The trailer for director Josh Sternfeld’s Meskada (Red Flag, December 3), starring Nick Stahl and Rachel Nichols as detectives whose investigation into a small town murder leads them into an adjoining burgh with dark secrets, is online and available for viewing, and I’ll say this: it looks to be a delight for young female meth addicts, and/or those with daddy issues. Stahl, Norman Reedus and Kellan Lutz all belong to that subset of recessed- and bleary-eyed knuckle-draggers that so delight girls looking to fill the void in their heart born of an absentee father. These three guys could be freshly showered and dressed in designer suits, but still look a bit beat-up, boozy, damaged, dangerous and, let’s be honest, reeking of cigarette smoke.
I’ll be getting more into Olivier Assayas’ Carlos, the three-part, five-hour-plus drama about pro-Palestinian activist turned opportunistic mercenary/terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (played by Edgar Ramirez) that’s unfurling on a variety of platforms in different iterations this October, in the coming days. But I submitted to the full Carlos experience this past Friday — with only two brief intermissions — and one thing that immediately struck me was that there are perhaps more cigarettes smoked in the full-length version of this movie than in the combined product of Hollywood for the past five or six years. Like, seriously. Straight up.
Assayas doesn’t so much fetishize the act itself (see David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, for instance), but neither is this just a case of one or two characters chain-smoking. All the characters seemingly smoke. There’s variety, too — angry smoking, nervous smoking, post-coital smoking, bored smoking, flirtatious smoking. And they don’t just hold cigarettes incidentally and passively, these folks, like someone absentmindedly rubbing their temple or adjusting their glasses. They draaaag, they put in the effort, really. There seem to be more cigarettes smoked in Carlos than Mitch McDeere drops crumpled $20 bills in The Firm. Which, for anyone who remembers John Grisham’s original text, is probably in the neighborhood of about 10,000.
Paramount is doing a fairly wise thing with the sequel to its 2009 low-fi smash hit Paranormal Activity. Dolling out a handful of viral clips to horror flick sites, certainly — that’s a given. But also debuting the movie for fans that “demand” to see it first, via the movie’s web site. The top 20 cities with the highest registered online demand for the film will be invited to attend a free screening on Wednesday, October 20, before the movie’s nationwide October 22 release. Buzzy word-of-mouth from rabid fans of the first film and other genre diehards will be key in trying to deliver commercial success, since this sequel is bucking the slow-build, platform-release strategy of its surprise $108-million-grossing predecessor, which didn’t top 1,000 screens until its fourth week of in theaters, and finally hit the #1 spot at the box office in its fifth weekend frame. For the movie’s teaser trailer, click here; for more on the film, click here.
It’s an image whose appeal I totally understand — not arresting, exactly… but eye-catching, certainly. That said, Gemma Arterton’s clingy red top and short-shorts, the entire thrust of its American marketing, are going to give plenty of folks the wrong impression about Tamara Drewe, for what it’s worth. There are Thomas Hardy references and a bovine stampede in this film, people.
It has many more noteworthy sins, certainly, but it’s interesting that Kristen Bell‘s You Again is her second film this year to feature sensory deprivation eating. The other was punishingly unfunny When in Rome, which also essentially had two settings: broad, and broader. That film’s one potentially amusing bit — in which Josh Duhamel’s character takes Bell’s character to a pitch-black restaurant, in which the lack of sight is supposed to heighten other senses, and an appreciation of the food and drink — is botched and rushed. In You Again, it’s Bell’s screen dad, played by Victor Garber, who’s undertaking a diet where he blindfolds himself, in order to let his stomach tell him more naturally when he’s full. No word yet on if this has worked or will work for any audience members, who might blindfold themselves in an effort to even more accurately gauge how full of shit the movie is.
Money matters everywhere, of course, but one of the differences between truly, exactingly ordered period pieces and their more lax brethren is in the use of American currency. Twenty dollar bills, with a larger Andrew Jackson on the front, were redesigned in 1998 and 2003, so when you see an ATM spit out in new currency in a movie set in the 1980s, it’s a foul, but chiefly on whom? The script continuity person? The production designer? The director? There’s enough blame to go around, I suppose.
So I have the sneaking suspicion that the stylized poster and advertising art (above) for George Clooney and Anton Corbijn‘s The American (Focus, September 1) is saying what the TV trailers cannot, which is namely that this isn’t a commercial endeavor, and those seeking assassin-on-the-lam thrills would be wise and better served to look elsewhere. The orange background color is a purposefully jarring arthouse choice, and the female eye — at once lurking and alluring — is too esoteric a thing for Joe and Jane Popcorn. “Prepare for European styling,” the above says. Only several more hours until confirmation on this.
