Over at The Wrap, Steve Pond chats with cinematographer Gordon Willis, a honorary Academy Award recipient this year, who dances and ducks his share of questions, but does share his thoughts on being excised from the main Oscar ceremony, and working with Francis Ford Coppola.
All posts by Brent
Amelia
Two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank can’t give any lift to Amelia, a soggy, unengaging biopic of Amelia Earhart, the American aviatrix who rose to fame with her transatlantic flights in the 1930s but disappeared in a later attempt to circumnavigate the globe. An attractively packaged but dramatically inert hagiography, the film feels so utterly designed not to offend, shock or confuse any potential age group that it ends up saying nothing of consequence about its subject. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Fox Searchlight, PG, 111 minutes)
My Hero Festival Spotlights Stories of Human Uplift
For the Extreme Makeover set and other fans of human uplift in general, the world’s best hero-themed movies will be honored next month at the My Hero Short Film Festival. The fifth annual festival takes place November 21 at 7 p.m. at the University of Southern California’s Norris Theater. Finalists include narrative, documentary and animated films, as well as music videos. Among them are:
- Biblioburro: The Donkey Library, an inspiring film by Valentina Canavesio about a Colombian teacher who brings books to rural communities that have no access to libraries
- Home Is Where You Find It, a touching film by 16-year-old AIDS orphan Alcides Soares, who received a movie camera from an American television writer and movie director, and who journeys to find a family and make a new life in his native Mozambique, a country ravaged by AIDS
- Iqra: Read, an eye-opening film by Fauzia Minallah, about the creation of a mural painted by Afghan and Pakistani boys in a settlement in Islamabad, which promotes the education of girls
For more information on the films and the festival in general, click here; to donate money, or otherwise help aid the festival, click here.
Toy Story 3 Trailer Baits the Hook for Next Summer
The trailer for Toy Story 3 , which opens next summer, June 18, has dropped, and does it look like a winner? Yes, yes it does. The first half of the trailer works on two levels — using flashbacks to both establish the passage of time integral to the story within the movie and also remind filmgoers of their own nostalgic attachment to the first two Toy Story films. This is the sort of honest swing in adolescent feeling — wild joy laced with melancholy — most children’s movies don’t attempt to conjure, but that Pixar typically does so well. The second half of the trailer is more antics-oriented, and characteristic of what’s used to bait the LCD set. Still, it’s a nice blend.
It’s been a decade since the last film in the series, but given Pixar’s esteemed track record and the heavy rotation of the huge stack of DVDs they sold, I don’t see how this entry does any less than previous movies ($361 and $485 million worldwide, respectively), only more. Eschewing any sort of long-lead tracking or impression mumbo-jumbo, I’d peg its earnings at $550 million, about evenly split Stateside and internationally.
Actors Like To Be Praised and Directed, Even in Interviews
Can’t decide if it’s more charming or weird, the phone interview where the subject interrupts his/her own answer to ask, “How do you think this interview is going?”
An Education
Whether it’s Matthew McConaughey in A Time to Kill, Sandra Bullock in Speed, Edward Norton in Primal Fear or Ryan Gosling in The Believer, every so often there’s a feeling one gets watching a movie that the career of a young performer is about to explode into the stratosphere. The stand-alone or lasting quality of the film isn’t the most important thing, but rather the manner in which the actor or actress pops off the screen, and commands your attention in a variety of ways, large and small. A perceptive, engaging coming-of-age tale adapted from Lynn Barber’s memoir by About a Boy author Nick Hornby, An Education is just that sort of film for 24-year-old Carey Mulligan (below).
She stars as Jenny, an intelligent, headstrong, 16-year-old British girl itching to shake off the constraints of her suburban, all-girls-school upbringing circa 1961. Jenny swoons when she meets David (Peter Sarsgaard), a dapper guy twice her age who knows about art and wine, and has jet-setting pals, Danny (Dominic Cooper) and Helen (Rosamund Pike). Her friends are equally agog and her practically minded parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) surprisingly open to the courtship, so no matter the disapproval of her teacher (Olivia Williams), Jenny decides to celebrate her impending 17th birthday by losing her virginity with David.
The fact that An Education has to be described even to the degree above is somewhat regrettable, because the prescribed path of its narrative motivations are artfully obscured for a good bit of its running time, which actually benefits the movie. The more one experiences it wide-eyed and nakedly, like Jenny, the deeper the identification. There’s a fantastic exchange late in the film between Jenny and her headmistress (Emma Thompson) in which the young student eschews a glass-ceiling life of modulated expectation, instead making a case for stridency and a life lived through experience, no matter the pain: “Just an education isn’t good enough anymore — you have to tell us what it’s for,” she says, registering just the right blend of anger and exasperation.
