Memorial Day Weekend - I guess those silly billboards that looked like jeans ads worked

Full top 10 behind the jump


This is the big one, folks. And I’m not just talking about the banner weekend for X-Men: The Last Stand, I’m talking about the weekend as a whole. Memorial Day Weekend is an essential part of the movie industry’s diet, what elevates them from an ordinary bloated heathen to the gargantuan tub of sloth and vice we all so aspire to emulate.

With that extra day of no work and no school, with those college kids starting to trickle home with smelly laundry and nothing to do for three months, this is the weekend, along with the 4th of July, Thanksgiving, and the last week of the year, that we as Americans have a sacred duty to plow through the turnstiles and keep these hard-working multinational execs in blow for another few months.

In that combination of Indian poker and drunken jig known as movie scheduling, this is a weekend where you have to stake out your territory in advance. It is such a monumental accumulation of fear that it passes a kind of anxiety event horizon and transforms into a kind of gentleman’s etiquette – once one movie is firmly established as the wide opener for Memorial Day, the other studios stay back and allow it to do its magic. And the X-Men delivered.

1. X-Men: The Last Stand
Weekend Take: $120.1M
Current Domestic Total: $120.1M

First, as a personal rant – after keeping the budget thumbscrews so tight on Bryan Singer (one of those “talented filmmakers” you hear about sometimes) for the first two editions in this franchise (the first was delivered for a downright flinty $75M or so), why in God’s name does 20th Century Fox give over $200M to Brett Ratner, filmmaking’s equivalent of a birthday party magician?

Realize – the $45.5M penciled in as an estimate for Friday’s gross is the third biggest day for any movie at the domestic box office. Ever. Sure, that doesn’t take inflation into account, but it’s an impressive number no matter how you filter it. But on a budget of over $200M, this extraordinary weekend still might not be enough to provide a comfortable profit margin. Doesn’t that sound…what’s that word…stupid?

I’m not trying to deny reality – the third X-Men movie busted the box office wide open, absolutely punking The Da Vinci Code in the process. And with the mixed-to-positive reviews and the added incentive of a decisive trilogy ending preceding the launch of individual character spin-offs, they’re likely to have enough momentum to get into some acceptably rarefied air. But every year the math is plain but somehow unavoiadble – the most expensive movies have climbed to such dizzying cost, and continue to climb further, that they literally must become one of the biggest hits in the history of the business just to avoid failure. If you had withheld $30M from X-Men: The Last Stane, not only would it still have had a higher budget available than the Poseidon re-make, you could have also afforded to produce a Brokeback Mountain, two Lost in Translation-s, a Fargo and still had enough left over to make a Saw for the kids. And doesn’t that sound, from an investment standpoint, hell, a taste standpoint, like a smarter, more diversified way of spending your money?

2. The Da Vinci Code
Weekend Take: $43M
Current Domestic Total: $145.5M

One of the side effects of the Memorial Day Weekend – with its inclusion of Monday’s tally plus the general rising-tide-lifts-all-boats phenomenon – is that the usual rules for drop-offs don’t apply. Which is a sigh of relief for the makers of The Da Vinci Code, because those artificial boosts, and the attention paid to X-Men’s gargantuan numbers, help to obscure its unsettling downward momentum.

What these numbers say is that the audience is less reliable than they were hoping, more affected by the negative critical response and bring-on-the-next-bauble mentality of the summer movie season. These will not be the faithful, discriminating viewers that sustain it at the multiplexes through those hot and heavily-contested months. This movie’s being chucked down the well. Thankfully, they grabbed enough cash up front to cushion the fall. Breaking $200M domestic is a long shot but not inconceivable, and there’s a particularly robust contribution from our friends overseas for this one.

3. Over the Hedge
Weekend Take: $35.3M
Current Domestic Total: $84.4M

What last week was a worrisome soft open turns, this week, into an ingenious stroke of counter-programming. Anyone who didn’t feel like squeezing in for the mutant smackdown had a gentle and appealing family product to turn to. Even just looking at the 3-Day numbers, this critter’s demonstrating legs, enough to allay the fears I mentioned last week of audiences losing faith with the Dreamworks Animation shop.

4. Mission: Impossible III
Weekend Take: $8.6M
Current Domestic Total: $115.8M

Against my expectations, MI: III is clinging to enough of an audience that it might yet heave itself, gasping, through the $122M over/under barrier I set a couple of weeks ago. I’m sure this is a tremendous relief to Tom Cruise – wait, I forgot, OT-7’s don’t actually worry about anything, since they can manipulate time and space with their will alone. This movie has flopped because he wanted it to. Only he, and L. Ron, can understand the fiendish genius behind this.

5. Poseidon
Weekend Take: $7.0M
Current Domestic Total: $46.6M

Poseidon shared MI: III’s softer descent this weekend, which still fails to be good news. But with a disaster like this, you take all the not-quite-as-cataclysmic-as-it-could-have-been news that you can get. Not to mention, all the people responsible for making this lousy movie will work again and be very well paid for it, and how often in corporate America can you spend $160 Million on a failed initiative and enjoy that result? Actually, don’t answer that, I’m likely to be disappointed, aren’t I?

6. RV
Weekend Take: $5.3M
Current Domestic Total: $57.2M

Our lesson for the week – audiences clearly see Robin Williams with a family as being a more compelling disaster than whole heaps of movie stars on a sinking ship.

7. See No Evil
Weekend Take: $3.2M
Current Domestic Total: $9.2M

Just like the release window for horror movies has, through sheer ubiquity, become basically immune to season, so has their usual quick-burn box office trajectory. The attention deficit crowd is in the process of moving on, the filmmakers have their money, and everyone’s happy except the actors whose characters didn’t survive for a sequel.

8. Just My Luck
Weekend Take: $2.3M
Current Domestic Total: $13.9M

This movie has performed so badly – if only it had a title that lent itself to jokes about its own disastrous ineptitude. It would make my job as a non-professional rude blogging jerk commentator so much simpler.

9. United 93
Weekend Take: $1.1M
Current Domestic Total: $29.9M

It would have been crass to expect Universal to try and lure audiences into theatres for this project on Memorial Day Weekend. But perhaps more importantly, it would have been a serious misjudgment about how Americans like to spend this holiday – Honoring our Nation’s Saintly Dead by getting ripped to the tits and watching Indy Cars crash into walls.

10. An American Haunting
Weekend Take: $0.9M
Current Domestic Total: $14.9M

It’s a stark sign of how limited the movie-going appetite is on this weekend to see just how few dollars it takes to come in at number 10. You might see a number like this in January, but on a four-day weekend in May? People wanted entertainment, and thus concentrated their money with great intensity on those few titles that would provide.

Click for Full Post

Boxes

Yesterday morning I woke up thinking the world was coming to an end, or I had been transported to the Mirror Universe where Hollywood has remained a violent slum instead of the artsy and genteel slum it is now. The power was out, and I heard heavy footsteps and panicked voices and the squawk of walkie-talkies outside my door. Ugly drips of yellowed water fell from my ceiling, and there was a frantic knock at my door.

My head was still half-dreaming, so I was considering the full range of possibilities from earthquake to zombie plague. A young woman was there, urgently asking: “Are you the manager? ARE YOU THE MANAGER?!”

No

“My car’s blocked in! I can’t get out!”

She rushed off. I changed out of my pajama punts and stumbled down the back stairwell, admiring the emergency lights. A team of firefighters was in the lobby, trying to pry open the elevator door.

All of this has a simple explanation. There was a power outage in the neighborhood, which trapped people in the elevator and froze the parking garage gates on what happened to be finals day over at USC. And somewhere up on the fifth floor, someone’s fish tank broke, leaking water out of the filter into the floor, where it wended a lonely wandering path down towards my light fixtures.

This meant the amount of water was finite, even though it started dripping again at 4:30 last night, forcing me to stir from a Xanax-haze and perform a rubber-legged silent comedy walk to drag the trash can back under it. A pool of it’s still sitting on the cheap plastic under my bathroom fluorescents – I warned the maintenance man about it, since as of this weekend it’s not my problem anymore.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say the building was trying to get rid of me. In a way it’s a rather elegant conclusion, paralleling my first week here – when the power was off and my parking space blocked and I couldn’t find the manager either. And what would be a last fling in this pad without firemen lumbering around? Not a month’s gone by without one of those delightful false alarms.

Still, even as I pack and stack and pull nails and heave out Hefty bags of old files and obsolete scripts drafts, I’ve started feeling like a screenwriter again in the last couple of days. I’ve finally wrapped up and delivered a new set of comedy pitches to my agent and a manager I’ve been doing a tentative mating dance with. That’s one roadblock out of the way of the tasks I’ve wanted to get to – i.e. finishing the new script, revising an old one I’m going to need as a sample soon, and whipping that treatment into shape while people are still enthusiastic about it. I’m not sure yet how I’m going to be keeping my hours in this new arrangement (my friends know what I’m talking about), but it’s always a boost to remind yourself that your goals are concrete and compartmentable, not just a terrifying smoke-mass of Responsibilities. You might think you’re in the Great Breakdown – but it’s really just a blown transformer and a bad aquarium gasket, and none of it can really stand in the way of what you want to do. Or must do.

Click for Full Post

MOVIE REVIEW - Over the Hedge

Full review behind the jump

Over the Hedge
Directors: Tim Johnson and Karey Kirkpatrick
Writers: Characters by Michael Fry and T. Lewis, Screenplay by Len Blum and Lorne Cameron & David Hoselton and Karey Kirkpatrick
Producer: Bonnie Arnold
Featuring the vocal talents of: Bruce Willis, Garry Shandling, Steve Carell, Wanda Sykes, William Shatner, Nick Nolte, Thomas Haden Church, Allison Janney, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Avril Lavigne


Simpsons creator Matt Groening has said that one of his rules of thumb for the design of a cartoon character is – would you recognize them by their silhouette? And you could certainly pick Bart Simpson’s grocery bag hairdo or Mr. Burns’ predatory stoop off of lines alone, so let it not be said the man doesn’t practice what he preaches.

I was thinking of this wisdom while watching Over the Hedge – a new comedy from Dreamworks Animation which is charming enough in its own right. But unlike with the inimitably-shaped Shrek, if you were to put its hero in silhouette, I wouldn’t think: “Hey, it’s RJ!” I’d think – “That looks like a cartoon raccoon”. And the turtle looks like a cartoon turtle and the possums look like cartoon possums – although in deference to Le Pew’s Law of Cartoon Mammal Coloring, the skunk can pass for a cat when you cover up its stripe.

I can see broad types in the body shapes and facial expressions of our critter heroes, but I don’t see a high standard of individuality. I don’t see a truly loving level of detail. I don’t see character, and that flaw permeates the whole picture, forcing the other elements to work harder to entertain. A talented voice cast and smartly-timed direction makes this a worthwhile amusement, but it is held back from being more.

The story, too, is an exercise in function over form – it frustrates me when filmmakers treat children like miniature development executives, as if they need to be provided a letter-perfect checklist of emotional character arcs and ticking clock deadlines, pitched at the lowest threshold of comprehension and with all surprise surgically-removed. RJ (Bruce Willis), a resourceful loner of a raccoon, accidentally destroys the hibernation food stash of surly bear Vincent – Nick Nolte voices Vincent and sounds rather marvelously like he’s gargling a mix of molasses and sharp rocks. So RJ has exactly one week to replace Vincent’s food to avoid becoming the replacement himself. While he’s a savvy scavenger with an enlightened understanding of the human animal as a food source, and has trumped Darwin by mastering the use of tools without opposable thumbs, he’s lacking in manpower to get the job done by his deadline.

Enter a little family of “foragers” led by the steady worry-wart turtle Vern (Garry Shandling). While they slept through the winter, their woods were bulldozed in the name of suburban sprawl, and now a tall, intimidating hedge cuts off their tiny green space from a flat expanse of McMansions and SUVs.

Vern sees doom, and wants to ignore it and set to work gathering this year’s store of bark and nuts and berries. RJ sees opportunity, and sells them on the quick-fix pleasures of human-made junk food. Hammy (Steve Carrell), a squirrel already on a perpetual sugar high, is particularly persuaded. Of course, their increasingly-bold expeditions into Yuppie territory attract some unwanted attention, including a pest-control expert with a truck full of lethal gadgets who calls himself The Verminator (Thomas Haden Church).

I could go on about the point where RJ has second thoughts about abusing the help of his new friends, or about Vern’s sense of being supplanted as the parent figure of the group, but you can really sketch it all in for yourselves. The success or failure of Over the Hedge is fixed on the amount of wit and flair can be glopped onto the well-sanded edges of its perfunctory plot. And there’s enough of both to go around, Carrell’s calibrated mix of high-speed shouting and desperate whimpers is a constant source of smiles; and William Shatner, in what amounts to a clever bit of stunt casting, voices a possum who takes the art of playing dead to scenery-chewing extremes.

And there’s jokes a-plenty about the dire chemical contents of our snack staples, and our dependence on sugar and caffeine and our culture of conspicuous consumption. Over the Hedge seems afraid to go the distance, though, and actually say the stuff is bad for us, because we can’t be offending promotional partners, can we? No, nobody ever really sticks up for Vern and his dull old nuts and berries, those cans of potato-product chips are just too addictively-scrumptious!

I don’t want to damn with faint praise, but what else can I do with descriptors like “pleasant” and “likeable”? As contrast, note your emotional reaction to First Flight, an absolutely enchanting short written and directed by Cameron Hood and Kyle Jefferson that’s running in front of the main feature. With no spoken dialogue and animation that’s comfortably removed from the bleeding edge of technology, it tells a brief and simple story about a little bird that brightens the life of a depressed businessman, and shows how effortlessly something with heart and imagination can still summon laughter and tears in mere seconds. Does Over the Hedge do the same at ten times the length? It’ll be fun for the kids and enjoyable enough for the grown-ups, but the answer is no.

Click for Full Post

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - The Day After Tomorrow

Originally posted 6/4/04
Full review behind the jump

The Day After Tomorrow
Director: Roland Emmerich
Writers: Roland Emmerich and Jeffrey Nachmanoff, from a story by Roland Emmerich
Producers: Roland Emmerich, Mark Gordon
Stars: Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Emmy Rossum, Sela Ward, Ian Holm


In Independence Day we had aliens to fight against, which involved zooming around in planes and spaceships and cracking jokes. So even though the human death toll was in the millions, if not billions, we could still have some fun watching it.

But in The Day After Tomorrow, the bogeyman is cold air, and really not much can be done in the face of that but freeze in it and die. Not so many chuckles there.

So I find myself applying Bizarro-world logic to another story about the death of billions – should I be having fun with this? Dennis Quaid, in the role of rugged “paleoclimatalogist” Dr. Jack Hall, sure doesn’t crack many smiles as he trudges across the icy wasteland that used to be the Northeastern United States. Has Roland Emmerich made a Serious Movie?

The answer is no, he’s made another Big Dumb Blockbuster, as is his stock-in-trade, but has chosen for it a subject matter that doesn’t lend itself to the kind of zesty guilty pleasure we took from Independence Day or Stargate. Despite occasional flashes of gallows wit, this is an ill-fitted movie, doofy summer entertainment playing dress-up.

As we open, Dr. Hall and his loyal sidekicks – you know the type, jocular wise-cracking buddies who stay by our hero’s side because, it would seem, they have no family or friends of their own – are conducting some research in Antarctica when suddenly a chunk of their ice shelf the size of Rhode Island shears off, with the crack forming right in the middle of their camp, naturally.

We then cut to New Delhi, where it’s incongruously snowing, and Dr. Hall is delivering a stern warning to various important-looking people about the dangers of global warming triggering a new ice age. But how could warming cause an ice age? some of them chuckle with the same scoffing tone creationists use to show how contemptibly absurd an idea it is that a man could evolve from an ape. They are so oblivious to Dr. Hall’s explanations that I half expected one of the dignitaries to suddenly interrupt with – please, Dr. Hall, what are these “polar ice caps” you speak of?

This movie counts on its audience knowing the broad strokes of the global warming phenomenon – that “greenhouse gases”, pollutants trapped in our atmosphere, will warm the Earth, melting polar ice caps, flooding coasts and radically changing our climate. Armed with this, we are invited us to mock naysayers like the scowling, bespectacled Vice-President (Kenneth Walsh), who for purposes of making a point with subtlety might be named “Rick Craney”, “Nick Haney”, or simply “Vice-President Greedy Oil Tycoon Ratf***er.” IMDB lists his name as “Vice President Becker”.

Of course, Dr. Hall is even more right than he realizes – what science tells us would be disastrous occurring over the course of decades soon unfolds on-screen in a matter of days. Tornadoes carve up Los Angeles, giant hailstones pummel the citizens of Tokyo, and torrential rains cause flooding in New York, where it just so happens Hall’s son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Laura Chapman (Emmy Rossum) the ravishing braniac he’s sweet on, are competing in a national scholastic Decathlon.

Roland Emmerich is most comfortable in the kind of movie where an actor looks at an innocuous computer monitor, then suddenly…something…starts…blinking! and the actor’s face pales in horror and bass notes thoom away on the soundtrack. In this movie, most of that task falls to Ian Holm as Terry Rapson, who is in a lonely monitoring station in Scotland when it all starts to go bad.

As he phones Dr. Hall every so often to remind him, the North-Atlantic Current has been disrupted, which creates three “superstorms” – land-bound hurricane-like blizzards whose central eye funnels super-cold air directly downward from the upper-reaches of the atmosphere like some ghastly freeze ray. People caught in it ice over and perish in mere seconds, and one of them is headed straight for New York. Holm plays most of his part with the same look of poignant, dignified sadness he probably got as soon as he was offered the role and realized there was no way in the world he was going to be alive by the end of the script.

Briefing the White House with the shocking news that just about everyone in the Northern half of the country is a write-off, and the rest need to evacuate to Mexico (which, in a moment of satisfying irony, causes Mexico to close the border and panicked American families to try and sneak across), Hall then decides that the best thing for him to do is set out, on foot, to reach his son.

After all, he has made a promise. To rescue him? No, not really, since he won’t be taking along a helicopter or ice skiff or anything. Was the promise to bring supplies? Well, beyond Hall’s own survival gear, not really that either. But he did promise to come for him. See, Dr. Hall is that heroically sad father who realizes now, with the world going mad, that he just spent too much time at work.

And so we watch Dr. Hall and his sidekicks shuffling towards the frozen, half-submerged towers of Manhattan, while Sam and Laura, holed up with survivors in the Public Library, exchange cute factoids and flirt awkwardly. This is one of those movies where half the planet dies in varied horrible ways – one reporter is smacked into oblivion by one of LA’s famous “Angelyne” billboards – but we’re happy because the pretty people lived, and were generous enough to let some funny character actors share the fireplace with them along the way.

We get a few good chuckles – what’s not to love about a climactic Presidential address being carried on the Weather Channel? But at the end of the day, even the heroic Dr. Hall has no better advice than take cover and try to wait it out. Despite some extraordinary visual effects and the charismatic presences of our leads, that’s just not the type of message to get me excited in a movie this big.

Click for Full Post

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Troy

Originally posted 6/2/04
Full review behind the jump

Troy
Director: Wolfgang Petersen
Writer: David Benioff, inspired by Homer’s The Iliad
Producers: Wolfgang Petersen, Diana Rathbun, Colin Wilson
Stars: Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, Orlando Bloom, Diane Kruger, Brian Cox, Peter O’Toole, Sean Bean, Brendan Gleeson, Saffron Burrows, Rose Byrne

At the beginning of Troy, when the armies of Thessaly take the field opposite the armies of Greek city-states under King Agamemnon (Brian Cox), a little boy in the row in front of me, probably 5-6 years old, asked his dad with burning curiosity – which ones are the good guys?

The father had no easy answer. The closest thing to an answer comes in the movie’s key scene: Agamemnon, who united the Grecian cities by explaining with a smile that there’ll be less bloodshed all around if they just accept his rule, has been beaten back from his first assault at the impregnable city of Troy.