A bit old but still very much worth a read, this amusing piece from Cracked.com about five ridiculous gun myths everyone believes because of movies — from the usefulness of silencers and infallibility of bulletproof vests to the dramatic effects of cocking a gun, and how a single bullet can/will ignite pretty much any piece of machinery. If any polling firm wants to donate their services, I’d truly be interested in partnering on some sort of empirical study of youngish NRA members, because surely there has to be some level of buyer’s remorse with respect to most typical Hollywood actioners, right? I mean, when they go to the gun range or out hunting buck or whatever, and experience kickback that doesn’t jibe with what’s been peddled by Sylvester Stallone or whomever. Or is it that all those films are merely a testosteronized manifestation of how they’d like to really see themselves? That they present a world free of obstacles that can’t be overcome with just a little (assisted) masculine acting out? Something to ponder.
So it looks like VH-1’s Scream Queens is back for another go-round, with a supporting (and presumably bloody) gig in the forthcoming Saw 3-D dangled as bait for the winner, just as a role in Saw VI was on the line in the original program, which was won by Tanedra Howard. The success of the original series was in its savvy blend of acting class work (which gave it a respectable underpinning, by highlighting the very real challenges in genre performing), on-set “director’s challenges” (basically filmed scenes with James Gunn), and, of course, bitchy, passive-aggressive in-fighting, which is pretty much guaranteed when 10 young aspirant actresses are put together in a house.
As reality shows go, this one actually somewhat sincerely showcases the difficulties of the acting profession, in balancing a purely physical “look” that is arguably beyond one’s control with more (potentially… cough, cough) esoteric personal creative choices. Question, though: do they just embargo the latest Saw‘s full credit listing on IMDb to prevent word of the winner leaking out, or what? I mean, the movie releases in a little over two months.
Full review to soon follow, but it’s worth noting one (interesting? strange?) thing about Charlie St. Cloud, the new Zac Efron flick — that there’s a moment that features a most unusual therapeutic twist.
Yes, the movie touts (and debuts, probably) the notion of “cuddle-rescue.” At one point, when Efron’s Charlie goes to comfort Amanda Crew‘s stricken character, who has weathered a couple balmy days of a very mild Pacific Northwestern summer or something like that, he snuggle/sidemounts her like a pinniped, while director Burr Steers marks time by employing a series of very discrete dissolves. (All this despite the fact EMTs are on the way, less than 20 or 30 minutes away, and, again, it’s not snowing or subzero or anything like that.) Later, it’s said that this brief exposure of body heat saved her from the threat of death by hypothermia (!?), which is apparently the only major injury she suffered in a boating accident.
This is all of course horseshit ridiculous, but teen girls will probably spark to the notion of Efron unbuttoning their jackets and nuzzling up against them asexually. Or maybe not. One twenty-ish-year-old at the screening of the film I caught responded with heavy skepticism afterward: “Seriously… what was that about?”
Over at the Bullz-Eye Blog, in an interesting and ruminative glimpse over the shoulder, Will Harris et al take a crack at 25 final films from no-longer-living legends, complete with trailers/clips. It’s an interesting lens through which to filter actors and actresses, and to a certain extent how they choose to cap their careers — whether they’re protective or mindful of “legacy” issues, or just like to work until they’re almost ready to keel over into a pine box kept at set’s edge… the “Jay Leno model,” it would seem. At any rate, a quick, fun read — though a tipster rightly points out that a funnier if perhaps slightly less tasteful article would have concentrated solely on the roster of well-known actors whose final films were, shall we say, significantly “lesser” than their work at the height of their careers (think Anthony Perkins, Rock Hudson, Kirk Douglas, Donald Pleasence, etcetera).
In a newly published essay, Mark Twain assays the art and experience of the interview, while over at PopMatters, Monte Williams takes a flight-of-fancy look at sequels that never were. The latter is of particular interest to me in that I too feel often feel intrigued or interested most by what’s out-of-frame in sequels; I’d love (at least in theory) to see genre pieces spin-off and follow characters in more talky, urbane directions. If you give me an interesting character, I’m perfectly happy to follow them into new terrain. The mathematical studio formula of apportioned excess (e.g., Bad Boys II) makes for some absolutely terrible follow-ups, just on a very basic conceptual level.
I missed a couple long-lead screenings of The Extra Man (Magnolia, July 30), starring Paul Dano and Kevin Kline, which is billed as being about “a lonely young dreamer who fancies himself the hero of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel,” and what happens when he rents a room from a wildly eccentric failed playwright who serves as a social escort for the wealthy widows of Manhattan high society. As a general rule I tend to enjoy tales of warped mentorship — films that embrace the notion that there are sometimes truths and lessons to be imparted from young and old alike — but the above photo is off-putting on an instinctual level, for reasons one just feels in their bones.