While some of the film’s cross-purposes casting (notably Pike, who’s mostly traded previously in ice princess roles, but delivers quite winningly as the happily unaware Helen) work quite well, Sarsgaard doesn’t seem to fully embody David’s silver-tongued charisma. Of course, it’s ultimately not his show, so in the end it doesn’t much matter, or at least not to a degree that sinks the film. In her performance, Mulligan locates both the braininess and restless hormonal energy of an adolescent who’s blooming before most of her peers. Bearing witness to her education, in all its naiveté, brashness, passion and pain, is illuminating. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 100 minutes)
(Untitled)
Adam Goldberg wears a furrowed-brow scowl of perpetual distrust and discontent; even in screen romances he seems unhappy, or at least convinced that the world is basically a dreadful place. So in theory he could be the perfect guide for a piece like (Untitled), a loose-limbed comedy that casts a skeptical eye on the contemporary New York art scene, as seen by and experienced through a pair of quietly competitive brothers. In reality, though, Goldberg is let down by the material.
Josh (Eion Bailey) is a commercially successful painter, even though his work is sold discreetly to corporate clients out of a gallery’s back room. Self-important composer Adrian (Goldberg, above), meanwhile, fronts a performance art trio who peddle atonal, disharmonious works involving buckets, chains, duck calls and crumpled paper. When gallery owner Madeline (Marley Shelton) attends Adrian’s concert, she commissions a work from him and a weird quasi-love affair ensues, even though Josh had earlier introduced Madeline as his girlfriend.
Almost from the start, (Untitled) seems conflicted about what sort of agenda to pursue, or perspective to advance. Is it a satiric send-up of the modern art world, a wry debunking of avant-garde sensibility in general, or just a very specifically rendered comedy of upward social mobility? Where (Untitled) really drops the ball is in not getting into the brothers’ relationship in a more substantive way. With Madeline, there’s ostensibly a love triangle here, but director Jonathan Parker and his co-scripter, Catherine di Napoli, never plumb any deep conflict from it. Perhaps most damningly, Adrian embraces experimentation in the realm of music, yet has disdain for every other artist in the film, whom he regards as fraudulent, insincere, untalented or a sell-out. That’d be fine if the movie at least had Adrian self-justify his point-of-view, or argue about it with Josh, as they grapple with contrasting notions of success. But he doesn’t, so (Untitled) itself comes off as fuzzy and false.
Zak Orth quietly steals scenes as a collector (“a guy who did something with a computer and got rich,” as one character describes him) given a personality infusion by art, and Shelton gives an invested performance. True, too: there are bits and pieces of the movie — an inquisitive woodwind score, a few fun zingers, Madeline’s penchant for noisy clothes — that give it some punch. But the characters here don’t ring true, and a problematic ending only further sullies what comes across as a rich concept unconvincingly explored. (Samuel Goldwyn, 96 minutes, R)
Paramount Finds $2 Million in Couch Cushions for Spec Pitch
So screenwriters Aline Brosh McKenna and Simon Kinberg have sold an untitled pitch to Paramount for a cool $2 million, through a first-look deal with J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot shingle, according to Variety. Mum’s the word on the plot, but the two scribes — who met on a production rewrite of the forthcoming Date Night, starring Steve Carell and Tina Fey — are seemingly a weird fit, as even Abrams acknowledged. “These two writers couldn’t be more different; the genres they write seem almost diametrically opposed,” he said. “But they came to Bad Robot with a pitch that thrilled us.” So, given their respective filmographies, and the purchase price, it has to be a femme-centric spy thing, right? Probably not an Alias movie, but something in that vein, no? With comedic undertones. If there’s not at least a sizeable genre component, the cash register doesn’t ring for that amount.
Gradiva
If a David Lynch acolyte with a jones for art history and a basic working knowledge of the canon of Ingmar Bergman decided to shoot a casually sleazy, cautionary tale of intellectual and sexual midlife crisis, it would likely resemble French director Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Gradiva, a flatly shot, self-serious 2006 erotic thriller that isn’t quite lurid enough to succeed as an Angel Heart-type piece of provocation, and isn’t psychologically perspicacious enough to satiate arthouse audiences.
A gothic murder mystery that the film’s DVD cover bills as “in the style of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo,” Gradiva centers around English historian John Locke (James Wilby, a sort of Gaelic cross between Matthew Modine and Timothy Hutton), who comes to Morocco to work on a study of painter Eugene Delacroix. Embarking on a search for a rare series of engravings, Locke sees a beautiful woman dressed in white wandering the narrow streets of the ancient medina, and becomes obsessed with unearthing her identity and tracking her down. Locke’s newly taken young lover, Belkis (Dany Verissimo, above), tries to warn him off both his academic search and his obsession with the mystery blonde, whom he comes to find out is named Leila (Arielle Dombasle). But Locke is convinced these elements somehow hold the key to some groundbreaking thesis work, and so it may be too late for him to escape from this dangerous labyrinth of swirling desire and intrigue.
