"Hanna" or her thriller brethren, "Limitless" and "Source Code" and "Insidious?"
"Certified Copy" or "Of Gods and Men" at the art house?
"Hop" or "Rango?"
I am way behind -- but I hope to be caught up when I return on April 25.
Penelope Cruz, who won a best supporting actress Oscar for "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," is reuniting with that film's writer-director, Woody Allen. (Click here for Entertainment Weekly's story.) It's hopeful news for fans of both. Critics used to say that Allen's best movies were about "sex in the head," as if his characters simply had to relax and let it travel through their bodies.
In the blissfully entertaining "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," Cruz was part of an ensemble that let Allen dramatize -- gleefully -- how much residue sexual desire or experience leaves in the brain and gut and heart. Everyone in the cast was seductive, including Scarlett Johannson as Cristina, an artist looking for an art; Rebecca Hall as Vicky, a grad student studying Catalan culture; and Javier Bardem as Juan Antonio, a painter with romantic and critical reputations.
But Cruz leapt out of the pack as a wild card -- Juan Antonio's ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz), herself an artist, as well as (to borrow a phrase from Sam Peckinpah) the poet laureate of manic depression. Cruz was ardor incarnate, and the picture's triumph was to show how Juan Antonio couldn't live with her or be fully happy without her. I can't wait to see what Cruz and Allen cook up next.
Keanu Reeve's MTV confession that a screenplay for a third "Bill and Ted" film is a month and a half from completion roused a wave of nostalgia for "Bill and Ted 1" (their "Excellent Adventure") and some faint derision for "Bill and Ted 2" (their "Bogus Journey"). I prefer "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey." It has all the deadpan humor of the first film but is even more goofy and cosmically amusing. Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Reeves) are still boyz n the burbs with dysfunctional families and zero brains. They still channel their energies into a teen-age mutant vocabulary -- "Dude!" "Duder!" "Excellent!" "Bogus!" -- and a series of synchronized hand riffs. And in "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey," their joint destiny to be heroes of future world civilization so alarms the film's villain (Joss Ackland), a twenty-second-century fascist dude, that he sends evil robots of Bill and Ted back in time to kill the originals before an epochal battle of the bands.
But in the middle of "Bogus Journey," the director, Peter Hewitt, and the writers, Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, sandwich something even sillier and funnier—a slapstick version of Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" in which Bill and Ted play games with Death. Just watch the clip above. William Sadler, so terrifying and sardonic as Walter Hill's "The Man Who Was Death" (for HBO's "Tales from the Crypt" series), is splendidly outré as the Grim Reaper. He undergoes a second (or maybe a first) childhood after Bill and Ted best him in diversions like "Battleship," "Clue" and "Twister." His expressions of abashment are almost touching, and his very Old World accent ranks with the best of Peter Sellers.
Stephen Colbert runs such a witty, classy show that at times it's almost spooky. He managed to debate James Franco about who is the real Renaissance Man -- Franco or Colbert -- without linking their talk to the film Franco was supposed to be plugging, the medieval fantasy-adventure-comedy "Your Highness." (The film came up just once in the two-part interview -- and Colbert treated Franco's role in it as a riff on "Freaks and Geeks.") Watch the clips and let me know your choice for 21st-century Renaissance Man. To judge from he advance reviews, these clips are probably a lot more fun than "Your Highness."
Annapolis-bred Joshua Grannell became a San Francisco culture hero as his drag alter-ego, Peaches Christ. He fulfilled his youthful dreams last year when he made his directorial debut with the slaphappy horror extravaganza, "All About Evil." (For our interview, "Hometown Boy Makes 'Evil,'" click here.) Last week he received another boost for his camp sensibility when his film was named one of three features in the Tromadance Film Festival (April 22-23, in Asbury Park, New Jersey). The festival was founded a dozen years ago by Lloyd Kaufman, the creator of "The Toxic Avenger."
Also included in the Tromadance program is a frequent Maryland Film Festival guest, that subversive and original animator Bill Plympton, who will present a program of cartoons such as "The Cow Who Wanted to be a Hamburger" (see clip above).