Their original motive for this war has been rendered tragically moot, and the King is heavy with grief. And yet they’ve sailed all this way with this massive army, and after all, now he has something new to avenge. For Agamemnon, who understands only power and the perception of it, the reasons keep changing but the goal has always remained the same. Troy must be conquered.

Odysseus (Sean Bean), whose wisdom will in time solve the problem of Troy’s fortress walls, points out that the men will not take well continuing to die in great numbers for shifting purposes. But, Agamemnon rebuts, to leave now is to appear vulnerable. Enemies might be emboldened. The security of all Greece is now at stake, he concludes.

And so we have perhaps the largest war epic in recent memory in which neither side is really the good guys, though each has an equal share of beautiful movie stars in their ranks. In that scene in the tent, we hear underneath the dialogue awful questions which ring familiar to us today – how did we get to this point, where there seems to be no bloodless end in sight? And are the reasons we’re here now enough to demand that so many keep dying? Do we even have a choice?

This is admirable, because The Iliad never was about which side was good or bad. Each side had heroes and cowards, virtues and tragic weaknesses, and each side had gods urging them on. The point was how particular motives and characteristics under these circumstances created a cataclysm the likes of which still seems unimaginable to us today.

It is also challenging, because it is difficult to feel many emotions except two – excitement at the extraordinary spectacle that unfolds, and sorrow at the misery and pain which seems so needless, yet so tragically inevitable. We have in Troy a curiously remote epic, impressive in many aspects yet not so stirring as we might be accustomed to.

As we open, Greece’s powerful neighbor Troy is making peace with long-time rival Sparta, where Agamemnon’s younger brother Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson) is King. But as Paris (Orlando Bloom), younger son of Trojan King Priam (Peter O’Toole) makes moony eyes at Menelaus’ wife Helen (Diane Kruger), and the two slip away to admire each other’s well-moisturized skin, we can tell that peace will be short lived.

Paris’ looks and passion-above-all tunnel vision are intoxicating to Helen – and so she abandons her doubts and is snuck aboard the departing Trojan ship. The young, beautiful couple have no realistic idea of how they’re going to get away with it, and Paris’ warrior brother Prince Hector (Eric Bana) realizes with full fury the course his impetuous brother has set for them.

Those with knowledge of this story will be wondering where the Gods are during all of this, since according to myth they played a very active role in Paris and Helen’s courtship. But, perhaps fearing the memory of Clash of the Titans, the filmmakers keep the Gods off-stage. Their existence is hardly a matter of debate to the characters, we just are spared the sight of them up on Mt. Olympus, carrying on their feuds and intervening from time to time.

The decision could also be one of practicality – it’s daunting to think of reducing The Iliad to a single movie, and even at over 2 ½ hours it often feels like we’re getting the Cliffs Notes version of the story. The war that in Homer’s version took years seems to take, for our purposes, all of about 3 weeks.

Not that we are short on action. Once those 1,000 ships sail we are treated to battles both mammoth and intimate – crowds of thousands clashing with sword and spear, then suddenly (almost absurdly, in one instance) ceasing so two of the big ticket names can go mano-a-mano. The one between Achilles (Brad Pitt) and Hector is a humdinger.

Achilles is the mightiest warrior of his time, he specializes in a nasty trick where he leaps up and sinks his sword down through your shoulder, piercing your heart. He and his Myrmidons are unmatched in combat, and he has devoted his life to achieving the only thing, in his mind, worth achieving – immortality through deeds so astonishing that the world will always remember his name. Even though he is told that sailing for Troy means giving up hope of a family, and spells doom for him, he goes; not for Greece, or the King he despises, but because it holds the glory he’s longed for.

These are tricky characters, because they are afforded little in the way of modern motivation, and their dialogue sometimes works at cross-purposes to this. But director Petersen has invested as heavily in talent as he has in effects, and it pays off. Peter O’Toole, one of the last of his generation of brilliant, hell-raising British thespians, has an extraordinary scene with Achilles where he seems to bear the tragedy of the whole war as an extension of a father’s loss, and comes down from his royal station to beg a courtesy from the soldier.

And kudos too for Orlando Bloom, who sheds the heroic, unflappable Legolas and essays a callow youth with no clue how foolish his romantic declarations sound. He shows full colors of petulance and cowardice before finally growing into something more. How boyish and overmatched he appears when he faces off against Menelaus, it takes courage for an up-and-coming heartthrob to commit to showing such weakness. Eric Bana, watching his every action with a mixture of love and dread, finds a way to bring us in to Hector’s torment at having to resolve his conflicting duties into action.

There’s little to say on the technical side except that the movie delivers; there’s only so much that can be done with swords, spears, and arrows before it grows repetitive. Those vast carpets of men sweeping towards each other are rather jaw-dropping, and Petersen ably flies the camera over them as they brawl. But in the end, it is a transitory excitement, we realize it’s just more potential casualties in a war where heroic deeds occurred, and achieved Achilles’ dream, but heroic purpose was absent.

Click for Full Post

They always want to talk to me

She’s wearing hospital slippers and a stocking cap and has about three miles of white hair. Her face is sun-toasted and she walks with a shuffle. There’s a half-dozen other customers waiting in this Chinese take-out place, but there’s never a moment’s doubt – she’s coming to talk to me.

She shows me her cup. She shows me her Ziploc bag that holds dark yarn and a pink sandal she found in the garbage. She shows me an empty Coca-Cola Zero bottle that she’s taped pictures of the Blue Man Group to. She says one of them’s her son. She points at the “Zero” on the label and tries to win me over to her point of view that One is better than Zero.

She tells me all about the room she lives in, which is very clean, and the house where it is – which is her mother’s house. Only not really, she confides, it’s actually Arnold Schwarzenegger’s mother’s house.

I might not have been so polite or attentive, except that she started the conversation by railing that there’s too many people in this world, and I couldn’t tell what else she had buried in that big bag of hers.

Click for Full Post

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Van Helsing

Originally posted 5/29/04
Full review behind the jump

Van Helsing
Director: Stephen Sommers
Writer: Stephen Sommers
Producer: Stephen Sommers, Bob Ducsay
Stars: Hugh Jackman, Kate Beckinsale, Richard Roxburgh, David Wenham, Shuler Hensley

How cool is that?, writer-director-producer Stephen Sommers seems to be saying with every flourish of overemphatic music, every digital monster leaping into frame, every shot of figures swinging across endless chasms. How cool is that?

I’m sad to say, not very.

It’s not that he lacks for resources. First, he has at his disposal heavyweights of movie-monster-dom like Dracula (Richard Roxburgh), Frankenstein’s Monster (Shuler Hensley), and the Wolfman, plus a cameo by another famous literary beast. One fantasizes about how Godzilla might somehow be invited to the party.

And second, you can see the expense on screen. Cinematographer Allen Daviau (The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun) and production designer Allan Cameron (Willow, and Sommers’ two Mummy movies) lavish the screen with their work. Even the gorgeously-dilapidated windmill Frankenstein’s Monster is chased into by the de rigeur torch-wielding angry mob looks expensive. Whenever smoke and fog were needed, I suspect they simply burned piles of $100 bills.

No, where Sommers fails to make Van Helsing cool is – and this one has a pesky way about it, folks – in his script, which knots itself into an irreconcilable mass of arbitrary fantasy rules that, in the end, fail to prop up the absurd plot.

I can’t even get into many of its convolutions without giving away climactic secrets, but I’ll try. Since when is that the only thing that can kill Dracula? Why is that the only way Dracula’s plan can come into fruition? And where’s the suspense in setting a deadline around the 12th stroke of midnight when you have the slowest-ringing clock ever built?

Anna Valerious (Kate Beckinsale), the last surviving descendent of a family whose ancestors can’t enter heaven until they kill Dracula, strikes a pose and boasts – “nothing can outrun Transylvanian horses!” And you might think - how cool is that?, except that in the very next scene, pretty much everything our heroes were trying to outrun is outrunning the Transylvanian horses. So what was the point?

Anyway, let’s get on with the story. Gabriel Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) is an enforcer for a secret order of the Catholic Church, traveling the globe and vanquishing evil spirits. Since most of the population doesn’t know the people he’s killing are possessed, he’s a wanted man. Posters everywhere show his menacing eyes and snappy hat. My advice is, since that’s all they recognize about you, get a new hat. Then again, if I had a hat that good-looking, I’d probably be reluctant to part with it too.

Call him the Vatican’s James Bond – we even have that chestnut scene where he goes to H.Q., gets his assignment, and picks up his weaponry from the testy comic-relief designer (David Wenham). This time, he’s dispatched to Transylvania, whose economy is clearly based around gathering in angry mobs, they never do anything with their farm tools but wave them menacingly. He’s to help Anna and her brother Velkan (Will Kemp) destroy Dracula and his three brides (Elena Anaya, Silvia Colloca, Josie Maran). This plan eventually involves both the sympathetic Frankenstein’s Monster and the snarling Wolfman.

Van Helsing lost his memory, and keeps doing the Lord’s work in the hopes that he’ll get it back. His ring matches an insignia on a Transylvanian artifact that we are told Will Be Important To The Plot Later, so there’s a chance, on this one, that maybe he’ll learn a bit more about his past. He does, sort of, although as with every detail in this movie, it raises at least as many questions as it answers.

We also begin to wonder just how heroic Van Helsing really is, since he succeeds more through dumb luck and the work of his supporting cast than anything. When the movie is over, we think back and realize that he would never have had a chance to win at all if he hadn’t bungled a prior action sequence.

Jackman proves himself, yet again, to be a true movie star, selling every half-witted line while never seeming to work too hard. He wears the outfit well, and if this is his audition to be the next James Bond, he gets high marks from me. Beckinsale is as beautiful as ever despite her dubious Boris-and-Natasha accent. I think back wistfully to the days of Cold Comfort Farm and hope that someone sees past her looks soon and gives her something worthy of her talents.

But a pre-emptive Golden Raspberry Award must be reserved for Roxburgh, who I thought had already earned himself all-time overacting infamy as The Duke in Moulin Rouge! Here, this graduate of the esteemed Australian National Institute for Dramatic Arts goes beyond Ham, beyond Camp…hell, he goes Beyond Thunderdome. This is scenery-chewing the likes of which we may never see again.

Every so often we cut back to his lair, where he exchanges quips with his ever-whining brides, beats his chest, and moans about his filthy desires. I kept thinking of some bad variety show, or those host segments Elvira used to do around horror movies. With every pseudo-witty rejoinder, I wanted to see an audience of drag queens hooting and cheering. There’s something captivating yet dreadful about it all.

If recent years have taught us nothing, it’s that you can spend millions on digital effects and they’ll still end up looking bad if we’re too bored to do anything but examine them. When Bruce, the mechanical shark, just couldn’t land on the boat the right way in Jaws, Steven Spielberg (who Sommers clearly aspires to emulate) said with confidence that it wouldn’t matter if this shot didn’t look completely realistic, because at this point in the movie, he’d have us. And he was right.

Van Helsing hits overload before ten minutes have even passed, doing its damndest to wow us with set piece after set piece after set piece. And by doing so, it doesn’t have us. Sommers tries to seduce us by shouting pick-up lines for two hours straight with hardly a breath in between, and wisely, we tune out and examine the scenery.

This is not an offensive movie, not some self-important Michael Bay-helmed assault on our senses and intelligence. It simply has the lazy hope to use its “popcorn movie” status to ward off scrutiny of the sloppy, ultimately uninvolving tale it has to tell. How unfortunate is that?

Click for Full Post

MOVIE REVIEW - The Da Vinci Code

Full review behind the jump

The Da Vinci Code
Director: Ron Howard
Writer: Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by Dan Brown
Producers: John Calley, Brian Grazer
Stars: Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellen, Jean Reno, Paul Bettany, Alfred Molina


The Da Vinci Code is an exercise in overkill. Plodding self-seriously through this adaptation of Dan Brown’s bajillion-selling novel, some of Hollywood’s most beloved craftsmen lavish all their boldly middlebrow attentions on it, begging for our approval. Rarely has more love been put towards the task of getting an “A” for effort.

But the final product is just so much overwrought hooey, which should only impress people who’ve never before conceived of a story in which an innocent man might have to go on the run and solve a mystery; or, more shocking still, in which a major character turns out to be not whom he/she seemed! For the rest of the moviegoing masses, we find only a bloated progression of run-and-deduce calisthenics that masks what is essentially a game of ecclesiastical Trivial Pursuit.

This is beneath the talents of so many of its participants, and yet the smell of a box office “sure thing” brings them all to the set, where they determine to furrow their brows and convince us that they don’t find the premise, the characters, or the convolutions of plot to be at all silly. Ron Howard, Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellen, Paul Bettany, Alfred Molina – these are all creative people who’ve made smashingly good films. But, try though they might, they just can’t put this one over.

The plot – just in case you haven’t heard yet – involves a race to find The Holy Grail. Only it’s not the traditional Grail as cup, but rather the Grail as a metaphor for something else entirely. Robert Langdon (Hanks) deals in metaphors as an expert in religious symbology: an amalgam of history, sociology and puzzle-solving that seeks the root message in hallowed squiggles the world over. He is summoned while giving a lecture in Paris to examine a rather elaborately-decorated corpse sullying the polished floors of the Louvre Museum. The deceased (Jean-Pierre Marielle) was an acquaintance of Langdon’s, and after he was shot in the belly by an albino monk (Paul Bettany) – yes, an albino monk, we’ll deal with him in due time – he used his last few minutes on this Earth to arrange a cryptic message.

And so we have the first of many tests this movie will subject you to – can you countenance the image of an octogenarian, bleeding from the gut, dragging himself around the Museum, planting clues, leaving messages in invisible ink, and finally splaying himself naked on the floor and, with his last breaths, painting religious symbols all over his body? If the image of that never once tugged upward at the side of your mouth, reader, you might just survive this film.

This dead man wanted to show Langdon a path to a grave secret, one that he was murdered over. But the lead investigator, Fache (Jean Reno) is convinced that Langdon himself is the killer. Never mind that, through the magic of cross-cutting, it appears to us that Langdon was giving a speech in front of hundreds of witnesses when the murder occurred. Fache’s suspicion sends Langdon on the lam, with only the aid of young “police cryptographer” Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), the deceased’s granddaughter.

And in the course of the next 24 hours there will be car chases, narrow escapes, a visit to a bank of the most supreme discretion, and the revelation of an earth-shattering cover-up so cunningly guarded by the forces of history that Langdon and Sophie must go all the way to Ian McKellen’s country house to have it explained to them over tea.

McKellen (who adds some dearly-needed insouciance) plays Sir Leigh Teabing, an eccentric historian who, with Gnostic texts, fancy computers and a fair dollop of wishful thinking, has concocted a provocative alternate theory about the life and doings of Jesus Christ, and the fallibility of the Church founded by Men in His name. Although he might have skipped all of his research and just Netflixed Kevin Smith’s Dogma, which posits the same theory and has dick jokes, to boot.

Many of the secrets are connected to or conveyed via the art of Leonardo Da Vinci, who is said to have been a member of a secret organization dedicated to protecting and preserving the Grail until the time is right for its revelation. We first learn this when Langdon realizes that a phrase left by his friend the corpse unscrambles into the artist’s name. The other characters are agog at this cognitive feat, as though none of them ever attempted a Jumble in the Sunday paper.

Howard dips once again into the bag of superfluous special effects as he did in A Beautiful Mind – trying to illustrate our hero’s thought process by lighting up letters and painting images into empty spaces. At one point, as our heroes enter a church, the entire landscape around them changes and crowds of people in period dress swirl into existence. The point of these and other re-enactments along the way is primarily to make the movie more expensive and give us something else to look at. It does not serve to make proceedings any more exciting or enlightening.

There is a little action in the course of an exhausting two-and-a-half hours, much of it unnecessarily goofy. It’s usually instigated by Silas, the afore-mentioned albino monk. He works as a psychotic form of muscle for a Bishop (Alfred Molina) who is trying to snuff out the Grail and all its followers. He is, at least, too conspicuous by half as assassins go, given his pallor and the expression of divine agony he wears all the time. Plus his habit of wrapping barbs around his legs and whipping himself after each kill makes him less agile than you might want. Bettany may have cursed this role by playing it too earnestly, thus exposing its naked ridiculousness.

I have not read the book, so I cannot say how faithfully screenwriter Akiva Goldsman – who never met a yarn he couldn’t lop 30 IQ points off of – has adapted it. If this is genuinely what all the fuss has been about, I can see that there’s a combination of pulp and clearly-explicated arcana that might in book form make, not great literature, but bracing distraction. The Da Vinci Code might be a victim of its own success, binding the filmmakers to an ultimately destructive fidelity. Surely someone along the way heard a little voice in their head whispering – “they’re going to laugh you out of the theatre for that one.” They should have listened.

Click for Full Post

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Laws of Attraction

Originally posted 5/15/04
Full review behind the jump

Laws of Attraction
Director: Peter Howitt
Writers: Aline Brosh McKenna and Robert Harling, from a story by Aline Brosh McKenna
Producers: David T. Friendly, Marc Turteltaub, Beau St. Clair, Julie Durk, David Bergstein
Stars: Pierce Brosnan, Julianne Moore, Michael Sheen, Parker Posey, Frances Fisher, Nora Dunn


Who are these people? I shouldn’t be so confused about the desires and emotions of the lead characters of Laws of Attraction, especially since it goes to the trouble of thumping me over the head with them every two or three minutes. The only rational conclusion is that they aren’t behaving like human beings. The movie is a much more relaxing experience once you’ve decided that.

Let’s start with their jobs. Both Daniel Rafferty (Brosnan) and Audrey Woods (Julianne Moore) are billed as divorce attorneys who’ve “never lost a case!” I may be ignorant, of course, but since divorce settlements are often about negotiation and grudging compromise, wouldn’t the win-lose dynamic not apply in a great number of cases? Maybe they just skip those cases to pad their record.

We meet Woods “tagging along” and taking surreptitious notes while her mother (Frances Fisher) tours the expensive townhouse of her latest target. Then, having lunch afterwards, she says something which amounts to “Yes! This information is just what I need to succeed at the big, important case which I, a divorce lawyer, am undertaking.”

Never mind that her mother knows both her profession and the purpose of their subterfuge. The information is for us. I half-expected the screen to freeze and a guy to walk in front of it and say “See how successful she is? You too can become a high-powered divorce attorney like this, by following our series of 10 easy lessons!

The nicest way I can say it is that Laws of Attraction has been made for people who don’t watch many movies, and need everything pointed out to them in big neon signs.

These two beautiful, unattached people wind up opposing each other frequently in the courtroom and the press – which in this movie has nothing better to do than obsess over the movements of divorce attorneys. In the process, these perpetual opponents gradually discover that…well, do I really need to finish that sentence?

See that Moore starts out with one of those wound-within-an-inch-of-their-lives hair buns, the type that looks like a plug to stop your brains from leaking out. Get it? She’s uptight. Then after Brosnan coerces her into one shot of liquor, impulsively she decides to try and drink him under the table, then has sex with him. The next day, talking to her mother, her hair is down. Her mouth says she has absolutely, positively no interest in this cad, this sly dog. But we know differently. We’re looking at her hair.

And how about that drunk impulsiveness? It later leads to them actually getting married – well, kind of, after which they agree to kind of act married (for the sake of that too-curious press), which leads to them kind of falling in love, again. The movie’s frequently-espoused moral is – whatever you do when you’re off your nut is how you actually feel, and if you don’t go along with it, you’re a big quitter.

Woods is constantly lunging towards Rafferty then retreating before she learns this lesson. It gets to the point that we become suspicious of yet another dewy-eyed close-up with Touching Music – we raise an eyebrow at the movie and ask - okay, so is she in love with him now? It’s astonishing how exhausting this becomes, particularly since the movie is only 87 minutes long.

