People Tell Me I Look Like Han Solo.

What the...?!?!

2010-07-02T10:00:00.003-04:00

Hey, so regular readers have probably noticed a bit of a change here, visually. That's in part because we've moved all the Captivate Network blogs to a new place, Captivateblogs.com (for the direct link to my movie blog, it's Captivateblogs.com/Movies).

In the meantime, I'll be continuing to post here, as well as providing occasional exclusive reviews and opinion beyond my usual two posts per week on the Captivateblogs site. But for the full experience, you're going to want to bookmark Captivateblogs.com.

That's all. I'll be back with more stuff next week, including a whack of fresh DVD reviews. Stay tuned, true believers...

DVD Review: Lewis Black - Stark Raving Black

2010-07-02T09:15:00.000-04:00

Lewis Black, one of the angriest comedians working today, really broke out for a lot of people with his ‘Back in Black’ segments on The Daily Show. I quite like his comedy, less because it’s angry (though people who know me well will certainly see a connection between Black’s animated, furious ranting and my own), but because it’s so smart. Black is a very intelligent, informed man (he used to be a playwright!), and much of his comedy is based on what’s going on in the world. Which isn’t to say he’s a political comedian, but rather that he’s a comedian whose material goes deeper than pointing out the differences between men and women or the perils of the dating scene.

Stark Raving Black is a pretty solid package, especially for fans. It’s got an 80-minute stand-up special, as well as a 50-minute documentary called Basic Black about his life and career. The special itself is quality stuff – Black is very funny, and like a lot of my favorite comics, he’s particularly good at long, involved stories that don’t follow the traditional stand-up comic joke structure – covering topics as diverse as the economy, politics, his parents and his own bizarre career path to the mainstream (which culminates in a fantastic story about him following Vince Gill and Amy Grant at a benefit show). I’m not sure if it’s the sort of thing that will win over non-fans, but as a guy who enjoys Lewis Black, I quite liked it.

Basic Black, the documentary, was much more comprehensive than I expected. It’s a fairly insightful look at the man, covering his life and career as a playwright and how and why he transitioned from that into comedy. It’s got a lot of the expected clips of friends and colleagues talking about how brilliant he is (as well as Vince Gill's reaction to Black's bit about him), but it’s also a nice look into his process (which seems to largely consist of him reading the newspaper, getting really angry, and generating a bunch of material based on that). It’s also got lots of footage of Black performing in the ‘80s and ‘90s, where he seemed much angrier and less accessible (which only made me like him more). And at less than an hour, it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

On the whole, Stark Raving Black is an excellent DVD for fans of stand-up comedy fans, and if you’re a particular fan of Lewis Black, it’s essential viewing.

GRADE: B+

DVD Review: Youth In Revolt

2010-06-30T11:27:00.005-04:00

Michael Cera is an actor about whom I'm somewhat split. Like a lot of people, I discovered him in his breakout role as George Michael Bluth on the brilliant sitcom Arrested Development, and he remains one of the best things in the entire show. It's where he perfected his stuttering-wallflower shtick, and, in the context of the show (where he plays an awkward 15-year-old with a sad crush on his cousin), it's perfect. But Cera's basically been playing variations of George Michael ever since, which has led to a lot of people experiencing a sort of Cera fatigue. (I know more than one person who pretty much hates him because he always seems to be doing the exact same thing in everything he does.)

Youth In Revolt is a movie that directly plays on Cera's on-screen persona. He plays Nick Twisp, a shy Michael Cera type who falls for Sheeni, a girl at the trailer park his mom and her boyfriend have forced him to spend his summer at. After hearing about Sheeni's too-cool boyfriend, Nick creates a new persona for himself, the devil-may-care, cigarette-smoking Francois Dillinger. Francois appears as another character who only Nick can see, and he's the exact opposite of Nick (and by extension, the Cera Persona).

With Youth In Revolt, Cera does prove that he can go outside of his usual stuttering-geek wheelhouse, and most of the scenes with him in character as Francois are hilarious. Cera's also surrounded by an able supporting cast, including Zach Galifianakis, Justin Long, Ray Liotta, Steve Buscemi and the always-game Fred Willard, and they're all doing solid, funny work.

The main problem that the movie can't string together enough quirky, vaguely funny scenes to overcome is the fact that the character of Sheeni (who, as the girl Nick is pursuing, is sort of the primary driver of the plot) is sort of horrible. She's pretentious, manipulative and appears to take great pleasure in messing with Nick, always happy to mention her mysterious, apparently perfect boyfriend, Troy, to make Nick feel jealous and inadequate. Which, considering every action our hero takes is in pursuit of her, ends up undermining the movie. I was sort of amused for much of Youth In Revolt's running time, but I never actually cared about Nick or whether or not he won Sheeni. Many of the characters are funny and eccentric, but none of them are what I'd call likeable or engaging, so I never cared about what happened to any of them. And I certainly didn't care if Nick ended up with Sheeni.

Youth In Revolt exists halfway between something close to reality and the absurd fantasy-world of movies by filmmakers like Wes Anderson and Napoleon Dynamite's Jared Hess. Almost every character in the movie except for Nick has a weird eccentricity that feels manufactured and put-on, with the exceptions of Nick's dual father figures of his actual father (Buscemi) and his mom's boyfriend (Galifianakis), who are both blue-collar slobs that the movie really seems to look down on.

There's some funny scenes in Youth In Revolt, but on the whole there's little more going on than forced quirkiness. Despite its flirtation with indie-film pretension, Youth In Revolt has nothing to say about youth or rebellion or puberty beyond "teenagers want to get laid." Bravo.

Overall there are movies that cover much of the same ground that are funnier and more observant than Youth In Revolt. The biggest thing I got out of watching this movie was reassurances for the upcoming Scott Pilgrim vs. The World that there's more to Michael Cera than his Arrested Development shtick. And there is, but unfortunately it's been largely wasted with this film. The good news is, Scott Pilgrim hits theaters in just over a month. Now that movie looks awesome.

GRADE: C

DVD Review: She's Out of My League

2010-06-29T12:37:00.007-04:00

She's Out of My League is a charming, sweet and pretty funny little romantic comedy about an awkward airport security guard named Kirk (Jay Baruchel) who somehow finds himself dating Molly (Alice Eve), a ridiculously hot party planner. The movie never strays too much from the usual notes movies like this typically hit, but it's a light, fluffy piece of entertainment that bops along nicely. It's certainly not one of the funniest movies I've ever seen, but it made me laugh more than I expected it to, and it's filled with solid, funny actors in supporting roles, which helps to elevate the material above the usual generic "raunchy" relationship comedy.

A lot of the plot and characters in She's Out of My League are fairly paint-by-numbers; Kirk's family is the token group of lowbrow social misfits who say and do inappropriate things at dinner, a mirror image of every wacky family in movies like this, and his gang of buddies is basically lifted from The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up and every other movie like that (there's the ladies man, the smartass and the guy who's even more of a loser than the hero), but the actors in those roles are actually pretty good for the most part (especially T.J. Miller as the smart-alecky Stainer), so it never really grates.

She's Out of My League is definitely an R-rated comedy, but it never feels like director Jim Field Smith is piling on gross-out humor or raunchy gags (though there are some of those, including the requisite ejaculation joke, which makes me wonder if there might actually be a guidebook for creating movies like this) for cheap laughs. Because it lacks the pedigree (i.e. a producer credit from Judd Apatow) of similar comedies in recent years, I assumed it would go that route, but I was pleasantly surprised. It's a fairly smart, legitimately funny comedy.

The movie's primary weapon is Jay Baruchel in the lead. The Montreal-bred actor is really cementing himself as the go-to guy for geek-types in movies, and he's one of the best at it. He's really funny, and he also conveys a vulnerability and sweetness that makes viewers naturally want to root for him. He's funny without stealing scenes from his comic-relief sidekicks, and charming enough to make Kirk seem like he could legitimately be appealing to Molly. Once the movie gets going and you get to know the characters a little bit, it never seems that weird that Molly would be into him. She's Out of My League smartly plays up Kirk's insecurity, rather than the incongruity of their respective appearances, which I found refreshing.

The only character in the movie who isn't surprised by Molly's attraction to Kirk is Molly herself. Alice Eve doesn't have to do much as Molly other than look hot (which, admittedly, she's pretty awesome at), as she's mostly the straight-woman, but she's got solid comic timing and a charm about her that quickly reassures viewers that there's no third act twist coming that reveals that Molly to be a superficial monster who's actually just messing with Kirk. But she really sells from the moment she enters the movie that she's genuinely into Kirk, and it makes her an easy character to like.

Things do get pretty cliché in the third act, and the "conflict" at the end feels even more tacked on than usual for a movie like this. It was literally midway through Kirk and Molly's climactic argument before I realized, "Oh! This is the part where they fight so he can go win her back…!", it was so ridiculously out-of-the-blue. At this point in our cinematic evolution, I think you have to either really nail that part of the movie, or don't do it at all. The idea that there has to be some conflict for them to overcome in order to be a couple is just lazy, paint-by-numbers screenwriting, and while I realize that most of the appeal for She's Out of My League has to do with it knowing exactly what kind of movie it is, but I really would have like the movie more if it wasn't so satisfied to just hit all the usual marks. I mean, for the love of god, there's a climactic scene involving characters running through an airport! Are you even trying when you sit down to write that sequence in the 21st century? In fact, I'm starting to wonder they didn't make Kirk and his buddies airport workers just so they could use that cliché. If they were trying to be ironic or comment on romantic comedies, they failed.

But overall, as a guy whose dating life probably skews a bit closer to Kirk's than I'd like to admit, She's Out of My League is a sweet little wish-fulfillment romantic-comedy, the geeky male equivalent of the movie where the mousy career woman (who is actually clearly just a ridiculously hot woman under glasses and a bad wig) successfully convinces Matthew McConaughey or Gerard Butler to stop his womanizing ways and settle down. It's a nice, disposable piece of entertainment, and it's helped greatly by the fact that it's actually quite funny. It's sweet enough to keep the guy half of a date night interested, and sweet enough to appeal to fans of romantic comedies.

GRADE: B

First look at 'Conan,' plus trailers for 'The Green Hornet' and 'Red'

2010-06-24T11:24:00.006-04:00

So there’s a new Conan movie in production, starring Jason Momoa from one of the Stargate TV shows I never watched. I’m a bit of a Conan fan, though I came at the character through comics rather than the novels and stories where author Robert E. Howard created the iconic barbarian, and the original 1981 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Conan the Barbarian is a total classic (though it deviates quite a bit from the source material, which means a lot of really hardcore Conan fans hate it. And the sequel, Conan the Destroyer, simply sucks), so needless to say I’ve been curious about this new cinematic Conan.

The first official picture of Momoa in character has been released, above, and I can say he certainly looks the part. Momoa, who had a big mop of dreadlocks on Stargate, also appeared to still be rocking that look when a grainy spy picture popped up a few months ago, which left many fans (myself included) more than a little disappointed. But it looks like the studio is eager to put those fears to rest with this new pic, as Momoa even appears to have Conan’s ice-blue eyes. Momoa, who I gather did a lot of running and jumping and swordfighting-type stuff on Stargate, can probably handle the physicality of the role, and I don’t think Conan the Barbarian is a role that requires incredible acting chops, so all Momoa has to do to nail it is not suck. Conan is directed by Marcus Nispel (the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th remakes, as well as the very Conan-influenced Vikings vs. Native Americans flick Pathfinder), and is slated to hit theaters in 2011.

* * *

Sony’s finally released a trailer for The Green Hornet, starring Seth Rogen and Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou, and it looks alarmingly generic. A genuinely brilliant director (Frenchman Michel Gondry, who made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) is behind the camera on this film, and aside from one brief shot in the trailer (the neat little camera trick after Chou’s Kato kicks someone), there’s nothing in this trailer – which, in fairness, is just that, and not always the best thing to judge a film on – that suggests there’s anything going on in The Green Hornet that we haven’t seen before. Even the dynamic where the ostensible sidekick is more capable than the hero feels rehashed. And the fact that I couldn't understand any of Chou’s lines in the trailer doesn’t bode well for his chemistry with Rogen, who, again, seems to be playing himself. Maybe Christoph Waltz, glimpsed only briefly, can save this one? Who knows.

Sony seems to not know what to do with The Green Hornet; they recently bumped the film from a high-profile Christmas release to the relative dumping ground of January 2011, but they’re also converting it to 3D (which, as I understand it, is not cheap). I can’t pretend I’m not curious, but at this point there hasn’t been much about The Green Hornet that hasn't left me confused at best. I guess I’ll find out what the deal is on January 14. In the meantime, have a look at the trailer for yourself.

* * *

And finally, an item that I can, at this point at least, endorse wholeheartedly. It’s a teaser trailer for an upcoming action thriller (with much more of a comedic edge than I would have guessed) called Red, about a group of retired CIA badasses who find themselves targeted by their former agency. The cast is what makes this one look so compelling: Bruce Willis as the lead, with Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman and John Malkovich as his former team.

Red is a movie close to my heart for a few reasons: it’s based on a very cool comic miniseries of the same name by writer Warren Ellis and artist Cully Hamner (though the movie has expanded and changed a lot, which is fine; the comic was really spare, and would barely have made a 20 minute short on its own), and it was also shot mostly around my office in Toronto. (Well, old office technically; we’ve moved since they filmed this.) Those two factors always had me curious about the movie, but having seen this teaser, which looks awesome and hilarious and fun, I’m now officially really excited. Red is set for release on October 15.

Summer. What happened?

2010-06-18T10:17:00.006-04:00

There’s less than two weeks left in June, and I’ve only seen two genuinely fun movies this summer. One was Iron Man 2, which semi-officially kicked off the summer blockbuster season more than a month ago, and the other was The A-Team, which was a metric ton of fun, but is also already considered a box office disappointment. Aside from Shrek and the Karate Kid remake (both kiddie movies, you’ll notice), this summer is widely considered a weak one so far in terms of both box office and quality. Now, obviously, money isn’t everything, but it’s not like there’s been a pile of critical hits so far either; perceived financial disappointments like Sex and the City 2, Marmaduke and Prince of Persia all received so-so reviews at best.

By this time last summer we had already seen the release of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Star Trek, Angels & Demons, Night At the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, Up and The Hangover, all of which, regardless of your feelings about the respective quality of those films, are considered to have at least been moderately successful. Everyone knows there are flops every summer, but this year looks more packed with them than usual. Despite the studio trying to convince everyone it’s a huge deal, I know absolutely nobody who is the least bit interested in the Tom Cruise-Cameron Diaz action-comedy Knight and Day, and I don’t even think Warner Bros. expects the critically-savaged Jonah Hex to do much business this weekend.

The big hope, aside from the guaranteed hit that is Toy Story 3, is Christopher Nolan’s Inception, which, as intriguing as it looks (I’ve always got time for ambitious, thinky sci-fi movies filled with striking visuals), is still a big mystery. It’ll obviously open big based on post-Dark Knight hype alone, but whether or not its (presumably) more challenging subject matter turns off audiences in the long term remains to be seen. (Movies like Watchmen prove you can use marketing and buzz to get people into theaters opening weekend, but if people walking out of the movie afterward didn’t enjoy it, that’s pretty much the end of that.

There are still a few movies I’m really excited about seeing in the coming months, like Inception, Predators, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and the Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg cop comedy The Other Guys, but I can’t help but think this summer will go down as a let-down in terms of the quality of the big movies released, and so far, it appears audiences voting with their wallets for the most part agree.

Ghost Rider sequel getting Cranked?

2010-06-17T09:20:00.004-04:00

It’s always a bit strange when I’m far more interested to the sequel to a bad or mediocre movie than I was in the original, but suddenly Sony’s planned sequel to the weak 2007 Marvel Comics adaptation Ghost Rider starring Nicolas Cage, has gotten a lot more interesting with the news that directing duo Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the team behind the Crank movies, are in talks to helm the follow-up, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.

The original Ghost Rider was directed by Mark Steven Johnson, a self-described comic geek who, unfortunately, can’t make a movie to save his goddamn life (he was also behind the 2003 atrocity Daredevil). Johnson’s heart was in the right place, and he certainly had a game star in Cage, who injected Ghost Rider’s alter ego, stuntman Johnny Blaze, with a goofy, Elvis-like charisma. The movie itself wasn’t that terrible; there were some interesting FX shots and it was fairly cool to see the supernatural avenger’s signature flaming skull brought to life onscreen, but I can’t recommend a movie where the best thing I can say about it is “it wasn’t as awful as I had expected.”

I’m excited about the potential involvement of Neveldine/Taylor, as they credit themselves, the duo responsible for the wonderfully insane Crank and Crank 2: High Voltage, some of the best action movies to come out of America in years. (Crank 2 also features an awesome performance by the late Corey Haim.) Their Crank follow-up, Gamer, was a bit of a disappointment, but the fact that it devolves into a generic action movie is somewhat redeemed by it being the first movie I’ve ever seen that satirizes online gaming and social media that was clearly made by people who have an actual understanding of such things.

But I’m digressing. One of the things I love so much about the Crank movies is how utterly insane they are, but Neveldine/Taylor, who used to make music videos, have a really great eye for composition and a touch for wacky camera tricks, and I’d very much like to see their over-the-top visual style applied to a comic book movie. (They were originally set to direct this summer’s Jonah Hex with Josh Brolin and Megan Fox, until “creative differences” saw them leave the project, though they still have a screenplay credit.) Add to that the fact that Cage is also reportedly in talks to return – I’d love to see how Nicolas Cage could get in a Neveldine/Taylor movie – and suddenly Ghost Rider: The Spirit of Vengeance is looking very intriguing indeed. Stay tuned for more news as I hear about it.

DVD Review: 44 Inch Chest

2010-06-11T10:30:00.005-04:00

44 Inch Chest is a British gangster film from the writers of the brilliant 2000 gangster flick Sexy Beast (see that movie if you haven’t, it’s great), and it also shares a few actors in lead Ray Winstone and co-star Ian McShane. But while Sexy Beast was a slick, stylish gangster flick with a riveting performance from Ben Kingsley as a ridiculously stubborn thug who lent the film a real sense of menace and tension, 44 Inch Chest is more of a meditation on love, heartbreak and the masculine ego. With gangsters.

The story follows Colin Diamond (Winstone), a middle-aged tough guy from the British underworld who finds out his beloved wife (Joanne Whalley) has cheated on him with a French waiter half his age. Utterly devastated, his shady pals Meredith (McShane), Old Man Peanut (John Hurt), Archie (Tom Wilkinson) and Mal (Stephen Dillane) abduct the young lothario from the restaurant where he works to set up an impromptu trial – with him tied to a chair – so their heartbroken friend can feel better about himself.

While director Malcolm Venville doesn’t have the visual flair of Sexy Beast director Jonathan Glazer (that film is referenced all over the box art and extras on this movie, so they’re very much inviting that comparison), 44 Inch Chest is a really great-looking movie. Venville has an excellent eye, and while his film isn’t as in-your-face with style and use of crazy colors as Sexy Beast, his film is filled with wonderfully composed shots, and the pacing is top notch.

The best thing about 44 Inch Chest is the actors. Everyone here is doing stellar work, particularly McShane as the supercool gay gangster Meredith. While almost every scene he has references his homosexuality, McShane resists the temptation to play him as a cartoonish drag queen type, rather giving him an incredible charisma fused with a menace that lurks just beneath the surface. And the delight he takes in riling up Hurt’s decidedly homophobic Peanut is a ceaselessly entertaining running gag.

Hurt, one of my favorite British character actors, gets a wonderfully meaty role to sink his bizarre false teeth into as the cranky Old Man Peanut. Wilkinson makes Archie the most easily likeable character in the film – we’re introduced to him while he’s enjoying a nice, quiet evening with his mom – and his positive disposition makes him the natural mediator in the group. And Stephen Dillane, the only actor in the ensemble I wasn’t familiar with going in, ended up making the smart-assed Mal one of my favorite characters in the movie.

But is 44 Inch Chest is anyone’s show, it’s Winstone’s. The arc he gets to display as Colin – heartbroken man, terrifying bully, repentant husband – takes real chops, and he’s stellar. The way the film is structured, we get flashbacks as the film goes on of what happened before the little kangaroo court began, and the insights they provide end up shading the character of Colin. Winstone really is playing a man with a broken heart, and for much of the movie it’s the other characters who get to seem threatening, so he ends up spending the first act seeming like just a pathetic, blubbering sadsack. But once the plot starts to thicken as the film unfolds, we get glimpses of Colin as the terrifying, violent thug his friends know him to be.

Aside from the acting, it was the intimate, theater-like vibe of 44 Inch Chest that impressed me the most. Aforementioned flashbacks aside, the bulk of the film is set in a small room in a run-down tenement with the main characters delivering speeches to each other, and it really felt like a play a lot of the time (and I mean that as a high compliment). And it means every actor in the film gets at least one big, juicy monologue to play with. McShane has at least two totally awesome speeches, but the real centerpiece is Winstone’s lengthy speech to Loverboy, delivered mostly to the camera in a tight close-up, about the true nature of love, and how it takes hard work. It’s incredibly well done, and surprisingly heartfelt and touching. I wasn’t expecting this level of emotional engagement from a gangster/revenge movie, but it knocked me on my ass. There’s a rhythm to Louis Mellis’ and David Scinto’s dialogue – which is also often hilarious – that approaches masters like Quentin Tarantino and David Mamet. 44 Inch Chest is simply a piece of great writing, and much of the movie’s appeal is watching a pack of great actors go to town with the material.

As much as 44 Inch Chest isn’t as flashy and slick on its surface as Sexy Beast, Venville adds a bunch of wonderfully subtle touches, like the French waiter only being referred to as Loverboy, or the fact that he doesn’t even have a line in the film (he literally just spends the movie sitting there looking scared, but his role is still fairly significant), or the fact that Colin and his friends are never officially identified as gangsters, and we never get an explanation as to exactly what it is these men do. It’s little touches like that that make 44 Inch Chest feel like it takes place in its own little reality; there’s a history between these characters that’s almost never directly referenced, but is always present.

As much as 44 Inch Chest is about love and heartbreak, it’s also about love between men. The characters in the film have an unbreakable bond that goes beyond business, and as sinister and violent as the goings-on can be (there is a bloodied man tied to a chair in the middle of the room that they all keep threatening to murder, after all), it’s always clear that Colin’s friends are doing this for him out of a completely genuine sense of loyalty and love. They hate Loverboy as much as he does – maybe even more – because of what he’s done to their friend, and it’s clearly painful for them to see their comrade reduced to such a pathetic state.

The pacing in 44 Inch Chest is a bit odd, and it’s not really a traditional gangster movie, which may put off some viewers. There isn’t a lot of violence or “action” for a movie ostensibly about gangsters. It’s similar to Reservoir Dogs in the way it’s sort of set after a lot of the action that drives the plot, and mostly follows the characters as they react to what happened earlier, which is eventually made clear to the audience in pieces over the movie’s running time. It’s a slow-burn movie that lacks a big payoff – I suspect some viewers will really dislike the ending, which is almost anti-climactic – but the ending was actually one of the aspects of the movie I liked the most. It felt like it fit in perfectly with the rest of the movie.

I went into 44 Inch Chest expecting a hard-edged British gangster film, and while it certainly has those elements, it ended up being a strangely insightful story of love, betrayal and the male ego. It’s not as superficially “cool” as a lot of other movies about underworld types, but it’s an excellent film nonetheless, and will appeal to mature, intelligent fans of the genre. Highly recommended.

GRADE: A-

Fright Night remake, more Bourne and Tom Cruise's latest

2010-06-10T10:40:00.006-04:00

Lots of little news items today about a few interesting projects today. First off, two more people have joined the cast of the remake of the 1985 vampire horror-comedy Fright Night, about a teenager convinced his next door neighbor is a vampire (and he’s right), but nobody believes him. Anton Yelchin (Star Trek, Terminator Salvation) signed on some time ago as Charlie, the lead, Colin Farrell is on board to play the charming vampire and Toni Collette (United States of Tara) will play Yelchin’s disbelieving mom. Now on board are Christopher Mintz-Plasse of Kick-Ass and Superbad fame as Evil Ed, Charlie’s friend who becomes a vampire, and David Tennant, who recently wrapped a stint as the title character in the BBC’s revamped Doctor Who, will play a Criss Angel-like stage magician who claims to be a vampire expert, but it turns out he’s full of it. (It’s a reimagining of Roddy McDowell’s role in the original, where he played the host of a late-night horror show.) While I haven’t seen the original Fright Night since I was a kid, I have quite fond memories of it, and with the whole vampire craze going on right now, I guess now’s as good a time as any for a remake. And if they retain the comic tone of the original, the new Fright Night could stand out as more than a post-Twilight cash grab.

* * *

Fresh from an in-character appearance at the MTV Movie Awards, the rumors appear to be true: Paramount says Tom Cruise will reprise his role as foul-mouthed movie mogul Les Grossman from Tropic Thunder for a spin-off movie. Now, I’m a huge fan of Tropic Thunder – I picked it as one of the best movies of 2008 – and I enjoyed Cruise’s comic turn more than a lot of people I know, but I really just don’t see Les Grossman carrying a movie. Characters like that work best in short bursts, as Cruise did in Tropic Thunder, but an entire movie about him sounds like it could be pushing it. Personally, I’d much rather see Robert Downey Jr.’s Kirk Lazarus character get his own movie.

* * *

Universal seems hellbent on making more Bourne movies with or without the participation of star Matt Damon and director of the latter two movies, Paul Greengrass, hiring a screenwriter to start work on a fourth film, with the working title The Bourne Legacy. Damon’s said in the past that he doesn’t want to make a Bourne movie without Greengrass, who seems more interested in making non-Bourne films for the time being (though marketing his last collaboration with Damon, Green Zone, as a Bourne-style thriller clearly didn’t help its box office), but Universal wants The Bourne Legacy in theaters in 2012, which doesn’t sound like a timetable that would accommodate either Damon (one of the busiest actors in Hollywood) or Greengrass. The fourth script will reportedly have a new story, and will disregard the two other scripts for a new Bourne movie that Universal hired some writers to work on last summer. I think the Bourne franchise could survive without Greengrass, as brilliant as he is (his movies are the best in the series), but a Damon-less Bourne film seems like a dodgy idea. Audiences love these movies (they’ve made almost $1 billion in total), but they also clearly associate Damon with the role. I don’t think people will shell out their hard-earned money just because the word Bourne is on the poster. I’d rather Universal waited until both Damon and Greengrass were ready to make another Bourne film, but it’s pretty clear at this point that Hollywood doesn’t really listen to me.