Another regular visitor to the Maryland Film Festival, documentary-maker Rachel Grady -- she even took part in the festival fund-raiser March 11 -- received a more august honor last week. She won a Peabody award for the documentary "12th & Delaware," which she made with Heidi Ewing. It's a riveting film about an abortion clinic and an anti-abortion "pregnancy care center" that sit across the street from each other at the title intersection in Fort Pierce, Florida. For my take on it, click here.
An Oscar-winning screenwriter has done some hair-raising reporting about a group of soldiers who turned killing unarmed Afghans into a one-sided blood sport. Mark Boal, who won the Academy Award for best original screenplay for "The Hurt Locker," has written an angry, complex expose called "The Kill Team" (click here) for Rolling Stone. The subtitle summarizes the content brutally well: "how U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered civilians and mutilated their corpses -- and how their officers failed to stop them."
The piece is harrowing because it brings you frighteningly close to the corrupted psyches of "bored and angry and shell-shocked soldiers" in the 3rd Platoon of the 5th Stryker Brigade. They "couldn't tell the difference between local nationals and combatants" and viewed Afghans as "savages."
You turn the pages appalled and amazed at their monstrous cruelty and their ability to get away with it. "Even if the commanding officers were not co-conspirators or accomplices in the crimes," Boal writes, "They repeatedly ignored clear warning signals and allowed a lethally racist attitude to pervade their unit."
Boal's piece hasn't roused as much news coverage as the Rolling Stone cover story on Rihanna, "Pop's Queen of Pain." Are its revelations too much to bear in an apocalyptic news cycle? Boal and Rolling Stone, to their credit, don't overplay the Oscar card. But you'd think the media would pick up on an agonizing expose of atrocious misconduct by the author of "The Hurt Locker."
Photo of Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal at the Charles Theatre in 2009, by Barbara Haddock Taylor
If you stayed awake through the mechanical exposition and soulless melodrama of the new Showtime series "The Borgias," you probably hung on for the promotional feature. Its whole point was that the Borgias were not just (as the series tag-line goes) "the original crime family" but also Mario Puzo's direct inspiration for the Corleone clan in "The Godfather." The promo feature even charted some forced parallels between Rodrigo Borgia's children and Don Vito Corleone's. It included an interview with Puzo's longtime girlfriend Carol Gino, who finished a novel Puzo did write about the Borgias, "The Family," published in 2001, two years after Puzo's death.
But the warmth, vitality and complexity that made "The Godfather" a milestone of popular storytelling was nowhere to be found in the first episode of "The Borgias," which detailed how Rodrigo, in 1492, bought his way into becoming Pope Alexander VI. What makes "The Godfather" infinitely compelling is the way it places a vibrant family life and immigrant culture in the center of a criminal empire.
When I interviewed Puzo in 1997, for a New Yorker piece on the making of Coppola's film "Godfather," he told me that he'd realized that "The character of the Godfather was actually my mother." He emphasized "her ruthlessness and her 'what the hell is justice?' attitude." In retrospect, he said, that's what helped him establish "The Godfather" as "a book about a family" -- a real family, not just a mythic criminal dynasty.
Continue reading "Ignore bogus comparisons of 'The Borgias' to the Corleones" »
One note about "Jane Eyre" and Elizabeth Taylor: most of the 1944 version, with Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine, has a baleful sweep to it. But my favorite section is its lyrical childhood sequence featuring a very young Taylor as Jane's friend Helen. Taylor is both radiant and magical in the role: her beauty in this film really does have a spiritual quality.
The blah new "Jane Eyre" is pulling in crowds at the Senator. But at the end of the first Friday night show I actually heard the sound of one-and-a-half hands clapping: someone started to applaud, then reconsidered.
It starts like the cinematic "Jane Eyre" of your dreams: Mia Wasikowska, as Jane, fleeing Rochester's mansion on foot, storming through the vast, gale-swept countryside, propelled by a passionate grief. Even after the aspiring missionary St. John Rivers (the excellent Jaime Bell) and his sisters take Jane into their home, and in flashbacks we see Jane's terrible upbringing, the movie retains its intensity and flair.
But the fragmented structure fails to let many scenes come to a boil or even simmer. Soon, the overly clipped bits of Bronte, the uninspired use of available lighting in the dreariest weather and circumstances, and the anti-theatrical flatness of most of the staging wears you out. The only thing that plays like a house afire is Thornfield Hall, and, alas, I mean that literally.
