So because very narrow-minded and unimaginative people love to rent Hollywood as a piñata, filmmaker Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness — which imagines a mysterious epidemic that causes people to see nothing but fuzzy white light, resulting in a collapse of social order in an unnamed American city — is being protested by blind people. “The movie portrays blind people as monsters, and I believe it to be
a lie,” said Marc Maurer, president of the Baltimore-based National
Federation of the Blind. “Blindness doesn’t turn decent people into
monsters.”
The organization plans to protest the movie — based on the 1995 novel by Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago, and starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and Danny Glover, among others — at 75 theaters around the country when it’s released Friday by Miramax
Films.
Blind people and their advocates will hand out fliers and carry signs.
Among the slogans: “I’m not an actor. But I play a blind person in real
life.”
Stupid blind people… protesting the movie without even seeing it. Sigh…
So Deborah Kampmeier’s cornpone Southern gothic Hounddog — which rather outrageously has its wanly sketched Mystical Negro character advance the novel concept that, “It’s how people treat you that makes you a nigger!” — is banking on a rather unusual advertising strategy, after the whole Dakota-Fanning-rape-movie buzz didn’t really catch on the first go-round. Print ads this past weekend now feature an exhortation from no less than Gloria Steinem, reading, “Women especially should see this important, unforgettable film.”
Why, precisely? Because in its 98-minute running time there is a 20-second rape scene? Or because the writer-director is female? Hounddog is neither important nor unforgettable — except as the latter relates to David Morse’s portrayal of a drooling simpleton who cuts his own bangs after he gets struck by lightning. The fuzzy logic of this direct gender appeal is somewhat lost on me, but maybe it’s a post-Sarah Palin thing, I don’t know. It’d be interesting to know when it was hatched. And can the diehard P.U.M.A. folks really be pried off the Internet and cattle-rustled to arthouses?
There’s a special shame that any truly thinking, feeling person feels when one contributes to the theatrical gross of an utterly brain-dead movie, I mean a true piece of crap — even if it’s for purely professional reasons, with a reimbursement eventually coming. Some films go so far beyond the pall of mere uninspired, lowest-common-denominator entertainment that they feel like an affront to humankind, an insult to all creative types everywhere, all the way down to rural Kentucky public access talk show hosts.
Victoria Jackson, the ditz who in the 1980s made a career on Saturday Night Live out of playing a ditz, is the latest celebrity to drop a poorly written broadside against Barack Obama.
On her eponymous blog, right under a click-through ad for her latest album, Ukulele Ditties for Itty Bitty Kiddies, Jackson lets loose a rambling, semi-coherent rant that derides Obama as a relativist and humanist, and cites as evidence the fact that the Bible passages he quotes are too willfully obscure, and thus selected to overtly court Evangelicals. (Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.) In addition to scattering commas like pitched dice, confusing the word “attribute” with “contribute,” and labeling Obama a communist, racist and liar, Jackson asserts that, “Obama bears traits that resemble
the anti-Christ, and I’m scared to death that un-educated [sic] people will
ignorantly vote him into office.” Yes, she actually types those words, acknowledging that, “I know my stance might keep me from L.A. jobs, since (almost) the whole
town is liberal but… [sometimes] one must stand for what they believe in, and put
truth before popularity.”
So this is an inarguable truth in her mind? That he is the anti-Christ, or merely “bears traits that resemble” him? I guess I’m confused. I’m all for political expression on all sides, really, but I confess I’m both shocked and depressed by the levels of batshit-crazy present in opinion pieces like this — and the much commented upon op-ed from Jon Voight, whose prose reads like his train of thought skipped the rails and plunged off a cliff. Let me bottom-line it: you sound like ignorant rubes, anyone who peddles the most repugnant of this material.
When I hear/read stuff like this, it always comes off as desperate, needy invective from emotional hoarders — people who so feed on others’ insecurities and reactions that they need to try to exercise reverse mind control. It’s never about an intellectual, reasoned response; it’s always about attacking the strength of a feeling, and how this shouldn’t be trusted. Wasn’t that at the heart of Footloose, too?