Robbe-Grillet, director of the infamous, Oscar-nominated Last Year at Marienbad, trades in an astonishingly flat and unengaging visual style, and elicits wildly uneven, often derisible performances. (Farid Chopel is especially noteworthy in the negative sense, even in a fairly functionary role.) The filmmaker thinks nothing of casually shooting an outdoor cafe sequence where an actress has her nipple hanging out of her blouse for the entire scene, but titillation seems back-burnered with respect to the mock intrigue of the plot, which means there’s lots of wandering dusty side streets and run-ins with authority figures both real and perhaps contrived. Gradiva represents Robbe-Grillet’s final film (he passed away in 2008, at 85 years of age), and it’s a grand-scale misfire that doesn’t work as either a legitimate treatment of the themes of quixotic desperation and obsession it wishes to explore or a sex-tinged, exotically set thriller.
Housed in a red plastic Amaray case, Gradiva comes presented on a region-free disc with a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that — despite coming from a brand new striking of the negative — is sullied by a bit of grain, if no problems with edge enhancement. Audio comes in the form of a Dolby digital stereo track. The film’s original theatrical trailer is included along with extensive production notes and cast biographies, plus a seven-minute preview trailer spotlighting other Mondo Macabro releases. The chief supplemental extra, though, is a 31-minute interview with a red scarf-clad Robbe-Grillet, in which he discusses both his cinematic influences more generally (Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni and surrealist master Luis Buñuel, naturally) and the movie specifically. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D+ (Movie) B (Disc)
Where the Wild Things Are
With Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, Spike Jonze quickly built up a reputation as a quirky auteur, so it’s hard to believe that Where the Wild Things Are is just his third film, and first in seven years. A creative, melancholic adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s strikingly imagined but admittedly slim children’s book, Jonze’s work is essentially a delicate portrait of a kid’s id restlessly coming to terms with growing up — a yelp for attention from a generation with dwindling adult role models. Just as Election was a film with teen characters that wasn’t really a teen movie, so too is Where the Wild Things Are a movie about a child that — though Warner Bros.’ marketing team may loathe to hear this — isn’t a children’s film. Despite star presence and largely swooning reviews, neither of Jonze’s other movies cracked the $25 million mark domestically. Critical praise will be paramount in positioning this film to adult filmgoers, since family audiences may find it too challenging. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (Warner Bros., PG, 101 minutes)
Staunton Hill
There are big familial shoes to fill when your last name is Romero and you’re tackling the horror genre, which is unfortunately part of the problem of outsized expectations that weighs down Staunton Hill, a thin bouillabaisse of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho and a half dozen other horror flicks, directed by Cameron Romero, son of zombie flick godhead George Romero.
Set in the autumn of 1969, for seemingly no other reason than to give its subjects the chance to talk about “the rally” in Washington, D.C., the movie centers on a group of five college-age kids hitchhiking through a remote mountainous region of Virginia. There’s Boone (Kiko Ellsworth) and Raina (Christine Carlo), Jordan (the strangely named Cristen Coppen), Cole (David Rountree, also the film’s writer) and Cole’s old crush Trish (Paula Rhodes). After hooking up with Quintin (Charlie Bodin), a nice young guy who offers to give them a ride, the group makes it a couple dozen miles deeper into the woods before Quintin’s beat-up truck breaks down. After holing up in what they think is an abandoned barn for the night, in the morning they unwittingly stumble across the Staunton family, for whom the nearby hill is named. They subsequently find themselves at the mercy of a depraved, diabolical brood (headed up by the tubby Kathy Lamkin) that will stop at nothing to rid their property of these “trespassers.” The only law on Staunton’s Hill is the law of the Stauntons, and in this case, not too surprisingly, the penalty for defying that law is death.
The work of the actors here is a bit uneven, but for the most part naturalistic and vacuumed free of histrionics, though Coppen is a late offender in this regard. Rountree’s screenplay baits a passably intriguing if somewhat familiar premise, but ignores the basic dynamics of group interaction by allowing Quintin to steer some collective decision-making. The film’s twist is tipped fairly early on by Romero’s use of affected flashbacks/flashforwards, so by the time the requisite big, lumbering, retarded guy in overalls, Buddy (B.J. Hendricks), starts dropping people with shovels to the face, one has a fairly fixed sense of where this is headed. The remaining thrills, in either gore or suspense, don’t connect enough in level of execution, and the final reel sags tremendously, including a two-minute tracking shot of a putative escape. Sans closing credits, in fact, Staunton Hill clocks in at an undernourished 81 minutes. Of note, however, is composer Jesper Kyd’s music, which is superlative.
Housed in a regular Amray case with a hollowed-out spindle area to reduce the amount of plastic used, Staunton Hill comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing. The title is divided into 12 chapters via a separate static menu screen, but there are no supplemental features, which further dents any collectible value. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) D- (Disc)
Assassination of a High School President
An acid-tongued, comedically inflected mystery with attitude to spare, Assassination of a High School President is a fun, engaging recasting of high school angst and adolescent friendships and liaisons, in all their white-hot heat — and not merely because of the awesome-adjacent name of its director, Brett Simon. Sharply acted and powered by some clever writing, the movie is an unblinking, straight-faced send-up of noir conventions, and the heightened stakes and skulking, fringe’s-edge energy of the best of those genre pictures meshes surprisingly well with Simon’s private school setting, and its hidden machinations.
