This weekend, New Moon made over $140 million. That's the third-biggest opening weekend ever behind The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 3. It helped create the second-biggest box-office weekend of all time. It's the biggest opening weekend of 2009 (obviously). It made twice as much money as the original Twilight did when it opened. The audience was 80 percent female, and 50 percent under 21.
In short, as much money as people thought it would make, it made even more.
$60 million more on opening weekend than Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince. $30 million more than Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen. More than twice as much as last weekend's 2012.
It may seem at times like the only people who can drive blockbusters anymore are teenage boys playing video games, but don't you believe it. You give them the right story, and teenage girls will fork over just as much money.
By any measure, this weekend's showings of The Twilight Saga: New Moon are already a big event. Fans all over have packed movie houses and camped out to be first in line to see the second installment in the bloodsucking series. In fact, online ticket seller Fandango has already reported selling out more than 1000 midnight shows last night.
How big could it get? The first film took in nearly $70 million in its opening weekend, and some insiders think New Moon's first weekend could top $100 million. If you want to go, you might want to book in advance, because you might otherwise be redirected into a showing of something with no vampires at all.
Unfortunately, when it's this crowded, even if you're lucky enough to have a ticket, that doesn't guarantee a smooth moviegoing experience. With this potential for insanity in mind, I sought some advice from film and TV writer Mark Jordan Legan on how to handle the chaos inside the theater.
1. To optimize your seating, arrive early and make nice with the staff. Often, if the line is long, there's a mad rush for seats when the doors actually open. Legan says that if you can, you might try to curry favor with an usher. Maybe you can teach him some hilarious New Moon limerick you've created in your spare time, and "Boom, he might open the other door for you." Maybe even better, you could get a heads-up right before the side door to the theater opens.
2. Run back and straight to the middle as quickly as you can. Legan says that most people are like bad drivers on the freeway who hold up everyone else around them. Avoid them by heading straight for the center middle and staking out ground there. If necessary, feel free to go into a row and start climbing over the seats. The last thing you want is to be stuck in the front row, and you should do whatever it takes -- within reason, of course -- to avoid that outcome.
Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart bring their vampy stuff back to the big screen in ... well, you know. (Summit Entertainment)
by Linda Holmes
This week's theater offerings, money-wise, are likely to be dominated by a certain semi-dead romantic leading man, but there are other things going on as well, from a Chinese battle epic to a partnership that just had to come along eventually.
• Teenage vampire aficionados were probably out all night seeing New Moon, but Kenneth Turan was not excited about it.
• Bob Mondello didn't care much for the schmaltzy The Blind Side, which "turns the book's measured account of Oher's story into a feel-good fantasy for white liberals." Which is kind of what I was afraid of earlier this week, you'll recall.
• Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans comes from noted unusuals Nicolas Cage and Werner Herzog, and Jeannette Catsoulis says their collaboration provides "the film's fertile heart and loony brain."
• Speaking of notable collaborations, Pedro Almodovar and Penelope Cruz are back together with Broken Embraces, which Bob Mondello recommends, saying it's "never less than engaging."
• And finally, John Woo -- whom you may know mostly from shoot-em-ups -- has a new battle epic called Red Cliff, and Mark Jenkins says it's impressive in scale, but "too tidy to evoke combat's mud, gore and terror."
It may sound like fun to date a vampire, but it probably isn't. (Summit Entertainment)
by Linda Holmes
You probably know that this Friday is the day The Twilight Saga: New Moon premieres -- and if you don't, plenty of people around you do. Once again, we will be treated to vampire-human romance and melodrama.
1. Never sleeping means spending extensive time buying coffins on eBay and updating Facebook status with "Sooooooo bored and thirsty." ("Dracula and 609 others like this.")
2. Constantly tries to win arguments with, "When you're six hundred years old, you'll understand."
3. Insists that your blood tastes fine, but cannot stop talking about taste of previous girlfriend's blood as "not really better, but different."
4. Devouring the unwary even less fun at family reunions than Balderdash.
5. Red-eye in every picture.
6. Companion with sparkling, marble-like skin likely to overshadow "bling" at prom and wedding.
7. Because of mind-reading ability, wins every game of Battleship and then dances around bragging about it.
8. Friends who are "animal-only" vampires total downers; make vegans look like bacon-gobbling hedonists.
9. Won't stay and talk over problems; stomps off to pout in a tree.
The Blind Side: Evolution Of A Game, by Michael Lewis, is a book I really loved. It was one that I told everyone about, couldn't shut up about, wouldn't stop recommending.
The centerpiece of The Blind Side -- though not the whole thing -- is the truly incredible story of Michael Oher, who now plays for the Baltimore Ravens. Oher had a very, very hard childhood and was eventually adopted by a family that had a daughter at the school he wound up attending, and ... it's a very involved, very involving story about this kid who just had every possible thing operating against him, who had to start from scratch in the sense of "practically no identifying documents, school records, or anything that would demonstrate on paper that he existed," whose life changed completely because a whole pack of people, particularly his adoptive mom, voluntarily assumed responsibility for him.
Of course, one of the challenges they faced is the centerpiece of that poster: his adoptive mom, Leigh Anne Tuohy, is a fairly small white lady, and Michael was, even as a ninth-grader when they met, a very big African-American kid (the combination of speed and size is how he became a great offensive tackle).
And no matter how much I loved the book and love the story, I have to admit that I look at that poster with a twinge, because when you see the tiny noble white lady and the enormous black kid who doesn't talk, you are suddenly in the realm of a whole lot of potentially grotesque movie dynamics that were very well explained in this piece by Mark Blankenship (who has contributed here from time to time).
After the jump, let's watch the trailer and talk a little more.
Hey, 2012, you had a great weekend! Don't look so concerned about the end of the world. (Columbia Pictures)
by Linda Holmes
In yet another nose-thumbing at critics who suggested that Roland Emmerich's 2012 put the "disaster" in "disaster movie" (and not in the good way), moviegoers worldwide coughed up a massive $225 million to watch things blow up.
Clearly, we love to hurt the ones we love. And hate. And visit on major holidays. Entire states, cast into the sea! Buildings toppled! Clothes closets ransacked! Library card catalogs thrown entirely out of order!
Build it up, knock it down. As it is with Susan Boyle, so it is with our major landmarks. Precious is actually making a lot of money, but clearly, it would make more if it ended with Precious blowing up the Washington Monument.
John Cusack stays ahead of disaster, kind of, in Roland Emmerich's 2012. (Columbia Tristar Marketing Group)
by Linda Holmes
• Bob Mondello really is not a fan of 2012. At least I think that's what he means by, "By the time it's over, you'll feel like it is 2012 already, and you'll have such a headache that it'd be kind of nice if the whole world went away."
• Bob was much happier with The Messenger, which he calls a "quietly explosive drama."
• Kenneth Turan has good things to say about The Fantastic Mr. Fox, the new stop-motion animated film from Wes Anderson, which he reports "goes to your head like too much champagne."
• Ella Taylor is underwhelmed by Pirate Radio, the new offering from director Richard Curtis (Four Weddings And A Funeral, Love Actually), but doesn't seem to have the heart to entirely condemn it, given the fact that it at least succeeds in communicating "the freshness and innocence of a generation's passion for the infant rock 'n' roll."
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson have been around a long time -- has everything about them been said? Well, now it has. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
By Glen Weldon
So I'm watching the teevee Sunday night, and it occurs to me about ten minutes in that I'm experiencing the show live -- that I'm suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous car commercials, network self-promotion and big-'splosion movie trailers without availing myself of the protective, time-shifted remove offered by the DVR.
I must say that I felt, in that moment, like the pioneers must have felt, and wished that I could swap the leftover Halloween candy in the bowl by the couch for, I don't know, hardtack.
But my delight in braving the electronic-Laura-Ingalls-Wilderness soon faded under the punishing onslaught of ads. I think it was right around the seventh freaking commercial for Sherlock Holmes, the upcoming Robert Downey Jr.orgy of ordnance, that I got an idea for a post about Holmes as forefather to the modern superhero.
I remembered reading this story as a kid, in which Batman (a.k.a. the World's Greatest Detective), and his super-colleague The Elongated Man (a.k.a the Stretchable Super-Sleuth, a.k.a. the Ductile Detective, a.k.a Yeah, I know it's dumb, let's just move on, shall we?) meet the centenarian Sherlock Holmes himself.
The parallels are all over the place, I thought. Holmes had superpowers, a supervillain, even a costume, after a fashion. Man, this post is gonna write itself.
The thing is: When I awoke the next morning, it pretty much had.
There it sat in my Google reader, the post I would desperately have liked to have written, but a good deal smarter, funnier and more comprehensive than what I had in mind, and with a much more awesome title. Seriously, just go read it.
Well played, Kyle Duvall, of the blog at www.newsarama.com. Bask in your blogospheric triumph. But know this: You have made an enemy this day.
While completing my project of reading all of Wikipedia one page at a time (so far, I have read about thermometers, Gavin McLeod and the origin of the Thanksgiving turkey), I learned that the world might end in 2012, which explains that movie that's about to come out about the possible end of the world in 2012.
If there really is an apocalypse in 2012, I will be very disappointed for a variety of reasons. These are some of them.
1. Will not fulfill lifelong dream of watching Olympic golf at the 2016 Summer Games in Rio (clarification: golf in Rio, watching from house)
2. Will be scooped on my own prediction of an apocalypse in 2014
3. Will regret selling worldly goods for 2013 balloon payment offered by man with book under arm called Understanding The Mayan Calendar
4. Will wish I had switched the first and second halves of my five-year plan, "Cleaning And Organizing" and "Lying Down And Relaxing"
5. Rumored Harry Potter sequel, called Scarlett, will never be completed
Jim Carrey voices Scrooge -- and some other characters -- in Disney's A Christmas Carol, one of this week's new movies. (ImageMovers Digital LLC)
by Linda Holmes
It has occurred to me that, depending on how you navigate around NPR, you may or may not stumble across the movie reviews that are written by NPR's movie critics, who specialize in ... you know, reviews, and not lists of Wolverine's worst jobs and whatnot. So it seems sensible to point to the new movie reviews that are bubbling about, in the event you're venturing out to the theater this weekend.
• Scott Tobias points out that Disney's A Christmas Carol is not terribly Dickensian, as Robert Zemeckis has "effectively turned London into a sleek diorama of pristine brick and cobblestone surfaces, and scrubbed the faces of the wretched as clean as porcelain dolls." Still, he allows that even with Scrooge riding an icicle at one point, it is better, as a Christmas Carol adaptation, than Ghost Of Girlfriends Past. Ouch.
• Ian Buckwalter reports that The Fourth Kind is the "cinematic version of a chain e-mail hoax," and is (perhaps unsurprisingly) not entirely convinced by its combination of "reenactments" and alleged documentary footage.
Mo'Nique and George Clooney (though not together) and more, after the jump.
Even if you were not already familiar with the basic structure of The Box, they reveal it to you in the trailer. A young couple (here played by James Marsden and Cameron Diaz) meets a stranger, who gives them a box with a button and tells them that if they push the button, someone they don't know dies and they get a million dollars. This tale, adapted from a Richard Matheson short story called "Button, Button," also became an episode of The Twilight Zone (albeit the 1980s version, not the original).
This is, I think, supposed to be some sort of difficult dilemma. What would you do for a million dollars? Would you push the button?
Michael Jackson's new film This Is It shows the singer preparing for a tour the never happened. (Kevin Mazur / Sony Pictures)
by Tanya Ballard Brown
As a longtime fan of Michael Jackson's music, I found both a trick and a treat in This Is It, the new movie showing the rehearsals for his final tour that didn't happen. (For those of you who haven't seen it yet, there are a few spoilers, of course.)
First, the tricks -- Michael's tricks, that is. They raised a few questions.
• Why did he keep telling people "God bless you" when no one had sneezed?
• I understand that, being on stage, you have to show some glitz to boost the visual dramatics and help those poor (or cheap) fans in the nosebleed section identify which dot on the stage is the star, but why were some of Michael's non-performance clothes also bedazzled?
• When the volume in his earbud was too loud, why didn't Michael just say that, rather than giving a long, incoherent speech about a fist in his ear?
• Why did Michael get mad during rehearsals because some mysterious "they" made him ... sing? To quote him, "That's what rehearsals are for."
Hilary Swank (seen here with Ewan McGregor) does admirable work in Amelia, but it's not enough to make up for the basic failures of the form. (Ken Woroner / Fox Searchlight Pictures)
by Glenn McDonald
It's official: The mainstream Hollywood biopic is dead.
With today's release of Amelia, the ought-to-be-compelling story of famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart, the contemporary biopic as a viable cinematic genre should finally be issued its toe tag. Director Mira Nair, working from a script based on not one but two Earhart biographies, manages to reduce the life of one of the 20th century's most fascinating figures to a series of blandly familiar screen conventions.
It's a problem of form. Amelia is done about as well as this type of movie can be done -- but that's the problem. The celebrity biopic has become Hollywood's most tired and predictable genre. If you recall, we were tipped to this problem in 2007 with the very funny mock-biopic Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Walk Hard tackled the subgenre of the musical biopic, but its cautionary lessons can very easily be extrapolated -- and, evidently, ignored.
The end of the road and a possible way forward, after the jump.
This weekend marks the opening of Saw VI. The original Saw only came out in 2004, meaning that these movies have been coming out at the rate of one per year for the last six years. That is an impressive feat, and none can deny that the word "saw" contains a certain measure of dread. If you are a movie character and you are appearing in a particular scene, you certainly would hope there is not also a saw in the scene.
But I wondered: Is the power saw the most frightening tool? After all, the average workshop contains innumerable ways you could injure yourself. Has the saw earned its position, or is it coasting on its reputation?
I decided to conduct a highly unscientific study in which I measured my own fear responses to various home-improvement implements in order to determine which was the most frightening. They're all upsetting to varying degrees, but using myself as a guinea pig, would anything frighten me more than a saw?
Carrie Fisher's show Wishful Drinking covers a lot of territory, including some of the Hollywood people she's known. (Joan Marcus)
by Michael Portantiere
Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking, her one-woman show based on her book of the same title, is a wry, hilarious, insightful, and occasionally touching theatrical memoir of the woman who grew up as the daughter of celebrity parents (Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher); went on to become a film icon with her role of Princess Leia in the first three Star Wars films; struggled with manic-depression and substance abuse; and had emotionally fraught relationships with Paul Simon, the super-famous musician to whom she was very briefly married, and agent Bryan Lourd, who left her for another man after they had a child together.
A few chapters of her life were previously covered in the semi-autobiographical novel and film Postcards from the Edge, and now she's earning critical acclaim and deep audience affection for letting it all hang out in Wishful Drinking, which is playing at the Roundabout Company's Studio 54 after previous engagements in other cities. I had the golden opportunity to speak with Carrie just before one of her recent performances, and I asked her to complete these sentences.
"If Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine had been unavailable to play me and my mother in the film of Postcards from the Edge, I would like to have seen ... "
At the time? My mother playing my mother, and Debra Winger playing me. If the movie were made today, I'd like Mary Louise Parker to play me, but I don't know who's out there now who could really play my mother. It's a hard role. That's why my mother is so good at it.
"My favorite holiday to spend with family is ... "
[Laughs] It's hard to answer that! [Pauses] I'll say Christmas. I mean, we always have to have Christmas together. I don't know if it's my favorite, but it's the one that we do spend.
"The popular song whose title best reflects my life is ... "
"Mad World."
"The best and worst things about the Star Wars experience were ... "
I guess you could say the best thing was that it made me into a star, and the worst thing was that it made me into a star.
"Some interesting things that most people don't know about Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford are ... "
[Laughs] Well, if there are such things, then there's a reason they're not known, which is that Mark and Harrison don't want them to be known. I will say that Harrison is a wonderful person when he's intoxicated, but Mark ... is not.
Tacky Princess Leia memorabilia, Carrie Fisher's celebrity crush, how to sabotage a marriage, and lots, lots more, after the jump.
You may have heard a few things about Where The Wild Things Are, and on this weekend's All Things Considered, you can hear a bit more. (Warner Brothers Pictures)
Where The Wild Things Are hits all the points on the stereotypical public radio listening hipster's checklist. The director, Spike Jonze, helmed Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. The screenwriter, Dave Eggers, wrote A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and founded the literary journal McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (name-dropped in Juno). The trailer features music by The Arcade Fire, and Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs did the soundtrack.
This movie is essentially the hipster equivalent of Star Wars -- just replace the over-the-top special effects by Industrial Light and Magic with frame after frame of heartfelt earnestness.
But whether it actually goes on to do Star Wars business is anyone's guess.
On Saturday's All Things Considered, NPR's Bob Mondello gives his take on the film, and we look at what exactly is going on with the marketing -- which has included displays at Urban Outfitters, limited-edition clothing lines and even custom skateboards. Host Guy Raz spoke with Cliff Kuang, who wrote this piece for Fast Company where he wonders whether this is "The Most Hipster-ific Movie of All Time."
And does Warner Brothers risk being too cool for the room? The film's budget's been reported at $90 million -- so Warner's got a lot to lose if thousands of fixed gear bicycles aren't chained up outside of theaters across the country this weekend.
Here, Gerard Butler and Jamie Foxx work out their differences in Law Abiding Citizen. And in fact, neither of them looks particularly law-abiding. (LAC Films)
by Linda Holmes
It's kind of amazing that the new Jamie Foxx movie is called Law Abiding Citizen, isn't it? And I don't just mean the missing hyphen, although ... there is a missing hyphen. Technically, the title Law Abiding Citizen is more like a newspaper headline announcing that the law is patiently tolerating a citizen, sigh, probably because it is the law and it has no choice. "Law Abiding Citizen; Citizen Still Kind Of A Pain In The Neck."
I assume this is an ironic title, action-movie-wise. I mean, nobody really wants you to conclude that it is about a law-abiding citizen. Who would watch a movie about a law-abiding citizen? Would you watch a remake of Die Hard called Safety Harness? I think you would not.
Furthermore, the synopsis of the movie says that the main character takes justice into his own hands. That is not the act of a law-abiding citizen. That is the act of a law-ignoring citizen. Wouldn't it be better if they had called the movie Law-Flouting Citizen? Now that, I might have attended. Law-Flouting Citizen, with Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler!
It turns out there's a science to naming your action movie.
Flint Lockwood, voiced by Bill Hader, grabs for a falling cheeseburger in the absolutely delightful Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs. (Sony Pictures Animation)
by Linda Holmes
I didn't manage to motivate myself to the theater for the blockbuster Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs until this weekend, when friends with kids invited me along on a family outing. Had that not happened, I might have missed one of the most visually interesting and genuinely funny comedies I've seen in a long time.
It made me wonder: Adults read Harry Potter books and Twilight, both of which are nominally aimed at young adults (at the oldest). Why doesn't it feel as likely that they'll go to purported kids' movies?
Jane Lynch plays Sue Sylvester on Glee. (Matthias Clamer / Fox)
by Linda Holmes
You probably know Jane Lynch, who plays the brilliantly evil cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester on the so-happy-it-hurts Fox show Glee. She's also appeared in many (many, many) other projects: Best In Show, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Julie & Julia, A Mighty Wind ... we could go on and on. We really could.
Who would win in a knock-down cage match between a cheerleading squad and a show choir? And what fate should befall the losers afterward?
The cheerleaders would squash the show choir by stomping on their windpipes.This would result in a bunch of shallow-breathing singers who would soon form vocal nodes. The Glee Club would be hobbled.
Given Glee's structure, and your hopes to eventually get to sing on the show, we have to ask: What's the best song to use as the soundtrack in a plot to destroy your enemies?
"Rose's Turn" from Gypsy. Key phrases: "Thanks a lot and out with the garbage, they take bows and you're battin' zero." And "Mama's gotta let go!!!"
If all the characters you've played were running for president against each other, which one would you vote for?
I would probably vote for Laurie Bohner of A Mighty Wind. Pornography and good old-fashioned American folk-singin' would walk hand in hand. And then I'd have to leave the country.
In the last year, you've starred on series called Glee and Party Down. What's behind your sudden interest in relentlessly upbeat titles?
We're in a recession, people. "Lighten up" is what that's saying.
Your Internet Movie Database entry shows about 70 credits in the last five years. That's roughly one new credit every three to four weeks. Do you have a clone?
Yes. Glenn Close does roughly three-fifths of my work.
Bonus round: You told Melissa Block that you're happy to "be home" on the Glee set, to have a long-term gig and a trailer to settle into, complete with a pillow and a candle you brought in yourself. Which leads us to wonder: What would Sue Sylvester say about your decorating taste? And who would she hire to pretty up that trailer?
Sue would have Jack LaLanne design a mini-gym around a 75-pound medicine ball. No candles or pillows please -- too damn sissy.
Chris Rock . (Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
Chris Rock will be working with Oprah Winfrey's production company on a movie version of Will You Be My Black Friend?, a GQ article (still available online here) from November 2008, in which writer Devin Friedman describes his attempt to ... well, make a black friend, after noticing that his group of friends had gotten whiter and whiter.
Friedman's piece starts out gimmicky and precious, mocking Craigslist and George W. Bush and sounding like he's trying to address race relations from underneath so many levels of irony that it's not clear whether he really wants to make a friend, really wants to write a stunt article, or really wants to soothe some guilt wound by making jokes about how guilty he feels.
But as it progresses, it becomes gradually less obnoxious until, by the end, you do sense that he's legitimately interested, not only in asking questions about race, but in asking why certain questions about race are so hard to ask.
And that's what makes Chris Rock such a good choice for the movie project, and that's why I hope his sensibility will be as much a part of the movie as possible.
Sensitivities, new movies, and why Chris Rock is a treasure, after the jump.
It may not have been a big-money opening for Whip It, but the people who love it are likely to be loyal to it for years. (Fox Searchlight)
by Linda Holmes
I was utterly enchanted by Whip It, the roller-derby-themed coming-of-age story, starring Ellen Page and directed by Drew Barrymore, that opened Friday. Not only is it touching and funny and a rollicking good time, but it's a movie that rarely finds its way to the multiplex -- it's a sports movie about a team of women, it's got a cast chosen mostly for suitability and not perceived hotness, and it's warmly funny but almost wisecrack-free.
Of course, all these things are box-office poison. Without wisecracks, what do you put in the trailer? Without perceived hotness, who do you put out front to promote it? You can talk all you want about astonishingly good performances from people like Alia Shawkat (that's Cousin Maeby to you) and Marcia Gay Harden, but it's hard to compete with horror comedies like Zombieland, which stomped everything else this weekend.
Its slow weekend at the box office, therefore, was sad news. The people who saw it gave it great marks, but not a lot of them went.
It's enough to make you despair, but I don't.
Long tails and the power of enthusiasm, after the jump...
Judy Garland looks extra-spiffy in the restored The Wizard Of Oz, which has been released in a new box set with some extra add-ons. (MGM Studios/Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
One important thing to understand about the fancy new box set of The Wizard Of Oz celebrating its 70th anniversary is not a new restoration of the film. The big restoration came in 2005 for the "Collector's Edition" -- this is the "Ultimate Collector's Edition," and it's the first release of the film on Blu-ray, which is how I saw it.
