The fourth annual HollyShorts Film Festival kicks off on Thursday, August 7, with a marquee opening night celebration featuring a number of high profile short film projects. The opening night event, which takes place at the Egyptian Theatre in conjunction with the American Cinematheque, will feature director Bill Purple’s Hole in the Paper Sky, which stars Jessica Biel and Gary Marshall; WireImage co-founder Jeff Vespa’s Nosebleed, which stars David Arquette; director Alex Ferrari’s Red Princess Blues Animated: The Book of Violence, voiced by Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay‘s Paula Garcés; radio personality Marty Keegan’s award-winning Verboten; and, as previously mentioned, the Hollywood premieres of directorial debuts from two actors — Josh Brolin‘s X and Larry Hankin’s The Outlaw Emmett Deemus.
Friday, August 8, will mark the festival’s inaugural HollyShorts Music Video celebration, showcasing clips from some of the industry’s hottest new music video directors. The festival’s core screenings and industry panels take place at the Laemmle Sunset 5 on Saturday, August 9 and Sunday, August 10. “We’re stepping up our Hollywood presence in a major way this year, with a marquee opening night celebration in conjunction with the American Cinematheque, a new music video category and a lineup of high profile films,” said HollyShorts Film Festival director and co-founder Daniel Sol. For tickets and more information, click here.
I went into Drillbit Taylor with lowered expectations. I missed the movie during its March theatrical release, but had read the negative-trending reviews. The failed suicide attempt of Owen Wilson cast a shadow over things, certainly, making for an awkward sell with the public, given that its famously wry and sunny, butterscotch lead couldn’t or didn’t fully press the flesh on the movie’s behalf. The result was a $32 million domestic shrug. The truth is, though, Drillbit Taylor quite plainly doesn’t work on its own terms. A comedy that doesn’t know whether it wants to be a movie about high school essentially for adults (see: Election) or a slapstick-y farce for kids, it’s about five percent inspiration and 95 percent downhill coasting. Actually, make that about 90 percent coasting, and five percent Steven Brill suckitude. I’d forgot how bad of a director he really is.
Written by Kristofor Brown and Seth Rogen, who met on Judd Apatow’s Undeclared, Drillbit Taylor centers around three freshmen with varying levels of geekiness — Wade (Nate Hartley), Ryan (Troy Gentile, above left), or “T-Dog,” as he insists on being called, and Emmit (David Dorfman, above bottom right) — who end up as targets for bully Terry (Alex Frost), an emancipated minor who has the school’s principal (Stephen Root) convinced of the sincerity of his “welcoming hazing.” Pooling their financial resources, the kids hire whom they think to be an ex-military specialist turned bodyguard, a guy who name-drops Sylvester Stallone and Bobby Brown as former clients.
In reality, though, Drillbit (Wilson) is a homeless dude loafing it in Santa Monica, showering on the beach and looking for the next scratch-off lottery ticket payday that will score him a plane ticket to British Columbia, where he inexplicably wants to move. So at first Drillbit looks merely to take the kids for a ride, taking their meager cash offering and raiding Wade’s home for items he can pawn. A few of his homeless pals, though, convince him to milk the situation for further benefit, and eventually the kids and their plight start to matter to Drillbit. Wan advice morphs into a more hands-on approach, which culminates with a massive showdown at a party thrown by Terry.
There’s the potential here for a coarse, Bad Santa-type romp, but the edges are all sanded down to yawning, test audience-approved memes and lessons, never mind the (theatrical release) restrictions of a PG-13 rating. A couple love interests are crammed in — Wade swoons for classmate Brooke (Valerie Tian), while Drillbit hooks up with a teacher played by Leslie Mann, producer Apatow’s wife — to negligible effect, and gaping holes of illogicality (in a bit lazily nipped from School of Rock, Drillbit winds up as a substitute teacher, somehow heading up a variety of classes) pepper the movie’s second and third acts.
I waited with anticipation for the arrival of bit player Danny McBride, who helped make Hot Rod a hoot, what with his belligerent energy and bizarr-o proclamations (“This is my hat now — totally my hat!”), but he first pops up 16 minutes into the movie and, though he serves as a sort of devil-on-shoulder and increasingly antagonistic figure to Drillbit, he never feels particularly well integrated into the proceedings. Not that he’s alone in that regard — the movie lurches about when asking audiences to consider the aforementioned female characters, or a parental meeting with the principal.
The film scores a few points when Rogen and Brown’s touch with cracked specificity pokes through the carefully crafted studio notes that make so much of the rest of the movie feel like a store-bought painting of dogs playing poker. The boys’ fate is cemented in savvy, silly fashion when Wade and Ryan wear the same, very distinctive shirt on the first day of school. There’s a freestyle-rap battle where Ryan slams Terry, and a bit where Drillbit shows the kids The Untouchables as evidence of the “hold-back” method, wherein one or two peers restrain a yapping-mad friend, who doesn’t really want to fight anyway. A motorist also scrawls “not for pot” on a handout to the panhandling Drillbit, explaining, “Now I bet you’ll feel really silly if you try to buy weed with that money.” Unfortunately, these inspired moments are few and far between, and director Brill (Little Nicky, Mr. Deeds), who can’t locate the pulse of a scene without resorting to static master shots, throws in plenty of tired physical gags in an inartful attempt to skew the energy of the piece.
Housed in a regular Amray case, this extended and unrated version Drillbit Taylor prolongs the unruly narrative in what seems like relatively pointless fashion (what great character insights are possibly gleaned?), but at least comes with a decent array of bonus features, starting with an audio commentary track featuring Brill, co-writer Brown and the three young leads. There’s a four-minute gag reel in which McBride is advised to lose the improvisational “ass” from a scene, Gentile accidentally pulls up some grass turf, Brill frequently shouts out lines, and Wilson is told, by a ringer kiddie extra, that “Vince Vaughn is much funnier than you.” As with most other Apatow-produced flicks, there’s also four minutes of “line-o-rama” excised material, the bulk of which is funnier than around 85 percent of what’s actually in the movie.