* * *

Finally, a little item just for me. I wrote a big rant not too long ago about how stupid I think video game movies are, and sure enough, a week or so later a weird little short turned up on the web that claimed to be from some sort of Mortal Kombat movie. As it turns out, it’s basically a demo reel from director Kevin Tancharoen (last year’s Fame remake) and fight choreographer Larnell Stovall (who worked on the recent Undisputed III: Redemption, an awesomely fun martial arts movie that I’ll find an excuse to write about in greater detail some day soon) to try to get Warner Bros. on board with their vision of the film. It also features Michael Jai White from Black Dynamite, one of my favorite movies of last year (read me gushing here).

Now, as dumb as game movies are, I think fighting games like Mortal Kombat have potential to make fun kung fu movies (martial arts movies and fighting games share thin plots, colorful characters and, if done well, exciting action), and it looks like Tancharoen and Stovall get that. Their vision of Mortal Kombat deviates from the stories of the games (which involve mystical creatures and ancient magic and stuff) and grounds it in a grittier, dare I say “realistic” context (I know, I know), and it looks like it could work as a fun, violent martial arts flick. If these guys make the next Mortal Kombat movie, I’ll eat my words and line up to see it. Have a look at the short below and judge for yourself.

DVD Review: The Road

2010-06-04T10:30:00.001-04:00

The Road is a movie that I enjoyed a lot more than I expected to. I’ve read Cormac McCarthy’s award-winning novel (one of the best books I’ve read in a decade, and I’m a pretty voracious reader by most standards), and the bar set by the Coen Bros. with their Oscar-winning film of McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (pretty much a flawless movie, in my estimation) is so high that it’s effectively unreachable. Not helping director John Hillcoat and Joe Penhall is the fact that the source material is actually far less film-friendly than the more plot-driven No Country. But I was very pleasantly surprised by their version of The Road, which, while it doesn’t approach the perfection of No Country for Old Men, is still a very good movie that manages to hit many of the book’s emotional beats without being too depressing or bleak. There’s a core of hope to the book that the filmmakers manage to tap into, and it makes The Road much, much more than an overly serious riff on The Road Warrior.

The Road, if you’re unfamiliar with the book, follows a father and son in post-apocalyptic America. The cause of the catastrophe is never explained, nor are the characters’ histories explored beyond a handful of golden-hued flashbacks, which Hillcoat and Penhall expanded considerably from the even more vague flashbacks in the novel. McCarthy’s book is less proper prose than a sort of tone poem about humanity, and the plot – The Man and The Boy (never named) are making their way south in the hopes of finding a more friendly climate on the coast – is almost non-existent. The Road is basically a collection of sequences of the Man and the Boy encountering other survivors (most of them bad; the death of just about every plant and animal on the planet has led many to turn to cannibalism), and Hillcoat and Penhall sort of stumble by trying to serve two masters: the novel and the moviegoing audience. The biggest problem with The Road – and it’s hardly a major one, and will really only be noticed by people who’ve read the book – is that it sort of falls halfway between being an incredibly loyal adaptation (à la No Country) and a more Hollywood-style revamp (i.e. with beefed-up action and a more traditional narrative arc). It doesn’t ruin the movie, and thankfully Hillcoat and Penhall err on the side of being faithful to McCarthy’s novel, changing the structure considerably but otherwise staying very true to the book. (Hillcoat says in his commentary that McCarthy approved of the final film.)

But The Road lives and dies by its actors, and Viggo Mortenson and Kodi Smit-McPhee are both incredible as the Man and the Boy. McPhee, in particular, is fantastic, and I look forward to seeing him in the otherwise ill-advised upcoming remake of the mind-blowingly great Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In (read me gush about it here and here). Mortenson is just so reliably good at this point in his career that I can’t even come up with anything clever to say about his performance. He’s simply awesome in what’s clearly a very challenging role.

In addition to the leads, there’s also a handful of other great actors who turn up in tiny roles (often just a single scene), including Charlize Theron, glimpsed in flashbacks as the Woman, whose emotional scenes with a heartbroken Mortenson are almost difficult to watch. Guy Pearce and Michael K. Williams (best known as Omar from The Wire) also turn up, but it was Robert Duvall who blew everyone else away as an old blind man. His scene with Mortenson and McPhee at the campfire was, for me, easily the best scene in the entire film.

Beyond the lineup of stellar actors, The Road really benefits from Hillcoat’s direction. The Australian first grabbed me with his Outback western The Proposition (which starred Pearce), probably the grimiest, dirtiest film I’ve ever seen. His gritty visual style is perfect for the ash-covered world of The Road. The crew also used mostly real locations (much of it was shot in and around Pittsburgh), as opposed to using CGI to create the film’s desolate, blasted landscapes, and the results make the movie seem that much more real. Hillcoat also does an excellent job of ramping up the tension – I don’t remember the last time I saw a movie where the mere fact that there was a person in the distance could inspire bowel-clenching terror – and The Road is as scary as any horror movie.

As for the DVD itself, there’s a commentary track from Hillcoat that’s a little dry, but he’s charmingly self-conscious about his lack of experience doing commentaries, and once he gets comfortable he provides lots of interesting insights into the process of bringing The Road to the screen, including the process of involving McCarthy. There’s also a pretty good making-of featurette, as well as a small collection of deleted and extended scenes.

Overall The Road really surpassed my guarded expectations, and while it’s not best-film-of-the-year material, it’s emotionally involving without being too much of a downer, filled with incredible performances and some really striking imagery. The Road is a refreshingly mature, grown-up post-apocalyptic movie with genuine heart.

First look at Captain America, new Scott Pilgrim trailer

2010-06-03T10:13:00.005-04:00

Ain’t It Cool News posted some images of what is apparently the almost-final costume designs for Marvel’s upcoming Captain America movie. I’m okay with them. I’m not the world’s biggest Cap fan (though the current run, written by the brilliant Ed Brubaker, is some of the best mainstream superhero comics going), so I can’t pretend I have some deep, nostalgic connection to the little wings on his head on his outfit in the comics (but the comic geek in me sort of misses them), but my first thought was this seems like a pretty cutting-edge costume considering the fact that, as I understand it, the bulk of the movie’s action is set during the Second World War. And as a friend of mine pointed out, that there’s really a lot of pouches on there.

All that being said, these are obviously just illustrations, so I’ll reserve my judgment until I see the first actual photos of Chris Evans in the real-life suit. As much as the buzz surrounding Captain America was somewhat negative until Evans’ casting (script problems, budget disputes between the director and Marvel, etc.), I’m cautiously optimistic that the movie will be good. I like Evans a lot, and I really like the stage-setting for Thor and The Avengers Marvel started doing in Iron Man 2. Who am I kidding? Screw head-wings, I’m excited. Captain America: The First Avenger hits theaters next summer.

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Because I am a kind and benevolent movie blogger, I will leave you today with the new trailer for Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. I’ve already gushed over how awesome the comic is, and how primed I am for this movie, so I’ll skip that. But I will say that this new trailer (which really showcases the action; I really can’t wait for this thing) also puts to rest a lot of the concerns I had about Michael Cera playing the title role. I’ve said before that the character of Scott Pilgrim and the persona Cera adopts in everything he’s ever done couldn’t be more different, but it looks like he’s finally moving out of his stuttering-wallflower wheelhouse.

I want to see this movie so badly I’m on the verge of tears. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is out August 13.

Okay. Enough already with the video game movies.

2010-05-27T09:40:00.008-04:00

So news came down the pipe this week that the latest big video game franchise to get the Hollywood adaptation treatment is Mass Effect, a plot-heavy sci-fi action/RPG where the player controls the captain of a starship with the token motley crew of eccentrics and aliens. Coupled with the insane amount of hype that Prince of Persia has been getting (the ads have been inescapable for weeks now), something in my brain just snapped, and I’ve had enough. Enough with the video game movies, Hollywood. They’ve never worked (either financially or artistically), and I really don’t think they ever will, whether it’s Prince of Persia or Mass Effect or Gears of War or any other big-name game franchise that’s been optioned for a movie. And I’m saying that as a both a movie buff and a gamer.

I love Mass Effect, a lot. So much so that my Xbox 360 recently died on me and I’m already resigned to dropping about $300 just so I can re-play the Mass Effect games as well as the upcoming Mass Effect 3. I’m a fan. Not a posting-fanfiction-on-message-boards fan, I grant you, but I probably have more invested in Mass Effect than the vast majority of “average” moviegoers. And I think the idea for a Mass Effect movie is awful.

Here’s the crazy part of why I’m so sick of movie games: I like video games. A lot. Probably more than you. No, screw it, I can almost guarantee I like games more than you. But the movies suck. They always suck. They almost certainly never won’t suck. I want them to be good. But they never are. You know what one of the best video game movies made yet is? Mortal Kombat. And that movie is not good at all (and I know from martial arts movies). Trust me. Mortal Kombat is not a good movie. But compared to literally every other video game movie – Hitman, Max Payne, Super Mario Brothers, Resident Evil, whatever – it’s pretty awesome. It’s entertaining and it’s faithful to the story of the games (a term I use quite loosely indeed), and those are two things that are almost never said about movies based on games.

Why is that? I have some theories. And they’re not the sort that are popular in hardcore gaming circles. I think the reason movies based on games are always crap is that the stories the movies are adapting are always crap. Games pretty much all tell stories nowadays (obviously I don’t mean Wii Sports here), and they always reference movies, because cinematic storytelling is what games have aspired to for as long as cutscenes have existed. Mass Effect, to continue with this example, has as detailed a sci-fi universe behind it as any game I’ve ever played, but it’s filled with ideas and concepts that are borrowed from existing sci-fi movies, TV shows and books. There’s nothing terribly original in there beyond a few clever superficial things, and so a Mass Effect film will automatically feel very derivative to an “average” (i.e. non-gamer) audience. They’d only see the Star Trek-inspired ships and the Star Wars-inspired aliens and concepts. What makes the Mass Effect games so special isn’t the plot itself, it’s how the player interacts with it. Mass Effect is a brilliant game because it fuses all these things – Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Blade Runner – and lets you control the story. And that detail, that control, is the thing that, by definition, all game movies will lack. It’s also the thing that Hollywood still doesn’t seem to understand: watching a character do something amazing onscreen will never replicate the excitement of feeling like you’re doing something amazing. It’s the sort of detail that most studio executives and producers (I’m gonna go ahead and assume that most Hollywood shot-callers aren’t avid gamers) miss because they lack sufficient hands-on experience with games.

Len Wiseman, who was at one time attached to direct the planned Gears of War movie (another really fun game that would most likely make a derivative, mediocre-at-best movie), became familiar with the game when he picked footage out of a lineup of big games for a monitor to be glimpsed in the background of a scene in Live Free or Die Hard. Before that, he’d never heard of the game, which was basically an instant phenomenon in the gaming world when the first title was released in 2006. Now, I’m not slamming Wiseman for his lack of gamer cred (if I made big-budget blockbusters and was married to Kate Beckisndale I doubt I’d have as much time for Red Dead Redemption as I do currently), I’m just saying that that story sort of explains how unfamiliar Hollywood still seems to be when it comes to games. So of course they don’t know how to adapt one properly. Studio execs really only respect one thing, and that’s numbers. Naturally they get all hot and bothered when someone shows them how much money a huge game release like Halo or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare can rake in in a day or a week (a major game release like Halo regularly rake in billions of dollars, something Hollywood movies only do once in a blue moon; Grand Theft Auto IV made more money in its first week in stores than The Dark Knight did in its entire North American theatrical run); they just think about how much money they’ll make a movie based on that property would bring in for them hits it big – if just a fraction of the tens of millions of people who play Halo or World of Warcraft online shell out $10 or $12 for a movie ticket, they’re rolling in it – except that never happens. But still, we have movies based on hit games like World of Warcraft, Bioshock, Gears of War and Halo currently in various stages of development hell, and if any of them are made (which still looks like a big “if” at this point, though nothing that a fat opening weekend for Prince of Persia can’t fix), they will almost certainly be bad movies.

But the main difference between adapting games to movies and adapting other media is that other adaptations, be they of books, comics or TV shows, aren’t adapting interactive media. There’s a narrative structure already in place from which to draw, and the problem with the narrative structures of most games is that they exist first and foremost to help create a compelling game, which is vastly different from a compelling movie, and the gulf between those two is far more vast than the gulf between a compelling book and a compelling movie (though that gap can also be very significant). It’s also why the stories in most games, objectively speaking, are bad, at least compared to movies. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is one of the best-selling and best-reviewed games ever released, and I’ve played through it twice and I still couldn’t tell you what exactly the story is, but it seemed liked the stuff of a second-rate 24 ripoff. But that doesn’t mean the game isn’t awesome, it’s just different from a movie. A Call of Duty movie would just be a bunch of soldiers running around shooting terrorists. It would be terrible. But the game’s a blast to play. Because you’re playing it, not just watching what happens and listening to the dialogue.

Some game people get it. Rockstar Games has been notoriously reluctant to sign over the movie rights to their blockbuster Grand Theft Auto franchise, because Rockstar is staffed by very smart, savvy folks who seem to understand how a GTA movie would, by definition, suck, primarily because you’re not playing it. Removing interactivity from these characters and stories and expecting them to still connect with audiences is like adapting Avatar into a radio broadcast and then scratching your head when the same audiences don’t turn out to listen to the adventures of Jake Sully and the Na’vi on Pandora. Not only is it not the same experience, it effectively removes the most compelling part of the source material (in Avatar’s case, the visuals; in a game’s case, the part where you play it and it’s fun) and presents the hollowed-out husk to audiences. No wonder nobody’s interested.

Fire and Ice, Looney Tunes making comebacks

2010-05-21T10:47:00.009-04:00

Ain’t It Cool News is reporting that Robert Rodriguez has acquired the rights to remake the 1983 animated cult babes-and-barbarians film Fire and Ice, a product of the minds of maverick animator Ralph Bakshi, legendary (and recently deceased) fantasy artist Frank Frazetta, and comic writers Gerry Conway and Roy Thomas. Apparently Rodriguez is planning to make the film live-action, though presumably with heavy use of green screen like he did with Sin City. It sounds like the deal is pretty recent, so there’s no information on casting or release dates, but as a guy who grew up a fantasy nerd (and Fire and Ice fan), I’m pretty excited about this news.

I was actually considering doing a column about Frank Frazetta’s passing a few weeks ago after his death at the age of 82, tying it into movie via Fire and Ice. I picked up Blue Underground’s remastered DVD a few years ago purely for nostalgia reasons (while cheesy as hell, I must admit that the film held up far better than I expected it to), partly because of an awesome documentary on it about Frazetta called Painting with Fire. It’s a really great doc, one of the better DVD extras I’ve seen. Frazetta, in case you don’t know, gained fame in the 60s for his paintings of classic pulp characters like Conan the Barbarian and Tarzan (as well as lesser-known cult characters like John Carter of Mars – soon to be a live-action film itself), and his artwork on the covers is actually credited with the success of the Conan books (if I recall correctly, Conan made his debut in the 1930s, but it wasn’t until the Frazetta-cover paperbacks started coming out decades later that the character really caught on in a major way with readers, and to this day Frazetta’s visual interpretation is the most universally-recognized version of the character). Even if you don’t know him by name, you probably recognize Frazetta’s distinctive style, which has been seen in everything from book and magazine covers to posters to album covers. He was an incredibly talented guy who’s impact on genre fiction in any medium really can’t be overstated. It’s a shame he won’t be able to see Rodriguez’s take on Fire and Ice, but in the AICN story he says he was in discussions with Frazetta about the project right up until his death on May 10.

Anyway, suffice it to say that the more I hear about Fire and Ice, the more you will.

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Warner Brothers is reintroducing its Looney Tunes characters with a new 26-episode animated series set to air on the Cartoon Network in the fall, but unfortunately it has a silly sitcom-y premise (Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck as odd-couple roommates with the other characters their neighbors? Ugh.) The far more interesting piece of information, to me at least, is that WB is also making a series of 3D shorts Road Runner to air in theaters before movies. I grew up a huge Looney Tunes fan (the Road Runner ones were always among my favorites), so this is far more interesting to me. The first short, in which Wile E. Coyote will fall off cliffs and get brained by anvils (in 3D!) will hit cinemas on July 30, ahead of Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore. Naturally, I’d be more excited if these shorts were airing ahead of movies I actually want to see, but sometimes you’re the Louisville Slugger, and sometimes you’re the ball.

Classic summer movies

2010-05-20T09:17:00.005-04:00

It’s Burger Week here on the Captivate blogosphere (hey, that’s a word officially recognized by Microsoft Word’s spellchecker now. Huh.), and because of the rather unsurprising dearth of movies about burgers that aren’t designed to gross out audiences (i.e. Fast Food Nation or the documentary Food, Inc.), I’ve been given license to expand the Burger Week theme a little bit to include summer in general, so I thought I’d look at a few of what I consider to be pretty quintessential summer movies.

Speed
It doesn’t happen every summer, but every few years a summer blockbuster transcends “hit movie” status and vaults into “pop culture phenomenon” territory, like The Dark Knight last summer, but this 1994 actioner lodged itself into the public consciousness with a high concept that arguably has yet to be topped – a terrorist rigs a city bus full of innocent people so that if its speed drops below 50 mph the whole thing explodes – as well as Keanu Reeves in a career-cementing action-hero performance and Sandra Bullock breaking out as a full-on movie star (though I always thought she was great in Demolition Man). In the summer of ’94, Speed was the movie to see, and its smash success shows that it appealed to more than just testosterone junkies. (It’s also sort of amazing that a violent, R-rated action flick could rake in more than $100 million, a huge amount of money back then, and something that completely flies in the face of what passes for conventional wisdom in Hollywood these days). Even today I still occasionally hear people say “Pop quiz, hotshot.”

Jan De Bont made his directorial debut with this crackerjack action flick after working as the cinematographer on iconic action movies like Die Hard (which Speed borrows more than a bit from) and The Hunt for Red October, and never came close to these heights again in terms of either quality or box office success. But most importantly, Speed is just a good, old-fashioned pre-CGI action movie, packed with thrills and crazy stunts. Revisiting the movie for this column really made me appreciate how, even as high-concept as it is, it feels decidedly old school by today’s standards. I’d forgotten there was a time when tightly-directed practical action was what you built a big-budget blockbuster around, not maelstroms of computer-generated images and gimmicky special effects. (Seriously, how many summer blockbusters these days have more than, say, 35% “real,” un-CGI’d footage in their climactic sequences? My guess is zero.) There’s a reason why when I hear “summer blockbuster,” I usually picture Keanu Reeves standing over Sandra Bullock while she frantically tries to drive a bus. Speed is a summer classic.

Transformers
For this column I specifically wanted to look for summer movies in the classic sense, movies that are all about fun and spectacle, but not the sort of movies that get nominated for non-technical Oscars, if you catch my drift. Summer blockbusters are typically at least somewhat flawed, as the goal is usually to entertain rather than intellectually stimulate. But watching part of the abysmal sequel Revenge of the Fallen on cable the other day really hammered home how good Michael Bay’s first go-round with the transforming robots actually was. The 2007 smash is still way better than it has any business being (a bigger childhood fan of the Transformers property you could not find, and even I thought it was a stupid idea to turn it into a movie), and for me, it’s because Bay and company managed to create human characters that I actually cared about. Transformers was where I realized I actually quite like Shia LaBeouf (though I still can’t shake the feeling that I shouldn’t), and that Michael Bay can somehow simultaneously embody everything that’s wrong with modern Hollywood, but also make really fun movies. Transformers is the ultimate diversion, a movie with a beyond-silly premise (it is adapted from a toy line, after all) that still manages to be a huge amount of goofy fun, a near-perfect popcorn diversion.

Iron Man 2
I figured I’d throw in a movie currently in theaters just in case you feel like checking something out on your impending holiday weekend, and Iron Man 2 is a pretty solid piece of summer entertainment. A lot of critics seem to think the sequel, while upping the ante considerably in the action department, is actually a step-down in terms of story and characters. I’ve seen the original Iron Man a great many times, and I found the same loose, fun vibe that the first movie had in the sequel. Sure there’s a few plot issues (the blood-poisoning angle that drives much of the first two acts of the movie is wrapped up in an absurdly convenient fashion), but overall Iron Man 2 is just a great time at the movies. As much as there’s still a ton of great-looking movies due in the next few months, I’m not sure any of them will be as much pure fun as Iron Man 2.

DVD Review: Deadliest Warrior: Season 1

2010-05-13T10:34:00.002-04:00

There are times where I like to consider myself a smart and sophisticated consumer of culture, and there are other times that I like to just turn my brain off and watch things explode and dudes get chopped in half. Spike’s Deadliest Warrior finds a way to bridge those two halves of my brain – one that enjoys shows about ancient history and one that enjoys Conan the Barbarian – by fusing genuinely interesting science-y type stuff and the silly “who would win?” conversations I had with my friends when I was 10. Deadliest Warrior uses science to answer questions like “Who wins: a ninja or a Spartan?” And if you think that sounds intriguing, then this show’s probably for you. If you think that sounds stupid, well, I don’t know what to tell you; it sort of is. And that’s what makes it such a fun show.

I was initially in the “this show is stupid” camp, based exclusively on the promo ads that aired on Spike during the show’s first season. But I caught most of an episode during one of the network’s many, many marathons, and found myself getting really into the show. See, as much as the central idea is sort of goofy, and each episode ends with a cheesy fight sequence between two (sometimes more) actors dressed up in high-end Halloween costumes, the stuff before that is actually pretty interesting. The Deadliest Warrior team – ER doctor Armand Dorian, biomedical engineer Geoff Desmoulin and computer programmer Max Geiger – spend the bulk of the show, along with two-man teams representing each side of the fight, testing each combatant’s various weapons using cutting-edge technology. And as a guy who grew up fascinated by medieval history and reading bad fantasy novels, watching a quasi-scientific test aimed at finding out what, say, a Viking’s great axe would actually do to a human body (or in the show’s case, a gel-covered torso with a fake skeleton and fake organs) is pretty compelling television.

How the show works is, the three main hosts spend most of the hour testing weapons and techniques with the help of the experts, and at the end all the data from the tests is fed into a computer, which runs 1,000 simulated fights between the two combatants (for fairness’ sake, to avoid a lucky shot winning the day for either side), and the winner is declared the deadliest. So for the first episode in the set, ‘Apache vs. Gladiator,’ two actual Apaches (one of whom is a combat instructor for the U.S. military) pit their weapons and techniques against two experts trained in the use of gladiator weapons (short swords, tridents, nets, etc.), while the three series regulars evaluate the results, with Desmoulin (a former paramedic) and Dr. Dorian providing their assessments of how deadly each weapon and/or warrior is, and Geiger, the token geek, offers his two cents as well. The experts themselves can also be quite entertaining, especially when they start posturing to each other after the weapons tests. Usually this is all in good fun, but there are a few awkward moments when temperatures start to rise. And the losing side almost always makes a bitter crack about how they don’t need science geeks and computers to tell them their warrior is really the deadliest.

Deadliest Warrior isn’t without its faults. As much as the show caters to both idiot fratboys who think 300 is the pinnacle of historical fiction and history buffs who argue over the relative merits of samurai and medieval knights, the show is definitely built to appeal more to the former, and sometimes the hosts, while evaluating the weapons, are a bit too wowed by superficial stuff like how messed up a crash test dummy looks after being hit by something. And some of the matchups are just silly, like mafia vs. yakuza or an episode positing a battle between historical figures William Wallace and Shaka Zulu. But once the show hits its stride a few episodes in, it can be pretty fascinating stuff for military and/or history buffs. ‘Green Beret vs. Spetsnaz’ is probably the most interesting episode of the entire first season (Spetsnaz being the harder-than-hardcore Russian special forces), and it’s based entirely on watching four highly-trained soldiers do their thing (the Spetsnaz guys in particular are absolutely terrifying; you can tell immediately that these guys are actual killers).

Deadliest Warrior does a pretty awesome job of stimulating both the meat-eating, violence-loving side of my brain as well as the more sophisticated side that appreciates history, though the balance is definitely tipped in the Neanderthal direction. The extras on the DVDs are some of the most fun stuff in the whole set, collecting the ‘Aftermath’ web series, which runs after each episode and features the hosts and experts taking questions submitted online, and while they’re quite short, they’re also often as interesting as the show itself, and offers some insight into how the show is made. Overall Deadliest Warrior offers just enough real information to make you feel like you learned something, but it’s also just a fun show for guys.

Summer flicks. For MEN.

2010-05-10T14:21:00.006-04:00

Everyone knows summer means blockbusters, and this year’s crop is as big and bombastic as any year previous. From superheroes to TV remakes to mystery-shrouded thrillers, I’m looking at the most promising summer movies for guys. If you’re like me and summer means copious amounts of time in air-conditioned theaters watching things explode, you’ve come to the right place.

For a rundown of some more girl-friendly summer flicks, check out ‘Byte-Sized’ blogger Amber Plante's list here.

Iron Man 2
Summer kicked off this past weekend with the hugely-anticipated sequel to the breakout 2007 hit, and while some are grumbling that the story doesn’t measure up to the first film (a complaint I don’t really understand after seeing the movie; it’s a lot of fun!), the action is miles ahead of anything in the original Iron Man, and for a comic geek like me, that counts for a lot. And while I may not think much of Scarlett Johansson’s acting chops, I can’t really argue with her in that Black Widow catsuit.

Robin Hood
Director Ridley Scott re-teams with Gladiator star Russell Crowe to put a new spin on the classic folk hero. While I love most of Scott’s movies, I’m not a huge Gladiator fan – I’ll take his underappreciated Crusades epic, Kingdom of Heaven, over that film any day of the week – but I have a big soft spot for medieval movies, and I can’t think of a better team to put a fresh coat of paint on the legendary archer than Scott and Crowe. If the action measures up, this could be one of this summer’s stronger movies.

MacGruber
I never did understand why this, of all the current Saturday Night Live characters, was getting his own movie – after all, the MacGruber skits are barely a minute long, and epitomize the one-repeated-joke SNL comedy structure – but after seeing the trailer, I’m on board for this R-rated spoof of action movies. Will Forte and Kristen Wiig are two of the funniest people on SNL right now, and as a child of the ‘80s who grew up watching action flicks, this looks like it’s right up my alley. Also: Val Kilmer as the bad guy! It could be this summer’s Hangover…or this summer’s Land of the Lost.

The A-Team
The first teaser for this adaptation of the ‘80s TV show left a lot of people (myself included) pretty cold, but the longer trailer that came out a few months later was much more promising, showcasing the ridiculously over-the-top action sequences and what appears to be a cast that isn’t taking itself very seriously. We’ll see how UFC fighter Quinton “Rampage” Jackson does filling the mohawk of ‘80s icon Mr. T, but between Liam Neeson hamming it up as Hannibal and District 9’s Sharlto Copley as “Mad” Murdock, I can’t pretend I’m not looking forward to this. If The A-Team is big, dumb action done right, it could be a riot.

