In the movie KNOCKED UP, Seth Rogen's character -- as a mark of his nightmare-date, slovenly, man-caveyness -- hopes to start a web set that catalogues only nude scenes from movies. He's crushed to discover that someone called MrSkin has already developed the idea.
The New York Times discovers that MrSkin is not only real, but really popular, attracting 2.9 unique visitors a month.
"Fewer movie critics means fewer voices shouting against the noise of Hollywood's hype machine, fewer champions for the small, interesting films struggling to break out amid the blockbusters," says Sean Means of the Salt Lake Tribune [via Romenesko]
Distressing news from the Atlanta Journal Constitution, where longtime film critic Eleanor Ringel Gillespie will be replaced by "the wires" next month. "The wires" - thanks, we can read that stuff anywhere. Atlanta is no small city: The wires won't tell you what's going on in your hometown. Read what the Alliance of Women Film Journalists has to say about her departure here.
Amazing Grace
Dir. Michael Apted
2006. Ioan Gruffud, Michael Gambon, Youssou N'Dour.
Michael Apted’s stirring if conventional bio-pic of 18th-century British abolitionist William Wilberforce offers rum, funneled into anti-slavery PM William Pitt the Younger (Benedict Cumberbatch) and sugar, in the form of the hero’s adoring wife, Barbara Spooner (Romola Garai). This is polite England, so Middle Passage horrors remain veiled: slave turned memoirist Oloudah Equiano a/k/a “Gustavus” (Youssou N’Dour) is silenced until the end credits. As Wilberforce, Ioan Gruffudd (The Fantastic Four, TV's Horatio Hornblower) conveys the charisma of a 'faced-on-faith hero. Just how he outmaneuvers his enemies becomes a cynical surprise, especially in a drama financed by fundamentalist Christian tycoon Philip Anschutz of Walden Media. Don’t seek answers here as to where God is when mankind fails, on a tremendous scale, to love his fellow man. That’s for other films to deal with. Better ones, like MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON. (Or worse: BILLY JACK.) For now--for a portrait of a righteous man who gave his all to help others, there’s Wilberforce, exacting moral justice without going berserk.
--Justine Elias
The Boston Phoenix
Feb. 21, 2007
DAKOTA DARKNESS: Reluctant farmgirl Jess (Kristen Stewart) -- who has seen neither AMITYVILLE HORROR nor OKLAHOMA! -- prepares to barn dance with the unquiet dead in THE MESSSENGERS.
The Messengers
Directed by Danny and Oxide Pang.
Movie website at Sony Pictures (Reviewed at Loews Boston Common Cinema, Thursday, Feb. 1, 2007 for the Boston Phoenix: Print edition February 7, 2007)
Twin directors Danny and Oxide Pang, who explored the supernatural downside of cornea transplants in The Eye, unearth the ghosts of the Northern Plains states with stylish but mostly unfrightening results in their first non-Asian horror movie, The Messengers. Imagine Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma done as an ominous, tuneless, pastoral spookshow. In place of corn as high as an elephant's eye, substitute a patch of droopy sunflowers grown as low as an elephant's shin. Even a bumper crop yields a harvest of trouble for the Solomons, the broke Chicago family turned Dakota homesteaders, and for the film's poorly hidden invaders, who must crouch in tilled fields and girl-don't-go-in-there barns till harvest time
As clueless, handsome farmer dad (Dylan McDermott) sits astride his tractor, idly stoning crows, and oblivious farm mom (Penelope Ann Miller) scrubs black mold off the walls, a strangers emerge from the golden haze: a snooping banker ("The X-Files"' William B. Davis, channelling Former U.S. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft) and a virile, shotgun-toting hired man (John Corbett, hilarious channelling Pore Jud Fry).
Only the dark-dreaming teenage heroine, Jess (Kristen Stewart) and her silent, oddly unclingy toddler brother (Evan and Theodore Turner) perceive threat amid the falling shadows. Soon grey-limbed apparitions are lurking in linens, muddying the dug cellar, fiddling with doorknobs-- if you think they're not approaching, the fibre in your ears and the hair on the back of your neck indicate otherwise: Eerie.
The Pangs (or maybe the screenwriters) are door-slammers too, smash-cutting to the next day, the next week, the next month—yet the family's still marooned on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre estate as if hoping to meet Leatherface's ghost.
