.
Housed in a regular Amray case and presented in 16:9 anamorphic widescreen with Dolby stereo on a single DVD-5 disc, Cracking the Maya Code is, as with other NOVA titles released through WGBH, rather slim on special features. In addition to closed captions and described video for the visually impaired, the only other supplemental material is a link to the NOVA web site, and a small clutch of printable activities for educators. B+ (Movie) C- (Disc)
It’s flaming out theatrically, already clinging to the 10th spot at the box office, and on course to gross only around $35 million domestically, but in doing some hard drive cleaning I stumbled across this even-more-interesting-in-retrospect quote from The Love Guru‘s co-writer, Graham Gordy, about the manner in which Mike Myers work-shopped his prodigiously bearded character of Guru Pitka.
“We did stage shows, and Mike tested the character,” says Gordy. “We had a character and a glut of jokes and wanted to put it in some sort of form, so we had a show we did in 100-seat theaters in New York. We ended up doing eight or nine of them over a period of about two years, and what we would do is put a half-hour of written material with a half-hour question-and-answer period. We’d record it all and see which of the jokes played in the written material, and Mike would always have two or three really great things that we would take from the Q&A that we would end up putting in (the script). As it went along we would take out the stuff that didn’t play. It’s all based on the idea that the Marx brothers toured all of their shows for six months before they ever put anything on film. And Mike is such a rigorous comedian that he says, ‘I don’t want to put a joke in a movie if it hasn’t been laughed at.’ That was the process.” Yikes. All of which raises the question… if “Bring me some alligator soup, and make it snappy!” made the final cut, what were the jokes that weren’t laughed at?
Will Smith’s Hancock pulled in $6.8 million from its Tuesday night sneaks (second to Wall▪E‘s $7.6 million), and looks to have added an estimated $17.3 million from its official Wednesday bow. Its five-day-plus holiday weekend haul should easily top $100 million, maybe by as much as 20 percent.
The red-band trailer for Asylum, the new direct-to-video horror thriller starring Sarah Roemer (aka, the chick from Disturbia) that streets on July 15, is online, and seems to promise plenty of gore, or at least a nice clip reel for the foley artists who labored on it. There’s a pinch of Session 9 here, it seems, but mostly the movie appears to be an excuse for a ghastly-looking “doctor” to ram sharp implements into the eyes and/or heads of a bunch of college students. The voiceover narration is clumsy and derisible (“at history’s most notorious asylum for teenagers,” and, “students hiding their mysterious past have unlocked true evil”), but who’s really paying attention, right? The flick is directed by Snakes on a Plane helmer David Ellis, whose previous work doesn’t much recommend him. (He parlayed stunt coordinator and second unit gigs into directing work on Final Destination 2 and Cellular, the latter of which I never saw.) Holy crap… Ellis is doing Final Destination 4 as well. Somehow missed the news on that one. So this was the in-between paycheck gig, I guess.