What makes The Wizard Of Oz such an interesting candidate for a loving and meticulous restoration -- especially on Blu-ray -- is that the more closely you look at the film, the less realistic it appears, and the more the matte paintings look like matte paintings, and the more conspicuous it becomes that the entire thing is shot inside on soundstages, and not in fields or forests or on the Kansas prairie.
When you look at a modern film that benefits from high-definition, like, say, The Dark Knight, the high quality feeds the vivid realism. But with Oz, those same things feed the vivid unrealism -- rather than intensifying the film as a true-to-life, you-are-there, through-the-screen immersion, it works as an ever more beautifully produced storybook.
What's included and whether it's worth it, after the jump ...
In Surrogates, Bruce Willis lets his robot self run free. (Touchstone Pictures)
by Linda Holmes
It seems like a good way to get a movie going: "It's the future, and what's happened is ... "
That's how the new Bruce Willis film Surrogates works. In the film, it's the future, and everyone has decided to lie in chairs while neurally controlling robots who represent them in the outside world. As I understand the premise, you would stay at home and think about Starbucks, and your robot self would go to Starbucks. Where a robot barista would make your robot self a robot latte, while you and the barista stayed at home.
According to the press materials, the filmmakers see this as a natural outgrowth of cell phones and the Internet, as well as multi-player games. If you enjoy your cell phone, and you enjoy using a character to play a complicated online role-playing game, you would logically enjoy lying in a chair for the rest of your life while a robot does your job for you, goes to parties for you, and so forth.
Welcome to our goofy dystopian future. We've been here before.
More silly visions of the terrible things that await, after the jump...
Barbie was on display at her 50th birthday party in March, and now she's getting her own movie. (Shea Walsh / Associated Press)
by Linda Holmes
Well, it was probably inevitable.
The Transformers have their own movie franchise, and so does G.I. Joe, and they're working on View-Master. It's surprising Barbie hasn't been lined up for a live-action movie before now. Thank goodness that's about to be rectified.
The styling-head horror film and more, after the jump.
Matt Damon's Mustache is one of the stars of Steven Soderbergh's The Informant!. (Warner Brothers Pictures)
by Linda Holmes
Dear Matt Damon's Mustache From The Informant!,
I am concerned that you may be feeling neglected. In the run-up to The Informant! (a different movie from The Informant? and The Informant ... and especially The Informant;), there has been a lot of talk about Matt Damon gaining weight in order to play the role of informant! Mark Whitacre, but much less talk about you.
Without you, Whitacre would just be out of shape. With you, he is out of shape and clearly an idiot. Matt Damon plus thirty pounds would just be ... Matt Damon. Matt Damon hitting the craft services table. He's gotten alarmingly skinny before for Courage Under Fire; he still looked like himself. This would not have been different.
It is you, Matt Damon's Mustache, visually transforming Matt Damon into a buffoon. In the trailer, it is you doing the heavy lifting so that his divinely clueless line readings don't simply seem like he's playing it cool, like in Ocean's Eleven. No, with you, we know that he is not someone who should wear a wire, even though he is someone who very badly wants to wear a wire.
I know I should have some defense mechanism against character-building facial hair. I should be able to say, "You must build personalities based on behavior; you cannot cheat!" But you are such an utterly perfect mustache on the face of Matt Damon that my objections collapse.
I think it is your stubbornly unstylish appearance. Not for you the goatee's effort to look cool, nor the mutton chops' calculated irony. Not for you the soul patch's superfluousness or the stubble's implied suggestion that it could win in a fight.
No, you are simply yourself. You are a simple mustache for a simple man. A shade darker, and you would be distracting. A shade lighter, and you would go unnoticed. But you merely pose a question: This guy is going to do something stupid within the next five minutes, right? Even though he is probably a fundamentally nice guy?
My hat is off to you, Matt Damon's Mustache. Surely if they can find ten movies to nominate for Best Picture, they can find a category for you. If I had a write-in ballot, I would write in your name, even though I haven't seen your movie yet. Bravo, sir. (I assume you are a "sir.")
Aaron Eckhart and Jennifer Aniston star in Love Happens, which actually doesn't make love sound very good. (Universal Pictures)
by Linda Holmes
The new Jennifer Aniston/Aaron Eckhart romance opening tomorrow is called ... Love Happens. Which would seem to be based on ... you know, the common phrase? "[Blank] Happens"? I'm not saying they're directly attempting to link love and [blank], but it sort of feels that way, doesn't it? Maybe the movie is darker than the trailer makes it appear. If that is indeed the intention, we may be opening up an entire new world of depressing movie titles based on the world's most downbeat platitudes.
She Can't Tell Her Heart From A Hole In The Ground
If It's Not One Thing, It's A Lover
Into Every Life, That Guy Must Fall Headfirst While Wearing An Unlaundered Football Jersey
Sometimes You're The Windshield, Sometimes You're The Hug
Love Hits The Fan
Going To The Olive Garden In A Handbasket
SNAF-OOh, You Look Good, Baby
What Goes Out Must Come Down
It's No Use Crying Over Spilled Tears Of Heart-Crushing Sadness
Pick Yourself Up, Dust Yourself Off, Buy Some New Shoes, Get Your Hair Cut, Punch Up Your Online Dating Profile, Practice Your Small Talk .. Actually, Just Forget The Whole Thing, It's Totally Not Worth It
I was sixteen when Dirty Dancing came out. I had just started driving -- to the point where, the first time I went to see it with my friend Erin, we didn't get to see it because I locked my keys in the car at the theater with the car running. I was young; I was the target demographic. Somebody was always trying to put me in a corner. Sixteen feels like that.
So it may be an accident of timing that I was disproportionately attached to Patrick Swayze, whose death, while not at all unexpected, hits surprisingly hard. I could say I admired the way he kept working even after he was diagnosed with cancer, which is true. Or that I admired the fact that unlike a lot of famous actors, he stayed married to the same lady from 1975 until today, which is also true. Or that I admired the sense of humor about himself that he demonstrated in a famous sketch on Saturday Night Live where he and Chris Farley played aspiring Chippendales dancers -- that's true, too.
But while those things are true, much of it is the amiable and easy familiarity of a good movie star. Between Ghost and Dirty Dancing, the guy made films I have seen a preposterous number of times. Not usually giving my full attention, never studying them like I would with really serious movies. But with a cup of tea on the first really cold day in November, with a plaid wool blanket? Or late at night when something worrisome is happening and sleep is oddly elusive? You should be so lucky as to find Dirty Dancing on television.
Ghost, simple pleasures, and keeping company, after the jump...
If you saw Twilight, you know that we learned that vampires are (1) sparkly, (2) pouty, and (3) very good at baseball. Now, the trailer for New Moon, the sequel out November 20, we learn that they (4) make rash decisions, (5) are under the control of a mysterious robed monarchy of sorts; (6) appreciate that red is eye-catching on camera, and (7) appreciate a decorative fountain, just like anyone.
Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs was only one of the 3D movies that made a splash this summer. (Twentieth Century Fox)
by Linda Holmes
Now that we're through the Labor Day weekend and the cinematic summer is truly over, the numbers are being crunched on just how good of a summer it was.
Analysis of the summertime data takes place in the context of the very strong first quarter of 2009, which broke some records and made it look like movies might be the recipients of all the recession-fueled escapism money many people believed would wind up going somewhere.
How did the summer go?
What 3D has meant to summer box office, after the jump...
In Extract, Jason Bateman plays a factory owner. But he's played some far sketchier characters in his day. (Miramax)
by Linda Holmes
Jason Bateman, as an actor, possesses great warmth and humor, but he also plays a great con artist. In the new comedy Extract, he plays a factory owner who does a bit of scheming of his own, and if you look back over the guy's career, it really isn't a surprise.
So we wondered: Of all the slicksters and semi-slicksters he has played, who is the slickest?
Michael Bluth, Arrested Development Risk level: Low
Yes, Michael was capable of the odd caper now and then, mostly when the rest of his family forced him into it. And yes, he had questionable judgment with regard to girlfriends. But there's no malice in Michael; certainly nothing that would lead you to believe he was after your possessions.
James Cooper Ingalls, Little House On The Prairie Risk level: Very low
After the death of his biological parents, James was raised by Pa and Ma. (Bateman joined the show late in the run, as the original children aged and it became clear that you could not make an entire show about Laura and Almanzo fighting over tarragon.) If the child had ever in his life been destined for a life of crime, Pa and Ma would surely have put a stop to it.
Corrupting Ricky Schroder, Very Special Episodes, and much more, after the jump...
On the set of Sex And The City 2 on Tuesday, Sarah Jessica Parker wore ... this. (Charles Sykes / Associated Press)
by Linda Holmes
Normally, we would leave the fashion to the Fug Girls, who actually covered this outfit yesterday. They're certainly up to it.
But an infinite number of monkey-themed pop-culture blogs at an infinite number of typewriters will eventually write one entry that says, essentially, "Get a load of what Sarah Jessica Parker is wearing." And we have reached that moment.
Let us somewhat regretfully discuss, after the jump...
Marvel is the golden egg, and Disney is the cake company, and if you keep reading, it will all make sense, really. (Marvel Comics, iStockphoto.com)
By Glen Weldon
On Monday, the news came down. The analyses began. Jokes were joked. Freakouts were well and truly freaked.
The news: Disney acquired Marvel Comics for $4 billion. ("Acquired," which makes it sound like Marvel's a tube of Pink Glitter lip gloss that somehow ended up in Disney's purse as it sauntered out of Hot Topic. "How'd THAT get there?")
If you need a taste of what folks in the comics industry are saying about it, you can't beat The Beat,
or Journalista! The transcript of the Disney/Marvel call to investors is worth checking out, if only to remind yourself that there are people in the world who actually say things like "vertical integration," "the wheelhouse of this distribution channel" and who - willfully! repeatedly! - use "impact" as a verb.
Conventional wisdom soon congealed along these lines: Good for Disney, because Marvel's stable of heroes can help them reach boys age 8-18, a demographic that has thus far proven stoically resistant to the charms of Hannah Montana and High School Musical -- with, um, some exceptions (Hi, Jason! Stay fabulous, kiddo!). Good for Marvel, because Disney's got more distribution channels in their wheelhouse (sigh) than Cruella's got Dalmatian handmuffs.
After the jump: It's not about the comics. And yes, the Tastykake Analogy.
All About Steve is being marketed in such a way that even if you might be inclined to like it, you may get the sinking feeling that you won't. (Twentieth Century Fox)
by Linda Holmes
I want to stress that I have not seen All About Steve, do not know whether All About Steve is worthwhile, and generally am in no position to pass judgment on whether All About Steve is going to ultimately be worth seeing or not. I am always happy to be surprised -- I was oddly charmed by Sandra Bullock's other summer offering, The Proposal.
But I will tell you this: Rarely has a movie managed to take so many elements of which I am generally in favor and combine them in such a way that my initial reaction is that I would rather be shot out of a cannon than see this movie. In fact, if you told me I had to be shot out of a cannon, my only request would be that you aim me away from this movie.
Stalker hilarity, love among the grotesques, and what's going on with Bradley Cooper, after the jump...
Everybody wants the statuette, and they're making the process for getting it trickier and trickier. (Jason Merritt / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
You probably remember that this year's Best Picture race at the Oscars will involve 10 nominees, not five. But now, we learn that there are more changes on the way, and specifically that voters will be asked to rank all 10 nominees in order of preference.
Could this punish polarizing films? And how do you rank a movie you've never seen? We consider these questions, after the jump ...
Trying to predict what this deal is going to mean for Marvel, for comics, for superhero movies, or for Disney is pure speculation at this point. But there is an immediate problem, and it's one of perception: Put simply, Marvel has a cool factor and Disney doesn't. People who love Spider-Man do not necessarily see themselves as close cousins of people who love Donald Duck just because there's drawing involved.
There is a streak of the contrarian in comics culture — of devotion untempered by socialization. Even as comics-based movies have made untold fortunes, comics-geekery has retained a splash of oddball cool, which is a bit of a neat trick. What doesn't have any measure of oddball cool? Well, Disney, for one.
But now, Spider-Man will indeed be sitting down at the company picnic with Goofy. Will hanging with Goofy ruin Spider-Man's reputation, or will Spider-Man make Goofy seem cooler?
When we talked aboutHeathers as part of the Summer Of '80s Movies series, there had been news that there might be a Heathersmusical.
But now, there is to be a Heathers television show, too. If you watch the clip above (caution: language not suitable for blasting in your cubicle), in which Veronica (Winona Ryder) meets J.D. (Christian Slater), you will note that there is some darkness to the comedy here that would be difficult to replicate on television.
(That's in addition to the fact that all the characters are said to be returning, which will require either some revisionist history or a prequel, if you know what I mean.)
Still, the concept of remaking Heathers doesn't fill me with as much dread as the prospect of some other remakes. Depending on where it winds up, a TV show could certainly manage some dark comedy about high school. It would probably need a different central thrust than the bumping-off of the popular kids, simply because that doesn't seem like an arc with a long lifespan. But the gang of mean girls with the unhappy member who's involved with an outsider and harboring viciously violent tendencies? That has promise.
I'm a little puzzled by the involvement of Jenny Bicks, whose major credits are Sex And The City and Men In Trees, but I'm willing to withhold judgment. Which is better treatment, I'd point out, than most remakes receive.
This is a pretty scary scene, right? Or is it? We're wondering what really scares you. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
There are two scary-movie franchises putting out new chapters this week: Rob Zombie's Halloween II is opening against The Final Destination — which is actually the fourth movie in the Final Destination series.
(Believe it or not, The Final Destination is a different movie from Final Destination, making it literally only one-half as creative as the "let's drop two instances of the word 'the'" approach to sequel naming that was pioneered by Fast & Furious.)
Horror movies of various kinds are huge business, but are they scary?
The difference between unease and assault, and some spoilers about Psycho, after the jump...
Brad Pitt -- more specifically, Weird Brad Pitt -- is one of several winners after this weekend's good showing for Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. (Francois Duhamel / The Weinstein Company)
by Linda Holmes
There wasn't a whole lot opening this weekend: the big story was Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (spell-checkers around the world will be so pleased when it passes into history), with kids' movie Shorts and the comedy Post Grad both far more modestly promoted and discussed.
And that's just about the way it played out. While Shorts and Post Grad didn't do much business (the latter far less even than the former), Inglourious Basterds went smashingly well with a take of more than $37 million domestically.
Now, opening weekend box office is good for only what it's good for -- it contributes a great deal to the perception that things are successful, even though a lot can change once you find out whether something has any kind of legs or not. But in this case, the performance of Basterds is big news because of the volatile reputations of Tarantino as well as Bob and Harvey Weinstein, whose company released the movie. (The recent New York Timesprofile of the Weinsteins is a good read if you haven't already seen it.)
There was a lot of talk last week leading into the weekend about how badly the Weinsteins needed the film to perform well -- Tarantino says in the Times that they wanted a hit more than he did -- so you can imagine their relief.
So it's a win for them (and for the likelihood that you will soon be watching The Reader 2: The Bubble Bath), and for Tarantino, and for Weird Brad Pitt.
In May 1967, The Beatles celebrated the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. They probably didn't know they'd still be making news 42 years later. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
You may have heard about a hot emerging band with a lot of irons in the fire right now -- "The Beatles," anybody? I'm pretty sure they're going to be the next big thing.
Today's Beatles news is that Disney is working out a deal for Robert Zemeckis to access Beatles tunes to remake Yellow Submarine. Not only is a movie remake planned, but there's interest in a Broadway show.
In September, The Beatles will undoubtedly make huge headlines with the release of The Beatles: Rock Band, the new video game that will allow you to play along with the band. (For a whole lot more about the game, and about the Beatles, and about why people pick on guys who like to play Guitar Hero and Rock Band, see this marvelous recent article by Daniel Radosh from New York Times Magazine.)
All that is not to mention, of course, the fact that remastered versions of their entire catalogue on CD are scheduled for release in September as well.
Need more? "Why The Beatles Broke Up" is the cover story in the latest issue of Rolling Stone.
There's even some speculation that the Beatles' records could finally be coming to iTunes, but that still looks like wishful thinking as much as anything.
There tends to be a certain ebb and flow to interest in The Beatles, but this does seem like an interesting little uptick. I don't think there's any question that Guitar Hero has wildly increased the familiarity younger kids have with hair bands (I base this in part on my nephews' shockingly advanced knowledge of "Rock And Roll All Nite"); I'll be curious to watch for an increase in the visibility of Beatles tunes among ten-year-olds.
Peter Capaldi and Chris Addison play a foul-mouthed jerk and a less foul-mouthed semi-jerk in the wonderful comedy In The Loop, which you may or may not be able to see. (Nicola Dove / In The Loop Productions)
by Linda Holmes
I saw In The Loop yesterday -- it's a very effective, guffawingly hilarious political satire that features some of the best and funniest performances I've seen in quite some time. It's one of those that makes you think, "I have to go right out and recommend that movie to everyone I know."
So you can see it -- and you should -- if you're between Boston and D.C., or if you're around San Francisco or Los Angeles or Chicago, or if you're in one of the few other cities that's been chosen as a mid-nation representative of people who like indie movies: Minneapolis, Austin, Seattle/Portland...there are a handful of others.
But that single theater in Denver looks pretty lonely, doesn't it? Without that, there'd be nowhere to see it between San Antonio and Los Angeles.
The frustrations of distribution, after the jump...
Bryan Singer has been brought on to produce and perhaps direct a feature film version of Battlestar Galactica...but why? (Elisabetta Villa / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
If you were a fan of the recently wrapped Battlestar Galactica series on Syfy (then known as SciFi, sigh), perhaps you'd greet the idea of a feature film with enthusiasm. Perhaps having it come from director Bryan Singer, who did The Usual Suspects and the first two X-Men movies (along with the less well-received Superman Returns) would make a certain amount of sense.
But wait. It isn't at all clear whether the project to which Singer is now apparently attached has anything to do with the incarnation that just went off the air. It sounds at least as likely as not that it's entirely separate — a totally new approach to the same material, which might have as much to do with the Syfy Battlestar Galactica as the Syfy one did with the 1978 original. Which is to say: not much.
This seems like a bizarre move. If fans of the recent series can't be reassured that something of what they love will be preserved, then they will turn on this project with bitterness, and without them, it's hard to imagine why it should be made at all, let alone announced within months of the series' end.
According to Hitfix, this is a project Singer was working on as far back as 2001. But since 2001, there has been another entire version of this material that was very influential in sci-fi circles.
Fans might be ready eventually to see a new approach, but as Keith Phipps at The Onion A.V. Clubsaid today, it seems a little bit ... soon for this.
Kate Winslet won the Oscar for Best Actress earlier this year. You may soon see her move to television. (Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
Varietyreports that HBO may be about to pick up a miniseries adaptation of Mildred Pierce, starring Kate Winslet -- and written and directed by Todd Haynes, who made I'm Not There and Far From Heaven.
It's an interesting progression: television used to be primarily a place for people who hadn't yet made movies but hoped they eventually would, and then it became an equally welcoming place for people who have in the past made movies, and now, more and more, it's a perfectly viable place for people who remain bankable movie stars and filmmakers.
As Sunday night's premiere of the very cinematic Mad Men approaches, that line between television and film only gets finer.
In the new movie District 9, it appears that we have been peacefully living with space aliens for more than 25 years when suddenly, we manage to provoke a violent confrontation. Why are we so bad at dealing with space aliens? Why can't we learn the basics, after so many years of (totally fictional) experience?
Does this look like a guy whose lease you want to terminate prematurely? (Columbia TriStar Pictures)
1. Do not try to evict giant spidery creatures that can fly and/or eat you. In the trailer above, the bureaucrat who's serving the "eviction notice" comes up to the armpit of the "tenant," and the "tenant" appears to be a lizard with a metal exoskeleton, or thereabouts. If you have convinced a bunch of super-powerful lizard-people who can leap from one building to another to live peacefully in what certainly looks to be the poor part of town, leave them alone.
Rachel McAdams looks pretty happily married to the temporally mobile Eric Bana in The Time Traveler's Wife. But would that really be such a great situation? (Warner Brothers Pictures)
by Linda Holmes
Oh, sure, this one looks like Eric Bana, and it's all very romantic when he pops up out of nowhere — and the fact that you're separated by time and space at least allows you your alone time for reading.
But would being married to someone who can travel through time actually be enjoyable? I believe it would not be, and these are only the first 10 things I thought of that could potentially go wrong.
1. Wins the Oscar pool every time, and won't admit cheating by reading next week's Entertainment Weekly.
2. Lost car keys in nineteenth-century France; claims he can't go back for them due to "crippling fear of Napoleon."
3. Difficult to shop for; claims the future is a time of bounty where ownership of material goods by the individual is obsolete.
4. Separates coffee grounds from other trash and buries them wrapped in plastic sealed with duct tape; won't explain why except by shuddering and saying, "You'll know soon enough."
5. Annoys everyone at Thanksgiving by saying, "Well, that's not how the Pilgrims did it, but I'm sure whatever you think is fine."
6. Abrupt departure of his body from this temporal plane inevitably means a pile of dirty laundry on the floor.
7. Tries to milk extra sympathy for shaving cuts by claiming they're from the Battle Of Gettysburg.
8. Never shuts up about dinner with skinny Elvis; insists he co-wrote "Jailhouse Rock."
9. Really smug about having already seen all the Harry Potter movies.
As Duke, Channing Tatum brings some charm to the latest toy-based smash hit, G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra. (Paramount Pictures)
by Linda Holmes
So, in what we might call Today's Consideration Of Summer Box Office, Part Two, a question: Was Paramount right about G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra?
As we discussed last week, Paramount clearly had confidence that it would do well whether critics reviewed it or not. In what the studio probably sees as vindication for that point of view, the movie brought in a robust $56 million at the domestic box office (a total of $100 million internationally) to finish first for the weekend.
But what about the other half of the equation? Paramount's decision not to screen the movie for critics seems to have been based on a suspicion that it would be panned, just as Transformers was earlier in the summer. For all the talk about letting the audience decide for itself, if they'd believed it was going to get Iron Man reviews, they'd have screened it.
And what happened?
Critics don't exactly get on board, but they don't throw flamethrowers at the train, either, after the jump ...
Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is one of many kid-oriented movies to be successful this summer. (Paramount Pictures)
by Linda Holmes
I cannot recommend highly enough this rigorously even-handed piece by A.O. Scott in The New York Times, in which he discusses the "mass infantilization" at the movies that comes from cautious marketers wanting only to deal with proven brands and formulas that satisfy primarily children and adults' inner children. I must admit that even though I tend to tirelessly defend the legitimacy of entertainment designed to just be entertaining, there has been something vaguely demoralizing about this summer, and this piece nails it: it is the discomforting feeling that everything that's being deemed successful is something you could have appreciated as a seventh-grader.
You'll notice that Scott doesn't resent popcorn movies for being popcorn movies, or kids' movies for being kids' movies, and it's not about being too good for an action-based blowout. It's less about loss of quality and more about loss of variety. That's why he includes The Hangover in the problematic trend -- even though he calls it "riotous" and recognized in reviewing it that it's good at what it does, much of the time.
All blockbusters are not alike: last year's big action spectacles, after all, were The Dark Knight and Iron Man. This year's may turn out to be Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen and G.I. Joe. You don't have to be a poor sport -- or, as Scott puts it, a "pointy-headed grouch" -- to see something discouraging about that.
