Film Fatale

Get ready for the revenge of the Revenge Movie.

Two trailers -- very similar -- catch your attention. The movies don't promise the same depth or quality: THE BRAVE ONE, starring Jodie Foster and directed by Neil Jordan, looks far more intriguing and troubling, while DEATH SENTENCE, with Kevin Bacon, looks like a formula picture.

Check out the trailers, posters and tagline: the genre never fails to go for the gut. From THE BRAVE ONE, there's complexity - conflict. "We're on your side," says Terrence Howard, the sympathetic detective. Replies Foster: "How come it doesn't feel like that?" And her voice over - she's going over the edge. "It is astonishing to find inside you there is a stranger." There's a great trailer line for Foster, who can't help but sound badass: "I want my dog back."

Were there trailer lines before blaxploitation movies, Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry?

Continue reading "Revenge of the Revenge Movie: BRAVE ONE, DEATH SENTENCE" »

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Can't do better than this headline.

"Ah, Hollywood, where men will be boys
What can big-screen women expect from love? A bong-sucking, porn-addled, baby-fatted slacker."

Johanna Schneller of Toronto's Globe and Mail gets to the heart of the male - boyish - romances of I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU CHUCK AND LARRY, THE BREAK-UP, KNOCKED UP (a movie in which guys know 5,000 words for penis but can't bring themselves to say the word 'abortion.'"

Adam Sandler is perhaps the most talented actor who consistently under-casts himself, and Schneller perfectly describes his (or the movie's?) over-indicative comic style: In a scene where he, pretending to be gay, lusts for gorgeous Jessica Biel,

"The agony in his eyes as Biel proffers her luscious but off-limits body is funny. The fact that he quickly has to tie his sweatshirt around his waist is funny. Yet Sandler can't stop there - that wouldn't be literal enough.

He has to jam his hand down his pants and fish around in there, fidgeting and readjusting so assiduously that he stops looking like a man wrestling with an erection, and starts looking like a toddler who has to go pee-pee."

There it is, the annoyance in these movies: the heroes dwindle from manly -- human -- carnal appetites to childish antics. Maybe we're supposed to think this is adorable. But I find it boring.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 12:23 PM | Permalink

Is there a sorrier sight than than marked-down action figures headed for the island of unwanted toys?

After the heavily hyped GODZILLA remake, I recall seeing broken, abandoned 'Zilla toys and knockoffs on 14th street -- you couldn't give that stuff away.

The Onion's A/V club remembers thirteen failed franchises, movies that looked like Part One of a sure thing, from comic book heroes (DICK TRACY) to spinoffs (DAREDEVIL) to literary adaptations (MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD). One even had summertime box office king Will Smith (WILD WILD WEST)

What went wrong?

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 04:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Think you're being watched?

From DISTURBIA, the teen-noir remake of Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW, to RED ROAD, Andrea Arnold's international festival hit about a CCTV-obsessed Scotswoman, to this weekend's paranoid thriller CIVIC DUTY, with Peter Krause as an Arab-bashing Yank, movie characters are peering through their Venetian blinds into the lives of others. And seeing enemies everywhere.

Peter Keough of the Boston Phoenix notices that these post 9/11 surveillance films, unlike the McCarthy-era REAR WINDOW, arrive at a time when "we've grown used to the idea that not only should we suspect everyone of evildoing, but that we should also welcome the intrusion of government surveillance into our private lives."

Though Keough mentions only these three films now in theaters, he might have added one of the week's top rental DVD's: the action thrillers like DEJA VU, which had hero Denzel Washington -- and the government -- seeing everywhere, even into the past.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Break out the formal wear and the surgical scrubs. The fight for Academy Awards is a "bloody one," writes the always- sanguine David Carr of the New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/movies/07viol.html?em&ex=1165726800&en=595ca621b40371ba

“These are bloody, serious times," said David Thomson, film historian and author of “The Whole Equation,” among other books. “There are extraordinary cruelties out there in the real word — bodies hung on bridges, Daniel Pearl being murdered — and I think that’s why torture has come into our entertainments in a serious way. There is a truthfulness to it that audiences seem to be responding to.”

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Photo by FINLAY MACKAY, New York Times: Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat. I think that's the film's director, Larry Cohen, bicycling alongside the car. The floppy eared goats go uncredited.
Thursday Styles recently us that moustaches are making a comeback. Examples: the fuzz faces of MY NAME IS EARL actor Jason Lee, SUPERSIZE ME director Morgan Spurlock, and Sacha Baron Cohen as BORAT.

Now the New York Times Magazine has an imaginative photo pictorial by Finlay Mackay demonstrating the enduring allure of a man in a blue-gray suit and a skinny tie.

Continue reading "NYT Fashion Pictorial: The Skinny Tie Is Back" »

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 02:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Newsweek, noting the existence of BATMAN BEGINS, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE BEGINNING, and refreshed 007 in CASINO ROYALE, has an overview of movie-prequels This is great! My nephew loves A PUP NAMED SCOOBY DOO and FLINTSTONE KIDS.

On the horizon: new installments in the HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH movies, featuring earlier adventures of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees. (Or maybe Jason's mother, when she was young.)

There's also HANNIBAL RISING. Director Peter Webber (THE GIRL WITH THE PEARL EARRING) says the movie will cover a time period well before the starting point of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and RED DRAGON, leaving room for sequels to the prequel. French actor Gaspard Ulliel (A Very Long Engagement) will portray adolescent Hannibal Lecter, who's sad because during WWII, Nazi soldiers ate his sister. Don't get Hannibal wrong. All the killing and cannibalism he does later on isn't his fault--it's because Nazis friggin' suck.

Continue reading "Sequels, Prequels, Babyfications" »

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 04:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)