The running time on Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs — i.e., a few minutes short of an hour and a half — is feeding negative buzz on the film as little more than a piece of agitprop, the reasoning being that nothing that short and ostensibly heavily political can also be of legitimate substance. We’ll soon see; I’m screening the movie, Redford’s first film behind the camera since The Legend of Bagger Vance, this week. After kicking off AFI Fest on November 1 in Los Angeles, the movie opens nationally November 9.
Category Archives: Musings
Ben Affleck on The Daily Show
Fraternal relationships were under the microscope on The Daily Show last night, when Jon Stewart rightly questioned this statement from a bearded Ben Affleck, about his relationship with younger brother Casey: “When we were younger we kind of grab-assed around a little bit, like most people probably do with their siblings.” Errr… what?
Affleck was more than a bit off his game; unlike Matt Damon’s appearance earlier this summer, this chat had little wing-ding charm, though it was funny when Affleck mentioned how he was being asked the same junket questions about sibling fights, and had thus concluded that all journalists have horrible relationships with their brothers and sisters. Not so, Stewart insisted. “We just don’t think very hard about our interview questions. We’re not very good at what we do…”
Sylvester Stallone on Rambo IV
A few pictures from the fourth Rambo flick have been released, but Sylvester Stallone is finally getting out there and pressing a bit of long-lead flesh for the film… well, still without saying much. At the Las Vegas premiere of Resident Evil: Extinction, Stallone talked, in this short video clip, about (what is ostensibly) the final installment of the franchise, saying, “It’s a lot more realistic and hardcore than the last one,” before adding, “He’s in a grumpy mood and going to let it all out.” Probably not in a break-through therapy session, one imagines…
Sure this smacks of going to the well one time… well, several times too many, but Stallone, against long odds, pulled off a marvelous feat with Rocky Balboa; he showed that he really grasped the base appeal of the character, and went back to his roots in an interesting way. While there’s a bit less to work with in John Rambo, and the whole action pitfall trap of trying to make sure a suitable explosions quotient is met, some budgetary constraint might actually result in a halfway thought-provoking revisitation of the character. Certainly this is generally preferable to other career twilights for Stallone, be it continued straight-to-video teamings with Renny Harlin, entering politics or ending up the glad-handing celebrity judge on some reality show.
Bee Movie Swarms
The promotional assault for Paramount/DreamWorks’ Bee Movie has kicked into full gear, with a lot of the cardboard character stand-ins and other parallel market work I glimpsed almost a year ago while wandering around its production offices waiting for an off-the-record chat with someone I can’t currently remember (big impressions must’ve been made there, on both ends) now seeing fruition.
 wants more out of life than the inevitable career that<br />
awaits him and every other worker in New Hive City — that is to say, a job at<br />
Honex making honey. Barry jumps at the chance to venture out of the<br />
hive, and soon encounters a world beyond his wildest dreams. When Barry<br />
inadvertently meets a quirky florist named Vanessa (voiced by <a href=)
Renée Zellweger),
he breaks one of the cardinal rules of beedom — he talks to her. A
friendship soon develops, and Barry gets a guided crash course in the
ways of the human race. At press time, however, it was yet to be determined if Barry stings Vanessa, causing her squinty eyes to wholly disappear into her face.
The ubiquitous marketing will make this movie a commercial player, no doubt, and the perspective/in-flight animation (seen in its trailer here) seems pretty cool. Still, there’s a lack of Shrek-style bodily function humor, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing for you or I, that tells me (along with the end bit, in which Barry flies repeatedly into a window) that the movie might have some difficulty carving out mondo repeat kiddie viewership. The question, then, is whether long-parched Seinfeld fans will want to get their fix of the comedian in animated fashion.
The Universe Expands…
Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe, starring Jim Sturgess and Evan Rachel Wood, goes wide this week, and in many ways it’s still something worth checking out, even if it’s a tailor-made suit that doesn’t hang perfectly on the rack. The film lost me for significant swatches in the theater, but it’s bold and nervy — something too many movies decidedly aren’t — and a good portion of its music of course sticks with you, even if you’re not a hardcore Beatles maniac. Also opening this week are Michael Clayton and Lars and the Real Girl, along with Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Sleuth and We Own the Night. More on most of these soon, though I’ll be waiting to catch Elizabeth later, having had to see 30 Days of Night last night, instead of the former’s all-media screening…
On Creativity’s Restlessness
An interesting, if unexpected, juxtaposition occurred yesterday when I caught long-lead screenings of Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth (Sony Pictures Classics, December 14) and Andrew Wagner’s Starting Out in the Evening (Roadside Attractions, November 23) in back-to-back fashion. Each film is, in its own way, about the struggle of a brilliant man to reconcile within himself the fact that he may not have it in him to finish his final piece of work.
 shaken up when a graduate student (Lauren Ambrose) invades his solitude to mine his life for her thesis work about his out-of-print novels.</p>
<p>They’re very different works — and one is much more successful than the other; more to soon follow on this — but <b>each film tries to tap into the parallel aspiration of artistic and intellectual pursuit — how such devotion compels action but also stunts other behaviors</b>. Artists, writers, academicians and the like are frequently and not always wrongly knocked as selfish, a less-than-venal sin for which the characters here certainly don’t get off free and easy. But <b>there’s a necessity to such self-motivation, which feeds thought and spurs invention as much as salves the soul of the creator</b>. Or at least that’s the justification one peddles…</p>
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P2 Trailer Goes Down
The trailer for P2, a little thriller of containment starring Wes Bentley and Rachel Nichols (aka the hot babysitter from The Amityville Horror) slated to hit theaters November 9, has dropped, and though it’s complete boilerplate, I confess a little tinge of arch-browed curiosity, mainly from trying to figure out if the movie has any sort of twist or not.