Particularly with respect to the anti-Christ stuff, if you’re more invested in finding links between outlying scripture and current events to support your worldview, rather than living in the moment and confronting problems in something at least resembling head-on fashion, you’re not living as a Christian concerned with Christian works, with doing good and making the world a better place. You’re living merely to jump-circle defend the status quo, because any advancement in science, technology, social custom or anything else is another brick in the path toward the Great Reckoning. You might as well be living in a cave, honestly, and guarding the tribal flame.
None of this would matter, I guarantee you, if Barack Obama’s name was Barry Johnson. I’m not saying that all of the whackjob-fringe criticism of him falls purely along racial lines, but this isn’t about Obama, this is about people projecting their own uncertainties about the state of this country onto a man they have never met, because they fear the sea changes — racially, culturally, geographically — that this country will undergo in the next two generations. So the guy with the funny name is the easy, most immediate, front-and-center target. And after eight years of bewildering inarticulateness, “speaking well” becomes elitist, and appealing to a sense of hope and optimism becomes a reason to play the great Revelations card. It’s enough to make one mull the benefits of forced sterilization, really.
No, it’s not the latest lightweight advance in Hannibal Lecter face-guard technology. It’s a GoateeSaver™, and the exact minute that this company raises enough money to firm up and finalize a big screen product placement deal with a major Hollywood studio film will represent the fourth sign of the coming apocalypse. It will also force me to kick a puppy.
Don’t know if others have the same feeling, but there’s an Edge shaving cream commercial out there in heavy rotation that I find monumentally irksome, wherein the invigorating effects of said product’s scent are portrayed by a group of miniature women with jet-packs who fly up the nose of a guy slathering on shaving cream for his morning face-scrape. There, inside his nasal cavity, they dance about, underneath a disco ball (?!), seemingly having the time of their lives.
I’ve seen this commercial a dozen times, maybe more, and it’s made me realize just how strongly I don’t find anything appealing or funny, regardless of the set-up, about scenes in which shrunken humans and/or insects enter the body through a nostril — something the recent animated flick Fly Me to the Moon reconfirmed, with its bizarre, stupid joke about Grandpa Fly having once saved Amelia Earhart’s life by buzzing up her nose while she was dozing off during her transatlantic flight. Not content to merely feed audiences a cringe-inducing joke (“That was one serious booger!”), the 3-D movie gives us a flashback too, in which the intrepid, duster-clad fly does his thing and is sneezed out. Gross. It’s a low point in a movie with plenty of valleys, and was greeted with derision by most of the many youngsters with whom I saw the G-rated film.
Per this item forwarded along by a reader in the UK, it seems like a fair number of cinemas in Great Britain are banning popcorn, which has to be, sincerely, among the stupidest things I’ve heard this year. Somehow even more stupid than the surging trend of its banning, though, are the explanatory comments by Daniel Broch, owner of the renowned Everyman cinema in London’s
upmarket Hampstead district.
Broch cites popcorn’s “disproportionate influence on the space in terms of its overwhelming
smell, the cultural idea of it and the operational problems created by
the mess it produces” as contributing factors in its banning. Here, let me play transatlantic problem-solver for a moment. First, it’s the odor of those urinal cakes in downmarket theaters that would trigger my gag reflex long before the odor of popcorn; perhaps an air filtration system or, failing that, a can of Oust will help save the apparently large segment of the British population allergic to the odor of popcorn. Secondly, I’m not even sure what “the cultural idea of it” refers to it, but I think that’s class-bashing. Finally, if your business is suffering major “operational problems” because of popcorn, feel free to mix in a teenager with a broom. Most towns have one or two who would gladly sweep for the chance to watch free movies. You don’t even have to pay them — just tell them they’re “floor interns.”
Broch wraps up by adding, “I’m not saying no popcorn is better than popcorn,” failing to somehow realize that yes, that’s exactly what he’s saying. Oh, Great Britain…
Disappointing, but no big shock, really. What’s notable is that this tack of cloak-and-dagger anti-publicity didn’t at all help The X-Files: I Want to Believe, which grossed one-third of the opening weekend haul of its 1998 predecessor, or Eddie Murphy’s Meet Dave, which bombed to the tune of a $5.3 million bow. Each of those films screened in highly selective, opt-in fashion, just like The Happening. Yet despite the clearly demonstrated lack of success in prying first-weekend filmgoer dollars out of wallets merely by airwave promotional carpet-bombing, 20th Century Fox seems intent on pursuing this strategy. The dirty truth is that while things are changing, yes, and there is a “wild west” element to film criticism on the Internet, you still have to get down and do the dirty work — all the foot-soldier stuff that publicity involves. An air war alone (or trying to “message manage” through a couple corruptible sites) won’t win out for a full year’s slate.