Continue reading "No fire to drab hit 'Jane Eyre'; it needed a Timothy Dalton" »
Brett Easton Ellis wrote just three weeks ago, in a Daily Beast piece that also ended up in Newsweek, "Sheen seems saner and funnier than any other celebrity right now. He also makes better jokes about his situation than most worried editorialists or late-night comedians." It was part of Ellis' bogus theory that the boorish pseudo-wit we've been seeing and hearing from graceless or out-of-control celebrities marks them as truth-speaking, convention-flouting culture heroes who rebel against the "old entertainment Empire," presumably like Ellis himself.
The discussion may be over if Sheen's live shows turn out to be a series of fiascoes like the gonzo potpourri that drove the audience out of the theater on Saturday night in Detroit or a succession of fan-pandering chats like the one in Chicago that was praised with faint damns by a Tribune columnist (click here), who gave a huge amount of credit to "Sheen's interviewer, former radio deejay Joey Scoleri, a co-producer on the tour who works in marketing for promoter LiveNation. He worked hard to keep the actor on track, telling stories rather than being distracted by noises in the crowd."
The New York Times sent one of its chief film critics, A.O. Scott, to cover Sheen's debut in Detroit. Just as Sheen sucked up to his audience while professing his superiority over them, Scott wrote that "the people in the seats -- fans, rubberneckers, critics -- were guilty of a complementary hypocrisy," because, despite professing "dismay" over Sheen's "long history of drug abuse and violence against women...we have also enabled and indulged this behavior, and lately encouraged his delusional belief that he could beat the toxic fame machine at its own game."
He could have been talking about Ellis -- or all those just waiting to say that Sheen is a cultural avatar and a master of reinvention because he kept Chicago fans in their seats.
Photo by Geoff Robins/Getty Images
It proved to be a weekend when the biggest hit at the box office was a movie starring a digital Easter bunny. So nothing cheered me up more than The Wall Street Journal's compendium of the best tweets posted @BronxZoosCobra in the guise of the Egyptian cobra who escaped from the Bronx Zoo and was found (where else?) in a dark corner of the Reptile House on Friday.
Here are the best ones that had anything to do with movies (think "The Third Man" for my top pick).
4. "I want to thank those animals from the movie 'Madagascar.' They were a real inspiration.
3. "Just FYI, I've had it with Samuel L. Jackson too."
2 "A great cake recipe. 2 cups sugar, 4 eggs, 1 cup milk, 2 cups self-rising flour, 1 saw, 1 stick butter. And mix. Bring it by the zoo..."
1. "On top of the Empire State Building! All the people look like little mice down there. Delicious little mice."
It plays much better than it reads: that's my take on James Franco's explanation of his Oscar-show performance to David Letterman in an advance clip from tonight's Letterman show. Even the under-line on MSNBC this morning made it sound as if Franco is intent on belittling Anne Hathaway. Actually, in the clip, when Franco says that standing next to the energetic Hathaway would make the Tasmanian Devil look stoned, he's likable -- he's trying to be funny, and he's actually succeeding.
When he says that people sneer at the Oscar show beforehand and exaggerate its impact afterward, he's only stating the obvious. The most ridiculous postmortem on the Oscar show was Brett Easton Ellis' too-hip-to-live piece about the new celebrity culture in Newsweek. Ellis defended Franco -- but he did so by lumping him together with, among others, Charlie Sheen as stars who (in Ellis' view) rightly display contempt for the old Entertainment Empire. With friends like Ellis....
Franco is a versatile and often inspired actor. Let's focus on that.
And let's not forget that Hathaway, who pulled off her Oscar chores with exuberant charm as well as raw vitality, came in for some lumps of her own.
The New York Times spread the canard that Hathaway proved she had no chemistry with her leading men. What a ridiculous remark! Just months ago she and Jake Gyllenhaal generated steam heat in the otherwise lamentable "Love & Other Drugs." The Oscar-show producers should have teamed Hathaway with Gyllenhaal again -- here's a clip of that robust yet also subtle actor swapping droll pleasantries with Jon Stewart.
In Baltimore, we first met 24-hour performance artist Bill (Reverend Billy) Talen three years ago, when the painfully hilarious documentary "What Would Jesus Buy?" (trailer above) played at the Charles during the 2007 Christmas season. At that time Reverend Billy led the Church of Stop Shopping. Since then, Talen has run for mayor of New York City on the Green ticket, and his church has evolved into the Church of Earthlujah! -- an ambitious "post-religious church" and "radical performance community" that strives, all year round, "to complexify the moment of purchase, to snap people out their hypnosis and back into the mystery of being human."