We've been talking this week quite a bit about how much John Hughes knew about life in high school, but Daniel Waters, who wrote the 1989 blacker-than-black comedy Heathers, knew something too.
If Hughes understood the vulnerable, exposed bellies of sixteen-year-olds and the way high school can make you want to crawl inside a sleeping bag and not emerge until college, Waters understood, to put it plainly, the way high school can make you want to poison someone.
Waters understood how the overt bullying and covert sadism among high-school students is, at times, so brutal and relentless that if it took place outside the high-school context, you'd probably classify it as psychotic, or at least indicative of a very unquiet mind. Hughes understood how all the resulting anger can be turned inward; Waters understood how it might be turned outward -- and while they both wrote for laughs much of the time, you can tell that they both meant it.
Little Nicholson, why it's your friends who will kill you, and the color red, after the jump...
Even the parts of Julie & Julia that are about Julie are really about Julia (Meryl Streep). (Sony Pictures)
by Linda Holmes
I'm not surprised by the reviews of Julie & Julia that consider it a movie in two parts, where the half that involves Meryl Streep playing Julia Child feels important and the half that involves Amy Adams playing Julie Powell doesn't. I'm not surprised by those who wish it were just a movie about Julia Child. But I think they miss the point a little.
It's important, I think, to understand that nobody is trying to compare the accomplishments of these women. Nobody is claiming that Julie Powell's year-long blog project cooking everything in Mastering The Art Of French Cooking puts her on an equal footing with Julia Child -- least of all Julie Powell. There are beats of similarity in their stories, in that they're both married, and in that they both love cooking and feel brought to life by it. But to recognize that one of these women dwarfs the other in stature isn't to undermine the movie; it's to grasp the entire point of the movie.
Great teachers and ordinary New Yorkers, after the jump...
Last night's midnight screening of G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra (uh, more about that later) was the first time I had seen this trailer for Old Dogs, from -- logically enough -- the director of Wild Hogs.
Now, here are some things in this trailer that concern me.
1. John Travolta.
2. Robin Williams.
3. John Travolta with Robin Williams.
4. Jokes about Japanese businessmen.
5. Kid-hit-in-the-face humor.
6. Golf-ball-in-the-groin humor.
7. Travolta in his womanizer guise.
8. Williams passing out with his face in his plate.
9. Justin Long with comical facial hair.
10. Camping humor.
11. Accidentally winding up in the zoo.
12. In the gorilla enclosure.
13. With a guy in a gorilla suit.
Balancing out all of this is Seth Green singing Air Supply, which could be pretty good. Okay, and possibly John Travolta being eaten by a penguin.
But as a whole, Old Dogs kind of terrifies me, as if they've taken everything about the modern whimsical family comedy that I dislike and stuffed it all into the same movie. Would it work to close my eyes through the whole thing except when Seth Green is singing?
As Ferris Bueller in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Matthew Broderick was one of John Hughes' many flawed but very human high-school students. (The Kobal Collection)
by Linda Holmes
UPDATE: If you haven't yet read this great story about John Hughes that's been kicking around Facebook and Twitter all day, I highly recommend it.
John Hughes never won an Oscar. He really never won awards at all. He made mainstream, popular entertainment. But for a period of time in the late 1980s, he made a series of movies, mostly about teenagers, that people still watch, still love, and still quote. And those movies have never really been replaced, because the guy knew something. These five moments are the best explanation I have of what it is he knew.
1. "Never had one lesson." There are many more famous moments in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but none is as important as Ferris (Matthew Broderick) squeaking incompetently away on a clarinet shortly after getting rid of his parents for the day, then leaning forward and declaring — in the fourth-wall-breaking style of the film — "Never had one lesson!"
Unlike a lot of the kids at the center of Hughes films, Ferris Bueller isn't an outcast; he's at ease everywhere. So if he'd conned his way into staying home to make trouble or play video games — or, for that matter, to do nothing — he would just be a brat.
But from the start, he is skipping school because he genuinely believes he has better things to do than attend high school, which is an awfully difficult premise to entirely deny. Skipping school so you can stay in your house isn't really a quest; it's just skipping school. Ferris wants something bigger than school.
John Hughes movies were very good at putting school in its place. Everything isn't about yearbook and cheerleading; kids have inner lives of legitimate importance, and not only with regard to dating. Sometimes those inner lives demand a day spent with your friends, watching baseball and seeing great art, instead of answering to your name in homeroom.
In Julie & Julia, Amy Adams plays Julie Powell, who, among other things, struggles to perfectly poach an egg. (Sony Pictures)
by Linda Holmes
One scene in Julie & Julia, which opens tomorrow, concerns a series of attempts by Julie Powell (Amy Adams) to cook simple poached eggs according to the directions given in Julia Child's book Mastering The Art Of French Cooking. It was part of Powell's year-long effort to cook her way through the entire book.
And it's going to sell a lot of copies of the book, even though the recipes call for not only pounds and pounds of butter but ingredients like, say, a calf's foot. (Not available at your supermarket, probably, but necessary for the aspics — kind of like meat Jell-O — that Powell and her friends and family gritted their teeth to get through.) The movie does kind of make you want to try something. And since I am nothing if not my own guinea pig, I decided to try the poached egg.
How it went, including all the photographic evidence, after the jump...
Consider the trailer for Martin Scorsese's upcoming Shutter Island, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, to be the latest example of a trailer that appears to give away so much that it's hard to imagine what can really be surprising about the movie once you see it.
Let's go over just the information they've handed us.
Why ruin the movie before anybody sees the movie? After the jump...
Judy Garland, seen here in 1942, is the star of the day at Turner Classic Movies. (Eric Carpenter / Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
A quick programming note: August is "Summer Under The Stars" month at Turner Classic Movies. All month, they're spotlighting a different actor every day. They've already done James Coburn, Harold Lloyd, Marion Davies, James Mason, and Henry Fonda. And today, it's Judy Garland.
As of this writing, a run of her musicals with Mickey Rooney is already underway, and will wrap up with Strike Up The Band at 10:45 a.m. They'll be showing several musicals she made with Gene Kelly (including For Me And My Gal, Summer Stock, and The Pirate) as well as In The Good Old Summertime, the musical version of the same story in The Shop Around The Corner and You've Got Mail. It's certainly not a comprehensive retrospective, but there's lots of good stuff for fans.
Check out today's schedule, and look out for some powerhouse days coming up, including Bette Davis on Saturday, Cary Grant on Sunday, Audrey Hepburn on Tuesday, Glark Gable on Wednesday...there's a lot to see. The site for the series is annoying to navigate, but will reveal, if you are patient, who's featured for the rest of the month. Sidney Poitier, Elvis Presley, Gene Hackman, John Wayne...a little something for everyone.
Any time a scary movie apparently involves a decent-sized cast of people placed in a closed environment, it's a good time to play a game I like to call Pets Or Meat.
This comes from Roger & Me, in which Michael Moore meets a woman who sells what her sign calls "Rabbits Or Bunnies - Pets Or Meat." In your average scary movie with a sizable cast, there are some characters you can look at and immediately know: That guy is going to die. They are the Meat.
Others are the ones you're meant to identify with, and they have a reasonable chance of surviving. They are the Pets. These are tried-and-true tropes, and it takes a bold filmmaker to work against them successfully: Part of what makes Psycho a classic shocker is that it kills an apparent Pet, rather than just all the Meat. Got it?
Let us examine the Pets and the Meat of this week's A Perfect Getaway, starring Steve Zahn, Milla Jovovich, Timothy Olyphant, and Kiele Sanchez, along with Marley Shelton and Chris Hemsworth.
And I will stress: I am writing this while completely unspoiled about this movie. Haven't seen it, and am well prepared to be completely wrong. The fun is in the guessing.
The difficulty of Steve Zahn here and in general, after the jump...
One:
Bradbury refers to the book as "Fahrenheit Four-Five-One," and not, as you probably do, "Fahrenheit Four-Fifty-One." Huh.
Two:
Artist Tim Hamilton struggled with the classic Adapter's Dilemma (What to include? What to exclude?).
Three:
To the surprise of precisely no one, I sound on the radio exactly like the gigantic nerd I know myself to be off the air. ("Many-tendrilled creature?" Seriously?)
Four:
Bradbury's book isn't really about censorship, it's about a creeping societal apathy toward culture in general and literature in particular.
Four Point One:
Bradbury wrote the book in the early 50's, and was way out in front of the TV-rots-your-brain movement.
Four Point Two:
A smart writer like Bradbury could see the threat TV posed to his livelihood, and no doubt wrote the book feeling the hot breath of Uncle Miltie on the back of his neck.
In the piece,I also pontificate about good graphic novels evincing "a tension between text and image." Several people have asked what I meant by that, which is my fault for talking in the abstract (see above, in re: huge nerditude, pontification).
Let me try to put it more concretely: In the best graphic novels/comics/sequential art/whatever, the art doesn't just sit there. It doesn't simply illustrate what the words are describing, because comics are more than just books with pictures.
No, the art takes over a share of the heavy lifting. It does its own, independent narrative work: it characterizes, sets the tone, advances the plot, etc.
The art, in other words, gets off its damn butt.
After the jump: Art that puts in a hard day's work, and how the Watchmen movie is -- literally -- illustrative.
Paramount is aiming G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra at "mid-America." But what do they mean by that? (Paramount Pictures)
by Linda Holmes
In today's Los Angeles Times, there's a discussion of Paramount's decision not to screen G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra for critics, but instead to start with a military audience and aim at "not Hollywood or Manhattan but rather mid-America."
Let's put aside for a moment the just possibly disingenuous claim that a movie is not being screened for critics because you want a pure experience for Grand Rapids and not because, perhaps, it's not very good. Let's assume this is really the plan: "mid-America."
What does that mean, exactly? In this formulation, "mid-America" seems to include everything except Hollywood and Manhattan. It includes sort of southern-rock stuff, like marketing the movie during Kid Rock shows. It includes showing ads at the Mall of America, about a half-mile from an apartment where I once lived, which is part of the reasonably cosmopolitan and insistently high-culture-friendly Minneapolis/St. Paul area.
The irony of this attempt to speak to "mid-America," to claim to be addressing them when Hollywood so often overlooks them, is that it's a positively bizarre construct to conflate everything outside Hollywood and Manhattan as one giant "mid-America" blob -- mid-coast Maine, Gulf Coast Mississippi, the Iron Range in Minnesota, suburban Cleveland, North Dakota...it's all, under this definition, "mid-America."
And, remarkably, the L.A. Times notes that they're aiming an awful lot of marketing at "just one segment of the audience." That being the one segment of the audience that includes people at the Mall of America and people at Lynyrd Skynyrd shows, which -- I am here to tell you -- are not necessarily part of any common especially narrow segment.
The entire issue of the "flag-waving, NASCAR-loving American" as the focus of your marketing -- while lots of people certainly wave flags and like NASCAR, no matter what part of the country you're in -- seems a bit condescending, doesn't it? Not because it's accurate or inaccurate, but because it takes hundreds of cities and communities, large and small, agricultural, industrial, suburban, whatever -- and makes them one giant "mid-American" mass of humanity.
Nobody likes to feel lumped together -- Minnesota and Wisconsin are probably about as close as you can get to states that are similar in the popular imagination, and if you talk about them like they're the same, you're going to get two guys beating you up -- one will have a Viking helmet on and the other one will be pounding on you with a wheel of cheese. (So to speak.)
The Parsifal Mosaic, the apex of Robert Ludlum's career as an author of bad spy novel titles, will soon become a film under the direction of Ron Howard.
by Andy Carvin
It's been eight years since prolific spy novelist Robert Ludlum passed away, but thanks to Hollywood's penchant for milking some authors until there are no stories left to tell, we're still able to enjoy one of Ludlum's greatest gifts: the art of the absurd spy movie title.
From his very first literary offering, 1971's The Scarlatti Inheritance to The Bancroft Strategy, published posthumously in 2006, Ludlum managed to crank out a new spy novel almost every single year of his professional career. And the vast majority of them had that same three-word formula.
(The only two books of his that broke that structure were The Road to Gandolfo and The Road To Omaha, which apparently must've been gunning for big-screen premieres starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby.)
Perhaps the best-known Hollywood adaptation of Ludlum's works is the Bourne series -- The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy and the Bourne Ultimatum -- starring Matt Damon. But there have been more than half a dozen other Ludlum films and miniseries, all of which utilized the same three-word formula, from The Rhinemann Exchange to The Hades Factor.
And now, director Ron Howard is getting into the mix, with last week's announcement that he'll be at the helm of a film adaptation of Robert Ludlum's -- wait for it -- The Parsifal Mosaic, perhaps the most deliciously ludicrous of all Ludlum titles.
Even for the entire spy movie genre, it's definitely near the top of the heap: earlier today, I saw documentary filmmaker John Pavlus quip on Twitter, "Ron Howard's next project will wrest honors for 'worst-titled spy movie ever' from Quantum of Solace."
John may indeed be right, but I think we can do even better than that. So here's our challenge to you: come up with the worst spy movie title ever, using Ludlum's three word formula. The only rule we'll require is that the first word is "The" and the third word is a noun; the rest of it is up to you. Personally, my favorite Ludlum formula works like this:
"The" + [Greek mythological hero OR theoretical physicist's surname] + [noun relating some type of situation]
...which gives us some potential titles such as The Heisenberg Incentive, The Szilard Conspiracy, The Achilles Dilemma and The Priapus Conundrum.
Think you can do better? Post your absurd spy movie titles below or tweet with the tag #AbsurdSpyMovies. We'll go through your suggestions and share some of our favorites. And maybe - just maybe - Hollywood will come knocking on your door.
You can follow Andy Carvin on Twitter here to keep up with lots of good stuff from the world of NPR social media. (And, as always, you can follow Monkey See here).
Funny People won't make $150 million, but don't count out Judd Apatow quite yet. (Jason Merritt/Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
So the good news for Judd Apatow is that Funny People was the top movie in theaters this weekend. But the bad news is that it was a pretty light weekend of moviegoing, and that top spot only brought the movie about $23.4 million, which is being widely hailed as a disappointment.
It's a lot of money, but compared both to other Apatow-directed movies (specifically The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up) and to other Adam Sandler movies, it's a letdown. Of course, it's a more serious Apatow movie and a more serious Sandler movie than average, so drawing conclusions about what it means for future pure comedies from either one is a stretch. As Box Office Mojo notes, it's bad for a Sandler comedy, but good for a Sandler drama.
It's a wild overstatement to declare that this single weekend is "cold proof that Judd Apatow's hot streak is over", because -- just as we discussed with regard to Will Ferrell after Land Of The Lost bombed -- the magnitude of the streak is generally overstated to begin with.
Given that he's a guy who takes a lot of abuse and a guy almost everyone will gamely impersonate if given the chance, Keanu Reeves has had a much more interesting career than you'd think. In fact, if you look at his resume, he's bounced around from genre to genre as much as almost any actor you're going to encounter.
He's done action movies (Point Break, Speed, obviously The Matrix), he's done overwrought dramas (The Devil's Advocate), he's done romantic melodrama (Sweet November, The Lake House, A Walk In The Clouds), he's done highly respectable award-winners (Dangerous Liaisons, My Own Private Idaho), he's done Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing), he's done goofball farce (Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure), he's done light romantic comedy (The Replacements), and he's done middlebrow crowd-pleasing comedy (Parenthood, Something's Gotta Give).
He's actually kind of a fascinating guy, even if I'm as fond as anyone of yelling, "Cans! There was no baby! It was full of cans!" (Thank you, thank you.) (See here, starting at about the 6:20 mark, for the original.)
And the first movie where people really talked about him was River's Edge, which won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Film in 1987, beating out not only The Big Easy starring Dennis Quaid, but also John Sayles' Matewan.
How does it look more than 20 years later? Well...it looks, for lack of a more precise word, very, very weird.
In fact, it's appropriate that this is the movie Crispin Glover was promoting when he made his famous apparently unhinged appearance on what was then Late Night With David Letterman on NBC, because "unhinged" doesn't even begin to describe it.
A kick in the head, advice from a fashion genius, why Dennis Hopper didn't need a blow-up doll, and more, after the jump...
The latest in the Summer Of '80s Movies series is 1987's Wall Street*, which won Michael Douglas an Oscar and guaranteed that "greed is good" would live on in our grab-bag of overused cultural cliches forevermore. It was also a major step in the rise of Oliver Stone, who had won an Oscar for Best Director the year before (for Platoon) and would, in the next few years, make films including Born On The Fourth Of July, The Doors, Nixon, and -- of course -- JFK.
And what's shocking, seeing Wall Street 22 years after its release, is how aggressively bad it is.
Huge cell phones, Spader problems, unlikely speeches, and lots more, after the jump...
George Simmons (Adam Sandler) hires Ira Wright (Seth Rogen) to be his joke guy and his friend, in Judd Apatow's Funny People. (Universal Pictures)
by Linda Holmes
The most important moment in the solid new film Funny People is the opening. As he discussed on Fresh Air, writer-director Judd Apatow (both lucky and smart here, as they say) had old footage of a young Adam Sandler making prank phone calls from when the two were roommates, and that's how the film begins.
It is essentially impossible to duplicate manic comic energy in a written screenplay performed by an actor. Grief is easier to convey, anger is easier, joy is easier, attraction is easier. Nothing Apatow could have written would ever have driven home what this footage drives home about a young guy who prides himself on being funny — how hard he'll work to crack everyone up, including himself. Nothing would have captured the combination of likability and desperate eagerness that makes a giggling clown the kind of guy people are drawn to on one hand, and grow tired of on the other.
That's what happens to Sandler's character, George Simmons, who finds that after a long movie career very obviously modeled on Sandler's own, he's rattling around in his giant house by himself. What's more, he's just been told that he's probably going to die.
Antsy and without company, he goes back to the one place he feels comfortable: the world of stand-up, where he takes a liking to young comic Ira Wright (Seth Rogen), whom he hires to write jokes for him, and eventually to be his assistant.
And from there, like most stories, it's about whether these guys are going to be changed by this experience, and how, and how much.
The abrupt change of direction, the mixed blessing of celebrity cameos, and several people at their least annoying, after the jump...
It's a little bit of a cheat that Edward Scissorhands, which was released in 1990, is part of an '80s movie series at all. But in the same way that the cultural '60s actually extended into the early '70s, the emergence of Tim Burton with Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Batman and Beetlejuice is a late-'80s phenomenon, and it's not unfair to pull in Edward Scissorhands as a critical step in that process.
Besides, 1990 was Johnny Depp's breakout year -- including both this movie and Cry-Baby -- after a history as an '80s TV heartthrob on 21 Jump Street and a permanent position in the pages of Tiger Beat, so let's go with it.
Edward Scissorhands is so visually intricate and so famous for being so -- not just the way Depp looks, but the sidewalk-chalk color palette of the neighborhood where he's brought down from his ominous stone castle to live -- that it's easy to forget that it's also a very intense story about isolation. The symbolism is so blunt as to be either remarkably guileless or remarkably clumsy, depending strictly on how it strikes you at a given moment.
A man with blades for hands, capable of brilliant blasts of heartfelt creativity but not normal human contact, justifiably afraid of touching anyone, constantly accidentally-on-purpose turning the weapons on himself...it's so simultaneously rich and corny, as a concept, that it's the kind of tenderly simplistic thing that could have been conceived by the most tortured but talented ninth-grader at a creative-writing camp.
Why it still works, and what it might make you pine for, after the jump...
Adam Sandler performs a stand-up routine as George Simmons in Judd Apatow's new film, Funny People. (Universal Pictures)
by Marc Hirsh
Funny People comes out tomorrow, and I have to admit, I'm worried.
It has nothing to do with it being a Judd Apatow movie; the guy may have lent his name to some questionable projects (Year One, anybody?), but the things that are definitively his -- TV shows Freaks And Geeks and Undeclared, and movies The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up -- are all good-to-great. And it has nothing to do with it being an Adam Sandler movie, since Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love showed what he can do when not left unchecked.
No, what has me nervous is right there in the title. It's a movie that's about people who make a living being funny and who are presented in the very act of funny-being. That means that the characters have to...you know, be funny.
And that could be tricky. It's the fundamental tightrope walk for any film about the creative process, in whatever field. For it to work, those of us in the audience on this side of the screen usually have to agree with the audience on that side of the screen (or, at the very least, we have to buy into the notion that the fictional audience might plausibly respond as they do).
The problem is, we've been burned too often.
The Mr. Holland's Opus problem, and how Prince went the other way, after the jump...
The Dr. Seuss environmental cautionary tale The Lorax is being made into a 3D animated film to be released in 2012, according to Variety.
Choosing this book as source material makes a lot of sense, given the enthusiasm kids often have for environmental themes (one of my dear friends reported recently that his four-year-old, wanting not to be tickled anymore, protested, "Don't tickle me...it's bad for the environment!"). The writers, Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio, also wrote the 2008 version of Horton Hears A Who, which was a perfectly respectable adaptation, given the difficulty of taking a little book and trying to make it into a feature-length movie.
There are multiple layers of irony to sort through in the notion of a gargantuan, expensive Hollywood production mounted to tell a story that rests on its grave reservations about consumerism and industrialization. But WALL-E struck some of these same notes, certainly, and as you may have heard, that one did all right.
One of the big questions, it would seem, will be how to treat the book's rather bleak, tiny-ray-of-hope ending. "Only you can prevent this post-manufacturing dystopia" is a hard message to put on a Happy Meal, and nothing will bring down the wrath of devoted Seussians faster than ending the movie with a lush, regrown forest of Truffula trees or a production number in which all the animals return, hand in hand, singing about how it's great to see your old pals again. It's not going to be an easy balance to strike between palatability and preservation of the point.
Mary McNamara, television critic for the Los Angeles Times, argues today that television offers women better roles than film, making it crazy for a actress — her example is Katherine Heigl — to leave TV and make movies.
An artistic reason to remain in television? It's a world gone mad!
Problem with the thesis? A look at the evidence, after the jump...
As movies about quirky people multiply (such as 500 Days Of Summer, to name one), there comes a moment when it can no longer go unsaid that certain things have been used so excessively in the portrayal of quirky people that they have utterly ceased to be quirky. It may be that at this point, the quirkiest person in a Hollywood movie would be someone who wore clothes from The Gap and listened to the Dave Matthews Band. The following things are among the things that simply are not quirky anymore, if they ever were.
An unusual transportation method (scooter, tricycle, Segway, roller skates)
Being followed around by an omniscient narrator
Obsessive fear of the government
Having a strangely hypnotic way with children
Engaging in stalking behavior
Blunt-cut bangs
An addiction to sugary junk food
Inappropriate headgear (football helmet in church, etc.)
Wearing headphones a lot
Numbness to social cues
Being looked at through a fisheye lens
Blank-staring through several montages
Being moved to tears by divas (e.g. Edith Piaf)
Having a cat/dog/ferret/rat/bird
Ironic T-shirts
Band T-shirts
Ironic band T-shirts
An obsession with silent movies
An action-figure collection (see also: superhero underwear and/or bedding)
A scruffy beard
A bow tie
Being unhygienic
Being overly hygienic
Stammering
Reading
Knowing basic facts about science
Walking around to the coo of a breathy female singer
Brace yourself for the coming guinea-pig boom: Disney's G-Force had a surprisingly strong opening weekend, making a little over $32 million and bumping Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince down to second place.