After cycling through a couple long-lead teasers early on, the main theatrical poster for Lionsgate’s forthcoming Disaster Movie, which of course echoes back to the crammed visual-gag posters for Superhero Movie, Scary Movie and all the other spoof flicks of the past half-dozen years, just goes kitchen-sink character collection, under the tagline, “Your favorite movies are going to be destroyed.”
I suppose I get all the superhero inclusions (The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, Hellboy), but then there’s visual riffs on… Juno, Enchanted and High School Musical? Plus animated flicks like Alvin and the Chipmunks and Kung Fu Panda? Am I the only one confused, and disheartened? Ever since Not Another Teen Movie, which actually had some smarts, these genre-spoofing titles have, broadly speaking, been on a big-time downward slide, from an already middling perch. And sure, cheats have been part of the last couple Scary Movie flicks, but are filmmakers (and I guess I’m thinking chiefly, though not exclusively, of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, who’re jointly responsible for Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans and now this latest flick) even trying anymore? Hell, are executives even reading scripts anymore, or are these things greenlit solely on a title and coverage written up by a 22-year-old intern fresh off the bus from Ball State?
I assume (hope?) there’s at least some tossed-off plot contrivance that serves as a tip of the cap to the title, but if you’re not trying first and foremost to lampoon genre conventions why call it Disaster Movie, I guess is my point — why not just Popular Movie, or Money-Making Movie? And, more to the point, can flat-tire “satires” of this ilk — which seem to consist of people dressed up like characters from other movies, doing bad impressions and getting hit in the balls or plowed over by speeding vehicles — be long for a world in which any number of YouTube creations can offer the same sort cheap, dumb, double-F laffs, and often do it much better?
John McCain has concluded a strange week of brush-back pitches against Barack Obama, dropping three different attack ads, each seemingly designed to scare up as much mainstream news coverage as anything else. The first, a blistering rebuke of Obama for failing to visit wounded troops at Landstuhl Air Force base during the return from his European swing, is undercut by, you know, a lack of facts on the ground.
The second ad — a weird poke at Obama’s celebrity, visually comparing him to both Paris Hilton (whose parents, ironically, are max-donors to the McCain campaign) and Britney Spears, i.e., “an empty vessel” — seems to suggest it’s a bad idea to support an American leader who might also be able to capture the imagination of anyone overseas. (Picking up on this assault on optimism, advocacy group MoveOn.org responded with an ad buy of their own, directed by actor Rider Strong, which mockingly presented hope as a communicable disease.)
Upping the strangeness quotient even further, McCain’s latest ad, titled “The One,” features out-of-context clips of Obama talking up his campaign as part of a movement greater than him, and then closes with a comparison to Charlton Heston’s Moses from The Ten Commandments, ceding, “Obama may be ‘The One,’ but is he ready to lead?”
To me, this isn’t so much a “kitchen sink strategy” as it is the farcical, kids movie version of this scheme, where plastic toys, sofa cushions and a blanket are thrown at a rampaging sibling in an effort to slow his or her momentum. The first ad was a bit scummy (though still fairly mild by the Karl Rove-ian standards of recent electoral politics), but mainly it’s just stupid; this belies the claims of high-road, issues-oriented outreach, and kind of underscores the arm’s-length disdain and condescension with which the McCain campaign has treated the Obama campaign. I know this, though: Treating hope as a piñata, and mocking or questioning as somehow insincere or dubious the optimism and sort of desperate desire to reconnect and repair that a lot of people — many of whom haven’t given two shits about a national political election in decades, if their lifetimes — feel is on a very basic level a bit despicable, and probably a bad political play, too. I know they’re running behind and don’t have the advantage of many intangibles, but this tack didn’t work out very well for Hillary Clinton, in case the McCain camp didn’t notice.