Talen preaches against corporate exploitation of the earth, and the rabid consumerism that supports it, with fierce satiric zest and grass-roots theatrical esprit. He turns Elmer Gantry-like hyperbole and grit and the in-your-face antics of contemporary evangelists into comic weapons that dent the armor of Wal-Mart and Walt Disney. And he's still backed by the two-score souls of the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir.
Although he has taken his fight right into the bellies of corporate beasts -- including Disneyland's Main Street -- he faces his greatest challenge yet on Friday, April 1, at 7 p.m., when he tries to shake a sophisticated art school's rafters with his joyful, iconoclastic noise. He and the Church of Earthlujah!, complete with the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, will appear at MICA's Falvey Hall (1300 W. Mount Royal AVenue). This anti-consumerist celebration is, appropriately, free.
Last week wndr -- a Baltimore-based "creative boutique" dedicated to "interactive, design, advertising and wondering: what are we trying to do, why are we doing it that way, can it be done differently, do we really need this" -- put up a revamped DavidLynch.com for the auteur's music company.
No filmmaker (or artist) has better deserved such a spiffy audiovisual presentation. It reminded me that Lynch didn't just introduce some new lyrical-ironic-eerie modes to American movie music.
He also helped pioneer the whole concept of "sound design" that integrates everything you can hear on the soundtrack of a movie. His prime audio collaborator was the unsung genius Alan Splet, who worked with Lynch on "Eraserhead," "The Elephant Man," "Dune," and "Blue Velvet," and also teamed up brilliantly with Philip Kaufman ("The Unbearable Lightness of Being") and Carroll Ballard (Splet won an Oscar for his work on "The Black Stallion").
Drink in the masterly combinations of song, sound, and image in the opening from "Blue Velvet" above, especially when the elderly man has a heart attack while watering his lawn -- and when the camera makes a horrifying audiovisual descent into the insect world.
The great critic Pauline Kael described the Splet-Lynch collaboration in "Blue Velvet" this way: "When Jeffrey walks up the seven flights to Dorothy's apartment the building has a pumping, groaning sound. It could be an ancient furnace or foghorns or a heavy old animal that's winded. The mix of natural sounds with mechanical-industrial noises gives the images an ambience that's hokey and gothic and yet totally unpretentious."
Splet died at age 54 in 1994, but every director who worked with him has carried on his legacy.
Jimmy Kimmel, who has made a specialty out of killer 'King's Speeech" parodies, has his own take (above) on the sanitized version of the film that the Weinstein Company rejiggered to win family crowds with a PG-13 rating. But it's not as howlingly funny as the actual trailer I saw last night. While proclaiming that the new version of the film is fit for the whole family, it rounds up every second of screen time given to the little princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret. It's misleading to the max about the film's actual content; watching the trailer, I half-expected the King's speech therapist to teach the kids how to sing "Do-Re-Mi." But this alteration of the film and its commercial promotion isn't about the sound of the human voice in any way. It's about the sound of money.
Dark Knight Trailer by sniderz
"You've changed things forever; there's no going back" are the first words in the above trailer to Christopher Nolan's second Batman film, "The Dark Knight." Warner Bros. doesn't agree. Not only did the president of the Warner Bros. motion picture group, Jeff Robinov, tell the L.A. Times that he has plans for the long-awaited Justice League of America. He also is developing feature scripts for Flash and Wonder Woman -- and setting the table for yet another variation on Batman. (For the full interview, click here).
Robinov told the Times that he is plotting to launch a new Batman series right after Nolan finishes his third Batman film, "The Dark Knight Rises." Robinov said, “We have the third Batman, but then we’ll have to reinvent Batman…Chris Nolan and [producing partner and wife] Emma Thomas will be producing it, so it will be a conversation with them about what the next phase is.�
These days, studios are rebooting heroes before they've even had a chance to take the old boots off. It's hard enough to make a sequel or a series film without getting deadeningly repetitive. Isn't that a greater danger with a reboot? What's the value of starting all over again? Sure, the 1989-1997 Batman series thudded after Tim Burton and Michael Keaton left. But can't a series change casts and directors without rejiggering a superhero's whole mythology - again?