In addition to more deleted scenes, a clutch of five featurettes, ranging from three to six minutes, offer up specialized looks at Brill (who jokingly mock-punches his adolescent charges in the face) and McBride (who observes, “I play a homeless guy, but he has more clothes than I do in real life”), as well as Gentile’s training for the rap battle, a sequence involving a pulled fire safety sprinkler, and Frost and fellow screen bully Josh Peck. Finally, Rogen phones in from the set of another film for a 14-minute phone chat with co-writer Brown, in which they reminisce about a planned opening sequence, scratched for budgetary reasons, showing Drillbit’s military service in Iraq (“We should have just used footage from Behind Enemy Lines,” Rogen moans). There’s also talk about studio notes and other compromises large and small, before the whole thing devolves into a discussion about the recent Rambo sequel, which Rogen enthusiastically deems a “humanitarian wet dream.” Again, a
good portion of this chat is much more interesting than the actual finished product. Conspicuously absent in all the extras, though? Wilson himself. To purchase the film via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) B+ (Disc)
Gail Sheehy’s lengthy post-mortem on the Hillary Clinton campaign, for Vanity Fair, is at once a fascinating and — for anyone who followed the particulars of the Democratic primary race the past six months — familiar read. Screw Primary Colors, this may be the real political psychodrama of our time, ripe for its own roman a clef treatment. It’s all there — the perpetual bafflement at Obama’s non-belligerence; the serial campaign mismanagement and bickering between Clinton’s “Big Five” (Patti Solis Doyle, Harold Ickes, Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson and Mandy Grunwald); the ravings of pollster Penn, convinced that Hillary needed to throw around more weight than any
man in order to meet the commander in chief threshold test, and how this approach was normalized by the experience of the Clintons’ White House years; and yes, even the “dark clot of wishful thinking” that broke loose with Hillary’s invocation of Robert Kennedy’s assassination in June of 1968.
A lot of this piece is re-tilled Earth in the macro sense, but it’s got great detail. Among the notable revelations is news that, long before the Bosnia sniper-fire issue, another one of Clinton’s signature stories — about a young woman who worked for minimum wage,
was uninsured, and who got pregnant — was apocryphal at best, riddled with inaccuracies that seem to indicate a willful neglecting of facts. And then there’s this quote from Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff: “There are moments when [the Clintons] want to hear from the
dark side because that may be the only way to win. …Losing is not part
of their vocabulary. They know no limits when it comes to the energy
and tactics they will use — no matter how distasteful.” For the full read, click here.
As previously mentioned, on Monday I did some interviews for Hellboy II: The Golden Army, opening wide July 11, and Mike Mignola, the originator of the source material, talked a little bit about his collaborations with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro — including a rather strange visit to a haunted house with the Pan’s Labyrinth director and composer Danny Elfman.
“This is one of those things that Guillermo always says will happen, and then usually never happens,” recounts Mignola, with a smile. “But he lured me over to England during post-production on the first film by saying, ‘Hey, you, me and Danny Elfman should get a haunted hotel room.’ But we did, and then we decided to each spend a half-hour alone in the room. Guillermo very much changed his mind when we turned out the lights and it was his turn. He wasn’t as keen on it then. And then Danny’s cell phone rang, and it has some sort of Nightmare Before Christmas ring-tone, and he and I nearly wet ourselves laughing. Nothing happened, but it was very interesting,” to say the least.
Mignola, who said he pushed to move the character of Lobster Johnson from the second film to a possible third movie after some late studio and producer wavering on the matter (“I said you’ve written a very specific story for a medium, and switching [from Johan Krauss to Lobster Johnson] now, late in development, would be like saying, well, we can’t get Superman, let’s just put in Batman instead — you can’t swap them out,” he explains), feels that del Toro has plenty of material in mind to continue to franchise, as long as box office returns warrant it. “If Guillermo puts everything in the third film that he’s talked about, it’ll be about 180 hours long,” Mignola says.
Long week, so I just put a bullet in the June 24 episode of The Colbert Report, with Will Smith guesting to promote Hancock, a rarity for Stephen Colbert’s show. After an inspired opening segment bit in which he took Smith to task for being at the forefront of Hollywood’s “glorification of face violence” (his latest cause du jour, after a mysterious injury last week that left him with a couple stitches between his eyebrows), Colbert mostly stuck to genial set-ups instead of jabs, asking Smith if his support of Barack Obama was part of a conspiracy to eventually play him in a movie.
Smith, for his part, kept things equally light, laughing a lot and dipping back into his Muhammad Ali accent for effect. Some self-effacing jokes about ears led to a shared fist bump, which was then mocked as a terrorist fist jab. After a clip from the film, Colbert did seem to catch Smith on his heels a bit when he asked him if the movie, about “a superhero using his power and the world getting mad at him for it,” was a veiled metaphor about the United States and the events of the past half-dozen years.
Vantage Point feels very much like what it is, which is to say a screenplay written by a television development executive turned debut screenwriter, in this case Barry L. Levy. A defanged political thriller in which much dry ice-manufactured fog is pumped around the “single truth” behind an assassination attempton the president of the United States on foreign soil, the film unfolds over and over, from eight different points-of-view. Unfortunately, it’s so meticulous in its peddling of red herrings and inclusive in its conspiratorial underpinnings that it just becomes an exercise in tedium.