New York Magazine‘s Vulture craps on August movies, which seems especially appropriate this year since a lot of studios are running up the white flag because of the Olympics. I skipped out on screenings of Swing Vote and The Mummy: Attack of the CGI Wildebeests and Golden Emperor Played by Jet Li (or whatever it’s called), both because they were up against one another and I had another evening commitment, but there’s an extra ring of truth to all this since Lionsgate is currently busy stalling on even communicating to me the Los Angeles theaters in which their new, not-screened-for-critics horror flick, Midnight Meat Train, is opening this week. That’s a good sign.
In what surely seems like the set-up for a new movie, or at the very least a Saturday Night Live sketch, Will Ferrell, David Beckham and Danica Patrick are now apparently… the three co-owners of a racehorse, after having been awarded part-ownership as part
of a gift bag handed out at the ESPY Sports Awards in Los Angeles on
Wednesday?!
With increasing frequency, Hollywood studio publicists are asked to oversee convoluted games of keep-away.
These muddied-water campaigns of containment are designed to squeeze as
many dollars as possible from first-weekend moviegoers by nixing
advance screenings for critics and thereby delaying the collateral
damage. This past March, a couple of movies shrouded in mystery were the Weinstein Company’s comedy spoof Superhero Movie and 20th Century Fox’s Asian-flavored horror flick Shutter. Both are new to DVD this month, with respective July 8 and July 15 release dates, and the question that arises (besides perhaps, “Are you
desperate enough to rent either one of these titles?”) is, “Did the end-around on critics work?” The answer, in a word, is yes. Both
films opened in the $10 million range and went on to total domestic
grosses of just under $26 million — not bad for a couple of PG-13 rated
titles that cost next to nothing to make and even less to market. On DVD, Superhero Movie and Shutter are the kinds of
movies with front cover artwork that bypasses the glowing review from a
major (or even minor) critic in favor of big-letter “EXTENDED EDITION”
and “UNRATED” proclamations above the title, and a reminder of the
makers’ previous credits down below. Essentially, it’s all about dangling more
craptastic product in front of hungry genre fans, never mind any nuance or the individual merits of a film. For the full read on this phenomeon as it applies to these flicks, from FilmStew, click here.
Is anyone shocked that Molly Ringwald is apparently begging John Hughes for a sequel to 16 Candles? Well of fucking course she is. She’s not a total brain stem, I guess. Ringwald made her name in the 1984 adolescent romantic comedy, the first of a string of successful collaborations with Hughes. Now 40, she’s rarely had occasion to appear in anything either memorable or of lasting value to anyone outside her family since the 1980s (I’ll grant a waiver for 1994’s The Stand), and her big 1996 small screen comeback, Townies, flamed out after half a season if I recall correctly.
But sometimes things happen for a reason; I caught Ringwald on stage a number of years back, and she was flat-out awful… like, Ozarks dinner theater bad. Yeah, different muscles, I know, but Ringwald couldn’t even summon the meager skill and energy to charm thirtysomething the audience members who were most doggedly in her corner to begin with. She mainly just… talked quite loudly. For this reason and many others, if Hughes were to finally cede to decades-long pressure to return to some of his ’80s hitmakers, 16 Candles sure wouldn’t be the film to launch that trip down nostalgia lane. Maybe, maybe, maybe it’d be The Breakfast Club, but I still think Ferris Bueller’s Day Off would be the best candidate.
Hey, you know what I really hate in movies, even more than insipid “jokes” involving fart sound effects? Snot rockets. And yet they’re in The Love Guru, and make the cut in the opening scene of Hancock as well. I hope this doesn’t augur a summer trend.
So actor Stephen Baldwin sure doesn’t do much to chip away at the Democrats’
built-in Hollywood advantage in this clip from Fox News from a couple days ago, in which
he dismisses the claim that John McCain represents a third Bush term as “the
most stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” Tip of the cap to Politico for the grab…
Fox News long ago devolved into a broken-limbed, blinkered, self-congratulatory parody of itself, but they may have outdone themselves with their latest bit of whack-ass fear-mongering. During the June 6 edition of America’s Pulse, host E.D. Hill threw it to a commercial by teasing an upcoming discussion segment on nonverbal communication, and specifically Barack Obama‘s celebration of securing the Democratic presidential nomination, thusly: “A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab? The gesture everyone seems to interpret differently.” In the ensuing discussion with Janine Driver — whom Hill introduced as “a body language expert” — Hill at no point explained her previous reference to “a terrorist fist jab,” all of which raises the question of how we feel when the freedom of the press collides with tactics that are the moral equivalence of yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater.