Just as Oklahoma's tomboy/virgin Laurey made a beeline for the local sociopath, then had to be rescued by Curley, Jess – a nubile rebel yell in a Sweet and Toxic T-shirt – is raring to confront ghouls but not the real, knee-high source of her anxiety. Not even the obvious juju jolts, which get sillier as the movie goes on, will steer Jess (or her peers, the PG-13 target audience) away from the down staircase, where – wouldn't you know it? – the lights are out and everybody's home.
[After the jump, marketing notes. SPOILER ALERT]
Babel's Rinku Kikuchi : Words Fail, Voids Remain
The smart young film critics of Reverse Shot get mad -- feisty mad -- at "Eleven Offenses of 2006" -- 11 movies that have been over-praised. These writers - who include Jeannette Catsoulis of the New York Times -- insist that they are not "trying to be contrarian" - but when they cite their twentysomething ages and bark like this, I imagine a pack of Scrappy Doos nipping at the heels of Armond White's wise and lordly Scooby. (Marmaduke?)
Darn it, these kids are cute with their sharp teeth.
And some of these eleven titles ought to be smacked down -- as DP wrote -- "with the smugness of the average bright film student". Smacked hard because they're the same caring, drastically competent studio freight that comes out every fall, bearing a worthy message, all but demanding critical respect and major awards.
Or smacked hard because they're needlessly pretentious, fractured and convoluted, like BABEL and THE FOUNTAIN. (After the jump)
I cannot agree with Michael Koresky's outraged reading of BABEL -- he's way off base when he attacks the absurdity of one character. Of course the film is winning awards and rounding out lists of nominations -- BABEL has little something for every critic and award voter - and not too much nothing for everyone else. No one can say that BABEL isn't a reflection of some aspect of life - or another, more cohesive film. With the film's title, aren't the filmmakers giving us a clue to the arrow they've shot in the air? (Genesis 11:7 "Bajemos a confundir su idioma, para que ya no se entiendan entre ellos mismos" -- ie "Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech."
What Koresky doesn't realize is that the deaf-mute Japanese teenager portrayed so feelingly by Rinku Kikuchi-- the girl who, in "a desperate bid for connection, flashes her privates in cafeterias, puts her dentist's hand on her vagina, and, in her ultimate humiliation, strips naked in front of a much older police detective" is a completely authentic and believable character-- merely because she is in a movie.
How dare anyone object to what one movie character does, if the film is enjoyed, praised and wins awards?
Continue reading "Tower of BABEL: Words Fail, Voids Remain" »
The past nine Januarys, David Edelstein -- once of Slate, now of New York magazine, used to round up a posse of film critics to talk about the year in movies. Now that Edelstein's left the pack, Slate's Dana Stevens chairs the discussion, and she drops a bomb on day one:
She doesn't like war movies. She doesn't get war movies. She goes into a "dissociative state" during war movies. As she tells Wesley Morris (the Boston Globe), Keith Phipps (The Onion), Carina Chocano (the Los Angeles Times),
"God, war is strange. … Large groups of men in uniforms trying to kill other men in uniforms, in service of an abstract concept … How could anything so horrible have happened once in the history of humanity, much less be happening all over the world right now? … I wonder if the American death toll in Iraq has passed 3,000 yet … Oh shit, Giovanni Ribisi is gonna get it now. … Please don't show his guts."
If I ever meet Dana Stevens, or anyone else who quails at the thought of seeing a combat movie (and not all war movies are combat movies), I will say: you know that girly-girl movie PRIDE & PREJUDICE? The old one, with Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson.
Greer Garson was more famous for starring in another film, MRS. MINIVER, a war movie set on the home front. And please read THE WORLD WAR II COMBAT FILM by Jeanine Basinger. I know I'm not the only woman who loves war movies, and not merely because they're so ferociously gay.
Continue reading "Slate's Movie Club Does Combat Over War Movies" »
Another year end critics poll: Film Comment surveys film writers and critics, asking for twenty top films and the 10 best movies still unreleased in the U.S.
Martin Scorsese's Boston-set crime drama THE DEPARTED led critics picks, followed by Romanian Academy Award submission THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU, and the old-but-new Melville noir ARMY OF SHADOWS.
Here's a poll in which an early 2006 release (TRISTRAM SHANDY) wasn't forgotten, and cool pop movies like CASINO ROYALE make a strong showing.
What's up, though, with the unreleased film list? Many of the unreleased titles are scheduled for North American theatrical distribution in 2007.
