Ian Somerhalder has eyebrows that will always guarantee his employment in certain types of straight-to-DVD titles. I first noticed this in The Rules of Attraction, in which he seemed to play the surliest, most outrageous Abercrombie & Fitch model of all time. There’s just something about his eyes, the depth of his stubble and, most certainly and strikingly, the definition and angle of those peeper-toppers that make Somerhalder, formerly of Lost, the perfect “get” for the producers of swashbuckling genre movies that can’t quite get Matthew McConaughey to return their phone calls. Like Casper van Dien before him, Somerhalder has a dependable, soap opera-level skill set and matinee idol looks, meaning he can comfortably draw TV and movie-of-the-week paychecks for the next quarter-century easily, recession be damned. Ladies like that look, and he obviously puts in enough time in the gym to keep things working.
Wait… what were we talking about? Oh, right… the inherently employable features of Somerhalder’s visage. Which brings us to Lost City Raiders, a paint-by-numbers genre exercise to be sold off to foreign TV networks looking to pad their weekend schedules. The plot? In the near future, global warming has caused water levels rise to unfathomable heights, destroying port cities and consuming more than half of all land. With matters only getting worse, two treasure-hunting brothers (Somerhalder and Jamie Thomas King) must team up with their daring father John (James Brolin) to retrieve a lost artifact that will restore Earth to what it once was. Also in pursuit of said artifact is callous, brutal real estate tycoon Nicholas Filminov (Ben Cross), who really should change his name if he wants his villainy to be less conspicuous. With Al Gore nowhere in sight but eye candy Giovanna Becker (Bettina Zimmerman) thankfully in tow, brothers Jack and Thomas find themselves in a race against time to save the world from its end days.
In promotional text on the DVD’s cover, Marshall Fine is credited with tagging Lost City Raiders as “Waterworld meets Raiders of the Lost Ark,” which is accurate only in the broadest sense of that mash-up — there is an archeological-based quest, and lots of water. Not surprisingly, the special effects work here isn’t quite up to snuff with the sort of material with which master-of-disaster Roland Emmerich stuffs his frames, and consequently those predisposed to really get into and off on the material will likely find their fanboy enthusiasm dampened from the start. All in all, though, this is just a shrug — no better or worse than it sounds, or one might reasonably expect, given its players, production means and storyline. Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Lost City Raiders comes to DVD presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English and Spanish subtitles. A gallery of preview trailers is the only supplemental feature. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) D (Disc)
The gut-level fit of ensembles mean almost everything for Hollywood studio laffers, and John Cusack, Craig Robinson, Rob Corddry and Clark Duke make for a sweet cocktail of laughter in the trailer, now online, for high-concept comedy Hot Tub Time Machine, releasing in March from MGM. It seems like The Hangover cross-pollinated with Dude, Where’s My Car? and a pinch of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
Holding a copy of Inalienable in my hand, the first thing that crosses my mind is that whole argument over the word (i.e., inalienable versus unalienable) that, according to some long-forgotten secondary source from high school history, nearly caused a dust-up between Thomas Jefferson and another one of the Founding Fathers (John Adams?) during the penning of the Declaration of Independence. That amusing anecdotal remembrance and all its what-if off-shoots, unfortunately, is of more entertainment value than anything in Inalienable — a weird, pedantic, sci-fi courtroom/social drama which could also be called My Octopus Son.
Science-fiction legend Walter Koenig, of the original Star Trek, is the writer-actor most responsible for this mess, though Timequest writer-director Robert Dyke helps him carry out the celluloid crime by helming, and staging scenes with the unimaginative flatness of some moralizing sketch from a small town bank’s Christmas party. The production was obviously mightily strapped for cash (hence the ridiculously spare production design, which results in unadorned hallways and entire offices and “scientific” research areas free of anything except gaudy metal furniture), but that doesn’t excuse the lame dialogue, flatly sketched characters and oscillating tone. Inalienable wants to explore the intersection of science and moral justice (hence the comparisons to slave-era blood laws, and the dubious, unintentionally hilarious invocation of the word octoroon), but Koenig never makes convincing case that he’s the best party for that job.
The story? Oh, right. Sorry. It centers on Dr. Eric Norris (Richard Hatch… no, not that jack-off), a scientist who discovers his body is host to a parasite from another world. With the shocking revelation that this microscopic intruder also carries his DNA, Norris confronts the possibility that he might give “birth” to a new son to replace the one lost in a tragic accident years earlier. Flash forward a bit, and Norris, his lawyer Howard Ellis (Erick Avari), and this new, tentacled fusion of human and alien find themselves at the center of legal battle involving Norris’ dickish boss, Shilling (Koenig).