In third place was The Ugly Truth, an attempt at romantic comedy for those who found He's Just Not That Into You too cerebral and evolved. The Ugly Truth pulled in $27 million, despite a Rotten Tomatoes score of 15%, which borders on the grotesque. (One point lower than Year One!)
It's also worth noting that several smaller releases are performing well in limited or very limited runs: the political satire In The Loopstarted strong but tiny, while The Hurt Locker and 500 Days Of Summer are chugging along as both head for wider release.
So even if you are (shockingly) not a fan of either adorable talking animals girded for battle or men and women calling each other names and then making out against the most fake-looking sky you have ever seen in your life, there's reason to believe some movies you might like will continue to creep closer to your town.
The Ugly Truth: Men and women are different! Get it? Sony Pictures
by Linda Holmes
If you've seen any of the publicity for the upcoming Katherine Heigl/Gerard Butler vehicle The Ugly Truth, you may have seen this poster, which is a variation on this poster. Because, see, the woman feels love with her mind, while the man feels love...eh? Eh? Get it? I knew you would. (To get a better idea of where this movie is going, you may want to watch the trailer, but rest assured: the poster gives a good idea of where it's going.)
It seems a shame, though, to waste such compelling art on a dull title like The Ugly Truth. And so, we present the following speculative list of the titles that were apparently rejected.
Am I Right, Fellas?
The Man Who Loved With His Colon
Dairy Cattle Acquisition In The Context Of Free Milk In Urban Non-Agrarian Economies: The Movie
Marry That Misogynist!
He's Just Not That Into You From The Neck Up
Come Back To The Five And Dime, Abrasive Jerk, Abrasive Jerk
Men Are From Mars, Women Are Crazy
28 Dresses: The Last One Is A Straitjacket!
Listen Up, Ladies!
Growing Old With An Angry Cable-Access Host, And Other Happy Endings
The Humiliatrix Reloaded
That's No Lady, That's My Boss
The 30-Year-Old Spinster
Come For His Abusive Insults, Stay For His Hidden Emotional Wounds
Now with more Boogaloo: We've reached one of the most notorious sequels of the '80s: Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. Courtesy of the AFI Silver Theatre.
by Linda Holmes
This is, I am telling you sincerely, the thought I had during Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, the latest entry in our Summer Of '80s Movies series: "Boy, the quality really slipped from the original Breakin'."
Several things happened between the original and the Boogaloo. The first is that somebody decided it would be better to have less acting and more dancing. In theory, this is a good idea, because the acting in the original was of a caliber usually reserved for seventh-grade plays. Written by seventh-graders. For seventh-graders. The dancing, on the other hand, was Shabba-Doo-lightful.
But for some reason, instead of seeing intense, quasi-realistic break-dancing smackdowns in clubs, as in Breakin' Classic, there are a lot of large-scale production numbers. You know how "Dancing Queen" was performed in the movie of Mamma Mia!, where all the townspeople gathered and gradually migrated to the docks in order to celebrate togetherness through the dance? This is more like that.
Overall, the production numbers have gone over the Oklahoma! barrier, if that makes any sense to you. Oklahoma! often gets (only moderately accurately) described as one of the early musicals that became really successful in spite of totally defying reality -- in other words, in many prior musicals, people danced and sang in dancing-and-singing situations, which is why you had so many musicals about stage performers and so forth. But in Oklahoma!, people will just start randomly warbling and leaping about right in the middle of, say, a serious discussion about fidelity.
What I'm saying is that Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo is kind of like Oklahoma!.
[deep bow] Thank you. This shall be my contribution to the culture.
The dance-off, the draw of Paris, girlfights, and saving the community, after the jump...
Natalie Portman: She's joining the Thor movie. But Thor? Still a jerk. Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images
by Glen Weldon
On Monday, Marvel Studios announced that Natalie Portman has been added to the cast of the upcoming big-budget Thor flick, scheduled to begin production early next year. She'll play "an updated version" of Jane Foster, a character who served as love interest for both the God of Thunder and his earthly alter-ego, Dr. Don Blake, back in the Thor comic's early years.
Portman joins Chris Hemsworth (who appeared briefly as Kirk's hot dead dad in this summer's Star Trek film) as Thor, and Tom (lots of British TV) Hiddleston, who'll play Loki, God of Lies.
Never been a Thor fan, I confess. And not just because of those little winglet-things on the side of his helmet, which never stop screaming Head Showgirl at Bally's.
No, it's his attitude. The guy's forever yelling at someone or other, and always with a puss on his face.
We review the prospects for a successful movie about the God of Thunder and Snippiness, after the jump.
Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince: A lot of people will be seeing this movie over the next couple of days. How can you make sure one of them punches you in the eye? Warner Brothers Pictures
by Linda Holmes
1. "Does that guy die? How about her? Does she die? Hey, what about the main guy, does he die?"
2. "If they can do magic, how come they're on brooms? I mean, you'd obviously make yourself a car."
3. "When's the part with the Muppets?"
4. "I think 'half-blood' sounds racist. Don't you think it sounds kind of racist?"
5. "That's the girl from Little Miss Sunshine. Yeah it is. Yeah it is. Yeah it is." [repeat]
6. "Yippie-ki-yay, [expletive deleted]! Because that's that guy! You know, 'Find my detonatahs!'"
7. "This part's fake. Where they're flying, you can tell this part's completely fake. It's totally CGI."
8. "It was different in the book. See, in the book he doesn't say that, like, at all, that's such a rip-off. In the book, there's this great part where he says..."
9. "He is so hot OH MY GOD he is totally so hot he is SO HOT."
Brüno: It's not the authenticity; it's the laughs. Universal Pictures
by Marc Hirsh
Comedy can be a funny thing. (See? No? All right.) We laugh when other people laugh, which is why there are laugh tracks on sitcoms and why people insist that you have to see The Hangover in a theater with a lot of other people. It's social dynamics, and to a large extent, it's hardwired into our systems.
That's one of the reasons it's so tough when you think that something is unfunny that everyone around you insists is hilarious. So when it happens, we usually come up with excuses, lest we end up at the receiving end of "Well, you just didn't get it." (The laughers, you see, come up with their own excuses.)
Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen's similarly-themed but differently-accented followup to Borat, had its detractors even before it was crowned the #1 movie in the country this past weekend. Setting aside those who were offended by the treatment and portrayal of [insert your choice of religious/ethnic/socioeconomic/political/etc. group here], one of the key complaints was a carryover from Borat: a sneaking suspicion that some of the scenes were staged.
I have to say, until last night, I didn't even realize that the star of an '80s movie about break-dancing would be a girl who looked like Sheena Easton's Mini-Me and was once the third-runner-up for Miss Kansas.
It's easy to see how it happened: "You know who we need to get for our break-dancing movie in which we defend the artistic importance of the pounding rhythm of the authentic dance of the streets? Shabba-Doo and the woman who was three heartbeats away from becoming Miss Kansas."
Believe it or not, Wikipedia claims that Breakin' is a retelling of West Side Story. I assure you that this is not true. (Just when you think Wikipedia is an impeccable source of information!) I did notice during the movie that Miss Kansas' agent -- we'll get back to him -- had a West Side Story revival poster behind his desk. Given that this movie is so cheap-looking that they clearly wouldn't have paid for so much as a plastic ficus if it didn't have a specific reason for needing to be there, it's certainly not an accident. It's a (rather overly ambitious) hat-tip. But this is not even meant to be a retelling of West Side Story. There is not enough death. At least not enough literal death.
The movie starts with Kelly (played by the aforementioned former almost-Miss Kansas, Lucinda Dickey) working as a waitress in a cheap restaurant, where she runs into a friend. The friend despairs that Kelly isn't dancing at the moment (Kelly is very talented, a piece of information that must be passed along as exposition, as it will not necessarily be self-evident at any point during the movie) and encourages her to get in touch with an agent who can get her some work.
Meanwhile, Kelly is taking jazz classes with Franco, a teacher who looks a little like Luke Perry plus ten years, four divorces and a DWI. Franco clearly is not to be trusted. He wears his super-intense Sexyface all the time, forever leering at Kelly in her classic '80s dance look of a black unitard and what appears to be hot pink underwear worn outside it. He cannot resist her. He says things while they are dancing together like, "Caress me! More passion!" (He says "Caress me." I swear.)
Can Kelly fight off the skeevy dance teacher? What will happen when she encounters street dancing? And what is with the pants in this movie? More, after the jump...
As you know, I am in the middle of the Summer Of '80s Movies, and this is the weekend when I decide whether to enjoy Breakin' and/or Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo.
The question is: How ridiculous is too ridiculous? Do I want to see one breakdancing movie, let alone two? On the other hand, aren't they iconic, in a...well, in a "how ridiculous is too ridiculous" way? Hasn't every sequel made since 1984 been referred to as [Whatever] 2: Electric Boogaloo at some point? Haven't pop-culture writers (including myself) been leaning on the "Electric Boogaloo" crutch for so long that we almost owe it to the movie to actually go?
There's only one solution, and that's to ask you. To attend (and report upon), or not to attend (and report upon), Breakin' and/or Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo?
Feel free to cast your vote. Which I promise to ... take under advisement.
I Love You, Beth Cooper: This is a project that was always doomed not to go well. Twentieth Century Fox
by Linda Holmes
If you're following the reviews of movies coming out this weekend, you know that critics have been not only unkind but positively brutal to I Love You, Beth Cooper, a comedy about a nerd who proclaims his love for a popular beauty during his valedictory address.
I went in really rooting for the movie, because the book on which it's based is delightful and charming, and its author, Larry Doyle, wrote the screenplay. It didn't seem like a looming disaster, though if I'd remembered it was to be directed by Chris Columbus (who came up in these pages a week ago), I'd have been more skeptical.
But now, looking back, I understand that it's an unadaptable book.
The director of Beverly Hills Chihuahua is on board to direct the upcoming live-action/animation hybrid movie about the Smurfs.
I'll let that sink in for a moment.
Yes, that's right. Raja Gosnell is in charge of the new film, according to Variety.
We've had such a big week for Very Bad Ideas that I don't feel like I have any more "But WHYYYEEE?" to offer. All I can do is look ahead, right? It is better to light a Smurf than to Smurf the Smurfness.
What is a movie like this even going to be about? Does the fact that it's part animation and part live-action mean that the Smurfs will be animated and will interact with humans? Some kind of Smurfs Take Manhattan business? Are humans going to PLAY Smurfs, or just VOICE Smurfs?
Is there any possibility I am imagining this particular bit of news because I have a fever? I mean, I don't actually have a fever, that I know of, but it does seem like a likely explanation.
Capitalism: A Love Story: Michael Moore's new movie about the financial crisis finally gets a name. Overture Films
by Linda Holmes
Michael Moore will arrive in theaters on October 2, and it's finally got a name: Capitalism: A Love Story. In the press release, Moore says that the film will be "the perfect date movie," and adds, "It's got it all -- lust, passion, romance, and 14,000 jobs being eliminated every day. It's a forbidden love, one that dare not speak its name. Heck, let's just say it: It's Capitalism."
It will be interesting to see how a Michael Moore movie railing against large corporations and the financial system fares in an environment where everyone's already doing it. It's a swing at a pretty big target at this point -- he's going to be competing with, among others, every other edgy, ironic gadfly who was inspired by Roger & Me back in the day and is now a crusader against all the same things Moore is against.
So I put the question to you: Are you eager to see what Michael Moore has to say about the financial crisis? Did he ever have any charm for you, and does he still? Do you find his description of the movie tantalizing? Wearying? Something else? I sense that the earth has shifted under the guy a little bit, and it will be a different thing to market this movie in late 2009 than it was to market Roger & Me in 1989.
This weekend's arrival of I Love You Beth Cooper (based on a clever little book that may be literally the fastest read of all time — it may take you less time than watching the movie) brings us back to a familiar genre: The Out-All-Night Romp.
At least since American Graffiti, they've been making these movies in various forms — from respectable entries like Risky Business to mid-range entries like Can't Hardly Wait to low-rent entries like most of the Corey Haim oeuvre.
Even Sixteen Candles and Some Kind Of Wonderful are at least partly members of the club, and last year's Nick And Norah's Infinite Playlist is a very traditional entry.
And they're a lot of fun, as long as you don't think too hard about the fact that they constitute crime sprees.
Think about it. Think about it.
1. Reckless driving. Most movies of this kind involve car chases in which, if there is no fruit cart, there is generally at least a hapless driver screeching and skidding to stay out of the way. You can see plenty of examples of this in the Beth Cooper trailer above.
2. Driving Without A License. Remember Sixteen Candles, when Farmer Ted wound up in Jake's father's car? Oh, sure, it seemed funny at the time, but unlicensed drivers make insurance rates higher for all of us.
3. Assault. To put it delicately, it appears at the end of Some Kind Of Wonderful that Bad Boyfriend Hardy is about to be separated from his limbs by Elias Koteas, the Bad Guy Turned Ally. While there is a promise that Hardy will only be scared and not harmed, my personal belief has always been that Hardy was beaten and reduced to the size of a macaroon the minute Eric Stoltz's back was turned. Inappropriate!
(And while it may not be criminal, have you ever noticed that [22-YEAR-OLD SPOILER ALERT] Stoltz wanders off in a haze of love with Mary Stuart Masterson, apparently abandoning Lea Thompson back at the party where she just turned on all her friends and slapped her menacing ex-boyfriend? How did she get home, exactly? What of Amanda Jones, people?)
With Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince opening next Wednesday, it's time to prove your mettle.
I'm not always a big fan of quizzes, but I like this one, because it backs up the great majority of the answers with relevant clips, and because it boasts a nerd-friendly 25 questions, cutting down on the likelihood that a pretender will manage a strong score by guessing.
(Not that I tried to do this. At all.) (And not that it ended in disaster when I got ten questions right.) (None of that happened. You didn't even read this paragraph.)
Feel free to report your score and claim your bragging rights. Or, in the alternative, show off how good you are at guessing.
The View-Master: It used reels just like this. Feel the action! iStockphoto.com
by Linda Holmes
It's rare to get the opportunity to play Very Bad Ideas two mornings in a row, but what else can you do with the news that DreamWorks is developing a movie based on the View-Master?
If you don't remember the View-Master, it looks like this. You peer in the eyeholes and pull a lever, and you are treated to a series of still pictures in very, very primitive, goofy-looking "3D." When I was a kid, these were largely scenic photos -- you'd look at the Grand Canyon or Great Skyscrapers Of The World or something of that nature. Ooh! Aah! The View-Master!
From what I can see, they just offer licensed characters like Dora The Explorer and Spongebob and other boring extensions of the munchkin-industrial complex. A travesty.
It is an understatement to say that the logic of a movie about the View-Master is difficult to discern. A View-Master is, in its current incarnation, a plastic device that shows a series of still pictures of cartoon characters. Envision about thirty seconds of action followed by scads of children running up and down the aisles of the theater pelting each other with popcorn.
According to Variety, the word is that the movie is supposed to resemble The Goonies and Young Sherlock Holmes. Based on that, I suppose the idea is going to be that a group of...kids? Finds an old View-Master? That has...reels in it that are, to their surprise, not just a pile of promotional higgledy-piggledy for Kung Fu Panda? And those reels lead to treasure, or transport you into another dimension? (Feel free to steal that. You're welcome, DreamWorks!)
It's conceivable in theory, but what is the composition of a target audience for this film that wouldn't be equally drawn in by a story involving an old book? Are adults supposed to go see a Goonies-style kidventure about a View-Master? Are kids supposed to go see a movie because it features what Variety calls a "nostalgia toy"?
I realize the Transformers situation has likely created a Pied-Piper-like effect in which movie executives are following the ghosts of their own warmly remembered childhood toys right out of Sensible Town into the Lost Fields Of Crazy, but...the View-Master? The world's most static toy? This is at least as ridiculous as a Lite-Brite movie.
Not every toy is a Transformer. This cannot be repeated often enough.
My Dinner With Andre: Are you finding it a little loud at the multiplex? A good conversation might be just the thing. Courtesy of the Criterion Collection
by Glenn McDonald
If the world were at all fair, or even moderately discerning, Michael Bay would not be a movie director at all. Instead, he would be where he belongs, as technical supervisor of an industrial demolitions crew, blowing stuff up for a living. As is stands, however, Mike is still making "movies" such as the new Transformers sequel, which if I have my notes right, is actually titled Transformers: Assaulting Your Senses for 147 Minutes.
Summer action blockbusters, with their aggressive FX and frantic editing, are migraines waiting to happen. If you're looking to go the other way for an evening, may I suggest the new Criterion edition of My Dinner with Andre, director Louis Malle's 1981 indie triumph. Here's a movie that more or less does the impossible: It consists entirely of two friends having a quiet conversation over dinner, and it's riveting.
What the new release can give you, and what's been in the movie all along, after the jump...
Having just seen My Sister's Keeper, I feel I am perfectly situated at the moment to work on the development of a taxonomy of crying in the movies. This movie -- and if this is a spoiler for you, then I cannot help you -- contains a great deal of crying.
My Sister's Keeper: If you want to study movie crying, you could do a lot worse. New Line Cinema
Not all crying is the same, of course. Some crying is pitiful, while some crying is angry. Also, some crying is well-acted, while some crying is Luke Skywalker saying, "That's not true...that's impossible!" with all the authentic, raw emotion you would get if you were to cast Ryan Seacrest in a production of King Lear.
So let us review. We will look at examples where available.
The Brave Lip Quiver Of The Apparently Doomed
There's actually a lot of this one in My Sister's Keeper. This is how you cry when you are very sick, but you don't want anyone to worry about you. It involves quite a bit of tearing up and a break in your voice, but no sobbing. For you are brave. Very often, the effect is to make the other person burst into wet, sloppy tears through the sheer force of your noble bravery. At which point: you win.
The Masculine Welling-Up That Doesn't Make You Any Less Of A Dude, Man
Think of John McClane in the bathroom in Die Hard. Sure, he's picking glass out of his feet. But the real reason he's weepy is that he's begun to realize that he truly loves his estranged wife and regrets that he may be massacred at Christmas by a colorful band of international terrorists before he gets a chance to confess that he shouldn't have been such a jerk about her taking a new job. The worst thing about dying at the hands of a colorful band of international terrorists: unfinished conversations.
The Soft Whimper Of True Love
I apologize for reminding you of "You had me at hello," which we are so close to being entirely finished with, now that it has had its full run of regular overexposure followed by its full run of ironic overexposure, but this is the form of crying you get right when Renee Zellweger says, "You had me at hello." Earlier in the movie, she cried the Happy Tears Of Hooray, Hooray, I Am Glad You Proposed, but only true love makes her whimper. (Note: she is responding to a Masculine Welling-Up, see above. You can tell that's what it is because he cries while saying "tough competitors.")
Major breakdowns, Meg Ryan, human biology, and much more, after the jump...
Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen: Is there a gap between audiences and critics, or do they just have different jobs? Paramount Pictures
by Linda Holmes
An AP article argues today that Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen "sets a new standard for the gulf between what reviewers and mass audiences like."
The film is on its way to make insane amounts of money, while critics have mostly hated it. Rob Moore, vice-chairman of Paramount (the movie's distributor), offers the smug claim that audiences "kind of roll their eyes at the critics and say, 'You have no idea what you're talking about.'"
But is that right? That audiences read reviews of Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen and think, "You don't know what you're talking about"?
Or do audiences understand what critics mean by "good," and simply think that's not the kind of "good" they're looking for on a Friday night?
Imagine a restaurant review of McDonalds. Now think about how much money McDonalds makes. It seems like a stretch to assume that the disparity means that people who eat at McDonalds are rolling their eyes at restaurant critics and thinking they don't know what they're talking about.
That's because not every purchase is conceived as an attempt to buy quality, either with burgers or with movie tickets. Sometimes you just want what you want.
Moore insists that critics "forget what the goal of the movie was. The goal of the movie is to entertain and have fun." This is a common argument leveled against movie critics — awfully common, for one that's so easy to prove false.
Look, I'll level with you: I enjoyed The Proposal, that Sandra Bullock-starring, Betty-White-and-naked-Ryan-Reynolds-featuring romantic comedy that opened as a box-office winner.
I laughed several times. I got manipulated into tears, thanks partially to Peter Chiarelli's script and partially to the indestructible charms of Bullock herself. In fact, Bullock is the reason I was excited to see the movie. When she opens the refrigerator door to my heart, the light always comes on.
That said, The Proposal troubled me. Underneath all the superficial laughs and charmy-charm-charm reaction shots, the film suggests that a woman will be much happier if she cedes her power to a man.
After the jump, our heroine's journey into total, blissful passivity. There will be many spoilers.
Cameron Diaz: It's been a long road, and now it runs through mom roles. Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
Cameron Diaz first showed up in the movies in 1994, in The Mask, with Jim Carrey. At the time, her reviews came in somewhere around "surprisingly good, for a model."
She went on to appear in a series of hits -- My Best Friend's Wedding, There's Something About Mary, Charlie's Angels, and Shrek, to name four -- as well as the usual allotment of bombs. Most recently, she had another hit last summer with What Happens In Vegas.
But this weekend, she shows up in My Sister's Keeper, a tear-jerking drama about a child with cancer (one that's so enamored of its cancer-centered imagery that its trailer alone features more lingering shots of bald heads than you will find in publicity packages for the NBA). Diaz has tried her share of Real Acting; she was in Gangs Of New York and Vanilla Sky, and very early on, she was in the very small independent film The Last Supper.
The Oscars: If the ceremony isn't long enough for you, it's about to get a little longer. David Livingston/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
Great news for people who want to stay up even later on Oscar night: this year, there will be ten nominees for Best Picture instead of five.
It's hard to figure out what this is supposed to accomplish, other than perpetuating the "more of everything" attitude that seems to be prevalent nearly everywhere. To some people, it's going to devalue being nominated -- which is kind of silly, unless you presume there to be something magical about five movies rather than ten.
The most obvious beneficiary is Up. Animated movies are historically the subjects of much speculation about their nomination-worthiness anyway. And while it might have been plausible to find five movies better than Up, but they're going to have a tough time finding ten.
It will also be interesting to see whether this allows one or two giant crowd-pleasers that got great reviews but would normally never make it to an awards ceremony -- maybe even something like The Hangover, for instance -- to get nominations they could never have gotten in the past. (It seems like it would almost certainly have had this effect for The Dark Knight last year.)
What it will do for sure is inflate the hoopla surrounding the Best Picture race, and unless they're going to ignore some of the nominees, it's going to make the show even more endless than it already is.
And what of the annual events where they show all the nominees in one day? What about the people who try to see every Best Picture nominee, but may give up if the list doubles in length? How, precisely, this will play out remains to be seen, but the rationale for it is not immediately obvious.
If we assume the existence of Johnny Depp, we can assume that there will be a resulting desire to locate a next Johnny Depp.
This is partly because Johnny Depp doesn't do just any old thing. On his resumé, alongside the Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise and Edward Scissorhands and so forth, you will find the odd Secret Window and other flukey bad ideas.
