Matt Damon and amnesiac CIA assassin Jason Bourne, né David Webb — the tightly coiled, pit-bull seeker at the heart of the hard-charging Bourne trilogy.

Damon isn’t short, per se, but his compact frame hardly gives off the air of someone who’s a professional killer. What Damon does have is a swallowed intensity and intellectual awareness of his surroundings, and he impresses these traits upon Bourne, hardening his close-set eyes to match a clenched jaw of resoluteness. With Damon, you see the whirring inner motor of Jason Bourne, as he absorbs information at a high rate of speed and then translates that into both rapid analysis and breathless action. Despite any and all story points, he is the jockey driving this series, exhorting it forward in inexorable fashion. The utterly absorbing The Bourne Ultimatum, then, finally delivers some redemption for Bourne, even if it’s chiefly of the cold-comfort variety. For the review of the film, click here.

I went for another walk-run-lounge (my own version of the triathlon) in Santa Monica this past weekend, and in three weeks or so the wraparound trashcan ads for Hot Rod have faded mightily in the sun, in addition to some of the expected petty graffiti (fake mustaches drawn on Isla Fischer, rather appropriate considering the movie’s fascination with them). Advance word via viral and new frontier advertising is all well and good, but when you’re heading into the home stretch prior to your film’s release and a string of its posters look worn and faded… well, that has to have a psychologically dampening effect. Underdog ads, meanwhile, have taken over some of those same trashcans. And that movie releases this Friday as well, along with Hot Rod. Smart, that Underdog. For once.

Zathura, I think that’s most of it; I’m really interested to see where he goes as a director. With this picture, surely Robert Downey, Jr. had to be having some Natural Born Killers flashbacks, though…

Has anyone else seen those unnerving Hanes commercials with box office toxin Cuba Gooding, Jr., alongside erstwhile basketball star Michael Jordan? It’s not merely bad enough that Gooding’s in a forthcoming sad-sack sequel/spin-off, Daddy Day Camp, directed by Fred Savage, but he’s also prostrating himself in commercial work. The pieces (of which I’ve seen two cuts), find a couple production assistants instructing Gooding to be cool in front of Jordan as they prepare to shoot an ad, and then Gooding running up like a fan-child, and locking himself around Jordan in a bear hug.

To be clear, this would (or at least could) be funny if it played off the dignified image of a cool and collected customer, but Gooding reeks of flop-sweat and desperation. He’s got the accumulated stench of a dozen bad choices on him, and it’s clearly a burden that weighs on him. I last interviewed Gooding for Dirty, writer-director Chris Fisher’s very derivative amoral cop drama, and he seemed like a dead man walking even then, before the release of the emotionally overdialed, air-quote artistic Shadowboxer. (His action movie End Game, meanwhile, didn’t even make it to theaters.) It’s not mortgage-payment commercial work in and of itself that is misguided (Kevin Bacon also appears in Hanes ads with Jordan, and Jennifer Love Hewitt has some herself), it’s just the shuck-and-jive desperation to please that comes across as debasing — here as in the Daddy Day Camp poster. Can Chill Factor 2 really be that far behind?

I got the spec information today for the August 7 DVD release of Disturbia, and had to laugh a little bit. The film’s original poster, of course, featured an eyeless shot of star Shia LaBeouf peering through those same giant-lensed binoculars. This is a case of box office performance shaping artistic reconceptualization for the home video market; now that LaBeouf is a big star, post-Transformers and all, it makes sense to show us his eyes. Still no front-cover name mention, though, which seems strange.

Another delayed tidbit that I found of interest; in many of its first and second weekend newspaper ads for Ratatouille — at least out here in the Los Angeles Times — Disney took the time and space to affix a little “certified fresh” emblem (above) from critical aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes. The first one I saw pegged the review support rate at an already astonishingly high 95%, but when that percentage crept upward, a few other ads were revised to “96% fresh,” where, as of this writing, the movie still stands. This is a tack that seems really smart to me — selling the consensus of the movie to those adult film fans still resistant to animated flicks on grounds that they’re a genre and not a medium (which of course isn’t the case).