Owing to Koenig’s avuncular sci-fi status, Inalienable boasts a recognizable cast of mostly genre favorites: Battlestar Galatica‘s Hatch, Avari and Star Trek: The Next Generation alumnus Marina Sirtis, in addition to Alan Ruck, Richard Herd and Gary Graham. But the screenplay is an emotionally half-baked collection of capital-I ideas and scenarios, all just shoved up against one another. There’s the awkward romance between Norris and much younger coworker Amanda (Courtney Peldon), in an effort to give the movie some domestic mooring. There’s the desperate infusion of a reckless, fear-mongering press, to try to give the story some social depth. And then there’s the genre “sizzle” — the special effects that, in the words of Butt-head (or was it Beavis?), just aren’t that special. These include practical creature effects for Norris’ son that make him look like a cardboard Hellboy. None of this works, sorry. Multiple “FAILS,” across the board.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a complementary, foil “O-card” slipcover, Inalienable comes presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen aspect ratio, with a Dolby digital 2.0 audio track. Its static main menu screen features a weird (and factually inaccurate, given the rest of the narrative) Photoshopping of Peldon holding said octopus baby, and the feature is divided into a dozen separate chapters. A version of the film’s trailer is the sole bonus item; no one wants to step forward and take credit for the birthing of this Inalienable baby, it seems. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D- (Movie) D (Disc)
I’m sort of torn when it comes to musician-turned-director Rob Zombie; in a landscape littered with genre fakers, filmmakers who seemingly embrace affect for no other reason than to simply further their careers, he’s a not-untalented guy who comes across as the genuine article, and someone who obviously has a well-honed knowledge and appreciation of the exploitation and horror genres in which he likes to trade, as the unrelentingly brutal The Devil’s Rejects amply demonstrates. Visually and tonally, he’s made savvy use of his devil’s minion image, finding a way to marry that tattooed, “hellbilly,” devil-may-care outsider sensibility to the film projects — derided limited release castoffs at first, but increasingly commercial fare — he’s managed to mount.
The plot doesn’t take us too far afield; it’s that time of year again, and adolescent killer turned hulking slasher Michael Myers (Tyler Mane), powered on by visions of his mom Deborah (Sheri Moon Zombie), has returned home to sleepy Haddonfield, Illinois, to take care of some unfinished family business. Picking up at the end of Zombie’s first film, with a dead Myers in hand, Halloween II concocts a resurrection/car crash escape, and then flashes forward a bit, following the aftermath of Myers’ latest murderous rampage through the eyes of heroine Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor Compton), who herself is suffering from trauma, nightmares and possibly delusions. While Sheriff Lee Brackett (Brad Dourif) tries to protect both his daughter, Annie (Danielle Harris), and Laurie, who is living with them, things go terribly wrong, naturally. Myers’ antagonist/surrogate father figure, Dr. Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), is also back (and nuttier than ever), having penned a new cash-in book on his famous patient.
Zombie is hellbent on trying to make the body counts in his movies mean something, but all the merry depravity and over-the-top gore in this film (unsurprisingly, it was not screened for critics) doesn’t particularly aid one in a more sophisticated reading of its narrative. What Zombie is good for is a certain collagist sensibility that is refreshingly out of lockstep with modern horror conventions; he’s also not afraid to let our putative heroes, or more redemptive characters, show a nasty side, or dark streak. That makes his narrative miscalculations in both armchair psychology and churned-up viscera (the more violent the killing of an innocent or passerby, the more deeply an audience will feel it, he seems to posit) all the more disappointing. His touch with actors also seems uneven; Compton is allowed to rant and rave to the point of drama class embarrassment, and various over-articulated, spat-out iterations of the word “fuck” are liberally sprinkled throughout the dialogue, which has the weird effect of giving greater dramatic heft to small arguments over larger scenes of physical imperilment. Taken together, Zombie’s Halloween films achieve a certain air-quote modernity, in that they are gritty, vulgar, and showcase an analytical preoccupation with cause not present in slasher films of years gone by. They do not, however, haunt or unnerve like John Carpenter’s original films.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Halloween II comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track that captures the sounds of plunging knives and bloodcurdling screams with sickening volume and clarity. The ample slate of supplemental material makes for slow navigation on most DVD players, with several seconds elapsing between many menu screen selections. A hearty collection of deleted and extended scenes, 25 minutes worth, seems to run counter to the assertions of slashed scheduling and fine-tooth comb budget consciousness that Zombie mentions in his audio commentary track (more on that in a moment), but you have that material if you want it; a lot of it is of the slightly tweaked variety, with a couple clipped, inessential (often vulgar) dialogue exchanges within a given scene. There is also audition footage, make-up test footage, a couple music videos and a bit of stand-up routine footage (seriously — it’s part of an outdoor festival that figures into the movie’s final act), in addition to the requisite collection of preview trailers. Oh, and there’s also a scored, four-and-a-half-minute blooper reel, which includes footage of McDowell eating it outdoors, tripping on a branch, as well as Dourif giving the slow burn to a day-player who fails to hear her cue for entrance.