Brosnan as Rafferty, however, gives us no such doubts. He seems to be in love with Woods before, technically, they’ve even met, and stays affixed to that. He expresses this love by frequently humiliating her, often in public – this is the typical way career-driven movie heroines are punished until their resistance crumbles. But Brosnan is charming enough to be forgiven since at least, we decide, he’s moving the story forward. Moore is shockingly devoid of the charisma which would ordinarily be Brosnan’s equal. Either she’s simply drowned in the effort to play an inconceivable character, or she’s been replaced by a Pod Person.

Not so hindered, though, are the supporting characters, who score the laughs while the leads are having an off night. Fisher is marvelously sassy. Michael Sheen and Parker Posey play a horndog rock star and his flighty clothing designer wife who retain those “never lose” divorce attorneys – both are so fantastically spoiled and obnoxious that the screen crackles to life at their appearance. And Brendan Morrissey is nearly worth the price of admission by himself in one scene as Mr. O’Callaghan, who explains in a very Irish way that, just because it’s Tuesday and he’s here, doesn’t necessarily mean he’s here on Tuesdays.

This happens during a long Irish sojourn that happens perhaps because so many romantic comedies happen in New York that they’ve run out of romantic locations. Ireland performs beautifully, as expected. Ed Shearmur provides the musical score, which sounds sly and ingratiating until the opening credits end, and thereafter behaves like oversized emotional cue cards.

It becomes jarring how wide the gap is between what we’re being told to feel and what we actually feel. It’s not that the movie is bad, it’s simply doomed from takeoff because of flawed design. Laws of Attraction begins life as someone going – isn’t that a great idea for a movie? And unfortunately, they went ahead and made it before someone had time to say - no, it isn’t.

Click for Full Post

May 19-21: Making museums cool again

Full top 10 examination behind the jump

The summer movie season is finally upon us, and it only would have been an enormous surprise if The Da Vinci Code hadn’t provided that decisive mass burst through the turnstiles. Sony can be particularly proud that, in the face of blistering reviews, with a movie that was neither animated nor spawned by a comic book, they still rang up a monster of an opening weekend. Of course, it’s not like they spared the ammo, considering Ron Howard behind the camera, Tom Hanks in front of it, and the most popular/controversial novel of the last bajillion years on the marquee.

The corollary to the story is the wrecking ball effect the two big openers of the week had on the rest of the field. Box office holdovers suffered vertiginous plunges from their numbers of the previous week, some as much as 60-70%, which is the multiplex equivalent of terminal velocity. The results were not pretty, as Ice Age: The Meltdown, Stick It, Goal! The Dream Begins, Scary Movie 4, Silent Hill and Hoot (with a particularly terrifying 81.5% drop) all got fitted for cement shoes by the kingpin Da Vinci.

1. The Da Vinci Code
Weekend Take: $77.1M
Current Domestic Total: $77.1M

An opening like this is essentially critic-proof. On Da Vinci’s budget, Sony is all but guaranteed to hit the sort of numbers that would normally spell profitability. I stress “normally”. What remains to be seen is what effect the poisonous word-of-mouth and critical response has on audience degradation in the next two weeks. Normally the demographic appeal of this movie would promise a longer life, but the summer season is not forgiving, and the rush of enthusiasm that created this weekend’s victory may prove to represent more of this movie’s total audience than the bean counters would hope. Between Howard, Hanks, producer Brian Grazer and writer Akiva Goldsman, you’ve got a whole cage full of 800-pound gorillas who will get their gross profit participation. This sets the comfort level for domestic gross much higher than normal.

Today the bosses are happy. They couldn’t have asked for much better. Tomorrow they’ll start to sweat all over again.


2. Over the Hedge
Weekend Take: $38.5M
Current Domestic Total: $38.5M

Dreamworks Animation has grown itself with speed and ambition and can now effectively release two major movies to theatres each year. Although they might now be comparing these numbers to the opening numbers of last year’s Madagascar ($47.2M, for those who don’t want to chase it down), and wondering if it wasn’t too much talent dilution too soon. It’s devilishly hard to keep introducing new franchises and make each one’s characters and premise distinct and appealing enough. Witness the creative and financial flameout Disney Animation suffered when it graduated to annual releases of more careless product; and by contrast, the far more measured growth of Pixar as an animation franchise, and how memorable each new arrival from their factory is. Dreamworks may be leaning too far the Disney way.

It’s harder still when you continue banking on the ephemeral drawing power of celebrity voices. This is still a solid number, and with the usual trajectory of a family movie of this size they should have a respectable hit on their hands when the last chips are counted. Plus, they had heavy competition this week, so I’m anticipating soft drops in the next couple of weekends. But the trends are certainly moving in the wrong direction for the company. That next Shrek movie will come along at just the right time.

3. Mission: Impossible III
Weekend Take: $11.3M
Current Domestic Total: $103.5M

Although the money’s still good enough for third place, what you’re seeing now is a franchise bleeding out. M:I-III couldn’t hold its ground in the wake of Da Vinci’s arrival, and was flung aside like Tom Cruise was by that missile in all those expensive but fruitless trailers. It’s about time to place your “under” bets for my over/under prediction of $122M domestic from last week.

4. Poseidon
Weekend Take: $9.2M
Current Domestic Total: $36.8M

Just like there’s no nice way to spin a sucking chest wound, there’s no way to put a smile on a 58.4% second weekend drop. It’s worse when your first weekend was such a dog. Poseidon is a big enough disaster that it might even distract people from writing about the financial failure of Mission: Impossible III. But do you think this will stop the re-make chuck wagon from continuing to roll through town? It won’t even slow down.

5. RV
Weekend Take: $5.0M
Current Domestic Total: $50.3M

R.V. brought in enough money in its first month that this shedding of business comes too late to cause real alarm. It should come in for a soft landing out of the top 10 in a couple more weeks, its quiet and sane path to box office success a lesson studio heads are sure to ignore completely.

6. See No Evil
Weekend Take: $4.6M
Current Domestic Total: $4.6M

Vince McMahon’s new WWE Films label stuck with a safe bet for their first time flying solo, putting one of their glowering man-mountains into a horror movie with a bunch of teens. Opening that’s as close to a no-brainer as this town offers. It didn’t break out of the genre box a la Saw but it will turn a profit and build brand awareness for their next effort to groom a steady supply of movie stars in the ring. When your budget is only $8M this is what success looks like.

7. Just My Luck
Weekend Take: $3.4M
Current Domestic Total: $10.5M

Without a similar movie opening this weekend, Lindsay Lohan’s comedy suffered far less of the audience erosion that punished her companions on the top 10. That’s paltry consolation considering how much the studio unwisely spent on providing a grown-up vehicle for her. Some movies just don’t make sense past a certain price point. The $45M budget listed on IMDB, if even close to accurate, is far, far beyond that point.

8. An American Haunting
Weekend Take: $1.5M
Current Domestic Total: $13.4M

Freestyle Releasing now knows what it’s like to bring in wide distribution dollars, and it also knows the speed at which those numbers dissipate. Their risk to open this movie big (perhaps sneaking it to the audience before reviews could hamper them) has paid off; not handsomely necessarily, but they didn’t get stripped and left for dead in the exhibitor’s desert, which was all too possible.

9. United 93
Weekend Take: $1.4M
Current Domestic Total: $28.3M

United 93 should break $30M domestically, which is more than a comfortable number at their budget level, and enough to bear out the wisdom of containing the investment on a project this daring. They suited creative intent to format to business needs in a way that you wished filmmakers and studio heads could emulate more often.

10. Akeelah and the Bee
Weekend Take: $1.0M
Current Domestic Total: $15.7M

The end of this movie’s major presence in theatres was not quite graceful, but it made enough noise along the way to make its producers happy. Anytime a movie with this combination of elements – tricky title, complex emotions within the story, sub-marquee cast names – sees success off the appeal of the final product, it’s a victory for people who still believe that moviegoers will come to a good product if it’s provided them, all Da Vinci-related evidence notwithstanding.

Click for Full Post

Behind a few posts

Okay, I owe you:

Box Office analysis for the weekend
Movie Review of The DaVinci Code (yeah, I saw it on opening night)
Pictures and details about where I was this weekend and why

And where was I this weekend while I neglected you, poor blog?

Well, here's a hint:

Click for Full Post

MOVIE REVIEW - Poseidon

Full review behind the jump

Poseidon
Director: Wolfgang Petersen
Writer: Mark Protosevich, based on the novel by Paul Gallico
Producers: Mike Fleiss, Akiva Goldsman, Duncan Henderson, Wolfgang Petersen
Stars: Josh Lucas, Kurt Russell, Richard Dreyfuss, Emmy Rossum, Jacinda Barrett, Jimmy Bennett, Mike Vogel, Mía Maestro, Andre Braugher, Kevin Dillon


I’m trying for the life of me to figure out where the money went. Normally I don’t make a movie’s budget part of the critical formula, but the only apparent purpose behind Poseidon, a remake of the seminal disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure, is to spend a great deal of money. I’ve seen reports of a budget ranging from $150M to $165M, and if a studio’s going to lie about a budget it will be to pretend it cost less than it actually did, not more.

So what did they spend it on? The movie is shot entirely on soundstages in Los Angeles, which are admittedly elaborate in that they must be duplicated as upside-down, floodable versions of themselves. And the titular ocean liner, constructed in a computer for sweeping camera shots, looks terrible. We get a long time to scrutinize its fakery. They even skimped on an orchestra, hiring composer Klaus Badelt to provide one of those too-in-vogue wall-of-synthesizer musical scores scrubbed free of any troubling human touch or warmth.

Titanic, for all its Tiger Beat-frippery in the story department, actually went and built a full scale mock-up of the damned ship in question, and gave you three hours of spectacle for your ticket. By contrast, Poseidon is stunningly short as your star-studded “A” picture goes, barely 95 minutes before the credits start to roll. It might sound like contradiction to be demanding more of a movie that doesn’t pass muster even at its current length, but we might have had time then for something other than an eventually-dull parade of one reel of flaming peril after another.

Our characters don’t really have emotional lives, they have backstories which they occasionally stop to talk about. Perhaps as compensation, their backstories are almost grotesquely convoluted. Take Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell), whom everyone in the movie recognizes. He was a New York fireman who achieved fame rescuing people from a tragedy which remains nameless, and was subsequently elected Mayor of the city, and then left that post for reasons which I think have something to do with why his wife isn’t around anymore. The other characters are too polite to be clear on this point.

And what does any of that have to do with anything when a “rogue wave”, a moon-eclipsing giant tide of fake digital-water, capsizes the luxury ship and leaves it upside-down, exploding, and sinking all at once? From that point on what is required of Russell is to a) be rugged and heroic, b) look after his daughter (Emmy Rossum), while learning to trust her independence and not be so threatened by her boyfriend (Mike Vogel), and c) nod knowingly whenever the conversation turns to fires. The movie has no time for reflection or growth, all crucial emotional moments are handled by anguished facial expressions and, if they can spare the time, one line of dialogue.

Now you’ve got Richard Dreyfuss on board, playing a fussy architect in a suicidal funk over being abandoned by his longtime male lover, and he’s got an Academy Award in his trophy case so you know they will be quality anguished facial expressions. But how much good can he do with deathless dialogue like: “I’m an architect, these boats aren’t built to float upside-down!”? I kept waiting for him to punctuate it with: “I learned that in architect school!”

After the initial catastrophe, the Captain (Andre Braugher) orders everyone to stay put in the ballroom and wait for help. Well, it doesn’t take an architect to see the flaws in this plan – namely the giant glass windows everywhere. Still, only our small band of movie stars, with a few disposable supporting characters in tow, rebel against his instructions and begin climbing towards what used to be the lowest bowels of the ship, seeking air and an exit. Providing the daredevil Ying to Ramsey’s stoic Yang is Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas), who used to serve on submarines in the Navy but is now a professional poker shark. Somehow, this combination of elements makes him a Zen Master at survival dilemmas, from the beginning he looks and acts like a man who gets into these sorts of scrapes all the time. It bears thinking just how weird that is.

Dylan is protecting a single mother (Jacinda Barrett) he’s probably wishing he hadn’t hit on, and her little sprite Conor. Conor is played by Jimmy Bennett; who, having already been kidnapped in both last year’s Hostage and this year’s Firewall now easily qualifies as this generation’s Most Imperiled Movie Tyke.

And they all climb and swim and gulp for air and scream and dodge fire and climb some more. Screenwriter Mark Protosevich serves up a balanced menu of breathless set pieces. Some are imaginative enough, as when our party is trapped inside a vertical air shaft with water rising beneath and an inconveniently screwed-in grate above. Or when they’re in a giant ballast chamber which they can only escape by flooding. But these are little more than cinematic Rube Goldberg contraptions, and it’s usually absurdly simple to predict who’s going to come out the other end alive and who’s going to suffer a noble, tragic, or karmically-justified death in between.

And I still don’t know where they spent all the money. It must have been the catering.

Click for Full Post

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Kill Bill, Vol. 2

Originally posted 5/2/04
Full review behind the jump

Kill Bill: Volume 2
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Writer: Quentin Tarantino, based on the character “The Bride” created by “Q + U”
Producer: Lawrence Bender
Stars: Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Darryl Hannah, Michael Madsen, Gordon Liu

When the credits “Based on the character ‘The Bride’ by Q+U” flash in big bold letters over the end credits of the second half of Quentin Tarantino’s spaghetti samurai splatter fest Kill Bill, one half expects a little heart with an arrow through it around the “Q+U”. Because once you look past the blood, dirt and sweat caked on The Bride (Uma Thurman) during her murderous kung-fu rampage of revenge, you realize that almost never in cinema history has an actress been shot more lovingly.

Tarantino’s camera is under the direction of Robert Richardson, an Academy Award-winner in his own right most well known for realizing Oliver Stone’s crazed visuals in The Doors, JFK, Natural Born Killers, and many others. And this camera adores Uma Thurman, lavishes her, but not in the usual oily-shiny make-the-woman-look-like-a-pin-up way. Tarantino’s love is like the schoolboy who doesn’t know how to express that he likes the girl, so he puts spiders in her lunchbox. Take a second to look when you’re fully in the groove he’s laying down, when the movie’s at its best – you’ve never seen Uma look so beautiful.


This second part is better than the first, and one of the reasons why is that we finally get to see Bill (David Carradine) and learn a little more about the origin of The Bride (including her utterly fantastic real name), her training to be a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, how she got pregnant with Bill’s child and tried to leave him and his life of killing behind.

After a brief re-cap, she’s back on her mission, with three names left on her to-do list – the first two are Bill’s younger brother Budd (a rather zaftig Michael Madsen), and the one-eyed Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), who also trained with Bill and the Bride’s teacher, 1,000 year-old master Pai Mei (Gordon Liu). She had the misfortune to insult Pai Mei – hence the eyepatch.

And then there’s Bill himself, who dropped in on The Bride’s “wedding dress rehearsal” with the rest of the DiVAS one fateful day and laid waste to everyone – not to mention, made off with her daughter, born while she was in a coma. At the end of Vol. 1, we realized that The Bride doesn’t know about her yet.

There’s hardly a filmmaker working today with a wider pipe feeding his imagination directly onto the screen than Tarantino. That has its advantages and its disadvantages.

The advantage is that he makes his cinematic alchemy coherent, combining elements no one else would consider and somehow making them seem to belong together. The grainy photography and color palette during The Bride’s training (along with Pai Mei’s exaggerated gestures and extravagant overacting) are straight out of cheap chopsocky movies. Meanwhile, her travels through desert landscapes, with their extreme close-ups and sawdust ethereal music are straight out of Sergio Leone (there are even a few vintage cuts of Ennio Morricone’s music on the eclectic soundtrack). Like no one else could (or would even think to), Tarantino makes that shotgun marriage work.

The disadvantage is, his skill at playing with timeframes in order to keep constant tension sometimes comes off as a cheat, a stopgap for him to indulge in his love affair with his words. One of the things Tarantino is best at is tipping you off that something terrifically violent is coming in the very near future, but you’re not sure what. You’re waiting for the cool. So long stretches of seemingly aimless dialogue, with languid coolest-person-in-the-room pauses, often become unbearably tense, because you’re itching for the payoff.

The problem is, in Kill Bill, everyone considers themselves the coolest person in the room. So everyone pauses, everyone tries to milk the too-arch verbiage to the maximum, and sometimes, on reflection, you realize that what you just spent so much time watching didn’t add up to all that much.

And as incisive and funny as the speech on the subject is, I have trouble believing Bill ever had much time to become so well-read in Superman comics. Just like Tarantino’s famous ghost-written stretches of Crimson Tide, which posited that rough-tough Navy Man Denzel Washington was also a Silver Surfer connoisseur, it’s a bald-faced stretch, and I think Tarantino lets himself get away with it because he’s convinced its too good not to set out to be worshipped. He’s almost right.

Sometimes these moments work in the final analysis because they allow us to get under the skin of the characters that little bit more. Between the excess of Tarantino and the paint-by-numbers characters of most studio fare these days, I’ll take the excess.

When the cool comes, it sure is something. The fight between The Bride and Elle in a rickety trailer home is as unforgettable as its flawless punchline. And when someone mentions a tantalizing bit of violence known as the “five-point palm exploding-heart technique”, you’d better believe you’ll see it in action.

Enough can’t be said about Thurman as the anchor of all of this. Few enough actresses in the world could be called upon to keep a straight face through all this gouging, splintering, and serum-injecting, much less tug on the audience’s heartstrings during the unexpected emotional moments and perform martial arts as good as anything you saw in The Matrix. It’s a performance the likes of which we may never see again.

If Thurman is the schoolgirl with spiders in her lunchbox, with this performance, she spreads peanut butter on the spiders and eats them, and it knocks Tarantino head over heels. I can’t imagine two happier people than “Q+U”, making their movie together. That kind of joy is palpable, and what makes this movie a standout.

Click for Full Post

MOVIE REVIEW - The Notorious Bettie Page

Full review behind the jump

The Notorious Bettie Page
Director: Mary Harron
Writers: Mary Harron & Guinevere Turner
Producers: Pamela Koffler, Katie Roumel, Christine Vachon
Stars: Gretchen Mol, Chris Bauer, Jared Harris, Sarah Paulson, Cara Seymour, David Strathairn, Lili Taylor


Bettie Page lit up in front of a camera, and The Notorious Bettie Page, a keenly-observed dramatization of her brief and scandalous career as a pin-up queen and bondage icon, has the same virtue. It has matched part to player sublimely in the person of Gretchen Mol – a confident, beautiful woman placing her healthy body on display without shame or fear. And when she poses and struts and flashes her smile, the movie is all it should be: naughty but somehow nice; sexy, but somehow innocent.

Some actors seem to make a spiritual connection to the real-life figures they depict, and Mol’s kaleidoscope of expression flawlessly duplicates that unique combination of hormonal appeal and disarming exuberance – Page’s ability to be, as one photographer puts it, “nude, but not naked”.

It’s in the rest of the movie that co-writer/director Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol, American Psycho) fails to find her footing. She has put the all the proper ingredients on the screen, but when those central elements – Page and a camera – are not together, the movie deflates a crucial little bit.

Its inference is clear as can be – that Page, abused by one man or another from the moment her adult body blossomed, had an unusual appreciation for the parameters of modeling. In the film she seems to see it as a form of politeness – men will continue to take pleasure from the fact of her womanhood, only this time they will at least ask her permission, keep their hands off her and give her thanks and compensation. She takes classes in Method Acting technique simultaneously – to her they are interchangeable forms of play and make-believe.

Harron doesn’t over-indulge in the worst pains of Bettie’s life, she lets our imaginations do most of the work and that’s smart. But the hints we’re given, by and large, fail to summon the dread you’d expect. We’re watching a timeline, an explanation of the powerless position a women could find herself in, but rarely do we make a connection with her immediate feelings. Throughout the movie, facts and places and events come to us as awkward trivia, the curse of any biopic and a disappointing contrast to the vibrant joy of the modeling sessions.

