Did anyone see $30 million for Eagle Eye coming?
I guess we have to get used to Shia LaBeouf for sure.
Fine by me, I think. I picked him at as a future star with his three minutes in Constantine. Why I have a radar for that sort of thing, I have no clue.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Okay ...
who had Ryan Reynolds at 24 in the office pool?
By the way, I just noticed that I have the same birthday as the newly minted Mrs. Reynolds.
By the way, I just noticed that I have the same birthday as the newly minted Mrs. Reynolds.
The state of film criticism
Does Kent Jones really believe that Paulene Kael was leading a national dialogue of film criticism in the 1970s? Who paid attention to film criticism in the 1970s? Elites, yes, but prior to Siskel and Ebert, did people in Peoria really pay that much attention?
The truth is that film criticism is more alive and influential today, because of the access provided by the Internet, than it ever has been. Too many elite film critics mistake the state of film criticism with their personal job security.
The truth is that film criticism is more alive and influential today, because of the access provided by the Internet, than it ever has been. Too many elite film critics mistake the state of film criticism with their personal job security.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Paul Newman, rest in peace
As you likely know, Paul Newman passed away from cancer Friday evening. My favorite Newman role is Hud Bannon in Hud, the type of mournful ranch movie that the country is too urbanized to make anymore. He was a screen legend by the time I was born and he remained one to the end. Rest in Peace.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Duked out [The Duchess]
The Duchess [R]
Grade: C
Cast: Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, Hayley Atwell, Simon MacBurney
Director: Saul Dibb
It’s fitting in The Duchess that, despite the obvious passage of years, no one seems to age.
It’s a wonderful analogy for British film and the way it seems frozen in time. No film industry in the world more needs a swift kick in the knickers. If Martians landed and could only use modern films to assess British culture, they might conclude all Britons present are gangsters and all Britons past were bed-hopping aristocrats.
The Duchess, as the title implies, falls squarely in the aristocratic bed-hopping category, the latest “sumptuous” fall film built on grand marble estates, beautifully elaborate (and unbelievably spotless) period costumes, and Keira Knightley’s pout.
Saying that about Knightley is easy and unfair. She’s a capable actress, even if she doesn’t always choose to show it. Few 22-year-old performers could reasonably be trusted to carry a film of this scope. While not equal to her magnetic turn in 2005’s Pride and Prejudice, her performance proves dutifully tragic as Georgiana Spencer, an 18th Century aristocratic wife trapped by matrimony and tradition.
Married as a teen, Georgiana becomes the wife and virtual slave to the quietly caustic Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes), who needs a male heir and sees little point in marriage other than productivity. Taken to the lovely but dead surroundings of his London estate, Georgiana’s womb proves to be an X-chromosome factory, sprouting one daughter after another to the Duke’s silently burning disapproval.
Disappointed by his wife, the Duke takes up with other women. He eventually seduces his wife’s best friend, forcing the three of them to live in the same home. In response, Georgiana explores a romance with Charles Gray, an adolescent flame and a rising politician. Her only other comfort is her growing public adoration, as her fashion and frivolity makes her a star of the 18th Century press. As a playwright puts it, the Duke is the only man in London who isn’t in love with his wife.
What has the modern British press all atwitter is that, in real life, Georgiana Spencer came from the same family as Lady Diana Spencer. Given the seeming similarities of their fates, there appear to be “overtones” here.(Or are they “undertones?”) Like Stephen Frears’ The Queen, The Duchess is a fragment of continuing British Diana obsession that, as an American, seems alien. It comes from something in the British soul that I don’t quite understand. Without it, I’m not sure the film packs the same energy.
Costume dramas are notorious for swallowing their characters in beautiful fabric .To the credit of the actors, The Duchess avoids this fate. That said, what does get swallowed is the story. Director Saul Dibb doesn’t add much to a familiar feminist nightmare of aristocratic patriarchy. It would help if the men weren’t so weakly drawn. It’s hard to share in an obsessive love for a man living up to a last name of Gray.
My own sense is that if you want a really good film about the injustices of European aristocratic life, you should hire an American director. Perhaps it’s because Americans are less dazzled by the surfaces and more awake to the dark humor of it. Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette captures the dehumanizing lunacy of court life at Versailles. Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon turns the aristocratic costume drama into a biting dark comedy of the human condition.
Like most European period pieces, The Duchess pays unbending attention to the details of court life. These films make you wonder if British film producers keep a storage shack of candelabras, and whether British drama training requires a course in dorky court dances. But the question remains, how often can the British get past the pomp and the sex and the reverence for their history to deliver a period piece that is something truly more than itself? One time too few, for certain.
Grade: C
Cast: Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, Hayley Atwell, Simon MacBurney
Director: Saul Dibb
It’s fitting in The Duchess that, despite the obvious passage of years, no one seems to age.