As mentioned, there’s also an engaging (and, naturally, spoiler-heavy) feature-length audio commentary track with Zombie, who talks about the movie’s Georgia shoot, and explains how the loss of several scheduled filming days informed some of his choices, most notably in two third act chase/kill sequences, in which he uses a cross dissolve and slow motion to skip ahead from Myers’ final two kills. He also shares a couple amusing anecdotes, including one about how balsa wood was apparently trimmed from the budget, leaving a very pissed-off Mane to get in touch with his inner method actor, and break through a real door. Most explicitly, though, I’m sorry to say, for my friend Luke, Zombie dismisses the notion that his movie is a paranoid fantasy of any sort. Yes, he says, the film is about Laurie’s increasingly tenuous grasp on reality (hence the kiddie version of Michael that she hallucinates at film’s end), but in Zombie’s mind, it was always his intention to show that Laurie dies, and that that is the closure of the homicidal Myers narrative. The final shots in the movie do not represent an institutionalized flash-forward, but a dying Laurie’s attempt to sort through her family scrapbook, and make peace with it. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) B- (Disc)
He incorrectly swore I gave a negative review to 2001’s Conspiracy (on which he was an executive producer) when I met him, but I can’t be mad at 84-year-old, Oscar-winning screenwriter Frank Pierson, who will appear in person for a Q&A conversation at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica following a special screening of Dog Day Afternoon on the evening of Thursday, January 28. The Aero Theatre is located at 1328 Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. Tickets for this, 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.
It is now not a matter of if but rather only when Avatarwill unseat Titanic as the highest-grossing film of all time, according to The Wrap, besting the latter’s $1.84 billion global haul. Does this mean Hollywood will take note of the fact that it is an original story, without the putative source material/fanbase safety net of a comic book or videogame title? No, not at all. Hollywood will spark only to its 3-D exhibition, because that is something they can implement in piecemeal fashion, in lieu of actually taking more creative chances.
Ben Foster and Dennis Quaid headline Pandorum, an effectively moody but also fairly frustrating sci-fi mash-up of Supernova, Event Horizon and Cube, among other films. A more action-oriented cousin of spare, fellow paranoid space opera Moon, Pandorum could slot decently as part of a double-dip couch festival with that movie, depending on one’s level of interest in either slipping into something spooky and meditative after a well intentioned but essentially romper-style genre flick that feels shruggingly compelled to include snarling beasties, or vice versa.
The latest collaborative effort by Robert Kulzer, Jeremy Bolt and Paul
W. S. Anderson, the producers behind the hugely successful Resident Evil movie franchise, Pandorum — like Unknown, Cube and the basic plot hook for the original Saw — revolves around people who wake up in strange places, and in various stages of pain, abuse and amnesia. In the year 2174, two astronauts, Bower (Foster) and Payton (Quaid), awaken in a hyper-sleep chamber aboard a massive, seemingly
abandoned spacecraft known as the Elysium. They’re massively disoriented, and the only sound
is a low rumble and creak from the belly of the ship. Trying to piece together bits of their own respective identities along with mission specifics, Bower ventures deep into the ship, with Payton staying behind to guide him via radio transmitter.
Before too long, however, Bower comes across some nasty, pale, toothy creatures who, unsurprisingly, do not have much of a penchant for cultural dialogue, or even exchanging pleasantries. These mysterious creatures — where did they come from, Bower wonders — are lightning-quick, and they like to kill, even if they don’t seem entirely carnivorous. In scrambling for his life, Bower comes across Nadia (Antje Traue) and Manh (Cung Le), and the three of them form an uneasy alliance, continuing their trek deeper into the Elysium.
Directed with a nice attention to background detail by German-born Christian Alvart, who traded in similarly grim subject matter in his underappreciated 2005 film Antibodies, Pandorum is an interesting study in contrasts. Much of the tech-jargon dialogue (“The reactor timing is offset in the core!”) and all the get-to-the-center-of-the-ship plot mechanics are yawningly familiar, to the point of almost paralyzing disinterest. And yet the movie is constructed with such style, and makes use of a couple nice slick directorial tricks, that it keeps you leaning forward a bit, always wanting to like it a bit more than you in the moment are, but never entirely giving up on it. The engaging authenticity of the film’s settings and production design — which nip piecemeal inspiration from some of the aforementioned genre efforts, but also movies like Dark City — go a long way toward holding an audience’s interest.
It’s just a shame, really, that Pandorum seems almost bound by convention to include such a clamorous external threat. This is by far the least successful and intriguing portion of the movie, in large part because Alvart and company have neither the budget to replicate the creature effects of an Aliens film, nor the imagination of someone like Guillermo del Toro, who can stage memorably unsettling and fantastical scenes for a fraction of the normal Hollywood cost. Part of the film’s initial appeal relies in its use of unreliable narrators, and in this way, it feels a bit like a jumbled-up, madcap, recast take on The Shining, which put eroding sanity and the effects of extreme isolation under the microscope. Pandorum starts to be this type of film, and fitfully returns to this theme, but it’s an ill-designed and ultimately unsuccessful match, on a cathartic narrative level, with a lot of what else is included in the story.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Pandorum comes to DVD presented in a 2:35:1 widescreen aspect ratio, with Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. DVD special features are ample, anchored by a feature-length audio commentary track with director Alvart and producer Jeremy Bolt, in which the pair discuss Alvart’s late-in-the-game, pre-production idea of depicting the effects of years of hyper-sleep via sloughing skin, as well as the special challenges involved for Foster in crafting a performance out of reacting to Quaid’s disembodied voice, since more than half of his material was prerecorded, before the younger actor’s scenes.