Jonah Hex
The buzz for this comic adaptation, about an Old West outlaw with some supernatural connections, isn’t really great, and the recent trailer reminded me a bit too much of Wild Wild West for me to get too excited. But Josh Brolin is always quality, John Malkovich is usually reliable as a fun villain. And I guess there are worse things that Megan Fox dressed up as an old-timey prostitute. Jonah Hex could be one of this summer’s surprises.

Predators
Now this is what summer movies are all about. Producer Robert Rodriguez and director Nimrod Antal (Armored) rescue the Predator from the wastes of the Aliens vs. Predator movies with a flick that looks to return the iconic movie monster to his roots. A clever inversion of the classic 1987 Predator, this time out a group of deadly humans (mercenaries, criminals, etc.) is transported to another planet where they’re stalked by a group of the alien hunters. I love the original Schwarzenegger Predator quite a bit, and everything I’ve seen from Predators suggests the people who made it do as well. It may lack the buzz of Iron Man 2 or Inception, but this may be the movie I’m the most excited about this summer.

Inception
Christopher Nolan follows up The Dark Knight with what appears to be a heady sci-fi thriller that seems to involve dreams and corporate espionage. Nolan’s keeping plot details pretty close to the vest (something that’s fast becoming his trademark), and as a fan of science fiction, I’m very much looking forward to seeing exactly what Leonardo Di Caprio and Ellen Page are doing in those mysterious trailers. If the rumors I’ve heard about the plot prove true, I have a feeling Inception might be a bit too thinky and weird to do Dark Knight-like business, but that has nothing to do with whether or not it’s good, and it certainly looks intriguing. I’m one of the few people who enjoyed Nolan’s The Prestige, so I expect at the very least a cool, twisty thriller that’ll make me think. For a summer movie, that could really be a mind-blower.

The Expendables
Quite possibly the manliest movie of the summer, director/star Sylvester Stallone assembles a murderer’s row (pun intended, and immediately regretted) of action stars, past and present, including Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Mickey Rourke, UFC fighter Randy Couture, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Eric Roberts and the amazing Terry Crews (he of those insane and wonderful new Old Spice ads), for this old-school action flick about a group of mercenaries on a suicide mission to free a South American country from the clutches of a dictator (at least that’s what I think is happening; it’s hard to tell from the trailers from all the explosions and muscles). I love Stallone’s recent Rambo, and while this PG-13 actioner won’t have nearly that movie’s levels of violence, I’m still expecting a fun time at the movies. There aren’t enough Men On A Mission movies anymore, and I’m stoked that Sly’s looking to rectify that.

Dinner for Schmucks
The magnificent Paul Rudd stars in this comedy about an ambitious exec who finds out that in order to get the big promotion, he must impress his bosses at a special dinner party they hold where everyone brings some an idiot along for the rest of them to laugh at, and when he meets a good-natured dork (Steve Carell), he realizes it’s his shot at impressing his boss. But as much as I love Rudd, it’s The Hangover’s Zach Galifinakis who looks like the movie’s secret weapon, playing a wacky eccentric who thinks he has mind powers. I’m sold.

DVD Review: District 13: Ultimatum

2010-05-07T10:00:00.006-04:00

THE MOVIE

I’m quite a fan of the original District 13, the parkour-influenced 2004 sci-fi/martial arts movie co-written and produced by Luc Besson. It’s a fun martial arts flick that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and really exists as a showcase for martial artist Cyril Raffaelli and parkour co-creator David Belle. It’s set in a near-future France where civil and economic unrest has deteriorated to the point where the slums have been walled off into numbered districts where all sorts of illegal activities go down and even the police fear to enter. The story follows straight-laced cop Damien (Rafaelli), who must team up with streetwise outlaw Leito (Belle) to save Leito’s sister from evil drug dealers, and also save Leito’s building (which he rules as a benevolent protector, outlawing drugs and other shady activity), and the rest of District 13 from a bomb the corrupt government wants to use to level the entire district for some impromptu gentrification.

District 13: Ultimatum is the sequel, reteaming Belle and Rafaelli as Leito and Damien, and it ups the ante in just about every sense. A text crawl at the beginning explains that in the three years since the first movie, literally nothing in District 13 has changed – the promise Leito got that the government would clean up the slums has gone, unsurprisingly, unfulfilled (“The government reneged on a promise?,” another character deadpans in response to Leito’s gripes. “That’s a total outrage!”) – and quickly establishes that Leito is up to his old tricks fighting back against The Man. The plot this time around really expands on the social commentary in the first movie – the original District 13, as much as it’s an action flick, also had a lot to say about the state of modern France, which, at the time of its release, was dealing with a lot of street violence and anti-immigrant sentiment – concerning an incendiary video of cops apparently being gunned down in cold blood by District 13 residents, which almost sparks a civil war. Naturally, some shady government types (seemingly a cross between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the CIA) are behind it all, and its up to Damien and Leito to expose the conspiracy.

Regular readers know of my love of martial arts movies, and the first time I saw parkour in action – it was actually a YouTube clip of what turned out to be the best sequence in District 13, showing Leito eluding a gang of cops – I thought it was one of the coolest and craziest things I’d ever seen. I love the speed and kinetics of a well-choreographed fight scene, and what Belle was doing was sort of similar, but with less emphasis on fighting and more on speed and graceful movements. It was just a blast to watch him do what he does. So when I found out that this crazy sequence was from a movie, I was incredibly excited – even more so when I learned that Belle’s co-star was Rafaelli, who I recognized from a great fight scene with Jet Li in the otherwise forgettable (but similarly Besson-produced) 2001 actioner Kiss of the Dragon. The idea of a movie that mixes parkour and martial arts is a brilliant one, and the original District 13 is a wonderfully fun movie with boundless energy.

My main problem with the original District 13 – which my comic-addled mind considers the greatest Batman/Superman movie never made – is that it makes the cardinal action-movie sin of peaking early, putting the most impressive sequences near the beginning, which ends up making the rest of the movie feel like a letdown after those incredible early action scenes (not that the ending isn’t cool – the filmmakers seemed to realize that they couldn’t really provide Damien or Leito with an adequate adversary for the climax, so instead they have to fight each other), but thankfully Ultimatum doesn’t fall into that trap. Director Patrick Alessandrin wisely ramps up the action scenes, and he doesn’t frontload the movie with the coolest stuff. Instead, the action gets crazier and crazier as the film goes along (our heroes drive a car through a government building midway through the film, and that’s before the parkour army shows up), making Ultimatum feel like an old-fashioned sequel; everyone involved is trying to give fans more of what they loved about the first movie, and in this case, it definitely works.

There’s a nice vibe between Belle and Rafaelli in these movies that’s oddly infectious. Sure, neither of them is going to win any acting awards for their work here, but they have a natural chemistry together and, as a fan of the first movie, I was surprised how much of a kick I got out of the scene where the two characters finally hook up again. There’s a great (if traditional) dynamic between the almost comically by-the-book cop and the more cynical, streetwise tough, and both Rafaelli and Belle bring a great dry humor to their roles, and their odd-couple banter is never overdone.

The strangest part of District 13: Ultimatum was the ham-fisted political commentary, which is thankfully confined to just the last couple of minutes. There was a bit of the same in the first movie, but screenwriter Luc Besson lays it on far thicker in the sequel, from the name of the evil corporation at the center of the conspiracy (Harriburton!) to the left-wing fanfiction ending, District 13: Ultimatum wears its political standpoint on its sleeve, and it’s oddly charming (if for no reason other than I really don’t think an American-made action film would have the stones to take things as far as this movie is willing to). It’s very much a reaction to the immigration debate currently raging in France, but to Besson’s and director Patrick Alessandrin’s credit, the film manages to say what it has to say without really bogging the proceedings down or making it anything less than fun. Overall, District 13: Ultimatum is an incredibly fun action movie with tons of eye-popping stunts and great fights. If you’re into this kind of movie, I recommend it highly.

GRADE: B+

EXTRAS

District 13: Ultimatum has the best collection of deleted and extended scenes I’ve seen in a while, as they’re all extended versions of the movies fight sequences. It’s sort of a surprising decision to cut down the fight scenes in a martial arts movie (it’s sort of like cutting out scenes of the two good-looking leads together in a romantic comedy), but I’m assuming they were trimmed to help the movie’s pacing, and nothing crucial was excised. But the longer scenes are on the DVD, and they’re pretty much all awesome. There’s also a French rap video, and a pretty decent making-of featurette in French (with English subtitles) that goes over most aspects of production (stunts, casting, etc.). It’s fairly interesting stuff, if nothing groundbreaking.

Kick-Ass director for X-Men prequel

2010-05-06T10:48:00.004-04:00

So apparently Matthew Vaughn, who directed the excellent and fun superhero movie Kick-Ass (check out my review here) has signed on to direct the prequel X-Men: First Class for Fox. This is sort of odd news for a couple of reasons, one being that Vaughn was attached to direct X-Men: The Last Stand for the studio for months before bailing, apparently because he wasn’t comfortable with Fox’s budgetary and time restrictions. (Fox has a reputation for less-than-respectful treatment of genre properties like comic book movies, often rushing them into production on unrealistic schedules, and the result is crap like The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine.) And here, again, Fox is rushing First Class into theaters for next summer, despite not having a cast lined up. So it looks like Vaughn has just agreed to the exact scenario he bolted from just a few years ago.

Now, I loved Kick-Ass (see the aforementioned semi-fawning review), and as a lifelong comic book nerd, no property is closer to my heart than the X-Men franchise, so this should be good news. But given that Fox’s filmed mutants peaked with the brilliant 2003’s X2: X-Men United, the two films released since then with the X brand were each worse than the last. I’m confident (hopeful?) that Vaughn has a plan and will bring his considerable game to Marvel’s beloved mutants, but there’s no trend in genre movies right now that annoys me more than prequels, and that’s the other major strike against X-Men: First Class. I, an avid X-Men fan, have absolutely zero interest in a movie about the X-Men in their teen years (especially if, as rumored, Wolverine is involved, which messes up the continuity of the movies; that’s just a cynical money-grab if I’ve ever heard of one), and as dramatically rich as the Professor X/Magento relationship is, I’m nowhere near as fascinated with it as original X-Men and X2 director and First Class producer Bryan Singer seems to be. (Has someone told him that people want to see X-Men movies about the X-Men, as opposed to X-Men movies about two old guys who used to be friends but aren’t anymore?) I don’t need to see an entire movie about how Charles Xavier and Magneto’s friendship fell apart while a bunch of little plastic people from the CW run around in the background pretending to be the X-Men.

I try not to prejudge movies, but really, I should be excited about another X-Men movie, especially one directed by the guy who made an awesome superhero movie that I believe will go down as a major cult classic. But I’m not. Instead I’m getting a rushed prequel (I’m seriously so filled with vitriol about Hollywood’s obsession with prequels that I’ll have to revisit in for a future column) featuring a story that no X-Men fan that I know feels needs to be told in a movie.
More on X-Men: First Class as it develops. If for nothing other than spite.

* * *

One last thing for the day, just so I don’t end it on an angry rant. Here’s the trailer for The American, which stars George Clooney as a withdrawn hitman who crafts his own weapons and takes the infamous One Last Job in a small Italian town. But it’s neither Clooney nor the hitman premise that has me so interested to see this movie, but rather director Anton Corbijn, a brilliant photographer and music video director who made his feature-film debut with 2007’s Control, an excellent biopic about late Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis (check out my review here). That movie was incredible, and showcased Corbijn’s considerable filmmaking talents, so him tackling an intriguing movie like The American, especially with an actor as great as Clooney in the lead, adds up to one movie I am very much looking forward to seeing.

First look at Thor, news on Anchorman 2

2010-04-30T10:21:00.005-04:00

Hey! It’s the first picture of Chris Hemsworth as Thor! I’m totally psyched for this movie like you couldn’t believe. I’ve had a soft spot for the character of Thor for a long time (Norse mythology + superheroes = awesome), and while this is easily Marvel’s riskiest movie yet (see the above equation), it’s also easily the Marvel movie I’m the most excited about. I like Hemsworth a lot from what I’ve seen him in, and he looks sufficiently Thor-like in this shot. (Though I assume he wears his little helmet at some point; if he doesn’t, I will be upset.)

Click on over to Yahoo! Movies to have a look at the full-sized pic. Thor is slated to hit theaters a year from now, in May 2011.

* * *

In significantly less awesome news (though I guess a photo doesn’t really constitute “news,” but I’m digressing), director Adam McKay said on Twitter that Paramount “basically” turned down Anchorman 2. You’d think that when the stars align (i.e. agree to cut their salaries) to make a sequel to probably the best comedy in a decade, any studio would happily open the till to make it happen, but that shows how little I understand Hollywood.

I suppose the possibility exists that another studio could swoop in and agree to finance Anchorman 2 (or maybe not, Paramount may have exclusive rights), but it’s a bummer that apparent lack of studio interest seems to have scuttled the project. The first Anchorman was a pretty big hit, and Paul Rudd, Steve Carell and Christina Applegate had all agreed to return alongside Will Ferrell, but it looks like now that won’t happen.

McKay’s and Ferrell’s latest project (along with Mark Wahlberg, an incredibly underrated comic actor), the action-movie spoof The Other Guys, hits theaters August 6. It looks great. Here’s the trailer.

Hobbit gets a release date, Breaking Dawn gets a director

2010-04-29T10:32:00.004-04:00

I’ve made no secret of my love for Peter Jackson’ Lord of the Rings movies, and in my recent review of the Blu-ray set, I confessed to not being a big fan of author J.R.R. Tolkien’s books. I’ve never read The Hobbit – when I finally got around to reading Tolkien, I went right to the Rings trilogy, as I always understood The Hobbit to be more of a kids’ book, and I was more interested in the epic scale of the trilogy – and I was pretty lukewarm on the idea of making a Hobbit movie, a smaller-scale prequel to The Lord of the Rings. That was until it was announced that Guillermo del Toro was directing The Hobbit, and that it would be made as two films, one more or less adapting the book, and the second acting as a “bridge film” between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, incorporating elements from Tolkien’s many detailed histories of Middle Earth. Suddenly I was interested in The Hobbit.

The thing is, the Hobbit movie is unfortunately wrapped up in the slow collapse of movie studio MGM, and neither Guillermo del Toro nor producer Peter Jackson have stated when The Hobbit is expected to start production (del Toro’s been in New Zealand working on preproduction for like a year), leading to much speculation of “delays,” which Jackson recently debunked by pointing out that there was never an announced start date, therefore there can be no actual delay. But the news just came down that Warner Bros. has scheduled The Hobbit to hit theaters in December 2012 and December 2013 (which is how New Line released the Lord of the Rings movies). I guess part of the problem was that 2011 was originally the target date for the first Hobbit movie when the project was first announced back in 2007, but it’s now looking pretty unrealistic. (While del Toro is using a lot of the same design elements and behind-the-scenes folks who worked on the Rings movies, which cuts preproduction time, it still took Jackson and company the better part of a decade to make those three films, so adapting Tolkien isn’t something you can really rush through to hit an arbitrary release date – which is what Hollywood usually does with big movies.)

So mark it on your calendars, folks. The Hobbit is coming to a theater near you beginning December 2012.

* * *

In news that I don’t really care about, but is sort of a big deal nonetheless, Dreamgirls director Bill Condon has signed on to helm Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final film in the Twilight series. I know nothing of Twilight other than the bits I’ve gleaned from snippets of the first movie I’ve flipped past on the movie channel up here, and I’ll be dead in the cold, cold ground before I try to read one of the books, but I hear the final book is utterly insane. It sounds like Summit Entertainment had been looking for a “name” director for the final film in the franchise – which may still be divided into two films to keep the gravy train running just that much longer – and Condon fits the bill. I’m not really that familiar with Condon’s previous movies, but he’s certainly classing up the Twilight franchise, and from what I’ve seen of this low-rent, high-yield teeny-bobber vampire series, they could use a filmmaker capable of making a movie that doesn’t look like a mediocre episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Good luck to you Bill, but I suspect I won’t be going to see your Twilight film.

Men In Black 3, Escape From New York remake, and...the death of Jason?

2010-04-23T10:21:00.004-04:00

I’m really not sure who out there will be excited about this, but apparently Men In Black 3 is getting close to being official. Stars Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones and director Barry Sonnenfeld have all reportedly signed on for the sequel, which will be in 3D (of course) and is due in theaters in May of 2011.

I liked the first Men In Black okay back in the day, but the sequel (often held up as an example of the worst-case example of what happens when you rush a film into production with half a script to beat an impending writers’ strike) is just a sketchy collection of half-baked gags and ideas, and is about as forgettable a big summer blockbuster as Wild Wild West (oops). And don’t even get me started on the use of 3D gimmickry…but Sony needs a big blockbuster in 2011 – that’s when Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 4 was due out until the studio scrubbed it for a 3D Twilight-flavored reboot the following year – so I guess the studio calculated that it’s easier to park dumptrucks full of money in front of Smith’s, Lee’s and Sonnenfeld’s respective homes and get Men In Black 3: A License to Print Money into theaters for Memorial Day weekend next year.

* * *

Breck Eisner, director of the recent not-quite-a-zombie-movie The Crazies, is reportedly in final talks to helm the remake of John Carpenter’s classic Escape From New York (one of my personal all-time faves). I’m pretty much over being upset about remakes of movies I love – a remake of Escape From New York, no matter how awful, won’t retroactively erase my DVD of Carpenter’s magnificent original – and Hollywood’s been threatening to remake it for years, so it was bound to happen eventually. The only detail that sort of irked me in the report is that the script apparently combines the story from the original Escape From New York – the President is trapped in a walled-off NYC that now serves as a supermax prison and an soldier-turned-outlaw is promised a full pardon to rescue him – with an origin story for Snake Plissken. One of the coolest things about the original Escape is precisely that you don’t really know what Snake did before or who he was exactly, except through small snippets of dialogue from other characters.

Remaking Carpenter has been a thing the past few years – Rob Zombie remade Halloween in 2007 (check out my review here) and they’re shooting bits of the prequel to Carpenter’s The Thing a few blocks from my office here in Toronto this week. But there’s a magic to Carpenter’s movies that none of these remakes can hope to touch (and I’m one of the few who liked Zombie’s Halloween), but that doesn’t mean they can’t be enjoyed on their own merits. There aren’t many bigger Escape From New York fans out there than me, but I’m trying to keep an open mind. But nobody will ever top Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken for pure cinema badassery.

Stay tuned for more on this project as I hear about it.

* * *

One final item that I find genuinely confusing. Producer Brad Fuller recently Tweeted that the planned sequel to last year’s Friday the 13th remake is “dead – not happening.” I assume there’s a story behind this – studios don’t typically kill sequels to horror remakes that make more than $100 million worldwide (and I can’t believe that a Friday the 13th movie is that expensive to make). The Friday sequel was planned to be in 3D, and it also would have marked the 13th film in the Friday franchise, obviously an important milestone. I can’t wait to find out what happened here.

Celebrate Earth Day with Green Movies

2010-04-22T10:23:00.006-04:00

Avatar

The Earth Day DVD/Blu-ray release of James Cameron’s sci-fi epic was no accident (it is a Thursday, after all; usually DVDs are released on Tuesdays), as Avatar lays on the environmental themes pretty thick. And that’s not really a knock; Cameron makes movies for the broadest possible audience – and clearly he’s really good at it – and as much as some adults found the “be good to the planet” themes a tad heavy-handed, the second time I went to see it months after its release, the theater was at least half-filled with children. Just the sort who wouldn’t grasp more subtle environmental themes, but who probably took Cameron’s green message to heart.

As much as I didn’t think it was one of the best films of 2009, I did quite enjoy Avatar, and I found its environmental theme worked quite well within the context of the story. And really, subtlety has never been Cameron’s thing (of all the words I’d use to describe classics like Aliens and Terminator 2, “subtle” would not be among them).

The only problem with the Earth Day Avatar release is that there’s nothing on the disc. Cameron is planning to re-release Avatar in cinemas in August with an additional six minutes or so of footage, so a more proper DVD/Blu-ray release (with extras like commentary and making-of documentaries) isn’t expected until the fall. That’s the version of Avatar I’m excited to own, one that lets me watch picture-in-picture footage of Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldana in motion-capture suits alongside the finished film. But until then, there are worse ways to mark Earth Day than with great bit of sci-fi/action spectacle.

Away We Go

A bit of an odd choice, as the movie itself has no environmental themes (though the main characters, expecting couple Burt and Verona, definitely seem like the types of people who are concerned about their carbon footprint), but rather it’s the production itself that was environmentally-conscious. There’s a short featurette on the Away We Go DVD that explains how the filmmakers tried to make the production as carbon-neutral as possible, and details the lengths they went to in order to achieve that goal. It’s a noble endeavor, and made me realize just how much waste is created by a typical movie production. It also helps that Away We Go, which I picked as one of the best films of 2009, is a wonderfully warm and sweet movie that anyone with a heart will enjoy. (Check out my initial review here.)

The Lord of the Rings

The environmental allegories in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic are quite well-known at this point – the villains, primarily Saruman and his orcs, represent the industrial revolution, while the hobbits and the Shire signify a more traditional agrarian lifestyle that Tolkien saw fading in his lifetime – and Peter Jackson’s film version of the classic trilogy makes good use of those themes without losing focus on the main story. Also, these are phenomenally well-made films that just got re-issued on Blu-ray (check out my review of the new set here), so this it’s as good a reason as any to revisit Middle Earth and hearken back to a simpler time (which never really existed; I guess this is what being a Republican is like?) when men were men, hobbits were hobbits, and if you destroyed half of a forest, the other half would come looking for you and totally ***** up your ****.

Review: Kick-Ass

2010-04-19T11:33:00.004-04:00

I realize it’s unfair to hold a film’s hype against it – especially if that hype is ostensibly grass-roots (i.e. from people who’ve seen it, as opposed to studio marketing people) – but I found myself watching Kick-Ass, the new superhero action/comedy, waiting to have my mind blown. It never happened, and while the film was good – very good, actually – my world, sadly, remains unrocked. This movie’s been getting absolutely insane levels of hype in certain corners of the Internet (“best American action movie in a decade” and “greatest gunfights since Hard Boiled” are the two that stand out in my mind) since last summer’s ComiCon, and I’m not a guy who takes comparisons to vintage John Woo films lightly (check out my review of his 1989 classic The Killer here), to the point where I couldn’t help but let it inform my opinion of the movie. And as much as I went into it with a bit of an “Okay, let’s see what you got” attitude (which is almost never a good headspace to be in going into a review, in my opinion), I must say that while it didn’t rewrite the rules of action cinema for the 21st century, as some have claimed, Kick-Ass is a fun, foul-mouthed and gleefully violent and take on superheroes. I haven’t laughed this hard in an action movie since Punisher: War Zone, a movie I dearly love.

Kick-Ass is about a geeky high school kid named Dave who decides one day to try dressing up like a superhero. His first foray into crimefighting lands him in the intensive care unit, but when he recovers his nerve endings are so deadened that he can barely feel pain. Which helps, as he rises to fame courtesy of an Internet video of him getting beaten up by some thugs. The resulting clip, which becomes the biggest thing ever on the Internet, makes Kick-Ass a household name, and brings into the light the previously unknown father-daughter vigilante team of Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloë Moretz) and inspiring the Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). All of this is to the chagrin of the local crime boss (Mark Strong), who finds himself having to add “costumed crimefighters” to his list of career headaches.

The idea of a “real-world” take on superheroes isn’t new – Watchmen is the best, and best-known, exploration of that concept – but instead of going the grim, vaguely depressing route that Watchmen did (as well as the recent Canadian indie flick Defendor – check out my review here), Kick-Ass is an ultraviolent day-glo cartoon. See, the “realism” in Kick-Ass doesn’t go much further than the notion that if someone were to actually don tights and fight crime, they’d probably be horribly injured or killed. And they’d also probably have to be insane.

Dave (Aaron Johnson) isn’t crazy, just a geeky kid who takes a chance and does something he can’t believe nobody’s tried to do before. Naturally, it doesn’t go exactly as planned. Johnson is actually very solid in the role (I didn’t realize he was British until after I saw the movie, which is impressive), and he manages to make Dave a loser (and an idiot; it never feels like you’re supposed to think him dressing up like a superhero is a good idea) without making him unlikeable or too much of a pushover (a problem I had with Wanted, another comic-turned-movie from the same comic writer, Mark Millar; more on him later).

As much as he’s clearly the hero of the piece, Dave/Kick-Ass ends up acting almost as an entry point to a larger world that he (and the viewer) didn’t really know about, and that’s the world of Big Daddy and Hit Girl, a hyper-violent riff on Batman and Robin. (Cage is doing an utterly insane Adam West/William Shatner impression while in costume that you have to see to believe.) They’ve been fighting crime for some time, but from the shadows, as opposed to Kick-Ass, who promotes himself with a MySpace page. It’s Big Daddy and Hitgirl that get to do all the cool stuff during the film’s many excellent action sequences, and as much as some people seem to take issue with this (the complaint is that Kick-Ass is a supporting character in his own movie), it really only underlines the reality that the film has set up; Dave isn’t really a particularly good superhero, and usually ends up getting beaten up. But Big Daddy and Hitgirl have been training themselves to do this for years, and they, unlike the amateur Kick-Ass, are very, very good at killing bad guys. When they turn up, the movie’s energy level kicks up a notch, and that’s a credit to both Cage and Moretz (who has gotten a ton of attention as the vicious and foul-mouthed Hit Girl, and she is indeed the best thing in the movie), and the tragedy at the heart of their origin gives weight to characters that could have otherwise just been cartoonish and silly.

But the real star of Kick-Ass is director Matthew Vaughn (Stardust, Layer Cake), who shows with this movie that he may be one of the best new action filmmakers working in Western movies. His film moves gracefully from action scenes to character moments, and as much as this is being sold as a superhero action film (and it is most definitely that), I took it more as a comedy about superheroes that happens to have stellar action scenes. Vaughn manages to poke fun at superheroes without being too mean-spirited (though believe me, as a lifelong geek and comic reader, many of the jokes in the film ring very true indeed), and as much as he obviously there’s obviously some mockery of genre conventions here, it never feels condescending or insulting to superheroes or their fans.

Kick-Ass is even more impressive in how it eclipses its source material. The film is based on a comic series from Scottish writer Mark Millar, who also wrote the comic Wanted (which was altered much more heavily for the movie version, which is great, because the comic is among of the worst I’ve read), and the film manages to clean up a lot of Millar’s juvenile tics and make them watchable. As much as I’m slagging on Millar’s writing style, which is too clever by half, he’s actually quite good with the basics of storytelling and pacing; there’s some twists and turns in Kick-Ass that I didn’t see coming and some genuine “how are they gonna get out of THIS?” moments in the third act. But Vaughn is a far superior filmmaker than Millar is a comic writer. As a guy who considers himself more of a comic fan than a movie buff (though it’s a close No. 2, believe me), I usually prefer the original comics to the film versions, but in the case of Kick-Ass, the movie is the better of the two versions, by a wide margin.

