The trailer for The Bourne Ultimatum, the next installment of the Jason Bourne series, is of course out, along with the long-lead television ads and the billboards somewhat strangely pitching the movie’s tag (“On August 3, Jason Bourne comes home”) but with no mention of its title. I guess I say strangely because it’s still hard to think about the sleeper hit of summer 2002 as now being its own sort of instantly recognizable franchise. A spry melding of up-to-date aesthetic and worldview, hand-to-hand combat, and a narrative that dovetails perfectly with its protagonist’s panicky quest for self-actualization, The Bourne Identity has an awful lot to do with James Bond’s Casino Royale reinvention than most mainstream audiences might think. The TV ads for The Bourne Ultimatum are so-so, with David Strathairn as the new barker of orders, to Joan Allen’s returning witness of Bourne’s squirrelly escapability, but the long-form trailer hints at a full temporal memory awakening, as well as featuring some kick-ass car chase bits.

Fiscally, look for a slight uptick on the worldwide grosses of the first two films, which made $213 and $290 million, respectively. A big part of that will be eaten into by a budget that reportedly almost doubled from The Bourne Supremacy, however. Stealing away from his work on the third film, director Paul Greengrass made a special trip to the Los Angeles Film Critics Association dinner this past January to accept Best Director honors for his work on United 93 (his only awards season appearance), and he appeared a bit haggard, to be honest. Granted, a trans-Atlantic flight will help do that to you, but there were other problems born of the movie’s staggered shooting schedule and many locations.

In other news, as part of its promotional campaign for The Bourne Ultimatum, Universal is teaming up with Google for “The Ultimate Search for Bourne,” kicking off on July 16. Using various Google tools to track Bourne across various continents, contestants will make themselves eligible for a variety of prizes, including a bag full of phony passports. No, just kidding about that last part…

I went for a jaunt around Santa Monica yesterday, traversing pretty much the entire beach from Temescal Canyon to far south of the pier, and was struck by the literally hundreds of trashcans bearing wrap-around advertisements for Paramount’s new comedy Hot Rod, starring Andy Samberg. I get that these types of things, along with item separators in grocery stores, are the new frontier of “public impressions,” a nice, low-cost supplement to conventional P&A. But does it strike anyone else as subversive commentary on the relatively disposable nature of the piece? Too-easy ammo, I suppose. Some reviewer will make hay of this… maybe me, since I should be seeing the movie this week, so as to also lay to rest any controversy over its running time.

So a portion of this piece from Variety, on the German government’s decision to help fund United Artists’ Valkyrie — a rooted-in-truth drama, directed by Bryan Singer, about an assassination plot against Adolf Hitler during World War II — struck me as interesting. The project has already been in the news, of course, due to the government turning down the production’s repeated entreaties to shoot at an actual historical location, all owing to Cruise’s beliefs as a Scientologist, which the German government views as totalitarian.

What I don’t get, I guess, is how the government’s $80 million annual federal film fund — $6.5 million of which will go to Valkyrie — doles out its kitty. Production incentives and enormous tax rebates are one thing, and totally old hat, part of the game of luring Hollywood flicks abroad, but chipping in cash on a foreign production would seem to be the role of an investor, no? What, exactly, does the government get for its money? I know production money then flows back to local economies via catering, room and board, local artisans, etcetera, but how does it benefit German filmmakers or fans to throw that kind of money at a Hollywood flick?

Meanwhile, if the grant — which exceeds the total cost of most German
features — seems generous, it’s not the biggest of the year. In April, the same government agency put up $12.3
million for Warner Bro.’s Speed Racer, starring Emile Hirsch, Christina Ricci and Matthew Fox, which is currently shooting at
Studio Babelsberg just outside of Berlin.

Michael Bay is an unparalleled conductor of destruction, that much we know. He likes his set pieces big, his explosions bigger, his bass deep, his music cues thundering and his subtext bold, highlighted and rendered in all caps. At the screening of his forthcoming Transformers that I attended, he welcomed the audience and said he was on hand, just recently back from Australia, “to make sure it’s fucking loud,” with all appropriate exclamation.

The film certainly delivers in terms of its effects work, from Industrial Light & Magic, and Bay trades in the typical sort of emphatic, canted close-ups and adrenalized style
that have been his hallmark throughout his career. The
problem is that Bay, for
all his arguable skill as a conjurer of sugar-rush catharsis,
has little sense of spatial coherence. He’s a top-notch imagist, as all those Clio Awards somewhat attest (that also explains the segments of Transformers that come off as car commercials), but his basic aesthetic sensibility doesn’t seem to have advanced that much beyond his swirling, shadow-inflected work on Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got a Gun” music video.