Set
in Salamanca, Spain, the story unfolds at a summit of world leaders at
which the American president (William Hurt) is set to unveil a bold new
anti-terrorist measure. Assigned to protect him are Secret Service
agents Kent Taylor (Matthew Fox)
and Thomas Barnes (Dennis Quaid, above left), the latter of whom is a recently
returned-to-work hero who’s already taken a bullet for his boss. When President Ashton is shot on stage in a large, public square, chaos
ensues. A bomb explodes outside the walled-off venue, and then another
larger explosion rips through the main platform. Among those present
are a reporter (Zoe Saldana), a local cop (Eduardo Noriega, above center), three
mysterious, whispering bystanders (Said Taghmaoui, Ayelet Zurer and Domino‘s Edgar Ramirez) and an American tourist, Howard (Forest Whitaker), who thinks he might have captured the shooter on his camcorder while videotaping the event for his kids back home.
Vantage Point — whose trailer can be glimpsed here — is an enterprise hamstrung from early on,
and thus its faults can be traced quite easily and non-fussily back to
the major cornerstones (writing and directing) of its rendering. The movie’s conceit affords the audience an aerial view of matters, but there’s no significant investigative mooring
(apart from two bits that Barnes glimpses in camera footage, which
apparently tells him everything he needs to know) to make the
actual forward-push of the narrative matter.
Director Pete Travis has previous experience with political violence; his debut film, 2005’s Omagh,
focused on the search for justice after a 1998 bombing in Northern Ireland, and picked up a few
festival prizes, though no Stateside distribution. Here, though, he’s
given a script that substitutes
whiz-bang car chases and cheap emotional gambits (a child imperiled,
standing in the middle of a busy road) in place of anything slightly
more interesting. That means, as the movie wears on, more and more jittery, Bourne-style-lite mayhem, with edits every one-half to one-third a second.
Vantage Point is essentially a single, episodic set piece of an episode of 24, stretched like taffy into a mad-dash exercise in button-pushing exploit-ainment.
The air-quote explanation of the entire plot basically distills down to
the line, “This war will never end,” which is offered up in a raspy,
death-rattle confession by one of the complicit terrorists. The
motivation (religious fanaticism? political disenfranchisement?
old-fashioned greed?) is never really explained, though we’re led to
believe it’s perhaps elements of all of these, as well as… blackmail?
Sorry, that just doesn’t pass the smell test.
To render all this carnage in PG-13 strokes seems additionally ludicrous,
and requires that Travis and editor Stuart Baird cut away from and
otherwise “stunt” (including a slight, stuttering-frame effect) more
than a dozen gunshots that are by implication lethal. Poor Dennis Quaid
tries, and is as much of an anchoring presence as the story will allow. Vantage Point, though, has no unifying vision of purpose — either of its own, or the world at its center.
Housed in a regular Amray case, Vantage Point‘s DVD includes both widescreen and full screen versions of the film, plus a bonus digital copy for playback on PSP, PlayStation 3 or PCs. A trailer of the forthcoming Hancock automatically plays upon start-up, and other special features on the DVD include a genial and very informative audio commentary track with director Travis, as well as a deleted scene and a mock-serious “surveillance tape” which is actually a 40-second clip of Travis entering a room and discharging an ammo clip, in theory to show how he’d like the scene staged.
The biggest supplemental inclusion comes by way of a 27-minute making-of featurette, which includes interviews with most of the principal cast and crew, as well as producer Callum Greene. Though this segment sometimes needlessly dips into an affected fake video style, it does pack in a fair amount of information (e.g., Sigourney Weaver‘s character, a television news director, was originally written as a man, hence the name “Rex,” which they kept), along with all the expected back-slapping self-congratulation. There’s also a separate interview with screenwriter Levy, and a seven-minute look at the movie’s stunt workand effects, in which stunt director Spiro Razatos talks about the 15 cameras used to capture the big explosion, and the challenges of filming a car chase in Mexico City’s very narrow streets — especially when “closed for filming” doesn’t fully translate, south of the border. For another clip from the movie, click here. To purchase the film via Amazon, meanwhile, click here. D+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)
I wasn’t really around for Richard Nixon’s Watergate flameout, but was there as much enmity toward the man as there now is toward President Bush, or was he generally regarded as more of a sad, pathetic bastard who’d merely written his own political obituary, and in the process inadvertently exposed the country to his own darkly paranoid worldview?
Largely because of the war in Iraq, of course, there’s no such oh-it’s-just-politics pass for Bush, whose current 25-30 percent approval ratings still seem kind of high to me, and have for most of his second term. After all, Bush’s impending exit has already been touted in celebratory T-shirts that have gained popularity as much more than just some whimsical Blue State item. He’s routinely booed and heckled in public on the few occasions he’s not trotted out before a scrubbed audience. Anti-smear email campaigns are used, and regularly falsely attributed to celebrities, to try to prop up his administration as something other than the flaming trainwreck of a disaster that it is. And now graffiti — like the above item, and an entire series of professionally stenciled put-downs here in Los Angeles and in other big cities — openly scorns the guy. January 20, 2009, indeed…
Is anyone shocked that Molly Ringwald is apparently begging John Hughes for a sequel to 16 Candles? Well of fucking course she is. She’s not a total brain stem, I guess. Ringwald made her name in the 1984 adolescent romantic comedy, the first of a string of successful collaborations with Hughes. Now 40, she’s rarely had occasion to appear in anything either memorable or of lasting value to anyone outside her family since the 1980s (I’ll grant a waiver for 1994’s The Stand), and her big 1996 small screen comeback, Townies, flamed out after half a season if I recall correctly.