It’s a wonderful analogy for British film and the way it seems frozen in time. No film industry in the world more needs a swift kick in the knickers. If Martians landed and could only use modern films to assess British culture, they might conclude all Britons present are gangsters and all Britons past were bed-hopping aristocrats.
The Duchess, as the title implies, falls squarely in the aristocratic bed-hopping category, the latest “sumptuous” fall film built on grand marble estates, beautifully elaborate (and unbelievably spotless) period costumes, and Keira Knightley’s pout.
Saying that about Knightley is easy and unfair. She’s a capable actress, even if she doesn’t always choose to show it. Few 22-year-old performers could reasonably be trusted to carry a film of this scope. While not equal to her magnetic turn in 2005’s Pride and Prejudice, her performance proves dutifully tragic as Georgiana Spencer, an 18th Century aristocratic wife trapped by matrimony and tradition.
Married as a teen, Georgiana becomes the wife and virtual slave to the quietly caustic Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes), who needs a male heir and sees little point in marriage other than productivity. Taken to the lovely but dead surroundings of his London estate, Georgiana’s womb proves to be an X-chromosome factory, sprouting one daughter after another to the Duke’s silently burning disapproval.
Disappointed by his wife, the Duke takes up with other women. He eventually seduces his wife’s best friend, forcing the three of them to live in the same home. In response, Georgiana explores a romance with Charles Gray, an adolescent flame and a rising politician. Her only other comfort is her growing public adoration, as her fashion and frivolity makes her a star of the 18th Century press. As a playwright puts it, the Duke is the only man in London who isn’t in love with his wife.
What has the modern British press all atwitter is that, in real life, Georgiana Spencer came from the same family as Lady Diana Spencer. Given the seeming similarities of their fates, there appear to be “overtones” here.(Or are they “undertones?”) Like Stephen Frears’ The Queen, The Duchess is a fragment of continuing British Diana obsession that, as an American, seems alien. It comes from something in the British soul that I don’t quite understand. Without it, I’m not sure the film packs the same energy.
Costume dramas are notorious for swallowing their characters in beautiful fabric .To the credit of the actors, The Duchess avoids this fate. That said, what does get swallowed is the story. Director Saul Dibb doesn’t add much to a familiar feminist nightmare of aristocratic patriarchy. It would help if the men weren’t so weakly drawn. It’s hard to share in an obsessive love for a man living up to a last name of Gray.
My own sense is that if you want a really good film about the injustices of European aristocratic life, you should hire an American director. Perhaps it’s because Americans are less dazzled by the surfaces and more awake to the dark humor of it. Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette captures the dehumanizing lunacy of court life at Versailles. Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon turns the aristocratic costume drama into a biting dark comedy of the human condition.
Like most European period pieces, The Duchess pays unbending attention to the details of court life. These films make you wonder if British film producers keep a storage shack of candelabras, and whether British drama training requires a course in dorky court dances. But the question remains, how often can the British get past the pomp and the sex and the reverence for their history to deliver a period piece that is something truly more than itself? One time too few, for certain.
Be Nighted [Nights in Rodanthe]
Nights in Rodanthe[PG-13]
Grade: B
Cast: Diane Lane, Richard Gere, Viola Davis
Director: George C. Wolfe
As the brand-name middle-age romances of the moment, “Diane Lane Movies” have one good thing going for them. Diane Lane stars in all of them.
The torch has been passed down decade to decade from Doris Day to Meg Ryan. But it’s a pleasure to have as rich an actress as Lane filling the niche for this space in time. Even better, her reputation is built on making the most of less-than-first-rate material. That’s pretty darn essential for a puffy weepie like Nights in Rodanthe, adapted from the Nicholas Sparks novel.
One thing is for sure, Diane Lane is now a certifiable formula. Here’s a 10-point recipe. You take
1) a restless single or divorced fourty-ish beauty in need of a
2) personal reawakening, who leaves her home for a
3) remote, picturesque vacation locale, where she is joined by
4) a diversity-friendly best friend, and she meets
5) a successful, attractive, stimulating love interest, an encounter that usually involves
6) fine wine and
7) gourmet food and
8) love letters, errrr
9) oh, no no no no no, Wait! Not just love letters but
10) HANDWRITTEN love letters!
Throw in an artist somewhere to remind us of the richness of life and there you go.
That pretty much boils down Nights in Rodanthe. Lane plays a recently divorced mom with kids in need of a personal re-birth. For a week, she takes over her friend’s bed and breakfast along the serene coast of North Carolina. There she strikes up a friendship (heh, heh, heh) with the inn’s sole visitor, a surgeon operating on his own emotional wounds.