I touched upon this previously in a brief piece on Michael Bay, but Jonathan Foster also has up an excellent piece on the excess of Bay’s canon, writing this of the filmmaker:

“In all of Bay’s work, there’s forward momentum to the
imagery and, by linking one shot to the next, a story seems to occur (emphasis mine). But
there’s nothing cinematic about the way he accumulates moving pictures. That’s
one of the reasons his films always have excellent trailers — every shot is
powerful by itself, and yet they’re all inherently meaningless. He might be the
greatest second-unit director film has ever seen.”

Foster is right, really. Bay is an imagist; he only understands story in the most cursory sense. He’s there to make it move and, more often than not, glisten in the sun. I’d wholeheartedly disagree with Foster about the ending of Transformers, though. The story was so warped at that point, and the accumulated mind-numbingness of its images so discombobulating, that it felt like “pop shot” action, nothing more — certainly not (emotionally) involving action.

So pictures from the new, fourth Rambo film — now entitled simply John Rambo, after having gone through a host of silly monikers — have leaked online, including the above one, which to me makes Sylvester Stallone look like an animal wrangler on the set of Snakes on a Plane.

Against long odds, Stallone pulled off a marvelous feat with Rocky Balboa; he showed he really got the root appeal of the character, and went back to his roots in an interesting way. I’m more skeptical about his ability to do the same sort of thing with the character of Rambo, who is a relic of Reagan-era machismo in not insignificant ways. That said, I’d much rather see this sort of autumnal career arc from Stallone — involved, hands-on, really trying — than a flicker-fade of more block-headed genre tripe. It makes for nice contrast with all these discussions and stories about newbies on the scene.

All right, I’ll look to slam out a proper review tomorrow, perchance, but I thought I’d drop a few thoughts on Danny Boyle’s Sunshine. All in all, it’s an interesting and kind of artful misfire — the type of movie that doesn’t really ignite a desire to ever view it again, but one that you’d recommend to certain friends, if maybe not others.

Loosely categorized as a science fiction thriller, it’s set in the year 2057. The sun is dying and a solar winter has
enveloped the Earth, whose last best hope lies with the Icarus II, a spacecraft
with an international crew of eight men and women. Their mission: to
deliver a nuclear device designed to reignite our fading sun. Deep into their
voyage, out of radio contact with Earth, the crew hears a distress beacon from
the Icarus I, which disappeared on the same mission seven years earlier. A
terrible accident throws their mission into jeopardy, and soon the crew finds
themselves fighting not only for their sanity and their lives, but for the
future of us
all.

The obvious benchmarks here are Solaris, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien and (just a bit) Armageddon, with Boyle’s tastes of course tilting toward the more artistic, which accounts for Alwin Kuchler’s affected cinematography, shot in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, a first for Boyle. What the movie — which, at its concentrated core, has a relatively bleak-hearted view about humanity essentially being its own worst enemy — most has going for it is that there is no sentimental attachment to its characters, which equals a real sense of jeopardy, since anyone can die at any time. After creating a relatively foreboding sense of mood in its first half or two-thirds, however, Sunshine devolves into an impressionistic action tale. By the time two characters are left sliding around on a giant cube, three words surge to the front of your brain: what the fuck? For more information, click here.

A full review will follow on Friday, but Kevin James and Adam Sandler’s I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry is a movie that makes you say wow, and not in a good way. It’s bad. In fact, it’s flat-out awful. I went in expecting a slightly down-market, dumb-fun-time comedy, and left underwhelmed. The story is derisible, the cameos are strange (Dave Matthews? Dan Patrick?) and a long and absolutely laugh-free early passage leaves one with plenty of time to ponder the average number of popcorn crunches per minute of one’s neighbor.