Set at tony St. Donovan’s, the film takes as its protagonist sophomore newspaper reporter Bobby Funke (Reece Thompson, above in
background), a hard-charging quasi-outcast who is assigned by editor-in-chief Clara (Melanie Diaz) to
write a cover story on popular class president, National Merit scholar and soccer team captain Paul Moore (Patrick Taylor). After a stack of SAT tests is stolen from the office of Principal Kirkpatrick (Bruce Willis), a hard-as-nails war veteran, Bobby publishes an expose that names Paul as the prime suspect, which brings him notoriety and acclaim — and even an audience with Paul’s now ex-girlfriend, a slinky senior named Francesca (Mischa Barton) who continually (along with other characters) mispronounces Bobby’s surname.
Feeling pressure from a journalistic rival, the sniveling Tad Goltz
(Aaron Himelstein), and starting to question the motivations of erstwhile vice
president Marlon (Luke Grimes, of Brothers & Sisters), who is also Francesca’s step-brother, Bobby begins to doubt the star jock’s guilt. Something doesn’t quite add up. When further investigation uncovers a campus-wide conspiracy that threatens to take down students and teachers alike, Bobby must decide whether or not to tell the truth and risk a prestigious journalistic summer internship, or simply enjoy the social upgrade that his work has afforded him.
The feature directorial debut of Simon, Assassination of a High School President is written by Tim Calpin and Kevin Jakubowski, a pair of former production assistants on South Park. What’s right about the movie mostly starts with Thompson, so striking in the underrated Rocket Science, and a wry anchoring presence here in a filmic exercise whose hearty stylistic leanings could have otherwise tipped over into irritation quite quickly. With its canted dialogue delivery and recasting of high school as both a riddle to be solved and a dangerous, hormonally charged swamp of criminal plotting, the movie strongly recalls the imaginative Brick.
The plot, part Chinatown mystery, part The Usual Suspects shell game (both heartily copped to as influences in interview material with the writers), is a take-it-or-leave-it affair that might be too cute by half for some, but it’s mainly the involving style of the film and its barbed dialogue, along with Thompson’s engaging performance, that seduces. Sometimes bits and pieces of Bobby’s moody voiceover narration errs on the side of juvenilia (“Their alibis were like Dutch ovens — gamey, but airtight”), but the banter and other little asides smartly inform the characterizations (“I coached English for two seasons” boasts Michael Rapaport’s dimwitted instructor, also in charge of the soccer team), and hold one’s attention up through an ending that will feel familiar to anyone who chafed at the less well reasoned of high school’s rules and constraints.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Assassination of a High School President comes presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track that too frequently comes across as mixed low, both in dialogue and upper register ambient noise. Extracurricular activities on the disc include 20 minutes of extended and alternate
scenes, and another seven minutes of deleted scenes, all with optional commentary from the aforementioned writers. Also included is an alternate opening sequence, part of a much longer tracking shot, which Calpin and Jakubowski explain had to be trimmed for the sake of out-of-the-gate clarity. Preview trailers for Fragments, Year One and a handful of other films are also included. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B- (Disc)
Kanye West’s Thoughts on Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize Win
Ken Jacobs Brings Nervous Magic Lantern to Redcat
L.A. Weekly‘s Scott Foundas has up an interesting professional overview/interview with Ken Jacobs, whose week-long residency at Redcat includes the belated local premiere of Nervous Magic Lantern, a presentation of images conjured live by Jacobs, using a single projector, a shutter and myriad filters.
James Franco to Guest on… General Hospital?
From the “Errr… what?” files, days-old news that James Franco will be guest-starring on ABC’s daytime soap opera General Hospital, for a two-month stint beginning in November. Strange, sure, and a bit of a step down from the Spider-Man flicks for which Franco remains best known to mainstream audiences. But this is a guy who’s always marched to the beat of a different drummer, as evidenced by everything from his choice in projects (Milk, an upcoming Allen Ginsberg biopic) and squirmy disregard for interviews to his low-fi directorial debut, The Ape, which was about a corporate drone and would-be writer struggling with his roommate — a raunchy, talking gorilla with a penchant for loud Hawaiian shirts. Studio films like Tristan + Isolde and Pinepple Express notwithstanding, this route to mid-aged stardom — very loosely the same sort of flirtation-rejection that Johnny Depp engaged in with Hollywood for years — is the much more interesting path to take. And make no mistake, Franco has the chops to be a perennial Oscar nominee.
Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do?
Do notions of right and wrong, good and evil, fall from heaven, or do we make them here on Earth? Timed to release on DVD to coincide with the public television
broadcast of a similarly themed special and the debut of Professor
Michael Sandel’s book of the same title, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? challenges perceptions of morality through the Socratic recreation of a compelling lecture series at Harvard University. The result, for those who like to look outside of themselves, is a one-of-a-kind take on what we perceive, both individually and on a societal level, as ethical, and our views toward humanity and moral reasoning.