"The Grateful Dead Movie Event," centered on the rockumentary culled from the group's 1974 Winterland concerts, will play one night only -- Wednesday, April 20 at 7:30 p.m. -- at Columbia Mall 14, Cinemark Egyptian 24, Snowden Square 14, and Bel Air Cinema 14. Made under the direction of Jerry Garcia himself with co-direction by Leon Gast ("When We Were Kings"), the movie is said to capture the psychedelic chemistry of the actual events.
I've never seen it, but at the time of its original release (1977) my biggest Dead-head friends thought "The Grateful Dead Movie" was the best rock-concert movie ever made. They dragged me to one Dead concert in that era, in Boston, and all I can remember is a seductive yet somehow lulling beat, bodies shuffling and bobbing in loose unison for hours, and a genial haze. Actually, was that 1974, or 1973? Or '72?
If like mine, your memory needs jogging, this screening will offer "exclusive, never-before-seen interviews with both Garcia and Bob Weir that were captured during the filming of this historic production." Tickets are available at www.FathomEvents.com.
Farley Granger's place in film history rests on four starring roles for three masterly directors. His focused, intense contributions to the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray and Luchino Visconti weren't trumpeted as widely as the work of his more flamboyant costars. But he was the emotional anchor to a quartet of haunting works.
He first edged into immortality when he acted in Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 "Rope." (Actually, as Richard Brody pointed out to me, he had already filmed Ray's "The Live By Night" when he started working for Hitchcock -- but "Rope" came out first.) In this impressive, atypical Hitchcock movie, the brilliant homosexual thrill-killers Leopold and Loeb become Brandon (John Dall) and Philip (Granger), Manhattan dandies who murder a member of their social set and dump the corpse into a chest that soon becomes the centerpiece of a dinner party. The guests include the dead man's family, �ancée, and romantic rival, as well as the unholy duo's former prep-school teacher (James Stewart), who has unwittingly inspired them by preaching Nietzsche. The film is best known for being photographed in 10-minute takes and unfolding in "real time" —the eighty minutes of the crime, the party, and the aftermath. But the movie's depth charge comes from its peculiar modern ghoulishness. Hitchcock relied on Dall's rabid intensity to energize the drama, and the actor put on quite a show, disguising Brandon's aestheticized sadism and malice toward all with an oily solicitude. Still, Granger brought something essential to this macabre party -- an aptitude for playing the foil to a showier actor in the splashier "evil genius" part.
It was like a talented run-through for one of Hitchcock's masterpieces, "Strangers on a Train" (1951), in which Granger plays a classy tennis-player and Robert Walker plays Granger's malignant alter ego, who murders Granger's estranged wife in hopes that Granger commit a murder for him. Walker's daring performance as a warped homosexual killer is what made the picture great. But Granger brought off a difficult balancing act, establishing a radically different kind of rapport with every character. With Walker he goes from mistaken cordiality to bafflement and fury; with Ruth Roman, as the woman he wants to marry, he segues from suaveness to a stricken sort of ardor. And he's light and airy with Patricia Hitchcock, the director's daughter, who plays the critical role of his future sister-in-law. She is the comic relief in the tense, morbid tale; she stays rooted when Granger and her sister (his fiancee) drift into a whirlpool. Granger makes you feel his appreciation whenever these siblings throw him a life-line.
David Letterman won the headlines as well as the "Johnny Carson Award for Comedic Excellence" at the first annual US Comedy Awards on Saturday, when he quipped, "Giving me this award is the equivalent of NASA giving the Neil Armstrong Award to Balloon Boy." (The ceremony will air April 10 at 9 p.m. on the MTV Networks’ Comedy Central, Spike TV, TV Land, VH1 and Nick At Nite.)
But another another comic superstar who exploded in the 1980s was also on the bill: Eddie Murphy, who accepted the "Comedy Icon" award. This comedy award has come just in time for Murphy, because I think his best prospects these days are increasingly in drama.
He's more than earned his standing as "Comedy Icon." He's been equally imaginative and funny in many different modes. I've come to think of him as three different personae: Crazy Eddie, the unabashed wild comic of films like "The Nutty Professor"; Mr. Ed, the family-film comedian of his "Doctor. Dolittle" and the more appealing "Dr. Dolittle 2"; and Fast Eddie, the dynamic, ad-libbing movie star who helped power "48 HRS." and carried the "Beverly Hills Cop" series on his back.