But sometimes things happen for a reason; I caught Ringwald on stage a number of years back, and she was flat-out awful… like, Ozarks dinner theater bad. Yeah, different muscles, I know, but Ringwald couldn’t even summon the meager skill and energy to charm thirtysomething the audience members who were most doggedly in her corner to begin with. She mainly just… talked quite loudly. For this reason and many others, if Hughes were to finally cede to decades-long pressure to return to some of his ’80s hitmakers, 16 Candles sure wouldn’t be the film to launch that trip down nostalgia lane. Maybe, maybe, maybe it’d be The Breakfast Club, but I still think Ferris Bueller’s Day Off would be the best candidate.
I did some interviews yesterday for Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and Luke Goss, who appears in that film under a lot of white make-up as a spear-twirling elven prince bent on Earthly domination, talked about his next movie, the just-wrapped big screen adaptation of the videogame series Tekken, helmed by Dwight Little (Murder at 1600).
“I play Steve Fox, the former leader, this crispy Tekken guy,” says Goss. “He’s not that old, actually — I say that because they surrounded me with a bunch of 21-year-olds. We filmed the fight scenes in their entirety, like 30 times, so we’d choreograph them and then go through the whole thing, which was very different than the work on Hellboy, and exhausting. And I think it’ll definitely be a hard R rating, because a lot of the fans are, [well], also crispy Tekken dudes.”
Coming two years after Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams, 1991’s City Slickers tapped into some of that big screen hit’s same listlessness and ennui, deeply felt by an aging boomer population. The story centers around New York City family man Mitch Robbins (Billy Crystal), who finds himself sort of going through the motions — he’s unhappy with his advertising job at a radio station, frets that his kids don’t respect him (little Jake Gyllenhaal makes his screen
debut as Mitch’s youngest, while Crystal’s real-life daughter Lindsay
plays his eldest screen kid), and generally feels the soul-deadening crush of impending middle-age. His wife Barbara (Patricia Wettig) wonders where the smile and spring in the step of her husband have gone.
Things are similarly screwy for Mitch’s friends: Grocery store manager Phil Berquist (Daniel Stern) finds himself teetering on the edge of divorce, while commitment-phobe Ed Furillo (Bruno Kirby) keeps intimacy at bay through habitually dating a string of much younger women. Trading their briefcases for saddlebags, the three longtime pals decide to beat a retreat from the hustle and bustle of big city life, and take a vacation together at a New Mexico theme ranch where people can live on the land and take part in cattle drives. There, under the tutelage of grizzled cowhand Curly Washburn (Jack Palance), the men locate a pinch of the wonderment of adolescence. Out of place but enthralled, they, along with an array of other vacationing city folk, learn about the Old West and themselves.
Crystal may have still been in his early 40s when City Slickers was made, but the idea of him playing a 39-year-old may be among the biggest stretches of credulity on display in this film (hence the ubiquitous Mets baseball cap his character wears, to cover his chrome dome and aid in this regard). Still, despite a few obvious set-ups (Helen Slater guests as a single gal on the same ranch trip), the script offers up a quotable skewering of colliding cultures. As directed by Ron Underwood (Tremors, The Adventures of Pluto Nash), the movie also has the benefit of solid pacing and staging; known-commodity jokes don’t linger too long, which helps still give City Slickers, all these years later, a bit of a leg up on most of its masculine-angst brethren — like Wild Hogs, which was obviously based upon this movie, at least in the loosest sense.
The special edition presentation of City Slickers, housed in a regular, plastic Amray case with cardboard slipcover, comes with a nice array of bonus material. Presented in a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen aspect ratio, it come with English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and Dolby digital stereo surround audio tracks, a Spanish language Dolby stereo surround track and a French mono mix, as well as optional English and Spanish subtitles, the latter of which instantly make the urban cowboy kvetching even funnier, in bits and spurts. An audio commentary track with director Underwood, Crystal and Stern kickstarts the affair, and it’s a genial, all-inclusive affair. Naturally, lots of kind words are reserved for Palance, who of course would go on to stake his claim on AARP virility with his famous Oscar telecast performance of a bunch of one-armed push-ups.
Four featurettes follow, all running around 10 minutes, give or take. Though all feature interview segments interspersed with clips from the the movie, one is more of a generalized making-of, with the cast and crew reminiscing specifically about production. In another, longtime writing tandem Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel also revisit their experiences, and chart how they came to be involved in the project. The remaining two featurettes are a bit more out-of-field, with “A Star is Born” showcasing the baby calf (actually several calves, of course) used in the movie, and “The Real City Slickers,” slickly packaged self-congratulation as only Hollywood can, throwing a spotlight on people who were inspired to go on a real-life cattle drive after seeing the movie. One’s mind might wander here, wondering why there wasn’t a similarly canted featurette on Must Love Dogs, about all the women inspired to try online dating when shown Diane Lane‘s hook-up with John Cusack. A clutch of deleted scenes rounds out the collection, in fine form. To purchase the movie via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B (Disc)
Robotic loneliness, love and yearning
may not seem like the most natural jumping off points for an animated
film, or any movie for that matter, but those questions were at the
heart of Wall▪E, according to director Andrew Stanton. “We
had this lunch around the time of Toy Story, in 1994, where we
were batting around any idea we could think of to try and come up
with what the next movie would be,” recalls Stanton. “One of the
half-brained sentences tossed out was, ‘What if we did the last robot
on Earth — everybody’s left and this machine just doesn’t know it
can stop?’ All the details weren’t there, there
wasn’t a name for the character and we didn’t even know what it would
look like. But it was just the loneliest scenario
I’d ever heard and I just loved it; I think that’s why it stayed in
the ether for so long.”
The yawning interim between Wall▪E‘s
inception and release, marked by some noodling around and roughly
four years of production work, have of course been filled with animated hit after hit from Pixar — nine theatrical releases in all,
and around $5 billion in ticket sales. Still, there’s no simple
formula. “We’re always trying to be different with every movie,”
says Stanton. “We’re a director-driven studio and we’re trying to
encourage and support the (director’s) vision so that every film will
be unique, and have its own taste and slant. But I knew going in that
this was more of a major unconventional film, even when we just had
the character conceit and nothing else.” For the full interview feature piece, from Reelz, click here.