More than 14,000 students at Harvard have taken the “Justice” course, making it one of the college’s most popular classes. And now, in collaboration with WGBH Boston, Harvard opens up Professor Sandel’s classroom to the world. The course aims to help viewers become more critically-minded thinkers about the moral decisions we all face in our everyday lives. The two dozen featured lectures here read like a cross-section of high
school debate topics — affirmative action, abortion, the death
penalty, euthanasia, sex education, privacy protection, elder care, same-sex
marriage and public health legislation — but the level of discourse is of course higher than the chirpy, easily digestible facts and specious reasoning parroted back in Mrs. Osborne’s 11th grade class. Sandel presents students with ethical dilemmas on modern-day issues, and then conducts lively, engaging and remarkably intimate debates that challenge students’ moral reasoning.
By title, the topic list includes: “The Moral Side of Murder,” “Putting a Price Tag on Life,” “How to Measure Pleasure,” “Free To Choose,” “Who Owns Me?,” “This Land is My Land,” “Consenting Adults,” “Hired Guns?,” “For Sale: Motherhood,” “Mind Your Motive,” “The Supreme Principle of Morality,” “A Lesson in Lying,” “A Deal Is A Deal,” “What’s a Fair Start?,” “What Do We Deserve?,” “Arguing Affirmative Action,” “What’s the Purpose?,” “The Good Citizen,” “Freedom vs. Fit,” “The Claims of Community,” “Where Our Loyalty Lies,” “Debating Same-Sex Marriage,” “The Good Life” and, yes, “The Case for Cannibalism.” While there’s an understandable societal hesitancy to tackle the big challenges and problems confronting our notion — change is, after all, a scary thing — this DVD lays the groundwork for reasoning, reflection, soul-searching and (gasp!) empathy, and ultimately makes the point that all, rightly, influence and shape our opinions and problem-solving skill sets.
Running around 12 hours and spread out over three DVDs, with a snap-in, dual-sided tray housing the first two discs, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? is presented in full screen. Special features include an excerpt from Sandel’s same-named book, as well as a printable series viewing guide. To order the DVD, phone (800) PLAY-PBS or merely click here. A- (Show) C (Disc)
Year One
The big, blustery physical comedy of Jack Black makes for a mostly amusing fit with Michael Cera’s quiet comedy of self-negation in Year One, a ramshackle banished-buddy picture which connects more on the strength of its scene-to-scene joke writing than any startlingly grand execution of its premise. Pushing far away from one’s brain any recollections of of historical or religious antiquity is of paramount importance given the historic license this movie’s story takes. Once that is accomplished, though, there’s airy delight in the mixing of slightly contemporized but socially inept consciousnesses with a primitive setting. It’s not fall-down great, but Year One works slightly more than not, making for a decent enough rental.
When oafish hunter Zed (Black) eats from the forbidden tree of knowledge and later accidentally sets fire to his village, he’s banished. Reluctantly accompanying Zed out into the wilderness is his reserved gatherer pal Oh (Cera, sporting a generally ridiculous wig that undergoes an unexplained metamorphosis three-quarters of the way through the movie); left behind are their respective crushes, Maya (June Diane Raphael) and Eema (Juno Temple). Discovering that the story of the world’s edge is false, the wandering pair comes across hothead Cain (David Cross), and bear witness to his murder of his brother Abel (Paul Rudd).
Again fleeing, Zed and Oh come across Abraham (Hank Azaria) , who warns them of the sins of the nearby city of Sodom. This sounds like a great place to Zed, however, so off they go, to partake of its pleasures. Once there, they again cross paths with Cain, as well as Maya and Eema, who have been sold into slavery. While Zed tries to devise a plot to free the ladies, Oh fends off the advances of the king’s creepy, flamboyant high priest (Oliver Platt). Olivia Wilde also lends her prodigious, come-hither eyebrows to the proceedings.
Though somewhat similar in some of its targets to Monty Python’s Life of Brian or Mel Brooks’ sprawling History of the World: Part One, Year One is more assertively a comedic hodgepodge of different eras, in this case commingling polytheism alongside Judeo-Christian Biblical stories separated by hundreds of years. Trying to hold onto and make any sense of the manner in which this intersects chronologically factual human history or cognitive development is akin to swimming upstream into a headstrong current. It doesn’t help, either, that the movie can’t seem to decide whether Zed and Oh are accidental masters of their fate (upon arriving in Sodom, they briefly become royal guards), or habitual victims of circumstances and their surroundings. The sooner one relinquishes the notion that this is more than anything than just an unfettered spit-balling of widely generalized life in a dusty, bygone era, the more simply they’re able to appreciate the movie’s otherwise generally solid joke-writing and characterizations.