The decision to shoot largely in black-and-white, while a tribute to the agility of cinematographer Mott Hupfel (see how he replicates the color schemes imprinted on us as representing the Technicolor “reality” of the 50’s), costs us some intimacy. The dialogue feels almost purposely flat in these danger sequences as well, as if trying to do a somersault bounce off the squeaky-clean cliché image of America’s Leave it to Beaver years. Such trickery is not the way to the hearts or guts of moviegoers.

It does provide a funny and stark contrast to today’s world, where hardcore pornography is a phone line and two mouse clicks away. This is still the time when men slink in to dingy storefronts with their trenchcoat lapels pulled up to hide their face, seeking stimulation. And some had the money and influence to request particular satisfactions. By the inviolate laws of economics, supply materialized to meet that demand. A woman with Bettie’s sense of freedom could have power, and a kind of awe, accorded her.

The movie excels at observing her relationship to her actions, how at times she seems to be standing outside and wondering at the peculiarity of it all. Perhaps, also, how lucky she is, given what was done to her back in Tennessee, that some men will pay just to see her wearing leather boots. She even has a spiritual theory about it, and tries to balance Jesus’ awareness of her sins with his desire to have her use the talent she’s been given. How marvelous that she could share this theory while a man (Jared Harris) is fitting her with ropes and a ball gag.

You can tell that Irving (Chris Bauer) and Paula Klaw (Lili Taylor) know almost immediately that they’ve found someone special. They run a private studio that creates photos and short films to send high-paying customers through the mail. Bettie is so agreeable and playful with even their weirdest ideas that the biggest challenge is getting her to look stern when she’s holding the riding crop.

The Klaws are a joy to watch as both a couple and a team – protective of “their” girls, impressed by the status of their most fervent customers, always functioning as one. When legal troubles flare up, resulting in a Congressional Committee headed by an unctuous Senator (David Strathairn), poor Irving can’t seem to understand it at all. In his mind, if the New York Times can run a picture of a spanking next to a review of a Broadway musical, how is he doing anything wrong? Not to mention the fact that the people condemning him now are the same elites he was so proud to cater to.

The hypocrisy and squareness of the authority figures, abusers, and the generally sanctimonious, combine to fade them into the background. It’s only people like the Klaws, and fellow photographers like John Willie (Jared Harris) and Bunny Yeager (Sarah Paulson) who seem to have a pulse, and Bettie above them all living a full and fearless life. I like what The Notorious Bettie Page has to say but am dismayed at the elementary stumbles that cloud its many qualities. It’s as if the movie nails the hardest maneuver of its genre, then stubs its toe while walking.

Click for Full Post

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Haute Tension

Originally posted 4/30/04
Full review behind the jump

Haute Tension (High Tension) aka Switchblade Romance
Director: Alexandre Aja
Writers: Alexandre Aja, Gregory Lavasseur
Producers: Alexandre Arcady, Robert Benmussa
Stars: Cecile De France, Maiwenn, Philippe Nahon

Those who have lately impugned the stick-to-it-iveness of the French (as people who use phrases like “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” seem to be possibly impugning) would do well to not share such an opinion around the villain of Haute Tension (High Tension in English, the movie has also screened under the title Switchblade Romance). Not that it would matter what you said, or didn’t say, or did, or didn’t do, because this is one single-minded villain, and they will likely kill you anyway. If only their bullish determination could be focused on something more useful than decapitation.

If nothing else, Haute Tension shows that the French, through 25-year old director/co-writer Alexandre Aja, have closed the slasher movie gap with us Yanks. This is as bloody, jumpy, squirmy, cringe-inducing a suite of violence as you’ll see at the movies this year – except for The Passion of the Christ, of course.

Then again, you might not see it at all. Lions Gate Films acquired North American distribution rights to the movie at the Toronto Film Festival last fall, but it is sadistic enough to earn each letter and digit of its NC-17 rating. It uses everything from the de rigeur kitchen knives and axes to more adventurous weapons like power saws, barbed wire, and, in one case, a stairway banister (I’ll let you ponder that one on your own). So it remains to be seen if Lions Gate will risk a stubbornly anachronistic MPAA and a marketplace hell-bent on censoring itself.

It will not be because this movie is a superior piece of artistry that they do it. This is a movie with low ambitions, achieved stylishly. That it is in a foreign tongue is all but incidental, since long stretches go by with little to no dialogue, and a gushing throat wound has a way of crossing the language barrier.

After a brief and ominous prologue, we open on Alex (Maiwenn) and Marie (Cecile De France), two comely school mates on their way to Alex’s family farm in the countryside for some quiet study. The farm and farmhouse look like they were purchased on E-Bay from the family in Signs, and come complete with a swishy, threatening cornfield. In truth there are visual references to other horror movies all over this one, including genre pillars like Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Aja is up to something here which is a little more than just an homage, but it’s hard to explain this without giving away a trick the movie has up its sleeve. After a long wait, we are at last given some answers as to why events are unfolding as they are. That these answers also raise a big basket full of other questions is something else which cannot be gotten into without spoiling things. The movie ultimately ends up being much more about the experience of being constantly tensed up and horrified, rather than seeing a story that makes sense. And at that it does succeed.

But back to our two schoolgirls. No sooner have they settled down for bed (and Marie has given us a potent demonstration of why she isn’t interested in losing her virginity to the boys at school), than a creepy, creakedy old van rumbles up to the house. A man (Phillipe Nahon), who we in the audience have already met and judged to be an exceedingly disturbed character, knocks on the door, the sleepy father opens it, and the mayhem begins.

We never get too clear a look at le tueur (as he’s billed in the credits), he’s often out of focus, in shadow, or hidden beneath his hat brim. But he’s sweaty, his breathing is raggedy-wet, and he looks sort of like the bad bits of M. Emmett Walsh and Dan Hedaya after a jug of moonshine. He carries a straight razor and wastes no time going to work with it.

Where Haute Tension strives to outstrip its forbearers is in including everyone in the potential victim category. There are a very limited number of characters, and only two hot teens, so suddenly those who used to be in the saintly-protected category in slasher movies (children, dogs, etc.) are just as squarely in the firing line.

Aja demonstrates clear impatience about getting to this part. The establishing scenes have an accompanying soundtrack of distorted and amplified sound effects. It almost suggests that, without all the THRUM-und-WHINE noises squawking distorted out of the speakers, we might forget what kind of movie we’re in. It’s a bit clumsy, but easily forgiven once he gets a chance to show us what he can do.

For a movie that so lacks in shyness about shedding blood on camera, what’s surprising is how often Aja wrings effective scenes out of what he doesn’t show. One of the twitchiest moments of disgust involves nothing more than blood being dotted on a closet door as we listen to some nauseatingly squelchy sound effects; and a later scene in a truck stop restroom is downright impressive in that nothing’s-happening-which-makes-it-scarier vein M. Night Shyamalan is so good at milking.

I won’t pretend there’s grand purpose to Haute Tension, even the layer of understanding added by its trick ending doesn’t manage to hoist it to a higher platform. This is a polished, professional geek show put on by a filmmaker who knows his stuff. I hope his ambition grows, because too long in this genre and you’re just finding new ways to kill people, which is not a good use of anyone’s time.

Click for Full Post

Just a little touch-up

I can tell you with authority, because it happened to me this morning, that it is possible in the movie business for someone to really like your 126-page screenplay, but suggest that you consider throwing out the last 120 pages and trying something different.

Click for Full Post

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Walking Tall

Originally published 4/18/04
Full review behind the jump

Walking Tall
Director: Kevin Bray
Producers: Ashok Armritraj, Jim Burke, Lucas Foster, David Hoberman, Paul Schiff
Writers: David Klass and Channing Gibson and David Levien & Brian Koppelman, based on the screenplay by Mort Briskin
Starring: The Rock, Johnny Knoxville, Neal McDonough, Ashley Scott


How can I help but smile this scene: The Rock opens his shirt to expose his rippling torso to a courtroom; the crowd gasps, and the judge sternly admonishes “I want the jury to disregard what they’ve just seen!”

Well, I think in my sassiest voice, how could they?

With Walking Tall (a re-make of the 1973 movie “inspired by” events in the life of pro-wrestler-turned-take-no-guff-lawman Sheriff Buford Pusser), we’re firmly, proudly, in B-movie country. This is a movie that lists its stunt performers with the same space and typeface size as the actors.

On second thought, that generosity could simply be a clever way to pad the credits, since by the time they’re rolling up the screen barely 80 minutes have passed.

I don’t mind this, I think more movies could stand to be 80 minutes long. There are too many B-Movies trying to pass as A-Movies these days (that’s right, Bruckheimer, I said it).

Perhaps the more times get complicated and confusing, and the more helpless we feel about events spiraling out of control, the more we desire to be handed a simple conflict – something bad that needs to be hit with a big stick. We’ve been solving problems like that since before we could speak, according to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The Rock, who in his career in the WWE has hit people with folding chairs, tables, and countless other blunt objects, is well-prepared for this role. He’s at ease on screen; even, I’d venture to say, charismatic. In one brief moment he’s able to get a laugh just from a subtle look he throws to his mother (Barbara Tarbuck). It’s a moment so quick you almost forget to notice hey, this guy’s acting up there.

He’s playing Chris Vaughn, an 8-year Special Forces Veteran who’s returned from his overseas adventures to spend some downtime in his woody Washington State hometown (a locale change probably prompted by them filming the thing in Canada). But from the moment he steps off the ferry, he starts seeing not-so-subtle signs that things have gone bad: pawn shops and sex emporiums have sprung up, people are buying drugs – they’re even leaving their babies in strollers on the sidewalk while they buy said drugs.

This is the sort of depravity we’re always being told is the result of not teaching the Ten Commandments in school. In this case, though, the reason is less complicated – the town’s clobber-worthy local greedy evil-doer Jay Hamilton, Jr. (Boomtown’s Neal McDonough) shut down the timber mill he inherited from his parents and opened a casino. This despite that there are still zillions of trees around, and with less jobs, there’s less money to gamble with.

But Hamilton isn’t just about the money – like a villain from that old cartoon Captain Planet and the Planeteers, he gets off on ruining things just for the sake of ruining them. Why, when the odds of casino games are calibrated specifically so that the House steadily, inevitably wins, do you have the dealers cheat anyway?

And why, on top of draining everyone’s money and vitality, and cheating at it, would Hamilton open a meth lab and hock drugs to children? Instead of exploring the devastating effects of unemployment, gambling addiction, drug abuse, etc. in a decaying small town, we get one bad, bad man (did I mention he uses dirty tactics in a pickup game of football?) just begging to be whacked with a big stick. All that’s missing is a scene of him evicting an old woman at Christmas and kicking a puppy.

Eventually Vaughn loses patience with Hamilton’s sliminess and the rubberstamp local police and, with an impassioned speech while on trial for busting up the casino, he performs the afore-mentioned flashing (ostensibly to show off the scars inflicted on him by Hamilton’s goons) and announces his candidacy for Sheriff. From the speed with which he’s acquitted and elected, we can tell no one was able to disregard what they just saw.

As Sheriff, he fires all his deputies and hires his friend Ray (Jackass’s Johnny Knoxville, acquitting himself better than I would have predicted), whose qualifications are that he watches COPS and was a drug addict, which somehow gives him textbook knowledge about how drug rings operate. Much like a wino could teach you how to ferment grapes, I suppose.

The gun rack in Sheriff Vaughn’s almost-too-manly-to-be-true pickup truck holds his signature weapon, a hefty club made out of a chunk of cedar. We don’t get too long to see him wielding it, but then again, we don’t get long to see much of anything in this movie.

That includes Deni (Ashley Scott), who Vaughn finds working as a stripper at the casino, and must bed her down so quickly for the sake of forward momentum that we never get much chance to find out what she did before she was forced to take the demeaning job. Or what the nature of their prior relationship was. Or for that matter, her last name.

But under the energetic direction of Kevin Bray, it becomes almost refreshing to see the way the movie skips like a stone across the heavy details. I especially like the sound work in the action sequences, it’s expected to have innumerable things going WHUMP, CRACK!, and AARGH!, but there’s genuine zeal in it here.

B-Movies are for people who know the drill and are there because they like the drill. Walking Tall riffs with more polish on charts previously covered by Schwarzenegger in the mid-80’s (it has better acting and continuity than Commando, and more style than Raw Deal.) It knows it is to provide a sneering bad guy, some laughs, a little bit of T&A (PG-13-ready, of course), and a big guy hitting things with a big stick.

And for all its sometimes ludicrous contrivances, and the way it gives a cheerful thumbs-up to inarticulate violent rages – this movie provides the drill. Entertainingly, unpretentiously, and (it’s worth saying again) briefly.

Click for Full Post

Kauai, Part II: A Very Touristy Day

Long post with heavy pictures behind the cut

I love travel but I hate tourists. I’ve grappled with how to reconcile this, and have thrown up my hands and gone for the old “I am large/I contain multitudes” cop-out. How can I hate what I so enjoy being? Maybe it’s a kind of shame by association: seeing all the crude and obnoxious tourists; that mob with belt packs and visors trundling the Earth, breathing with open mouths, gaping at Paradise through a Handycam viewfinder, expecting every local to serve their most asinine requests in perfect English and wondering where the nearest McDonald’s is. The ones who either seem confused or miffed or snippy; never happy. The ones who walk around like they bought and paid for the whole place and no one actually has to work or live here, it’s just all giant make-believe like one of those World Showcase Pavilions at Epcot that reduces every beautiful and complex culture on Earth to a restaurant with a kids’ menu and a gift shop.

I know I’m running with that herd, but every fiber in me makes a silent cry to the people who live where I travel – I want them to understand, I get it. I’m not like all these people. You can relax.

Maybe I succeed sometimes. Maybe most of the time I look like just as much of a yutz as the rest.

Monkeygirl and I had a conversation about this in Kauai – it seemed alien to her that I could have such strongly negative feelings towards any class of people. Darling that she is, she doesn’t think I have it in me:

“But you seem to like people.”

Do I?

“You’re more likely to talk to strangers than I am.”

I don’t think that I go out of my way. People just seem to want to talk to me and I try to be polite. The crazier they are, the more likely they’ll find me.

“Well, there is something inviting about you.”

She always knows what to say.

Our guide for today’s van tour is named Damien. He looks like a slender Wayne Newton without all the unfortunate cosmetic work, and he has a single thumbnail grown out so far it curls inward. I remember the cab driver from the ride in and wonder if it’s an island tradition to use extreme grooming attributes as distinguishing characteristics.

To Damien, all flora and fauna are divided into two very important categories, they are either “indigenous”, born to this beautiful island and thus part of its blessed harmony, or “Goodfa NATHING!”, meaning the honkeys brought it and it’s running amok and ruining everything. He has a bottomless supply of possibly-true facts and anecdotes about the living and growing things that we cruise by in our mini-coach, and which category they belong to; particularly the cursed cattle egret, which eats bugs off cows in Florida and was imported to serve the same function, only there weren’t many of the right bugs on the Hawaiian cows to begin with so the egrets took to eating all the bugs on the ground, which the other animals were sort of counting on for their next meal. Every time we see a cattle egret near the road, Damien growls and swerves to try and run it over. It is the only time he strays from an inexhaustibly effusive manner.

He never mentions the picky fact that the cows themselves probably didn’t evolve here naturally. And thus I am alerted to the existence of the secret third category – the living things that have proven relatively useful despite not being indigenous.



Like her parents, Monkeygirl won’t get up early for much, but they’re making an exception this time
First we’ll stop at a vista designed to set cameras clicking, then we’ll proceed to a gift shops where we can stretch our legs, tidy up and spend a few dollars convincing our loved ones we were thinking of them. Gift shop employees are another class of people I’m always trying to psychically communicate with. I want them to know they don’t have to play the ruse with me, that I know this cheap crap doesn’t really represent what they’re capable of; that it reduces, confines. I’m here for the good and the real, and just possibly if I can find it, the immortally-weird.

Your eyes aren’t deceiving you, and there’s nothing wrong with you for seeing what you see
As we alternate between these two extremes, Damien tells us about papaya trees, and noni, the plant that can cure everything, and the difference between Chinese bananas and Hawaiian apple bananas, about “tourist pineapples” that trick the uninformed into thinking they grow on trees. The trouble is, he often neglects to point at which specific tree of the many around us possesses the unusual qualities he’s describing.

We pass the point where Captain Cook first landed, and was worshipped as the god Lono. Damien’s frequent references to “the great explorer, Captain James Cook” get subconsciously re-written in my brain, and this reminds me of what a flaming nerd I am.

***
The Hawaiian language only requires a twelve-letter alphabet to transcribe, which is kind of inspiring, as it suggests the argot of a life too simple and serene to require any more. “Wai” means water. If you’ve got water, you can grow taro, the main food and the basic ingredient in poi, so “Wai wai” means “wealthy”. A mile-high mountain peak at the center of the island, where there’s an annual rainfall of about 460 inches, making it a regular finalist for wettest place on the planet, is called “Wai’ale’ale”: rippling waters. And that all makes a lovely sort of sense, you can practically see the hula dancer making an ale’ale motion with her gentle hand.

At an overlook for Waimea Canyon, far more expansive and detailed than my little digital camera could truly do justice to, Papa Monkeygirl falls into dizzying love with a fresh coconut, the kind where they whack off the top with a machete and stick a straw in right in front of you. You can always spot a man in taste delirium – because first he offers to share, wanting to know someone else feels the nirvana he now knows, then he suspiciously eyes how much of it you’re taking for yourself. But Monkeygirl and I get enough of the sweet water and the pulpy meat to sate us until lunch.



This is Spouting Horn, a blowhole which also has a separate nearby hole that funnels air, creating a full-bodied groaning sound. The superstitious explanation holds that inside the lava tube a giant lizard called a mo’o lies trapped. She was tricked in there by a fisherman and now wails in hunger and fury forever.



Lunch is at a golf club on the dry side of the island. Kauai fits a rather extraordinary variety of weather patterns for such a small bit of earth due to its position in the flow of the tradewinds. Over on the wet half, it’s likely to rain at least three or four times on any given day, usually just a few minutes of fresh cooling sprinkle – God’s version of a grocery store veggie mister, if I can be insultingly reductive. It gets to where you hardly mind being out in it, since you know it’s more likely than not to pass soon. Winds vary wildly, clouds practically tumble across the sky, changing you from overcast to brilliant sun hour by hour.


It keeps everything green, that’s for sure.



The tour is going on much longer than expected. We’d paid for the 5-hour version, but we’re getting a 7-hour version whether we like it or not. It’s testing the endurance of all of us, although Mama and Papa Monkeygirl are the more vocal about it. Papa Monkeygirl tries to bribe Damien to take an early detour back to our condo. We were up early and we’ve still got a luau to get ready for, which leaves us hardly any time at all for the very important business of laying by the pool.


Little wisps of sea foam would drift up the rocks like liquid tumbleweeds
The monk seal is an endangered species, when you see one you’re supposed to notify wildlife authorities. You are not to touch it, and you especially are not to disturb its sleep, no matter where it feels like napping. And these things sleep a lot. Which may explain the Darwinian bind they find themselves in.
The last stop is one of the many waterfalls we’ll see this week. Water runs off Kauai, from Mt. Wai’ale’ale down, as if poured from a bucket, spidering out from the peak through canyons and over falls into the rivers that connect them to the ocean. It is constant, it is clean, it is beautiful.



See that house on top? If a guy lives up there, I’d wager $10,000 that he’s taken a leak over the falls*
There are a few pictures of Monkeygirl and I at these beautiful sites, but I look fat in all of them and that ain’t what you’re here to see, is it, Jimmy?