Because 20th Century Fox is going for their collective corporate masters degree in radio silence and media manipulation, they didn’t send out invites for M. Night Shyamalan’s new film. In fact, they’re holding two screenings of The Happening today on their lot, at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., but I’ve been caught up in other things, forgot to reach out and prod them to confirm, and now just have too much else going on today to drive across town and wreck the rest of my schedule.
They’re usually pretty decent about ‘fessing up to these “opt-in” affairs, Fox, but I’ve had a pair of other folks with legitimate reviewing interests tell me they were either turned down for admittance, or flatly told that the movie wasn’t at all screening. I can’t get a firm read on what this means for The Happening specifically — trying to just run up the opening weekend gross since they know/feel they have a turkey, or protecting some arguable narrative twist — since Fox’s new modus operandi seems to be to angle for the quietest release possible anyway. (Exhibitors were also forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement in advance of screening the movie, a highly unusual and punitive move.) There may soon be a day when the studio just accidentally forgets to ship prints of a film, and releases something straight to DVD not necessarily because they meant to all along, but because someone using the logical extension of their publicity rubric figures that’s a good way to slip a film past an audience as well.
When is a DVD review not a DVD review? When, in lieu of the double-disc version of a release, you’re sent the bare-bones single-disc version, which is what recently happened with Semi-Pro, releasing today. So instead of my thoughts on the “Four Days in Flint” featurette, the look at the one-hit wonder (“Love Me Sexy”) featured prominently in the film, the presumably included Old Spice in-character ads, or the behind-the-scenes footage with Bill Walton, Bob Costas and the cast, I instead merely refer you to my previous review. And mention that Will Ferrell’s shorts on the movie’s slipcover are pointedly shorter than those of his costars.
Last night’s MTV Movie Awards, hosted by Mike Myers, proved their simultaneous disposable entertainment value and complete lack of worth as anything more than an exercise in staged, promotional diddling. More than 11 months after its previous coronation as the “Best Film Not Yet Seen” (seriously), Transformers took home the prize for last year’s Best Movie, besting Juno, Superbad and I think 13 or 14 other “nominees.” Yawn. I’ll cop, though, to feeling some small (very small) surge of pleasant, atta-boy identification in the feting of perceived underdog Best Kiss winner — a smooch between Briana Evigan and Robert Hoffman, from Step Up 2 the Streets. (This win may have been foreshadowed by an opening monologue dance-off between Chris Brown and Myers, who naturally managed to get in plenty of winking, non-plug plugs for The Love Guru.) Rain-soaked and over-photographed, theirs was a clichéd clinch, to be sure, but a heartfelt and climactic one.
A full review will be dropping later in the week, but it’s worth noting that John Cusack’s War, Inc., releasing this weekend in New York and Los Angeles, is a hot mess. The film is a sprawling, alleged satire about a shadowy gunslinger-fixer (Cusack) who trips to a fictional Middle Eastern country that the United States has invaded — and is now being occupied by a private army fronted by a corporation run by the former American vice president (Dan Aykroyd) — to both bump off a foreign dignitary who has the temerity to want to build his own oil pipeline and, for some reason never quite made clear, preside over the impending marriage of a Middle Eastern pop star played by Hilary Duff.
There are a few pockets of very small intrigue here, mostly owing to the charmed participation of Marisa Tomei, as a hard-driving, liberal reporter who is out to expose the corruption of this massive exercise in American “branding.” When the movie stoops to contrivances to advance the relationship between she and Cusack beyond spitfire head-bumping, however, what little air there was there goes completely pfft. Apart from its simply awful construction, the most surprising thing, however, may be how tedious the film is — there’s not even the piercing, occasional amusement of diamond-brilliant, unpolished righteous anger. If capital-I indignation were going to make a scathing, satirical rebuke of American military/capitalistic arrogance, but then had a few beers, fell asleep on the couch, woke up with a start four hours later with nachos all over its shirt and MSNBC on the TV, and then just yawningly agreed with whatever Rachel Maddow was saying, and muttered, “Fucking Bush administration” under its breath, that would be this movie. It doesn’t feel thought through, honed or even self-assured, and certainly not very smart.