The lead performances certainly don’t differ wildly from the personas that the two actors have cultivated; Black plays a libidinal, instinctive chatterbox, while Cera trades in wallflower asides and nervous, awkward silences. In their juxtaposition and interplay, though, there’s something approaching a sincere freshness. This owes to basic differences in age and demeanor, yes, but also size — something that director Harold Ramis (who also takes a writing credit, along with The Office‘s Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg) isn’t afraid to exploit through both written material and physical gags large and small. One wishes that the story exhibited a bit more discipline, instead of leaning on supporting characters that often seem like tacky appendages; that would help this movie really take flight. Still, especially for fans of its principals, Year One offers up enough fun to qualify as a diverting weeknight rental.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Year One comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with matching English and French language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio tracks and optional subtitles. Anchoring the supplemental material, a feature-length audio commentary track with Ramis, Black and Cera quite obviously predates the movie’s tough-luck box office reception (a mere $43 million domestic haul, under its production budget), with Ramis providing production anecdotes and the guys by and large complimenting each other’s choices. There’s also a 18-minute making-of featurette, a seven-minute blooper and gag reel, five-plus-minutes of line reading improvisations, and an additional 14 minutes of excised scenes, a couple of which expand upon Bill Hader’s bit role as a tribal shaman. To purchase the regular theatrical version DVD via Amazon, click here; to purchase the unrated DVD (which runs 11 minutes longer) via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) B (Disc)
Original G.I. Joe Series Gets 17-Disc Deluxe DVD Treatment
Good news G.I. Joe fans. For the first time ever, you can shortly own every episode of the original animated television show that was a pop-culture phenomenon for a generation of kids in the 1980s.
On November 10, the complete series streets in a tricked-out collector’s set, pitting the G.I. Joe team against the venomous COBRA organization, who’s bidding to rule the world. G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero‘s limited edition collector’s set, released by Shout! Factory in collaboration with Hasbro, is spread out over 17 discs and loaded with over 36 hours of content. All 95 episodes — some never before available on DVD until now — are complemented with brand new bonus features celebrating G.I. Joe‘s rich history, including a special collectible book, an exclusive 1-GB “Dog Tag” Flash Drive (USB 2.0) with G.I. Joe silent comics, and special Arashikage and Cobra rub-on tattoos. A specially designed deluxe footlocker case stores everything, and even includes a special DVD placeholder for the G.I. Joe original animated movie when it becomes available next year. It’s a bit pricey, at a suggested retail price of just under $180, but now you know to start saving up. And knowing is half the battle, I’ve been told.
Mitch Fatel Is Magical
Looking at comedian Mitch Fatel before listening to his act, one might have a different impression of his set, and areas of focus. If, however, they know the titles of his previous concert CDs, Miniskirts and Muffins and Super Retardo they’d have a better idea of what awaits them, no matter his unassuming physical demeanor and dweeby delivery. Yes, Mitch Fatel Is Magical, the comedian’s first full-length Comedy Central special, is filthy and sex-saturated.
That’s not the problem. In fact, a good bit of Fatel’s act is actually pretty solid, digging as it does into the specific preoccupations of the male psyche, and his own canted views on the female body (“Small breasts have more personality!”), sexual proclivities and what drove Thomas Edison to invent the light bulb (he wanted to see what was going on when he was receiving blowjobs, the comedian posits). What undercuts Fatel’s comedy is his overly affected execution; with his beaming, squinty-eyed, angelic smile and garbled-sweet voice, he comes across as a Forrest Gump-type simpleton. That this doesn’t match the lewdness of the material is only the most immediate surface problem. More grating is how frequently this works against the very nature of the material, leading to awkward pauses and hiccups in pacing when Fatel should be hammering home a point or scoring building mini-laughs off of a single themed punchline.
These strikes of delivery against this hour-long stand-up special notwithstanding, Mitch Fatel Is Magical does hold some genuine laughs, especially for guys who are willing to be honest about their base carnal desires, and the women who are willing to enjoy (but not judge!) such peeks behind the gender curtain. Herein, Fatel laments the declining popularity of one of his favorite sexual pastimes, the handjob (“They’re like a very slow movie that gets good at the end…”), and also waxes poetic about his love for certain female body parts. Naturally, he also devotes a huge portion of his show toward a dissection of blowjobs, from the points-of-view of both genders. From the male perspective, Fatel says, “Whenever we buy one of those romantic cards that talks about [the power of] our eyes meeting… that’s what we picture.” From the female perspective, he jokes about women enjoying kissing a man’s stomach for 15 minutes before heading further south, “because it makes them feel like a lady.”
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Mitch Fatel Is Magical comes to DVD as an extended and uncensored version of the same-named concert special broadcast recently on Comedy Central. Presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen with Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound, the title’s bonus material consists of chopped-up concert outtakes, material from Fatel’s DVD cover photo shoot, special animation and a clutch of interviews with longtime fans. No opinion on his act from his mother, though. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; to purchase it via Comedy Central, click here. B (Concert) B (Disc)
Happy Birthday, Hilary Duff and John Sayles
It’s a happy birthday to John Sayles, who turns 59 today, and Hilary Duff, who notches her 22nd season premiere. One looks hotter than the other in a green tank top. By a smidgen. But will Duff be able to carve out a notable pop princess/dual threat career, what with Miley Cyrus nipping at her heels? Or, to phrase it another way, will 19 producers be able to gravy-train off her movie career?