But I think he's only fully inspired now when a gifted writer or director provokes him to produce a piercing, rounded picture of an actual human being, as he did in Bill Condon's "Dreamgirls."
Here's something terrific to do while biding your time for the next Benedict Cumberbatch "Sherlock Holmes" TV series or the next Robert Downey Jr. "Sherlock Holmes" movie. MPI Home Video has just released "The Complete Sherlock Holmes Collection." It contains the fourteen Sherlock Holmes features that starred Basil Rathbone and defined the Great Detective for generations.
Rathbone was born to wear Holmes' cape and deerstalker cap, to smoke his brierroot pipe, and to rattle off his ratiocinations with merry hubris. Rathbone's perfect wedge of a profile sliced through the London fog, and he used his imposing brow to signal one idea while his glinting eyes intimated another. He and Nigel Bruce, as Dr. Watson, developed a rapport as close, and sometimes as comic, as that of Hope and Crosby.
In 1939 they starred for Twentieth Century Fox in a solid "Hound of the Baskervilles" and an even better "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes." They're at full throttle in the latter, a breathless tale of Professor Moriarty's attempt to exploit the restlessness of Holmes' intelligence. The arch-villain Moriarty (George Zucco) sends the sleuth on a wild-albatross chase while the evil genius himself schemes to make o› with the crown jewels.
Rathbone seizes the chance to celebrate and satirize—simultaneously—Holmes' peripatetic brilliance. Bruce's Watson never makes the Ed McMahon-like error of applauding Holmes' cleverness too loudly; he's more like a genteel Sancho Panza, suspicious of his pal's fantastic rationality. The result is everything a civilized thriller should be: witty, playful, and exciting. And Ida Lupino brings a hint of sexuality into Holmes' hermetic universe. She's refreshingly fervid—you can feel the heart of a dame beating within the damsel in distress. (Alfred L. Werker directed Edwin Blum and William Drake's adaptation of William Gillette's play.)
After their stint at Fox, Rathbone and Bruce did a dozen quickies for Universal, starting in 1942. The MPI set contains beautiful restorations of all 12. Set in the nineteen-forties instead of the nineteenth century, they resemble lively, literate Saturday-matinée serials. Roy William Neill directed almost all of them and all my favorites, including "Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon."
What "Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon" shares with the credited Arthur Conan Doyle source story, "The Adventure of the Dancing Men," is a code in which the �gures of dancing men in different positions stand for the letters of the alphabet.
Continue reading "DVD\Blu-ray of the week: "The Complete Sherlock Holmes Collection"" »
Warren Beatty beat our parent company, Tribune Co., in his fight to retain the movie and TV rights "to square-jawed comic-strip crime stopper Dick Tracy."
I'm no lawyer. All I can say as a movie critic is that it's a victory for taste and talent.
Beatty's 1990 version of "Dick Tracy," you may recall, was the rare comic-strip film that was criticized most strongly for being too classy.
I thought it was delightful -- an enjoyably splashy piece of comic-strip mythmaking, with a bold visual design that looks great on DVD.
In Beatty's version of Chester Gould's vintage crime-fighting sagas, the master detective defeats The City's crime boss, "Big Boy" Caprice (Al Pacino). The linchpin to the narrative is a mysterious figure with no face - loosely modeled on Gould's character, "The Blank" - who for a while knocks off Tracy's enemies more quickly than he can round them up.
Tracy's crime fighting antics comprise a boy's dream of heroics. In the world of close shaves and grotesque crooks, this straight arrow skewers one target after another. But his love life is an adolescent nightmare. He's torn between the nonstop titillation of Breathless Mahoney (Madonna, in her one effective movie role, subsumes her sexuality into the breathiness and slouchiness of a '30s glamourpuss) and the maternal understanding of Tess Trueheart (the delightfully subtle Glenne Headly), a woman so virtuous and life-affirming that she even works, as Holden Caulfield might put it, in a goddamn greenhouse. Tess eats all her dinners at that immaculate beanery Mike's Diner without complaining and, with barely a moment's hesitation, will take over the care of a waif known only as the Kid (Charlies Korsmo).