***
Hawaiians have a lot of practice at luaus now, and as smoothly as the process of slaughtering a pig and burying it in an underground oven must go for them by now, they’re even better at herding the tourists through. Monkeygirl has a compelling theory about how the food at these occasions can’t, by its nature, be too good, because the luau isn’t Hawaii. It’s like Hawaii: the Drive-Through Experience – a little song and dance, a little fashion show, some drinks, a language lesson and that little saucer of poi you try a bit of and then wonder why anyone would think it does anything to food but make it more slimy and purple (the need for said qualities never having been noted for any dish produced by our Immaculate Western Civilization.)

As they go, the Hiva Pasefika Luau is entertaining enough, confined as it is to a covered open-air hall of long tables and uncomfortable chairs. The food is acceptable and they don’t rush to cut off the buffet, the free booze isn’t too watery and by the time you move up to the stuff you have to pay for you don’t mind the cheap mixes too much. The host has a gentle singing voice and an impenetrable helmet of hair.

A few tourists are coaxed on stage so we can laugh at their amateur dancing style, and the hula girls do the basic routines well. I can’t imagine the muscles built up by hours of that fluid pedaling heel-toe motion. Monkeygirl asks me which ones’ calves I like the most. You truly can’t have hula hips without actual meat on your bones, and there’s something mesmerizing about those soft, fleshy, curves and the buttery skin. You see them and you think about this place of plenty which has found healthy balance with itself and is filled with life and joy. And you get horny.


Much as I’d like to take credit for this picture, it’s all Monkeygirl’s doing
We do a sing-a-long. There’s a fire twirler who brings the house down, the hardest five minutes that ever constituted a person’s day job. A little girl comes out to give a sort of one-person junior showcase, not prodigious by any stretch of the imagination but studied and confident, so everyone can be impressed and wonder why their own children don’t have any damned talent yet. There’s a glitch and the lights drop off, and she soldiers on in total blackness without a flinch. Maybe half of her routine is lost, but she’s a trouper and that’s to be admired.

I’ve reached total language overload. That charm for the lingo I felt earlier has been smothered by so many complex vowel constructions that they could be just making it all up and I would never be cognizant enough to call shenanigans. I’m sure this has happened: Yes, this is what we call the Ha’lonikiwala Uhi, which means “Cash Bar Only”.

It was healthy, I think, for us to get this stuff out of the way early, so we can be briefed enough to proceed to more in-depth appreciations. But this has been a long day, and when you’ve seen a middle-aged guy three mai tai’s in the bag wearing large-rimmed glasses, a tucked-in polo shirt and a cell phone in a belt pouch holding fake grass pom-poms and shaking his moneymaker, I’ve passed my endurance point with the tourist horde. Time for bed, and time to start moving in smaller packs to more specific destinations. Time to get past all that first date pretense and really get to know Kauai.

(*Note – Any and all wagers made on this blog, if accepted, will be paid in crinkled Monopoly money.)

Click for Full Post

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Hellboy

Originally posted 4/7/04
Full review behind the jump

Hellboy
Director: Guillermo Del Toro
Writers: Screen story by Guillermo del Toro and Peter Briggs, Screenplay by Guillermo Del Toro, based on the Dark Horse comic book by Mike Mignola
Producers: Lawrence Gordon, Mike Richardson, Lloyd Levin
Stars: Ron Perelman, Rupert Evans, Selma Blair, John Hurt

Guillermo del Toro is a pulp filmmaker. He enjoys blood, fighting, exciting chunky-looking machinery, loud weird sounds, and all manner of imaginative grotesquerie. In a pulp filmmaker’s movie, no subterranean lair is complete without spiky walls, and when someone gets sucked into a small interdimensional portal, his body will be crunched and folded in half in order to fit. That is how interdimensional portals behave in such movies.

This makes him the ideal director for Hellboy, Mike Mignola’s much-adored comic book. Its take on the superhero myth is both droll and macabre; it requires a filmmaker who can revel in the pulp, ever-so-slightly wink at it, yet keep his eye fixed on a few genuine emotional issues under the surface. It’s a balancing trick not unlike those street performers who can juggle a bowling ball, a chainsaw, and a lit cigarette all at once. Rare is the artist of perverse enough mind to even attempt it.

We open in 1944. Nazis, in collaboration with Rasputin – just go with me, folks – are trying to open a portal to Hell which looks suspiciously like the logo of producer/financier Revolution Studios. I take this as either a coincidence or an acknowledgement of what led to the making of The Animal, Daddy Day Care, and The Master of Disguise. Our villains want to break the crystal prison which contains the seven Chaos Gods, who will then bring the Apocalypse to Earth.

One might point out that this would appear to work contrary to the Nazis’ ultimate goals, since they’d be wiped out as well, but since among the ne’er-do-wells on the island is an assassin who has surgically removed his eyelids and lips, has dust for blood, and whose body works on Swiss watch-winding technology, our brains sensibly move away from such troubling questions.

In any case, the ceremony is broken up by a platoon of American soldiers, and all that comes through the portal is a growling red baby with an enormous stone right hand and a taste for Baby Ruth bars. Professor Broom, a young agent of the secret Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, adopts him as his son. The soldiers dub the creature Hellboy.

Cut to the present, where a grown-up Hellboy (Ron Perlman under makeup that makes him look like a bulky red version of, well, Ron Perlman) is in charge of eliminating supernatural beasties for the Bureau. He likes to act as if he’s come to grips with being a demon raised as a regular guy. The way he files down his horns to stumps in an attempt to look more “normal” says otherwise, though.

The Professor (played in old age by the indispensable John Hurt) knows that a) his end is near, and b) a crisis is approaching which will force his “son” to face the true purpose he was sent to Earth for, and whether or not that counts for more than the life he’s led up until now.

We experience all of this through the eyes of the young Agent Meyers (Rupert Evans). He’s been recruited to be the new “liaison” – among his duties are trying to creatively explain the supposedly non-existent Hellboy to frightened civilians, and bringing him pancakes. Meyers spends most of the movie gamely playing catch-up in situations that would send most people into a permanent state of the screaming heebie-jeebies.

Hellboy’s backup includes a fish-man with an array of psychic powers named Abe Sapien. His body is performed by Doug Jones, but his distinctive voice comes courtesy of Frasier’s David Hyde Pierce. Pierce is not credited, but when he dryly observes to Hellboy “you live a charmed life”, you realize that’s exactly how Niles Crane might say it; that is if Frasier were to ever lift a large manhole cover and suddenly find oversized cockroaches crawling all over him.

There’s a third member of the troika, Liz (Selma Blair). She’s pyrokinetic, and wonders whether living in a calming haze of Thorazine might just be better for everyone, since when she gets worked up, pretty much everything within a block’s radius gets incinerated, except (to the consternation of young male Selma Blair fans) her clothing. But if this is the trade-off we make to keep The Hulk’s pants intact, I’ll live with it.

Meanwhile, a remarkably resilient Rasputin and his minions haven’t given up on the whole Chaos Gods idea, and need Hellboy for their plans. Rasputin has such a convoluted array of supernatural powers that I can only sum them up by saying he has the power to Advance The Plot. For most of the middle of the movie, this involves repeatedly pitting Hellboy against a demon named Sammael.

Sammael suffers from the problems of many digital movie monsters – by constantly having him in high speed motion in dark environments, we lose all sense of clarity and resign ourselves to wait for the digitally-created blobs to stop pummeling each other and bouncing around for a few seconds so we can take score. The fight with the giant spider Shelob in The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King has, for better or worse, raised the bar for such clashes by showing us how well it can be done if you care to put in the time.

On the whole the effects are serviceable without being particularly impressive. Still, Del Toro brings a manic glee to the action set-pieces, and it’s in them that we find the tone which is key to much of the movie’s success. As Hellboy is essentially invulnerable, we cruise along not on suspense about whether or not he’ll win the fight, but on enjoying his attitude as a blue-collar Joe with a very weird job.

When he sees a train bearing down on his head, he grumbles “Oh, hell” like a construction jobber who’s just been given one more load of bricks to move. Just because it won’t kill him doesn’t mean it won’t hurt. And when a battle with Sammael places a box of kittens in harms’ way, it’s just one more damn thing for the feline-loving Hellboy to have to worry about.

I wish that the climax involving those Chaos Gods made a little more sense. And I wish Karel Roden was able to bring a little more otherworldly megalomania to the role of Rasputin. I wish that Marco Beltrami’s music found a little more cohesiveness. So winning is Perlman’s embodiment of the role, and Del Toro’s affectionate translation of the character’s world, that instead of disliking the movie for these flaws, I was simply disappointed momentarily. But the feeling never lasted too long; as within minutes, Hellboy was again being flung through the air by some Lovecraftian beast, grimacing, and dreading how that one was going to feel in the morning.

Click for Full Post

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Dawn of the Dead

Originally posted 3/27/04
Full review behind the jump

Dawn of the Dead
Director: Zack Snyder
Writer: James Gunn, based on a screenplay by George A. Romero
Producers: Marc Abraham, Eric Newman, Richard P. Rubinstein
Stars: Sarah Polley, Ving Rhames, Jake Weber, Mekhi Phifer

I wanted to sleep before I wrote this review, not because the movie was boring. Far from it. I wanted to sleep so I could confirm something.

Yep, no nightmares.

There’s a difference between making someone jump and genuinely, deep down, scaring them. I can make my cat jump just by turning on the vacuum cleaner. The re-make of Dawn of the Dead is extremely proficient at making me jump. In terms of technique, effects, and imagination in depicting a world gone berserk, I quivered for long stretches like someone had turned the thermostat way, way down.

But only a few times did I feel lasting, my-world-has-been-shaken fear. George Romero’s zombie movies didn’t make me jump as often, but they could sure as hell do that. I haven’t watched the original Night of the Living Dead in years, and I still get nightmares from it.

You could argue that it’s unfair to compare them, and I will in due course address this re-make on its own merits. But by using the title, and by accepting the conventions of the zombie movie that Romero laid down – there’s almost as long a checklist as a James Bond movie – comparisons are inevitable.

There’s the spreading by bites. The character who hides an important wound. The character who can’t accept the conversion of a loved one into the undead. The coward whose aggressive need to be in charge causes more harm than good. And like its progenitor in name, there’s the ennui of being barricaded in a shopping mall with every material good that used to be important, but surrounded by thousands of cannibalistic ghouls, which takes all the fun out of it.

There’s a lot to like about this re-make, and its first-time director Zack Snyder. He doesn’t succumb to overboard slash-cutting or “bullet time”, but actually understands the difference between moving the camera and simply setting it on the sticks in front of a well-composed image, and uses both to full effect. Full kudos to cinematographer Matthew F. Leonetti in that regard, too. Fighting zombies is never rock-out cool – it’s terrifying and exhausting, and mostly exciting to us because we’re relieved not to be taking part in it. The movie’s frequent and unexpected laughs stem from this principle, too.

While it has more money and resources than Romero has had in his entire career, it still works on the conventions of low-budget shockers. It’s a dirty, scrappy movie, clever in how it uses its small scope to not only make you feel oppressed and trapped, but simultaneously a helpless witness to the collapse of all civilization. That’s not easy.

The makers have learned from horror classics like Rosemary’s Baby and Alien that a handful of solid actors is worth a whole barrelful of plastic hot teens. James Gunn’s screenplay dips a little too often into self-consciously arch dialogue but ends up working; a little because you can accept circumstances are stressing these people out, but more because the actors sell it. When security guard C.J. (Michael Kelly) snaps – “You need to drink a tall glass of Shut the F*** Up!” it doesn’t sound snarky, it sounds like someone who thought of that days ago and could hardly wait for someone to show up he could use it on.

We open on Anna (played by the consistently underappreciated Sarah Polley), a worn-out nurse at a hospital where weird things have been happening today. Ambulance drivers are getting busy a little earlier than usual, and there’s a lot of talking and not much music on the radio. But Anna just wants to get home to her peaceful suburban neighborhood and sleep with her peaceful suburban husband, which distracts her from the TV cutting to a Special News Bulletin.

It’s when she wakes up that things really go bad.

As the living dead sweep through her town creating chaos, she eventually hooks up with a group of survivors – Kenneth (Ving Rhames), a cop who’s hesitant to count on anyone or be counted on by anyone except himself; Michael (Jake Weber), who never could find much to be good at in civilization but proves a very capable leader; and a young couple (Mekhi Phifer, Inna Korobkina) trying to bring a baby into the world. They head to the mall together and work to secure it and survive. And none of it goes smoothly.

This is a movie that, and I say this as a compliment, enjoys its mayhem. It’s not enough to show a car fleeing down a two-lane highway. We get to see the car in front of it collide with a van, then the van flips over and explodes. It’s the kind of movie I used to listen for Joe Bob Briggs’ review of, because he’d score it by its many myriad ways of spilling blood.

3 Chainsawings. Two propane tanks used unsafely. Crowbar-Fu. Broken croquet-mallet-Fu. About 300 hit-and-runs. Joe Bob says check it out.

The zombies themselves have better make-up this go-around (original FX guru Tom Savini has a cameo as a sheriff with some very stern advice), and they move too. You could hold a track meet pitting them against the ghouls in 28 Days Later.

This may contribute to the whole more-jumping-less-scary paradigm. Romero’s lurching zombies were always just a little pathetic, like that nun stuck in the sliding door or the one who wrestles a gun away and peers thoughtfully down the barrel. They were a freakish parody of a life without any meaning except to consume – the shopping mall’s use as a satire of materialism is gone here, although they do remember the ironic Muzak. In the old days, you could probably shove one or two out of the way, it was their relentlessness and your own human weaknesses that wore you down. These zombies are more dangerous, if less layered, monsters.

But again, this is making comparisons. As I’ve said, there’s a lot to like about this Dawn of the Dead. I like Andy (Bruce Bohne), holed up in the gun shop across the street, communicating with signs from his roof. I like Steve (Ty Burrell) who, with no yuppies left to compare clothes with, elevates being obnoxiously unhelpful to a kind of full-time hobby. And I like that these characters sweat, worry, bleed, cry, and reveal their true selves when the idea of Hell on Earth becomes very, very real.

(POSSIBLE MINOR SPOILER ALERT BELOW, READ CAUTIOUSLY)

What’s unique about Dawn of the Dead is that the part I disliked most occurred after the movie was ostensibly over. During the end credits something happens that threatens to make everything we watched pointless. It’s one thing to see bad events, it’s another to feel like having any kind of hope was foolish. A movie that was cruelly violent but in a heedless, action-packed sort of way becomes simply cruel. Although it might not be as bad as it looks; that is if you accept the logic that, if we’re watching a certain videotape, someone must have found it.

Click for Full Post

May 12-14, 2006: Another ship proves, sadly, all too sinkable

It was a soft, cushioned fall for most movies at the box office this weekend – Cinco de Mayo and Mother’s Day clearly inspire similar numbers of stay-at-homes. And we still haven’t had the true explosive opening of the summer 2006 movie season, so eyes turn now to next week, which carries a double bill of The DaVinci Code and Over the Hedge. Both should have drastic impact on the fortunes of this weekend’s contenders, and either could potentially bring out that audience that’s been pining for the popcorn season.

But this weekend the new wide releases, without exception, failed to turn out the masses, which is particularly damaging to the backers of the $160 million-budgeted Poseidon. Stop, for a moment, to consider that for director Wolfgang Peterson, who once made the beguiling Neverending Story and the devilishly ingenious Das Boot on such small budgets, this is actually cheaper than his most recent picture, Troy.

But for once the egos behind Mission: Impossible III have something to gloat about – this time of year, winning two weekends in a row is a rare feat indeed. And so that’s where we begin.

1. Mission: Impossible III
Weekend Take: $24.5M
Current Domestic Total: $84.6M

This is more victory by default, than anything. These numbers are merely estimates, but if they hold up they indicate a 48.7% drop from the previous weekend, which is an enormous relief considering the dire possibilities I talked about last week. This could be a response to the belated spread of the word that – you know, this movie isn’t really that bad, its space-cadet star notwithstanding. But the less-than-inspiring midweek numbers show that this is too-little, too-late, and Mission: Impossible III seems destined to finish as that new and peculiar breed of Hollywood bird: the “blockbuster” that surpasses $100M and is still perceived a failure. I’d put the over-under for its final domestic gross at about $122M right now. Not nearly enough.

The rest of the top 10 behind the jump.

2. Poseidon
Weekend Take: $20.3M
Current Domestic Total: $20.3M

Warner Brothers was lowering expectations like a campaign handler before the big debate on this one, and there is a grain of truth in its argument that the target audience for a movie like this skews older, and therefore doesn’t just dash out on opening day. They bide their time and consider the critical reaction, which isn’t a good portent in this case. Between the reviews and the likelihood of grown-up moviegoers flocking to The DaVinci Code next weekend, Poseidon is in big, big trouble.

So what happened? Some of it you might chalk up to confusion, since NBC produced a TV adaptation of the very same novel as a sweeps event last November. Both were remakes of an original that was already a well-known hit; Warner Brothers did not do quite a good enough job making the case that there was any good reason to re-re-tell the story, except that special effects have advanced beyond the old models-in-the-swimming-pool phase, and thinking up new things is hard.

I also wonder if American audiences have given up on these goofy disaster scenarios that we’re supposed to treat with gravitas. We live in a world where an almost numbing streak of horrendous real-life disasters have altered their potential for escapism – we’ve all watched too much of the evening news to think anymore that problems like these only happen to pretty movie stars.

3. RV
Weekend Take: $9.5M
Current Domestic Total: $42.8M

A frankly stunning 13.5% drop-off is a sign that this movie essentially has the family comedy audience to itself for another week; smart calendar positioning for Sony. Releasing this in the height of summer, which might be the first impulse with a star like Robin Williams in this genre, would likely have caused it to get lost in the crowd. Now they’ve got a safe mid-range performer under their belt heading into this weekend’s big DaVinci tentpole release.

4. Just My Luck
Weekend Take: $5.5M
Current Domestic Total: $5.5

Yet another exhibit in the sad finding that being famous doesn’t necessarily make you popular, Lohan’s debut as a grown-up romantic comedy lead proves the fickleness of the teen-and-tween girl audience which has so far paid for all her fancy clothes. Three years ago, this number for a $10M high school comedy would have been fine and dandy, but her star power was put to a higher test here and failed. Before she turned into the feud-starting, album-recording, Fez-snogging party girl, there were glimpses of real talent and charisma. Her next release is a range-widening effort in the ensemble of Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, perhaps it will have a rehabilitative effect.

5. An American Haunting
Weekend Take: $3.7M
Current Domestic Total: $10.9M

The relatively small drop-off is good news for director Courtney Solomon, whose last movie was the unintentional comedy masterpiece Dungeons & Dragons. Reactions to this new effort of his have been mixed to say the least but enough of the curious are coming out, my guess is from that undernourished “Gimme That Old Time Religion” crowd responding to the exorcism content and its angle of being based on a supposedly-true story. This will end up a minor success financially but an enormous boon for its distributor.

6. United 93
Weekend Take: $3.6M
Current Domestic Total: $25.6M

A solid hold for a risky project, Universal took that first tentative step into the marketplace with a 9-11 story; they did it smartly and without sensation and they’re now reaping the benefit of it. Whether the forthcoming big-budget Oliver Stone piece has the same future remains to be seen. Did I say “without sensation”? Aye, there’s the rub.

7. Stick It
Weekend Take: $3.2M
Current Domestic Total: $22.2M

Stick It is leaving the top ten with a relative whimper, never having made much noise at the multiplex to begin with. It can look forward to profitability without having ever really roused the masses.

8. Ice Age: The Meltdown
Weekend Take: $3.0M
Current Domestic Total: $187.4M

This is the last weekend that Ice Age gets to hoard the kiddie crowd, and it made the most of it, taking another healthy bite from the trough in spite of shedding a number of its screens. When it steps aside for Over the Hedge, it will damn near be courteous. The only possible thorn in Fox’s side is that breaching the $200M barrier, which often triggers bonuses and higher home video pre-buys up and down the board, is now only a remote possibility.