But it would certainly be nice if there were, say, two of him, which is part of the reason there has long been a booming industry in anointing The Next Johnny Depp. So far, it is an industry with a zero percent record of success.
Steven Lovekin/Getty Images
Joe Jonas Who said it:People Accuracy:People kind of makes it sound like Joe Jonas (one of the Brothers) considers himself the next Johnny Depp, but in fact, all he says in the piece is that he likes Depp's work. Considering that his first big "acting" project was The Disney Channel's Camp Rock, and that he's following it up with Camp Rock 2, it's safe to say he has a way to go.
Kevin Winter/Getty Images
Megan Fox Who said it:USAWeekend.com Accuracy: This really happened. As I understand it, the suggestion is that because Megan Fox has only been in silly movies and is mostly talked about in terms of being hot, she is just like Johnny Depp was when he was on 21 Jump Street. I have absolutely no idea how, under the formulation used here, every good-looking actor from bad movies is not "the next Johnny Depp."
Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen: See how mad this guy looks? He's not going to get any happier when he sees what Roger Ebert said about his movie. Paramount Pictures
by Linda Holmes
What's a good way to start the day? With a joyfully terrible review from Roger Ebert, who is an absolute champ when it comes to annihilating a movie without seeming nasty so much as happily provoked by the challenge of trying to quantify its awfulness.
This time, what's ricocheting around the Internet is his takedown of Michael Bay's Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen. Here's how it starts:
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments.
Aside from the fact that A Horrible Experience Of Unbearable Length should absolutely, positively be the title of Dave Eggers' next book, it's an admirably meaty, straightforward, and yet scrupulously fair opening.
He goes on to say, among other things:
There are many great-looking babes in the film, who are made up to a flawless perfection and look just like real women, if you are a junior fanboy whose experience of the gender is limited to lad magazines.
It's all just genius. There's a good reason this is the guy who has, probably more than anyone, popularized thoughtful, reliably accessible, condescension-free film criticism -- and, I think you can argue, the entire idea that even if your interests run largely to popular entertainment, you can and should read criticism and think about what you're watching.
(And when you're done, be sure to compare it to Nathan Lee's review here at NPR.org, which notes, "Never have such quantities of money, hardware, technology and fathomlessly complicated logistics been marshaled to produce and experience so fleeting and ephemeral." Hmm, I don't think he liked it either.)
Mr. Potato Head: It's about time he had his own movie, isn't it? Lawrence Lucier/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
This weekend, Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen makes its way to theaters, and once again, it raises the question, Where are the other action movies based on the potential menace presented by famous toys? The tagline for this one is "Revenge is coming," so it's not like a particularly high bar of creativity has been set.
Once again, this is a "If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself" situation. And so we humbly offer the following:
The movie:Baby Alive The tagline: She eats, she drinks...she kills.
The movie:Spirograph The tagline: What goes around comes around.
The movie:Dream House The tagline: When your knees don't bend, there's nowhere to run.
Sandra Bullock: Or is that Betty White? No, whew! that's Sandra Bullock. Kerry Hayes/Touchstone Pictures
by Linda Holmes
A while back, we had some fun (and created some massive confusion) over the fact that Julia Roberts, at 41, put out her first big movie in a while (the middling performer Duplicity) and found herself accused of being "Hollywood ancient" -- possibly too old to open a movie anymore.
Well, back it up, old-lady-haters, because Sandra Bullock just had the most successful opening of her entire career as her romantic comedy, The Proposal, roared to a $34 million weekend. She's almost 45 years old! She's even older than Julia Roberts!
That thoroughly thumped the very, very badYear One, which did all right with about $20 million, but came in fourth behind The Proposal, the long legs of Up and the continuing strength of The Hangover.
One noteworthy fact? The Proposal drew an audience that was 63 percent women and 86 percent (!) 18 and over. What might make that noteworthy? It sometimes seems to be a forgotten reality that it's really okay to make movies that have no appeal to teenage boys. They can still make money. In fact, they might even beat out movies that are most cynically targeted to teenage boys.
Year One: How do you put Jack Black and a bunch of other reasonably funny people together and wind up with...this? Sony/Columbia Pictures
by Linda Holmes
I almost walked out of Year One about five minutes into it. Five minutes, no kidding. It wasn't something I had to see, and its lifelessness was so aggressive that it was very hard to believe it was going to get better.
It didn't. And it raises a question, which we'll come back to.
Later, walking out at the actual end of the movie, these are the two comments I overheard: (1) "Those were the longest 97 minutes of my life." (2) "I would have been so much madder if I had paid to see that." (It was a preview audience.) Note that these are not your average "That stunk" comments.
You can tell a lot from its very few "positive" reviews. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, who made this a "Critic's Pick," quotes two lines from the movie: "Everything is weird" and "You want some of that?" ...Hilarious? She spends significantly more time quoting Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks.
(Incidentally, Dargis' use of the word "highbrow" to describe a movie that relies this heavily upon poop jokes and unceasing gay-panic humor is an instant classic.)
Or here, David Hiltbrand of the Philadelphia Inquirerdescribes a representative scene:
The itinerants are constantly being forced into bondage. At one point Zed, explaining his reluctance to trust Cain, says to him, "You did sell us into bondage." "Hold a grudge much?" responds the king of fratricide. "That was like a fortnight ago."
Yes. Yes, that is exactly what the movie is like. The movie is like that, for an hour and a half. You see, David Cross is playing Cain, who's from Biblical times, but he says stuff like "Hold a grudge much?" This is where you're supposed to laugh hysterically.
We're just a couple of weeks away from the big-screen debut of Bruno, the outré Austrian fashion reporter who sprang, swishing, from the mind of satirist Sacha Baron Cohen.
And like his similarly fictional Kazakh cousin Borat, Bruno can pretty much be counted on to annoy, offend, and otherwise outrage any number of constituencies — starting of course with The Gays, one group of whom have already taken the studio to task.
Meeow: Bruno (Sacha Baron Cohen) has catlike instincts ... for saying (and wearing) the wrong things. Universal Pictures
But just what percentage of the planet's inhabitants might reasonably take umbrage once the movie, like Bruno, finally comes out? Neda Ulaby and Linda Holmes had a look at the trailer to see if they could come up with a solid guess.
You're cordially invited to click the Play button and count along — hat-tip to multimedia intern Caryn Grant for getting those annotations onscreen — as we I.D. the soon-to-be-steam-eared populations. (Be sure to click the player's full-screen button, lower right.) And then, of course, we'd love to hear your suggestions in the comments.
Wedded bliss:The Hangover concerns a bachelor party gone awry. But what does it ultimately say about tying the knot? iStockphoto.com
by Marc Hirsh
As mentioned the other day, The Hangover is still going strong after two weekends in theaters.
After the ostentatious expressions of surprise that a movie without any "stars" could make so much money so quickly, it seems that the main topic of conversation is the closing credit sequence. (Caution: discussion of content that is seriously not suitable for mixed company.)
What's interesting is how little people are talking about the other noteworthy way that the movie ends, and how it fits snugly into a trend that seems to have gone unnoticed over the past few years. And on the whole, it may say more about The Hangover's sensibilities than whether that was really a you-know-what being what'd-you-say?ed.
What's so interesting about the ending of The Hangover...so obviously don't proceed if you aren't okay with knowing the basics of the ending of The Hangover, after the jump...
Betty White: Seen here in a much-previewed scene with Sandra Bullock in The Proposal, she hasn't slowed down a bit, and it's a very good thing. Kerry Hayes/Touchstone Pictures
by Linda Holmes
While watching The Proposal, I thought to myself, "It's nice that we seem to be having a little Betty White moment." She's been doing a lot of press for the movie, including this lovely clip from the folks at Hitfix:
It wasn't until I looked up her credits that I realized the degree to which the lady (now 87) has not slowed down.
A long and glorious career full of dirty jokes directed at Gene Rayburn, and what she's signed on for next, after the jump...
The Hangover: We could make a horrible joke about how it's hanging over at the box office, but we won't. At all. Really! Warner Brothers Pictures
by Linda Holmes
So the way the summer box office is supposed to work is that each weekend, new great big movies take over from the previous great big movies.
This weekend, specifically, The Taking Of Pelham 123 was supposed to take over the adults, and Imagine That was supposed to take over the children. (It's a slight oversimplification, but...just slight.)
Didn't so much turn out that way.
What happened, who had a good weekend, who had a bad weekend, and what to do with your long-term investments in Eddie Murphy, after the jump...
Mythical species: If seeing what's attractive about Adam Lambert is what it takes to be a cougar, then cougars don't exist. Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
It was this Newsweek piece, entitled "Why Cougars Crave 'Idol' Runner-Up Adam Lambert," that finally broke me.
It is time for the word "cougar" to go, preferably instantly.
The Newsweek writer, Joan Raymond, spends paragraph upon paragraph explaining why she and her "cougar court" spent an American Idol season sweating over the heavily hyped, extremely popular, out-without-having-ever-been-in Lambert. How could this be? How could it possibly be that they, as non-teenagers, could be interested in an American Idol who, at 27 years old, was young enough to be ... their nephew, if they had a significantly older sister?
When I first heard it, "cougar" was a crude slam; I think I first noticed it on the "Aldrin Justice" episode of How I Met Your Mother, which aired in October 2006, though this ABC story was chatting it up in 2005, and it surely is much older than that.
But interestingly, as the ABC story notes, it began as a putdown — a term of ridicule for older women who went home from bars with "whoever was left."
We could go through the sexual politics, the cultural baggage that comes with older men and younger women vs. younger men and older women. We could explain why seeing women gleefully referring to themselves the same way Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) did on How I Met Your Mother is kind of disheartening.
But really, it's not necessary. The term "cougar" can be easily retired, simply on the grounds that it's so stupid.
Crazy fans, too many sex therapists, and never calling yourself "punk rock," after the jump...
Update:I originally blamed Disney for this movie; my mind was completely playing tricks on me based on a trailer I had just watched, and it's actually Paramount. Apologies.
I am not here to tell you that Imagine That is bad, because I haven't seen it. But whoever is promoting it isn't doing it any favors. It has a serious case of Trailer Unwatchability.
It appears that the premise is that Eddie Murphy is a boring dad who works as some kind of insignificant cog in a giant corporate machine, and he discovers that his daughter's imagination can make him better at his job, because his daughter's imaginary companions are passing on information about upcoming mergers.
Okay. Let us pause for a moment.
Pardon the overused construction, but: Worst imaginary companions ever. Princesses and fairies are there to make your life more fun, not facilitate insider trading. What kind of an imaginary princess suckers a kid into passing along subliminal messages through her drawings in order to further her father's career?
I hope these imaginary companions have malpractice insurance. I would happily watch a movie called I Sued My Imaginary Friend For Breach Of Fiduciary Duty. That would be a movie, people.
But no. This just looks so...terrible, from top to bottom.
The Taking Of Pelham 123: Can you pick out the bad guy in this picture? Yeah, we thought so. Sony Pictures
by Linda Holmes
If you watch the original 1974 film, The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three (and you can, and you should), one of the things you'll notice is how Robert Shaw, as the train-hijacking villain, plays everything with the energy down, not up and out. In his general persona, he's not cackling like a loon, and he's not shrieking like a bully.
He is just explaining the situation and what's going to happen. He is telling you about your possible death dispassionately.
This was very much the era of Evil Wears A Fedora And Thick-Framed Glasses; it came out the same year as The Conversation, with Gene Hackman. That movie also features lots of terrifying guys who look like bureaucrats. For the most part, they speak softly and carry big, big evil.
What evil unfortunately looks like now, after the jump...
Okay, so Bradley Cooper (fresh off The Hangover and right on the edge of becoming a giant movie star) is maybe going to take the Dirk Benedict part in the upcoming The A-Team movie. And Liam Neeson is in talks to replace George Peppard.
And then the Varietypiece throws in the fact that, you know, they haven't quite figured out who's going to replace Mr. T as B.A. Baracus.
Now, it occurs to me that this is a fairly serious problem. In a baby-name book I saw once, it was argued that you can't give your baby certain names if they are overly strongly associated with one famous person. The chapter was called, "There's Only One Arsenio."
They could very easily have called it "There's Only One Mr. T." (Well, they could have if there were more of a threat of anyone, ever, actually naming a baby "Mr. T.")
So where do you begin looking for Mr. T replacements? Nobody is kind of like Mr. T. Nobody is the new Mr. T. Nobody captures the spirit of Mr. T. It becomes increasingly apparent that Mr. T is Mr. T, and he's the only Mr. T there's ever going to be.
Nevertheless, I am prepared to step forward with several ideas. You are welcome, Hollywood.
1. Mickey Rourke.
Based on that clip, you can see that B.A. is physically powerful, he dresses badly, and he doesn't make any sense. It's a perfect fit. Mickey Rourke is vaguely nutsy, he's aggressively unique, and he certainly has the requisite experience with bombs. (Hotcha!)
More ideas I am generously prepared to share, after the jump...
Will Ferrell: Don't start writing his career obituary just yet. Jason Merritt/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
As you may have heard, the Will Ferrell vehicle Land Of The Lost got spanked at the box office this weekend by both the second weekend of Up and the opening weekend of The Hangover.
Putting aside the fact that the typical "Here's why it was always obvious that this movie would never do well" piece would be more convincing if it came out before, rather than after, the opening weekend, it seems a little early for all this.
One of the things I don't have to do in this job is subject myself to the entire MTV Movie Awards, partly because anything that's worth seeing will show up online the next day anyway.
To wit: This digital short featuring Andy Samberg, Will Ferrell, and...well, J.J. Abrams in an awfully unexpected context. The language is only intermittently salty, and the subject is: "Cool Guys Don't Look At Explosions." It's rather wonderful.
A plea to Pixar:Up is so good; can you turn your attention to a different kind of hero? Walt Disney Pictures
by Linda Holmes
Dear Pixar,
This is not an angry letter. It is especially not an angry letter about Up, which I adored. I could have sat in the theater and watched it two more times in a row. I cried, but I also laughed so hard in places that it wore me out.
So I'm not complaining; I'm asking. I'm asking because I think so highly of you.
Please make a movie about a girl who is not a princess.
Joss Whedon: You might think you couldn't remake Buffy without him, but somebody thinks you can. Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
If you've ever thought to yourself, "I would love to hear what Pete Best would have done with the rest of the Beatles catalogue, you'll be thrilled to hear that Fran Rubel Kuzui, the director of the original Buffy The Vampire Slayer movie, is pondering a reboot with no involvement by Joss Whedon, who wrote the movie and.created the long-running TV show.
Okay, the comparison to Pete Best may be unfair. But the idea of a Buffy movie without Whedon but with the director of the 1992 original movie that had nowhere near the cultural impact of the TV show does seem more than a little bizarre.
It's one thing to use a high-powered guy like J.J. Abrams to reboot Star Trek more than 40 years after the original show debuted on television, almost 18 years after Gene Roddenberry's death in 1991.
It's entirely another to try to do a Whedon-less Buffy movie only 17 years after the original Buffy movie and only six years after the end of the beloved TV series, while Whedon is still not only alive, and not only still making wildly popular projects like 2008's Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, but still quite possibly the most cultishly revered showrunner in television.
The natural audience for a new Buffy movie is the existing Buffy fandom, which remains wildly loyal to Whedon to the point where its collective reaction to the reboot news this morning seems to revolve around words like "travesty."
Reboots often look unnecessary to begin with, but a reboot by the person who did the less successful version of something in an effort to take advantage of the appeal of the more successful version of it seems even worse.
Long-running fictional characters: Sure, there are a lot of candidates, but who takes the prize? iStockphoto.com
by Glen Weldon
"Longest running" is open to interpretation, so let's define our terms:
In any medium, what character has been consistently featured in continuous new adventures over the longest stretch of time?
Got that? Just the three criteria, here:
Consistent:
Makes regularly scheduled appearances — no yawning gaps between adventures.
Continuous:
The character's adventures form a central narrative that builds on what has gone before. (Read: Katzenjammer Kids, I know you've been around a long time, but you're a gag strip, not an ongoing narrative. Thanks for playing, we have some lovely parting gifts.)
New:
The constant churning out of fresh content, not simply adaptations, retellings or reprints.
So: Guesses?
After the jump: We review the top contenders, provide The Answer, and explain why The Neverending Story should really have been a horror film.
The weekend is coming: Is Night At The Museum: Battle For The Smithsonian the movie you'd most carefully avoid, or would you go another way? Twentieth Century Fox
by Linda Holmes
I apologize for ending the titular question with a preposition.
But really. The upcoming weekend's wide releases are:
• Terminator Salvation, which I used to think was Terminator: Salvation, but it turns out that it does not contain the colon, meaning that it is about the salvation of terminators or possibly salvation by terminators, as opposed to just being the next movie in the Terminator franchise and also named Salvation. (This may seem like a small point, until you realize that, for instance, Batman Returns would be a very different movie if it were called Batman: Returns, which would almost certainly make it about whether you can write off your cape as a business expense if you are self-employed as a late-night doer of good deeds.)
• Night At The Museum: Battle For The Smithsonian, which boasts a remarkable triumvirate of guys who are sometimes funny but also really annoying: Ben Stiller, Robin Williams, and Hank Azaria. Just the commercials make me tired.
• Dance Flick, the latest parody of other films from the various Wayanses who brought you Scary Movie and its sequels. Based on the ads, a good part of it seems to be taking shots at Save the Last Dance, a reasonably popular, but hardly iconic, movie from eight years ago. (It also takes on the more recent Step Up films.)
Some of you are undoubtedly eager to see at least one of these movies, and I'm not criticizing if that's the case. But of the ones you are not planning to see voluntarily, if you were going to be trapped in one of them, which would you dread the most?
If you didn't come to see Terminator Salvation, that's going to be a lot of explosions. If you didn't come to see Night At The Museum: Battle Of The Smithsonian, that's going to be a lot of Robin Williams. If you didn't come to see Dance Flick, that's going to be a lot of...that kind of joke.
So I put the question to you: If you could only avoid one, which would you avoid?
While watching the above clip of Tom Hanks on The Daily Show, I was appalled -- appalled -- to hear Hanks admit that there is no such thing as a Harvard professor of symbology, the credential boasted by his character, Robert Langdon, in Angels And Demons.
This was very disillusioning, and forced me to abandon my twenty-year plan to become a Harvard symbologist, which I believed was on track when I correctly figured out that on Survivor, fire represents life.
Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon: Not actually a Harvard symbologist. Sony/Columbia
But as I considered the matter further, I realized that giving a character a credential of some kind is a good way to make him believable and worth listening to. Perhaps the problem with some characters who are not taken seriously is that their resumés have not been fleshed out.
I am, as always, here to help. Thus, the following movie characters are hereby granted completely bogus credentials that will make it easier for them to get the respect they deserve.
Aziz Ansari: If this man tells you he has 25,000 Twitter followers, you should believe him. Michael Buckner/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
Comedian Aziz Ansari (who plays the odious Tom on NBC's Parks And Recreation) went to see Star Trek at an advertised IMAX theater this weekend. When he discovered that it wasn't the giant screen that he (and, I dare say, many people if not most people) associate with the term "IMAX," but merely a regular-sized screen that was "IMAX" only in that it had improved digital sound and picture quality, he got angry.
According to his account of the incident (which is filled with profanity from the title forward, so be warned), Ansari went to customer service after the movie and asked for his five dollars back -- not the entire price of his ticket, but the premium he paid to see it in IMAX, on the basis that he didn't get what he thought he was getting. He was refused.
He says he even warned the manager that he had 25,000 Twitter followers, and that if the theater wasn't willing to refund his five bucks, he'd explain his side of the story to them. Which he did, on Monday evening.
And by late Tuesday, the CEO of IMAX had been prodded to defend the smaller IMAX screens in a statement in which he claimed, in effect, that nobody except Aziz Ansari cares how big an IMAX screen is, and that nobody is paying those five dollars because they necessarily assume that IMAX means a large screen.
If that's the case, it's a bad break for them that the only guy in the country to feel ripped off happens to have an extremely popular Twitter stream.
How not to respond to a social media firestorm, after the jump...
American Gladiators: It's clear that you can't make the movie without the padded jousting weapons, right? NBC
by Linda Holmes
Movie adaptations of TV shows aren't notoriously reliable sources of money at the box office. In fact, they're often sources of spectacularly memorable bad ideas. Remember 1994's Car 54, Where Are You?, starring David Johansen, a.k.a. Buster Poindexter, of "Hot Hot Hot" fame?
In case you are (tragically) not familiar with the Gladiators format, it's basically a game show where the contestants face off against the show's resident "Gladiators," giant in-house bruisers with names like "Nitro."
Less than one minute into this video, which is the first-ever episode of the show in full, you will see two people jousting with what appear to be giant Q-Tips. And then there's some wrestling, and a guy kicking another guy off a pedestal.
Now...what, exactly, is a movie version going to entail? According to Variety, the idea is "an action story that takes place inside the world [show creator Johnny] Ferraro has created."
My guess is that the "world" at issue is the "world" of giant muscular dudes fighting wiry pharmaceutical salespeople, meaning that the movie will go something like this.
(I must give an honorable mention to my favorite Star Trek headline so far, in which the New York Times made clear that grammar is more important than actually making the correct pop-culture reference and called its review "A Franchise Goes Boldly Backward.")
In the end, however, my unofficial tally suggests that the tightly contested weekend race for most widely used Star Trek pun went to "beams up." Congratulations, "beams up"!
Star Trek: The new J.J. Abrams film is only one of a recent spate of successful origin stories that advance the story by retreating. Paramount Pictures
by Mark Blankenship
These days, whether at the movies or on television, you can't swing a cat without hitting an origin story.
The current season of Lost has focused on how the Dharma Initiative and Ben Linus began, and X-Men Origins: Wolverine reveals its point of view right there in the title.
And of course, half the allure of J.J. Abrams' new Star Trek film, opening today, is its promise to show us how Kirk and Spock met, how Uhura got her job, and so forth.
But these are more than just origin stories. All three properties are interrupting the chronology of long-running narratives to tell us how things began. And since none of them started their stories at square one to begin with, many of us are learning the early histories of popular characters for the very first time.
That's especially true for people like me, who rely on movies to get their X-Men information, and who aren't so deep into Star Trek lore that they'll read a novelization about Kirk and Spock's teenage years.
So why is this type of origin tale so satisfying? Why is it interesting to begin a narrative in medias res, then suddenly bounce back to the beginning?
(SPOILERS AHEAD!) (For Lost thus far and for X-Men Origins: Wolverine, that is. We won't spoil Star Trek.)
Why origin stories are so appealing, after the jump...
If it's Wednesday, this must be Culturetopia we're in. Yup, it's time for NPR's weekly arts-etcetera podcast, a roundup of our favorite NPR arts and entertainment stories from last week.
In this week's installment, arts reporter (and jazz enthusiast) Felix Contreras and I talked about:
• Terry Gross's Fresh Air interview with Gabriel Byrne of HBO's In Treatment;
• author Colm Toibin's new novel Brooklyn, about a journey from Ireland to ... well, Brooklyn;
• a recent installment of the NPR Music jazz-sampler series Take Five, in which NPR editor Tom Cole talks about the recordings that introduced him to the genre;
• a commemorative ride on New York City's fabled A train, to celebrate the 110th anniversary of the birth of "Take The A Train" composer Duke Ellington; and
• from right here at Monkey See, the amazing kids of the PS 22 chorus, with their performance of "Eye Of The Tiger."