Spike Lee's searing New Orleans documentary, WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE, shown on HBO in September, was probably seen by more people than some of the top 20 movies -- and it's now on DVD. (The six-hour documentary played at Toronto Film Festival, but only after it had debuted on HBO
CASINO ROYALE deals a new James Bond in Daniel Craig, and a better secret agent movie than the series has delivered in many years.
As Sarah Lyall writes in the New York Times, "Now even the meanest-spirited, most Sean Connery-nostalgic critics in Britain seem to have been charmed out of their bad attitudes by Mr. Craig’s performance as a gritty, steely James Bond in the latest Bond film, “Casino Royale.” Contrary to their predictions, they say, the 38-year-old Mr. Craig is not too blond, too wimpy, too dough-faced or too lightweight for the part.''
The New York Times raves, "Sure, the show is idiotic, but that's the point."
It's cheaper ($26) but wetter expensive to sit in the Splatter Section, where the theatre seats are covered in plastic and the audience gets covered in fake blood.
Evil Dead: The Musical is on now at New World Stages, 340 West 50 Street, (212) 239-6200.
The Guardian's John Patterson (Rated: Cranky) hasn't seen SCENES OF A SEXUAL NATURE or SAW III, but that hasn't stopped him from getting his bitch off over the MPAA's tell-all, explain-nothing film ratings and classification system.
Here is my annotated MPAA-type guide to the SAW movies.
SAW II (2005)
Rated R:
For grisly violence and gore, terror, language and drug content.
Translation: Less grislier, more druggier. Also, terror. If you consider flashbacks terrifying.
SAW III (2006)
Rated R for strong grisly violence and gore, sequences of terror and torture, nudity and language.
Translation: Same shit as first two. Plus: boobies!
After the jump, experience a moment from SAW III.
This is a slightly expanded but still spoiler-free version of a review I wrote for this week's Boston Phoenix.
Postmodern turns out to have been the wrong word, and world, for the Nolan brothers (director Christopher and screenwriter Jonathan) of MEMENTO fame. In THE PRESTIGE, a Victorian-set sci fi tale of rival magicians in search of the ultimate trick, the Nolans revel in embedded flashbacks, purloined diaries, mad scientists (David Bowie, in a deft cameo), and presto-change-o stagecraft ("Abracadabra!" will never again sound cheesy.) Hugh Jackman, cast as a proto-Vegas showman at first appears to have the meatier role, but it's Christian Bale, as the illusionist whose art blights the lives of those he loves, who makes a darker, deeper impression.
Though the film's slowish pacing, early on, over-indicates how both magicians' marquee misdirection --a disappearing act--will be achieved, The Prestige still pulls off a neat trick of its own. So what if you twig to the how of the deception; what remains is the horror of how any human being could stand it.
The season's hot documentary film is JESUS CAMP, a look at a Pentecostalist retreat for children where there's no room for s'mores--kids get a heavy dose of threats, hellfire and George Bush-worship.
Before you have nightmares about Christ-crazed kindergarteners declaring a Holy War on unbelievers, read this review of the film in Radar Online. "if there is a rising army of evangelical zealots," writes onetime Christian camper Paige Ferrari. "There's an equally large army of ex-Jesus Campers who burned out, rebelled, or simply left the fold because band camp sounded more appealing.
Evangelical Christian retreats have been around a long time. Where they used to condemn Dungeons and Dragons and disco, now they equate Harry Potter with Satan. For some kids, they instill a profound feeling of belonging and faith. For others, they're just an experience to later rebel against.
Only Joe Queenan could make me want to read Joe Eszterhas' self-basting screed THE DEVIL'S GUIDE TO HOLLYWOOD (subtitled "The Screenwriter as God!"). Queenan, in a New York Times book review, gives a sampling of the big E's "incandescent" prose:
“Don’t let your urine rise to your head.”“Michael Ovitz was the Anti-Christ.”
“Check your crotch before a meeting.”
Should you dare go further and check Eszterhasz' crotch, the book details his alleged affair with Sharon Stone, which he's been bragging about for the last 15 years, as well as all his ridicule for people like Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Marlon Brando, Humphrey Bogart, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. None of *them* ever had an affair with Sharon Stone or wrote a script about a female welder who moonlighted as an exotic dancer. So there!
I would admire anyone who slogs through the works of Joyce, Heidegger, Derrida, Kierkegaard and "Who Moved My Cheese." If such a person existed, I would admire him. Until then, I'll make do with the Bard of Lazarus, Connecticut: literary critic Nanx Hedwerp, who shares his (her? its?) thoughts on books and music with the readers of Amazon.com.
On PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: "A comedy of manners with simmering emotions. This is Austen's best novel yet, and I can't wait to see what she comes up with next...my second favorite book this year after THE SOUTH BEACH DIET."
On Tolkien's THE SILMARILLION: "Very hard to put down. But then again, it was suspended from the ceiling by a string."
On Wittgenstein's TRACTATUS LOGICO PHILOSOPHICUS: "A bit slow...I did not find the main character compelling. I recommend The South Beach Diet."
Some day, Nanx Hedwerp, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott will retire, and the New York Times will come calling.
When I reviewed the Bollywood melodrama KABHI ALVIDA NAA KEHNA ("Never Say Goodbye") for the Boston Globe last Friday, there were no advance screenings -- I attended the first show on opening day, August 14. To my surprise, the midday show was packed--everyone from twenty- and thirtysomethings skipping out of work on a beautiful day to grandparents to a two-year old who happily ran up and down the aisle for the movie's three and a half hour (plus intermission) running time. I wasn't the only non-Indian face in the crowd, either--many of the younger Desis sat with boyfriends, girlfriends, classmates of all colors.
Though KANK, as its distributors have nicknamed it, was playing in only a few markets on just 64 screens, it grossed $1.8 million over its first week. The film's per screen average was $28,330--extremely high. Director Karan Johar's previous film, the worldwide hit KABHI KHUSHI KHABHIE GHAM ("Sometimes Happy, Sometimes Sad" also had a big U.S. opening: $1.37 million its first week on just 73 screens. That 2001 film actually opened in sixth place--an extraordinary achievement for a foreign language film, and for any film playing on so few screens.)
Now is the time to submit your eyewitness reports of SNAKES ON A PLANE's opening night screenings. The audience shoutbacks. The shootings. Anything else you might notice.
Which publication will be first with the hater headline SNAKES BITE"?
And which fake populist critic will shill himself into the blurb whore pantheon with a line like, "who'd have thought a thrill ride about cold-blooded reptiles would turn out to be such a warm hearted, winsome surprise!" or "The plain truth? Snakes On A Plane is Hisssss-terrical!"
Salon's Stephanie Zacharek doesn't feel the snake love, but does give the impression that the first-night Times Square screening was the place to be. "When we became restless after too many trailers, a soft hissing noise filled the theater, a boo that was actually a cheer. Time to bring on the motherfucking snakes!" She continues: "While "Snakes on a Plane" barely stands up as a movie, it definitely qualifies as an event. A fellow critic present at the same showing said that afterward, he couldn't quite tell if the crowd actually liked the picture. But everyone sure liked being there."
Everyone but Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman, who seems decidedly creeped out by the mob mentality in that very same theatre. Smack! We have a winner. "Snakes on a Plane sounds like a title that Don Simpson, at 4 in the morning, scrawled in white powder on a glass table."
Finally, because somebody's got to take umbrage at something in every film, spare a moment for the reaction of a snake expert who points out that "snakes on crack" -- or pheremones -- would be more interested in loving than biting. This same herpetologist also takes umbrage at the film's portrayal of the "bald, geeky" snake expert. “We don’t like to think we’re nerds," sniffed the snake scientist, who wears his long flowing gray hair in a ponytail.
The next time I'm on an ill-fated flight upon which killer snakes escape and go amok, and one of the snakes kills me by chomping down on my bare bosom while I -- like an idiot -- am complaining about the flight attendants or (even better) I'm applying for membership in the Mile High Club, I demand that at least one eyewitness notice, semi off the record, "Nice rack, you know--which makes thisa real tragedy," and that my grieving survivors claim,: "It's how she would have wanted to go."
What do movie fans hate most about movie critics?
1. Spoilers.
2. Genre haters. If you've never liked video games, horror, sci fi -- don't review those movies. We know what you're going to say.
3. Plot-summarizersIf a review's nothing but synopsis, that's a good sign that the critic has no opinion at all.
4. Unstoppable typists. A review shouldn't take longer to read than the movie takes to watch. 5,000 words on CLERKS II? Why?
Slate praises the New York Times television film-capsule writers, especially the late Howard Thompson, whose forty years of miniature reviews still run in the TV listings. A couple of samples:
THE GUNS OF NAVARONE. Allied commando mission. Strong on scenery, but it weighs 10 tons.
MATILDA. A boxing kangaroo. What the world needs now.