9. Silent Hill
Weekend Take: $2.2M
Current Domestic Total: $44.5M

There are a finite number of screens in America, and with new wide releases every week exhibitors must pick and choose among the older movies in order to make room. They’ve waved the white flag on Silent Hill, pulling it off 700 of its almost 2,500 screens in its fourth weekend, with more to come this weekend. Formerly this would be a sign of meltdown, in today’s Hollywood it’s practically business as usual, and we can look forward to this movie easing into the black via 5,000 airings on the Sci-Fi Channel.

10. Hoot
Weekend Take: $2.1M
Current Domestic Total: $6.2M

A soft drop is a help to Hoot, but not its savior. This is little more than a toe stub to Walden Media, still fat from Narnia dollars, and the movie should have a long ancillary life among fans of the book if handled properly.

12. Goal! The Dream Begins
Weekend Take: $2.0M
Current Domestic Total: $2.0M

We’re dipping out of the top ten to mention this other wide release for the weekend. Now, conventional wisdom would hold that a $2M opening for a movie with a $30M budget is a nightmare in the making, but that disregards the international flavor of this piece, which is positioned to capitalize on overseas soccer-mania and the forthcoming World Cup tournament. The producers will not be relying on the domestic take for make-or-break solvency here; it’s a loss, but it’s also a sacrifice to get some experience catering to the growing Latino audience. It remains to be seen if this will affect plans for the other two episodes in a planned trilogy.

Click for Full Post

California drivers bat 1.000

Since I got my beloved and steady gray Kia, Samwise, I have been rear-ended three times. An hour ago was #3, a spindly and extremely androgynous boy from Las Vegas borrowing the family Mustang to go to UCLA.

And without fail, all three drivers have asked if we couldn't just handle it on our own, reimbursing me out-of-pocket for the repairs. Which makes me the asshole for wanting everything done properly. They never fail to ask in a whipped-dog voice, although this is the first one who has gone for the emotional jugular with "my Mom will kill me if my insurance rates go up."

The first time I insisted, firmly but with no malice, on reporting it; and aside from one pushy jerk of a photographer from the insurance company, who fancied himself a TV homicide detective that could entrap me with his tricky questioning, things got done without a hassle.

The second time the guy worked at a car dealership, said he had access to the right bumper, and he really forced the issue hard, so I relented and it became an annoying time-sink that cost me a lot of gas money on top of it all.

Unfortunately for this kid, he's going to have to take the hit for plowing into me at a red light. I'm trying to remind myself this is my right, and that, for the record, I'm the injured party in this equation.

Click for Full Post

Eetsa-me!

I guess this means I don’t count as a “hardcore gamer” – maybe I never really did. But as the bloops and yelps of E3 (the Electronic Entertainment Expo, annual Uber-Orgasm of the video game world, for you non-geeks) radiate across the landscape, crowing about the awesome graphical prowess of the next generation of video gaming hardware, I’m just not as impressed. When I was young, there was a simple and easily-grasped distinction between what the 8-Bit Nintendo Entertainment System could do and the 16-Bit Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo could do. The visual and audible leap was dramatic. And just one number to track. Simple!

Now Sony and Microsoft are in a kind of technobabble arms race, publishing thicker and thicker sheafs of impenetrable numbers in an effort to prove that their little miracle box will have, I don’t know, 2 billion more…somethings, than the other guy, and somehow this will make the games awesome.

Except, we’ve really learned that lesson too many times now, haven’t we? How many times are gamers going to be suckered by shiny technology? Tetris was programmed on a Russian clone of a PDP-1 mainframe, and Night Trap still sucks. You can’t buy fun with processing power.

I was having dinner with some friends one night – one an agent a few years older, one a teacher old enough to be our father, he wanted to know more about which system he should look into. I tried to break it down cleanly – Sony gets you the most games, especially with their library backwards-compatible to PS1, while Nintendo has the exclusive franchises that are always high-quality, along with the indefinable fun factor.

The agent next to me puffed up in his seat: “Me…I like power. I’ve got an X-Box. It’s got the most power. Best graphics.”

And I thought to myself – wow, you’ve got a wife and a kid and a house and a six-figure income, and your ego still needs that, doesn’t it? I guess there’s more out there like him.

I knew I was a hopeless rube doomed to have less gigaflops than the other guys on the block when I saw the presentation trailer for Nintendo’s Wii (formerly code-named the revolution). Graphically it’ll be behind the curve, no one’s pretending otherwise, but when I watched it, I understood it, and it looked like fun. The new motion-sensing controller looks fun. Using it as a sword or a gun or a tennis racket or a drum stick or a steering wheel looks fun. Having a new Zelda game, a new Mario game, a new Super Smash Bros. game (with Solid Snake and friggin’ Kid Icarus!?), a new Metroid game – we’re talking about the greatest fun franchises in videogaming, and they won’t be on PS3 or X-Box 360, and as long as that’s so, Nintendo will always have a foothold in the business. And, to top it off, to be able to download and play games from the Sega Genesis, Turbografx, and every previous Nintendo console ever made?

I’m sold. You can keep your bleeding edge anti-aliasing techniques and cloth physics. I’ma get a Wii, and I’ma going to have fun with it.

Click for Full Post

The importance of a sense of humor in your golden years

As I've said, my present temp assignment is for the Jewish Home for the Aging, which for all I can tell is quite a lovely facility. Today was the first day I've been able to work since last Wednesday, and the first full day since last Tuesday. I think I'm finally beating back this throat infection. Probably a blessing on all the residents that I stayed home.

Anyway, much of today's job involved typing data from admissions forms into a spreadsheet. One of the pages of the form requires prospective residents to provide an estimate of the amount and sources of any income they might have - Social Security, IRA, etc.

One heading is titled "Support From Children". In the space provided, one applicant wrote "Are You Kidding?"

Click for Full Post

Kauai, Part I: Settling into an island groove

Hawaii is the hang loose state, the great American anomaly. The place seems constructed by the Almighty for the sole purpose of relaxation and joy. The fruits are sweet, the animals are tender, the temperature rarely drops below the sixties, even at night in winter. Hell, the place doesn’t even have poison ivy. You can fall victim to mosquitoes in the wrong places, but even they aren’t local. They came as tourists and liked the place.

The sun is not too harsh, the water is mild and blue – it’s almost obscene, really, that a place like this exists, and people are enjoying it day after day while you live somewhere else. And yet it’s also somehow a miracle that fat cats and their harlot mistresses haven’t walled the whole place off for their private hunting and fucking pleasure. For the price of a ticket, you can still have your own Hawaii experience.

Kauai is the hang loose island of the hang loose state: 555 square miles, the vast majority of it inaccessible by automobile. Almost half of the shoreline is beach. About 56,000 permanent residents, nearly all of them somehow connected either to agriculture or tourism. You don’t see a lot of people putting on ties to go to the office. You don’t see a lot of offices. There’s a single main highway that circles about ¾ of the island and doesn’t connect with itself; every trip is either going to take you clockwise or counter-clockwise, but unless there’s a traffic light out somewhere it’s never going to take more than about two hours to drive from one extreme end to any other point on the island.

This is where you go to slow down, to abandon plans, to breathe and bake and soak and drink and let light showers pelt your face a few times a day. Within 555 square miles you find beaches, swamps, mountains, canyons, breathtaking cliffs, forests, grassy plains, gentle rivers, dirt trails, fresh produce, insects of shocking color, bikinis, resorts, luaus, buffets that have shredded pork for every meal, guided tours, mixed drinks, everyone wearing sandals at night, charter boats, charter helicopters, charter hang-gliders and two bazillion loud button-up shirts made of soft fabric. And it never feels crowded, and it’s all available, at a healthy mark-up, sure, but not so much that it’s out of Average Joe’s reach.

Sadly, until they perfect that matter teleportation device and eliminate those fly-mutation kinks, you don’t get to just wish for Kauai and appear there.

You’ve got to get on a plane.

More below the Jump!

***
My expedition to Hawaii is really a gift from the generous parents of the one and only Monkeygirl. Originally, they aligned their planned holiday so I could tag along and skip over to Maui for a couple of days for Princess Layla’s wedding. Then, the weather forced a delay and I missed the ceremony. Thankfully, even though my excuse for going was past, they weren’t about to withdraw their invite. So Monkeygirl, her Mama and Papa and myself packed our bags and sunscreen and camera and headed for the airport. At about 5:30 in the morning.

You can see the contrast helping later on. That gray, miserable morning light and the gray, miserable people standing outside in the check-in line, heavy with luggage and queasy from the unnatural hour; sure it would all be over soon, but that’s never a comfort in the moment. Hawaiian Airlines provides a trio to sing pop oldies a capella outside the terminal, but the surly don’t react well to the preternaturally cheerful at sun-up. No way, Jimmy.

On the plane there’s a kid screaming holy Hell in the row behind us by the window. Monkeygirl and her Mama want to throw chunks of Xanax at his mouth – even if they miss, there’s a chance one will land in his vicinity and he’ll get curious.

Every attendant on the flight could be on Xanax – they’ve got that same soft glow in their eyes, the same buoyant grin. But they don’t need the chemical replica, they get to mainline the real deal. Hawaii should be renamed “Xanax”.

They do their best to get us in the spirit, and that includes a generous beverage cart. I can’t even wait to hit terra firma before having my first mai tai. Besides, the lunch is terrible.


***
We have a long layover in Oahu, which includes a second effort at lunch in the terminal. Papa Monkeygirl loves the Hawaiian language, and he expresses his love by fixating on either real Hawaiian words or authentic-sounding gibberish, then substituting those words for everything. He’s half-Cuban and has a tendency to use Spanish and English interchangeably, so under the best circumstances I have a hard time following him.

Today’s word is “Poipu” – the name of a town in Southwestern Kauai. When our waitress comes by and greets us, he cocks his head and queries – “Poipu?” Later, when she checks if we need re-fills, he points at his glass and nods with a hearty and assertive “Poi-PU!” So far, as much as I can tell, spirits are high. Monkeygirl has warned me there is insanity ahead, and that we are due to discover much about our relationship in the next 10 days and nights.

I’m fine with that if it comes. But what I care most about is, in those 10 days and 10 nights, I get a thorough and well-rounded Kauai experience. I want to get up in this island’s grill.


***
Our taxi driver has a fantastic mole. Really just extraordinary. Our rental car is a Chrysler Sebring Convertible; just like the 20,000 other rentable Chrysler Sebring Convertibles on Kauai. There’s not enough room for four bodies and all the luggage. So Monkeygirl and I go separately in a cab. The driver is almost unintelligible, and it’s harder still when all you can focus on is….that…thing…on…his…face!

Hairs are spiking out of it. Long, gray ones, splayed like squid legs, one of them at least nine inches long. Either this man has not seen a mirror in forty years, in which case he shouldn’t be driving a cab, or he is at peace with his astonishing growth, even proud of it.

You can make peace with a lot on this island.


***

Where we’re staying is technically a “condo”. By all observations I would have pegged it as a hotel, since there’s an ice machine and free towels for the pool and a maid who always knocks at the least appropriate time. But there’s some legal distinction I’m unaware of that means, since this is a “condo”, that we’re paying a lot less than if we went to a “hotel” for exactly the same accommodations. I’m not one to question the arrangement.

Getting a good picture of this ruined one of my most comfortable pairs of dirt cheap shoes
The ocean is so very close. The sound of it washes over everything else on its way to our balcony screen door. Soft breezes rustle our curtains, and if we’re not very, very careful, Monkeygirl and I are going to relax too much and forget to shut them when the island atmosphere creates a need for privacy.



After unpacking and unwinding, the family meets in the courtyard, meanders along the beach, talks about dinner plans. Thanks to a friend I’m in possession of this rather stupendous little book, and in the days to come it does not let us down once when it comes to a good restaurant.

Tonight’s repast is at Scotty’s Beachside BBQ, actually opened by the writers of the above guidebook, since they’d judged Kauai’s only demerit to be the lack of a good BBQ place. Problem solved. We feast to bulging, and then get dessert on top of that – because when you’ve spent your whole meal watching parties at the other tables getting little portable fires to roast S’mores over, you’re by God going to order dessert no matter how much meat you’ve crammed down your gullet.

***
The next day is about orientation, plans, supplies. It is very, very important to Papa and Mama Monkeygirl that they locate the Target on the island. We need those disposable things that take up too much room to pack – beach towels and safe food (Mama Monkeygirl is not too adventurous, and Papa Monkeygirl can’t eat dairy). Monkeygirl and I intend to book some adventures.

There’s a shopping center right next door to the condo, and their breakfast café has a plate of banana pancakes with coconut syrup that will give you religion. While we’re waiting for our table Monkeygirl, Papa Monkeygirl and I explore the one kiosk that’s actually open (we’ll talk about “island hours” more later). The shopkeeper’s named Paula – she’s amiable, enthusiastic, makes jewelry out of cut glass. Every piece is unique and hand-fired. She used to ship to stores all over, but demand was too high for her to do it all herself, so now her little kiosk is the only place that sells her stuff.

Look at one necklace and she’ll take it out of the case and insist you look at it in the sun – to see how it flashes and leaps into 3-D. Then she’ll bring out four more that she thinks are suitable. Before you know it, you’re convinced that somewhere in that display is the one that was meant for you. If you’re into necklaces, that is.

Monkeygirl is into necklaces. We’re going to be back to this place before the trip’s over, and we’re going to be bringing Mama Monkeygirl, too. Standing patiently for this is how men pay women back for sports.

Decisions, decisions

***

After breakfast Monkeygirl and I borrow the car and drive north into Kapa’a, the nearest town, to make some inquiries at a tour booking service. I’ve got my own thick sheaf of suggestions gathered from the web and guidebooks on the lead-up to the trip, now we’re going to cross-reference them with the dozen brochures I grabbed at the airport and a little human intel and decide just what we want to do with our time, and how much can we conceivably drag her parents along for.

Jayne is our helper. It’s pronounced Jay-nee. Jay-nee stands proudly on the wrong side of the line between boundlessly optimistic and bonkers. She thanks us profusely for every single thing we do, and rains compliments down on our heads like rice at the most beautiful wedding in the world.

When we thank her for locating a particular van tour for us, she’ll say something like: “(Gasp!) Thank youuuuuuuuu! Look at how polite you are! Okay, just a minute and I’ll call to see if they’re available.” There’s a pause as she picks up the phone and dials, as it rings she gasps and says “Thank youuuuu!” quietly a second time.

The consensus is that we’re going to book a half-day van tour for tomorrow, which will cover a lot of ground, show us some of the major tourist-y spots, and get us used to the layout of the island while providing us some trivia to enrich the rest of the trip. Since it will be done in the middle of the afternoon, we’re also planning to book a luau for the evening, and thus handle all the square, conventional stuff up front, leaving the rest of the week for more thorough exploration.

Jay-nee is delighted to help with all of this.

It’s only four hours since we first visited Paula at her jewelry store, and already we’re back. There was no resisting it. We make an exhaustive search, and through deep examination determine the inherent color schemes of Monkeygirl and Mama Monkeygirl.


And it just so happens that Monkeygirl’s perfect necklace goes perfectly with a particular set of earrings. And it is perfect for me to seize on these items as a gallant present for her, since they’re about all I’m going to be allowed to pay for myself on this whole expedition.

***
The afternoon is awkward. With only one car, it’s easy for goals to collide with one another, and a jaunt into town for a burger can mutate without warning into a 3-hour miasma of forgotten directions, shopping and drunken angst. Monkeygirl and I are hungry. Mama and Papa Monkeygirl want to buy pants and shoes – these goals prove difficult to reconcile.

Eventually us young-un’s are dropped off in Nawiliwili near the harbor, where cruise ships the size of knocked-over skyscrapers drift in every Monday and Thursday, spilling an ant swarm of tourists out over the docks to filter throughout the island for a day, then gradually get sucked back on to the boat – a little more sunburned and a little more broke.

We chow down on burgers at a little two-story shack by the road that tourists didn’t used to know about, until the stupendous little book I linked to above. I get a buffalo burger, which is not too much different from cow but seems more tender and flavorful.

Mama and Papa Monkeygirl are still on their quest for Target goods, so Monkeygirl and I wander nearer to shore to J.J.’s Broiler, a restaurant that sort of has it’s own eco-system.

I will explain.

Kauai has a rooster problem. Aside from the many birds kept by farmers, there’s a popular cockfighting underground within the Filipino community, so there’s always been a lot of fowl on the island. But on September 11, 1992, the Category 4 storm Hurricane Iniki passed directly over the island, destroying 1,400 homes and wiping out electricity for the entire island for weeks, months for many residents. It also wrecked the famous Coco Palms Resort Hotel, a favorite of Frank Sinatra and the place where Elvis got married in Blue Hawaii. Miraculously, due to warnings and preparation, there were only a half-dozen deaths. But rooster fences? Gone with the wind.

The roosters – especially the aggressive, fighting-bred strains, have now multiplied and filtered into every corner of the island. Anywhere you go you can expect to hear crowing. Kauai also has a number of stray cats – the roosters beat the crap out of them, and you have to imagine the cats thinking there is something seriously wrong with the universe, dreaming of a place known only to their dim ancestral memory, a place where the birds don’t win.

Local restaurants, particularly the ones with outdoor seating, have a habit of making jokes about how fresh their chicken menu is.

At J.J.’s, roosters will wander inside and sleep in the corner by the bar when it’s raining. If you give off too passive a vibe they might hop on your table for a closer look at your food. It’s a queer sight to watch them trotting along the top of a hedge, poking around for nits and bugs, while tiny finches do the same nearby. You can imagine the little birds thinking – “What have you been eating, friend?”

The roosters would eat the geckos, but the geckos have learned to only emerge at night. So when the sun starts setting, they’ll come scuttling, looking for sweet things. Our waitress tells stories about them slipping into Piña Coladas, clinging upside-down inside the glass with their little suction feet, or just diving into a slice of cheesecake and eating out a little hole for themselves.

I hope you’re all taking note of the fabulous earrings
***
Monkeygirl is convinced her Papa is sneaking cigarettes. The three of them all made the painful pledge to quit together this year, and she and Mama Monkeygirl have made cold turkey stick. They’ve gone through the bad moods and cravings, Monkeygirl still stands near smokers and wafts, once in awhile, but overall they’ve survived. Monkeygirl’s even gaining weight. She cleared 100 pounds. I call her Fatass now. She’s happy.

But she’s sure Papa is cheating, because he makes silly excuses to slip away and go to the car. He’s lacing up to go for a walk, but when we ask for the car keys he suddenly says that first he needs to go shopping and find some pants he likes. Monkeygirl bets he’s got them in the glove compartment.

We walk back to the marketplace, which has a little bar in the middle. And it’s karaoke night. Monkeygirl absolutely, positively does not believe I didn’t know about this in advance. Since we’re in another state three time zones away, and these people will never see me again, I go for the gusto. I request American Pie. I ask if it’s the full version, since most places cut it short. The host, a great round island man, gives me a dubious head tilt – “I got the full version if you want it.”

I survive all six verses, and get some love in return. Two older women at the bar ask me to sing something else, I make a panicked gesture at my aching throat and go back to my drink. That song takes it out of you.

Tomorrow is an early call for our tour. In a way we’re thwarting the time zone effect – by going to sleep three hours earlier than normal so we can wake up three hours earlier than normal, we’re staying defiantly in our routines while the globe reorients itself. This is an ideal arrangement, and very cooperative of Hawaii. It knows so many other ways to make you feel welcome. Why not this as well?

Click for Full Post

May 5-7: America disavows "M:I3"'s existence

So, sports fans, I don’t know if you have any particular interest in the box office horse race, but I’m trying this once and I’m curious to know whether you’d enjoy seeing it every week. I want to provide a little bit of extremely opinionated and mostly uninformed analysis of the numbers, what they mean for the players involved and why audiences came out in these particular sizes.