The DVD also includes 16 deleted and alternate scenes, which run a total of 28 minutes, though there’s additionally a separate four-and-a-half-minute featurette, “What Happened to Nadia’s Team?,” that in actuality is an excised, direct-address in-character bit. Running 14 minutes, a behind-the-scenes featurette includes some solid interviews with both on-camera talent and director Alvart, who talks about blending together Travis Milloy’s original screenplay with an entirely separate yet thematically similar script that he was working on when producers first approached him about the project. After a brief, pointless “flight team training video,” a robust slate of picture galleries, including everything from pre-production storyboards, model work and conceptual monster sketches to on-set photographs, rounds out the material, along with the theatrical trailer and sneak peeks at five other forthcoming Anchor Bay DVD releases. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)
Old-ish news by just a couple days, but the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, in a poll of its members, has tabbed David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. as the Film of the Decade. Carving out a Top 10 list in any given year is tough, but picking from a decade’s worth of cinematic masterpieces is an especially brutalexercise. It’s always interesting to see how past favorites rise andfall in favor, and the personal unit of measurement in undertaking suchan endeavor is invariably subjective: Are they the films whose craftyou most admire, or those you most revisit? Are they films withpowerfully moving closed-circuit narratives, or need they leave youwith much to ponder?
I think the breadth of LAFCA‘s polling reflects the catholic tastes andintellectual engagement of our membership, but in so many ways Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. is an especially appropriate choice as Film ofthe Decade, and not only because it captures in elliptical fashion the polarizing extremes of life in Los Angeles. A beautiful, woozy mystery for the id, portions of itsmeaning are readily apparent, while others dance along its edges,deliciously up for substantive argument and debate — which is part ofwhat we as film critics love, after all. For some interesting reading/skimming, the full list of all 190 films receiving votes on 41 member ballots, as well as individual critic lists, is available by clicking here. Happy perusing!
Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize winner Fish Tank, from British writer-director Andrea Arnold, is a gritty, naturalistic drama that will slowly envelop patient arthouse audiences on the strength of its powerhouse performances. A slice of social realism in the vein of Ken Loach, this slow-boil, Essex-set tale of teen alienation and acting out is an example of character study done right.
Fifteen-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis, above) is in a constant state of war with her younger sister, her schoolmates and neighbors, without any constructive creative outlet for her considerable energies, save a secret love of hip-hop dancing. When her party-happy mother Joanne (Kierston Wareing), an across-the-pond version of Amy Ryan’s character from Gone Baby Gone, brings home a rakish new boyfriend, Connor (Inglourious Basterds‘ Michael Fassbender), the rudderless Mia is quietly amazed to find him return her attention. In fits and starts, she argumentatively pushes him away and seeks his approval, believing he can help her start to make sense of her life. Slippery slope inappropriateness ensues.
In Fish Tank, there’s none of the vanity so typically associated with American films centered on teen protagonists, and the performances are something special. Acting neophyte Jarvis shines, conveying a believable spitfire mixture of teen vulnerability and anger, while the charismatic Fassbender, a star in the making, puts a good sheen on a character whose actions label him a cad. At two hours, Fish Tank is a bit overlong, but part of its engagement lies in the inexorably mounting tension in wondering whether the narrative is really going where you think it might be headed. It goes without saying that Hollywood studios wouldn’t touch this material without benefit of a moralizing conclusion, but the American indie version of this story would also most likely find it necessary to ascribe explicatory backstory, motivation or revelation to Connor, which Arnold rather refreshingly does not. Men, like adolescents, Arnold seems to say, tend to take. The value judgment one places on that is not her primary concern. For more information, click here. (IFC, R, 122 minutes)
I weigh in as part of Vulture’s 43-critic sampling of the worst of film in 2009, with a from-the-hip ballot of five movies that supremely irked and rankled me. There are more, sure, but those are the ones that most came to mind when polled, perhaps because I skipped The Ugly Truth and Old Dogs. And hey, I even make the pull quote chart at Number Two, for their slideshow of the top 10 worst vote-getters.
Over at The Wrap, Steve Pond has up a nice interview with Louie Psihoyos, director of The Cove, which gets into details regarding the movie’s screening at the Tokyo Film Festival, and delves into the continuing fight regarding tainted marine mammal meat, and mercury poisoning levels.
I skipped Jennifer’s Body during its theatrical run, even with all the photos of Megan Fox in pasties and what not making their way around the internet. Perhaps appropriate, then, that as Jennifer’s Body arrives on DVD, I’m sent a review check disc that haphazardly skips around entire chapters, rendering any viewing of it some sort of crazy Memento-type experience. I tried viewing its two different iterations (theatrical cut versus unrated) on three different players, but the problems persisted throughout, so I finally just gave up and skipped to the end, probably catching in total 85 percent of the movie, with a few bits here and there out of order, or at least spoiled by said skip-glitches.