Sound good? Have a listen right here, if you like:
Where once uberfans were content to tromp out into the backyard to videotape themselves lightsabering the snot out of one another, new technologies have rendered the days of rough in-camera edits and hand-puppet dianogas obsolete. And even though any Fett with a Flip camera can turn out a respectable product, many fan films represent sizable investments of time, resources and effort.
Take, for example, the genre of comic book fan film.
Batman: Dead End (above) is perhaps the most famous example of the form. The 8-minute film went live on the Web right around Comic-Con 2003, setting off a nerdsplosion of interest in director Sandy Collora, who's gone on to helm an actual, you know, movie.
To my way of thinking, Dead End is notable for two reasons:
Dispelling the Memory of Adam West's Bat-Belly
Dead End proved that simple, true-to-the-comics circus tights can look great — as long as the guy who's sporting them has 4 percent body fat and biceps the size of your head.
Okay, Did NOT See That Coming
Right around the three minute mark — after Batman and one very aggressively eyebrowed Joker trade blows and bon mots, events take a turn. A silly, silly turn.
After the jump: We scour the tubes for the best and the brightest superhero fan films. Also the weirdest.
Do leaks matter?: This weekend's release of Wolverine provides at least one data point. iStockphoto.com
by Linda Holmes
This weekend's box office was worth watching for a few reasons.
First, it's the first official weekend of the summer movie season, with X-Men Origins: Wolverine acting as the first big summer release. Second, that very same film suffered a highly publicized leak of an unfinished work print that many feared could spell disaster. Third, it's been a big spring for movies, with box office up substantially over last year, and this might be our first opportunity to see whether that's going to carry over to summer. If all that weren't enough, you might even wonder whether fear of the flu could keep people at home.
So what happened? Wolverine made $87 million, and made it in spite of some truly dismal reviews: a Metacritic score of 44 and a Rotten Tomatoes score of 37.
As HitFix notes here, the movie's opening isn't in line with the bow of Iron Man last year at nearly $100 million, but it's a perfectly respectable superhero kick-off nonetheless.
It's hard to know what the effects of the leaked print were without visiting the hypothetical universe in which it doesn't take place, but when you consider that Watchmen, which was even more relentlessly hyped than Wolverine, made a little less than $56 million in its opening weekend, it's hard to feel persuaded that the unauthorized copy that made its way onto the Internet was particularly devastating.
What happened elsewhere? The only other big release of the weekend was Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past, which made an estimated $15.3 million, which isn't dreadful but did represent, as Box Office Mojo notes, "the least-attended start of all Matthew McConaughey romantic comedies." Ouch.
This Sunday, a fan-made prequel to the Lord of the Rings film trilogy will go live on the web. Two years in the making, The Hunt for Gollum was a labor of profoundly nerdy love for its British creators, who spent a reported $4,500 (£3,000) making the thing — and don't intend to make a single copper piece off of it. (Check Laura Sydell's report on the flick from last night's ATC.)
If the trailer's anything to go by, it'll be, at the very least, pretty to look at. The makeup and costuming seem mightily impressive. (The filmmakers saved on costs by sharing wardrobe with another Tolkien fan film called Born of Hope, which is still in the works).
Fan films, like fan fiction, have been around a long time, and most savvy filmmakers see them for what they are: potent emblems of the devotion their creations have inspired in a passionate few, not to mention a conveniently low-maintenance way to keep those creations alive in the public consciousness.
George Lucas, for example, now encourages fans to come play in his filmic sandbox by sponsoring a yearly fan film award.
But the Tolkien estate — and New Line, the studio behind the Peter Jackson films — have historically been quick on the draw with cease-and-desist letters. And there's a couple of things about this particular fan film that might draw the Eye of Sauron.
Disclosures: I was not a fan of Sex And The City when it was on TV. I thought the women were shallow, dumb, and much more similar to each other in temperament and personality than the "She's the craaaazy one! She's the sweet one!" lineup recognized. (Running the gamut from A to B, as to steal from Dorothy Parker.) I did not see anything relatable in any of them, ever, at any time.
Caveats to disclosures: During its TV lifetime, I wasn't a person who cared about clothes, or a person who had ever lived in New York, or a person who would ever kick John Corbett to the curb.
I did eventually watch a good part of the show's run, and I enjoyed it...occasionally, I guess? It was diverting enough, though I still never liked any of the women, and I still didn't care about clothes. Once I had lived in New York, though, I did find rather hilarious the way that in their world, living in the dreaded "Brooklyn" is the rough equivalent of living at the bottom of a vat of industrial waste and everyone in the entire city of New York thinks so.
I saw the movie, and it was...about what I expected. Absurd, breezy, full of women making very bad choices about relationships that are presented as freeing.
Now that casting news is rolling in about the sequel, is it too early to dread it?
Is it too early to dread the endless insistence that it resonated with every woman, that we all sat around for years discussing with our friends whether we were a Charlotte or a Miranda, and that we all rooted for Carrie to get together with the unreliable, emotionally unavailable, infantile Mr. Big? Is it too early to be sick of hearing the words "Mr. Big"?
I always kind of thought the best thing that could happen to Carrie would be the disappearance of that guy into witness protection. But then, I didn't want Ross and Rachel to end up together, either.
Most of all, is it too early to declare my entire brain a Jimmy-Choo-free zone? Because we've got a long way to go yet, and we need to pace ourselves.
If you're of a certain age and musical temperament, this week's DVD release of Dalton Trumbo's 1971 anti-war movie Johnny Got His Gun makes you think of one thing in particular, and that's Metallica's "One."
The film, which stars Timothy Bottoms and Jason Robards, is about a wounded World War I soldier whose mind is alive even as his injuries have turned him into a blind and deaf quadruple amputee with no way of communicating with the outside world.
The song, as metalheads and even the more pedestrian brand of rock nerds know, was inspired by the 1939 novel (also written by Trumbo), so much so that the band included scenes and dialogue from the film in the video.
Maybe "included" isn't the right word there: let's try "supersaturated." Even by the standards of the clip-heavy soundtrack videos of the 1980s (such as the Bangles' "Hazy Shade Of Winter" from Less Than Zero or Roxette's "It Must Have Been Love" from Pretty Woman), "One" was pretty extreme in its disregard for the boundaries between the video and the movie. So much so, in fact, that the casual MTV viewer of the time might have assumed that Johnny Got His Gun was in multiplexes right then.
Then again, of course it was extreme. It was freakin' Metallica. Even with Guns n' Roses having recently left most of the hair-metal pack in its wake the year before, there was nothing on standard-rotation MTV remotely as fast and heavy as this song.
I certainly hadn't heard anything like it before, even though I was familiar with the name Metallica through my metalhead friends. What's funny is that after I bought the cassette single (thus being on both the losing end of technological history and the winning end of musical history, as "One" became, amazingly enough, a top 40 hit), I always liked to pretend that it was the quote-unquote "folk" portions at the beginning of the song (yes, that's actually how I referred to them) that I loved.
But that was a lie.
The bond between movie and band, after the jump...
Remember the way people talked about Matthew McConaughey when he was in the 1996 film adaptation of John Grisham's legal thriller A Time To Kill? He was good in that movie. He got solid reviews in that movie.
That was the same summer he was in John Sayles' Lone Star. And he'd already been in the much-loved Dazed And Confused. It's not like he was racking up Oscar nominations, but the idea was certainly supposed to be: Handsome Man Who Is Also A Real Actor.
I mean ... he was in Amistad, for crying out loud.
The power of Beyoncé:Obsessed made a lot of money this weekend, so if you're following the fortunes of badly-reviewed movies, add it to your list. Sony Pictures
by Linda Holmes
Remember our chart from last week, showing Rotten Tomatoes scores against box office for the first four months of the year? Technically speaking, there was one weekend left to go at that point, and now that we're through it, we can see that there's going to be one more dot (of the Paul Blart: Mall Cop variety) showing a very low critics' score paired with very strong box office.
The Beyoncé Knowles thriller Obsessed, also starring Idris Elba and Ali Larter, took in about $28.5 million this weekend. Its RT score? A not-so-blistering 30 out of 100.
In second place was the fighting movie Fighting at $11.4 million, and The Soloist, with Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey, Jr. (RT score: 61) made less than $10 million.
This one weekend doesn't mean the hypothesis is accurate that all the well-reviewed movies are tanking and all the badly-reviewed movies are thriving, but it doesn't hurt.
If you've seen the trailer for the new movie Obsessed, you know that it seems to show Idris Elba wandering into quite a thicket, because he fails to identify early enough that he has an obsessed coworker. We have concluded that all he needed was this sign.
In fact, many movie characters would fare better if they only had access to better caution signs, because movie characters tend to face hazards that are different from the ones the rest of us face. Consider how many fictional lives could be saved by this one:
Oh, we've got more.
How to save everyone from the nuclear bunny, after the jump...
I'm not going to lie to you: I haven't seen Fighting, which opens tomorrow. But based on the trailer, it's this story about a guy, and he's part of "New York's underground," and what he really likes is fighting.
Frankly, that's a relief. I mean, if I go to a movie called Fighting, I want to see some fighting. Without spoiling anything for you, not much happened in The Happening. And nothing at all changeled in Changeling.
Did you know there wasn't a single shot fired in Bride Wars? Total rip-off. And Iron Man isn't about a guy who makes irons, either, the way it seemed like it was going to be. It's just about a guy who wears an iron suit. He's not an iron man at all! The president of Sunbeam; that's an iron man.
Twilight is equally misleading; that movie is about vampires. Now, if somebody actually makes a movie about the approach of dusk, the perfect title will already be taken. Why didn't they call it Biting? Hey, Biting is a great name for a movie. It's like Fighting, but with teeth.
I, for one, endorse this move toward greater candor. This has been bugging me ever since The Shining.
Box-office numbers: Are we really walking away from good movies? We take a look at the evidence. iStockphoto.com
by Linda Holmes
The high-profile sputtering of some well-regarded recent movies, including State of Play, Duplicity and Adventureland, has led to some hand-wringing over whether we've all turned our backs on good movies in favor of escapist movies. From that Hollywood Reporter link comes this lament: "Telling stat: The average Rotten Tomatoes score for the top ten earners so far this year is a dismal 42%."
What they didn't mention? According to my calculations, based on information from Box Office Mojo, the average Rotten Tomatoes score for the top ten earners of last year that were released between January and April -- not the time of year when studios traditionally release either their great summer blockbusters or their award bait -- was... 41.5.
So I thought I'd take a look at the top twenty first-quarter earners of 2009 and the top twenty first-quarter earners of 2008 and see where we stand. Let's go to... THE CHARTS!
While I recognize the danger of pronouncing two things a trend, I couldn't help noticing that the "Mommy Files" blog at SFGate.com last week featured the second public fretting I have seen this month (the first was in Slate, here) over whether it's okay to let your kids watch Star Wars.
The "Mommy Files" entry now has 148 comments attached to it. For every point of view, there is a representative: You're crazy if you let your 4-year-old watch Star Wars. You're crazy if you don't let your 4-year-old watch Star Wars. Letting your kid watch Star Wars will warp his brain. Not letting your kid watch Star Wars will make him sheltered. Kids who watch Star Wars are ruining society. Kids whose parents coddle them are ruining society.
The same thing, essentially, happened when Emily Bazelon wrote about Star Wars in Slate. It seems to be an awfully emotional issue for people, this business of little children and Star Wars.
17 Again: Maybe it's just us, but that actually doesn't sound that whimsical. Warner Brothers Pictures
by Linda Holmes
17 Again is the biggest movie in the country right now, thanks to an audience that was -- at least on opening weekend -- reportedly almost half people under 18. In other words, this movie about being 17 years old again is disproportionately appealing to people who are 17 years old right now, or haven't been 17 years old yet.
And it's no wonder, because for many of us, 17 Again is not a title that screams "whimsical fantasy." It is a title that screams...well, a title that screams screaming. Something like: "Seventeen? You mean seventeen years old? Again?"
Because here are ten movies in which I would rather find myself stranded than 17 Again.
1. Once More To The Oral Surgeon
2. It's A Year-Round Mall Of America Christmas
3. Fly-Fishing With Angry Talk-Radio Callers
4. Six Hours On The Tarmac
5. The Cubicle-Mate Of A Thousand Ironic Ringtones
6. The Longest Puppet Show
7. Car Alarm!
8. I Wore New Shoes To A Six-Hour Wedding
9. Phantom Of The Ice Capades
10. Faceful Of Pollen
Feel free to add your own in the comments, because I'm pretty sure there are many more.
Remember when Julia Roberts was about to show up in Duplicity? Remember how we discussed the discussion of whether she was "Hollywood ancient," and how she may have lost her ability to open a movie as a result of her extraordinarily advanced age of 41?
Duplicity went on to earn roughly $14 million in its opening weekend. Explanations abounded, as did discussions of whether Roberts should conclude that she is thoroughly washed up, or whether there was any hope that she might recover.
This weekend, the Russell Crowe vehicle State of Play earned roughly $14 million in its opening weekend (even with help from the whew-he's-under-40 Ben Affleck), and was well and thoroughly spanked by 17 Again, a body-swapping comedy starring Zac Efron. This despite, according to Variety, "a hefty payout for Crowe."
This can mean only one thing: At 45, Russell Crowe is too old to make movies. Particularly after the so-so performance of Body of Lies, doesn't this prove that Russell Crowe is "Hollywood ancient"?
The conversations we are surely about to see, after the jump...
The best thing about this brief preview of Quentin Tarantino's upcoming film Inglourious Basterds is that it promises the return of Weird Brad Pitt, whose appearance I always welcome after exposure to Very Important Brad Pitt.
Why W. Brad Pitt beats V.I. Brad Pitt, after the jump...
So no, we don't necessarily expect modesty from Marvin Hamlisch. He is, as his Wikipedia entry notes, one of "the only two individuals to have been awarded an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, a Tony, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama."
(Don't you just love Wikipedia entries, and the opportunities they offer for ego-driven factoids?)
'Cause what I hear him saying is, "Isn't it droll, the way I left Hollywood glamour behind and took a chance on this odd Broadway project about the little people, which went on to win me a Pulitzer and make me exceedingly rich?"
Check it out, and tell me if I'm wrong here — but for a composer, Maestro Hamlisch strikes me as amusingly tone-deaf.
Hannah Montana: The Movie: Be yourself! Well, maybe. Or possibly not. Who's to know, when you're Miley Cyrus either way? Walt Disney Pictures
by Mark Blankenship
Hello, my name is Mark, and I saw Hannah Montana: The Movie on its opening day. What choice did I have? I crave pop cultural literacy, so I'm practically required to experience this Miley Cyrus-fronted phenomenon that's dominating box office receipts, music charts, and the hearts of children worldwide.
But as a childless adult, Planet Hannah unsettles me. There among the super-cute outfits and fun choreography, I keep noticing shoddy filmmaking and a sinister sociological message, and it's making me paranoid. Am I the only one who sees the wicked signs?
Wicked signs and many spoilers regarding the undoubtedly shocking plot, after the jump...
Adventureland: It's a lovely movie, but it follows a most unfortunate trend. Miramax
by Linda Holmes
Look, there's no polite way to say this, but it's important.
It used to be that in a movie, if you were sick to your stomach to the point where you needed to empty its contents, you would do so discreetly, which is to say off-screen.
The retching sound was adequate to convey what had occurred. There was no need to actually watch the event in progress. "Cough cough," or sometimes, "Cough cough, flush," and everybody understood.
Oh, how things have changed.
Current examples, blaming Leslie Mann, and a plaintive plea for mercy, after the jump...
Fast & Furious: They didn't spend too much time coming up with that title, did they? Perhaps it will become a trend. Universal Pictures
by Linda Holmes
Now that The People have spoken with their enormous wads of cash, it's clear that making a sequel to The Fast And The Furious — and calling it something really inventive, like, um, Fast & Furious — is no barrier to success.
Before this, of course, there had already been two follow-ups to The Fast And The Furious: 2 Fast 2 Furious and The Fast And the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Neither of those is a particularly snappy title, but for sheer lack of effort, they cannot match the approach of, "What if we take out the small words and leave just the important words? That's a different title, right?"
And that got us thinking that in some cases, removing the little words might not only be workable; it might support the development of entirely new sequel concepts.
Doubt: The opportunity to hear the directing choices explained makes the film worth another look. Buena Vista Studios Home Entertainment
by Linda Holmes
Doubt was an apparently Oscar-hungry film, as its December 25 release date suggested.
Starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, based on a Pulitzer-Prize-winning play, and dealing with the issue of child abuse in the Catholic church, it was hard to imagine a film more naturally geared to an awards audience.
When it came Oscar time, though, all four major actors in the film -- Hoffman and Streep, along with Amy Adams and Viola Davis -- were nominated for their work, and John Patrick Shanley was nominated for the screenplay he adapted from his own play.
But the movie wasn't nominated for Best Picture. Your four big performances are all nominated, and your script is nominated, and you don't get a Best Picture nomination? That makes suspicion fall on the direction -- which Shanley also handled, and which was indeed one of the more widely criticized aspects of the film. (Bob Mondello, for instance, mentioned Shanley's "fussy directorial notions.")
That's why it's so wonderful that Shanley alone provides the audio commentary on the just-released DVD. You will hear him explain or at least acknowledge some of the very choices that were criticized, including his use of unusual angles, attention-grabbing lighting, and endless weather metaphors.
What John Patrick Shanley has to say in his own defense, after the jump...
You know by now that Kal Penn is headed to the White House. Great news for him; bad news for everyone hoping for the next Harold And Kumar movie.
Now that we know another sequel is not in the works, it's time to place some of the other fine cast members of the Harold And Kumar movies in government positions. He is doing his part; they should do theirs.
John Cho Noel Vasquez/Getty Images
John Cho: Strange Beings Liaison, NASA
Since his days as Harold, Cho has made a number of TV appearances -- including one on House -- and popped up in a few movies. But the biggest things are right around the corner, because he's playing Sulu in the new Star Trek movie that arrives on May 8.
Surely, all that he has learned about talking to the pointy-eared would make him useful to the space program. How different can fictional outer space be than real outer space? Unfortunately, he would spend his first month on the job telling NASA guys they don't need to do the "live long and prosper" thing every time.
Neil Patrick Harris, Rob Corddry, and more, after the jump...
Seth Rogen: Things are looking up, even as he portrays a blue blob. Kristian Dowling/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
There's a lot going on with Seth Rogen right now. His new movie, Observe And Report, starts Friday -- probably at many, many theaters near you packed with many, many members of coveted demographics.
He hosted Saturday Night Live this weekend, where the fact that he's lost a bunch of weight became one of the primary jokes.
While he's enjoying this svelte victory lap, he's also in theaters as one of the voices in Monsters vs. Aliens, in which he expertly portrays a blue gelatinous blob. (That may qualify as irony.)
Rogen has already made a lot of big movies -- The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Pineapple Express, Superbad -- the list is lengthy for a guy who's 26 years old (who, incidentally, was a writer on the celebrated Freaks & Geeks when he was 19).
But we may only now be entering the Rogenaissance.
Slimming down and smartening up, after the jump...
The Tauntaun sleeping bag: Sadly, it's only a joke. For now. ThinkGeek.com
by Glenn McDonald
Among the avalanche of April Fool's jokes last week was an interesting development from the nerd merchandising supersite ThinkGeek.com. As an April Fool's joke, the site put up for sale the ingenious and rather appealing Tauntaun sleeping bag pictured above.
Star Wars fans will recall the famous scene on remote ice planet Hoth, in which Han Solo slices open a warm Tauntaun carcass and inserts the typically hapless Luke Skywalker to keep the young Jedi from freezing to death.
Thus was born the Tauntaun sleeping bag. From the ThinkGeek product description: "This high-quality sleeping bag looks just like a Tauntaun, complete with saddle, internal intestines and LED Luke Skywalker Lightsaber zipper pull. Use the lightsaber zipper pull on the Tauntaun sleeping bag to illustrate to your wee ones how Han Solo saved Luke Skywalker from certain death in the freezing climate of Hoth by slitting open the Tauntaun belly!"
Genius. Hundreds of eager buyers were prepared to click over $39.95 for the sleeping bag, only to discover it was all a hoax. As the news made its way around the Internets, ThinkGeek quickly realized it had a phenomenon on its hands. The Tauntaun sleeping bag wasn't just a great idea for a fake product -- it was a great idea, period.
What ThinkGeek.com did next, more ideas for great gifts, and an invitation to do your worst, after the jump...
Hollywood marketers believe in Chick Movies and Dude Movies. The rest of us believe in...well, movies, in the best of all possible worlds. But when you are making a trailer, you are expected to identify Chick Movie elements and Dude Movie elements. Because we all know that Chicks and Dudes are very different.
(They like cars and beer! We like ponies and flowers!)
Thus, any movie -- well, any movie trailer, really -- can be sorted into Chick Movie elements and Dude Movie elements, resulting in a final reading on the Chick/Dude scale. Note that, for a single movie, the scale may change by trailer, depending on whether it is airing before He's Just Not That Into You or Knowing.
Let us take a look at this trailer for Adventureland, which opens today.
How to count Ryan Reynolds and expired food, after the jump...
Seeing in three dimensions...or not: A major studio and a major theater chain play a game of "I'm not paying for the glasses; I thought you were paying for the glasses." iStockphoto.com
by Linda Holmes
So. Monsters vs. Aliens has a huge opening weekend, Dreamworks is all set to keep rolling with 3D releases, and a few thousand screens have apparently already been converted to show 3D at a reported cost of up to $100,000 per screen.
But what about the plastic glasses? You may have thought that the $5 premium you paid for that 3D ticket was adequate to cover a pair of polarized plastic shades, but don't you believe it -- there's a whole new battle over who's going to pay for the glasses. Specifically, Ice Age 3 looks to be facing some difficulties getting theaters to put it on their new 3D-ready screens if Twentieth Century Fox keeps insisting it's not paying.
This sounds a little like the urban legend that exists at every college about how the library is sinking because the architects didn't account for the weight of the books. Millions of dollars to make the movie, millions of dollars to outfit the theaters, and now we're going to be hung up on the $1 million-per-movie cost of plastic-glasses manufacturing.
Wolverine: A version of Hugh Jackman's new film has leaked online; what happens now? Twentieth Century Fox
by Linda Holmes
The X-Men follow-up X-Men Origins: Wolverine, one of Twentieth Century Fox's most anticipated movie releases of the summer, leaked on the Internet yesterday.
Well, the movie wasn't leaked, exactly. It's reportedly an unpolished, incomplete version of the movie, and surprisingly, it has no watermark that might help identify the culprit.
Are full-length leaks the wave of the future? We consider the possibility, after the jump...
James Franco: Seen here on MTV's Total Request Live last fall, he's teaming up again with Pineapple Express's Danny McBride. Scott Gries/Getty Images Entertainment
by Linda Holmes
Maybe it's just me, but when I read that James Franco and Danny McBride -- who worked together in Pineapple Express -- were teaming up for a new movie called Your Highness, I thought, entirely seriously, "I do not need to see another movie from this same crowd of guys about how hilarious it is to watch them smoke pot for two hours. It wasn't that funny in Knocked Up, it went on too long in Pineapple Express, and I don't understand why they won't just let James Franco make a comedy in which he is not stoned."