The best source I know for the lay public to get at these figures quickly is Box Office Mojo. The snarky commentary is my own.

1. Mission: Impossible III
Weekend Take: $48M
Current Domestic Total: $48M

Paramount will try, but I don’t think they can spin this as anything but a huge disaster. Now, $48 million is a lot of scratch. Hell, it would keep me in Pop-Tarts until the Rapture at least. But while by that old fuddy-duddy calendar we’re still only halfway through “Spring”, the first weekend of May has sort of coalesced for this era of Hollywood as the opening of the “Summer Movie Season”.

Every year there’s one movie that busts the box office wide open, almost like audiences across America are done with the January turds and Oscar-winning prestige pieces, they’re ready to buy their popcorn and go to the god-damned MOVIES again. That movie comes out in May, usually on the first weekend. This weekend is when you see numbers like $68.1M for The Mummy Returns, $85.6M for X2: X-Men United, or the gob-smacking $114.8M for Spider-Man 2.

That $48M doesn’t seem so mighty now, does it?

On top of this, the rule of thumb is that sequels open bigger and fade faster than their predecessors. Mission: Impossible II opened at $57.8M, and that was six years ago, so by today’s ticket prices the figure would crunch to more like $68.6M.

Are we starting to see the problem?

Dirty details below the jump

Part of the disappointment I think you can chalk up to timing. There’s a window during which audiences are still excited about the idea of a sequel. After that, as they go on with their lives, they realize they didn’t miss it that much after all. Enthusiasm dims. If your movie is genuinely beloved enough, you can work a kind of jujitsu and stoke the latent affection into much bigger numbers. But after four years that’s a hard trick to pull, and this sequel took six years. This franchise has never thrived on forging an emotional bond with its viewers, it’s all about the sweat and stimulation. It’s hard to keep an audience loyal to that with so many other parties out there fighting to stimulate them.

And then there’s the star, and the dramatic shift in the public’s perception of him since he starting bounding on couches. His membership in the Church of Scientology was never a secret, but it was sort of politely ignored as a mostly harmless quirk, one of those things celebrities do like writing children’s books and giving their babies stupid names. But, thanks to South Park and Cruise’s nosy comments about Brooke Shields and the psychiatric profession, there’s a lot more knowledge out there about the batty dark side of L. Ron Hubbard’s cult, and the courtship of Katie Holmes has not played with the public the way Tom’s “people” must have hoped. His image has suffered, and I think a lot of executives around Hollywood will only today realize just how dramatically.

The reported production budget for this movie is around $150M. Another good rule of thumb is that if a movie meets its budget figure in domestic take, then once you add in international ducats and home video you’ve usually got a profitable movie. It’s harder still for Mission: Impossible III, given its enormous advertising budget and the profit participation of Tom Cruise as producer/star. I think Paramount’s real magic number is more like $180-200M. But we’ll be easy on them. Granting that this number is somewhere near the true cost of the film – and given its production history that’s a gift – can it catapult off this weekend to reach $150M?

I don’t like the odds. All the equations change in the summer season. Any other time in the year, a 50% second weekend drop-off is a near calamity. But between May and August, when every weekend a new 9-figure behemoth is trundling into the multiplexes, 50% is almost a relief. At 50%, you can end up with between double and triple your opening weekend as a final figure. 60% and even 70% drops are now, frighteningly, no longer total anomalies – you’ll see a couple each year. So every bean-counter at Paramount is now doing strong voodoo in the hopes of a less than 50% drop, because it’s the only hope of this movie becoming a genuine hit.

What keeps the drop small?

Audience approval: The hype has ended and now critical response and word-of-mouth takes over. These are the “legs” the gurus refer to. Critical response has been mixed-to-positive and the movie does deliver on action and humor. This breaks in favor of the movie, though not strongly.

Lack of competition: Here’s where the trouble lies. Poseidon opens next weekend, which is going to peel off both the older demographics and all those young women who still like Tom’s biceps, leaving only the young male adrenaline crowd, which is loyal with their money but not big enough for the kind of breakout numbers you need. I think Cruise’s star power at this point is more tenuous than the studios would like to admit, if enough women have been weirded out by his antics of the last year to abandon ship next weekend, expect the stench of panic in the air to ripen.

Repeat viewing potential: As I said above, this isn’t the sort of movie that turns on making an emotional connection, it’s about pure sensation. The segment of the audience that would pay for a second viewing, especially with DVD releases coming so quickly these days, is small, and not likely to keep this movie afloat. It will consist only of adolescents who were rocked hard enough.

This was Paramount’s big ticket for 2006, and it’s had the kind of weekend people get fired over. I think it will have a long ancillary life and Paramount won’t actually lose money on the thing when the final accounting is done, but in a town that thrives on ego no one from the Mountain is going to be strutting around with their dick hanging out this week. Now they’ll have to hope for a huge breakout from the likes of Nacho Libre and Jackass Two. Recently-acquired Dreamworks Animation’s Over the Hedge is a likely hit, though not one Paramount will reap as much benefit from as they’d like.

2. RV
Weekend Take: $11.1M
Current Domestic Total: $31M

A family comedy with our leading family comedian continues its steady progress towards solid lead-off single status. A promising audience holder, it lost only 32.4% of its opening weekend audience, and the schedule for next weekend is clear of direct competition. It’s these market-targeted mid-budget performers that keep the cash flowing, it’s not a breakout but Sony, which spent more money than it should have on it but will make enough to cover it, will happily ride it home.

3. An American Haunting
Weekend Take: $6.4M
Current Domestic Total: $6.4M

By normal standards this would be something of a wash; horror movies fade quickly as a rule, which would definitely imperil this movie’s profitability. Add to it the movie’s period setting and lack of marquee names. But this is sort of a coming-out party for the relatively-new distributor Freestyle Releasing, it’s their widest release ever and within the first 24 hours they surpassed the box office take of all their previous films. With the risk spread among European co-financing partners, producers should be well-satisfied by their market penetration even if the profit margin will be slim.

4. Stick It
Weekend Take: $5.5M
Current Domestic Total: $18M

I think Disney was hoping for more of a breakout than this – a vague marketing campaign didn’t help. Its fall from the charts will only accelerate, but this was a low-risk project to begin with, which mitigates the pain somewhat.

5. United 93
Weekend Take: $5.2M
Current Domestic Total: $20.1M

This is one of those movies that defied conventional prognostication, which had to make Universal sweat. But a strong critical response; plus a well-orchestrated “controversy” about whether “America” was ready to see this movie – many stories of which just so happened to come out of Universal’s sister company NBC – has assuaged their worries. Enough of an audience has come. Add a smartly-contained budget and you not only have a winner financially, but a potential awards contender and the kind of movie people remember and revisit – on ever-so-profitable DVD.

6. Ice Age: The Meltdown
Weekend Take: $4M
Current Domestic Total: $183.3M

From here on out it’s all gravy for the Ice Age brand – the sequel has outgrossed its progenitor and solidified it as a franchise. An unqualified hit. Many toys and DVDs to follow, and Fox-based Blue Sky Animation holds on to its corner of the animation market after last year’s respectable results for Robots.

7. Silent Hill
Weekend Take: $3.9M
Current Domestic Total: $40.8M

There’s more strong drop-offs ahead for this video game adaptation, whose genre and fan base should give it a long after-box-office life, but the producers must have hoped they’d break further out of the game-audience ghetto than this. Sometimes it costs more to make the movie properly than its target audience can recover, the lavishly-produced Silent Hill looks to have fallen victim to that calculus.

8. Scary Movie 4
Weekend Take: $3.8M
Current Domestic Total: $83.7M

This brand will never run out of parody material as long as Hollywood keeps churning out the horror/sci-fi movies, so if they don’t milk the name too quickly, or see their audience too diluted by Date Movie and other imitators, they should see profits through at least Scary Movie 5. Not the sort of thing you do for artistic satisfaction, but a hell of a smart investment.

9t. Hoot
Weekend Take: $3.4M
Current Domestic Total: $3.4M

New Line must have been hoping for Holes-sized numbers, but they certainly didn’t get them. They kept their risk low by letting the deep pockets of Walden Media fund much of the $15M budget, but this is a disappointment to say the least.

9t. Akeelah and the Bee
Weekend Take: $3.4M
Current Domestic Total: $10.7

I wonder if it was a miscalculation by Lionsgate to give this the saturation-release treatment. This is the sort of uplifting movie you want to hang around in theatres for people to discover and spread the word about, but by blocking out 2,000 screens for it from the word go you all but guarantee it’s going to quickly be silenced and swallowed as bigger movies shove them off those screens. It should still be profitable, but I think they missed out on making a better impression both financially and in the hearts/minds of moviegoers.

Click for Full Post

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - The Passion of the Christ

The Passion of the Christ
Director: Mel Gibson
Writers: Benedict Fitzgerald and Mel Gibson
Producers: Bruce Davey, Mel Gibson, Stephen McEveety
Stars: James Caviezel, Monica Bellucci, Claudia Gerini, Maia Morgenstern

(Okay, this movie asks a lot of its audience, and the talk about the movie in the media has asked even more. I like to think that reviewing a movie should be a pure exercise, but this is not an ordinary movie. And so, because I think it’s worth it, I’ll spend a few words up front addressing the “issues”. If nothing else, it will get them out of the way.

Also, I make no claims at being a Biblical scholar, and so none of my criticism is levied against the Bible and Christianity, or whether or not something in the movie was accurate to that source. Like with any adaptation, the ultimate purpose is to examine how well the thing works as a movie, which is a wholly different medium.)

The stuff that’s not really a movie review but seems expected
In the summer of 1996 I performed in Goldenwest Community College’s production of Jesus Christ, Superstar. After rehearsals, I’d often drop by to see a girl I was dating. “What did you do today, honey?”

“Oh, not much. Killed Jesus.” I’d reply.

What I mean to say is that a culture that has already turned the defining event of one of its major religions into a rock/soul piece of musical camp has long since passed the point of questioning whether or not it is appropriate for Mel Gibson to make, with his own money, a feature film out of it. And so let it take up no more space in this writing.

As for the film’s supposedly insidious Anti-Semitic content, I say with all honesty that I left the theatre hating the Jewish people no more than I did when I went in, which is to say not at all. Nor, I suspect, does it have any such effect on the people who go on at length about such dangerous hidden messages. It is not for themselves they write, but for the “other” people, the “stupider” people who lack their critical perception. These writers fret that the unwashed masses will be driven to hysteria by one thing or another and awful tragedies will result.

I would suggest, first, that anyone who uses this film as an excuse to do violence against any race had it in them to begin with. I’d also like to suggest, if those worried scribes guarding us from racism must write about something, that they go back to Birth of a Nation, which is genuinely, bald-facedly racist. And not racist in that oh-it-was-the-times-they-lived-in kind of ignorant way, but in a “pay attention people, because this race is full of lazy, shiftless, evil, ugly perverts who our out to steal our rightful place in society and violate our beautiful daughters, and we should hunt them down” kind of way. There’s always another essay to pull out of Birth of a Nation. But that movie’s not making headlines right now, is it?

The Passion of the Christ depicts Jews and Romans both, which is fitting, since they were there at the time. Among each group are examples of nobility, weakness, mercy, cowardice, sympathy, treachery, compassion, greed and all other aspects of the human condition. It makes no more sense to blame a race than it would be to say that I and all my descendents will wear the blood of John F. Kennedy, since a fellow Caucasian (or two or three, depending on whom you ask) pulled the trigger.

According to the story itself, no one person or race was responsible, and time and time again, we are reminded, it was the will of God Him/Her/Itself that it happen. As it goes in the New Testament, Jesus was put into a troubled land and troubled times for the express purpose of bearing the worst suffering mortal life could dish out.

It’s so easy with a film like this to get distracted from discussing the thing itself, so Important are the exterior issues. Permit me then, in my own guilt, to grope for a segue so I can actually review the thing now.

Full review below the jump.

The genuine reviewing part
Actually, there is one group that is singularly treated with contempt and scorn by The Passion of the Christ – sneering morons. They come off very poorly. The guards who unrelentingly beat and torture Jesus (James Caviezel), all while cackling “heh heh heh” like henchmen in a Batman movie, do get dealt a pretty short hand. But this story isn’t about them, it’s about Jesus Dying For Our Sins.

I’ve been asked in school classrooms if I know, understand, or believe Jesus Died For Our Sins. I’ve been asked on city buses. My own beliefs on that topic will stay my own, and it doesn’t strike me that Gibson intends to sway us one way or another about whether this is indeed the Truth. I think his goal, grandly ambitious and impressively achieved (though not always), is to describe as unflinchingly as possible what it means to die for our sins, and why it’s the key to this particular religion. And to its credit, to watch this movie is for it to be crystal clear.

The answer is not the suffering itself – the bloody, brutal, unblinking depiction of a man taken in his prime and, step by awful step, tortured until no life is left in him. It’s in the quiet moments in between, when Jesus recalls telling his followers – “no servant is greater than his master. If they persecute me, they will persecute you.” As grim as that sounds, the point is, with Jesus’ death, anyone can be forgiven and brought into the hereafter.

When he talks about tearing down the temple and rebuilding it in three days; he’s not talking about any old temple. He’s announcing that God is changing His/Hers/Its game plan, and just to prove a point, He/She/It puts a son (and, if you buy the concept of the Trinity, God Him/Her/Itself) among us to suffer the worst pain which can be known on Earth. If you can come back from that, the Resurrection is saying, you can come back from anything.

And oh, is there suffering. We watch thorns shoved into a head. Skin flayed from a body until there seems not an inch of Jesus left not criss-crossed with bloody tears and wounds. Blood sprays. Chunks of flesh are torn out. Nails are hammered through hands and feet. And we don’t miss a moment of it. This is as absolutely, authentically violent as a film can be and not qualify as snuff, and it will make you squirm in your seat. There is hope when all is said and done (sorry to spoil the ending), but the point is that the hope can’t be fully comprehended until we’ve seen the pain.

Caviezel provides every expression of agony that can be perceived underneath layer upon layer of spattered makeup. But he’s good in the moments of quiet, too, when his human side wrestles with his fate and dreads what he can see coming so clearly. The other leads all do what they can as representative figures in a larger canvas (one that frequently recalls Caravaggio, thanks to world-class cinematographer Caleb Deschanel’s dark, rich photography.)

Some of the most powerful moments are the simple ones, as when Jesus tumbles to the ground in front of his mother (Maia Morgenstern) and she flashes back to watching a toddler Jesus fall and hurt his knee, and she knocked everything over in charging to soothe him with her love. Caveizel, too, seems to share that moment with her, realizing what it means to be beyond even the healing power and care of a mother and needing to hand yourself over to a higher power.

It is when Gibson strays from such simple depiction that the film loses its true emotional charge. When Judas (Luca Lionello) sets off on his path towards insanity and suicide after betraying Jesus, Satan (Rosalinda Celentano) unleashes Scary Special Effects in pursuit.

Don’t get me wrong, they are scary; digital monsters and children deformed by makeup. It torments Judas and frightens me. But was it necessary for the Great Deceiver to borrow tactics from Freddy Krueger? Fear of Satan should run deeper than just hoping he doesn't make Something Scary pop up and go “boo”. It has a very deliberate intent, and may well be spelled out in the Bible for all I know, but to me it felt like the wrong emotion to aim for in the moment.

Gibson is a gifted and perceptive director, and he likes working on a grand scale. Have 9 years really passed since he gave us Braveheart? Surely at least one Lethal Weapon sequel could have been sacrificed to get him behind the camera again. Here he makes the most of a clearly tight budget – one or two of the sets look a bit wobbly, but he doesn’t linger on them long. What he gets for his money is, more often than not, pretty stirring spectacle (John Debney’s evocative score, with a few echoes from Peter Gabriel’s work on The Last Temptation of Christ, helps make the movie feel more expensive than it is).

His biggest problem here tends to be with crowd behavior. Like those ever-cackling Roman Guards, every background shot conveys a single idea with hordes of people expressing the emotion of the moment as baldly as possible. Whether crying in empathic agony or fists wagging with murderous rage, those shouting hordes are the one area of his canvas given sketchy attention, and in a film that tries to square itself with the horrifying details of the Crucifixion and every charged and complex emotion around it, it’s an unfortunate oversight. I’m not one to suggest how you bring depth to a guard whose job it is to scourge Jesus, but surely an Oscar-winning filmmaker can do something about it.

A Post-script with an important moral
It’s probably a little too late to say this, but on the off chance that even one person might be swayed, I’ll relay a little anecdote. It might seem silly, but it has a point:

I must have been about 6 or 7, and every Sunday my family went to St. Ignatius’ church in Cincinnati. My mom would let me play with the calculator from her purse to keep me quiet, but every so often I’d look up to see what was going on and if I was supposed to be standing and singing now. There was an awful lot of talk about this Jesus person, and I’d look around and see the pictures everywhere of the long-haired, bearded man with the peaceful look on his face.

And at a certain point each week, a man would take the podium and talk for a long time about one thing or another. It was, I know now, the weekly sermon, but when I would look up and see, addressing the audience, a long-haired, bearded man with a peaceful look on his face, I would simply think – oh, that must be Jesus, and go back to what I was doing.

Hey, I still believed in Santa Claus, and he came to our church at least once a year. That Jesus might be here talking to us wasn’t a stretch in my mind.

One day after the service my parents hung around the entrance and waited for the priest to come out. He came out and started talking to the children and he had a duck with him. Look, my mom said, he has a pet duck. Want to go pet it?

Now I thought this was cool. Every year my parents let me stay up so I could watch the Magic of David Copperfield TV special. Every year (at least back then), Copperfield would do one trick with his pet duck, Webster.

Wow, I remember thinking, Jesus has a pet duck. Just like David Copperfield.

Now for all of you who want to stone me for equating the King of Kings with the Master of Illusions, I acknowledge I was a weird little boy from the get go. But I don’t think this is completely out of bounds; in fact I think of it whenever I want a reminder about how wonderfully random a child’s way of sorting out the world can be. And so the moral of our story is:

Do not take children to this movie if you have any decency in you. They will not understand. They will either be driven to nightmares or utterly desensitized by the kind of horrific violence you’re always complaining about HBO, MTV, and video games for.

I saw a group of kids who looked about 11-12 come out. One was asking casually about what video game they should play over in the game room. Another was sarcastically yelling “Mommy, Mommy!” to taunt the one among them who had been disturbed.

The movie’s going to be around for a long time. Long enough to let your kids grow up. It takes maturity to grasp this movie’s meaning. It’s tough to face the violence and glimpse the message behind it, and you cannot and should not force that on people. Please, please, please, if you have yet to go, remember this before you do.

Click for Full Post

MOVIE REVIEW - Mission: Impossible III

Mission: Impossible III
Director: J.J. Abrams
Writers: Alex Kurtzman & Roberto Orci & J.J. Abrams, based on the television series created by Bruce Geller
Producers: Tom Cruise, Paula Wagner
Stars: Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ving Rhames, Billy Crudup, Laurence Fishburne, Michelle Monaghan, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Maggie Q, Simon Pegg, Keri Russell


While the James Bond franchise tends to take on the character of whomever is wearing the lead character’s tux, and can thus sustain a familiar tone for as much as a decade, rival franchise Mission: Impossible (steered by its producer/star Tom Cruise) distinguishes itself by shedding its skin for a new guise with every single episode. If the first was a throwback to Cold War paranoia enlivened by Brian DePalma’s cinematic penchant for stealing only from the best, and the second was an absurdly-operatic (yet quite watchable) romantic blowout that marked the moment John Woo officially jumped the shark, this third edition chameleonically takes on the character of co-writer/director J.J. Abrams, who’s been handed quite a bauble for his big-screen debut.