Kick-Ass is a riot. It’s crass, violent as hell and definitely not for everyone, but it’s also the most pure fun I’ve had at the movies all year.

GRADE: A-

DVD Review: Defendor

2010-04-16T10:00:00.010-04:00

THE MOVIE

Defendor is a small Canadian film (though that’s sort of redundant; a “big” Canadian film is sort of an oxymoron) about Arthur Poppington, a dull-witted but good-natured guy who thinks he’s a superhero. Similar to the bigger-budget Kick-Ass (which coincidentally opens today; look for a review on Monday), Defendor explores the question, “What would happen if someone actually put on a costume to fight crime?” When I first saw the trailer for Defendor ahead of last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, I noted that it looked interesting and ambitious (which is code for “I have no idea if they’ll pull this off”), and as a lifelong fan of the superhero genre, I can say that while Defendor certainly isn’t perfect, it does manage to ride its unique tone quite well up until the very end, and first-time writer/director Peter Stebbings himself has immediately established himself as an up-and-coming filmmaker to watch.

Woody Harrelson plays Arthur, a semi-homeless city worker who lives in an old warehouse that he’s turned into a sort of lower-than-low-rent Batcave, where he hones his skills with a slingshot, marbles, lime juice, his grandfather’s World War II trench club, and wasps he keeps in a jar to throw at his enemies. He prowls the streets of Hammertown (it’s never clear if this is the actual name of the city or a nickname) as Defendor – he gets really gets upset when people pronounce it “Defender” – in his homemade superhero costume in search of Captain Industry, a mysterious (and most likely fictional) villain he blames for his mother’s death. He meets a young crack-addicted hooker named Kat (Kat Dennings, from Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist) who lies and tells him she has a line on where he can find Captain Industry, and the two strike up a surprisingly sweet relationship as she tries to help Defendor in his fight against crime.

The trickiest part of Defendor is the tone; while the idea of a naïve dimwit (Arthur is said to have an IQ of 80) who thinks he’s a superhero seems like the stuff of wacky comedies (and usually it is), Defendor is much darker and more realistic. There’s certainly a lot of funny stuff here, but Stebbings is more interested in examining what kind of person would actually do that, what would happen to him, and what kind of effect that would have on the people around him. The combination of vaguely goofy comedy and gritty realism is a heck of a tightrope to walk, and for the most part Stebbings succeeds. I was pretty stunned at how well everything holds together for the majority of the film, and while the ending sort of collapses (more on that later), I was on the whole quite impressed.

Defendor is a remarkably good-looking movie given its budget; Stebbings has a great visual eye, and the action sequences are quite well put together. He manages to evoke the superhero genre while also clearly grounding the film in the real world; more than any movie I’ve seen, Defendor shows what would probably actually happen if someone put on a costume to wage a one-man war on crime. It’s never glamorous or sexy, and it never goes the way Arthur planned. Stebbings clearly has an understanding of comics and superheroes, and while he approaches the concept from a decidedly grown-up perspective, it never feels like he’s condescending Arthur/Defendor, or superheroes in general.

None of this would work at all if it wasn’t for an actor as solid as Woody Harrelson in the lead. He manages to make Arthur sympathetic and funny, but I found myself also cheering for Defendor, as silly as he is. It would be pretty easy to make Arthur just a buffoon, but Harrelson gets to show the pain at the character’s core that eventually drove him to become Defendor. Defendor would have been an absolute mess without an actor as good as Harrelson in the lead.

But it’s Elias Koteas that’s Defendor’s secret weapon. Koteas is a Canadian character actor who’s been in a ton of movies over the years (he first caught my eye in 1990’s live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie, playing Casey Jones, a low-rent vigilante who’s weirdly similar to Defendor), and he’s great in every single one. Here he chews the scenery wonderfully as the villain, a crack-smoking corrupt cop who hangs out with prostitutes and Serbian crime bosses, and like most great movie villains, manages to be hilarious and scary as hell at the same time. It’s an incredible performance, and the film takes on a wild energy every time Koteas is on the screen.

Michael Kelly is another excellent character actor I’ve been seeing for years who really gets a lot to bite into here. I first noticed him as the jerky security guard in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake (he also completely steals the hilarious/awful Law Abiding Citizen in ONE SCENE), and he’s wonderful and warm as Arthur’s boss and friend. He plays the normal guy who grounds Arthur and his pretty out-there behavior in reality, and he’s brilliant.

As I mentioned, it’s the ending of Defendor where things fall apart. I obviously won’t spoil the details, but its seriousness felt unearned. I understand what Stebbings was going for, and it’s not that he lacks the talent to pull it off, but rather it felt like he’d spent the entire movie slowly (albeit entertainingly) painting himself into a corner, and wasn’t able to work the miracle required to get himself out of it. As much as it definitely took away from the movie, I can’t say it ruined the entire experience, and I’ve always maintained that I’ll take an ambitious failure over a movie that plays it safe and doesn’t take chances. Defendor definitely falls into the former category (though I wouldn’t use the word “failure”; more like an interesting disappointment) and as much as I had my issues with it, it’s the work of a very talented filmmaker assisted by an excellent cast.

GRADE: B

THE EXTRAS

The Defendor DVD has a really nice collection of extras on it, including commentary from Stebbings, Harrelson, Dennings and producer Nick Tabarrok. The track has a nice, conversational vibe; everyone’s friendly and cool and funny. It’s bit of a mutual admiration society, but everyone’s charming enough that it doesn’t grate.

There’s also a collection of five featurettes that, if watched back-to-back, works as a nice little making-of mini-documentary that covers almost every aspect of production, from the project’s genesis to the casting to Stebbings himself. I found it all pretty interesting, and considerably better than the standard fluff you that passes for bonus material on most DVDs. There’s also a handful of deleted scenes and a funny little outtake reel. Overall this is an excellent little DVD for a quirky take on superhero movies.

Joss Whedon to direct The Avengers

2010-04-15T10:30:00.007-04:00

Great news for comic nerds this week: Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator and geek-TV icon Joss Whedon is in final negotiations to direct The Avengers for Marvel Stuidios. It sounds like it’s not completely official at the time of this writing, but as a fan of Buffy (never could get into the spin-off, Angel) and Whedon’s short-lived sci-fi series Firefly and the movie it eventually spawned, Serenity, I think this is wonderful news. As much as he’s being looked at as a director (and he’s pretty good behind the camera, having helmed Serenity and many of the best episodes of his TV shows), it’s his skills as a screenwriter that have me excited. Whether it’s official or not, it’s hard to believe Marvel would be talking this seriously with a guy like Whedon, known more for knack for characters and dialogue than his filmmaking chops, if they weren’t open to him polishing up the Avengers script as well.

The Avengers, in case you’re unaware, is Marvel’s all-star superhero team, featuring Iron Man, Captain America and Thor, as well as a ton of cool B-list characters like Hawkeye, Giant Man, the Wasp and the Black Widow (played by Scarlett Johansson in this summer’s Iron Man 2). Marvel has been slowly building up to The Avengers since Samuel L. Jackson’s cameo as Nick Fury in the first Iron Man, having signed the main actors in their movies, including Robert Downey Jr., Captain America’s Chris Evans and Thor’s Chris Hemsworth, to multi-picture deals that include The Avengers. A movie featuring Captain America, Iron Man and Thor all together is the stuff of fanboy dreams, and I think Whedon’s an excellent choice to realize that dream on the big screen.

I’ve heard that Marvel likes to let little tidbits like this leak out before anything is official to gauge the fan reaction online (no idea how true it is, but I read somewhere that the Captain America job was basically John Krasinski’s until the studio saw the overwhelmingly negative reaction to the news on the web), but given Whedon’s cred with the geek crowd, I suspect that won’t be an issue here. Whedon has one of the most devoted online fanbases; based purely on Google search results, you’d think both Firefly and Serenity were far more popular than the show’s brief life and the film’s relatively anemic box office take would suggest.

My only concern – and it’s a minor one – is that the scale of The Avengers dwarfs anything he’s worked on before (think city-destroying superhero fights and alien invasions), but Whedon’s nothing if not a sharp guy, and I assume he realizes The Avengers needs a little bit of a Roland Emmerich (2012, Independence Day) vibe. But I had similar concerns going into Serenity – would it just look like a two-hour Firefly episode, or would it actually feel like a movie? – but he put those to rest right quick, showing an ability to handle actions sequences that far more complicated and kinetic than anything he attempted on any of his shows, and the film had a scale to it that was only hinted at in the TV series. I definitely think Whedon’s got it in him to step up his game on a project as big as The Avengers.

Most importantly (to me at least) Whedon is the first filmmaker hired for a Marvel project who is actually a comic book fan. He’s written for Marvel Comics in the past – he has an excellent 24-issue run on Astonishing X-Men that’s a pretty solid entry point for newcomers to the X-Men or superhero comics in general, and another book he spent time writing, Runaways (about a group of teenagers who realize their parents are all supervillans) is also headed for the screen soon. More than Iron Man’s Jon Favreau or Thor’s Kenneth Branagh or Captain America’s Joe Johnston, he understands the dynamics of superhero stories, specifically superhero team stories; anyone who’s seen Buffy, Angel or Firefly knows of his knack for witty team dialogue and relationships.

The Avengers is expected to begin shooting some time in early 2011. You can bet your sweet can I’ll be following the news on this one closely.

Blu-ray Review: The Lord of the Rings - The Motion Picture Trilogy

2010-04-09T09:52:00.010-04:00

THE MOVIE

Last week I got to review John Woo’s The Killer, and now I’m reviewing The Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy on Blu-ray. Talk about a great run for the Captivate movie blog (and me in particular).

First things first: the versions of The Lord of the Rings movies included in this set are the shorter theatrical versions, not the Extended Edition versions (which I assume are coming to Blu-ray some time relatively soon) which I, and many other fans, prefer. But still – it’s The Lord of the Rings in high-definition! And it looks fantastic on Blu-ray. But aside from looking extra-sharp, there’s nothing on these discs that wasn’t included in the previous standard-definition releases.

Now, I’m a pretty serious fan of The Lord of the Rings movies, but in my travels I’ve found that I’m something of a curiosity; I grew up reading fantasy novels of questionable quality and playing Dungeons & Dragons, so I have a real nostalgic connection to all things fantasy-related, but I never got around to reading The Lord of the Rings, the novels that pretty much birthed the fantasy genre as we know it, until right before the movies came out. And I was pretty underwhelmed, to be honest, their indisputable historical importance aside. So my love of Middle Earth is essentially purely a cinematic one, as opposed to many diehard fans of the movies, who are also huge fans of the books. And like any self-respecting movie geek, I always try to seek out director’s cuts and extended versions of things, as I usually (but not always; I’m looking at you, Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut) prefer them. So as much as I’ve watched Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the classic J.R.R. Tolkien fantasy novels over the years (and I’ve watched them many, many times), it’s pretty much always the Extended Edition DVDs. In fact, it’s been so long since I’ve watched the shorter theatrical cuts of the Lord of the Rings movies that watching them again for this review was like seeing them again for the first time. Also a factor: because I am insane and tend to have a lot of free time, I often watch The Lord of the Rings Extended DVDs in a 12-hour marathon, which is actually a fairly serious undertaking I usually reserve for long weekends. So it’s actually been quite some time since I just watched The Fellowship of the Ring as a stand-alone movie. (Hey, turns out t’s awesome.)

Given that these movies are almost a decade old now and they’re among the most popular in recent memory, I won’t spend time reviewing the movies themselves (it’s almost guaranteed you’ve seen them and have an opinion of them). But watching these films again, I was reminded of just how much of a sucker for them I am. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but even the hokiest, borderline-goofiest aspects of these movies, from the earnest emotion on display throughout the trilogy to the multiple endings of The Return of the King, I just buy what Peter Jackson and company are selling every time I watch them. There aren’t too many movies I can say that about.

I was initially a little skeptical about revisiting the theatrical versions on Blu-ray, as I’m so used to the Extended versions by now. I’m in love with a lot of the little details in the longer versions (the showdown between Gandalf and the Witch King in the extended version of The Return of the King is one of my favorite moments in the entire trilogy) and I’ve seen them so many times that expected to sort of miss them, but honestly, with a couple of minor exceptions (I found the extra stuff in The Return of the King the most conspicuously absent), I could barely tell. And as much as I prefer the Extended versions, the theatrical cuts of these movies are all brilliant as well, and I appreciated how lean they are in terms of storytelling.

I, like many other fans of these films, am still waiting for the Extended Edition versions of the films to hit Blu-ray, but for the meantime this set is pretty fantastic. The Extended Blu-rays will, for me and many others, automatically become one of the prizes in my personal movie library, and until that set is released, this collection will do wonderfully.

GRADE: A

THE EXTRAS

The extras are literally just the bonus-feature discs from the original theatrical-cut Lord of the Rings DVDs. They’re standard DVD discs (as opposed to Blu-rays) and the second disc case in the set just houses the digital copies of the movies.

It’s been a while since I’ve watched this stuff – since the release of the Extended Edition DVDs, I’ve basically just watched those every time I get a hankering to revisit Middle Earth – and the even more in-depth features on the Extended discs (still among the best and most comprehensive bonus features I’ve ever seen on any DVD or Blu-ray) made me realize how relatively spare the extras on these discs are. They’re not bad (actually by most DVD standards they’re pretty excellent), but the Fellowship bonus disc, for example, has a couple of TV specials created to hype the movie on its initial release, some features from the movie’s website, and trailers. The Extended extras are still among the most comprehensive (and the best) making-of documentaries I’ve ever seen, and these extras don’t hold a candle to those. But overall these are fantastic films to have on Blu-ray, and until the Extended Editions hit high-def, this is the way to experience The Lord of the Rings.

DVD Review: Joe Rogan - Talking Monkeys In Space

2010-04-08T10:28:00.004-04:00

THE SHOW

I guess I’m what you’d call a Joe Rogan fan. I quite enjoy his color commentary on the UFC, and I own a couple of his comedy albums. And though I never watched Fear Factor, I really liked his work on Newsradio. A lot of people who only know him either as the Fear Factor or UFC guy may not realize he’s actually a stand-up comedian, and he’s spent the last few years re-establishing himself as a comic, including this TV special, which originally aired on Spike TV last year. But DVD is really the place to experience Talking Monkeys In Space, as Rogan’s comedy gets pretty raunchy at times, and it sort of ruins the flow when every other word out of his mouth is bleeped. I caught the special on Spike when it first aired, and thought it was okay. But watching it uncensored on DVD was a lot funnier. (What can I say? I think swearing is funny.)

The main reason I like Rogan’s comedy so much is that it’s smart. His material isn’t really political (“pot should be legal” is about as traditionally politically-charged as his stuff gets), but he talks a lot about society and human development (the title refers to us, riding on what he calls “a giant rock flying through space”), and I’ve always been fascinated by that sort of big-picture stuff. Add to that the fact that Rogan’s just damn funny, and you’ve got a comedian who’s stuff is right up my alley.

Rogan’s actually one of the sharper comics I’ve seen, certainly much more thoughtful than his goonish, fratboy image lets on. Talking Monkeys In Space covers topics ranging from evolution, religion, drugs (a lot about drugs), telepathy, having a baby and the inevitability of death. And Dr. Phil. All of it’s very funny, but naturally, it’s probably not for everyone (i.e. Dane Cook fans). But if you’re a fan of smart, raunchy comedy, this is pretty great stuff.

Also included on Talking Monkeys In Space is an extended Q&A session that took place after the main show, exclusive to this DVD. It runs almost 30 minutes, and, a few awkward audience-interaction moments aside, it’s almost as funny and interesting as Rogan’s act. (One of my favorite moments is Rogan mocking the first questioner, who tries to impress him with some inside-baseball MMA questions before an audience that largely seems uninterested.) Overall I was impressed with how interesting the Q&A stuff was, especially considering its length, but it’s more than just padding for the DVD.

GRADE: B+

THE EXTRAS

There’s a pair of short featurettes on the DVD, one a behind-the-scenes piece about Rogan’s life as a travelling stand-up comedian, and it sort of touches on the world of comedy and Rogan’s take on it (I have some friends who’ve done comedy, and I find the world of stand-up pretty fascinating). It follows him working out and preparing for the show on the DVD.

‘Talking Monkeys In Columbus’ is more about the preparation for the show itself, including a show he did at a smaller club the night before he recorded his special. Neither is mind-blowing (they’re actually fairly similar, and likely could have been combined into one longer mini-documentary) but as a fan of Rogan’s, I thought it was sort of fun watching him crack wise with his buddies in vans and hotel lobbies. But overall this is a pretty nice DVD package for a quality comedy special.

Old Tron, new trailer

2010-04-02T10:00:00.005-04:00

I’ve made no secret of my giddy anticipation of Tron Legacy this December, winner of this year’s District 9 Awad for Movie I Keep Finding Excuses To Write About, and clearly I’m not the only child of the ‘80s looking forward to Disney’s sequel. I found this the other day, and it filled me with nerd-glee; it’s a shockingly effective modern-style trailer that someone edited together for the original 1982 Tron, and it makes it look as awesome as The Dark Knight.

I didn’t really need any more reason to throw in my 20th Anniversary Edition DVD of Tron this weekend, but now I’ve got it. If you haven’t seen Tron before, or in a long time, I dare you not to check it out after watching this.

DVD Review: The Killer

2010-04-01T10:00:00.016-04:00

THE MOVIE

The Killer pretty much changed my life.

Not in the sense where it got me through a life-threatening situation or even a particularly difficult time, or radically changed my existential path. But movies are a major part of my life (more so than most normal people, I’d wager), and action movies are probably my single favorite genre. When I saw The Killer for the first time on home video in my teenage video store-rat days, it quite literally changed the way I looked at action films. Every action movie that I’d been blown away by up to that point seemed like weak pabulum in comparison to John Woo’s masterpiece of violence; my life as an action-movie fan is basically divided into pre- and post-Killer sections. So this is a pretty special day here on the Captivate movie blog, as it’s the first time I’ve gotten an opportunity (excuse?) to review a movie that’s in my own personal hall of fame. Which means I should probably can the preamble and get down to business.

The Killer is Hong Kong director John Woo’s 1989 magnum opus, about a hitman with a heart of gold (Chow Yun-Fat at the absolute pinnacle of his coolness) who accidentally blinds a lounge singer (Sally Yeh) while killing a nightclub full of people. His conscience won’t let him rest, so he re-enters her life as a mysterious paramour, taking one final job (without her knowledge, natch) in order to bankroll the surgery she needs to save her sight. Along the way gets the attention of a driven police detective (Danny Lee) determined to bring him to justice, but the unlikely duo eventually team up after Chow’s employers try to screw him out of his payment, and his life.

The tagline from the VHS box of the version of The Killer that I initially rented (and re-rented many times, until I eventually bought a copy for myself) is one of my favorites of all time: “One vicious hitman. One fierce cop. Ten thousand bullets.” And that’s about as astute a summary of the film as anything I could come up wity. John Woo’s style (lots of slow-motion, everyone firing nearly comical amounts of bullets without reloading) is fairly well-known nowadays, thanks mainly to his breakthrough American film, Face/Off, but it’s The Killer that sees Woo at the height of his powers as an action filmmaker. The gunfights in The Killer are simply awesome, and even more than 20 years later, you can see the movie as the template for hundreds of action movies made all over the world since. Dudes leaping and sliding around in slow motion, firing two guns as the scenery around them explodes with enemy fire, with optional pigeons or doves? That’s John Woo’s legacy, and it doesn’t get much better than The Killer.

The argument could probably be made that Hard Boiled, which re-teamed Woo and Chow in 1992 and is even more over-the-top (and is also available in a sweet two-disc set from Dragon Dynasty), is the purer action-movie experience, but The Killer’s emphasis on plot and emotion and its themes of honor and brotherhood – concepts almost entirely absent from Hard Boiled – overheated though they may be, gives it the edge in my heart. There’s something really endearing about how corny Woo is willing to get in The Killer; it’s the exact sort of thing that, even in 1989, a Hollywood film would replace with groan-inducing one-liners. Whether it’s the romance between Chow and Yeh or the bromance between Chow’s hitman and Lee’s detective, the dramatic beats in The Killer are just as exaggerated as the action sequences, and for me that’s part of the film’s appeal.

As much as I love The Killer (I’ve had a poster of it up in my home somewhere since I was in high school), it’s that very aspect that may not work for some viewers. There’s a completely unironic and totally straight-faced sense of melodrama that pervades the movie, and for some audiences it might veer into out-and-out silly territory. But even if you find the dialogue chuckle-inducing, I guarantee you will be pinned to your seat during the film’s many glorious shootouts. The movie eventually culminates in an utterly insane shootout in a church that’s only topped in action cinema by the 30-plus-minute gunfight in a hospital that caps Hard Boiled (not sure what’s up with Woo’s habit of staging his climactic action sequences in vaguely inappropriate locales, but it somehow adds to the tension and drama).

My feelings about it aside, The Killer is unquestionably one of the best – and most important – action movies made in the last 25 years. This new Dragon Dynasty DVD cleans up the picture beautifully (The Killer, unfortunately, has been available only sporadically in North America since the advent of DVD, and even then it was a fairly poor transfer bereft of features). The sound, however, is another issue; Dragon Dynasty’s recent Hard Boiled two-disc set features a weighty DTS 5.1 audio track (you can practically hear the bullets whizzing past your head), but The Killer only has mono tracks for English and Cantonese, which is unfortunate. What makes it even odder is that I actually already have an overseas DVD of The Killer with a nicely restored picture and a DTS audio track (I have a magic DVD player that plays discs from anywhere in the world), and I’d assumed when I first heard about this new North American release for The Killer that Dragon Dynasty would just repurpose that audio track. But no, as sharp as The Killer looks, the sound doesn’t match that level of quality. It’s a real missed opportunity that does take away from the experience a little, at least for a hardcore John Woo devotee like myself.

Overall, if you’re a fan of action movies, you need to see The Killer. If you only know Chow Yun-Fat from his Hollywood movies, find out why cinema geeks have been worshipping him for decades and watch The Killer. If you only know John Woo from Face/Off or Mission: Impossible II or another of his American films (like Paycheck or the truly atrocious Windtalkers, a movie so bad it’s almost akin to a war crime), then forget those and watch The Killer. More than two decades later, this is still one of the most amazing action films I’ve ever seen. The Killer comes with my highest possible recommendation.

GRADE: A+

THE EXTRAS

This new Killer DVD is a pretty sweet package, but there’s one curious omission in particular, and that’s a commentary track from Hong Kong cinema expert Bey Logan, which is only conspicuous by its absence because Logan does commentary on almost literally every Dragon Dynasty release, including their Hard Boiled set. It’s a minor omission, to be sure, but I’ve gotten so used to Logan’s commentaries (which are always wonderfully entertaining and insightful) that I sort of missed it. But it’s the sort of thing that only a nerd like me will notice; it’s certainly not a big deal.

That said, there’s a pretty good selection of extra features here. There’s a pair of Q&As with John Woo conducted at the American Cinematheque in 2002, one for The Killer and one for Hard Boiled. Both are lengthy and interesting, though the audio is a bit sketchy (particularly the Killer discussion), and coupled with Woo’s thickly accented English, it can make parts of the Q&As (conducted by American Cinematheque program director Dennis Bartok) almost entirely unintelligible.

There’s a separate interview with Woo that was done more recently (he looks considerably older than in the 2002 clips), and it covers quite a bit of ground. Also, it has optional subtitles, which makes it easier to follow. Woo discusses his influences like Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai, and talks about shooting The Killer largely without a script (he shot a lot of it from his treatment).

Also included is an odd little featurette called ‘The Killer Locations,’ in which a pretty Asian woman takes viewers on a travelogue of the Hong Kong locations where significant sequences were shot. It’s sort of weird, but for hardcore fans like myself who have seen The Killer dozens and dozens of times, it’s pretty cool seeing these locations today. It also works as a sort of a historical/travel piece about Hong Kong, and there’s some interesting tidbits of information included about the movie.

There’s also a collection of deleted scenes (some of which are included in longer international cuts of the film) that are fairly interesting, mostly character moments that presumably slowed the film down too much.

Overall this is a pretty excellent DVD for one of the best action movies of all time. If you’ve never owned The Killer, this is the version to get. If you have a previous release, it’s time for an upgrade. If you love action movies there’s no excuse for this DVD not being in your collection.

HOLY ****!: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World trailer

2010-03-26T09:00:00.011-04:00

There's a movie coming out this summer that I've been quietly awaiting a trailer for, and that's Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. There's a number of factors that has this near the top of my Must-See List, among them the fact that it's the third film from director Edgar Wright, who helmed the too-brilliant-for-words Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz (see both immediately if you haven't already), it's based on the incredible graphic novel series by Bryan Lee O'Malley, and it's set in my hometown of Toronto (as is the comic; O'Malley's a Toronto guy as well). It stars Michael Cera as the titular character, a twentysomething dude who falls for the girl of his dreams, the beautiful and mysterious Ramona Flowers, only to learn that in order to win her, he must first defeat her Seven Evil Ex-Boyfriends (who include Jason Schwartzman, Chris Evans and Brandon Routh, among others). The trailer just hit the 'net, and it looks amazing.

The Scott Pilgrim comic is just a blast of pure fun, combining martial arts, classic video games and romantic comedy, and it's one of the best comics being published today (the sixth and final volume, Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour, is due in stores in July). From the look of this trailer, Wright and crew have totally nailed the tone of the books, which, on the surface, seems like it would be difficult to adapt into a movie. I've been on the fence about Cera's involvement – the character of Scott Pilgrim, a loud, outgoing, fun-loving guy, couldn't be further from Cera's usual on-screen persona – and while this trailer doesn't totally put my concerns to rest (he barely speaks in it), the rest of it just confirms that this movie looks like it deserves the excitement that it's generating in many corners of the Internet (including this one).

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World hits theaters on August 13. See it, or you are dead to me.

Check out the Scott Pilgrim trailer here, courtesy of Apple.