A G-rated robot did battle with a slick actioner with a hard R rating this past weekend, and there was plenty of business for both. Pixar’s latest animated effort, Wall▪E, debuted to $62.5 million, while hyper-kinetic action vehicle Wanted, starring James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, tallied $51.1 million. Both films should continue to woo large audiences throughout the week and over the extended July 4 holiday, though with Will Smith’s Hancock set to invade theaters tomorrow night, in advance of its official Wednesday opening, the drop-off for Wanted could be a bit steeper.
Placing third for the weekend, Steve Carell‘s big screen action-comedy adaptation of Get Smart, which topped the box office last week, added $20 million to its coffers, pushing its domestic total to $77.3 million. Rounding out the top 10 were the animated family flick Kung Fu Panda ($11.7 million, $179.3 overall); Universal’s Edward Norton-starring reboot of The Incredible Hulk ($9.2 million, $115.6 million overall); Mike Myers’ The Love Guru ($5.4 million, $25.3 million overall); Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ($5 million, $300 million overall); writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening ($3.9 million, $59.1 million overall); Sex and the City, starring Sarah Jessica Parker, ($3.8 million, $140.1 million); and Adam Sandler’s You Don’t Mess with the Zohan ($3.2 million, $91.2 million overall).
In limited release, Kitt Kitredge: An American Girl, starring Abigail Breslin, held on five screens in advance of its nationwide bow this week, and picked up $106,000, pushing its two-week total to $449,000. The Last Mistress and the documentary Trumbo opened on a handful of screens, grossing $35,200 and $28,500, respectively. John Cusack’s sprawling satire War, Inc., meanwhile, added another $50,000 to its limited, six-week domestic haul, pushing its total theatrical gross to date to just under $410,000.
The John McCain campaign doesn’t really want his 96-year-old mother, Roberta, talking with the press, according to this James Rainey piece in the Los Angeles Times — a warm-and-fuzzy write-around that still intimates the generalized worry that old people are more likely to go off the reservation and say something crazy, or so wildly out of step with modern convention and language that it makes them seem unhinged or unkind. “They’ve got me muzzled,” says the (truly) elder McCain at one point, then adding with a chuckle: “Now, don’t you print that… I
really don’t like to be interviewed.” Later she tells Rainey, who relied on a preexisting relationship to circumvent the normal channels of interview arrangement, “Well, hon, they never said so, but I just don’t think they’re crazy about me talking to anybody.”
From the beloved, best-selling series of children’s books written by Holly Black and illustrated by Tony DiTerlizzi comes the fantasy adventure The Spiderwick Chronicles, a rangy, free-spirited and mostly enjoyable family film that brings to life in wondrous, state-of-the-art fashion a fantastical, unseen world that exists all around us. For those who devoured dime-store fantasy tales in their younger years, and dreamed up all sorts of outlandish reasons behind the strange hump of grass in your neighbor’s yard or the oddly shaped tree at the end of the block… well, this will spark memories of nostalgia, and likely win a place in the hearts of your own children, or nieces and nephews.
From the moment the Grace family, headed by exasperated single-mother-to-be Helen (Mary Louise Parker), moves into a secluded old country house, peculiar things start to happen. Unable to explain a series of accidents and strange disappearances of personal items, the three Grace children — Mallory (Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker‘s Sarah Bolger) and twin brothers Jared and Simon (both played by Freddie Highmore) — start to investigate. When one of them uncovers a manuscript hidden in the wall, the unbelievable truth of their sprawling new home and the amazing creatures that live in and around it is revealed, leading to much adventure. It turns out that 80 years ago, naturalist Arthur Spiderwick (David Strathairn) began compiling all sorts of information about fairies, sprites, hobgoblins and other fantastical creatures, and this hidden tome is the culmination of his life’s work — a text with which the evil ogre Mulgarath (Nick Nolte) could do much damage, if only he could lay hands on it.
As directed by Mark Waters (Mean Girls), The Spiderwick Chronicles doesn’t bowl one over with breathlessly ambitious scope and dazzling, dizzying, overly slick execution, so perhaps the best way to appreciate its solid charms is in the comfort of one’s own home, where it properly feels like just a nice, imaginative bedtime story come to life. Seth Rogen and Martin Short contribute voice work, and Highmore — who between this, Finding Neverland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is racking up quite the fanciful filmography — delivers two nice performances, as both the bookish, introverted Simon and the more rascally, forward-leaning Jared, most upset over his parents’ impending divorce. Overall, the movie is an engaging enough, direct-line-to-the-fanciful piece of entertainment, in the vein of Bridge to Terabithia.
The two-disc, “field guide,” special collector’s edition DVD of The Spiderwick Chronicles comes housed in a regular, plastic Amray case that is then in turn stored in a nice cardboard slipcover with a small, red, horizontal, mock-wax seal that preserves the “unbroken” integrity of the fantastical secrets that await inside. Presented
in widescreen enhanced for 16×9 TVs, the movie comes with Dolby digital
5.1 surround sound audio mixes in English, Spanish and French, and
optional subtitles for all of those languages as well. It also boasts an impressive array of behind-the-scenes featurettes, starting with the seven-minute, Waters-hosted segment “It’s All True!,” which finds the director gently pitching the movie’s back story as real, and catching audiences up on the wide variety of characters and which household items offer safety (that would be salt, though tomato sauce is also a good defense against goblins).