, the film<o:p></o:p> marks the directorial debut of collaborator Franck Khalfoun. Set on Christmas Eve, it stars Nichols as Angela Bridges, an ambitious young white collar-type who’s stuck working late before she<br />
leaves for her family’s holiday party. When she gets down to the parking<br />
garage, she discovers that her car won’t start. The garage is deserted, and her<br />
cell phone doesn’t get a signal underground. When Thomas (Bentley), a friendly security guard, comes along and offers to help, Angela<br />
nervously accepts his gesture of goodwill. When he invites her to stay and share a small Christmas dinner, she initially laughs it off, not knowing that Thomas has been watching her<br />
closely for months, and that his dinner invitation is not optional.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p>Though I really want to go with <b>the heaving-bosom picture of Nichols in a negligee and handcuffs</b>, I’ll save that one for a later date, maybe pegged to the film’s release. Speaking of which, <b>has there been any young actor of recent memory who’s traded away his heat quite like Bentley?</b> In the span of just several years, he’s gone from a spoof-worthy co-star (in <i>Scary Movie</i>) of the Oscar-nominated <i>American Beauty</i> to almost completely anonymous. His post-<i>Beauty</i> choices — <i>The Claim</i>, <i>Soul Survivors</i>, <i>Four Feathers</i> and <i>The Miracle Match</i> — represent one heck of a craptacular parlay. I’m sure his agents had to both put a gun to his head and twist some studio arms to get him cast in <a href=)
Ghost Rider, but how did that work out, exactly? Does anyone actually remember him in the movie? Actually, maybe I’m not giving the handlers enough credit… maybe that was the point all along.
On Arab Pigeonholing
A piece in the Los Angeles Times yesterday by Ashraf Khalil presents an interesting overview of the struggles facing actors of Arab and Middle Eastern descent. This despite opening with a deeply suspect, no-names anecdote — a voice coach lecturing an actor about hiding his grandfather’s heritage, or he “won’t work in this town.” Even if true (and I would flag it as somewhat dubious not because of shoddy reporting, but because of self-motivation on the part of the actor), this is reflective of the individual, bigoted opinion of one idiot voice coach, and not a top-shelf decision maker. As such, it’s an awful if predictably emotionally strategic opening for a much more thoughtful piece about one of the chief dilemmas facing Arab actors today — whether to play terrorist roles.
Interview subjects include Omar Metwally (Munich, the forthcoming Rendition), Tony Shalhoub and Sayed Badreya (next summer’s Iron Man), and of course the main gripe seems to (rightly) be one about multi-dimensionality. One of the more amusing bits, meanwhile, mentions the pilot episode of The Watch List, which features a skit in which young Arab actors learn how to play terrorists — practicing holding assault rifles, begging 24‘s Jack Bauer for their lives and, finally, falling down dead. In the end, the class’ teacher (Iranian American comedian Maz Jobrani) earnestly urges his students to learn how to play these roles “so that Latino actors won’t get them.”
There’s also a telling, funny-sad anecdote from Badreya about his work as a consultant on the 1996 Kurt Russell/Steven Seagal action flick Executive Decision; a wedding scene at a mosque, meant to showcase Arabs in a positive, familial light, as well as a moderate Arab ambassador character who helps the movie’s heroes defeat the terrorists were both trimmed from the film. That’s something you can hang on studio executives. Well… them and a jingoistic test audience, more than likely.
Happy Birthday, Rachael Leigh Cook
It’s a happy birthday to Rachael Leigh Cook, who turns 28 today. Despite this summer’s Nancy Drew cameo and appearing in the forthcoming The Final Season, Cook is stuck is a rut of inconsequentiality, the result of a really bad 2001 (Antitrust, Josie and the Pussycats and fabled Miramax washout Texas Rangers) and… oh, who am I kidding? The only moment of commercial note in Cook’s career was the 1999 release She’s All That, which topped $100 million theatrically (seriously), and momentarily catapulted her to the top of people’s call lists.
Resident Evil: Extinction, the series looks alive and fresher than ever, despite its co-starring hordes of the undead.
. While Ashley Scott gets most of the butt-worship treatment (including one <I>very</I> lecherous angle and lingering shot), Alba bares a bit of skin as well. <B>Naturally, Stockwell featured plenty of young things in bathing suits in <I>Blue Crush</I>, and did the same with <A href=)
Turistas. I’m just wondering — and a little nervous — about how this predilection is going to get folded into Stockwell’s next film, Middle of Nowhere, starring 
Knightley and her Atonement director, Joe Wright, and thus a savvy, very smartly timed piece of flirty parallel promotion for a romance that is being described as devastatingly well-made, but still has to overcome certain period piece prejudices. The production was overseen by Chanel Artist Director Jacques Helleu, and it features a soundtrack tune performed by Grammy-winner Joss Stone. “Coco Chanel’s strong personality, bold temperament and charisma were impressive,” states Knightley in a press release on the matter. “There was no one like her in the world… her impact went beyond fashion and transformed society by liberating women in both a real and figurative sense.”
the bizarre amount of hate out there for Rossum — everything from