[REC] 2 gets U.S. release date

2010-03-25T10:39:00.004-04:00

News came down yesterday that Magnolia Pictures has picked up the Spanish horror sequel [REC] 2 for distribution in America. The original [REC], the best zombie movie I've seen since Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake (it's like Cloverfield or Blair Witch meets zombies, and it's remarkably effective), was remade in America as Quarantine, which is basically a shot-for-shot remake of the Spanish original. (As a devoted movie snob I always try too seek out the original, and it's almost always superior.) The film is due in U.S. theaters on July 9, which is significant if only because the original [REC], which had some serious buzz going for it, was basically buried for fear that it would hurt the box office for Quarantine (why pay $12 to see something in a theater when you can rent the original movie it's a remake of for $5?), but it's available on DVD now, and I recommend it highly if you're into horror movies. It's terrifying in ways the American remake (which really isn't bad) isn't.

Original [REC] writer-directors Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza are back for the sequel (which means it will probably also be awesome), and they're already talking about making [REC] 3.

Check out the teaser for [REC] 2 below. But be warned, it's not for the faint of heart.

And Captain America is...

2010-03-23T11:08:00.006-04:00

A nice bit of news broke late yesterday that I'm happy to report (in part because I've been following this whole situation closely for months now): Chris Evans will don the red, white and blue tights in The First Avenger: Captain America.

I love this, as I mentioned last week in my rundown of the casting rumors, and I think Evans will do a fine job as the Star-Spangled Avenger. It took me a little while to warm to Evans – I initially thought he was just another pretty boy – but his work in movies like Sunshine and his genuinely awesome job in the really rather cruddy Fantastic Four movies won me over. It's also sort of weird that one actor will have played both the Human Torch and Captain America, but nobody seems to remember the FF movies (which I own on DVD, and I actually kind of dig the sequel, Rise of the Silver Surfer, but that's mostly because I'm a big fan of that character; I can't actually defend that movie as being any good), so it's not like viewers will be confused. Hell, I'm just happy it's not Channing Tatum or, even worse, Dane Cook. But of the list of actors that circulated last week, Evans was my favorite choice, and I'm really happy he accepted the job. Him interacting with Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark in The Avengers will be an absolute treat.

The First Avenger: Captain America starts shooting in June, and is due in theaters on July 22, 2011.

DVD Review: Good Hair

2010-03-19T08:27:00.006-04:00

Good Hair is a documentary produced, co-written and narrated by comedian Chris Rock about black hair, and more specifically black women’s hair. It struck me as a bit of an odd subject for a full-length documentary when I first heard about the project, but it turns out to be a fascinating subject for many reasons, and I could have happily watched a much longer version that went into even greater detail about weaves, relaxer and the Bronner Bros. Hair Show in Atlanta. (I could watch a two-hour documentary of just Ice-T talking to a camera about whatever’s on his mind.)

Good Hair begins with Rock trying to answer his daughter’s question of why doesn’t she have “good hair.” It’s a cute premise that allows Rock to narrate the film in a much more personal manner than usual, which is perfect for a comedian (it also allows him to be honest and funny about what he learns during the film), and it also roots the film in something real, making the movie something of a personal journey. The idea is that Rock is investigating the concept of “good hair,” which basically means straight hair, which is not natural to black women. Good Hair is about the lengths black women (and, as Rock says, some men, like Prince or Michael Jackson) will go to in pursuit of good hair.

A lot of the best parts of Good Hair are the celebrity interviews. Rock and company interviewed dozens of black stars about their hair, from actresses like Nia Long, Raven Symoné to rappers like Salt N’ Pepa, Eve and the aforementioned Ice-T and cultural figures like Reverend Al Sharpton and Dr. Maya Angelou. Everyone is hilarious and compelling, particularly Sharpton, who first got his hair straightened, we learn, in the ‘early 80s when he went with James Brown to visit the White House to visit Ronald Regan, or Maya Angelou, who didn’t try relaxer until she was 70. And Pepa’s famous asymmetrical haircut from the video for Salt N’ Pepa’s breakthrough single, ‘Push It’? Turns out Pepa had to shave half her head because of a relaxer mishap.

Like Rock’s comedy, Good Hair seems light and funny on its surface, but there’s an undercurrent of real intelligence here. He’s not just talking about hair, but the social and economic issues surrounding it, from the health hazards of regularly using relaxer (which, as it turns out, is an insanely dangerous chemical that can literally erode a tin can into nothing in about four hours), to the cultural implications of black women pursuing a beauty standard that essentially aims to make them look white, to the economic impact of the importance of good hair (black women can spend upwards of $1,000 on a weave, in some cases when they’re simultaneously struggling to put food on the table), to the hair-smuggling trade in India, to the fact that, as much as black hair is a multi-billion-dollar industry – several people in the film mention the black community spends more on hair products than just about any other cultural group – it’s dominated on the business side of things by non-blacks. All of this stuff gets covered, but at no point does Good Hair feel preachy or like Rock has an axe to grind. These things are just presented, and he seems happy to let the audience make of these observations what they will.

Most importantly, Good Hair is funny. Rock, arguably the smartest and funniest stand-up comic working today, is brilliant, but he’s intelligent enough to know when to stay in the background. He wisely lets the humor come about naturally from the interview subjects. In the sections that are explicitly about the Bronner Bros. show, he profiles a handful of competing stylists, all of whom are in some way ridiculous (as is the competition itself, the winner of which receives a boxing-style title belt), but the film isn’t feels mean-spirited nor does it feel like Rock and company are mocking their subjects.

As a person of mixed race, I also grew up with kinky hair that I wished was straight, so many of the personal stories that the interview subjects tell struck a chord with me (I wished for long, flowing locks when I was 6, but alas, that was not in the cards for me), but at the same time Good Hair is a glimpse into a world I knew literally nothing about, and I found it utterly absorbing. Regardless of your level of knowledge about, or interest in, hair, Good Hair is a highly entertaining film, and I recommend it.

GRADE: A-

EXTRAS

The only bonus feature on the Good Hair DVD is a commentary track from Rock and producer Nelson George. It’s a really funny and entertaining track – George holds his own fairly well with Rock, an actual professional comedian, but mostly plays straight man or provides producer-y nuggets of information to counterbalance Rock’s cracking wise – and I felt like I learned even more about the subject after listening to it. My problem with the disc is that Rock and George repeatedly mention in the commentary other features that will be included on the DVD (additional interview footage, etc.), but alas, none of it is included. It’s too bad, as the commentary track is great, but the empty promise of more hilarious interviews with Sharpton and Ice-T and others ends up being sort of annoying. Otherwise, this is a great documentary and a nice DVD.

More Captain America casting rumors

2010-03-18T08:15:00.013-04:00

I make no secret of my geekiness, and, as I’ve mentioned here numerous times, I’m closely following the production of Marvel Studios’ potential blockbusters set for next summer, Thor, which is about the Norse god of thunder exiled on modern-day Earth, and The First Avenger: Captain America, which is about, well Captain America, and is largely set during World War II (it also apparently ties into Iron Man 2 via Tony Stark’s father, in addition to leading into the planned Avengers movie). I like both characters, and I’m really excited about seeing Thor, Captain America and Iron Man all crossing over in the same movie universe; this is the sort of thing comic book fans have been dreaming about for decades.

On paper, Thor is the more difficult sell, as it combines superhero action and a more Lord of the Rings-like fantasy setting, with frost giants and other mystical creatures, which seems like a tricky balance for a superhero flick. Captain America, on the other hand, punches out Nazis in the Second World War and is frozen in a block of ice until he’s thawed out in the modern day by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, introduced in the post-credits scene in Iron Man), which sounds like a relatively easy film to pull off, at least compared to a movie that has to somehow fuse the more real-world vibe of Iron Man with a story, quite literally, of gods and monsters. But somehow Thor is the production that seems to be humming along nicely with a solid team of people behind it (it’s directed by Kenneth Branagh, stars relative unknown Chris Hemsworth as Thor and co-stars Natalie Portman, Anthony Hopkins, Rene Russo, Stellan Skarsgård, Ray Stevenson and Idris Elba), while Captain America seems to be rife with problems: the film starts shooting in June and Marvel is still searching for its lead actor (though casting Hugo Weaving, who’s in final talks to play the evil Red Skull, is brilliant), and director Joe Johsnston, who last helmed the flop The Wolfman (though he came onto that film with a couple of weeks to go before shooting, so he can hardly be held responsible for its performance, and it’s actually quite a good movie), has reportedly been butting heads with Marvel over the casting and the budget, and I’ve heard rumblings that the Captain America script is fairly underwhelming.

A few weeks back I mentioned a list of actors Marvel was bringing in for screen tests, which included Jon Krasinski of The Office (a choice that, as much as I railed against it initially, I have to admit is growing on me a little bit). At the time it was believed that the casting of Cap would be finalized any day, but here we are weeks later and all we know is that there are even more actors apparently being considered for the role, the latest being Ryan Phillipe, Chris Evans and Dear John’s Channing Tatum. Given the parade of actors gunning to fill the Star-Spangled Avenger’s tights, as well as my interest in all things Marvel-related, I thought I’d give my thoughts on some of the actors rumored to be up for Cap.

Channing Tatum. This guy is one of the new additions to the list of people Marvel has apparently approached, and I hate it. Tatum, who I keep hearing is actually a very good actor, has sucked in the stuff I’ve seen him in. He was the dead weight in the otherwise fun G.I. Joe, and given how similar the characters of Duke and Cap are (charismatic soldier and leader of men), I really don’t need to see the Marvel movie universe sullied by a Captain Marblemouth film. I get that someone up high has decided that Tatum will be a star, I just want him to do it as far away from Marvel Studios as possible.

Ryan Phillippe. He seems too physically small to play Captain America (who’s usually portrayed as a tall, beefy guy) but otherwise he has the right look. I have no doubt Phillippe would bulk up for the role, but purely in terms of height his Cap would probably seem tiny, especially next to Hemsworth (who looks massive in everything I’ve seen him in, like A Perfect Getaway and Star Trek), who plays Thor, one of the members, along with Iron Man, of the Avengers. Phillippe also seems a little bland to play a guy who is supposed to be, quite literally, an icon.

Chris Evans. Evans has already been in a Marvel franchise – his Human Torch is the best thing about the utterly the mediocre Fantastic Four movies – and he had powers in the excellent little sci-fi/action film Push (a likely future Under the Radar entry). And despite his good looks, he’s actually a fine actor as well; I thought he was just another pretty face until I saw him in Danny Boyle’s overlooked Sunshine (it’s like Event Horizon, but good), where he actually acts. He’s got the charisma and he looks like a superhero. Of all the actors said to be under consideration, Evans is probably my favorite.

The Supernatural guys. Supernatural co-star Jensen Ackles is reportedly one of the contenders, and he certainly looks the part with his square jaw and Aryan good looks. As much as I think he’d do a fine job (he’s pretty great on from what I’ve seen of that show, and he’s also solid in the fun slasher flick My Bloody Valentine 3D), I actually think it’s his co-star, Jared Padalecki, who would make a better Captain America. He’s taller (he’s almost the same size as the hulking Jason in the Friday the 13th remake), and already solidly built, so he’s essentially just a peroxide bottle away from being Steve Rogers.

Jeremy Renner. The Hurt Locker star was reportedly in talks with Marvel for quite some time (sometimes rumored for Cap, sometimes for Hawkeye in The Avengers; it’s speculated the character turns up either in the Thor film or Captain America in a cameo), but word is the low salary Marvel’s offering, coupled with the apparent nine-picture deal required by the studio, turned off the recent Oscar nominee. I think Renner would probably make a better Hawkeye (the character is traditionally portrayed as a cocky smart-ass, which is right up Renner’s alley), but you could do a lot worse than having an Academy Award nominee and star of the recent Oscar darling playing Captain America. If it were up to me I’d pay Renner what he wants and give him the shield and get to it.

Garett Hedlund. The star of the upcoming Tron Legacy is apparently one of Marvel’s top choices for Captain America, but once again, he’s said to have balked at the studio’s low fee. His name’s still in the mix up though, and between the positive buzz Tron Legacy is building up online (and not just from yours truly) and the fact that he’s still in this discussion, it sounds like Marvel may try to meet Hedlund halfway. I dig the actor’s work (he’s great in Friday Night Lights and is solid enough in the underwhelming Troy), and again, he certainly has the right look. I think he’d make a pretty fantastic Captain America.

Ryan McPartlin. I’ve never seen Chuck, or McPartlin in anything else. All I’ve seen on the Internet are a lot of pictures of this guy with his shirt off, and he’s certainly blond, handsome and ripped. Who knows if he can act, but if I wanted a picture of a guy dressed as Captain America, I’m sure he’d be great.

Jon Krasinski. So a few weeks ago I went on about how I just couldn’t see Jim from The Office as Captain America. Despite conflicting rumors that Krasinski has the inside track and that he’s all but out of the running entirely, he’s been stuck in my brain ever since I first heard his name come up. He sort of has a 1940s look to him, and he’s tall enough that he’s in no danger of being dwarfed by Robert Downey Jr. when standing with the rest of the Avengers. I’m still not sure he has the gravitas to be Captain America, but I’m slowly warming to the idea of Krasinski in the role, even if he’s starting to look like a longshot.

Mike Vogel. The fact that this guy is still being mentioned as a contender despite being something of a nonentity (I’ve seen both the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake and Cloverfield, and I have literally no memory of Vogel in either of them, which does not bode well for him) suggests to me that he’s Marvel’s Plan B, C or D. I guess if he shaves his permanent 5 o’clock shadow he may look the part, but he seems to lack the onscreen presence to pull off a character as important as Captain America.

Dane Cook. This one, is probably nonsense (or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part). The only guy rumored to be in talks (the “rumor” seems to be generated by Cook’s own Twitter feed, so take it with the requisite amount of salt) that will make me, a dyed-in-the-wool Marvel geek, not go see a Captain America movie. I can think of few people worse for this role, and I don’t want to dignify the concept of Dane Cook playing Captain America any more than I already have, so I’ll just stop writing now, lest I get too worked up and give myself a stroke.

DVD Review: Capitalism: A Love Story

2010-03-12T08:19:00.011-05:00

THE MOVIE

To call Michael Moore a polarizing figure is an understatement, but his latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story, is simultaneously his most provocative work yet, and also his most understated and least hyperbolic. Which sounds like a contradiction, but Moore has learned the lessons of his past few films (and, more specifically, the reaction to them), and focuses more on hard facts and real-life anecdotes like he did in Sicko, as opposed to bending the truth to make his point like he occasionally did in Fahrenheit 9/11 (which Moore himself admits is less of a proper documentary than it is a “filmed essay”), and the result is a movie with the emotional power of his early work like Roger & Me and the best parts of Bowling for Columbine and the more mature, quasi-journalistic style of the better-regarded Sicko. Examining the collapse of the American economy, Capitalism: A Love Story is in many ways the film Moore has been building to for his entire career, to the point that it’s almost a sequel to 1989’s Roger & Me, and it sees Moore continuing his shift from political agitator to activist. Unlike some of his previous films and TV series, in Capitalism, Moore is less interested in making fools of his subjects or getting easy laughs from the audience (though the movie is also very, very funny) than he is making a point about what he feels is wrong with America, and it’s a wise move. The lack of cheap-shots makes the film seem more like a legitimate documentary (albeit one with a definite point of view, which is something most documentaries have nowadays) and less like a political screed, and given the importance of the message Moore is trying to convey, it’s a canny decision, and short-circuits much of the usual criticism his movies garner.

Capitalism sees Moore at his best as an advocate for the working class, and as much as I realize that he’s probably a millionaire a few times over himself, he’s toned down the rhetoric in this film, so there’s less opportunities for him to come across as disingenuous when he discusses the plight of blue-collar folks. He may not be a middle-class guy himself these days, but his anger at the fact that the secure, middle-class lifestyle he enjoyed when he was a kid has basically vanished from America seems very real, and he’s hell-bent on exposing what he sees as the corrupt political and corporate forces that are eroding the middle class. Moore, a former seminary student, returns again and again to the moral implications of capitalism, repeatedly asking whether Jesus (or any other religious figure) would be on the side of the tiny fraction of Americans that control most of the country’s wealth (who also seem to invoke Jesus’ name quite a bit) or on the side of the underpaid, exploited masses. In past films, Moore’s moral outrage can seem like an act, but I totally bought it this time around.

Moore is angry in this film, but he doesn’t make himself the centre of the proceedings. He’s learned the lessons of Sicko (that sometimes it’s easier to get your point across without all the histrionics), and it seems like he’s internalized some of the criticisms against him, particularly after Fahrenheit 9/11. He barely appears in the film other than in voiceover (he still appears onscreen several times, but he’s nowhere near as much of a presence as he was in Fahrenheit or Columbine, and it’s a wise decision, particularly given the politically sensitive nature of the subject matter and how divisive a figure he is). Moore’s smart enough to realize how politically touchy it is to basically make a documentary about how American capitalism has failed and destroyed much of the country, both literally and figuratively, especially in America, and he constructs the film wherever possible as a simple presentation of facts. Moore sniffs out examples of capitalism run amok (like teenagers unjustly thrown in juvenile detention, sometimes over the objections of probation officers, because a local judge had cut a deal with the private company that built the for-profit detention center to keep the flow of kids coming so the company could make more money with more inmates), and in contemporary America, it’s not hard to find examples of lower-middle class people getting screwed over by the horribly broken system. It would be tough to argue against the points Moore makes in Capitalism: A Love Story without resorting to partisan name-calling or talking-points or just blind devotion to a system that any reasonably intelligent person can see is simply no longer working. The only arguments against Moore’s thesis in the film, which is basically that capitalism has gone too far and replaced democracy in America (as opposed to remaining just an economic system that runs alongside democracy) are either that no, everything’s actually just fine (which probably means you’re one of the 1% that controls the vast majority of the wealth in America) or that it’s unpatriotic or sacrilegious to even begin to question the sanctity of the capitalist system, which is the propaganda that those in power have been selling for years.

The unfortunate thing, in America at least, is that there’s a lot of truth, ugly, harsh truth, in what Moore is saying in this film, but because of his reputation I’m sure a great many people who should see this film and be moved by it, won’t. As much as I agree with Moore on a lot of issues on paper (I’m Canadian, and I’m probably further to the left of the political spectrum than he is), even I find his style a bit grating and disingenuous at times (in particular in Fahrenheit, and some parts of Bowling for Columbine are a little too over-the-top for me), but Capitalism: A Love Story really isn’t a political movie in the left-right/partisan sense (Moore’s as hard, if not harder, on the Democrats than the Republicans, particularly in the section covering the bank bailout, one of the film’s strongest – and most infuriating – sequences). It’s about justice and what’s right, and it’s about a broken system that’s still sold as being “for the people” despite the fact that it isn’t. But Moore, sadly, has positioned himself through his career in such a way that people already predisposed to disagreeing with him will just ignore Capitalism as another tirade against America, and that’s too bad.

Overall I was quite blown away by Capitalism: A Love Story, and I went into it expecting to agree with just about everything Moore had to say in it (and I pretty much did); if I have a knock against the movie it’s that Moore seems to scale back his argument near the end, I guess to avoid being seen calling for the complete dismantling of modern American society, and I can understand his reluctance to take his argument to its logical conclusion lest he be seen as an insane radical or worse, something approaching a terrorist. Capitalism: A Love Story is a film that, in an ideal world, would be seen by just about everybody in America, and other parts of the world as well. It’s not a political rant, but rather an incisive, street-level breakdown of exactly what went wrong with the American economic system over the last several decades. It’s a film about how we got where we are, and it’s a heartbreaking, infuriating journey. Moore ends the film with a call to action, his most explicit appeal to his viewers since Fahrenheit 9/11 (a movie that existed purely to try to hamper George W. Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004), and, as much as it pains me to say it, I think he’s barking up the wrong tree. Either way, Capitalism: A Love Story is an important, and remarkably well-made documentary that just about everyone should see. Highly recommended.

GRADE: A-

THE EXTRAS

The extras on the Capitalism: A Love Story DVD are good and plentiful. The strongest, in my opinion, are an extended version of Moore’s interview with Congressman Elijah Cummins (D-Maryland) in which Cummins breaks down while describing the plight of the working class, and an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Chris Hedges in which he discusses ‘The Killing Machine Known as Capitalism,’ essentially (and with terrifying rationality) laying out the argument that unfettered capitalism, in addition to causing a great deal of pain and misery (for example, the huge and politically influential corporations that make insane amounts of money off the current wars in the Middle East, and so it’s therefore in their interests that war and destruction continue), unregulated capitalism is destroying America. I realize that on paper that sounds like the ravings of a fringe intellectual figure, but listening to Hedges calmly explain his position is incredibly unnerving.

There’s a ton of other interesting stuff on the DVD, including the full version of Jimmy Carter’s infamous Jul7 15, 1979 address to the nation, in which he warns of the dangers of self-indulgence and the worship of material goods (Moore uses a piece of it in the final film to segue into his hilarious and depressing segment on Ronald Regan); it’s chilling to watch in its entirety, and sort of mind-blowing to consider the political ramifications of an American president just talking honestly to the people (the idea of, say, Barack Obama doing the same thing today is nigh-unthinkable). There’s also a bunch of little profiles of different business models (a piece called ‘Commie Taxi Drivers’ looks at Wisconsin cab drivers that operate as a worker’s co-op, and another looks at a “socialist” bank operating out of North Dakota). The result is an assortment of extras that run the gamut of righteous indignation and angry reaction to real alternatives and examples of how some smaller companies and communities are making things work without screwing over or taking advantage of workers. A great DVD for an excellent documentary.

Trailers for Iron Man 2, Robin Hood

2010-03-11T08:52:00.005-05:00

There’s a pair of new trailers out this week for movies coming this summer (well, I guess it’s spring technically, but May is summer in the world of movies) that I’m particularly excited about. The first is the second trailer for Iron Man 2 (which I’m so stoked about I’m trying not to think about it too much), and, of course, it looks awesome. There’s a bunch of stuff in this new trailer that’s got the Marvel geek in me insanely primed (the suit-in-a-suitcase gag, lifted directly from the classic comics; the apparent promise that Mickey Rourke will don a something closer to a full suit of armor at some point; Downey and Cheadle kicking the crap out of a bunch of robots; I could go on and on), and it’s clear that director Jon Favreau and company responded to the common criticism leveled against the first Iron Man that there wasn’t enough action. The only X-factor for me is Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow, because the Black Widow is supposed to be Russian, and Johansson is a bad enough actress as it is without trying to handle a Russian accent. But that’s a minor concern considering the amount of robot suits and lasers this movie promises. Iron Man 2 opens on May 2.

Next up is Ridley Scott’s re-teaming with Gladiator star Russell Crowe for a new take on Robin Hood. I’ve been fascinated by medieval stories since I was a little kid, Robin Hood in particular (I loved the Kevin Costner movie when I was 9), and Scott, one of my favorite filmmakers, already made an excellent (and underrated) movie set in the period in 2005’s Kingdom of Heaven (it’s a really great Middle Ages epic, or at least the Director’s Cut is; I never saw the terribly-reviewed theatrical cut). As much as I was pretty lukewarm on the idea of another Robin Hood movie when I first heard about the project (particularly Scott’s and Crowe’s involvement; it felt like they were revisiting Gladiator territory), and I was so-so with the first teaser, this new full-length trailer finally grabbed my interest. It looks more epic than I expected a Robin Hood film to, and Cate Blanchett (probably the best actress working today) classing up the joint as Maid Marian certainly helps matters. Robin Hood hits theatres May 14.

Blogging the Oscars: Part 2

2010-03-08T10:32:00.007-05:00

Welcome to the part two of the second annual Captivate movie blog Oscar night liveblog. I actually hate the word “blog,” and I just used it twice in one sentence there, so I doubt you’ll be seeing it again today. Check out Part 1 here if, for some reason, you want to read a more detailed rundown of my picks. The deal is, I watch the entire Oscars telecast and write about it, and this is noteworthy because I don’t really care much about the Oscars. This year, however, unlike last year, I’ve actually seen most of the nominated movies (6 of the 10 Best Picture nominees, vs. none of last year’s five), so let’s see if my actually knowing what the hell I’m talking about improves my accuracy. I don’t really expect it to.

A quick note: I actually fell asleep during the red carpet pre-show (which tells you about all you need to know about my level of interest in Oscar fashion) and woke up a little bit after the show started, and I’m actually watching the show saved on PVR on about a 45-minute time delay, so my times are estimated and may be a little bit off, if that’s the sort of thing that matters to you.

8:30 pm ET
Okay, we’re off to a pretty weird start, with all the best actor and actress nominees on stage. I don’t get it. And neither does Clooney, apparently, who looks sort of uncomfortable.

Neil Patrick Harris comes out for a little song and dance number to introduce Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. I hate musical numbers with a burning passion, so right off the bat they’re making me question the wisdom of doing this whole “force myself to watch the whole Oscars show and be witty about it” thing again. Antonio Banderas looks impressed though.

8:34
Martin and Baldwin take the stage. I think both of these guys are pretty great (though I still can't help but assume their pairing was originally meant to promote It’s Complicated, which they’re both in...and now they’re joking about Meryl Streep. Does this thing come out on DVD next week or something?) They’re doing the bit where they joke about nominees in the audience, which is almost always the source of uncomfortable jokes. Martin and Baldwin are solid so far (less than five minutes in, for whatever that’s worth), and I like Baldwin’s little staredown gag with Clooney, who usually seems more game for joking around like this. Who pissed in Clooney’s cornflakes this morning, I wonder? Overall though, it’s a fairly solid opening monologue, though I guess it’s really not that because there’s two of them. Duologue?

8:45
They’re doing Best Supporting Actor already. I love how they always start off with a couple of big awards to trick us into thinking the show is actually bopping along at a quick pace and isn't going to drag until after midnight. Oh, how naive we all are. So is The Last Station movie about Leon Trotsky? Because if it is, I don’t understand why Christopher Plummer is up for Best Supporting Actor.

8:50
Christoph Waltz wins for Inglourious Basterds with a nice little speech. Not boring, didn't drag on, and it seemed heartfelt and sincere. And I was right, so we’re off to a pretty nice start here. And I can’t escape the feeling that this will be the only award Inglourious Basterds wins all night.

My Pick was: Christoph Waltz
I Am: Right. 1-0.

8:56
Cameron Diaz and Steve Carrel are solid. So far I’m pretty impressed with the writing in the show, and the presenters are surprisingly not-terrible. Up wins Best Animated Feature, which is not much of a surprise. I would have liked to see Fantastic Mr. Fox win (I’m a Wes Anderson nerd and I really liked this movie), but Up was pretty much a shoo-in, and it’s a great movie. Is it shoo-in or shoe-in? Anyway, good for Up.

9:00
Man, that Miley Cyrus is a void of charisma. I’m not looking forward to when they try to shove her down my throat as a movie star in a few years. Seriously, entertainment business, this is the best you’ve got to offer? I am unimpressed. Ryan Bingham and T. Bone Burnett win Best Original Song for something from Crazy Heart. They keep it nice and short, so again, I feel like I’m being lulled into a false sense of hope as far as the show’s length goes. We’ll see.