The film’s plot centers around “plain Jane” high schooler Needy (Amanda Seyfried) and her va-voomish best friend Jennifer (Fox), a fembot-type cheerleader in the small town of Devil’s Kettle. Ditching Needy’s boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons, of Hotel for Dogs) for the evening, the pair head out to see a visiting band fronted by Nikolai (Adam Brody, sporting guy-liner and having a blast); tragedy ensues, in the form of a fire that kills many of their classmates. Needy and Jennifer are separated, and when the latter turns up, she’s possessed by a sinister demon that requires frequent blood to keep her looking fresh and beautiful. Jennifer
Playing around a bit with both horror movie conventions and the hormonal spikes and surges of its adolescent male audience, Jennifer’s Body is scripted by Oscar-winning Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody, which of course means all sorts of outrageous details (9/11 “tribute shooters” at a bar) and over-articulated sassy dialogue, wherein jealous is slangified to “Jello.” Sometimes this works, but it also leads to false/hollow exclamations (“Oh cheese fries!”) that undercut the drama within scenes, however exaggerated their construction. In general, there’s some fun here, but under the direction of Karyn Kusama (Aeon Flux) it doesn’t seem to cohere in a meaningful way, either as an all-out Heathers-style satire or a more bloody genre-fueled take on the memes of Mean Girls, in which feminine competitiveness renders tumult upon relationships.
There are bonus features galore on double-disc and Blu-ray versions of the film — supposedly including deleted scenes, a gag reel, video diaries and a Megan Fox public service announcement, among other tidbits — but the review disc I received included only the aforementioned widescreen theatrical and extended cut versions of the film. The latter has a feature-length audio commentary track with Kusama, while the former has a separate audio commentary track with both Kusama and Cody. Naturally, more fun is had with some interplay, even if Kusama’s assertion that the script is about “facile ambition, and how that’s totally evil” comes off as a bit dubious. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie, Somewhat Speculatively) C+ (Disc)
Does anyone doubt that if Barack Obama had not been elected president in 2008, The Book of Eli would have a slightly fairly different advertising campaign, one that did not involve character-specific posters and billboards that make the entreaty to “believe in hope”?
Martial arts maestro Jackie Chan makes a play for adolescent embrace in The Spy Next Door, a mirthless, unimaginative piece of desultory entertainment that is neither well executed enough to elicit any substantive emotional response other than begrudging tolerance, nor hyper-realistic enough to work as a slice of silly, colorful fun, a la Robert Rodriguez’s recent Shorts. The Spy Next Door will benefit from a general lack of family film competition in the latter frames of January, but its poor word-of-mouth among Chan’s Stateside fans, familiar with the slightly more adult tones of his Rush Hour and Shanghai series, will quickly consign its best commercial prospects to home video.
The movie suffers from anemic follow-through on its most basic comedic set-ups, as well as an overall lack of imagination. While one blanches at passing too harsh a judgment on a film’s adolescent performances, the unfocused and uneven nature of the child acting further evidences Brian Levant’s poor direction. Chan, meanwhile, mugs mercilessly. The jokes all misfire, but there’s still something mildly amusing about Chan’s indefatigable effort and consistently sunny personality, which helps make the English-mangling outtakes which play over the end credits the film’s undisputed high point. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Lionsgate, PG, 94 minutes)
With another $13.3 million on Friday and an estimated $40 million-plus over the weekend, Avatar, going into its fourth week of release, will pass Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen as the top domestic release. It’s now getting into heavily retrenched and/or typically disinterested audiences; I’ve been asked about it by bus drivers, deliverymen and, yes, a homeless guy.
It’s to be expected, really. As Amy Adams climbs the Hollywood ladder, and slots alongside dramas and prestige projects the sort of inevitable romantic comedy slop that studios believe women want to see, she’s going to be required to tread water in a few stinkers. Not every film that’s a studio “giveback” can be as enchanting and engaging as Enchanted, which actually had a premise, characters and smartly presented, believable conflict, within the confines of its world of heightened absurdity.
Yes, some movies are going to be like Leap Year, an undercooked confection which can most charitably be described as a moment-in-time measuring stick for how many box office dollars Adams can wring out of her burgeoning fanbase without alienating them into tuning out and ignoring her future choices. By attaching the “Sadie Hawkins” conceit to a mock Irish tradition — in which women are “allowed” to propose to dawdling boyfriends once every four years, on the Leap Day of February 29 — the movie at least becomes a bit of a travelogue, in the visual sense. There’s precious little else to recommend it, however.
Adams stars as Anna, a successful Bostonite property “stager” who is happy but feels a bit restless in her four-year relationship with surgeon boyfriend Jeremy (Adam Scott). They’re moving in together into an exclusive apartment community, but their anniversary passes without a marriage proposal, much to her consternation. When Jeremy’s work pulls him away to Ireland for a conference, Anna decides to traipse after him to get down on one knee herself, and pop the question. Waylaid by inconsiderate weather, however, Anna finds her airplane diverted from Dublin to a smaller burgh, where she must enlist the assistance of surly but handsome innkeeper/bartender Declan (Matthew Goode) to help get her to the big city. Naturally, romantic complications and second-guessing ensue.