Gere and Lane have done this sort of thing before. They possess a breezy, realistic chemistry that smoothes over some of Rodanthe’s swoonier melodrama. Lane has that natural thing that makes you want the best for her, which you pretty much have to have to succeed in this sort of thing. I like that she achieves this feeling without the need to pour out her sauce and play to the audience.
If a scientist wanted to conduct an endurance tests for eye-rolling, he certainly could to catch the 2:45 show. At the same time, even if I would have been a model test subject – and I definitely would have been a model test subject– I recognize that this is a film that wants to be that way. I find it impossible to punish a movie for being what it wants to be.
Grade: B
Cast: Diane Lane, Richard Gere, Viola Davis
Director: George C. Wolfe
As the brand-name middle-age romances of the moment, “Diane Lane Movies” have one good thing going for them. Diane Lane stars in all of them.
The torch has been passed down decade to decade from Doris Day to Meg Ryan. But it’s a pleasure to have as rich an actress as Lane filling the niche for this space in time. Even better, her reputation is built on making the most of less-than-first-rate material. That’s pretty darn essential for a puffy weepie like Nights in Rodanthe, adapted from the Nicholas Sparks novel.
One thing is for sure, Diane Lane is now a certifiable formula. Here’s a 10-point recipe. You take
1) a restless single or divorced fourty-ish beauty in need of a
2) personal reawakening, who leaves her home for a
3) remote, picturesque vacation locale, where she is joined by
4) a diversity-friendly best friend, and she meets
5) a successful, attractive, stimulating love interest, an encounter that usually involves
6) fine wine and
7) gourmet food and
8) love letters, errrr
9) oh, no no no no no, Wait! Not just love letters but
10) HANDWRITTEN love letters!
Throw in an artist somewhere to remind us of the richness of life and there you go.
That pretty much boils down Nights in Rodanthe. Lane plays a recently divorced mom with kids in need of a personal re-birth. For a week, she takes over her friend’s bed and breakfast along the serene coast of North Carolina. There she strikes up a friendship (heh, heh, heh) with the inn’s sole visitor, a surgeon operating on his own emotional wounds.
Gere and Lane have done this sort of thing before. They possess a breezy, realistic chemistry that smoothes over some of Rodanthe’s swoonier melodrama. Lane has that natural thing that makes you want the best for her, which you pretty much have to have to succeed in this sort of thing. I like that she achieves this feeling without the need to pour out her sauce and play to the audience.
If a scientist wanted to conduct an endurance tests for eye-rolling, he certainly could to catch the 2:45 show. At the same time, even if I would have been a model test subject – and I definitely would have been a model test subject– I recognize that this is a film that wants to be that way. I find it impossible to punish a movie for being what it wants to be.
No miracle work [The Miracle at St. Anna]
The Miracle of St. Anna [R]
Grade: D
Cast: Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso, Omar Benson Miller
Director: Spike Lee
Spike Lee’s World War II epic The Miracle of St. Anna reminded me of a certain film critic’s dilemma – is it legitimate to criticize a film for being “too long?”
I think the answer is generally no. Unlike the filmmaker, the critic doesn’t slave over the movie for months thinking deeply about his options. A critic doesn’t have to worry about pace and continuity and giving the film its full dimension, and a critic never gets to see how other options might work or fail. Generally, for a critic to flippantly say that the filmmaker could have trimmed this and that shows a lack of respect for the involved labor.
That said, I think there is a case for it with the 160–minute St. Anna. This is not because there are four or five scenes that could easily hit the wastebasket and send us home ten minutes earlier. Lee simply keeps running headlong into a new story and then another new story. He never quite figures out when to stop and chew the story that he has.
An unexplained murder in a post office in 1984 leads to the story of a mysterious missing sculptured head from a bridge in Italy. Which leads to the story of the all-black 92nd Infantry division and a memory of a 1944 skirmish along an Italian river. Which leads to the story of four soldiers stranded behind enemy lines on the wrong side of the waterway. Which leads to the story of finding an Italian orphan with an imaginary friend. Which leads to the soldier’s time hiding in a small Italian mountainside villa. Which leads to the story of its inhabitants and their legends about the nearby mountain. Which leads to a story of Italian partisans fighting in the hills. Which leads to the secret of a Nazi massacre in a neighboring town. It’s not that it’s too much to follow. It’s just that following means never staying in one place long enough to fully appreciate.
I think this points partially to Spike Lee’s dilemma as a filmmaker. He makes films for two reasons. He wants to tell important stories. More than that, he wants to right past racist wrongs. It’s an admirable mission that makes for passionate filmmaking. But when placed in the context of something as broad as World War II, it can lead the story all over the place. His soldiers are not merely asked to fight Nazis. They’re asked to fight every injustice Lee can find.