It turns out, though, that this is the more time-worn interpretation of the words "Your Highness," and Franco and McBride will play "spoiled and arrogant princes." Or so the story claims. The movie will apparently be directed by David Gordon Green, their Pineapple director. It might actually be a good movie, even with everyone substance-free.
Drew Barrymore: Is her romantic-comedy reputation greater than her track record? Gabriel Bouys, AFP/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
Quick, name the last Ben Affleck movie that (1) you really liked; or (2) you really liked him in; or (3) both.
Take a look at the evidence. It's pretty dismal. The Affleckian lean years, it is safe to say, have far outnumbered ... the year in which Good Will Hunting was released.
I've had this discussion with several friends over the last five years or so: Aside from his ability to be remarkably charming on talk shows, how is Ben Affleck a movie star?
(In fairness to Affleck, he also directed 2007's Gone Baby Gone, which was quite good, and he has at times shown some self-awareness about the possibility that acting may not be his particular gift.)
Comes now the news that Drew Barrymore will be teaming up with Justin Long in a romantic comedy called Going The Distance.
This might seem like welcome news to date-movie fans, who haven't had a great year so far. But is it, really?
The movie ticket: Still an alluring purchase, even for a cash-strapped public iStockphoto.com
by Linda Holmes
Everybody feels broke, everybody feels pinched, but U.S. box-office receipts are up, not down.
If you stop to think too hard about spending $10 for less than two hours of entertainment, it doesn't hold up all that well, compared to what Netflix costs, or what cable costs, or what books cost. (And those are just the standard options — obviously, you can use your local library or watch free stuff online or whatever.) Also, 10 bucks assumes you don't buy a four-dollar drink.
Are you going to the movies at the same clip you were, say, a year ago? What movies have you chosen to see in theaters since, say, the first of the year?
And if you're still going, what is it about the theater experience that makes it worth the money? Would you go more often if there were more movies to your liking? Do you still prefer to see big, lavishly produced movies in a theater?
Or is it the crowd itself? It strikes me that movies are one of the only things the public still does in large numbers that involves placing yourself in a crowd where everyone is paying attention to the same thing at once. Are we paying to immerse ourselves in a sea of humanity, despite the seat-kicking and cough-drop-unwrapping and aisle-running?
Update: In a not-very-surprising side note, ticket sales may be up, but concessions are down, so theaters aren't as happy as you might think.
Monsters vs. Aliens: DreamWorks Animation has reason to believe audiences are at least interested in 3D technology; how long will their interest last? Paramount Pictures
by Linda Holmes
Monsters vs. Aliens made enough money this weekend to keep DreamWorks throwing things directly at you for years to come.
(I, for one, would like to see DreamWorks return to live-action films and produce them in 3D also, because I doubt anyone could resist A Beautiful Mind 2 in 3D, in which Russell Crowe could seem to be drawing math problems in grease pencil directly on your forehead.)
At any rate, Monsters vs. Aliens made a plush $58 million according to current estimates, and a little more than half of that came from 3D tickets, which cost about five bucks extra.
(The surcharge covers the rad plastic glasses, which I learned this weekend make small boys look like Tom Cruise and small blonde girls look a little like the Old Navy lady, even though they're flat on top rather than round.)
The 3D receipts will certainly be good news for the DreamWorks animation outfit, which has committed to releasing everything in 3D from now on. At the same time, we are still in the very early stages of widely released 3D animated films. Coraline wasn't as mass-market as this, and both it and Bolt opened in substantially fewer 3D theaters than this.
Of the two kids with whom I saw Monsters vs. Aliens, one announced that the 3D was only okay and it gave him a headache, and the other got frustrated with her "uncomfortable" glasses halfway through and ditched them. This is one of the first hugely nonthreatening 3D kids' movies to punch the 12-and-under zeitgeist right in the breadbasket. The numbers certainly show audiences want to try it; whether they'll continue to pay a $5-per-ticket surcharge (which is pretty hefty when you're hauling a family) once the novelty lessens remains to be seen.
Speaking for myself, I'd pay an extra dollar; maybe two. But five? Not regularly. Not until they add Smell-O-Vision.
Duplicity: It's a better movie than you might think; is that saying too much? Universal Pictures
by Linda Holmes
Duplicity was a better movie than I thought it was going to be, and less predictable than I thought it was going to be.
And with that, some people would conclude I have said too much.
"You can easily guess what the 'predictable' elements are," they would reason, "so you have revealed that at least one of those predictable elements will be upended in some way, which gives away something about the ending, and you should not give away anything about the ending, at least not without spoiler warnings, because now I know that of the three or four basic things I expect from this movie, one of them won't happen, so I know something about what will happen, so you have ruined it for me."
"Well, have you seen it?" I might ask them.
"Are you kidding?" they might well respond. "No way. I assumed it was going to be totally predictable."
Therein lies the puzzle.
After the jump: Let us use an older movie as an example of a very current problem...
We told you yesterday about the controversy surrounding the subtitles for the Swedish film Let The Right One In, which underwent some kind of bizarre bowdlerization between theatrical release and DVD release. Over the course of about a day, this became a verybigdeal for those of us who see RSS feeds of blogs all day, and it became increasingly clear that some kind of response or explanation would be required.
Now, Magnet Releasing (which is handling the DVD) has responded to the controversy by agreeing to change the subtitles and use the theatrical subtitles for copies manufactured from this point on -- but, they are not offering exchanges for people who purchased the "bad" version. Or they're not...yet. Let's see if that holds up.
(You have to admire Magnet's pluck in referring to the cacophony of Internet outrage as "several fans.")
This is a great example of the power of blogs used for good: at their best, they can weaponize the short but intense bursts of attention that a story like this can draw and multiply it across popular sites to apply pressure that very quickly becomes overwhelming. If that sounds like a double-edged sword, it is: the same thing can happen whether the story is right or wrong.
But in this case, speed appears to have been on the side of the angels, and there was no way the wave of wretched publicity could be allowed to continue without a response. DVD sales are immensely important to acclaimed films that many people don't get an opportunity to see in theaters, and film purists make up a good chunk of the crowd; it's hard to imagine a movie that could less afford to have this happen to it.
The blog debate:Variety may be responsible for a debate better than it entirely deserves. iStockphoto.com
by Linda Holmes
I see the Variety newsfeed every day, and I was surprised to see threeseparatepieces about how much they hate entertainment-industry bloggers.
It isn't really aimed at commentary blogs, but at "breaking news" blogs, and specifically at Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily, which was the target of most of the vitriol.
Obviously, some of the points about accuracy and speed sometimes pulling against each other are completely valid, and the distaste for blogs spending their time whining about each other instead of talking about...what they're supposed to be talking about is something most blog-followers are familiar with. At the same time, the generalizations are so broad that it's hard to know where to go next. Blogs vary in value just as much as print media does, and they're not all alike, any more than The Economist is the same as People just because they're both issued on paper.
Of many responses that have followed, I was most heartened by this excellent essay at Film School Rejects. FSR is more of a commentary blog and not really in the Variety line of fire, but the calmness and lack of defensiveness in the piece makes it much more substantive than, in fact, the pieces that started the conversation in the first place.
One of the documentaries newly available on Hulu is Dig!, a little-seen but much-discussed and award-winning 2004 film about the...rivalry? Friendship? Mutually assured destruction? At any rate, the relationship between two late-'90s bands: The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Notice how they both have quasi-playful, ironic, punny, wordplay-based, fundamentally annoying names? It's not a coincidence.
Two unlikable bands, two unlikable guys, one very likable movie, after the jump...
And so, again, we find ourselves embroiled in a debate about age and women, money and Hollywood, and -- oh, yes -- jokes about support hose, because really, what's fresher than that?
Of course, Newsweek didn't say they think she's too old; it simply said Hollywood thinks she's too old. It's the "some people say" brand of little dig: "We're not saying anything; we're just saying." Traditionally, of course, there's plenty of truth in the bruising realities faced by actresses over 40. But there are other questions about that piece that need asking.
Being on a first-name basis, the irrelevance of Ashley Judd, and much more, after the jump...
Sam Mendes didn't get quite the critical or awards response he might have expected for Revolutionary Road based on the response to American Beauty. But the trailer for his new film, Away We Go, suggests that he's stocked it with powerful weapons. Even though there are shots that look a bit self-conscious and insufferable, like that moment on the moving sidewalk, there's something about the trailer overall that appeals.
Mendes is working from a script by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, and he's lined up an awfully interesting cast. John Krasinski of The Office and Maya Rudolph of Saturday Night Live both seem to be working outside their usual arenas, Catherine O'Hara and Jeff Daniels are both delightful as a rule, and nothing with Allison Janney in it has ever entirely let me down. (That's the underappreciated comedian Jim Gaffigan with her, by the way.)
It's hard to tell with this kind of "Look at me, I'm quirky!" marketing whether it's going to be quirky like the first half of Juno (bad) or quirky like the second half of Juno (good). But at least it's not another dull assault on the perfection of suburbia, and that in itself is a relief.
Today is March 17th, and if you're not wearing green, drinking green beer, wearing a headband with shamrock diddlybobs attached to it with springs, or pretending to be Irish, you may be unsure exactly how to mark St. Patrick's Day.
Fear not! Simply enjoy the Ten Worst Irish Accents On Film, including my personal favorite, Brad Pitt in The Devil's Own, above. Not that Tom Cruise, who spends all of Far And Away seemingly chastising all of those who have stolen his Lucky Charms, isn't also a good choice.
Watchmen: Does there always have to be a movie? Warner Brothers Pictures
by Marc Hirsh
There's a movie opening today called Watchmen. Perhaps you've heard of it. It's gotten a bit of press lately, most of which has involved some variation of the headline "Who watches Watchmen?," because headline writers are just that clever.
Most of the coverage has also fixated on the long, roadblock-studded path from the original 1986-1987 run of the comic book to the silver screen. To hear the media tell it, those of us who love Watchmen have been waiting for this day eagerly for over 20 years.
The thing is, I don't think we have.
The comic as its own fully realized form, after the jump...
That's right: they're bringing Sleepless In Seattleto the stage. For a musical. With songs. And maybe dancing. I, for one, happily look forward to the pas de deux featuring Sam and his deceased wife as he ponders whether to go to the Empire State Building. But what else might we expect? I don't want to be pushy, but I am hoping the following ten songs are already being written.
1. "I Want A Stranger For A Mom"
2. "Take It From Your Sassy Friend"
3. "This Pea-Soup Fog Of Grief"
4. "I'm Somewhat Sorry I Called You A Brat (A Father's Apology)"
5. "The Unaccompanied-Minor Negligence Lawsuit Blues"
6. "Marry That Mope, Annie"
7. "The First And Only Time Ever I Saw Your Face"
8. "Am I Looking Too Hard For A Sign In The Form Of The Lights In The Shape Of A Heart?"
You Mustn't Read This: Linda didn't much like Benjamin Button, but there are those who argue the movie's still better than the book.photocredit
By Linton Weeks
The literati can't stand to hear it, but sometimes a movie is better than the book it's based on. Even when the book is pretty good: Jaws comes to mind. And, arguably, Forrest Gump.
This year theaters are teeming with movies based on books. And some reviewers who've had a look at both are saying that the movies are better.
Take The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The tale, about a man who ages in reverse, is based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
"Having seen the movie and read the story," writes Fritz Lanham in the Houston Chronicle, "I'd say there's no comparison. As a book guy it pains me to admit it, but the movie is better. A lot better."
The film critic for the Montreal Gazette, meanwhile, avers that the movie Slumdog Millionaire is better than the Vikas Swarup book it's based on.
When it's the other way around, after the jump ...
Viola Davis: Her dress doesn't seem controversial enough to spark such a strange discussion. Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
One of the little rituals I tend to indulge in after the Oscars is the E! Fashion Police special. It used to be Joan and Melissa Rivers, of course, but they're long gone -- this year's special was handled by Debbie Matenopoulos, Project Runway champ Christian Siriano, America's Next Top Model stylist Jay Manuel, and stylist Peter Ishkahns.
This year, the four went through a pretty predictable discussion of Sarah Jessica Parker and Miley Cyrus and so forth, until they arrived at Best Supporting Actress nominee Viola Davis. Davis' gold gown, by Reem Acra, generally got very good reviews -- the Times Online called it one of the best dresses of the evening, the Fug Girls loved it, the Chicago Sun-Timespraised it, and so forth.
Not so the E! panel.
What went down, and why it went down uncomfortably, after the jump...
The trailer for Judd Apatow's upcoming Funny People has started to circulate in earnest, and the first warning is -- as explained at Low Resolution -- that the trailer is lengthy and appears to give away most of the plot. This is a baffling and frustrating affliction of the modern trailer, where there's been a collapse of the idea that you can sell a movie without encapsulating it.
What the trailer actually portends, after the jump...
What doesn't kill us makes us stronger — is that how the saying goes? With that in mind, we returned to the Oscar well one last time this morning for a live chat with our favorite film critic.
And now that it's over, no kidding, it's time for us to have a little nap. So enjoy the chat (you can replay it in the widget below), and we'll be back soon. Maybe tomorrow, but soon.
The live-blogging is done, But you can relive all 4 hours of it by clicking 'Replay' below, and add your thoughts in the comments. And don't forget: More NPR Oscar goodness is collected for your convenience at NPR.org/oscars.
Update: The day has come. I am doing jumping jacks with my mind. In a mere couple of hours, I will begin the long day ahead, which will feature, in order: Milk, The Reader, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire, and Frost/Nixon. Will I bail and spend the afternoon at Starbucks? I don't think we know. But now, we're going to find out. The suspense is killing me, and soon, I suspect that my spine will be also.
I've always been kind of fascinated by the AMC Best Picture Showcase. That's the special deal where, for $30, you can watch all the Best Picture nominees...in a row. It's happening today (Saturday), and they may be doing it at a theater near you -- check the site to find out.
This year, I'm actually going. I've already seen four out of five of the movies (sorry, The Reader!), but I don't mind a refresher before the big ceremony on Sunday night, and I'm kind of curious about what that much exposure will do to me -- I mean, for me.
To follow my adventures, follow me on Twitter at monkeyseeblog, or if you're not a Twitter person yourself, watch it roll by here.
We even looked back with pity and pleasure at Oscar fashion with the Fug Girls. And now we're ready for our very big weekend. To pull it all together, here's what's on tap for the next few days.
• Follow us on Twitter to see whether I survive the all-day Best Picture marathon tomorrow, or come back and watch the updates go by right here.
• On Sunday night, we'll be liveblogging the Oscars starting at 8 p.m. -- that will be me and two of my favorite speed-talking writer pals, Stephen Thompson and John Ramos. You can also check in with the rest of NPR's Oscar coverage Sunday night for backstage tweets, red-carpet photos, and all of the rest of the awards-ceremonial goodness you need.
• Come back Monday morning at 10 a.m., where NPR's Bob Mondello and I will chat and take your questions and comments about the ceremony, the winners and losers, and whatever else you dream up during the awards show and its many commercial breaks.
Benjamin Button: The rarely active, usually acted-upon central character is only one of his story's major problems. Paramount Pictures
by Marc Hirsh
Ever since 1996 -- when I'd seen Apollo 13, Babe, Sense And Sensibility and, yes, even Il Postino only to watch Braveheart win the Oscar -- I've seen every Best Picture nominee before the ceremony. Since I can't go to AMC's brilliant/horrifying all-day Best Picture marathon tomorrow [Ed. Note: HEY!] I've been catching up slowly. And so, on a full night's sleep, I somewhat reluctantly saw The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button.
I found myself baffled by Button's massive nomination haul. Here before me, on the verge of being festooned with highest honors, was a genuinely bad movie.
How bad? Allow me to count the ways. [Warning: the spoilers will fly fast and furious.]
The framing device. Button unfolds as Daisy's daughter, Caroline, reads Benjamin's journal to her on her New Orleans deathbed, with Hurricane Katrina looming. That's two entirely unnecessary elements added to the story. The dying woman looking back on her life is cheap sentimentality, while the Katrina aspect is rife with symbolic weight, but symbolizing what? It's a storytelling gimmick that Means Something, without the slightest indication of what that Something might be.
Moreover, the device invites pointless exchanges that stall the movie. My personal favorite: an agitated Caroline steps out into the hospital hallway for a smoke, where she's promptly told, "You can't smoke here." Thank you, Oscar-nominated, three-hour screenplay!
The All-Time Classic: Bjork swans her way into the 2001 Oscars. Lucy Nicholson, AFP/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
The fashion blog Go Fug Yourself is one of the sharpest and funniest destinations on the Internet, and your hands-down best bet for red-carpet fashion critiques.
It's won a boatload of awards, and it's been written up in Time and Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal and Entertainment Weekly, and there's just not time to list the accolades — but they are all deserved. There's even a book, The Fug Awards, perfect for the analog fashion critic in you.
So we're glad to report that The Fug Girls, Heather and Jessica, were kind enough to take time out of one of their busiest weeks — they're covering New York's Fashion Week for NYMag.com — to answer some Oscars 101 questions, and to warmly (?) recall the terrifying ghosts of red carpets past.
Be sure to explore the photo gallery above to see most of the outfits Jessica and Heather mention here — you may have blocked out the memory of the Demi Moore bike shorts, and it's just not the same if you can't see them for yourself.
What's your favorite Oscars outfit of all time? What made it successful?
JESSICA: I think mine would be Bjork's swan dress. I would not say it was successful, but that dress has given people comedic fodder — not to mention Halloween costumes — for literally years, and there's something to be said for that. On the other side of the coin, it's very hard to say what I think is the all-time most beautiful gown, as there have been so many, but I loved Marion Cotillard's white Gaultier from last year. I am looking forward to seeing what she wears this year.
HEATHER: I'm lousy at remembering this stuff year-to-year. Half the time I can't even remember stuff I fugged a week ago. My mind is a lousy archive. I do remember thinking Penelope Cruz's pink strapless dress with that feathered train — she wore it the year she was nominated for Volver, and I think it was Versace — was stunning. It was exactly the kind of dress I feel like a girl ought to wear to the Oscars, because when else can you go that big, that dreamy? The gown wouldn't really be possible at any old movie premiere, so I admired her for living the kind of red-carpet princess fantasy I feel like all little girls have when they dream of being actresses. You know, before they learn the business is all about rejection and sadness and pills.
Disasters, up-and-comers, and why Freida Pinto may be luckier than Jennifer Hudson, after the jump...
Milk: Might this man have a more uplifting story than even an instant millionaire? Focus Features
by John Ramos
Note: John Ramos is a film producer and a longtime writer at Television Without Pity. Happily, he will be joining me and Stephen Thompson (NPR Music Editor and the creator of The Onion A.V. Club) for our live Oscar coverage on Sunday night, beginning at 8 p.m.
-- Linda Holmes
Okay, I'll admit that portmanteau in the title doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
Superficially, Slumdog Millionaire and Milk are similar in that they deal with utter unknowns who become beloved figures. But beyond that, they're radically different. They're almost polar opposites in many ways, including the emotional states they left me in -- and not in the way their apparent happy-ending/sad-ending alignment might suggest.
As told in Sean Penn's (if you'll excuse the expression) Oscar-worthy performance, Harvey Milk's journey began with a simple desire to be seen, to stand up and be counted. He thrived on both the satisfaction he got from fighting for the rights of his gay constituents and on the attendant attention. The famous message he recorded to be played in the event of his assassination is featured prominently in the film as both a storytelling device and a reminder to the audience not to get too comfortable.
Furthermore, even if you go in not knowing the story, the film opens with Dianne Feinstein announcing his murder (and Mayor George Moscone's) at the hands of Dan White, so the viewer is intimately aware that Milk's story is going to come to a tragic end.
Why both sad endings and happy endings are often not as they appear, after the jump...
We continue the run-up to Oscar, Oscar, Oscar! Remember that my tired, exhausted, probably embittered self will be Twittering the AMC Theaters Best Picture Showcase this Saturday, and that I will be joined on Sunday night by a couple of Super-Magical Guests to chat about the Oscar ceremony As! It! Happens! So stay tuned.
My favorite movie of 2008 was Rachel Getting Married. There, I said it. I've gone back and forth between it and some others, but it's the one I keep coming back to, and it's the one I was most disheartened and baffled to see shut out of most of the major awards categories, with the exception of Anne Hathaway's (well-deserved) Best Actress nomination.
The "good sister"/"bad sister" movie has been done quite a bit, where one is a free spirit who gets away with murder, and the other is a dutiful rock who feels overshadowed and resentful. It's been done with a lighter heart in In Her Shoes, with great sadness in Georgia, and even with total froth in 27 Dresses. This is a very, very old story.
But the fact that it employs a storytelling staple in an interesting way is a great example of its best quality, which is the deft deployment of a beautifully broad range of talents. The credits include people who come from pop culture and high culture; from television and theater and music; people who are young and hot and people who are making comebacks. Creatively, it is a powerful endorsement of the idea that you often make great projects by opening your mind a little.
Why Anne Hathaway is a brave choice, and where the poppiest of pop-culture phenomena enters the mix, after the jump...
While checking out today's piece about the construction of Old Man Brad Pitt in The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, I was reminded that I was more impressed in the movie by whatever they did at the end that legitimately made him look very young than I was by the flashier business with his shriveled old-man head.
Because -- I swear -- my thought at the time was, "He looks exactly like he looked when he was on Growing Pains playing a high-school student." (I am a fount of knowledge that way.) And so, for reference, about a minute and a half into in the clip above: Brad Pitt as a high-school student. Or possibly a very old Benjamin Button.
The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button: Who cares? (Sorry, too blunt?) Paramount Pictures
by Linda Holmes
We're getting into the swing of Oscar season here, so look for coverage to continue this week. On Saturday, I will be sacrificing my posture and possibly my sanity to perform selfless acts of live Twittering from the all-day, multi-hour, good-for-your-soul AMC Theaters Best Picture Showcase, and on Oscar night, we'll be having live commentary on the show, which we'll discuss in more detail very soon.
Generally speaking, Oscar night is a frothy cocktail of pretty dresses and teary speeches, and it's unusual for the occasion to feel quite as fraught with tension as it does this year.
First, you have the pressure created by the failure to nominate The Dark Knight for major awards outside of Heath Ledger's Best Supporting Actor nomination. There was immediate disdain for that decision, particularly in combination with the failure to nominate WALL*E, another very popular movie that was very well reviewed and also didn't snag a Best Picture nomination.
More generally, the five films that were nominated for Best Picture had, as of the beginning of this week, grossed a little less than $275 million between them. While that's a large amount of money for a randomly selected group of five films, it's not a lot for a crop of five Best Picture nominees, and as Variety points out, it's in the neighborhood of $40 million less than last year, which already wasn't about nominating blockbusters.
Not only that, but the movies that did get nominations didn't get as much of a post-nomination boost as might have been expected, with the exception of Slumdog Millionaire, word-of-mouth about which had already boomed before the nominations came out. So on top of the fact that smaller films were nominated, it doesn't even seem to have done those small films very much good.