Directed by Anand Tucker (Hilary and Jackie, Shopgirl), Leap Year is a film with warm, soft, rounded edges on all sides, designed to rake in modest eight-figure returns from undemanding audiences who just want to see a couple good-looking kids get together. The script, credited to Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont, endeavors to whip up some romantic chemistry by having Declan peg Anna as snooty and she regard him as provincial, but Bringing Up Baby or even Moonlighting this most assuredly isn’t. The quips, while delivered with zest, simply aren’t up to snuff. So what we have are two people bickering at one another through rain and mud while, given largely the absence of other people their own age, they fall for another. Modest points are credited for an attempt at a modulated ending that doesn’t favor grand-sweep romanticism over any degree of sensibleness… but only modest points.
Mostly, though, this is all just a big shrug. Goode gets to add another accent to his grabbag. And Adams again displays an uncanny skill with small gestures; she knows how to convey inner uncertainty and subtle shifts in mood that many screenwriters needlessly labor over and overwrite. Unfortunately, the considerable charms of her company can’t sustain Leap Year, which, despite its name, putters along like any other normal, workaday cinematic offering, not a quadrennial breath of fresh air. (Universal, PG, 100 minutes)
In everything from Arrested Development to big screen hits Superbad and Juno, Michael Cera has traded mainly in self-negating humor and muttered, sardonic asides. He shakes loose of that character template (well, partially, at least) in Youth in Revolt, a picaresque booster shot of wily irreverence that puts a fresh, outrageous spin on adolescent obsession and rebellion.
Based on the acclaimed novel by C.D. Payne, and brought to the screen with flair by Miguel Arteta — who injects stop motion animation into the opening credits and works in a splashy palette of primary colors — the film stars Cera as Nick Twisp, an affable, artistically inclined, shoe-gazing teenager who doesn’t feel at home with either of his divorced parents (Jean Smart and Steve Buscemi). On vacation with his mom and her loser boyfriend, Nick falls hopelessly in love with the beautiful, free-spirited Sheeni (charming newcomer Portia Doubleday, above right). After he’s forced to return home, Nick abandons his buttoned-up niceties and, at Sheeni’s urging, initiates a campaign of revolt to try to get shipped off to stay with his father, closer to his new crush.
Certain elements of the story here don’t totally connect (the perfectly polite Sheeni’s encouragement of Nick’s pursuit despite the fact that she has a boyfriend, for instance), and the concluding narration reaches for a grand stab at self-actualization that isn’t there. Still, all the performances are terrifically funny, and the dialogue is smart and crackling without tipping over into the hyper-articulate style of Juno that that so rankled some.
The film most catches fire when it grants Cera permission to cut loose with “supplementary persona” Francois Dillinger, a mustachioed Casanova that the young actor plays with narrow eyes and a big cat’s stalking state of mind, as a sort of cross between Jean-Paul Belmondo and Fight Club‘s Tyler Durden. Understand that when Nick says to Sheeni, “I’ve never had something in my life I wanted to fight for so much” he’s really, subconsciously, talking about his quest to lose his virginity, and Youth in Revolt is every bit the same sort of raised-stakes love lust story that has teenage girls squirming in their seats during Twilight. (Dimension, R, 90 minutes)
While hackish, far lesser talents regularly scoop up studio jobs, and American audiences seem perfectly willing to spend money going to movies in which guys habitually debase themselves to the soundtrack of old Motown hits and Seth Green gets cradled in the arms of a gorilla, Mike Judge is perhaps destined to live out the prime years of his creative life — on the feature film front, at least — as a criminally underappreciated comedic talent. The writer-director of Office Space, which achieved cult-like status after its 1999 release, returned to theaters last fall with his first wide-release film in a full decade, only to see it unfairly sputter, pulling in only $10.8 million.
Extract centers around Joel Reynolds (Jason Bateman), a put-upon small businessman who seems to be sitting pretty, but is in reality a bit listless. Married and successful, with a comfortable home and an almost-finalized acquisition of the culinary extracts business he’s built from the ground up with his loyal lieutenant Brian (J.K. Simmons), Joel seems to have it all. His wife Suzie (Kristen Wiig), though, is about as interested in him as she is in her career (in supermarket coupon design); his bickering employees want a piece of the pie; and Cindy (Mila Kunis, who displays a prodigious amount of carefully shirt-taped cleavage in the movie), a flirty new temp with a seemingly unnatural interest in extract, is really a wily con artist. On the advice of drug-addled bartender pal Dean (a bewigged Ben Affleck, above right), Joel cooks up a scheme to cheat with impunity by hiring a dumb-as-a-box-of-hair gigolo, Brad (Dustin Milligan), to seduce Suzie. Unfortunately, Joel discovers the young object of his affection, Cindy, is behind a personal injury lawsuit by long-time employee Step (Clifton Collins, Jr.) that, if it goes through, will scotch the buyout deal and leave Joel penniless.