I mightily dug co-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s American Splendor, but the above picture — the one being peddled in almost all the advance coverage — just smacks of being dandy and twee, overly affected. A look at the film’s trailer seems to confirm this — I could barely make it through two minutes of Kline’s haughty put-on. Basically though, unless an audience instinctively knows what is being looked up at (a sci-fi “happening,” or a horror film’s menacing killer), it’s never a good idea for a film’s first/dominant still photo to have its stars gazing upward. It communicates a movie stuffed from its own sense of self-satisfaction.
Those who pooh-poohed Tom Cruise’s cameo in Tropic Thunder are proven wrong, with today‘s announcement that the character is getting his own spin-off movie, his “life rights” having been secured by Red Hour Films’ Ben Stiller and Stuart Cornfeld, who will co-produce. This is a win for Cruise — something that reinvents him and keeps him “hip,” or at least tangibly connected to a younger generation — but also something of a departure for a guy who, in his career, has frequently made Delorme cartographers look like radical, free-wheeling anarchists. I don’t yet know of Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, but screenwriter Michael Bacall had better figure out a way to make Grossman a bit less voluble, to temper his excesses. He’s more naturally a supporting character, in other words. Ninety-plus minutes with someone this “on” can be debilitating.
I generally dig the work of director James Mangold, but there was something bugging me, in back-of-the-mind, lingering fashion, about the impending Knight and Day, his summer action confection reuniting Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz. And I finally figured it out. It’s the TV ads’ use of Muse‘s “Uprising.” Trailers that use really popular, of-the-moment music frequently (not always) have big tonal problems, and so the use of a surging chart hit or on-the-rise band, particularly in heavy rotation small screen advertising, is an empty signifier; it’s meant to prod and rouse and make the movie seem in thumping lockstep with the zeitgeist, when it’s frequently not, and sometimes the exact opposite. It’s a shortcut end-around figuring out a more effective and honest way to sell the narrative, in other words, a not infrequent sign of makers’ (or at least distributor’s) remorse. One wonders if Cruise (or Mangold, for that matter) even knows who Muse is.
The letter “N” isn’t close to the letter “R” on a keyboard, but that potential keystroke error is about as close as Furry Vengeance gets to funny. Full review to follow tomorrow, but those at the press screening yesterday will forevermore share a special bond. Others will think they know… but they just don’t.
Islamist website Revolution Muslim has targeted South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, after an episode of the animated Comedy Central series last week included an image of the Prophet Mohammed in disguise. Their posting hints at violence, with a warning of “the reality of what will likely happen to them.” All of this makes me wonder — what did religious extremists do before the Internet? I mean, how did they really get bang-for-buck distance on the sort of blinkered, rigidly orthodox fundamentalism they wish to promulgate? Was it really all pamphlets and poorly recorded black market audio tapes? A selective embrace of modernity — utilizing and exploiting technological communications innovation divorced of any realization that it inherently exposes one to cultures, values and worldviews different from their own — strikes me as a curiously convenient thing.
Fret not about the future of movie criticism, says Richard Horgan over at Suite101 — it’s only a matter of time before the first A.I. film critic, “who will seamlessly inform his views with those of the braintrust responsible for the title in question.” Some would argue we’re already (almost) there, on the other hand.
Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL) debate President Obama’s forthcoming Supreme Court nomination on Meet the Press, opposite the very simian David Gregory, and it occurs to me that TiVo is a blessed thing, allowing me to skip past this empty political dance, in which Sessions claims not to understand simple statements, all to maintain maximum maneuverability once nominee is announced, and of course avoid admitting there’s a personal/issue-based litmus test he (and Republicans) would/will apply.
Also, apropos of nothing, it just occurred to me — if Gene Keady’s hair had a blog, I would totally read that.
It’s an unhappy 66th birthday to knee-jerk, right-wing bump-on-a-log Craig T. Nelson, aka Steve Freeling and Coach Hayden Fox, who last year famously and apparently without irony asserted that “no one helped [him] out when [he] was on food stamps and welfare.” Idiotic charlatans of political engagement like this — unfeeling creatures who don’t understand the difference between socialism and a societal safety net, and reflexively bristle at social/mental health/outreach programs that don’t conform to the prescribed rigidities of the manner in which they believe others should be living their lives — are in a certain sense citizens of the worst order, because they have the means to be better educated, but almost willfully choose not to be. They put on blinders and ignore the world at large, or indeed the very notion that there could be major problems that do not (yet) immediately impact their lives. Their opinions are rooted in having achieved a certain hard-fought success, and then — instead of celebrating living in a country which ultimately rewarded all their effort with a lottery-style win — becoming embittered with taxation and/or the inability to extend control and ultimate authority across all areas of life. I mean, clueless statements like the one above almost guarantee that the guy has an alcoholic past or has been in some sort of trouble with the IRS, right? Which one is it?