From Sandler’s libidinous, gum-smacking, single-guy skirt-chaser right on down the line, Chuck & Larry goes to extraordinary lengths to assert the fact that it’s a “play-gay” movie, both in the film and of course in its marketing. It even has not one but two hetero-tilting taglines — “They’re straight as can be, but don’t tell anyone,” and “How far would you go for a friend?” Why not just go ahead and put, “Seriously man, they totally dig boobs, for reals” in parantheses under the title? That would roughly equate to the level of nuance and subtlety contained herein.

Sure, the movie actually delivers on Jessica Biel’s butt shots, in rather… admirable fashion, I guess you’d say? But it’s not funny, period. Further carving to follow…

With Transformers‘ $220 million (and counting) gross, and a prominent role in the forthcoming installment of the Indiana Jones series, erstwhile Project Greenlight kid Shia LaBeouf is well on his way to stardom, getting so far out ahead of any disastrous solo projects that he can milk this high for another four or five years, easy.

A few quotes from a July 1 piece in the Los Angeles Times, just before Transformers‘ bow, however, showcase a manic streak that could conceivably augur trouble if LaBeouf hits a rough patch. “I freak out sometimes,” he says at the article’s end. “When I’m in my trailer, I have panic attacks. I’m like a nervous little gremlin. [On set] I can control myself, I can watch the monitor and say, ‘That’s the person I’ve created, that’s who I want to be right now.'”

“Acting is my entirety. This is the most important thing in life to me — above politics, above my family, above my own happiness. If I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t want to live, literally. I’m saying this and I mean it. Happiness isn’t worth anything, it’s momentary. This is forever.”

Such notions of forever are all well and good when you’re starring in blockbusters, of course. It’s a different matter when you’re no longer on the receiving end of phone calls and offer sheets. I’m not saying he’s doomed or anything, but LaBeouf seems like a genuinely good kid; I hope he doesn’t get too caught up in numbers analysis.

In a piece by Gina Piccalo, the Los Angeles Times is reporting today — and my own emails are confirming — that 20th Century Fox won’t be screening The Simpsons Movie for critics until three days in advance of its July 27 general release, ostensibly a strategy to the preserve the film’s plot, which has been a source of rabid speculation ever since the project was announced last year with a surprise theatrical trailer. While there’s the typical speculation that such a move means Fox doesn’t feel they really have the goods with the movie, I’m apt to side here with those that believe the surface explanation.

The trailers and TV ads to date have sold the movie merely on its status — as a celebratory filmic extension of the series. To the extent that plot points have been leaked or reported on (a nuclear accident in Springfield, etcetera), there’s been a lot of talk about these being potential misdirection, and large portions of the material from trailers being specially crafted for such. To me, that seems plausible. And you know what? I don’t really mind.

I just recently finished reading Spin‘s profile on Amy Winehouse, the British, up-and-coming, vaguely horse-faced jazz and R&B belter, and then I was struck yesterday, while blasted with her catchy hit single “Rehab” while stuck in traffic, that if it hasn’t already been snatched up by some bottom-feeding teen flick, this is a potentially great big screen song. It likely won’t find its perfect match; the quite literal if rather deliciously sardonic lyrics dictate that. But the tune’s superlative horn and trumpet work — working in concert with that slap-happy, click-clackitty percussive loop — give it an undeniable sense of thrift-store uplift. No big production for production’s sake, just everything working in unison.

Rather than finding its cinematic soulmate in the tale of some alcoholic drifter-grifter who makes good, “Rehab” will more than likely be used as spackle to cover up some narrative inanity. You know, kind of how Lincoln Park’s “What I’ve Done” is slapped over the end of Transformers and cranked up to spleen-rattling levels, in an effort (mostly successful, it turns out) to make you momentarily forget that the movie just told you that a massive, city-leveling battle between giant alien robots could be covered up merely by dumping its wreckage into the ocean.