Extract doesn’t quite touch the zeitgeist brilliance of Office Space or Idiocracy, the latter of which was dumped by 20th Century Fox under suspicious circumstances, one presumes in large part because of its fiercely satirical skewering of corporate excess. But Judge makes comedies of a rare breed — those that don’t wink at audiences, and entirely telegraph their intentions and moves from about a hundred yards out. His films are rooted in character, but also mindful of just how frequently baser instincts, petty judgments and irrational grievances typically rule our behavior, no matter the income bracket. They’re lowbrow-highbrow flicks, of a sort, and Extract is no exception.
In fact, while the movie is pretty straightforward in its plotting, it wrings laughs and all sorts of squirmy delights from the edges inward — the frustration of an overly talkative neighbor, or in dealing with someone who is unable to follow the clearest, most plainly dictated train of logical explanation. For a film that turns on a character losing a testicle, and another arranging to pay a guy to have sex with his wife — both seemingly free passes for wild excess — Extract is oddly restrained, almost chaste. (And I mean that in a good way, really.) Its laughs are typically inwardly reflected, and played for slow-burn. It’s not a reinvention of the wheel, but Bateman, meanwhile, is an ever-pleasant guide to the sort of suburban malaise under the microscope here. In him we’re able to see and appreciate the silver lining that sometimes is hard to focus on in our own troubles.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Extract comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English, French and Spanish subtitles. Its sole bonus feature is a 11-minute making-of featurette which interweaves footage from the set and film itself with interview chats with Bateman, Kunis, Judge and producer John Altschuler, and Judge mocks his acting cameo in the movie and shares that his inspiration for Kunis’ character was “a sociopath whom everyone happens to like.” Then Kunis goes and lets slip that she thinks her character was based on someone a friend of Judge’s (or he?) used to date, which interestingly shades things, and makes one wish that Judge ‘fessed up to his source inspiration a little more. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) C- (Disc)
The year 2009 has been something of a dream for Penelope Cruz. It began with her performance in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, already honored by several critics groups, winning her a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award in February. It continued with the filming of Rob Marshall’s musical Nine, based on Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, and the Cannes Film Festival presentation and release of the noirish, Spanish dramedy Broken Embraces.
It’s been a long trip for the little girl who began studying women at her mother’s hair salon when she was only five years old, becoming quietly aware of their public faces. Cruz is now an internationally recognized knockout beauty, which her recent appearance at a Beverly Hills hotel — brunette locks cascading over her almond brown blouse, past her shoulders and down her back — only serves to confirm. Yet for all her stardom, Cruz retains a beguiling mix of enchantress wonderment and button-cute innocence. No doubt some of the latter is due to factors of verbal intrigue; in Cruz’s mouth, the word monitor is pronounced “money-tar,” with no sense of halting uncertainty or embarrassment.
If the accent rather charmingly remains, Cruz’s grasp of English has aided her upward trajectory. “I remember when I was 20 and didn’t speak the language at all,” she recalls. “I did the casting [for a movie] on tape, got the part, and when I met [the filmmakers] they realized that all I knew were the lines for the character.” Cruz pauses here, smiles, then continues: “I’m more comfortable with English now, so the roles have become more challenging and demanding.” For the full feature piece/interview, from H Magazine, click here.
2009 is still fading, but one of the better titles of 2010 looms on the horizon. 44 Inch Chest, which is sure to lead to a rash of accidental rentals and VOD purchases in the years hence, is the debut feature from Malcolm Venville, and a collection of whiskey-soaked voices if ever there was one. Ray Winstone, Ian McShane, Tom Wilkinson, John Hurt and Stephen Dillane star in the film, whose tagline (“The measure of revenge”) makes matters clear, even if its title doesn’t.
A jazzy, profane exploration of the male ego’s breaking point from the writers of Sexy Beast, the British movie centers on a collection of pals who kidnap the younger French lover of their friend’s wife, who has been cheating on him. This craziness is ignited by Joanne Whalley, whose performance is described as exuding “Helen Mirren-like sensuality,” which, I freely admit, did cause me to yelp out loud in amusement, if also go watch the fun-looking trailer. So… mission accomplished, publicity packet writer. 44 Inch Chest plays in Los Angeles at the Nuart Theatre from January 15 through January 28; for a list of other theatrical engagements, extending into February and March, click here.
It’s hard to bear much ill will toward Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, given that it was thrown into a state of disarray when Heath Ledger passed away last year, with much but not all of the film complete. Nevertheless, the movie doesn’t really work, apart from the gobsmacked reaction elicited by a small handful of vividly imagined set pieces. A fantastical morality tale set in a grubby present day of Gilliam’s twisted devising, it sort of ambles along, like a scavenger hunt with an ill-defined search list, before collapsing in on itself in a finale of utter inconsequentiality.