An introductory look at the cast and characters further delves into the genealogy and intertwined relationships of all the Spiderwick creatures (hobgoblins, above left, are part pig, part bat, part monkey, don’t you know, and you shouldn’t take their fondness for spitting in your face personally), while a nine-minute explication of the series’ back story features sit-down interviews with humble-seeming authors Black and DiTerlizzi, as well as producer Mark Canton. “Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide,” meanwhile, spotlights reprinted pages from the books, with 10 links to in-movie scenes featuring the specific, mentioned creatures, though it should be noted that this function deactivates the DVD’s subtitles options. A separate little making-of featurette spotlights the movie’s production design and cinematography, and four deleted scenes are also included. Rounding things out are Nickelodeon TV spots and preview trailers for Barnyard, Bee Movie, the new Indiana Jones DVD Collection and a couple other titles. To purchase the two-disc DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) A- (Disc)
Hey, you know what I really hate in movies, even more than insipid “jokes” involving fart sound effects? Snot rockets. And yet they’re in The Love Guru, and make the cut in the opening scene of Hancock as well. I hope this doesn’t augur a summer trend.
In a career that has spanned over 50 years as a writer, producer and director, Blake Edwards has delivered classics in nearly every genre. To that end, his varied body of work will be celebrated at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica during the month of July, with screenings of his wild comedies as well as thrillers and musicals.
Though known primarily for comedies such as The Party and The Pink Panther, Edwards exhibited mastery of the domestic melodrama (the beautiful and tragic Days of Wine and Roses), the thriller (Experiment in Terror) and the musical (Darling Lili). In the best tradition of studio-era auteurs like Howard Hawks, Edwards managed to inject distinctly personal ideas and styles into popular forms. Regardless of genre, almost all of his films share a profound interest in the complexities and difficulties of close relationships (whether between friends, lovers or colleagues) and the wide range of the human experience. In fact, Edwards’ best films often veer from humiliation and anxiety to giddy romance and celebration, all within the space of a couple of hours. I reviewed some of these movies when they hit DVD for the first time a couple years ago, as part of a collection of Edwards’ work, so I may try to slap up a couple of those reviews later next month.
Regardless, the Aero’s special retrospective kicks off on July 10 with an evening screening of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, followed the next night by a double feature of 1964’s The Pink Panther and 1975’s Return of the Pink Panther, starring Peter Sellers. The series concludes with a celebratory screening of The Great Race on Edwards’ 86th birthday, July 26. The Aero Theatre
is located at 1328 Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. Tickets for all the movies, as well as other special events, are available through Fandango, but for 24-hour recorded
information on directions and the Aero’s upcoming schedule,
phone (323) 466-FILM.
An excerpt: “I had been living in Los Angeles for about a year and was a member of
a theater company. One night, after a play, I went to a party and ran
into the playwright. He said, ‘What’s your story?’ I said, ‘I’m from St. Louis. I just got here. I want to be an actress.’ He said, ‘I’m writing a film, and I think you’d be great for it. But I
have a question for you — would you ever do a raunchy sex scene in a
movie? Like really raunchy, with nudity?’ I kind of laughed and said,
‘Well, I wouldn’t do anything I wouldn’t be proud to show my parents.’
And he said, ‘A real actress would say yes. A real actress would piss
herself on stage if that’s what it took. Sylvester Stallone did porn, Shelley Winters pissed herself on stage. Every play, every movie I
write has nudity in it. You know why? Because that’s how I know if I’m
working with real actors. You’re not a real actress. You should just go
home. You don’t have what it takes.'” Fischer then went on to say that she would now gladly urinate on Bitterman, which would be a good thing to see.
Tool-bags like Bitterman are sadly about a dollar a half-dozen in Hollywood, and I’m depressed to say that I’ve personally overheard a conversation very similar to the one above at a party. It’s a sad fact — fringe-dwelling guys and self-touting producers pull crap like this as a way to try smoke out the most impressionable and psychologically persuadable aspirant starlets out there, fresh off the bus from the Midwest. It helps them save on buying drinks, I guess.
Perpetual man-in-black John Cusack turns 41 today, so it’s a bushel of benevolent birthday wishes for him. I could point out how he attempts to singlehandedly keep the whole Reservoir Dogs look alive, but what’d be the utility or purpose in that?
The DVD cover art of Wieners, starring Saturday Night Live‘s Kenan Thompson, is a thing to behold. And by behold, I mean laugh at, in shocked awe. First there’s Thompson’s creepily airbrushed photo, with his whitened teeth and eyes, and crazily plastered, shit-eating grin, like the fifth grade yearbook picture of your school’s biggest dorky outcast. Then there’s the picture of bit player Jenny McCarthy, plunging neckline and all, standing in front of a squirting bottle of mustard (apparently something she likes to do)… you know, positioned so it’s like Thompson is splooging on her! Two other dorks stand behind McCarthy, one on each side, underneath the words “100% Pure Beef Edition!” — indicating, falsely, that there might be some other “bare bones” DVD version of this movie. All of this is inset slightly against a background photo that makes the entire case look like… wait for it… a package of hot dogs. Ha!
Directed by Mark Steilen (The Settlement), Wieners centers on Joel (Fran Kranz), a guy who falls into a serious, Forgetting Sarah Marshall-esque funk after he’s publicly humiliated and dumped by his girlfriend on popular, nationally televised talk show of host Dr. Dwayne (Darrell Hammond, offering up a confused, listless, hybrid imitation of Al Gore and Dr. Phil). Trying to save Joel from his moping, his friends Wyatt (Thompson) and Ben (Zachary Levi)
force him to join them on a cross-country road trip to seek some revenge against Dr.
Dwayne. The three guys set out across America in Wyatt’s homemade wiener mobile,
handing out free hot dogs and encountering an endless
array of oddballs, weirdos and losers — including loogie-hocking
hippies, a flipper-fingered circus freak known as Walrus Boy and Ms. Isaac (McCarthy), their
formerly hot sixth grade teacher who’s unfortunately gone to seed.