The favorite what-if scenario of ultra-right-wing nutters will get its day in Unthinkable, which centers on a major threat to the United States involving three nuclear devices whose locations are shrouded in secrecy by a single terrorist. With only two days before they are deployed, a black-ops interrogator and a female FBI agent have to decide how far they will go to find them. Variety reports that Buffalo Soldiers helmer Gregor Jordan will direct, and Samuel L. Jackson will star (presumably as the black-ops interrogator, not the female FBI agent, which will be, I don’t know, Julianne Moore? Rachel Weisz? Rachel McAdams?)
While this will surely, finally give the talking heads at Fox News something other than 24 and Jack Bauer to reference, given the conceit, the guy-and-gal commercial concession and, I’m sad to say, the involvement of Jackson, does anyone doubt that this movie is going to suck in dispiriting ways? Jackson only tries in approximately every fourth film (the last time was in Resurrecting the Champ… though I haven’t seen Renny Harlin’s direct-to-DVD Cleaner), and everything about this reads phone-it-in, gun-waving, loud-authoritative-voice-using Jackson, which we’ve seen approximately two dozen times before. Can’t wait for the water-boarding recreations set to Hans Zimmer music, though. Oh wait… yes I can.
So according to Screen International, a sequel to Richard Kelly’s surreal, quasi-apocalyptic 2001 cult sensation Donnie Darko will begin shooting in Los Angeles on May 18. Entitled S. Darko, the movie will find Daviegh Chase reprising her role as Donnie’s younger sister, Samantha; other cast includes Gossip Girl‘s Ed Westwick (also currently on screens as the jerky older brother in Son of Rambow), Step Up 2 the Streets‘ Briana Evigan and The Invisible‘s Justin Chatwin. The story allegedly picks up seven years after the first film, when Samantha and her best friend Corey, both now 18, find themselves plagued by bizarre visions while on a road trip to
Los Angeles.
Chris Fisher, who previously co-wrote and helmed Rampage: The Hillside Strangler Murders and Cuba Gooding, Jr.‘s corrupt cop drama Dirty, will direct. “I’m a great admirer of Richard Kelly’s film and hope to create a similar world of blurred fantasy and reality,” says Fisher. Producers have spoken to Kelly, about the project but he is not involved in any official capacity at this stage. To my mind this is both amusing and kind of head-shakingly ridiculous at the same time — a sad attempt at recapturing unbottled magic instead of, you know, actually searching for great unproduced scripts.
Holy crap — so Warner Bros. is axing its specialty interests, according to Variety, severing ties with both Picturehouse and Warner Independent, and in the process eliminating more than 70 positions. “With New Line now a key part of Warner Bros., we’re able to handle films across the entire spectrum of genres and budgets without overlapping production, marketing and distribution infrastructures,” says Alan Horn, Warner Bros.’ president and chief operating officer. “After much painstaking analysis, this was a difficult decision to make, but it reflects the reality of a changing marketplace and our need to prudently run our businesses with increased efficiencies.” Translation: “more than ever, if it doesn’t have franchise potential, a comfortable genre slotting and/or a position for two major stars, or someone else didn’t already spend the money to make it, we’re not interested.” This is one of those things that doesn’t play for even casual Jane and Johnny Arthouse fans, but it sucks for American film, period.
So Nick Cannon and Mariah Carey are married… wait, what?! The pair — he 27 years old, she 39, and crazy — apparently tied the knot in a sunset ceremony at Carey’s home in the Bahamas on Wednesday. “They have been smitten with each other for days, weeks,” a friend told the New York Post. “And she’s always had a crush on him.” Oh. Well… good. There’s that, then. There’s a “me and Mariah/baby and pacifiers” joke to be made here, but honestly I can’t even summon the energy.