New York, I Love You
Following on the heels of 2007’s delightful anthology Paris, Je T’aime comes this second entry in a series of cinematic valentines to culturally influential cities, conceived by producer Emmanuel Benbihy. (Rio, Shanghai, Jerusalem and Mumbai also await the loving treatment.) An eclectic group of filmmakers oversee the dozen short films, populated with familiar faces, collected here — Mira Nair, Allen Hughes, Brett Ratner, Shekhar Kapur, Fatih Akin, Joshua Marston, Chinese actor Jiang Wen and even Natalie Portman. The shorts are mostly discrete tales about love, broadly defined, but with a few loosely interwoven characters to underline the theme. Naturally, it’s a somewhat mixed bag, and doesn’t hold together as well as one might hope, or expect from a feature. But the good news is that there’s something here for everyone.
The lighthearted, ironic and flirty entries (including, surprisingly, a wryly funny prom date tale cooked up by Ratner and co-scripter Jeff Nathanson) are mostly the best. A notable exception to this rule, though, is a sidewalk encounter between Robin Wright Penn and Chris Cooper — one of two superlative, chatty, can-I-bum-a-smoke? submissions from Yvan Attal, and a beautifully melancholic segment that would have provided the perfect closer for the movie if it had been ordered properly. The worst entry? Working from a script by the late Anthony Minghella, Kapur misfires with a dewy, dreadfully sentimental tale starring Julie Christie as an aging singer and (no joke) Shia LaBeouf as a hunchback hotel bellhop. The target is poignance, but the movie grinds to a halt here, courtesy of LaBeouf’s ridiculous accent and some equally affected filmmaking.
Like the city it honors, New York, I Love You is a jumbled, chaotic affair, full of seduction, brio, contradiction and a pinch of pretentiousness. It’s not perfect, not by a stretch, but in lump sum it does intriguingly showcase moments when regret and/or romantic constipation are finally swallowed, and surging feelings of possibility return. And that’s worth celebrating, now and always. (Vivendi Entertainment, 110 minutes, R)
Radha Mitchell on Surrogates, and Why She Loves Her iPhone
Radha Mitchell’s mid-afternoon plans have been waylaid, but you wouldn’t know it from her sunny disposition, and a laugh that can split the air. Traffic hampered our respective arrivals at the coastal hotel that serves as our meeting spot, and now — because this is Los Angeles, after all — there’s a deejayed potable water benefit raging at the pool. “I had this whole plan where we’d chat outdoors, and afterward I’d go sit in a patch of sun, read the rest of this thing,” she says, indicating a script in her bag, “and then take a swim.”
No worries. Repairing to a quieter spot indoors for drinks, we swap stories about the somewhat abstruse, themed billboards that have just gone up all over the city for her new film, a couple of which look an awful lot like Angelina Jolie and David Beckham. “That’s [popular] according to Disney marketing, which must be based on some reliable statistics,” she says. A chattering, water-supporting socialite wanders by, and conversation amiably turns to social networking, text-messaging and Mitchell’s iPhone, only the latter of which she loves. “I do love accessing the web on the phone,” she says. “It’s changed conversation. There are no questions. And it’s not really about the facts anymore, it’s about how you use the facts spontaneously. You don’t have to know anything, which I love.”
She’s kidding, of course. Mitchell must know plenty, because in her decade-plus in Los Angeles, the Australian native has effortlessly straddled the fence between art and commerce, deftly juggling popular studio fare (Man on Fire, Silent Hill, Pitch Black) with equally well received independent films (Melinda and Melinda, Finding Neverland, Henry Poole Is Here). Even her two forthcoming projects perfectly illustrate this split.
The Waiting City, which details a young couple’s journey to India to collect their new adopted baby, has just had its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival announced. Then there’s Jonathan Mostow’s brawny Surrogates, in which Mitchell plays an FBI agent alongside Bruce Willis, investigating the mysterious murder of a college student linked to the man who helped create a phenomenally popular technology that allows people to purchase robotic versions of themselves — fit, good-looking, remotely controlled machines that enable users to experience life vicariously from the comfort of their homes.
“It’s a comment on the state of culture now, and not that far from the way a lot of people live their lives, I guess,” says Mitchell of Surrogates. “It’s a pristine, manicured reality where you get to feel everything, because the sensory stimulation goes into your body, but it filters the pain out, and can modulate your experiences, if there are smells you don’t like or whatever.”
“At times my character is operated by other people, though I can’t tell you who, or why,” Mitchell continues. “You meet her as a real person briefly, which is interesting. It’s funny, because all the real people in this movie are fat, I guess because they’re sitting in their chairs. So I’ve got this really fat bum. I don’t know if it’s featured in the movie, but it took a while to make. And I have fake teeth. It’s quite a good look. There’s a different look with the surrogate — she had a padded bra and long hair. But what I discovered is that if there’s no other preference, the fat ass was a bit more comfortable.”