The staging here is atrocious, and the script, by Suzanne Francis and Gabe Grifoni, offers up virtually nothing except lame patter and set-ups for the next obvious joke. Wyatt’s wiener mobile is explained only by him having really wanted an Oscar Meyer internship (?), and he also nurses a pointless Charlie’s Angels fetish (“Cameron Diaz wouldn’t say that to Drew Barrymore!” he snipes at one point) that doesn’t really pay of in any rewarding way. Many miles are traveled, and Joel eventually achieves a sort of cathartic reinstitution of testicular fortitude, but there’s nothing to really recommend suffering through this. Cameos from Tenacious D member Kyle Gass (as the aforementioned Walrus Boy), Andy Milonakis and Mindy Sterling yawningly come and go, and McCarthy’s cameo is just a bit of gross-out stunt casting. If she’s a secret crush of your’s, just do a quick Google search and you’ll feel much better than if you rent this.
Wieners comes housed in a regular plastic Amray case, presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English, Thai, Portuguese and Spanish audio tracks in Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound, and a French language track in Dolby stereo surround. Optional subtitles in the above-mentioned languages are also included, along with Chinese. There no supplemental bonus features — unless one counts outtakes under the end credits, or previews for Meatballs, The Cottage, Starship Troopers 3 and a half dozen other flicks — or pleas of forgiveness from those involved. For a clip of the movie, click here. To purchase it via Amazon, meanwhile, or at least just glimpse that stupid damn cover, click here. D- (Movie) D (Disc)
So actor Stephen Baldwin sure doesn’t do much to chip away at the Democrats’
built-in Hollywood advantage in this clip from Fox News from a couple days ago, in which
he dismisses the claim that John McCain represents a third Bush term as “the
most stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” Tip of the cap to Politico for the grab…
Wall▪E, Pixar’s latest animated cash-cow-in-waiting, is two
parts robot love story, one part cautionary Mother Earth tale. Well,
unless you listen to director Andrew Stanton, who seems eager to
position his movie in as neutered and apolitical a light as possible,
lest GOP ticket-buyers think it’s part of some secret, liberal
Hollywood agenda. For the full read, from New York Magazine’s Vulture, click here.
The latest brawny, slick, slow-motion-fed shoot-’em-up to air-quote reinvent the action genre, Wanted is a hyper-stylized swirl of color, outlandish gunplay, acrobatic escape sequences and punishing sound design. It will titillate and enthuse a young, rabid (and overwhelmingly male) fan base for the summer, doing big box office business and leaving a deep international footprint. And then, like The Big Hit or Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever or Aeon Flux, it will disappear with a gentle plunk!, to be not much thought about outside of its fan-boy base until it pops up on cable television some drizzly evening 10 years hence.
Directed by Timur Bekmambetov, the Russian filmmaker behind Night Watch and its 2006 follow-up, Day Watch, the highest-grossing native movie of all time in his homeland, Wanted is based on a series of comic books by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones. Filmed in Prague against a panoply of architectural styles, the movie centers around Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), an accountant who leads a droning office existence (a la Office Space, and The Matrix), and is so non-confrontational that he can’t even bring himself to dump his girlfriend, a harridan who’s cheating on him with his equally insincere and duplicitous best friend.
Wesley’s life gets turned upside down when hit-woman Fox (Angelina Jolie) crashes into him on the business end of a smoking gun, and informs Wes that his presumed long-dead father was actually an elite-level killer just recently cut down by the vengeful Cross (Thomas Kretschmann). Escaping a rubout from the latter, Fox whisks Wes away and introduces him to the not-very-originally-named Fraternity, a secret, thousand-year-old sect of assassins derived from… weavers? Yes, honestly. Leader Sloan (Morgan Freeman) then explains that they “keep the order and balance” by bumping off individuals whose names are spit out from a loom, encoded in binary form by whether certain strands lay above or below other stitching. (Seriously, one can’t make this stuff up.) Drawn into the Fraternity, Wes learns to slow down and focus the 400-heartbeats-per-minute panic attacks that besiege him, all as he trains to seek revenge against Cross.
As shot by Transformers cinematographer Mitchell Amundsen, Wanted is an anthology of eye-popping steeplechases and nutso special effects, with characters leaping across city streets and flipping cars to fire guns down through the top of open sunroofs. It’s extreme and willfully over-the-top, in other words. It’s also very well put together, powered by special effects from Bekmambetov’s own visual effects house in Moscow. Several of the action scenes (Fox scooping up Wes in a red Viper, saving him from Cross; a train-set sequence which concludes in crashing fashion on a bridge between two steep cliffs) get the blood pumping. There are also cool visual conceits — like a waxy rejuvenation chamber which heals bruises, cuts and apparently bullet and knife wounds as well — and an exacting sense of each of the main characters’ presentations. “Toil” and “Tears” read the tattoos on the insides of Fox’s arms, accompanied by a string of ones and zeroes on her left wrist, presumably the code for some long-past target of special importance.
The problem is a matter of rootedness. Wanted aims to position itself as an outrageous slice of aspirant pop-cinema, about the transformation of a “nobody” into an unparalleled enforcer of justice; indeed, part of the direct-address marketing campaign touts the fact that “six weeks ago I was just like you.” The inspirations for the source material, and its cinematic translation, are fairly obvious, from Star Wars to The Matrix and Fight Club. A bigger part of the problem, though, is that the movie never convincingly sells us on its tone, and setting. Keanu Reeves’ transformation into Neo in The Matrix worked because of the differentiation established between two worlds. Here, everything is angled, and “extreme,” right down to Wes’ obese, grotesque boss (Lorna Scott), who could be something out of a Tim Burton film, or maybe even a Dr. Seuss book.