For those interested, Luke Y. Thompson drops a response to Kevin Smith’s diatribe against film critics, unleashed on Twitter over the past 48 hours. And he makes some good points, namely regarding the validity of opinion, which is what armchair pundits always invoke when they want to get all Sarah Palin on folks and paint film critics as effete elitists. Also, he’s right — there is (and should be) a certain stigma or price paid for films/studios when they don’t screen a film for review. It’s no big deal in the grand scheme of things, I agree, and totally well within a studio/filmmaker’s rights to do this, but it’s also certainly fair game to write about that fact, and let savvy moviegoers know. If that informs their opinion of said product, so be it.
I dig the blogosphere, broadly speaking (viva variety), but one thing that’s wearying is how the utterly mindless pursuit of traffic ends up reinforcing this herd mentality, wherein a single new photo or trailer or happening MUST BE POSTED, even if there’s no particularly pronounced tie-in/connection with said host site, or even any attendant commentary beyond the most titillating, rib-nudging headline. (See above.) So that means there’s like 15 or 20 movie, music and entertainment-adjacent sites today with Zooey Deschanel’s She & Him hipster porn, a new music video involving hula hoops and dainty skips. (You’re welcome, L.A. Weekly — I picked your link at random.) The overload is such that you sometimes just get the feeling the Internet is the same 5,000 people reading the same 500 sites, circle-jerking to the same rotating menu of 50 topics. When is someone going to deliver a 700-word treatise on the hatwear in Johnny Depp’s filmography?
In what’s been deemed a cost-cutting measure, three-decade veteran Todd McCarthy has been axed by Variety, the latest in a series of critic cappings that recall not so much an industry struggling to find its way in the era of New Media, but a mob movie montage of calculated extinguishings. The reaction from the critical community has been fairly harsh, if somewhat predictable, with Kim Voynar and others lashing out at the myopia of Variety‘s decision, not entirely without reason.
Still, can anyone legitimately claim this a surprise? It’s shocking merely in the way that the culmination of a grand, unsettling event is shocking — like a breakaway dunk in a big basketball upset. It’s an undisputed fact that arts journalism is a devalued brand, and criticism especially so. So Variety played the short money game, because previous cutbacks haven’t worked, and other bold strokes (executive bloodletting, a divestment of office space, and salary rollback) apparently weren’t on the table.
The harsh, bleed-like-me reality, though, is that McCarthy’s salary package was likely worth more than what nine out of 10 film critics make. And for those of a younger generation, film criticism seems to be trending toward a state of perpetual scramble, in which free agent-writers term-contract their services and trade on reputation and demi-celebrity, however dubious a distinction that is. It sucks, because it involves massive amounts of work that isn’t about the work. And yet someone sketch me a plausible macro-alternative.
Over at the Los Angeles Times, Geoff Boucher has an interview with director Joe Johnston regarding The Wolfman, which I skipped earlier this week for Please Give. My first thought was in regards to the accompanying picture: “Jesus, that guy looks old and more than a bit beaten down. Is this the same guy who so capably put audiences through the paces in Jurassic Park III?”
Getting into the meat of the piece, though, it’s clear this is a fairly rah-rah thing; there’s the obligatory, cursory mention of Mark Romanek’s departure three weeks before shooting, but not much detail. We’re told editor Dennis Virkler and composer Danny Elfman were also swapped out — for Walter Murch and Paul Haslinger respectively — and that Johnston “discovered” a startling and different cut of the movie in the editing room, especially after an upgrade in some 200 visual effects scenes were spliced in. Still, the lack of answers, or specific edifying information, hangs over the entire interview.
If Universal really pushed the budget upwards, toward $120 million (ironic, given that their reticence over going much past $100 million was cited as being at the root of creative differences with Romanek) what does this realistically say about their expectations for the film? Is it covering a short bet, essentially, a box office grab? Is Anthony Hopkins — lured back to the movie with promises of reinserted scenes now back on the cutting room floor — really so happy with the finished product? Is it really reasonable to harbor any ideas of sequels given the historical mismanagement of Universal’s monster movie library? And is the film going to be able to out-gross, per screen, Avatar in the latter’s ninth week of release?
I caught writer-director Nicole Holofcener’s Please Give (Sony Pictures Classics, April 23) last night, and while not perfect it’s a really pleasant, enjoyable thing — a quiet, deceptively simple New York movie that nestles you up against its bosom, and leaves you feeling like you could just trip along wherever with her characters. Like her previous films (Walking and Talking, Lovely & Amazing, Friends with Money), it’s a humanistic/realistic relationship ensemble that evidences a great touch with actors. Not starving for paychecks, Holofcener works plenty in television (Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, et al), but at some point it would likely behoove her to dig into a single-character work, something with a more singular, subjective point-of-view. (And if she did that with frequent collaborator Catherine Keener, look out.) Studios, meanwhile, would be wise to team Holofcener with some of their best drama scribes; it would be a good match.