Furthermore, it's my sense that not only are people not excited about the Oscar nominees because they haven't made a lot of money; they're not excited about them because with at least a couple of them, even many people who have seen them don't think they're all that good and will tell you so.
Does seeing Benjamin Button mean you care whether it wins awards? After the jump...
I have a long history with romantic movies of all kinds. Goopy musicals, kicky-girl rom-coms, masterpieces of banter -- you name it, and I've probably fallen for it at one time or another. Unfortunately, the older one gets, the more some of these fall apart, and the more others don't work at all. I give you five (of many) Un-Romances. Be warned: all descriptions contain spoilers.
1. Jerry Maguire
This really pains me, because I thought this was a terribly touching story the first time I saw it. As much as "you complete me" and "you had me at hello" are now as dessicated as "Show me the money!" there was a time when they seemed like sort of nifty things for people to say to each other. Of course...I was 25.
Why it's an Un-Romance: What's frustrating is that for the first three-quarters or so, this movie demonstrates all kinds of incredibly valid points. Don't perform dramatic stunts (like quitting your job) to impress guys with good teeth. Don't have drunks over to your house. Don't introduce your kid to guys he'll fall in love with unless you're pretty sure about them. Don't date your boss. Don't try to save disasters. Don't ignore your sister when she warns you about guys who are "hanging onto the bottom rung." Don't get married as an alternative to the nightmare of driving a U-Haul.
And then in the closing moments: BOOM! It turns out that the guy who clearly was not in love with you can suddenly discover he's in love with you, and that all your bad decisions are now irrelevant. If only real life worked...anything like that.
Movie romances: Mash them up; watch them spin. iStockphoto.com
by Glenn McDonald
The object:
The blurbs below combine the titles of two or more well-known movies. Can you guess the new mash-up movie title?
Example:
Michael J. Fox stars as a time-traveling teenager in this second installment of George Lucas' original space opera trilogy.
Answer: The Empire Strikes Back to the Future
NOTE:
At least one of the movies in each blurb is a famous cinematic love story. Remember that films can be mashed up phonetically as well, e.g. "Nosferatu Kill a Mockingbird"
Go to it, have fun, and post your answers below. Smug as you may rightly feel if you know them all, please post one answer per comment, just to make sure the most skilled among you doesn't grab all the glory. Feel free to elaborate in the comments, also, about details of the resulting mashed-up movie. How would it end? What would be the crucial plot points?
Official mashup answers will be posted shortly, so check back.
1. You can see the tragedy coming a mile away when Gary Oldman falls for Emma Roberts' plucky teen sleuth.
2. Kevin Spacey won the Oscar for this role, in which his middle-aged suburban Dad scandalously pursues the animated but provincial Belle.
3. Director Spike Lee vents his rage over Katrina with a story of gay cowboys, for some reason.
4. Roger Moore's 007 meets his match when he tries to seduce the beguiling Lucy Honeychurch.
5. Ethel Merman, Bing Crosby, John Cusack and Ione Skye form a bizarre love rectangle in this 1936 classic.
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's 1986 graphic novel? Blah blah postmodern masterpiece, blah blah deconstruction of superhero tropes, blahdee blah changed comics forever?
I know: As a rule, brainy NPR types like y'all prefer to read a given book before seeing the film made from it. That way, when you meet up with other brainy NPR types, you can discuss the sundry alterations that were made to the plot for the sake of budget, running time, narrative cohesion or monumental directorial stupidheadery.
But what about those brainy NPR types who haven't read Watchmen but have seen the trailer, which promises the kind of desultory superhero stuff (slow-mo fight scenes, big 'splosions) that one expects from comics-to-film projects?
They might well think: Why bother? It's just more masked dudes in fetish gear running around beating up on folk, no?
No.
After the jump: Reading Watchmen before watching Watchmen -- the case for.
The first time I ever heard what would now be a DVD commentary (my recollection is that I later learned it came from the Laserdisc edition), it was a showing of Clerks on cable, and I could hear Kevin Smith and whoever else chatting about the making of the film, and it was sort of fascinating, even though it wasn't a movie of which I was a big fan.
Now, of course, commentaries are everywhere. Not only do they have them for high-end movies where everything has been thought out to the last detail and there is much to say about every camera angle, but they also slap them on ordinary movies, and even very bad movies -- the audio commentary on the 1999 trash-classic Cruel Intentions is one of the funniest commentaries I've ever heard, because of the entirely serious way in which they explain how terribly French and sophisticated the whole thing is.
Somewhere along the line, the actual point of a commentary has become blurred. Many of them are fun but impart very little actual information -- witness the rollicking cast/crew commentaries on shows like The Office and How I Met Your Mother. Some are startlingly lame -- I find the 30 Rock commentaries excruciating, because the people involved are all so obviously of the "it's bad to explain comedy" school of thought, so they don't want to be there, and they seem miserable to a person.
But the best use I've seen recently of a commentary as it was originally adored by film buffs, where actual light is shed on the process of making something good, came with the track attached to the first episode of Season 2 of This American Life -- the Showtime TV version, that is. (That's a clip from the show above.)
Seven-year itch? Ben Affleck and Jennifer Aniston in He's Just Not That Into You. Warner Bros./New Line
By Alison Bryce
He's Just Not Into You opened in movie theaters this weekend, to scorn from critics and a box-office take of $27.5 million. The critics' dismissals were probably to be expected. But I'd say the cash haul that made the movie No. 1 this weekend was, too.
See, I was living in Montana about four years ago, and I was totally into a guy that wasn't into me. He called all the time to hang out, but just wanted to be my friend. I wanted more.
Then one day I got a package in the mail from my mother. You can guess which book it was: He's Just Not That Into You. I opened it, sobbing.
But here's the thing: Once I started reading, I couldn't stop. Seriously: As lame as it may sound, that book changed my life.
Don't be a Helo: Tahmoh Penikett was at a loss to explain why the Dollhouse crew was at NY Comic-Con. Fox
By Laurel Maury
I walked something like 200 feet into New York Comic-Con without seeing a single comic book.
Booths for video games, regular books, Dungeons and Dragons, sure. Toys, everywhere. But this year, the four-year-old NY Comic-Con seemed to be about everything but comic books.
What did go on? Well, Joss Whedon's new TV show, Dollhouse, premiered its first episode on Sunday. Japanese pop idol Sho Sakurai turned up to promote a movie; British It Girl Peaches Geldof wandered the convention floor with a film crew, courtesy of Nylon magazine.
The panel for the British sci-fi show Torchwood was mobbed. Booths sold T-shirts, corsets, vinyl dolls, messenger bags (really cool ones from Gamma-Go), even doorbells.
But it was increasingly clear that big "cons," as comic book conventions are called, are no longer the comic book geek's natural habitat -- they're places to see and be seen, where Hollywood and the gaming industry try to get products into the hands of early adopters.
Joss Whedon, Tahmoh Penikett, and The New York Times on pimping it Comic-Con style, after the jump ...
But even the most wonkish insider analysis focuses on the outcome of this year's Oscars. We say: Why limit yourself to whether Heath will trounce Hoffman, or whether The Reader will come from behind to skunk Slumdog Millionaire?
And so we offer you the first of five Oscars Past and Present polls, in which this year's nominees are forced, completely arbitrarily, to compete for your affections with Oscar winners from the past five decades — specifically the winners in their categories from 1999, 1989, 1979, 1969 and 1959.
We'll start with the roundup for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. The poll's below — pick your favorite, whether he's from this year or from a classic.
And yes, we know, you've probably forgotten what part the Welsh-born actor Hugh Griffith played in Ben-Hur.
Netflix: Is it a recession-proof marriage of cheap DVD-by-mail and cheap online streaming? iStockphoto.com
by Linda Holmes
It may look like every company in America is currently wearing a barrel and shaking a can of loose change, but interestingly, Netflix seems to be flourishing. Their total subscriber count is up more than 25 percent over the same time last year, even though belt-tightening on entertainment expenses is on the lips of almost everyone I know.
Furthermore, their cancellation numbers have gone up only a smidge, meaning that in addition to perhaps picking up some people who consider Netflix more affordable than whatever else they were doing, they don't seem to be losing a lot of existing customers who are deciding that their Netflix subscriptions are among the luxuries that can be dropped. In addition to their better-known DVD-by-mail service, they're also getting more aggressive with video streaming. The selection of movies subscribers could view on demand was pretty weak when the service started, but it's definitely been improving -- in fact, that's where I originally saw the fantastic documentary The King Of Kong: A Fistful Of Quarters.
Matt Damon: So, not an Octopussy guy, then? Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
It turns out Matt Damon is not a big fan of James Bond. Speaking to the Miami Herald, Damon -- who clearly has strong opinions about many, many things -- talked about the similarities and differences between Jason Bourne and James Bond. Let's let the Herald article set it up:
Damon has acted in several spy movies, including three as discarded CIA superassassin Jason Bourne, and he has developed some very strong opinions on the subject. Do not, for instance, compare that unctuous James Bond fellow to the misguided but moral Bourne.
''They could never make a James Bond movie like any of the Bourne films,'' Damon says scornfully. ``Because Bond is an imperialist, misogynist sociopath who goes around bedding women and swilling martinis and killing people. He's repulsive.
``Steve [Soderbergh, who produced yet another of Damon's spy movies, Syriana] told me that years ago he was offered a Bond movie. He told them he'd do it if they gave him creative control. Absolutely not, they said. They have a formula, they stick to it, and it makes them a lot of money. They know what they're doing, and they're going to keep doing it.''
Hear that, James Bond? You are an imperialist, misogynist sociopath! Also repulsive. If James Bond were a real guy and not a fictional character, this would be a pretty spectacular smackdown, quite possibly setting up the greatest red-carpet fistfight of all time.
The "poverty porn" problem: A man in actual India walks by a poster depicting movie India. Is there a problem here? Pal Pillai/AFP/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
As the Slumdog Millionaire awards train speeds along, with a (well-deserved) Screen Actors Guild Award bestowed on the whole cast on Sunday night, what might normally be a backlash against the movie itself (as almost always happens when acclamation begins to pile up) is taking the form of a lot of questions about whether the movie is, in the words you'll see most often, "poverty porn."
If you haven't followed this debate, you can start with this L.A. Times piece, in which an Indian film professor says that the movie is "a white man's imagined India." For a stronger negative view, try this.
It's not just the movie itself, either. Even before the film, you could take a so-called "poverty tour" of Mumbai's actual slums -- and the "slum tourism" industry has seen a big boost since the release of the film, in case what you saw on screen didn't make enough of an impression.
Interestingly, I've had this debate with people before, because before I saw intense images of Mumbai poverty in the high-culture context of an Oscar-nominated movie, I saw them in the thoroughly pop-culture context of The Amazing Race, which has filmed wrenching episodes in India in more than one of its world-traveling seasons. And when those episodes aired, there was inevitably a message-board debate about staring at poverty; filming disabled children panhandling from passing cars. The line between exploitation and the shedding of light on things the audience might otherwise never see is a tough one to draw.
I'm very interested in opinions on this question. Real poverty as part of a not-very-real story; an unsolved crisis as an element of fantasy. On the one hand, people are more aware than before of poverty in India in a way that may be more vivid; on the other..."slum tourism" sounds grotesque and creepy to my ear. What do you think?
When I first heard a fairly superficial list of similarities between Forrest Gump and The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, it didn't strike me as particularly compelling. I don't really care that they both worked on boats or they both went to war: such are the realities of Guy Recounts His Long Life movies.
It's the tone and the self-important pronouncements about life -- many of which, in Button's case, make absolutely no sense given the actual details of the movie's conceit -- that make them feel like the same movie. (And they are, as many have already pointed out, from the same screenwriter.) The above video from FunnyOrDie.com makes a pretty good jab at this issue, although without hearing Brad Pitt's syrupy "Well ah guess ah wuz just special"-style narration, you really can't grasp how similar they feel from a theater seat.
Sorry about the sporadic blogging today, folks -- hope we can make up for it by offering the live chat from this morning, as well as my chat with Neal Conan on today's Talk Of The Nation, where we covered Oscar matters, violent wrestling, and the relevance of being raised Catholic to your experience of watching Doubt. Had a lot of fun over there; the audio of the segment is now available.
UPDATE: The live chat has ended -- but you can play it back to see what Linda thinks about Angelina Jolie's lips. And your Oscar-noms observations (questions, frustrations, etc.) are still more than welcome in the comments.
Live chat: This is not the preferred way of participating in our live chat with NPR's Bob Mondello tomorrow. iStockphoto.com
by Linda Holmes
UPDATE: The complete list of nominees is here. As promised, I have a lot of questions. Hint: Several of mine involve Best Actress. Ugh.
I'm tickled to announce a whole new deal for Monkey See. It's the first time we've done this, but if it goes well, perhaps it won't be the last.
We're hosting a live online chat with NPR film critic Bob Mondello tomorrow morning at 10:00 a.m., where we'll take your questions and thoughts — most likely about Oscar nominations that did or did not materialize.
I'm certainly looking forward to seeing tomorrow's nominations, and no matter what they are, I will have lots of questions.
Is there any possibility that whatever recognition The Dark Knight receives will pacify its partisans, who have greater hunger for mainstream affirmation than you'd expect from dystopia aficionados?
Will The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button receive too many nominations? (Prediction not requiring clairvoyance: Too many for me, yes.)
Can the Slumdog Millionaire train possibly pick up any more speed than it already has? Will Wall-E get that Best Picture nomination, and if it does, what non-animated movie will it seem to have bumped?
And are Mickey Rourke's dogs destined to become the Most Recognized Pets in awards history?
Come right back here at 10:00 a.m. Thursday (that's Eastern time), and bring your questions and comments about movies, awards, oversights, what you hope to see actually grabbing a statue, and whatever else is on your mind.
It occurs to me, though, that this is true of many things. That I can think of many "[Item A] For [Item B]" movie titles that wouldn't draw me in, even though I like both Item A and Item B. Allow me to demonstrate.
1. Sassy Haircuts For The Wii
2. Mustard For Bunny Slippers
3. Dove Shampoo For Neil Patrick Harris
4. Margaritas For My Elementary-School-Aged Nephews
5. Alec Baldwin For Congress
6. Swimming For Minnesota
7. Fancy Makeup For Cats
8. Mopey Guitar-Dude Songs For Tap Dancers
9. Comfortable Shoes For My Camera
10. Love Poems For Awkward Nerds
If you spend much time kicking around the Internet, someone has already sent this to you, but in case you spent Thursday preparing for President Bush's farewell address or getting all excited about the premiere of Celebrity Rehab Presents: Sober House, here's a marvelous video presentation in which the audio consists of an explanation of the Star Wars trilogy by a person who's never seen any of the movies. It seems like a pretty pedestrian idea, but it's carried off with a great deal of panache.
The Wrestler: One of a few films about which the Golden Tomatoes have something to say. Fox Searchlight
by Linda Holmes
If you're familiar with the site Rotten Tomatoes, you know that it aggregates the opinions of many, many critics in order to present a general sense of a film's critical response. These are critics who have at least some credentials; they're not rounding up everybody with a blog and a ticket to the cineplex.
What emerges is an imperfect system in which every registered critic's opinion is counted, meaning that some people you wouldn't trust with your cable remote are weighted equally with people you've been reading for 25 years. It's absolutely, emphatically not a substitute for reading real reviews, and it's not a substitute for thinking for yourself, and it would be a grave mistake to suggest that the quality of a film is reliably reflected in its ability to appeal to the largest number of critics.
Nevertheless, what they call "Tomatometer" rankings do make for an interesting data set, and they've now released the "Golden Tomato Awards," in which they determine which movies were, overall, the best-reviewed of the year.
In the past, this hasn't correlated reliably with awards performance. I was intrigued by the fact that the top-rated dramas of 2007 were, in order, Away From Her, Gone Baby Gone, The Savages, There Will Be Blood, and This Is England -- only one of which got a Best Picture nomination. (I noted with some satisfaction the very high placement of Gone Baby Gone, which I thought was outstanding and very unfairly left out of almost all awards consideration last year in favor of more bombastic movies.)
So what happened this year? We investigate, after the jump...
While watching the Golden Globes and the tribute to Steven Spielberg, I got talking to a friend about Twister. Not a movie I think about very often -- not a movie anyone thinks about very often. Except maybe Philip Seymour Hoffman, who thinks, "Wait, I was in Twister?" (Yes. Yes, you were. And also Patch Adams. The Robin Williams silly-doctor movie. We won't tell the Academy.)
But what's amazing, in retrospect, is how terrifying and fabulous the Twister trailers were, particularly compared to how flat the movie is. Sure, the trailer has the advantage of skipping over the boring bickering-exes business between Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, but it also suggests far more movement and genuine suspense than the movie comes anywhere close to delivering. Even more than the trailer above -- which is a corker -- I remember a trailer I can't find online now, which featured an almost entirely dark screen as the sounds of the tornado approached, rattling the...root cellar, or wherever we were meant to be hiding. I don't think any of the movie was even shown; just the sounds in the dark theater. And I came home thinking, "I cannot wait to see that movie."
And then that movie turned out to be Twister.
Has this happened to you? I'm not talking about ordinary situations where the clips make the movie look better than it is. (And some other time, we will discuss the trailer that tells the entire story and thereby ruins the movie, which is a separate pet peeve.) I'm talking about sitting in the theater sounding your internal "WOOOO!" only to find, a few weeks later, that you have been wooed falsely, as it were. You have hooted in vain. Tell your tale. We care about your wasted hoots.
American Teen: It's worth seeing the DVD, just for the terrible performances the documentary subjects (including "popular girl" Megan Krizmanich) give in an artificial environment. Paramount Vantage
The Ugly Truth: Men and women are different! Get it? 
Now with more Boogaloo: We've reached one of the most notorious sequels of the '80s: Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. 
Natalie Portman: She's joining the Thor movie. But Thor? Still a jerk. 
Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince: A lot of people will be seeing this movie over the next couple of days. How can you make sure one of them punches you in the eye? 
Brüno: It's not the authenticity; it's the laughs. 
I Love You, Beth Cooper: This is a project that was always doomed not to go well. 
Capitalism: A Love Story: Michael Moore's new movie about the financial crisis finally gets a name. 
The View-Master: It used reels just like this. Feel the action! 
My Dinner With Andre: Are you finding it a little loud at the multiplex? A good conversation might be just the thing. 
My Sister's Keeper: If you want to study movie crying, you could do a lot worse. 
Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen: Is there a gap between audiences and critics, or do they just have different jobs? 
Cameron Diaz: It's been a long road, and now it runs through mom roles. 
The Oscars: If the ceremony isn't long enough for you, it's about to get a little longer. 
Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen: See how mad this guy looks? He's not going to get any happier when he sees what Roger Ebert said about his movie. 
Mr. Potato Head: It's about time he had his own movie, isn't it? 
Sandra Bullock: Or is that Betty White? No, whew! that's Sandra Bullock. 
Year One: How do you put Jack Black and a bunch of other reasonably funny people together and wind up with...this? 
Wedded bliss: The Hangover concerns a bachelor party gone awry. But what does it ultimately say about tying the knot? 
Betty White: Seen here in a much-previewed scene with Sandra Bullock in The Proposal, she hasn't slowed down a bit, and it's a very good thing. 
The Hangover: We could make a horrible joke about how it's hanging over at the box office, but we won't. At all. Really! 
Mythical species: If seeing what's attractive about Adam Lambert is what it takes to be a cougar, then cougars don't exist. 
The Taking Of Pelham 123: Can you pick out the bad guy in this picture? Yeah, we thought so. 
Will Ferrell: Don't start writing his career obituary just yet. 
A plea to Pixar: Up is so good; can you turn your attention to a different kind of hero? 
Joss Whedon: You might think you couldn't remake Buffy without him, but somebody thinks you can. 
Long-running fictional characters: Sure, there are a lot of candidates, but who takes the prize? 
The weekend is coming: Is Night At The Museum: Battle For The Smithsonian the movie you'd most carefully avoid, or would you go another way? 
Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon: Not actually a Harvard symbologist. 
Aziz Ansari: If this man tells you he has 25,000 Twitter followers, you should believe him. 
American Gladiators: It's clear that you can't make the movie without the padded jousting weapons, right? 
Star Trek: The new J.J. Abrams film is only one of a recent spate of successful origin stories that advance the story by retreating. 
Do leaks matter?: This weekend's release of Wolverine provides at least one data point. 
Wolverine: He may be powerful, but he is not the man for every job. 
The power of Beyoncé: Obsessed made a lot of money this weekend, so if you're following the fortunes of badly-reviewed movies, add it to your list. 
Box-office numbers: Are we really walking away from good movies? We take a look at the evidence. 
17 Again: Maybe it's just us, but that actually doesn't sound that whimsical. 
Snake news, from us to you: We have a few concerns about a news story you need to hear before you travel again. 
Hannah Montana: The Movie: Be yourself! Well, maybe. Or possibly not. Who's to know, when you're Miley Cyrus either way? 
Adventureland: It's a lovely movie, but it follows a most unfortunate trend. 
Fast & Furious: They didn't spend too much time coming up with that title, did they? Perhaps it will become a trend. 
Doubt: The opportunity to hear the directing choices explained makes the film worth another look. 
John Cho 
Seth Rogen: Things are looking up, even as he portrays a blue blob. 
The Tauntaun sleeping bag: Sadly, it's only a joke. For now. 
Seeing in three dimensions...or not: A major studio and a major theater chain play a game of "I'm not paying for the glasses; I thought you were paying for the glasses." 
James Franco: Seen here on MTV's Total Request Live last fall, he's teaming up again with Pineapple Express's Danny McBride. 
Drew Barrymore: Is her romantic-comedy reputation greater than her track record? 
The movie ticket: Still an alluring purchase, even for a cash-strapped public 
Monsters vs. Aliens: DreamWorks Animation has reason to believe audiences are at least interested in 3D technology; how long will their interest last? 
Duplicity: It's a better movie than you might think; is that saying too much? 
The blog debate: Variety may be responsible for a debate better than it entirely deserves. 
Watchmen: Does there always have to be a movie? 
Viola Davis: Her dress doesn't seem controversial enough to spark such a strange discussion. 
Oscar: This statue is waiting for Sunday night's ceremony and not, as it might appear, waiting to get married. 
Benjamin Button: The rarely active, usually acted-upon central character is only one of his story's major problems. 
Milk: Might this man have a more uplifting story than even an instant millionaire? 
The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button: Who cares? (Sorry, too blunt?) 
Movie romances: Mash them up; watch them spin. 
Watchmen: There are plenty of good reasons to read it before you see the movie. 
Netflix: Is it a recession-proof marriage of cheap DVD-by-mail and cheap online streaming? 
Matt Damon: So, not an Octopussy guy, then? 
The "poverty porn" problem: A man in actual India walks by a poster depicting movie India. Is there a problem here? 
Live chat: This is not the preferred way of participating in our live chat with NPR's Bob Mondello tomorrow. 
Hotel For Dogs: Hotels good. Dogs good. And yet? 
The Wrestler: One of a few films about which the Golden Tomatoes have something to say. 
American Teen: It's worth seeing the DVD, just for the terrible performances the documentary subjects (including "popular girl" Megan Krizmanich) give in an artificial environment. 