Centuries of presumed Fraternity customs, traditions, codes and the like are boiled down to vague directives (“Like an apostle, your task is not to interpret, but deliver”) and even vaguer overall motivations, and Bekmambetov can’t stop himself from pitching things at an ironic angle. Bits like the rejuvenation chamber, meanwhile, notwithstanding their visual appeal, render large chunks of the action wholly irrelevant. The movie also ends on a needlessly nasty and condescending note, with a direct-address dismissal of its core viewership.
Wanted isn’t lastingly odious or offensive — in its own warped way, it’s perfectly serviceable for what it is — but it is emblematic of what I like to think of as Cinema of the Now, which is to say films that answer to no greater sense or discipline than what works in the moment. Entertainment like that can wash over one pleasantly at times, but it isn’t ever a cleansing rain. Nor a particularly memorable one. (Universal, R, 108 minutes)
I chatted with Jenna Fischer a while back, in advance of the sadly aborted release of The Promotion, and she confirmed that The Office was a dream gig for her in more ways than the obvious. “I was a secretary for five years in various offices and I loved it,” says Fischer. “I always thought if I didn’t have a career in acting, I’d want to be the secretary to the President of the United States. Like, what is the biggest job you can shoot for as an assistant? I think I can do it, I can anticipate his or her needs!”
Here she laughs a bit, then continues. “I really did like it, though. I like filing, I like organizing things — not in my personal life, but I love going to work and working on an Excel spreadsheet. My Christmas list is on an Excel spreadsheet — any reason to make an Excel spreadsheet! But really, I like offices, and I like office work, so to get an acting job set in an office was like my dream come true — they combine my two loves. Even now, if you take to a Staples, I’ll get lost in there. The sheer variety of Post-It notes is amazing to me.”
Not everything in Fischer’s occupational past is peaches and cream, though. “I didn’t like catering very much — catering is so weird. I was always offended when people would look right through me, like I was a moving prop of food, but then I didn’t want anyone talking to me either,” says Fischer. “I was like, ‘Please don’t ask me any questions, don’t ask me what’s in it, I’m just going to make it up.’ I was always very grouchy as a caterer. If I was at a wedding and everyone [is getting] chicken, just don’t ask for the sauce on the side, just don’t. Because I don’t want to have to walk back to the kitchen and get sauce in a little cup and remember where you’re sitting, because you look like every other person at every other wedding that I’ve done for the past two years. So I was very grouchy, but as a result, when I’m at an event that is catered, I do not ask for my sauce on the side. I am polite but not too chatty with the staff, because I’ve been there.”
After suffering heavy losses of aircraft during attacks on German factories, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered — or at least allowed — cities to be targeted, in order to smash German morale and reduce the number of workers available for the Nazi war machine. Roughly 500,000 German civilians were killed as almost one-and-a-half million incendiary bombs turned the center of cities like Hamburg and Dresden into tornadoes of fire. Sixty years later, a new debate is underway over the reasons for this lethal bombing campaign. Were these relentless aerial attacks — many of which came in 1945, in the war’s waning days — a necessary tactic? Or was it an act of revenge by the British and Americans? Michael Kloft’s 2003 documentary Firestorm examines this issue, in fascinating if somewhat distracted fashion.
Kloft has a vast array of historical footage at his disposal (maybe too much), and it’s this material that forms the backbone of Firestorm. There are also plenty of interviews with former bomber pilots and survivors of the destruction too — from British bombardier John Chatterton, now an 83-year-old farmer, to American pilot Robert Morgan, whose B-17 “Memphis Belle” provided Hollywood filmmaker William Wyler with the first color footage of an American bombing run of Germany. The recollections these subjects provide, and the film’s exacting sense of detail with respect to the chronological escalation of this so-called moral bombing (euphemistically referred to by the British as a “de-housing of the industrial suburbs”), give the movie a genuine sense of engagement.
Yet Firestorm isn’t really a sustained moral inquisition. In German historian Joerg Friedrich and British counterpart Richard Overy, Kloft has two compelling advocates for at-odds points-of-view. But he doesn’t contrast these opinions and disagreements over matters factual and moral as directly as he should, and too often fritters away the heavy ethical lifting with digressive asides, like ducking into (some admittedly hilarious) footage from a National Socialist Party firefighting training video. The film would also benefit from a slightly more academic explanation of the British and American research that actually informed saturation incendiary bombing — how British Air Chief Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris plotted for the roofs of buildings to be first blown off, and then peppered with small stick bombs that would shoot flames after the initial explosions, burning for only 10 to 15 minutes but, in sum, overwhelming German firefighting capabilities. This wasn’t accidental collateral damage, in other words — this was truly a scorched-Earth policy. Knowing the specifics of the research that informed this policy would be interesting.
A lot of Firestorm is preamble, though perhaps necessarily. It’s only in its introduction and its final 25 minutes or so — detailing the bombings of Hamburg and Mainz, and then the fire-bombings of Berlin, Dresden and another port city in Eastern Germany, full of refugees — that the movie truly examines some of the more controversial bombings of World War II. If a debate about moral equivalence is mostly avoided, though, that doesn’t mean the film doesn’t put those questions in your mind.
Housed in a regular Amray case, Firestorm is presented in 1.33:1 full screen, and comes with eight minutes of (silent) amateur film footage of a bombed-out Germany in ruins. There’s also a scrollable text biography of Kloft, who from 1989 to 1995 worked as a
freelance director of historical TV documentaries for Chronos-Film in
Berlin and for Spiegel TV, and has since personally produced a variety of historical
films in addition to serving as the head of Spiegel TV History. Extra interview material would have been nice, but for history buffs this title is still a solid, meat-and-potatoes kind of meal. To purchase the film on DVD, click here. B (Movie) B- (Disc)