Beatty pulls off playing Tracy as a man in a squeeze. He's got dash and presence to squander, and he carries clothes as well as anyone since Steve McQueen in "The Thomas Crown Affair" - he triggers his biggest laugh when Tracy orders his police sidekicks (James Keane and Seymour Cassel) to get his suit cleaned.
But his real triumph here is as a director.
Continue reading "Thank the movie gods that Beatty still owns rights to 'Dick Tracy' " »
For those who want to stay on top of the charges that Natalie Portman's dance double, Sarah Lane, did almost all the real ballet in "Black Swan," click here for the original Entertainment Weekly coverage that started the controversy -- and, once you get there, be sure to click on director Darren Aronofsky's definitive retort.
My question is: why should you care who danced what in that movie?
I admire the way Aronofosky honors his actor (he gives Portman credit for 90% of the character's ballet stage-time), but not the fragmented way he shoots dance. He turns it into a series of jagged poses, all arms and faces and shoulders.
As I wrote at the time, he "uses off-kilter angles and prowling cameras to capture details you don't often see in ballet movies -- like the way the muscles of the back work when the dancers are extending their arms -- but he never gives you the pleasure of seeing a portion of 'Swan Lake' in all its full-bodied, lyric glory."
It's not terpsichorean and it's not very musical, either.
Last week, Jeff Kinney, creator of the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" novel-in-cartoon series and executive producer of the film version, said he didn't fear the impending confrontation between "Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules" and "Sucker Punch." (Both opened Friday.) "Not only are we poised for a good run with this movie, but we’re planning for the future; we want to tell more stories," Kinney told me.
That shouldn't be a problem, because history has repeated itself -- in a good way, for a change. Just as "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" ultimately whipped "Kick-Ass" last year, "Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules" took in $22.4 million during its opening weekend, leaving 'Sucker Punch" in the dust (with $19 million).
"We've got a family comedy with a strong ensemble cast," Kinney continued. "I spent a lot of time in Vancouver during the shooting with the kids, and just when you walked down the street with them you felt you were with an iconic group of actors. When you see them together -- Fregley (Grayson Russell), Patty Farrell (Laine MacNeil), Chirag Gupta (Karan Brar), Greg (Zachary Gordon), and Rowley (Robert Capron) -- they look like a classic ensemble. That’s why I feel very confident about this movie and the next as well."
This time around, the older characters were the biggest question marks. Rodrick, the bullying and manipulative brother of the Wimpy Kid himself, Greg Heffley (Gordon), had a minor role in the first film. For "Rodrick Rules," he had to step into the spotlight. "I guess they had the same issue in the 'Twilight' series," Kinney said, enjoying the semi-incongruous comparison. "They weren't sure that Taylor Lautner could play the big bad wolf in the second film, but he stepped up to the task. Devon Bostick had to step up, too, and he does a great job."
Then there was the parent trap.
Continue reading "'Wimpy Kid' beats 'Sucker Punch,' as we knew it would" »
Finding the fresh response in obvious situations has become a specialty for Amy Adams, so if anyone can bring new blood to Lois Lane for a Superman movie, it's Adams. She was robbed of awards for "Enchanted" simply because it was a goofy cartoon/live-action hybrid, but I can't think of a better contemporary performance in a piece of comic escapism. Playing a fairy-tale beauty named Giselle, who tumbles down a well in the magic kingdom of Andalasia and ends up peering out from a manhole in Times Square, Adams held to her insight that (as she told me in 2006) Giselle was "completely open, full of conviction and joy and a humor that would go along with that."
When the L.A. Times' Geoff Boucher broke the news yesterday that Adams would be Lois Lane in Zack Snyder's "Superman: Man of Steel," "Enchanted" was immediately invoked across the Internet as the closest Adams had yet come to a comic-book movie. But Adams has been developing many skills that she can bring to bear on Lois Lane.
Will Snyder's Daily Planet go the "His Girl Friday" route of rapid-fire verbal comedy? Well, in "Junebug," Adams turned an open-faced, openhearted pregnant beauty named into that near-impossibility: a lyrical motor-mouth. Once you got into her rhythms, you realized that everything she said had meaning, including a remark to her aging high-school-sweetheart husband: "God loves you just the way you are. But he loves you too much to let you stay that way."