While St. Anna lags in too many places, it has patches of excellent filmmaking. The soldier’s river crossing while the Germans blast Axis Sally propaganda is among Lee’s most gripping scenes. It says in five crisp minutes all the things about race that he dithers with for two-and-a-half hours. I also love how during the climactic battle Lee uses the geography of the village – its hills and tight cobblestone alleys – to create a different style from the open-field slaughters common to World War II films.
There was an impressive World War II film from several years ago called Days of Glory which dealt with similar racial issues from the French and North African perspective. Glory is trimmer, more fluid, more subtle, and more effective. It wouldn’t surprise me if Lee has seen it. If not, I wish that he had.
Grade: D
Cast: Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso, Omar Benson Miller
Director: Spike Lee
Spike Lee’s World War II epic The Miracle of St. Anna reminded me of a certain film critic’s dilemma – is it legitimate to criticize a film for being “too long?”
I think the answer is generally no. Unlike the filmmaker, the critic doesn’t slave over the movie for months thinking deeply about his options. A critic doesn’t have to worry about pace and continuity and giving the film its full dimension, and a critic never gets to see how other options might work or fail. Generally, for a critic to flippantly say that the filmmaker could have trimmed this and that shows a lack of respect for the involved labor.
That said, I think there is a case for it with the 160–minute St. Anna. This is not because there are four or five scenes that could easily hit the wastebasket and send us home ten minutes earlier. Lee simply keeps running headlong into a new story and then another new story. He never quite figures out when to stop and chew the story that he has.
An unexplained murder in a post office in 1984 leads to the story of a mysterious missing sculptured head from a bridge in Italy. Which leads to the story of the all-black 92nd Infantry division and a memory of a 1944 skirmish along an Italian river. Which leads to the story of four soldiers stranded behind enemy lines on the wrong side of the waterway. Which leads to the story of finding an Italian orphan with an imaginary friend. Which leads to the soldier’s time hiding in a small Italian mountainside villa. Which leads to the story of its inhabitants and their legends about the nearby mountain. Which leads to a story of Italian partisans fighting in the hills. Which leads to the secret of a Nazi massacre in a neighboring town. It’s not that it’s too much to follow. It’s just that following means never staying in one place long enough to fully appreciate.
I think this points partially to Spike Lee’s dilemma as a filmmaker. He makes films for two reasons. He wants to tell important stories. More than that, he wants to right past racist wrongs. It’s an admirable mission that makes for passionate filmmaking. But when placed in the context of something as broad as World War II, it can lead the story all over the place. His soldiers are not merely asked to fight Nazis. They’re asked to fight every injustice Lee can find.
While St. Anna lags in too many places, it has patches of excellent filmmaking. The soldier’s river crossing while the Germans blast Axis Sally propaganda is among Lee’s most gripping scenes. It says in five crisp minutes all the things about race that he dithers with for two-and-a-half hours. I also love how during the climactic battle Lee uses the geography of the village – its hills and tight cobblestone alleys – to create a different style from the open-field slaughters common to World War II films.
There was an impressive World War II film from several years ago called Days of Glory which dealt with similar racial issues from the French and North African perspective. Glory is trimmer, more fluid, more subtle, and more effective. It wouldn’t surprise me if Lee has seen it. If not, I wish that he had.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
RIcky Gervais, Oscar Host?
EW says that Ricky Gervais is being rumored to host the Oscars. One question. Does anyone in Flyover Country know who Ricky Gervais is?
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Top 10 movie titles
Christopher Campbell lists his 10 best movie titles of the last 10 years. There Will Be Blood, All About My Mother, and The Perfect Storm (as one that has entered the American vernacular) are good choices.
I'll draw up a 10 list, as soon as I think of one.
The best title of all time could well be Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead. Has anyone actually seen the movie? Yet everyone knows the title.
I'll draw up a 10 list, as soon as I think of one.
The best title of all time could well be Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead. Has anyone actually seen the movie? Yet everyone knows the title.
Solace review
I enjoyed reading through this James Bond fanboy thread on CommanderBond.net. It's a discussion on the authenticity of an alleged IMDb review of the new one Quantum of Solace. The posters dig in on both sides. I'd say I'm 70-30 in favor of it being authentic. If so, it's good news. The review, loaded with spoilers, is glowing.
The Duchess
I can't post my review of The Duchess here yet, but it should be up at the sites that I write for.
www.buzzine.com
www.stageandcinema.com
www.screencomment.com
They're in New York and LA, where it opened. I'm in Dallas, where it hasn't yet. I'll post it here next week.
www.buzzine.com
www.stageandcinema.com
www.screencomment.com
They're in New York and LA, where it opened. I'm in Dallas, where it hasn't yet. I'll post it here next week.
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