Blessed with the extraordinary gift of guiding the imaginations of others, Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is also a drunk and inveterate gambler who, thousands of years ago, made a series of bets with the devil (Tom Waits) in which he first won immortality but later lost his daughter, Valentina (Lily Cole), once she reached her 16th birthday. Desperate to protect her from her impending fate, Dr. Parnassus again renegotiates the wager, with the winner now being determined by whoever first collects five souls. Parnassus and his traveling theater show companions (Verne Troyer, Andrew Garfield) happen upon an amnesia-stricken stranger, Tony (Ledger), and together they set out to woo a quintet of well-heeled ladies into willingly crossing over to the other side. More trippiness then ensues.
Rather disconcertingly, Ledger’s first appearance on screen comes with Tony hanging by his heck from a bridge. Ledger is later replaced by Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell in three discrete fantasy sequences within the mirrored world that constitutes Parnassus’ playground, and this “fix” actually works well within the narrative. The story, though, has no innate emotional pull. There’s some sly fun to be had with the notion of a devil who so enjoys interacting in needling fashion with the strong-willed on Earth that he habitually indulges a gambling jones. But this narrative strand, and many others of fleeting intrigue, is quixotically embraced and discarded by the director and his writing partner, Charles McKeown. No one does cracked-world visuals quite like Gilliam, but he’s at his best when he has a strong producer sitting on him, or more strongly defined source material, and neither of these are the case with The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. There are moments of fitful wonder here, but they are few and far between; overall, score it an “I,” for Incomplete. (Sony Pictures Classics, PG-13, 122 minutes)
Forget the videogame — it’s a real-life version of Guitar Hero when Jimmy Page, the Edge and Jack White get together for the music documentary It Might Get Loud, an exploration of the electric guitar that spans, roughly, three different musical generations, and encompasses all sorts of different modes of expression. Director Davis Guggenheim‘s follow-up to the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, the film works as a sort of three-for-one biography, with just a handful of glancing, macro-analytical insights scattered and tossed in for good measure.
Guggenheim structures his film in discrete narrative strands, and doesn’t waste time with talking heads trying to frame or debate the importance of his subjects’ bands, or respective places in music history. In fact, even bandmates or other intimates don’t win any screen time; the only interviewees are the three men themselves, which helps give It Might Get Loud a well-groomed sense of intimacy and streamlined purpose.
Page, of Led Zeppelin and the Yardbirds, has probably the deepest reservoir of stories, and therefore the most fascinating back story, having started out as a session guitarist who laid down licks for commercial jingles on the side. For all the shit The Edge, of U2, takes for his zen-guitarist persona, it’s White — above, of the White Stripes, the Raconteurs and whatever new side project he’s put together this week — who is the most interested and invested in artificial persona. He drafts a miniaturized version of himself for the movie’s biographical segment, and stages scenes where he teaches this younger “him” how to play the blues, and even kick down a piano stool for added effect. He also cops to the arthouse conceit of the White Stripes, and the fact that the costuming was all misdirection and window-dressing, all so that they (or he, really, since bandmate Meg White comes across as doing little more than what Jack tells her) could play earthy blues and folk music without facing a harsh, skeptical vox populi.
The movie is in sum never less than in-the-moment engaging, even if there’s a lingering feeling that the roundtable gathering that forms its spine — what Guggenheim called “The Summit,” and less a Charlie Rose-style chat than a meandering exploration of a couple of the gentleman’s big tunes, and adolescent breakthroughs — could perhaps have used a bit more prodding or structure, to get at the marrow of exactly why and how sometimes even (or even especially) trite musical expressions achieve significant emotional lift-off. I know… it’s like dancing about architecture, this, especially since the movie quietly serves up contradictions (White talks about technology being “a big destroyer of emotion and truth,” even as he mounts a microphone into the carved-out body of a guitar, allowing for greater feedback and distortion) in a fashion that underscores how a lot of music, and indeed maybe art in general, is about learning and knowing the rules, and then consciously breaking or tearing them down.
There are some great song stories along the way, naturally, whether it’s Page recounting the drum set-up for “When the Levee Breaks” or the Edge stumbling across an early cassette recording of some “Where the Streets Have No Name” noodling, with Bono yelping out time shifts in the background. What most pokes through, though, is the sheer joy attached to creative expression. “There was a thrill in doing, even if we were doing it badly,” says the Edge. Later, White (resembling a ghostly, slightly pudgy Johnny Depp) talks about the aggressive quality of music, and seemingly channels the spirit of a bullied-too-long sensitive soul who’s finally screwed his courage to the sticking place, saying, “It’s our chance to push you down now.” It’s a reminder that music matters so much because it has the capacity to make us feel other than what we perhaps are, and feelings so often can and do trump cold rationality.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, It Might Get Loud comes to DVD presented in a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen that preserves the aspect ratio of its original theatrical exhibition. The disc’s Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track, naturally, nicely captures the title’s musical sequences, especially its “Summit” jam session. Supplemental features include an audio commentary track with Guggenheim and producers Thomas Tull and Lesley Chilcott, a clutch of deleted scenes and press conference footage from the movie’s Toronto Film Festival premiere, in which journalists jostle to lob questions laced with adulatory underpinnings at the film’s subjects and maker. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; for an interview with Guggenheim, meanwhile, click here. B+ (Movie) B (Disc)