9:07
Chris Pine is out to talk about District 9, part of the thing where they talk about every Best Picture Nominee through the show. There’s 10 nominees this year, so these will be more plentiful than normal. I only mention this because I suspect it will be the only time District 9 will be talked about tonight.

9:15
Man, Baldwin looked like he was eating glass when he said that thing about Tina Fey reviving his career. She and Robert Downey Jr. have a nice little bit together introducing Best Original Screenplay. But I just can't take Tina Fey seriously giving these little voiceover stage directions. I assume this is Tarantino's to lose…except he just lost to Mark Boal for The Hurt Locker. I’m pleasantly surprised (not that I have anything bad to say about Tarantino’s work in Inglourious Basterds, probably his best film yet), as it’s a fantastic movie (regular readers know I’ve been raving about The Hurt Locker since the summer), and journalists just don’t win enough Oscars. A nice, humble little speech from Boal, and The Hurt Locker has its first Oscar. I am stoked.

9:21
Wow, is Molly Ringwald a giant, or is Matthew Broderick really short? They're out for a tribute to John Hughes, which is a sweet little segment that does the job well. And look at that young Alec Baldwin!

9:28
Man, it is beyond weird seeing all these actors from old John Hughes movies all grown up. It’s cool that they got them all back for this, but that cut from 2010 Anthony Michael Hall to 2010 Judd Nelson was rough.

9:33
I like this little segment about short films (pretty smart to explain the significance of the “other” awards the Oscar producers make the public sit through to see the awards they actually care about), though it seems a little defensive, a two-minute piece justifying the short awards’ placement on the main show. And seconds after thinking to myself that this Logorama thing looks sort of cool, it ends up winning. Not a bad speech either, by some French guy, but there’s that inescapable feeling that this pleasant, charming man who is obviously experiencing one of the high points of his professional life is about to get played off the stage by the band any second.

9:37
The second the fat lady interrupts the black dude his acceptance speech after Music by Prudence wins best documentary short, I realize this is gonna get ugly. And lo and behold it does: we’re treated to a rambling, unintelligible speech by someone who interrupted the guy holding the award, ending with the evening’s first uncomfortable music play-off. Ugh. People who win the minor awards, while I understand they’re super stoked about winning, need to realize that nobody wants to spend three or four minutes listening to the thoughts of the guy who wins best animated short or best sound editing. These two guys who just won for best live action short film was just brutal. Two out of the three speeches for the shorts awards ended awkwardly, and I’m wondering once again why they’re even on the main telecast.

9:44
Ben Stiller comes out dressed as an alien from Avatar for a joke that seems sort of expected. But Stiller, as usual, sells it pretty well; the joke, somewhat wisely, is based on the fact that he looks like an idiot. Star Trek just won for best makeup, and I’m starting to doubt in my abilities to keep this whole thing interesting for the duration of the night.

9:50
I love that Jeff Bridges (a.k.a. The Dude from The Big Lebowski) introduces the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man in the best picture montage. Is only one of the Coens in attendance? That’s crazy. I don’t even know which one that is. Ethan?

9:54
Jake Gyllenhaal and Rachel McAdams are out to present Best Adapted Screenplay. Ooh, I forgot that In The Loop was up for best adapted screenplay! I finally saw that a few weeks ago, it’s brilliant. But it’s District 9 that I’m really rooting for. And Push wins, of course. I forgot that that movie needs to win stuff because it won’t get any of the “major” awards, like best picture. Man this guy looks emotional. He sounds like he's reading a monologue from a play. It’s gonna be so awkward when the band starts playing him off. Actually that didn't happen, he managed to end it quite gracefully. I’m impressed, and I need to see this Push business.

10:00
Queen Latifah is out for a thing about the governor’s awards, which I guess are four lifetime achievement-type awards. Awesome that Roger Corman has a Oscar now. Looks like everyone had a great time at that thing, everyone seemed drunk. Lauren Bacall and Roger Corman are getting a standing ovation until the announcer tells them to stop by bringing out Robin Williams. This is probably going to be painful.

10:03
It’s time for best supporting actress. Penelope Cruz still feels like a token nomination for Nine, a film that was clearly meant to be a big Oscar deal, but now the producers get to say it was nominated for something. And I’ve already ranted enough in this space about how Mélanie Laurent from Inglourious Basterds was robbed. Mo’nique wins, which makes me 2-0, and for some reason they cut to mostly black actors (many of whom, as far as I know, were not her co-stars in Precious, like Samuel L. Jackson) during her speech.

My Pick: Mo’nique
I am: Right. 2-0!

10:15
Avatar just won its first Oscar, for best art direction. Hoo boy, someone started their speech with “13 years ago, the doctors told me I wouldn’t survive…” pretty much daring the producers to play him offstage, and all but guaranteeing emotional applause. Well played, sir. Well played.

10:21
The scientists who keep Sarah Jessica Parker looking younger than 60 are working overtime tonight, but really, there’s only so much you can do for a hideous witch-woman like that. She and Tom Ford are out to present Best Costume Design, which goes to The Young Victoria. I’m sure it’s a fine film and the costume designers all worked hard, but I don't care.

10:24
The music they keep playing after they hand out awards keeps reminding me of ‘Love Hurts’ by Nazareth, which is incredibly distracting.

10:27
Cute little Paranormal Activity bit with Martin and Baldwin, but I expected it to go somewhere. Instead it basically just says to the audience “Hey, everyone, remember Paranormal Activity?”

10:30
Man, speaking of voids of charisma, two moppets from Twilight are out for a montage paying tribute to horror films. Hey, what are the chances that the Oscar people thing the Twilight movies are horror movies? Well, they included a shot of it in the montage, so I guess so. Too bad, it was an otherwise cool bit, even though I’m not sure I see the point. Someone decided to devote a couple of minutes to a montage of horror movies, and now that's done, the horror movies have officially been acknowledged and we can all move on? Also, I really, really hate the Twilight girl. It can’t be good that I get this irrationally angry when a person appears on my TV. Health-wise, I mean.

10:36
The Hurt Locker wins for best sound editing, which is cool, as that movie has pretty good sound editing (having a semi-decent sound system helps me notice stuff like this), and it’s more hardware for The Hurt Locker, so, aces. Nice short speech too, no complaints here.

10:38
The Hurt Locker wins again for best sound mixing, which means they have to fetch the guy who just won two seconds ago from the back to accept another award. Great stuff. I hope this is the beginning of a trend for the night.

10:42
For some reason they play the E.T. theme when Elizabeth Banks comes out to mention that they handed out some technical awards last night. Not really sure what the point of that was, either the E.T. thing or the technical awards mention, as they don’t even say who won what.

10:43
Is John Travolta wearing jeans? Did he not know about tonight’s show? I’m starting to wonder what it’s gonna take for Quentin Tarantino to win an Oscar. I guess Inglourious Basterds won’t be his The Departed after all.

10:46
Avatar wins for best cinematography, and during cinematographer Mauro Fiore’s speech it cuts to Stephen Lang, probably the only human in Avatar worthy of any acting recognition.

10:48
It’s time for the annual Oscar Death Montage. Patrick Swayze kicks off this year’s morbid “Who Gets the Most Applause?” sweepstakes. Oh man, I forgot Ron Silver died this year. Michael Jackson made the cut this year, which seems to bend the rules a little bit, but Farrah Fawcett (who was an actual actor and died the same day) isn’t even mentioned. Stay classy, Oscars.

10:55
Jennifer Lopez and Sam Worthington may the oddest presenter couple this year, and what they’re presenting is even odder, a montage of best original score done as an a series of interpretive breakdance numbers. I’m pretty sure I made a very similar joke last year, but if anyone's curious, what is happening on my television right this moment is exactly what people hate about the Oscar telecast. This is just absurd.

10:57
The Avatar number just pushed this breakdance number over the top into “among the silliest things I’ve ever seen” territory. Then Up wins best original score.

11:01
Gerard Butler and Bradley Cooper are presenting together, and I want to make a joke about how both of them are bland, handsome flashes in the pan. But I can’t think of anything funny, so I just wrote that. Avatar wins best visual effects, which is one of the biggest gimmes of the whole night (except perhaps Christoph Waltz), which is a shame, because for my money, District 9 had far superior effects, if for nothing other than I just believed more in that world and in those digital characters. But it looks like Avatar is winning all the technical awards, and I won’t pretend it didn’t have great effects. Can’t argue with the biggest movie of all time, I guess.

11:09
I forgot Alec Baldwin was co-hosting this thing. I guess they have these big chunks of the show without the host now (I vaguely recall something similar happening last year, when Hugh Jackman vanished for like 40 minutes or something), or in this case, hosts. I feel like we’re in the home stretch for some reason, and I also think I’m probably just fooling myself.

11:11
The Cove wins best documentary, underscoring my need to see that movie. Also, Fisher Stevens just won an Academy Award. Tonight is weird. Man, they are playing people off mercilessly tonight. That’s three times tonight that I’ve been moderately embarrassed for the people onstage.

11:14
Tyler Perry is annoying.

11:16
The Hurt Locker just won for best editing. I’m starting to think it’ll win all the major awards it’s up for. I wish I’d picked The Hurt Locker for best picture instead of Avatar, because then I think I’d be looking at a clean sweep in terms of my predictions. But no, I had to get all cynical and assume the Academy would split the Best Director and Best Picture awards to give both The Hurt Locker and Avatar some love. If only I’d gone with my heart.

11:20
My digital TV guide says the show will be over in 10 minutes, but I suspect that will not be the case. Quentin Tarantino and Pedro Almodóvar present best foreign language film. I’ve got to see this A Prophet movie, I’ve heard only insanely good things about it. An Argetinian film called The Secret In Their Eyes wins, and the guy accepting the award makes the funniest Avatar joke of the night, thanking the Academy for not considering Na’vi a foreign language. He doesn’t get any laughs.

11:24
Kathy Bates classes up the joint and sells Avatar as a legit contender for best movie of the year. Still not buying it. But I think the major awards are up next, which is good, because I am getting tired.

11:27
They’re doing that weird gang-presenter thing from last year again, bringing out a bunch of co-stars to talk about the nominees for best actor. And someone needs to find out what demon Michelle Pfeiffer made a bargain with, because she does not look however old she’s supposed to be. (I can’t believe we’re minutes away from Tron: Legacy officially starring an Oscar winner!) The problem with this system, though it is nice (Pfeiffer's tribute to Bridges was particularly touching), is that it takes several minutes to hand out one award. Also, these are such nice, warm tributes that it’ll seem sort of unfortunate that in about three minutes, four of these guys are going to be losers. And Tim Robbins is hilarious.

11:33
They’re still handing out best actor, except now Kate Winslet is doing it. They tricked me into thinking this would come in at a reasonable length again. Jeff Bridges wins, which is great, even though I haven’t seen Crazy Heart. He's an incredibly talented actor, and he deserves an Oscar. The Dude just won an Academy Award, and delivers a wonderfully Dude-like acceptance speech. Awesome.

My Pick: Jeff Bridges
I am: Right. 3-0.

11:39
Now it’s time to do this whole thing again with best actress. These things are actually very sweet and effective, particularly Oprah Winfrey’s tribute to Gabourey Sidibe from Precious. Sandra Bullock wins, surprising almost nobody. Bullock proves herself a class act with her speech, saying nice things about everyone else in the category. I don’t even really like Sandra Bullock, but that was the best Oscar speech I’ve seen in a while?

My Pick: Sandra Bullock
I am: Right. 4-0.

11:47
Two awards to go! Babra Streisand is out to present best director. The Academy makes my night by giving it to Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker. The director of Near Dark and Point Break, two of my favourite movies of all time, just won an Oscar. Cameron looks legitimately thrilled for his ex-wife, and Bigelow herself seems absolutely blown away. I get cynical about the Oscars every year, but every time I’m ready to write them off, the Academy pulls through and gives awards to truly great movies like No Country for Old Men or, in this year’s case, The Hurt Locker. If it wins best picture, my clean sweep is ruined, but I don’t care.

My Pick: Kathryn Bigelow
I am: Right. 5-0.

11:55
Tom Hanks literally jogs onstage to announce that The Hurt Locker is the winner for best picture. I don’t remember the last time a movie so deserved all the awards (well, I guess No Country winning). I got excited about The Hurt Locker the second I heard about it a couple of years ago, just because it was a new Kathryn Bigelow movie, so the idea that I just watched her win a bunch of Oscars is pretty nuts. Sometimes there’s justice in the universe.

My Pick: Avatar
I am: Wrong, for the first and only time tonight. 5-1.

12:00 am
Well, that’s the show, and it’s well past my bedtime. Not only did I come one pick away from being perfect on the big six awards, but I also accurately predicted that the show would go long.

I feel like this wasn’t as funny and clever as last year’s, but the more I think about it the more I realize it’s just a combination of my actually being satisfied with most of the major winners (particularly The Hurt Locker) and the show being boring. Not a lot of train-wreck moments, at least not ones I could write something clever about (that breakdancing thing was just brutal), and the show, overall, left quite a lot to be desired after, I thought, a pretty strong start.

The good news is, I went 5-1 after going 3-3 last year, so I guess it does make a difference when I actually see the nominated films. I have no idea what next years’ crop of movies will be like, obviously, but if it’s as solid a field as this year’s contenders (The Hurt Locker, District 9 and Inglourious Basterds were all up for multiple awards, and were my top three movies of last year), then I’ll take a boring show for some genuinely great films winning awards.

Blogging the Oscars: Part 1

2010-03-05T10:24:00.012-05:00

So it’s Oscar time once again, and I’m keeping up the tradition (now proudly in its second year!) of my two-part Oscar special. Today I’ll run through the big nominees and make my picks for the winners, and then on Monday morning you can read my liveblog of the awards show, and we can all find out how I did with my predictions. Last year I broke even at 3-3, and I hadn’t seen the majority of the nominated films. This year I’ve seen considerably more (I’ve seen six of the 10 Best Picture nominees; last year I’d seen none of the five nominees at the time of the show), and I so I feel like I should come out with a better record this time around.

Let’s do this thing!

Best Picture
Avatar
The Blind Side
District 9
An Education
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
A Serious Man
Up
Up in the Air

My pick: Avatar. While I did like this movie quite a bit (I always give points to movies that can legitimately say they showed me stuff I’ve never seen in a movie before, and the 3D was awesome), I don’t think it has any business being on this list, other than it made a metric ton of money. It’s a fun sci-fi popcorn movie, and a token nomination would be one thing (particularly with the new 10 nominees thing, a.k.a the Dark Knight Rule), but the idea that Avatar is considered a front-runner just because it’s the highest-grossing movie of all time makes me vomit in my own mouth a little. I haven’t heard or read one compelling argument that this movie is actually one of the best films of 2009, I’ve just seen quotes of box office figures. Which is sad.

Regular readers know my dark horse pick is District 9, which I realize doesn’t have a hope in hell. If Avatar doesn’t win though, I’d expect it to go to Up in the Air, though that movie seems to have lost a lot of the early momentum it had a few months back. But my pick is Avatar, which is a dire commentary on the state of mainstream movies. Or my own cynicism, whichever.

Best Director
James Cameron, Avatar
Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds
Lee Daniels, Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
Jason Reitman, Up in the Air

My Pick: Kathryn Bigelow. I’m almost tired (almost!) of singing Bigelow’s praises in this space, and I’ve already said more than once how awesome I think it is that she’s not only getting recognition for the brilliance of The Hurt Locker, but also that a woman is considered the front-runner for the Best Director Oscar for the first time in my lifetime. I can’t say enough good things about this movie or Bigelow, and I will do a dance of joy in my apartment if she wins. Or hurl something across the room if she doesn’t.

And Jason Reitman is Canadian. He won’t win, but if I fail to mention his heritage in an Oscar story, the Canadian government will take away my free health-care.

Best Actor
Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
George Clooney, Up in the Air
Colin Firth, A Single Man
Morgan Freeman, Invictus
Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker

My Pick: Jeff Bridges. He seems to be tied with Christoph Waltz in the Heath Ledger Memorial Foregone Conclusion sweepstakes this year. He’s a wonderful actor, and while I haven’t seen Crazy Heart, I only hear good things about his work in it. But this also seems like one of those awards that, assuming Bridges wins, is more of a reward for larger body of work than this specific performance, and he definitely deserves it. Jeremy Renner would also be a pleasant surprise, but I think he’ll be just fine career-wise if he doesn’t win; the nomination for him was proof that he’s arrived.

Best Actress
Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side
Helen Mirren, The Last Station
Carey Mulligan, An Education
Gabourey Sidibe, Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia

My Pick: Sandra Bullock. Similar to Bridges, this is Bullock’s award to lose, and as much as I hear she’s quite good in The Blind Side, doing some “real” acting for a change, I can’t escape the feeling that her winning an Oscar has more to do with the Academy rewarding her for years and years of making hugely successful, if fluffy, romantic comedies. But every one else in this category seems like an outsider, except for Streep, and I think she has enough damn Oscars already.

Best Supporting Actor
Matt Damon, Invictus
Woody Harrelson, The Messenger
Christopher Plummer, The Last Station
Stanley Tucci, The Lovely Bones
Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

My Pick: Christoph Waltz. He’s this year’s Heath Ledger, with the added bonus of still being alive. Nobody else in this category comes close.

Best Supporting Actress
Penelope Cruz, Nine
Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air
Maggie Gyllenhaal, Crazy Heart
Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air
Mo'Nique, Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire

My Pick: Mo’Nique. I haven’t seen Precious, but I hear she’s incredible, and the fact that she’s actually a comedian turning in an Oscar-worthy serious performance seems to strike a chord with Academy voters (see also: Tom Hanks, Robin Williams). Anna Kendrick is fantastic in Up in the Air, but for some reason it’s widely held that her sharing a category with co-star Vera Farmiga will probably cost her the award (I still don’t understand that logic myself, but whatever). And I’ve said here before that as far as I’m concerned, the best supporting actress of 2009, Inglourious Basterds’ Mélanie Laurent (who is flat-out incredible), isn’t even nominated, which is easily the most criminal act in this year’s nominations.

Swing by Monday morning to see how right (or wrong) I am. If District 9 wins anything, I’ll be absolutely over the moon, and if The Hurt Locker gets shut out (there’s a really weird and, to me, vaguely upsetting rash of stories in the media right now that seem to be trying to tear the movie down, which I don’t understand, from the suspiciously-timed lawsuit to stories about how real military bomb techs think it’s unrealistic), I’ll be filled with righteous fury. So come by Monday morning to get an update on my mental state, if nothing else. Should be good times.

Tron's legacy

2010-03-04T09:45:00.007-05:00

I don't think there's a movie coming out in 2010 that I'm more looking forward to than Tron: Legacy, which, considering Iron Man 2 is also due this year, is quite a statement. I still sort of can't believe that Disney made a sequel to Tron almost 30 years after the original (which, while not a flop, was hardly a blockbuster in its day), and everything I see for it, from images to the teaser released last year just reinforce how damn cool it looks. Commercial director Joseph Kosinski's making his feature film debut with Tron: Legacy, and if his commercial reel is any indication (he did some awesome ads for the Gears of War games), his movie will, if nothing else, look great. And really, for a Tron film, that's pretty much all that matters.

Rather encouragingly, it looks as if Disney is going all out with its reinvigorated Tron franchise, as there's talk of a potential trilogy, similar to Pirates of the Caribbean, and Disney has already confirmed a 10-part Tron "micro-series" on its Disney XD cable channel, which they hope to spin into a regular animated series, presumably to keep the brand going between film sequels (this, of course, could all go out the window if Legacy flops). As an old-school Tron fan, I'm very excited about this news, though not excited enough to go see the abysmal-looking Alice In Wonderland just to see the new Tron: Legacy trailer. But when this thing comes out in December, I'll be lining up for the first IMAX 3D screening. Lightcycles ahoy!

DVD Review: A Serious Man

2010-02-26T08:57:00.004-05:00

THE MOVIE

A Serious Man is the latest film from Joel and Ethan Coen, and it’s an oddball comedy in the vein of Burn After Reading (read my review here) and The Big Lebowski, rather than a dark thriller like No Country for Old Men. Set in 1967 Minneapolis, it follows Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a Jewish physics professor on the verge of getting tenure, as his life begins to fall apart. His wife is leaving him for one of his friends, his children don’t respect him, his down-on-his-luck older brother is overstaying his welcome on his couch, one of his students is trying to bribe him for a better grade, and the university is receiving anonymous letters besmirching his character. The comedy in A Serious Man comes from watching the Coens pile more and more indignities on Larry and seeing just how far he can bend before he finally breaks. The title is a reference to Larry’s ultimate goal: to be taken seriously.

A Serious Man is steeped in Jewishness in a way that sort of works to its detriment, at least in my opinion. There’s lots of funny stuff in here, but I could never escape the feeling that I was an outsider looking in; some of the cultural references seem so inside-y, and the Coens are so uninterested in explaining them (which actually makes it funnier), that as much as I can appreciate the absurd humor in, say, the scenes where Larry speaks to rabbis (there’s a running gag about them being hard get in to see; I guess rabbis are difficult to get appointments with?), I couldn’t shake the feeling that there were jokes flying around that were sailing over my head. It’s not necessarily a bad thing – I still laughed a lot during A Serious Man, and the Coens’ flair for capturing life’s little absurdities remains as strong as ever – but it felt like there was an invisible barrier around the film preventing me from fully embracing it. It made me feel like a tourist.

That’s not to say that A Serious Man isn’t funny, because it is. It’s very funny. There’s lots of great stuff in here, from the pot-smoking, foul-mouthed kids at Larry’s son’s school to Larry’s bizarre encounter with his female neighbor to the aforementioned rabbi scenes, and, as usual, the Coens never go for the obvious joke, letting the comedy come from the tone and the performances rather than traditional “gags.”

Michael Stuhlbarg in the lead is really excellent, especially for an actor I’d never previously heard of. He’s funny and relatable, and manages to make Larry a pushover without rendering him unlikeable. As much as Larry lets people in the movie walk all over him, I never stopped rooting for him, and much of that is due to Stuhlbarg’s performance.

As much as A Serious Man is a comedy, the Coens bring their flair for tension to the film in strange ways. They pile things onto Larry as the film builds, creating a weird sort of suspense as the viewer waits to see if Larry will finally (and deservedly) blow his top. There’s at least a half-dozen scenes in the movie where I, in Larry’s place, would have started flipping over tables and punching people in the face. By setting the film in 1960s Minnesota, and making just about all the characters practicing Jews, the Coens play with ideas of repression and tradition and social codes (something they always seem to have fun with) even more than usual.

There’s a streak of misanthropy in the Coens’ movies, especially their later ones (it’s one of the reasons I enjoy their films so much), and it’s one of the things I liked the most about A Serious Man. As much as some of the content of the film felt like it was flying over my head or was weird for just the sake of being weird, there’s also a sense that they think this stuff is funny, and don’t really care if the viewer agrees, and I love that. There’s no better example of this than the film’s ending, which I won’t spoil other than to say it’s basically the point at which most “normal” movies would start, and it’s also one of the most arresting final images I’ve seen in a film since Park Chan-wook’s similarly consciously weird vampire movie, Thirst (read my review here). A Serious Man is a weird little comedy that, as much as it made me feel like an outsider at times, is still an enjoyable entry in the filmography of some of the most ridiculously talented and prolific filmmakers of their era.

GRADE: B

THE EXTRAS

As usual with the Coens, there isn’t exactly a wealth of extras on the DVD for A Serious Man. There’s a pair of featurettes on the making of the movie, both of which are pretty standard affairs (one, called ‘Becoming Serious,’ is a standard making-of EPK piece, and the other, ‘Creating 1967,’ focuses on recreating period details in the film), and both are constructed around the same interview with the Coens, and also feature interviews with the cast and other crew. Neither featurette is mind-blowing or particularly insightful, but the Coens are interesting guys, so any glimpse into their process, for a movie geek like me, is sort of cool.

There’s also ‘Hebrew and Yiddish for Goys,’ a funny little item that translates the Yiddish and Hebrew terms thrown around in the film by the characters. It’s quite cleverly edited, and despite its lack of substance, it’s more in keeping with the vibe of the film than the somewhat bland other extras.

Captain America casting talk

2010-02-25T09:13:00.005-05:00

I’ve covered the development of the new Spider-Man movie here recently, and touched on the Thor movie due next summer from Marvel. But there’s another huge superhero movie coming from Marvel in summer 2011, and that’s The First Avenger: Captain America. The movie starts preproduction March 1 in London, and director Joe Johnston has said he wanted to have his lead in place by then. Given that it’s late February, there’s been a surge in casting news, with a leaked list of the final candidates Marvel’s looking at to play the Star-Spangled Avenger. It’s . . . weird.

The most well-known name on the list (Marvel and Johnston apparently are looking for a lesser-known lead to surround with more recognizable faces in supporting roles, similar to Thor) is probably John Krasinski of The Office. Also on the list is Chace Crawford from Gossip Girl, Garrett Hedlund from the upcoming Tron Legacy, Scott Porter from Friday Night Lights, Mike Vogel from Cloverfield, Patrick Flueger from Brothers and Michael Cassidy from TV’s Privileged.

For whatever my opinion is worth, most of these choices seem bland (a big chunk of these actors are on shows I don't watch, like Gossip Girl and Friday Night Lights, so I can’t judge them on much beyond their looks, and I didn’t even know there was a show called Privileged), and one is downright bizarre (Jim from The Office as Cap? WTF?). Now, I really like Krasinski; I’m a fan of The Office and I loved his work in the wonderful Away We Go, but he simply doesn’t have the dramatic heft and seriousness needed to play Captain America, the quintessential leader of men. There are other roles in Marvel’s movie universe I think Krasinski would work quite well in (he would make a great Dr. Henry Pym in The Avengers, a brilliant but troubled scientist who creates a serum that allows him to grow into the Godzilla-sized Giant Man), but I just can’t see him as Captain America. Who knows, the comic community lost its collective mind when Tim Burton cast Michael Keaton as Batman in the late ‘80s, and he’s still, for my money, the best Batman we’ve had in the movies, so if Krasinski does indeed get the nod to wear Cap’s red, white and blue tights, maybe he’ll prove everyone wrong like Keaton did in 1989.

The Captain America movie will apparently be mostly a period piece set during the Second World War (which I’m personally not a fan of, but I get the importance of that era to establish the character). I recently saw Johnston’s update of The Wolfman, and it’s a fun, violent monster movie, the kind they don’t make anymore. Johnston’s a very talented filmmaker, and I look forward to seeing what he does with a character like Captain America, and what that film will mean to Marvel’s movie universe.

But . . . Jim? Really?