Sagging asses give way to talk about mortality, and before long we’ve tripped headlong into a heady discussion of the possibility of virtually freezing time. At what point would one want to stop aging, though? “In the 30s,” Mitchell says, point-blank, then pauses. “But then I think there’s something interesting about being in your 60s or 70s. I’m sure it’s not great, going through that process of decay. But it must be interesting, and there’s something quite important about that cycle of taking care of your parents and then being taken care of — the reversal of that situation.” When I point out Americans typically aren’t as hands on in elder-care as other cultures, Mitchell has a one-word rejoinder prepped: “Florida.”
The Blue Tooth Virgin
In college, where self-indulgence and pretentiousness are practically
their own electives, especially in the creative arts, a theater
acquaintance who dabbled in his own brand of snarky, self-referential,
low-fi music, wrote a song (for another friend’s original stageplay,
it’s worth noting) in which he wearyingly noted it was “time to go put
on the ‘Good work!’ facade.” The Blue Tooth Virgin intriguingly
transposes this notion of necessarily glad-handing feedback to
Hollywood and the independent film realm, and chronicles the hurt and
petty jealousy — common to almost any creative individual, as well as
anyone who’s felt the sting of a loved one or family member’s shrug —
that comes bubbling to the surface when niceties fall away and shared
opinions aren’t all rosy.
The film centers around two Los Angeles wordsmiths, Sam (Austin Peck, above left), an aspiring screenwriter with a cult success, short-lived TV credit to his name, and David (Bryce Johnson, of Sleeping Dogs Lie), a successful magazine editor at a locally based laddie publication. The duo have been friends for years, but when David doesn’t appreciate Sam’s latest script it opens a fissure in their friendship that spreads through the rest of their lives. Ultimately, both guys must reevaluate their motivations for writing, their need for outside praise and validation, and what it means to see yourself as you actually are.
Written and helmed by Russell Brown, a still-young multi-hyphenate with the benefit of both previous directorial know-how as well as different industry experience and the perspective which that provides, The Blue Tooth Virgin is named after the achingly arty screenplay Sam passes off to David for feedback. A noirish character study (because Sam is really all about character, as he frequently intones) full of transsexuals, private investigators, time-traveling and mystery, the narrative within the movie seems like a cheeky nod of homage to Tom DiCillo, who’s aped the well-traveled grooves of independent cinema in movies like Living In Oblivion and The Real Blonde. It’s the perfect leaping-off point for a discussion of what film could and should mostly be — a challenge to audiences, or a salve?
The nice, conversational rapport between Peck and Johnson — a sort of budget lookalike for Paul Walker — is the film’s strongest selling point, and Brown imbues his work with real, lived-in dialogue that captures the ways we frequently muddy our feelings in trying to dance around directness. There’s the danger of the movie becoming too insular, an inside-the-Beltway-type circle jerk of specifically artistic competitiveness and grievance. Brown mitigates this somewhat with an argument between Sam and his white-collar wife, Rebecca (Lauren Stamile), that, while solid in theory, needs to be anchored a bit more in tongue-loosened drunkeness than how it plays.
Interestingly, and decidedly for the better, The Blue Tooth Virgin also trades in long-form scenes that serve as call-and-response mirror images of one another. (Quotations on the turmoil of the artistic process help serve as chapter divides within the film.) Though this tack could be sacrificed and tweaked a bit up front for more energy and surface appeal, it helps him more or less get to the meat of his conceit, and pays dividends later in the movie, in a pair of engaging scenes in which Sam and David crawl inside their own heads (the former with a New Age-y creative consultant, the latter with a more conventional therapist) and try to root out what their writing means to them. Captured in simple, point-and-shoot, low-fi strokes, The Blue Tooth Virgin doesn’t aim for grand-gesture profundity; it’s nervous and ambivalent about “correct” notions of modern cinematic storytelling, as reflected in the gulf of opinion between its characters. But it entertainingly captures the ever-present tension between art and commerce, and again sets on a tee the age-old question: is it an audience that makes a work a legitimate piece of art? (Regent, R, 79 minutes)
In Regards to Capitalism and the Fall TV Season
Over at The 213, Telly Davidson takes a peek at the 2009 fall TV line-up, and also Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story.
How Deeply Do Cell Phones Confound Hollywood?
Rich Juzwiak has gone and done the hard work and heavy lifting for me, putting together a five-minute clip of wonky, non-receptive cell phone calls that spans 66 films over the past… what, seven or eight years? It’s a particularly modern problem — isolating characters in a technological era in which isolation is all but obsolete — that screenwriters have labored over and had a lot of difficulty reasonably cracking, but the clip-fest really runs the gamut, from those movies that play it smooth and loose (The Ruins, Turistas) to those that overstate their case (The Hills Have Eyes). The trophy for Most Amusing Write-Around, incidentally, probably goes to Hatchet, for its exclamatory “No bars… I hate the South!” This sidestepping of technology bugs the crap out of me when it’s handled badly, sure, but most studio films are only concerned with eliminating cell phones from thriller/horror storylines, and then moving on as quickly as possible. And empty coffee cups are still my number one target.