Will her Lois Lane have Margot Kidder's push, grit and sexuality? Well, Adams was no shrinking violet in "Sunshine Cleaning" and "The Fighter," and way back in that underrated beauty-pageant parody, "Drop Dead Gorgeous" (1999), she played the gal who told a competitor "They're never going to let you perform naked. I asked!"
Will Lois simply be Superman/Clark Kent's true love? In Steven Spielberg's "Catch Me If You Can," she played the candy-striper who won the heart of Leonardo DiCaprio's hustler-hero. She was endearingly ardent and focused. When he tried to make a clean breast of things and said, "I'm not a lawyer or a Harvard graduate or a Lutheran; I ran away from home a year and a half ago when I was 16," Brenda simply responded, "Frank, Frank - you're not a Lutheran?"
Playing an idealistic nun in "Doubt" and a striving food blogger in "Julie & Julia," Adams (in my minority opinion) gave the most subtle, exact and feeling performance in either movie. And her crime-scene-cleanup gal in "Sunshine Cleaning" was just as scrappy, passionate and compassionate (if not as celebrated) as her wily barmaid in "The Fighter," Adams has shown she can do anything. She's not perfect: she stumbled badly in the cliched rom-com "Leap Year." Let's hope Snyder's Lois Lane gives Adams room to soar up, up and away.
Photo of Amy Adams at Vanity Fair's Oscar party by Pascal Le Segretain for Getty Images
Second City's "The Wire: The Musical" had its laughs, but it wasn't as memorable as "When it's Not Your Turn," an engaging hybrid prose piece on The Hooded Utilitarian website (click here.)
It's a pop-Nabokovian jape -- an academic defense of a forgotten (totally fictional) Victorian author, Horatio Bucklesby Ogden, and his panoramic 1840s serial about "Bodymore," called, of course, "The Wire."
The authors of the piece are Seattle-based Joy Delyria and Sean Michael Robinson (he got the idea and drew the pictures, she did the text).
Simultaneously, they satirize academic and Victorian prose and prejudices -- and pay tribute to a series they believe ranks with or surpasses the best of Dickens.
"I'm pretty grateful to Sean for giving me this idea, so i could sound like an academic without doing all that academic stuff," Delyria said Friday, with a laugh. She and Robinson gave me a joint speaker-phone interview for a piece set to run in the Sun's A&E section on Sunday.
Their pastiche has the surprising, multifaceted wit and humor that often bubble up from pure obsession.
Robinson told me that he'd caught up with all of "The Wire" after spending five years teaching art in an Everett, Washington high school. (The analysis of public education in "Wire" season four really clang true for him.) "There's always a temptation to take two things and smash them together," said Robinson, who is currently working on a graphic novel. "But it only really works when the two things have something to say about each other -- when they gain something from the combination.I hope at some point we accomplished that."
Illustration courtesy of Sean Michael Robinson
Are March and April the new January and February when it comes to the movies? In the fall you feel the excitement of moviemakers revealing their most ambitious projects. In the summer you at least experience the spurious vitality of big studios unleashing their most ostentatious hype. And ever since the Oscars moved up to February, the concentrated roll-out of contenders in theaters and on DVDs has kept igniting enthusiasm and detonating intense arguments through the dead of winter.
But March and April -- they're not exactly springtime for cinema. They're more like the doldrums. From the big studios and even some of the smaller companies, we've been seeing a parade of formula items of wildly varying quality -- mostly, it seems, star-laden thrillers.
What's missing are movies that get everyone talking. What's missing are movies that embed themselves in the national consciousness.
It didn't use to be that way.
In 1972, a movie based on a best seller opened in New York on March 15 and in L.A. on March 22 before breaking nationally on March 24. It contained elements of thrillers, gangster films, and family dramas. It also introduced an unprecedented emotional intimacy and scope, and a vibrant social consciousness, into a chronicle of American life in the 1940s and 1950s. The movie was "The Godfather." No film before it had ever made as much money as quickly as Coppola's gangster-family epic did in the spring of 1972. No film after it has done as much to influence the way audiences think about power in America.
Studios and producers: hear this plea. Don't be afraid to open films as ambitious as "The Godfather" (or, more recently, "The Social Network") in any month of the year. As Michael Corleone might have said, this plea isn't personal, it's strictly business. Show business.
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