Mongol sequel, The Secret of Kells trailer

2010-02-19T10:37:00.005-05:00

Some good news coming out of the European Film Market in Berlin is that Russian director Sergei Bodrov is planning to shoot the second film in his planned biopic trilogy about ancient conqueror Genghis Khan next year. The film, appropriately titled Genghis Khan, is the sequel to 2007’s Mongol, which I enjoyed so much I picked it as one of my favorite movies of 2008 (which is when I finally got to see it; I liked it so much I bent my own rules to include it), which tells the story of the legendary figure’s early days, ending with him assuming the name Genghis Khan. It’s an excellent historical epic, and I’m really happy that Bodrov is moving ahead with his trilogy. It’s not yet clear if star Tadanobu Asano will return to play Khan (I certainly hope he will; he’s the best part of Mongol), but the Japanese actor is in pretty high demand, so scheduling could be an issue. I hope the movie gods smile on Bodrov and he gets his leading man back for the sequel, as well as the planned third film.

***

A trailer popped up this week for a film that’s intrigued me since the Oscar nominations were announced recently, and that’s The Secret of Kells. The film, which it seems hardly anyone had previously heard of, was a surprise nominee for best animated feature, so naturally, as a fan of animation, I was curious to learn more about the movie. Now that I’ve seen the trailer, I must say I’m even more interested in checking it out. I love the old-school 2D animation, the stylized look (it reminds me a lot of the excellent Samurai Jack), and the Viking-related story. The Secret of Kells is now on my list of Movies I Need to See.

DVD Pick: Black Dynamite

2010-02-18T09:47:00.007-05:00

This week, one of my favorite movies of last year, and the funniest comedy I’ve seen since Anchorman came out on DVD and Blu-ray. That movie is Black Dynamite, a brilliant spoof of ‘70s blaxploitation films, starring Michael Jai White as the title character, a kung fu-fighting former CIA agent out to avenge his little brother’s death at the hands of mob drug dealers, eventually cracking a huge conspiracy involving tainted malt liquor and climaxing in a final confrontation so awesome and hilarious that I can’t even tell you who he fights at the end, lest I spoil one of the funniest jokes in the entire movie.

Now, I should tell you that an appreciation for blaxploitation movies is not a prerequisite for enjoying Black Dynamite. I’m pretty unfamiliar with the genre myself, my experience limited to seeing Shaft when I was a teenager, and catching bits of Dolemite when I was in university; the bulk of my knowledge about blaxploitation comes from Keenan Ivory Wayans’ 1988 spoof of the genre, I’m Gonna Git You Sucka (which this movie trumps in every way imaginable). Black Dynamite is just a hilarious movie that anyone who’s spent any time laughing at poorly-made genre movies (horror, action, sci-fi, etc.) can appreciate. Whether it’s boom microphones in the shot or a bad supporting “actor” who reads his stage directions in addition to his lines or poorly edited car chases, Black Dynamite is a wonderful satire of bad movies made by enthusiastic people.

Michael Jai White, who’s been toiling away in small roles in big movies (The Dark Knight, that awesome deleted scene in Kill Bill Vol. 2) or big roles in small movies (replacing Ving Rhames in the low-budget sequel Undisputed 2, which is actually a fun little martial arts flick), usually plays intense, scary dudes, and it was a revelation to see how funny he is. (He came up with the idea for the character when James Brown’s ‘Superbad’ came on his iPod while he was filming Undisputed 2.) He wrote a screenplay with director Scott Sanders and co-star Byron Minns based on a fake trailer they threw together, and the indie comedy was eventually bought by Sony. It saw a limited theatrical release, but home video is where great little comedies like this find their audiences, and I suspect Black Dynamite will find a cult following pretty fast. It’s a hilarious satire of low-budget genre movies filled with wonderfully authentic and hysterical music (my favorite sequence in the entire movie is probably the ‘Cleaning Up The Streets’ montage; Black Dynamite has the funniest montages since Team America) that any movie buff will be able to appreciate. I’ve watched Black Dynamite probably a dozen times now, and it still hasn’t gotten old. If you only watch one movie this year based on my recommendation, make that movie Black Dynamite.

DVD Review: Bronson

2010-02-12T08:46:00.009-05:00

THE MOVIE

I’ll get two things out of the way right off the bat: (1) Bronson has nothing to do with the late screen icon Charles Bronson; (2) Bronson is a flat-out incredible movie. It’s certainly not to everyone’s taste, but for its entire running time I was totally buying what director/co-writer Nicolas Winding Refn and star Tom Hardy were selling. Bronson is a biopic about Michael Peterson, a man who proudly claims to be Britain’s most violent prisoner. He was arrested in 1974 for robbery, and has spent most of the time since then in prison, and most of that time’s been spent in solitary. (According to the film, he adopted the “fighting name” Charles Bronson during a brief period on the outside when he took up underground bare-knuckle fighting to get his violence fix.)

The centerpiece of Bronson is Tom Hardy. His performance makes me want to drag out clichés like “electrifying” and “riveting,” because he is all of those things. This is one of the most jaw-dropping performances I’ve seen in a long time; the entire film rests on Hardy’s broad shoulders – he’s in every scene – and he carries it with the aplomb of a genuine star. (He’s apparently been tapped to take over for Mel Gibson in George Miller’s long-planned fourth Mad Max movie, and after watching Bronson I can tell you that the iconic character is in excellent hands.) Bronson is, without a doubt, a sociopath, and Hardy makes him simultaneously charming, hilarious and terrifying. He spends a chunks of the movie addressing the camera directly in his prison garb, or delivering monologues while clad in a tuxedo to what appears to be a high-class theater audience (Refn’s primary theme for his biopic has to do with Bronson as an artist/performer – more on that later), and it’s in these scenes that Hardy really draws the audience in with his – and Bronson’s – charisma. I know nothing of the real Charles Bronson, but Hardy’s work in the monologue sequences really helped me understand how this strange, violent man whose “calling” is that he fights cops and prison guards by the handful and has spent more than three decades in prison has become an underground cult hero in Britain.

The other star of the movie is Refn. The Danish director made a splash with cult audiences on these shores with his acclaimed trio of crime films known as the Pusher Trilogy (1996, 2004, 2005). I haven’t seen them myself – they’ve been on my mental list of Movies I Really Need to Get Around to Seeing Someday since I heard about them – and after watching Bronson, I’ve definitely got to check them out now. Refn is an amazingly talented filmmaker, and as stylized as Bronson is, it never felt showy for the sake of being showy.

The music in Bronson was one of my favorite things about the movie, and it’s split about 50/50 between classical music and synth-heavy 1980s pop (which is when much of the film takes place, or at least I think so – Refn makes a point of leaving the chronology vague), and the use of The Pet Shop Boys’ ‘It’s A Sin’ is particularly wonderful. Refn uses the music primarily during the fight scenes, and both the grand, sweeping classical music and the ‘80s synth-pop provide wonderful juxtapositions to the brutal violence onscreen.

In Refn’s film, Bronson’s central motivation is to be famous (the film opens with Hardy telling the camera “My name’s Charles Bronson. And all my life I’ve wanted to be famous.”), and it’s a really fascinating premise. The idea is that Michael Peterson created this persona of Charlie Bronson, and his primary concern through much of the film is his legacy and fame (or, more appropriately, infamy). When he’s first sent to jail as a young man, he relishes the opportunity to, as he puts it, “sharpen my tools, hone my skills.” Bronson is an exploration of celebrity and our cultural obsession with fame, seen through the eyes of a violent man who decided to become “famous” by fighting cops and prison guards. Bronson’s entire life is a performance, and his masterpiece (in the film at least) is a “rooftop protest” (seemed more like a full-on riot to me) at Broadmoor Hospital in 1983 that lasted 47 hours.

Bronson, however, probably isn’t for everyone. Refn doesn’t flinch from violent or disturbing imagery, and I don’t remember the last time I saw a movie with this much male nudity. But Bronson is raw, violent and hilarious, easily the best movie I’ve seen about a sociopath since Taxi Driver. There’s a quote on the cover that co0mpares Bronson to A Clockwork Orange, and as much as it tears me up inside to piggyback on another critic’s observation, that’s as apt a comparison as I can think of. Bronson is a brilliant piece of filmmaking, and comes with my highest recommendation.

GRADE: A

THE EXTRAS

The Bronson DVD has a great selection of bonus materials. There’s a nice making-of mini-documentary with interviews with the cast and crew, as well as individual interview featurettes with co-writer/director Nicolas Winding Refn and Tom Hardy. (Interestingly, Refn had never heard of Charles Bronson before he got the script, while Hardy’s been “obsessed” with him for years, a detail I found fascinating). There’s also a short featurette on the training regimen Hardy used to physically transform himself into Bronson, which, when you see how Hardy normally looks, makes his performance even more impressive.

The oddest – and also the most interesting – extra is something called the Charles Bronson Monologues, actual audio recordings from the man himself done in 2009. Hardy really got to know Bronson to prepare for the role, and felt he had a duty to the man. In the message, Bronson actually thanks the cast and crew of the film for telling his story, praising Hardy in particular (“No one else on this planet could have played me better than Tom Hardy.”). Just listening to him talking, it’s easy to see how this guy has crafted such a cult of personality around himself. Overall, this is a really great assortment of extras for an excellent film, perfectly balancing behind-the-scenes details with real-life information. If only DVDs for all biopics were this good.

Hughes Bros. to helm live-action Akira

2010-02-11T09:47:00.005-05:00

I saw The Book of Eli a few weeks ago, and I liked it quite a bit. It doesn’t really reinvent the wheel when it comes to post-apocalyptic action films, but it’s a solid entry in the genre, buoyed by a great performance from the reliably excellent Denzel Washington. The style and craftsmanship on display, in particular, really clicked with me, and it reminded me how talented the Hughes Brothers are as filmmakers. Now it’s being reported that they’ve signed on to helm another post-apocalyptic story, this time adapting the legendary 1982 Japanese comic Akira, (which was in turn adapted into a legendary animated film in 1988 by writer/artist Katsuhiro Otomo) for Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way production company and Warner Bros.

As far as I can recall, Hollywood’s been threatening to remake Akira for more than a decade (at one point it was to star Ben Affleck!), and I don’t think it’s any better an idea now than it was before. The story, originally told in a mammoth 2,100-page graphic novel (divided into six huge tomes), follows youth biker gangs in futuristic Neo-Tokyo years after a mysterious explosion destroyed the city and triggered a world war. Tetsuo, the youngest member of one of the gangs has an encounter with a strange, blue-skinned child on the street who, we later learn, has been broken out of a secret government facility researching mind powers. Tetsuo ends up in the program himself after he’s found to have incredible potential, and soon Kaneda, one of his older friends in the gang, tries to break him out of the program, only to learn that Tetsuo has gone mad with power. Screaming, exploding heads and another apocalypse ensues.

The graphic novel is much deeper than the animated film, delving into the society that springs up after Tetsuo triggers another mysterious apocalyptic blast that levels Neo-Tokyo once again, while the film (written and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, who wrote and illustrated the comic) has Tetsuo’s city-destroying meltdown as its climax. Word is this new version of Akira will actually follow the route of the comic, and in order to accommodate the much longer story, word is the movie will be released in two parts. Ambitious, to say the least.

I’ve read the Akira comic (it’s pretty incredible in its scope and ambition, and Otomo is an ridiulously talented cartoonist), and I really love the animated film (the opening sequence where the gang is racing through the streets of Neo-Tokyo while the taiko drums swell on the soundtrack is absolutely amazing, especially with a high-end DTS sound system), and as much as I pride myself as not being a guy who hates remakes just for the sake of hating remakes, I can’t envision a live-action adaptation of Akira with, presumably, an all-Western cast that isn’t terrible. That said, assuming this version of Akira moves forward – and that’s a very big “if” indeed – I can’t pretend I won’t be following this project closely going forward.

Valentine's Day picks

2010-02-10T07:45:00.014-05:00

Who doesn’t love Valentine’s Day? Most right-thinking people, as far as I can tell. It’s a weird, made-up quasi-holiday (I still have to go to work? What kind of ‘holiday’ is that?) that makes single people feel like crap and puts insanely unrealistic expectations on those of us who are in relationships. Unless you’re celebrating V-Day at that nebulous early point in a relationship where everything is still new and exciting and fresh and awesome, the only really winners on Valentine’s Day are greeting card companies, florists and candy manufacturers.

So Valentine’s Day sort of sucks. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make it more enjoyable with a great movie. And contrary to popular opinion, I do, in fact, have a heart, and below I’ve picked six movies to help you make it through Valentine’s Day. Whether you’re kicking back with your beloved for a romantic evening in front of the DVD player (hey, not judging), or you’re looking for a movie to curl up with as you stew in your own bitterness and isolation, I’ve got something for everyone.

FOR COUPLES

True Romance
One of my favorite movies ever made, and, like screenwriter Quentin Tarantino, I don’t really get it when people think of this movie’s title as ironic. Sure, it’s packed with extreme violence and language so foul it would make a sailor blush, but the core of the movie is still the love between the geeky Clarence (Christian Slater) and his former call girl wife Alabama (Patricia Arquette), and as offbeat as it seem on the surface, what with the gangsters and pimps sleazy Hollywood producers who surround them, it’s their relationship that drives the movie and keeps me coming back. I’ve seen this movie so many times I can’t even begin to calculate it, but I still get goosebumps every damn time I watch the scene where Alabama confesses her feelings to Clarence. And ever since I first saw this movie I’ve been holding out the dim hope of one day meeting the woman of my dreams at a triple-bill screening of classic kung fu movies. (Still no luck.)

Away We Go
This is a rare film in that it’s a movie about two people in love (Mya Rudolph and The Office’s John Krasinski, playing a couple expecting their first child) that isn’t about (a) them falling in love or (b) fighting against the forces of fate to get/stay together and (c) features actual grown-ups as the main characters. So already you know you’re dealing with a pretty weird little movie. Away We Go is a perfect movie for couples specifically because it’s never clichéd (romantic movies being No. 2 perhaps only to martial arts movies as a genre that relies so heavily on paint-by-numbers plots), and because it shows a fairly healthy relationship between two intelligent adults who love each other. While neither character is perfect, they also don’t seem like two-dimensional sitcom creations (the movie isn’t about them making goo-goo eyes at each other, it’s about them trying to build a life together), and the entire film just feels organic and real in a way that other romantic movies almost never do.

House of Flying Daggers
When I agreed to compile this list, a fellow editor half-jokingly dared me to include a kung fu movie. Never one to back down to a kung fu movie-related challenge, I have dutifully included Zhang Yimou’s gorgeous 2004 film about tragic star-crossed lovers: she’s a beautiful young revolutionary, he’s a dashing government agent sent undercover to gain her trust and stop her rebellion. House of Flying Daggers may feature some really impressive action sequences, but Yimou’s film really a romantic tragedy of almost Shakespearean proportions with a few fight scenes thrown in. Throw in an achingly beautiful cast (Zhang Ziyi, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Andy Lau) and you’ve got a date-night movie that will appeal to both guy’s-guys and girly-girls alike.

The Fountain
I’ll get this out of the way right off the bat: this movie made me cry a little bit. I feel like I’m one of the only people in the world who really enjoyed Darren Aronofsky’s ambitious science-fiction romance about a brilliant scientist (Hugh Jackman) whose pursuit of a cancer cure to save his dying wife (Rachel Weisz) stretches across centuries, flashing from a Spanish conquistador on a quest to save his beloved queen to the present-day scientist couple to a distant future where a bald Jackman floats through space with a giant tree. It’s pretty heady stuff, obviously, and it’s definitely not to everyone’s taste, but The Fountain is the rare movie love story that actually broke my heart.

FOR SINGLES

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
At the risk of showing myself to be an even bigger geek than I usually do in this space, I’ve actually watched all three extended versions of The Lord of the Rings as a giant marathon (which runs about 12 hours in total) on more than one occasion (it requires a level of planning and determination one doesn’t typically associate with an activity that basically amounts to spending 12 hours sitting on the couch) and I can tell you that spending 12 hours in Peter Jackson’s vision of Middle Earth is about as good a way as any I can think of to avoid Valentine’s Day. Throw on Disc 1 of The Fellowship of the Ring any time between 10am and 11am on Valentine’s Day (it’s on a Sunday this year), and I guarantee that by the time Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin leave the Shire, you won’t care what day it is.

Punisher: War Zone
Maybe 12 hours in Middle Earth isn’t a feasible solution to Valentine’s Day for you. In that case, may I recommend this criminally under-appreciated 2007 adaptation of Marvel’s cult vigilante. The Punisher, in case you don’t know, is basically a post-Death Wish take on Batman; after his family is murdered by the mob, Frank Castle takes to wearing a skull on his chest and killing criminals with guns, knives and just about anything else he can get his hands on. Punisher: War Zone is one of the most wonderfully, graphically violent and fun movies I’ve seen in recent memory (and it’s directed by a woman!), and I can’t think of a better way to rebel against Valentine’s Day than with a movie that features a guy with a skull on his chest punching through dudes’ heads, shotgunning people at close range and blowing up parkour practitioners with rockets. Hate Valentine’s Day? Celebrate it with the Punisher.

A winning trailer for The Losers

2010-02-05T10:25:00.003-05:00

When I went to see Mel Gibson’s new movie, Edge of Darkness last weekend (it sucked, don’t bother), the best part of the entire experience was seeing the first trailer for The Losers, an adaptation of the cult comic series from 2003-06 by writer Andy Diggle and illustrator Jock (yep, just one name). It’s one of my favorite comics of the 2000s, and is basically a cooler version of The A-Team crossed with Ocean’s Eleven. It follows a team of special-ops badasses (played by a solid cast including Jeffrey Dean Morgan of Watchmen, Zoe Saldana from Avatar and Star Trek and Idris Elba from The Wire) who are betrayed and left for dead by their handler, Max (Jason Patric), and enact an elaborate revenge plot that involves shooting things, blowing stuff up stealing trucks with helicopters.

The Losers is a pretty great comic, and the movie looks like it’s a lot of fun. My only gripe with the trailer is that it gives away one of the coolest moments in the short-lived series (despite critical acclaim, the book never sold particularly well, and was cancelled after 32 issues, though the entire series is collected in five graphic novels that tell a complete story), the gag where Chris Evans, playing the team’s tech geek/smartass, “shoots” some guards with the help of the squad’s sniper.

I’ve been quietly anticipating the movie version of The Losers since I heard it was being adapted, and it looks like it was worth the wait. April 9 can’t come fast enough.

One quick little thing before I go: Canadian screenwriter Terri Tatchell, who was just nominated for an Oscar for co-writing District 9, has revealed that her next gig is once again adapting a cool-looking short film into a feature (District 9 expanded director Neill Blomkamp’s Alive in Joburg short), this time a short called Terminus, about a guy being followed around by a big stone creature whose presence begins to drive him insane. The short, which is below, is pretty damned crazy (and also pretty cool), though I have no idea how this will be expanded into a feature-length movie. But given how much I loved District 9, I’m fairly confident the full-length version of Terminus will, if nothing else, be unlike anything I’ve seen before.

Oscar nominees

2010-02-04T10:51:00.004-05:00

So the Oscar nominations were released this week (full list of the big categories below), and I find myself with not much to say one way or another. To me, there were no huge surprises, even with the expanded field of 10 best picture nominees to include some more crowd-pleasers like The Blind Side and District 9 (I appreciate the nod for District 9, the best movie I saw in 2009, but I think only the certifiably insane believe it’s got a prayer of winning).

The only significant snub I can think of – and to my mind it’s a serious one – is Mélanie Laurent not getting a nomination for Inglourious Basterds. She’s an integral part of one of the best movies of the year, but for some reason two actresses from the pretty good-but-overrated Up in the Air got nominations, and as far as I’m concerned one of them (probably Vera Farmiga, who’s great, but doesn’t come close to the work that Laurent does in Basterds) is in her spot.

A couple of less infuriating/more understandable oversights are Jackie Earle Haley in Watchmen (the movie tanked, and some people seemed to not really get it, so I can’t say I’m shocked) and Sam Rockwell in the underseen Moon; any time one actor’s performance constitutes pretty much the entire movie, especially one as good as Moon, I think that actor deserves some awards attention. But it’s a little thinker of a sci-fi movie, so again, I can’t feign surprise that he was overlooked.

Though I don’t really expect it to win anything beyond the technical awards, I’m never a fan of when movies like Avatar get tons of nominations as a reward for raking in money. I liked Avatar quite a bit, but by no stretch would I consider it even in the same conversation as Inglourious Basterds, District 9 or The Hurt Locker.

Speaking of The Hurt Locker, I never would have believed when it first blew me away last summer that it would have a chance in hell of winning Oscars, but here we are with Kathryn Bigelow considered the front-runner for best director. I’ve been praising her work in this space for about as long as I’ve written this blog, so I won’t bother doing it again now, but suffice it to say I’m very excited at the prospect of one of my favorite – and until now, one of the most under-appreciated – directors making movies today. If she doesn’t win, I’m sure something will be thrown across my apartment come March 7.

Best Picture
Avatar
The Blind Side
District 9
An Education
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
A Serious Man
Up
Up in the Air

Best Director
James Cameron, Avatar
Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds
Lee Daniels, Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
Jason Reitman, Up in the Air

Best Actor
Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
George Clooney, Up in the Air
Colin Firth, A Single Man
Morgan Freeman, Invictus
Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker

Best Actress
Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side
Helen Mirren, The Last Station
Carey Mulligan, An Education
Gabourey Sidibe, Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia

Best Supporting Actor
Matt Damon, Invictus
Woody Harrelson, The Messenger
Christopher Plummer, The Last Station
Stanley Tucci, The Lovely Bones
Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

Best Supporting Actress
Penelope Cruz, Nine
Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air
Maggie Gyllenhaal, Crazy Heart
Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air
Mo'Nique, Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire

DVD Review: 9

2010-01-29T10:00:00.007-05:00

9 is an awesome little animated adventure film (not to be confused with the star-studded musical Nine, which doesn’t seem to be getting the Oscar buzz it was clearly constructed to generate) that packs more originality and verve into its opening 10 minutes than most animated movies do in 90 minutes (I’m referring specifically to the ones involving talking animals and/or ogres). There’s a singularity of vision on display in 9 that’s rare enough in movies in general these days, let alone children’s animation.

The story takes place in a post-apocalyptic landscape after a war with self-aware machines has wiped virtually all organic life from the world. But life continues in the ruins, even if it’s not made of flesh and blood; a handful of strange little living dolls is scraping out an existence, dodging larger, ferocious mechanical predators. It’s into this world that 9 (voiced by Elijah Wood) wakes up with no memories, and soon finds himself reunited with his burlap brethren. 9 ends up accidentally waking up the sinister machine intelligence that started the war, putting his new friends in danger, he takes it upon himself to shut it down once more, and ends up uncovering the origins of himself and his kind in the process.

Watching 9 again for this DVD review (I reviewed it in theatres as well, check out my thoughts here), I was half-tempted to go back and replace Up on my best of 2009 list with writer/director Shane Acker’s quirky little doll-centric fantasy tale. As much as the critic in me feels that Up is a better film objectively, I found 9 more exciting and fun to watch. With Up I felt like I was more appreciating the adventure than I was really getting into it; 9 actually had me jumping and moving around like I do when I’m really into an action movie (if you’ve ever noticed how some people jerk around unconsciously while playing video games, I do that with movies sometimes [I also do it with video games]). And none of this is a knock against Up, which is a wonderful movie that’s as emotionally affecting as 90% of live-action films released in any given year, and that’s something I can’t say for 9. But 9 really turned my action/geek crank, with its unique look and the wonderfully original world Acker and his team have created. Usually when I say positive things about an animated kids’ movie, it’s in the context of the movie not really being my thing personally, but when I say 9 is a genuinely exciting action-adventure movie, I mean it in the sense that it’s actually better than a lot of action movies aimed at more grown-up audiences.

There’s a darkness to 9 that will intrigue a lot of older kids, but some of the imagery can be somewhat unsettling (genuinely scary monsters, depictions of war and the resulting apocalypse, etc.) If you don’t relish the thought of explaining to a 5-year-old the concept of evil machines releasing a toxin that wipes out all living things on Earth, maybe wait a few years before watching 9 with them. That said, while 9 does have considerably more edge to it than, say, Monsters vs. Aliens, it’s really not as bleak as its post-apocalyptic setting would suggest. The themes of friendship and heroism and personal responsibility resonate with all audiences, and the film manages to be cute and charming when it needs to be without being cloying or saccharine.

The scale of 9, while also providing lots of opportunities for cool little innovative design gags (sewing needles and kitchen knives used as swords, fishing lines used as grappling hooks, broken dolls’ faces atop terrifying mechanical apparitions), also makes our heroes running across a desk into an action sequence, and crossing the street into a Tolkien-esque adventure.

The voice acting in 9 is also quite solid. Casting actors like Wood, John C. Reilly, Martin Landau, Jennifer Connelly, Crispin Glover and Christopher Plummer rather than big-name celebrities gives the performances an authenticity that doesn’t keep pulling you out of the movie because it’s clearly Will Smith or Jack Black doing the talking. Reilly in particular is great, making 2 sort of skittish and jumpy, but he never comes across a coward. Within a few minutes of his introduction, 2 is set up as 9’s best friend in the group, and the viewer never questions it.

Even after multiple viewings, I’m still quite impressed with 9. Director Shane Acker, who expanded a short film he made as a student (which earned him an Oscar nomination in 2005) for his feature debut, is the most unique and interesting new voice in American animation to come along in a long time. If 9 is any indication of what this guy is capable of, his will be a career to watch. 9 is a very cool little flick that I suspect will find an audience as a cult classic on video (the Dark Crystal of this generation, perhaps?), and I recommend it highly.

GRADE: A

THE EXTRAS

It’s always nice when a great movie gets a great DVD, and I’m happy to report that that’s the case with 9. When I saw the movie in theatres last year, I immediately wanted to know more about the world and the people who created it, and this DVD does a great job of exploring both. Writer/director Shane Acker provides commentary alongside animation director Joe Ksander, head of story Ryan O’Loughlin and editor Nick Kenway, and it’s lively and informative. These guys all know movies and have a real grasp of storytelling, and it really comes across. Acker himself is charming and smart, and manages to pepper the track with references to classic films he was trying to pay homage to without coming across as pretentious. And 9 has such a specific vision that it’s a treat getting to listen to the guy who’s vision it is discuss it.

Also included is a mini-documentary on the production of the film, a featurette on the character animation process, as well as Acker’s original short (which is very cool on its own), with optional commentary.