His successors include Times TV editor Jody Alesandro, Anita Gates, and Lawrence Van Gelder. I love this review for HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS "The usually holiday fare"
The web site Four Word Film Review lets readers compose ultrabriefs, but nothing delivers the icy blast of the true Times snub: "Not reviewed by us."
I wrote about Disney/Buena Vista's CARS for the Boston Phoenix.
Despite the sleek beauty of the Pixar animation, this G-rated family entertainment hits the back-breaking/migraine- or tantrum-inducing wall of pain around the 70 minute mark, with two or three unfunny, protracted automania sequences in the desert.
By the end of UNITED 93, it seemed most critics were too shattered to mention the one off-key note in this superb but almost unbearable to watch thriller: the portrayal of one passenger-- the ginger-haired German-accented man--on the doomed flight as not merely unwilling to participate in the uprising against the hijackers, but arguing "We should talk to them! What about...Mogadishu? What about...Somalia."
Which left me thinking: What is this guy talking about? Why now?
Gosh, I thought UNITED 93 was a docudrama. I hadn't realized that in addition to the four hijackers someone else aboard the plane was a great big pussy.
It turns out that the German guy-who was, like all the other people portrayed in the film, a real person-was not actually, as the Guardian puts it, a "surrender monkey."
Director Paul Greengrass, who has made several superior docudramas about justice denied and deferred (THE MURDER OF STEPHEN LAWRENCE, OMAGH, BLOODY SUNDAY), said (in interviews and in theatrical trailer-previews) that he'd gained the cooperation of the families of those killed on the doomed flight that set off from Newark airport on Sept. 11.
But the Guardian reports that Silke Adams, the widow of Christian Adams is "believed to have refused to cooperate on the film, saying that the memory of her husband's death was still too raw. This has left the film open to charges that Adams has been set up as the story's fall guy, the token cowardly German amid a band of brave Americans."
"United 93 is based on transcripts from the phone calls made by the passengers on board the plane, but much of the drama was improvised on set. "Surely one of the passengers didn't phone home to point out that there was a cowardly German on board who wanted to give in?" wondered the Sunday Times critic Cosmo Landesman. So far there is no evidence to suggest that Christian Adams did not support the other passengers, or refused to storm the cockpit."
I don't know where that "believed to" comes from, or how it can be substantiated, but the Adams of the film does stand out -- not as a pacifist but as kind of a 'tard who learns that the crew and other passengers have been murdered 20 feet away from him, sees their blood on his seatmates clothing, yet still thinks it's time for a chat.
Indiewire's Anthony Kaufman saw United 93 at the Tribeca Film Festival in May and was as perplexed by portrayal of the Euro-Pacifist. When he cited this as a major flaw in the film, he took a beating from respondents on Alter-Net.
As moved as I was by UNITED 93, I agree with Anthony, even though he told me he thought that the pacifist was Dutch. Look, AK--you've got to get down with your Northern European stereotypes: the Dutch are treacherous, kinky collaborators, the Germans are either treacherous Nazis, treacherous collaborators, or treacherous pork-eating perverts
Is it wrong to hate a child?
That's how I felt about the child actor (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick) cast as the new Damien in the remake of THE OMEN. So distractingly smirky is this little anti-Christ, his infant version seems cry and wail in six-six-six part harmony. Draw a little El-Marko moustache on his movie poster image (and I'm sure some of you all ready have already done so), slick down his black bowl haircut, and he looks like a kindergarten Hitler.
If only this kid had been given a chance to be scary rather than annoying.
Young Harvey Stephens, the cherub-faced boy who portrayed the Devil's son in the 1976 movie, said but a few lines in the original thriller. The first indication of his evil nature was an his naughty, secret wave "hello" to a slobbering demon-dog at his fifth birthday party. The second sign was Richard Donner's priceless shot of the boy's face when he realizes he's being carted off to a wedding--in an Anglican church. (The psycho-pout of Damien denied - and the tantrum that follows--is all too familar to babysitters and parents everywhere.)
Though director John Moore has displayed a commanding visual style in TK, this horror remake essentially follows the original script - but hits every harder and louder. At Damien's fifth birthday party, when the boy's first nanny takes a long, cursed leap off a short window ledge to make way for an evil new guardian, not only do we get several shots of her lifeless body crashing through a window below (same as in the 1976 movie), but we get a gratuitiously suggestive shot of her stockinged foot going slack, THEN losing a shoe, THEN the shoe falling another story or two till it goes SMASH into a crystal punchbowl filled with blood-red punch. Then the crystal cracks and the punch spills all over the white tablecloth. Subtle!