It sounds hackneyed to say, but Bay truly does play by his own cinematic rules, collapsing established spaces to suit momentary need, and frequently creating escape through reverse shots rather than any sort of
sensible internal story logic. The resultant action can be eye-popping, but also wholly devoid of any true or artful tension. He’s kind of like a home run hitter in baseball, in my opinion — always swinging for the fence with iconic images and “cool-factor” explosions. Frequently he strikes out, but sometimes he smacks one the bejesus out of the park… often within the same movie.

That said, as fun as it sometimes is letting the action of Bay’s movies wash over you, it’s generally the
cinematic equivalent of a false show-and-tell exercise — bravura
demonstration lacking any rooted emotional weight or
involvement. I know it has the air-quote disadvantage of being less grounded in reality than Live Free or Die Hard, but for all its state-of-the-art, tech-assisted carnage, the action in Transformers matters less, and is less involving, than that of the Bourne films. As with the worst moments of Bad Boys II, the ending of Transformers just feels like you’re being ejaculated upon.

I’ll have even more thoughts later and the full review tomorrow, but I thought I’d toss out another couple thoughts on Live Free and Die Hard‘s advertising campaign. First off, is it just me or does the poster not sort of look like the design folks at 20th Century Fox decided to knock off early, take a half-day and go play some golf? It’s iconic imaging by rubber stamp, really — maybe not the smartest move for a franchise whose last installment came 12 years ago, and barely crawled across the $100 million line domestically. That said, Die Hard: With a Vengeance absolutely killed overseas — where Willis remains hugely popular — so I guess they figure, perhaps somewhat rightly, they can phone that one in.

Mainly, though, I was amused by an interstitial bumper I saw for the film, after pausing late one night while making coffee to watch the last seven or eight minutes of Phone Booth on Fox-affiliated cable channel FX. (Incidentally, that movie plays awfully on television; it’s egregiously over-edited and Kiefer Sutherland’s voice work is flat-out terrible, consisting of a dozen different campy/exasperated iterations on the line, “C’mon Stu!”) Pitching Phone Booth to commercials was an awkwardly shot segment — billed, no lie, as a “McClane Moment” — with Willis and filmmaker/co-star Kevin Smith, in which the pair sat down together on a stoop (a stoop!) and talked a bit about Live Free or Die Hard. Cutting back and forth between footage from the movie and the pair, Smith lobbed genial softballs at Willis, but the actor was so down-tempo and barely audible that I sincerely thought the whole thing was a set-up for some joke or punch-line at the end. But… nope. Just strange, really. I don’t know if they’re still broadcasting this throughout the week, but it’s amusing if you happen to stumble across it. For a full review of the film, meanwhile, click here.

Bruce Willis’ Die Hard series made its reputation as a bit of a gritty but certainly a gleefully R-rated series… until this iteration, of course, which hits theaters tomorrow with a PG-13 tag. Those fearing a watered-down Live Free or Die Hard needn’t worry, however — audiences don’t get cheated on its rating in terms of action, that’s for sure. There’s some pretty wicked pyrotechnics, but also a bit of cold-blooded hand-to-hand combat with Maggie Q. It’s a pretty hard PG-13, honestly.

There’s likely a little less blood in the movie than there would otherwise be, but the big hit/main concession comes in the form of language, in which a bunch of obviously harsher curse words get dubbed over with some quite shoddy ADR. More discrete thoughts will follow later, along with a full review posted later tonight or tomorrow.

Somewhere, Paul Weitz is cackling. The wide-eyed, interlaced-finger corporate synergy he lampooned in searing fashion in In Good Company is on full, unapologetic display on NBC, which is using The Office to pump up star Steve Carell’s burgeoning movie career.

The network re-ran three episodes this evening, but stretched them to a cumulative running time of two hours by padding the night out with interstitial bumpers featuring copious clips from the movie and banter with Carell and other cast members, like Lauren Graham and Wanda Sykes. This tack may work for the film’s opening weekend numbers, but don’t expect word-of-mouth to help this movie out.

Carell exudes a certain nice-guy sympathy, so the natural inclination is to want to go easy on Evan Almighty, but the truth is that there are five times more laughs in the single half-hour “Casino Night” episode of The Office (which Carell penned, incidentally) than the entire running time of Tom Shadyac’s ramshackle (sigh) “comedy of biblical proportions.” It’s that uninspired, though Carell did give me one good laugh with an obviously improvised line — clarifying his bearded appearance by way of explaining that he was cultivating “a Loggins and Messina look” to spice up his love life.