One scary Mother

2010-01-28T08:58:00.009-05:00

A proper North American trailer has poppped up for a South Korean movie I'm very interested in checking out called Mother. Longtime readers know of my love of Asian movies, and South Korea has really come into its own, producing a slew of insanely talented filmmakers, of which Bong Joon-ho is definitely one. Bong's previous movie, The Host, is easily the best monster movie I've seen in a decade (maybe more), fusing comedy, awesome scares and genuine human drama in a way I never thought was possible for a movie about a giant mutated salamander. It's a flat-out brilliant film, so to say I'm interested in whatever Bong has next is an understatement.

That new movie is Mother, about an awkward 27-year-old man-child who lives with his super-protective mom and is accused of murdering a girl. The crime throws the town into a tizzy, with everyone assuming his guilt, even after he's let off on a technicality. His mother then takes it upon herself to head out on an O.J.-like search for the real killer, and she doesn't seem to mind doing some killing of her own to clear her precious son's name.

The premise sounds very promising, and the movie is so well-regarded in South Korea that Mother is the country's submission for the best foreign language film Oscar at the Academy Awards. Throw in a slick trailer filled with some pretty impressive quotes (comparisons to Hitchcock, etc.), and you've got one very intriguing-looking thriller indeed.

Check out the new trailer for Mother via Apple. And see The Host if you can. I promise you won't regret it.

Spike Jonze + robots = YES

2010-01-22T08:53:00.005-05:00

Spike Jonze has never made a feature film I haven’t been blown away by (he’s only made three, but still, 3-3 is still an excellent record in my books), and I picked his adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are was one of the best movies of 2009. Jonze, who got his start in commercials and music videos, is getting back to his roots, in a way, with I’m Here, a 30-minute short film produced for Absolut vodka that’s premiering at the Sundance Film Festival this year. And it’s about robots in love.

I’m not sure if this is an actual longform advertisement for vodka (which would be weird, to say the least), or if Absolut just produced it for the publicity and the movie isn’t about vodka (which would still be sort of weird, I guess, and will probably lead some people to question whether this type of corporate involvement is a harbinger of a new method of film financing), and I have no idea what form it will take when it’s released to the masses – if it’s only 30 minutes long, I would assume it’ll be on DVD rather than released in theaters – but it looks sweet and weirdly affecting; if Jonze could get me all misty watching giant furry monsters, he can probably get me with these wonderfully tactile-looking robots. Check out the trailer for I’m Here below. You’ll know more about this project when I do.

DVD Review: Pandorum

2010-01-21T07:54:00.009-05:00

THE MOVIE

Pandorum is a weird little sci-fi/horror movie. In some senses it’s better than I expected it to be, and in others it’s really quite bad. The story takes place on a ship in deep space, and follows Bower (Ben Foster), a member of the flight crew who awakens from hyper-sleep apparently before he’s supposed to. He finds the ship empty and apparently without power, and wakes Lt. Payton (Dennis Quaid), one of his superiors, to try to figure out what’s going on. The problem is that one of the side effects of the hyper-sleep process is temporary memory loss, so neither of them has much of an idea what they’re doing there. The two get separated when Bower descends into the bowels of the ship to try to get the power back on, only to find out he and Payton are far from the only people (or things) awake on the ship. (The title refers to a sort of “space madness” that causes hallucinations and other craziness as a result of long-term space travel.)

Pandorum, while being a sci-fi/horror movie that borrows very liberally from Alien and the Resident Evil movies (it shares producers with the latter series), is also structured largely as a mystery. Because of the conceit that Bower doesn’t really remember what he’s doing on the ship or even what their mission is, co-writer/director Christian Alvart doles out information a bit at a time as Bower pieces his memories back together. It’s an interesting idea (if a fairly obvious device to manufacture the mystery), and that’s where Pandorum’s strengths lie. Alvart is obviously a serious fan of science fiction, and the concepts he delves into, particularly in the final act as the mysteries in the film are revealed, are (with one glaring exception that I’ll touch on in a moment) certainly more intriguing and reminiscent of classic sci-fi stories about space travel than I expected.

Where Pandorum definitely does not work is the action. It’s explained in the DVD extras that the film started when two separate, similar projects (about the effects of extended space travel on the crew) were merged, and when I learned that, most of my issues with the movie seemed to be retroactively explained. The parts that work are the sci-fi elements; the parts that don’t are the horror and action elements. See, shortly after waking up, Bower encounters a bizarre, freakish mutant-thing with metal spikes sticking out of it, and subsequently learns from a couple of human survivors (who have clearly been awake for quite some time now, another nice little detail that deepens the pervading sense that something’s just wrong) that these creatures are infesting the ship.

The monsters aren’t necessarily lame because of how they look (they’re actually fairly creepy, especially their noseless leader…they were designed by Stan Winston studio; I just wish the late, great master’s final work was a better movie), but rather the explanation for what they are is vague and ultimately disappointing. I won’t spoil it, but considering how freakish they look, and how much the movie relies on them as a driver of the plot, their origin is basically tossed off in a line in passing. But in the light of the film’s aforementioned genesis as two separate projects, I assume the half-assed nature of the monsters is a casualty of that process. Maybe in the movie that was about monsters in space (rather than a bunch of people trying to figure out what’s going on with the ship while also evading bizarre monsters) they were more fleshed out. Usually things that go unexplained are scarier in movies like this (and I’m not asking for a prequel graphic novel or anything explaining how they came to be), but here the monsters are just a weird distraction, a way to keep things “exciting” by just having some more flesh-eating freaks show up every few minutes so the audience doesn’t get bored with all the talking. (The monsters, for some reason, also leap through the air, Crouching Tiger style, when they fight. It’s an incredibly irritating and stupid detail that makes no sense, is never explained, and makes the already-weak monsters even worse. I can’t express enough in words how much I hated that detail.)

While Bower’s dodging flesh-eating monsters, Payton remains on the bridge, trying to get the ship back up and running and figure out the situation for himself. He finds another crew member, Gallo (Cam Gigandet), hiding in a bunch of wires, and naturally, he has some more information to dole out to Quaid’s character in between cuts back to Bower and the two survivors he finds (played by German actress Antje Traue and mixed martial arts fighter Cung Le) as they sneak and fight their way through the ship.

Traue, while very hot, is charged with delivering the bulk of the film’s exposition – and in a movie relying this much on mystery to create tension, there is much explaining to be done – and her thick accent makes those scenes even more leaden than they should be (she also adopts an unfortunate “tough chick” growl that sounds totally put-on; her whole character is just a paint-by-numbers “ass-kicking woman,” which has, in itself, become a tired cliché in genre movies like this one). She sounds like she’s speaking phonetically, and it’s really noticeable every time she’s onscreen. That said, she is really hot, and there are worse things than watching her run around in a grimy tank-top.

Foster and Quaid, though, are the ones tasked with most of the heavy lifting in terms of acting, and they’re both solid. Foster is fast becoming one of my favorite young actors (his tweaked-out turn in Alpha Dog is amazing, and I’ve always lamented how wasted he was in the third X-Men movie), and he’s very good in his first big lead role. He wisely doesn’t play Bower as some sort of badass; of the three characters he spends the bulk of the movie with, he’s easily the least capable in a fight, which is an interesting dynamic considering he’s the hero. A less compelling actor in the role probably would have rendered much of Pandorum unwatchable. Quaid is also quite good, and he gets most of the over-the-top stuff to do – Payton is shown to be afflicted with Pandorum fairly early on, and Quaid is clearly having fun playing a guy gripped by space madness.

I actually dug most of the story and the ideas at play in Pandorum, but ultimately Alvart and company just didn’t do enough with it (not to mention the clearly shoehorned-in monsters). There’s a battle going on between a “things going wrong in space” thriller (an odd little subgenre of sci-fi thrillers than I have a major soft spot for) and a horror movie about flesh-eating monsters with big pieces of metal sticking out of them, and Pandorum’s biggest flaw is its failure to combine the two into anything more than a third-rate cross between Alien (a great movie, and a smart one to borrow from) and Resident Evil (decidedly less so). The twists at the end are actually pretty clever, and I didn’t see any of it coming. The mysteries are also handled well enough that, as much as I didn’t necessarily enjoy the movie, I can’t pretend I wasn’t interested to learn the explanation for everything. And with the exception of the origin of the monsters, all the revelations (and the ideas behind them) are intriguing enough that I was actually sort of disappointed they were lost in such an otherwise generic, unoriginal movie.

GRADE: C

THE EXTRAS

The Pandorum DVD has a nice assortment of stuff on it, including a commentary track from director Christian Alvart and producer Jeremy Bolt. Alvart’s clearly a smart guy who understands not only movies but also science fiction, and his perspective is fairly interesting, focusing more on the story and the characters and what he was going for in a given scene, while Bolt focuses more on the details of production. I never got bored by the track, but it didn’t really blow me away either.

There’s a collection of deleted and extended scenes, and most of them are slight variations or extensions of what’s already in the movie. The alternate ending is actually pretty cool, but it’s considerably darker then the one used; Alvart (correctly) notes in the commentary that it’s unusual for a film like this to have something approaching a happy ending, so it would have also made his film feel even more generic and ripped-off if he’d used it.

There’s a pretty standard making-of featurette that’s nothing special, but it’s interesting enough. Also included are two odd little extras, neither of which works particularly well: ‘What Happened to Nadia’s Team’ ostensibly shows what happened to Antje Traue’s team of scientists before things went pear-shaped on the ship. It only runs a few minutes and is shot Blair Witch-style with a handheld camera. It looks cheap, and nothing about it really clicks with the movie itself. It just feels like a weird, gimmicky thing to put on a DVD, and I failed to see the point of it. There’s also a ‘Flight Team Training Video’ which purports to be a video shown to members of the ship’s crew before the ship takes off, and it doesn’t really do much other than remind the viewer of some aspects of the plot. It’s sort of cute, and not as lame as ‘Nadia’s Team,’ but, again, I didn’t see why it was included.

Sony hires new Spider-Man director

2010-01-20T10:03:00.006-05:00

It’s official: Sony has hired Marc Webb to direct the new Spider-Man movie. Webb, who helmed last summer’s indie romantic comedy hit, (500) Days of Summer (which I haven’t seen, but I’ve heard both good and bad things about it), is apparently the hot director in Hollywood right now, and will reboot the franchise, moving the setting back to high school and focusing on the adolescent problems of Peter Parker, complete with a love quadrangle (with bully Flash Thompson, Mary Jane Watson and Gwen Stacy, played by Bryce Dallas Howard in Spider-Man 3).

The new Spider-Man films will be based more on the Ultimate Spider-Man series of comics launched in the 1990s, which similarly revamped the story for a more modern audience, as opposed to previous Spider-Man director Sam Raimi’s movies, which were inspired by the original Spidey books from the 1960s. The Ultimate version focuses more on teen angst than action, and the budget for the new film (around $80 million, which is actually pretty small for a modern superhero movie; Spider-Man 3 is said to have cost anywhere from $200 million to $300 million) seems to reflect that. It’s also assumed that unknown actors will be cast in the main roles.

Now, I hate to be that guy, but I have to be. This sounds like a terrible idea. It sounds like Sony’s chasing the Twilight/teen romance trend. And while I can appreciate the studio wanting to lower the budget in these tougher economic times, it’s hard to take this news as anything other than a step downwards for the Spider-Man cinematic franchise. I’m not even a huge fan of Spider-Man (the movies or the comics), but this is very disappointing news.

None of this is a knock against Webb; even the negative things I’ve heard about (500) Days of Summer acknowledge Webb’s visual talents, so I’m not worried that the movie will look bad. I just feel, as a fan of superheroes and superhero movies, that the genre, in film, is just starting to get to some interesting places, and I think Spider-Man (basically the mascot of Marvel Comics, the way Superman and Batman are at DC) deserves better than to be subjected to the Twilight treatment.

My negativity aside, I’m not going to pretend I won’t be following the development of this project closely. I’m trying to keep an open mind; I don’t want a crappy Spider-Man movie, but right now I’m not sure I can see how this new film will come close to the great, genre-defining movies Raimi crafted.

DVD Review: A Perfect Getaway

2010-01-15T08:58:00.009-05:00

THE MOVIE

A Perfect Getaway is a twisty thriller that’s so much better than it has any business being that it came within a hair’s breadth of sneaking in to the No. 10 spot on my list of the best movies of 2009. Not so much because it’s really, mind-blowingly great, but rather because I was so pleasantly surprised with it. The fact that the twist at the end is so gettable that most sharp viewers will probably figure out shortly after the opening credits (it would have been a bit more effective if all the marketing for the movie didn’t tell you that there was a big twist at the end) and the fact that movie is still as watchable and fun as it is is actually quite an achievement for writer/director David Twohy, last seen helming the awful/hilarious would-be sci-fi epic The Chronicles of Riddick.

The movie follows a newlywed couple (Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich) on their honeymoon in a remote part of Hawaii. As they’re traveling in the jungle, they hear about a pair of killers in the area posing as a couple. Considering that by this point they’ve met not one but two other couples who seem like they could be murderers, things start to get predictably tense – especially after they can’t seem to shake either of the other couples. The more normal-seeming couple is played by Timothy Olyphant and Kiele Sanchez. He’s a special forces type (or “American jedi” as he calls himself) who seems far too at ease around violence, and she’s a free-spirited southern belle who seems like she could be hiding something. Then there’s the even scarier couple played by Chris Hemsworth and Marley Shelton, who look like a pair of crazy meth dealers on vacation. As you can imagine, many psychological games of cat-and-mouse are played, and things are pretty much never what they seem.

What holds A Perfect Getaway together is the combination solid performances (from actors clearly having a great time) and Twohy’s smarter-than-you’d-expect script. Steve Zahn’s an actor I enjoy in just about anything I see him in, and he’s great as a bookish, slightly awkward screenwriter who keeps finding himself in situations he’d rather not be in. Olyphant is the other highlight, managing to be hilarious and charming and sort of scary all at the same time.

Twohy, despite having made The Chronicles of Riddick, also made its predecessor, the far superior little sci-fi/horror flick Pitch Black (it wisely chooses the path of ripping off Alien rather than Chronicles, which ripped off Star Wars), and A Perfect Getaway is in a similar vein. The tension comes from not being sure what will happen next, and even if you, as I did, called the twist from the opening minutes, it’s still fun to see how Twohy gets from Point A to Point B and how everything gets explained.

Twohy also uses a device that, in other hands, could have been grating and heavy-handed, but he handles it fairly well: Zahn’s character is meant to be a screenwriter, which fascinates Olyphant, and the two keep discussing the mechanics of movie storytelling (Olyphant has a cute running gag where he keeps mistakenly referring to plot misdirection as “red snappers,” which is what I’ve called them ever since watching this film), often covering what happens in movies exactly like the one you’re watching. Twohy uses his little gimmick just enough to wink at the audience and let them know that he knows that they know what kind of movie they’re watching (like when a character reveals something about themselves that will clearly come into play later in the movie, or when Olyphant refers to something that would “make a hell of an Act Two twist”). Normally I hate that sort of thing, but somehow in A Perfect Getaway it works, contributing to the film’s sense of fun.

A Perfect Getaway confirms that David Twohy’s strengths as a filmmaker lie in taut little flicks like this one, not with ostensible sci-fi epics. He definitely knows what he’s doing in terms of craftsmanship – there’s some really gorgeous shots of the jungle in this movie, and he can build tension like a mofo, despite the fact that a big chunk of the movie is basically just Zahn, Olyphant, Jovovich and Sanchez hanging around in the jungle being suspicious of each other – and the extended sequence at the end where he reveals everything is particularly well-constructed. Any time I can correctly guess the twist this early and still manage to have a this good a time watching the movie, that movie is definitely doing a lot of things right.

GRADE: A-

THE EXTRAS

The only extra on the DVD for A Perfect Getaway is the original scripted ending (which isn’t much different from the ending in the film, except that it’s far more vague and less satisfying than the one that was eventually used), which is sort of a shame. I’d have loved to see a commentary from Twohy or a making-of featurette.

DVD Review: Trailer Park Boys: Countdown to Liquor Day

2010-01-14T10:14:00.008-05:00

THE MOVIE

Ah, the Trailer Park Boys. The beloved Canadian sitcom (which was doing the faux-documentary thing before The Office) ran from 2001 to 2008 (including two TV specials), spawning two feature films, Countdown to Liquor Day being the latter, as well as the official, final, no-really-we-mean-it-this-time end of the Trailer Park Boys. Countdown to Liquor Day picks up as the boys are getting out of jail, two years after being busted at the end of the hour-long 2008 special. Would-be criminal mastermind Julian (John Paul Tremblay) swears he’s going straight for real this time, while the comically stupid Ricky (Robb Wells) tells the parole board up front that he’s planning to go back do growing pot (“I could tell you guys whatever you want to hear, or I can be honest. I’m gonna grow dope, ‘cause that’s what I’m good at. I grow the best dope of anybody I’ve ever met.”), while the bespectacled Bubbles (Mike Smith) just wants to get back to his shed and his kitties. But once they get out, the Boys realize their nemesis, Trailer Park Supervisor Jim Lahey, has transformed their beloved Sunnyvale Trailer Park into a more upscale community. (He also hasn’t had a drink in two years, but the title of the movie gives you a hint as to how that works out.)

Countdown to Liquor Day is clearly meant to the wrap up the series and give the beloved characters a proper send-off. There’s almost a sadness to the movie, a sense that the viewer (as well as the cast and crew) are really saying goodbye to the characters. Trailer Park Boys has never shied away from showing how important the Boys’ family unit is to each of them, but this time it feels like every character is more willing to come out and say it (there’s a particularly touching scene where the usually too-cool Julian tells Bubbles that he loves him. It’s fairly clear through the run of the show that Julian would do anything for his friends, but to actually have him just say it to Bubbles the way he does is oddly affecting if you’re a fan). Or seeing how furious Ricky (easily the most misanthropic of the Boys, but also somehow the most loveable) gets when he learns that Mr. Lahey and his faithful sidekick/lover Randy (whose huge gut graces the DVD cover, and remains a hilarious visual gag on its own) were responsible for shaving a chunk out of Bubbles’ hair. As much as the scene where Ricky returns the favor to Randy is hilarious (it’s really one of the funniest sequences in the movie), it’s also very clear that Ricky is avenging his friend’s humiliation. There’s even a scene where Ricky breaks down and cries, which is about the last thing I ever expected to happen (it also leads to one of the best parts of the movie, Julian’s “Grade 12 is inside of you” speech).

There’s a tangible feeling throughout the film that this is it, the final Trailer Park Boys story. It’s sort of like Mike Clattenburg (who co-wrote and directed every single episode of the show, as well as all the movies, which is actually a pretty incredible achievement) and co.’s third kick at the can – the final episode of the proper show felt like the finale, as did the subsequent one-hour special, Say Goodnight to the Bad Guys (which is unfortunately still unavailable on DVD). The extended ending of the Trailer Park Boys franchise is a little like the end of the Lord of the Rings movies, but as with the 12-hour fantasy epic, I feel like TPB has earned the right to take its time wrapping everything up.

As much as I’m a fan of the show (read my review of the whole series here), I actually found I didn’t really laugh very much watching Countdown to Liquor Day. Which isn’t really a knock; the movie is very funny, but I found the comedy to be more tonal and character-based rather than laugh-out-loud hilarious (though the movie does have plenty of moments like that as well). I enjoyed Countdown to Liquor Day purely because I got to spend time with these characters again (including my personal fave, the painfully white would-be rapper J-Roc, who steals every scene he’s in and, next to Bubbles, is probably the smartest character on the show…which is sort of sad), and I’m happy to say the movie works very well as a capper to the Trailer Park Boys.

My favorite aspect of Countdown to Liquor Day is sort of subtle (but not really; it’s actually fairly important to the plot), and it marks a definite change in the Trailer Park Boys universe. As in all sitcoms, there’s a status quo to TPB to which things invariably return at the end of if not every episode, every story arc: Ricky grows dope and is a screw-up, Bubbles lives in his shed with his precious kitties, Mr. Lahey’s a drunken mess, and Julian is an ostensible small-time criminal mastermind who always has a plan and is generally looked up to by everyone in Sunnyvale. But Countdown to Liquor Day begins by flipping one very important part of that premise: now, after years of ridiculous failures that have landed himself and his buddies in jail numerous times, just about everyone in Sunnyvale views Julian as a loser. It’s remarkable how much this changes the dynamics of the characters, as now virtually nobody in Sunnyvale has any time for Julian or his latest scheme (which is admittedly probably his dumbest plan yet), whereas before, practically everyone in the park would be lining up to work for him. Countdown to Liquor Day has reality beginning to seep into Sunnyvale.

This is definitely more than an hour-and-a-half episode of the show; Clattenburg adds enough small touches to Countdown to Liquor Day (shooting in lots of different locations, the use of music cues like “I Fall to Pieces” when Randy breaks up with Mr. Lahey, a romantic subplot for Bubbles) that it feels like a larger-scale TPB story. The climactic bank heist/shootout/car chase is easily the most elaborate setpiece in Trailer Park Boys history. (Also, it has Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson in a cameo as a cross-dressing undercover cop.)

More than anything, Countdown to Liquor Day feels like a victory lap for fans (and I mean this in the best possible way). As much as you don’t really need to have seen the show or previous movie to appreciate the comedy (context isn’t really that important to the gag at the beginning that sees Ricky and Julian walking out of jail, sneaking off the prison bus and immediately stealing a corrections van and robbing a liquor store after swearing to the parole board they’re going straight), most of the humor comes from familiarity with the characters and their relationships with each other. If this is your first introduction to the Trailer Park Boys, most of it will probably be lost on you. But if you’re not a fan and any of this sounds interesting to you, I highly recommend you seek out the show. It’s fantastic.

GRADE: A-

THE EXTRAS

All the Trailer Park Boys DVDs have lots of extras, and Countdown to Liquor Day is no different. There’s great a collection of deleted scenes, as well as an alternate ending that I daresay is actually better and funnier than the one in the finished film. There’s also a decent-sized making-of documentary and featurettes on the car chase and Randy’s haircut.

The only real disappointment is the commentary track. In previous Trailer Park Boys DVDs, Clattenburg and/or the cast (sometimes in character, sometimes not) almost always provide commentary, but here they elect to let some fans from a TPB fan forum provide commentary. I can understand if after hours and hours of commentaries, Clattenburg feels he has nothing more to say about the franchise, but the resulting track amounts to little more than boring people laughing at and pointing out jokes. It’s really, really bad, and not interesting at all.

Overall though, Trailer Park Boys: Countdown to Liquor Day is a very solid DVD for a hilarious movie that caps off one of the best – and most important – shows in Canadian television history.

DVD Review: Taking Woodstock

2010-01-13T10:25:00.006-05:00

THE MOVIE

Taking Woodstock is a movie I should probably hate, or, at the very least, be bored silly by. It’s a warmly-remembered, based-on-a-true-story movie about the story behind the legendary music festival (I’m too young to get all warm and fuzzy when I think about “the ‘60s” as a time in American cultural history, and I find the majority of music from the period to be an agonizing bore), and it stars comedian and former Daily Show contributor Demetri Martin, who I really don’t like at all. But it’s delightful. It’s funny, warm, sweet, and Martin does a surprisingly good job carrying the whole thing. I blame Ang Lee.

Ang Lee, it would seem, doesn’t make bad movies. I haven’t seen all of his movies, but the ones I’ve seen (the worst is probably his 2003 version of Marvel’s Hulk, and I actually think that movie’s a lot better than people give it credit for) have all been good-to-excellent. I couldn’t have been more skeptical about Taking Woodstock going in, and I couldn’t have been more pleasantly surprised coming out of it. (Well, that’s probably not true. If someone had turned into a robot or a wizard that probably would have been pretty badass.) So believe me when I say that knowledge of/interest in the ‘60s and Woodstock is not a prerequisite to enjoying this film (though I’m sure you’ll get more out of it if you are into that stuff).

Taking Woodstock is based on the autobiography of Elliot Tiber (whose name was switched to Teichberg for the movie), who helped organize the Woodstock festival as a young man helping his parents run a small (evidently decrepit) motel in upstate New York after a neighboring town pulls the plug on the hippie concert.

Maybe it’s just my own lack of interest in the mythology of Woodstock, but the fact that Lee never really shows us the concert is really charming; if you’re looking for a semi-concert film, just check out the 1970 documentary. The story if Taking Woodstock is Elliot’s story, and Lee and writer James Schamus wisely never lose sight of that fact. Also excellent are the supporting cast, which includes Eugene Levy as Max Yasgur, the man on whose property the festival would eventually take place, Emile Hirsch as a Vietnam veteran trying to get his mind sorted out after all the crazy things he saw “over there,” and Liev Schreiber as a cross-dressing ex-marine who agrees to help Elliot and his family with security. But Imelda Staunton and Henry Goodman steal the show (realizing both were actually British after the fact was a trip) as Elliot’s parents. They manage to be both frustrating and lovable, as real parents are, and both characters get nice little arcs alongside Demetri Martin’s Elliot.

Speaking of Martin, I need to mention how good he is if for nothing other than I couldn’t believe he was the same guy who’s Comedy Central show, Important Things, has nearly paralyzed me with rage on more than one occasion. He’s not the second coming of De Niro or Pacino, but for a first-time actor (especially one who’s in virtually every scene in the film), he’s great. He’s funny and sweet and warm when he needs to be, and his performance gives Elliot a trace of sadness with a subtlety I wasn’t expecting.

The only part of Taking Woodstock that really didn’t work for me at all was the acid trip sequence late in the film. It’s exactly what I was afraid this movie would be; indulgent and overly nostalgic for the ‘60s, as well as way too long (it runs a couple of minutes). All things considered, it’s a pretty minor gripe, but I really would have enjoyed the movie more if it hadn’t been there. Also, the final scene in the film does an annoying “nudge-nudge/wink-wink” thing to the audience that I particularly hate in movies like this; I don’t want to spoil anything, but it plays on our understanding of events that took place after Woodstock. For a movie that’s as wonderfully subtle and understated in its commentary on the ‘60s and what they meant to American culture, it’s a weirdly heavy-handed touch.

All told, Taking Woodstock is a very good movie. It managed to hold my interest despite my (admittedly low) expectations, and its characters and story are warm and quirky without being too precious. Whether you’re a devoted fan of all things ‘60s or an outsider like myself, Taking Woodstock is a delightful little movie.

GRADE: B+

THE EXTRAS

The Taking Woodstock DVD has a solid assortment of extras, led by a commentary track from Ang Lee and longtime producer/writing partner James Schamus. The pair, clearly old buddies, have a nice, playful dynamic together, and while there’s nothing particularly mind-blowing, the commentary is never boring.

There’s also a collection of deleted and extended scenes, and a nice featurette on the production of the movie. The latter doesn’t run long enough to overstay its welcome, and it covers just about everything from film’s inception (someone randomly gave Lee a copy of Tiber’s book while the director was promoting his previous film overseas) to the writing and casting and production.