As with his hit series Alias, we have a progression of high-stakes infiltrations during which the perpetrators wax about their complex emotional entanglements, separated by shocking plot twists and realignments of loyalty. And as with Lost, whose stunt-packed two-hour pilot provided his bridge to the big screen, we have action scenes which show imaginative staging and an appreciation for the ability of modern visual effects to seamlessly depict preposterous feats without tricky editing.

The rest is stripped away as dead weight; unlike its predecessors the movie never even cares to explain what great prize is worth all this computer-hacking, voice-pattern-recording, wall-climbing slinking-about business. It is known only as “The Rabbit’s Foot”, and it looks ominous enough to serve as a fine McGuffin. Those unfamiliar with the wily ways of the McGuffin, read here and enjoy. This serves the movie by eliminating pretense, but also detracts because it only emotionally compels to the extent that the actors can cram life into the tiny spaces provided, and only excites from the ingenuity of its craftsman, which is considerable though not enough for the whole ride. For better or worse, you watch this movie for the kinetics.

Full review behind the jump.

Ethan Hunt (Cruise), super-agent of the IMF (its stands for “Impossible Missions Force”), has removed himself from active field duty and has found a sweet and caring lady doctor (Michelle Monaghan) to settle down with. He tells her he studies traffic patterns for the Department of Transportation, which makes sudden trips and injuries difficult to explain. He’s sucked back into the spy game when a young protégé (Keri Russell) is captured while trying to get close to a sinister arms dealer named Owen Davian (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

This summer tentpole payday is a long-time coming for recent Oscar-winner Hoffman, and he creates for us a villain of sociopathic confidence – watch his face as his life is threatened at very high altitude; he’s less frightened than fascinated by the novelty of the moment, and delighted by the new revenge he’ll earn by this slight. Hoffman stands proudly in the Pantheon of scene-stealing villains with this role.

No less essential is Ving Rhames as computer whiz Luther Strickel, who has always provided both tech support and an angle of human concern to the series. While Hunt can too easily turn into a gun-toting human pinball once the mission gets under way, Luther is always there to channel the audience’s mood.

The strain of a man of action leading a double life, of believing he can leave it at the office and marry someone without them ever knowing the truth, is more familiar than the movie would like it to be. The Ethan Hunt we’ve known so far, as branded by Cruise’s cocky overachiever screen persona, holds no interest for us getting beers from the fridge at some house party. He practically disappears in a puff of vapor with no alarm to bypass or hostage to charge in and rescue. That he might yearn for the life he imagined he had before IMF never comes off as more than a nod to dramatic convention. He’s just too at home plotting entry points and hair-raising base jumps. He’s not even great shakes at finding out the truth behind a conspiracy; he’s better at just barnstorming in to whatever obstacle course is set for him, and hoping someone will blab something to him in the process and it will all come out in the wash.

So the big set pieces, which are many but not too many, allow the movie to reach full flower. When Tom Cruise, biggest movie star on Earth, scales the surrounding wall of Vatican City and strips off his gear to reveal, ta daaaa!!, a priest’s robes, it’s positively droll. Fans of Shaun of the Dead will appreciate a small but key role played by Shaun himself, Simon Pegg. There are frequent little delights like this, and bigger ones, too; I like one assault on a building that uses a best-of-both-worlds approach combining elements of both the one-man stealth job and an all-out gun-blazer. And Abrams and company make the rather bold move of not even showing one particular piece of sneak-thieving. I think they reasoned that a) we already knew how it had to end for the story to progress, and b) they didn’t need five more minutes of movie devoted to running down corridors shooting security guards, and so they stay outside where the more interesting emotion of the moment lies.

When you try to settle accounts the story makes a kind of sense; the motives aren’t particularly obtuse, though calculating the likelihood of such tactics achieving success by prior design could cause headaches. Tom sprints and smirks and smolders as the moment demands, although he’s a little lined to still be playing the kid with the chip on his shoulder in 2006.

Despite its weaknesses Mission: Impossible III works on its own terms, thanks in large part to the breadth of its supporting cast and the fresh eye behind the lens. Assembling a team like this must reflect back on the producer, and so for having the malleability to essentially reinvent his most valuable franchise for the times even as he stays the same in the center of it, Tom Cruise the producer deserves credit. For Tom Cruise the star, though, in roles like this, the clock is ticking.

Click for Full Post

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Starsky & Hutch

Starsky & Hutch
Director: Todd Phillips
Writers: Based on characters created by William Blinn; story by Stevie Long and John O’Brien, screenplay by John O’Brien and Todd Phillips & Scott Armstrong
Producers: William Blinn, Stuart Cornfeld, Akiva Goldsman, Tony Ludwig, Alan Riche
Cast: Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Snoop Dogg, Vince Vaughn

I don’t remember the 70’s, only having been alive during a quarter of them. I do remember all the jokes about the 70’s, which helps me in my task. I appreciate the way that director Todd Phillips populates this movie with the detritus of that decade without leaning on it too much as the joke itself (I’m looking in your direction, The Wedding Singer). Hutch (Owen Wilson) has an 8-track at his place, and over a meal they drink RC Cola. The movie feels no need to stop and point it out, and it becomes funnier that way.

I’ve never seen a single episode of Starsky and Hutch, which doesn’t help me in my task. Because this is a movie that, in trying to be all things to all people, struggles to be one thing at a time. Sometimes it’s spoofing the show – at least, I think it is. Sometimes it’s spoofing the 70’s in general. Sometimes it’s just a playing field for Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson to do what People Love Seeing Them Do.

It seems to be here at all simply as a matter of cultural inevitability – that strand of our DNA that can compel us to watch hours of I Love the 80s has also led to the revival and transformation of countless TV titles that should have been one-offs, Burma Shave ads along the cultural highways. That more money is likely spent now producing this goof on Starsky & Hutch than was possibly spent in the entire run of the original series is a fact whose ultimate meaning eludes me.

Full review behind the jump.

Anyway, it’s here now, though much of the time, Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson are simply playing themselves playing Starsky & Hutch, mismatched detectives battling the scum of Bay City. That is, unless, in the original, Starsky was an uptight goon who constantly embarrassed himself (Stiller has as many variations on the furrowed brow as the Inuit have words for snow) and Hutch was a vaguely stoned, smirking surfer-rascal. I am willing to be corrected on this point. I laugh because Stiller and Wilson are naturally funny and talented comedians; though if at any point they did something similar to their forebearers in the roles at all beyond the costumes and the car, it failed to make an impression on me.

Vince Vaughn and Jason Bateman, meanwhile, are having a grand old time playing a fantastically -leazy drug kingpin (who nonetheless buys his daughter a pony on her Bat Mitzvah) and his brainy majordomo with the nigh-invisible fuzzy mustache. They play it as straight as if this was the show itself, and had me smiling every time they were on screen because of their unwinking gusto.

Snoop Dogg plays Snoop Dogg, but they all call him Huggy Bear. And every so often Fred “The Hammer” Williamson shows up as our heroes’ supervisor, who looks like he doesn’t get what any of them are doing, and it makes him angry.

The story, which is occasionally important, is about a large shipment of a chemically-altered cocaine that gives you the same effect, but smells and tastes (even to highly-trained drug-sniffing dogs) like artificial sweetener. No bonus points if you guess whether or not that comes into play. Our heroes pursue this bust as they clash over their opposing methods, tease each other, and grow into buddies.

And here is one of the inherent translational gaffes that tends to occur between TV shows and movies. In a TV show, a relationship is established quickly and then riffed on for years. Growth and change is defied willfully – at least until the ratings slip. But there are books which Hollywood executives read that say a Movie Uses a Different Formula.

So even as I’m laughing, scenes from the Movie Formula creak into view and give me pause. Once in awhile even director Phillips sees them for what they are and does his best to tweak them. Then there are others – like a wholly awkward and artificial stretch where our heroes go their separate ways, Hutch feeling “betrayed” by a snippy report Starsky typed up about his behavior weeks before. Wilson is no more convincing in this beat than when he played exactly the same beat last year in Shanghai Knights (even some of the dialogue sounds identical).

What is the purpose, I found myself asking? Not even the dust mites in the house thought they wouldn’t reconcile. But to ask questions like that leads only to danger.

In an encouraging sign of comic generosity, attention is lavished even on the smaller roles, like Will Ferrell as a jailhouse informant with an alarming array of unique fetishes, Juliette Lewis as the drug lord’s admirably upbeat mistress, and Amy Smart and Carmen Electra, playing 70’s cheerleaders whose ultimate importance to the movie begins and ends with the fact that they are playing 70’s cheerleaders.

Once in awhile a joke goes almost spectacularly wrong – I might be a fuddy-duddy in a Gen-Y body but I’ve yet to see the hilarity in a coked-up policeman wildly firing his gun around at a disco. And mimes? Tsk tsk. That’s all I can say.

Many of the nostalgic references I was clearly supposed to guffaw in recognition of, I didn’t. But on the whole, with its slapdash attitude and great soundtrack, it appealed to that same lazy pleasure center in my brain – the one that never tires of Family Feud reruns and watching Michael Ian Black pontificate on The A-Team. On the days when I’m simply not getting enough done, and wearing too deep a groove in my couch, I wonder if I should have that part lasered out. But I suppose it’s necessary, and because of it, the movie gets a positive reaction from me.

Click for Full Post

MOVIE REVIEW - The Sentinel

Full review behind the jump.

The Sentinel
Director: Clark Johnson
Writer: George Nolfi, based on the novel by Gerald Petievich
Producers: Michael Douglas, Marcy Drogan, Arnon Milchan
Stars: Michael Douglas, Kiefer Sutherland, Eva Longoria, Martin Donovan, Ritchie Coster, Kim Basinger


It’s easy to chalk up the relative dearth of police procedurals in modern cinema to primetime television. After all, when you’ve got a factory churning out neatly-packaged hours of Law & Order, C.S.I. and all their forensic spawn every night of the week, it’s hard to come up with a murder that’s going to get people out of their houses. Classic supply and demand.

A similar familiarity drags down The Sentinel, which in an age of small-screen paranoid political intrigues like Alias and 24 just doesn’t pop. That’s not all about this movie which feels worn-out, but it might be the most difficult to overcome, even with the brisk direction of Clark Johnson (S.W.A.T.) and a pair of leads who certainly know the playing field.

Michael Douglas returns from a brief screen hiatus to star as Secret Service Agent Pete Garrison, an agency legend for taking a bullet meant for Ronald Reagan. But he probably won’t be putting his dalliance with the current First Lady (Kim Basinger) on his resume any time soon. So while we’re on the “familiarity” bandwagon, it bears pointing out that this is yet another movie where a woman’s sexual hunger for Michael Douglas has grave consequences.

You see, there’s a credible assassination threat against the President, with the added fear that someone inside the Service – famous for its unshakeable loyalty – is providing information about their boss’s movements to the assassins. So everyone on the protective detail is subjected to a polygraph, which puts Garrison in a fix because of that little matter about his employers he doesn’t want to divulge.

This triggers a fast-paced run-through of the thriller template wherein a massive security apparatus is directed at an innocent man; while only the innocent man, armed with just his guts and instincts, can discover the truth. Garrison’s Javert is David Breckinridge (“24” star Kiefer Sutherland), a former protégé with a dogged, exacting approach to investigation, and a seething grudge against his old mentor. See, Breckinridge is convinced the old man slept with his wife, and his conviction about it is compelling. Given the evidence that Garrison doesn’t exactly choose his bedmates wisely, it’s plausible, too, and yet the movie shoehorns in a preposterous confrontation between Garrison and the ex-wife whose only purpose is to buttress Garrison’s claims of innocence. This reeks of post-test-screening meddling, and the result has the two male leads come off like they’re working from different script drafts.

Sutherland knows how to play this sort of fiery bloodhound, David Breckinridge is basically Jack Bauer if Jack Bauer got to bathe and eat three squares a day. And Douglas knows he looks good in a suit and is still trim enough at 61 to run for his life, even if his ability to outpace or overpower highly-trained agents young enough to have been sired by him begins to fail the stink test.

There’s another lead whom I haven’t mentioned yet, a new field agent assigned to Breckinridge named Jill Marin (Desperate Housewives star Eva Longoria). I can think of no better reason to mention her except that she’s played by someone whose star is on the rise, as the movie provides her no better reason to participate in the narrative.

Another player is worth mentioning for spinning screenwriting straw into screen gold, though, and that’s Ritchie Coster in the role of the chief conspirator behind the assassination. Character actors must strike a delicate balance between filling out their roles with color and noshing the scenery, and in his lonely few minutes Coster provides just-quirky-enough unpredictability mixed with menace that in a minor way echoes Alan Arkin’s breakthrough role back in Wait Until Dark.

Director Johnson is a longtime television veteran and because of this he shoots in a no-nonsense style. Between cinematographer Gabriel Baristain and production designer Andrew McAlpine his visual scheme is distinctly colorful without ever drawing too much attention to itself, and when the scene calls for run-and-gun action he provides both crisp pacing and a sense of the geography. I especially appreciate his technique of revealing the literal army that is the Service, and how much logistical machinery (and audio cross-chatter) is triggered just by the President getting into a car.

But Johnson is not filmmaker enough to elevate the material. The reversals of fortune, the “surprise” betrayals (yes, this is another Fischer-Price level game of “Spot the Traitor”), the bursts of action and emotion all feel grafted together, a Xerox collage of story ingredients which worked well somewhere else. The charge of inspiration and urgency, the sense that someone, somewhere is excited about this story and wants to tell it to us, is absent in The Sentinel. Everyone is satisfied to do their job and get paid, but that is not enough for the price of a ticket when we can get this stuff for free at home.

Click for Full Post

From the Archive - MOVIE REVIEW - Spartan

SPARTAN
Director: David Mamet
Writer: David Mamet
Producers: Art Linson, Moshe Diamant, David Bergstein, Elie Samaha
Stars: Val Kilmer, Derek Luke, William H. Macy, Tia Texada

As a Special Forces operative with espionage experience, tough-guy Scott (Val Kilmer) is several times called upon to exchange code phrases with people. “Get me the Chinaman” he barks into a pay phone – “tell him it’s the only man who ever saw Jesus!”

In most movies, this would be fairly incongruous even as code-speak. But this movie takes place in Mamet world, where convenience store shoppers walk by Scott having this conversation and don’t bat an eye. And this is because, in Mamet world, not only is this normal for code-speak, it’s normal for casual discourse.

Don’t get me wrong, I live for the stuff. No one writes like the acid-penned, rat-a-tat auteur behind House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, State and Main, and a long list of heralded stage plays like Glengarry Glen Ross. His characters spit linguistic convolutions at each other like they have their own private history of nuance that it doesn’t matter if anyone else groks. They mumble the most bizarre non-sequiters straight-faced, like in their universe it’s a cliché as shopworn as “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

In Spartan, Mamet uses this to throw his audience off-kilter, you’re rarely sure there isn’t something else going on in this dialogue you don’t understand yet. It’s a gift, because once you boil the style away the story reveals itself to be a clever but not-exactly groundbreaking paranoid conspiracy thriller.

Full review behind the jump.

“The Girl” is kidnapped. Of that we can be reasonably certain, since for the first hour at least 20 percent of the dialogue consists of characters, mostly Scott, shouting at people: “Where’s the Girl!” – then punching, bone-breaking, or threatening unspeakable things with knives to men and women, young and old, when no answer is provided.

“The Girl”, if we haven’t had it explained to us already in the trailers, is revealed through clues to be the daughter of the President. She got a new haircut, argued with her boyfriend, and then during one missing hour…vanished.

This is but the kickoff, and I’d be loathe to deny you the surprises ahead, but if you’re watching and you don’t know everything that’s going on – because Mamet, bless his heart, never feels the need to have characters stand around explaining it to you – you’re in the same boat as most of the people on-screen. Even the kidnappers, we come to discover, have failed to understand something pretty important.

And so Scott is the man ordered to cross whatever barriers are necessary to bring her back in a timely matter. It is, after all, an election year, and the mere fact that this is brought up frequently under the circumstances gives some indication of the mindset of the administration in power.

Kilmer makes a good stab at re-inventing himself here; he’s bulked up some, no longer trying so hard to stay pretty, his face has hardened into a middle-aged glower that Tom Berenger would happily accept royalty payments for. He convinces us of the existence of a man who can profess to have little imagination or education, but who can spontaneously generate a verbal dressing down like “You wanted to go through the looking glass. Well how was it? Was it more fun than miniature golf?” By that standard if no other, he acquits himself well.

Many of Mamet’s unofficial acting company (i.e. the people who can handle his dialogue without sounding too ridiculous) show up as well. Chief among them is William H. Macy, spot-on as a worried operative who may not be worried about what you think he’s worried about. And though she’s not credited, I do swear I spotted Mamet’s wife-and-frequent-leading-lady Rebecca Pigeon (The Winslow Boy, State and Main) in a cameo as a woman whose exercise of 2nd Amendment rights has most unfortunate consequences.

As a director Mamet has developed an uncluttered visual style which he frequently espouses in excellent books like On Directing Film. And for the stories he tells, his argument is convincing. It’s sort of Hitchcock-montage-theory by way of Clint Eastwood – he shows you what the shot needs to show you to advance the story and doesn’t succumb to the desire to be “interesting”. And so the cool color scheme and subtle camera work of Juan Ruiz Anchia may not draw much attention to itself – and that’s exactly right for this movie. Subtle is the watchward for all the craftsmen, there’s no flash but a lot of solid work up and down the line.

There are times, unfortunately, that for all its street poetry I do think that Mamet’s dialogue outsteps its goal and is deliberately looking to spin our head around, and for that he gets docked.

And although he operates like a practiced sleight-of-hand magician – waving something in front of us while the other hand works the trick – he has a habit, especially in his climaxes, of suddenly ditching his sense of reserve and shoving something right down our gullets. Be it a final thudding clue or a dues-ex-machina appearance, maybe he fears that we won’t swallow it and blinks, because without it the whole will be lost. Anyone who remembers the end of The Spanish Prisoner (“Look at this. This book. Look, you got fingerprints all over this book. Fingerprints!" Repeat ad nauseum) may well be hesitantly – because they want, like I do, to forgive this flaw – asking themselves why a Swedish news crew just happens to be wandering, unaccompanied, the tarmac of an airfield in Dubai in the middle of the night.

But perhaps I’ve said too much.

Click for Full Post

Let the Big Big Whoredom Commence!

Hello, droogies, and welcome to my big sell-out for 2006. After spending two years and a half-million words blogging not for the money, but for the LOVE, over at LiveJournal, I'm ready to monkey-dance for your AdSense pennies. Just like those evil storm-chasers in Twister with their fancy black SUVs. (Hiss! We hate them!)

I've got heaps of stuff that I'll be trucking over here bit by bit, including my archive of movie reviews (130 and growing). Currently my plan is to carry on with crossposting on both sites, while saving a few special treats for my longstanding LJ friends. Starting today you'll see a mix of current stuff plus archive stuff, which I'll clearly label, until I think we're well caught up here.

So, for those of you who don't know me...

Your host (Artist's rendering)

I'm Nick. I write for a living. Actually, that living's been piss-poor lately (hence, SELLING OUT!) It wasn't always this way....

[dribbly flashback mode]

I've worked in and around the movie industry for the last 6+ years. Met some famous folks and their underlings, got my name buried in the end credits of some mostly-bad movies, even sold a screenplay which I've been hearing for two-and-a-half years now is this close to going into production. Other odds and ends, a story optioned here, a treatment some producer LOVES there, some stage work. One of the cutest things about the movie business is you can keep incredibly busy without actually making a dime. You'll hear about that.

[/dribbly flashback mode]

I've got a cat. Her name is Nessie:

I make frequent references to friends and relatives. All of them have galling nicknames you'll get to know. I post frequently though not necessarily regularly. You will not always get an explanation as to why. There are aspects of my personal life I will not share with you. Sometimes I will call you "Jimmy". You will not always get an explanation as to why.

More about me you'll learn along the way. Welcome.

Click for Full Post