Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Original Sin
Spanish director Pedro Almodovar's latest thriller, "The Skin I Live In," had filmgoers fleeing the theater Thursday night at its gala premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, due to some aggressively violent and disturbing content.
The film, which stars Antonio Banderas and budding actress Spanish actress Elena Anaya, focuses on a mad but brilliant surgeon (Banderas) who kidnaps a man who raped his daughter.
The doctor's daughter killed herself from the grief and it drives him to take very drastic measures. This is where it gets complicated and disturbing.
Banderas then gives the rapist a sex change and transplants his deceased daughter's face onto his body.
He later has sex with the man he has brutally experimented on and turned into a woman.
Crashing The Sheen-kansen: Two & A Half Men Canceled
By halting production on the eighth season of "Two and a Half Men," CBS Corp. and Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros. are turning away from a proven hit with both viewers and advertisersOutbursts from star Charlie Sheen led the media companies to cut off production of TV's most-watched comedy, potentially ending a program that helped lead a revival in TV sitcoms.
New episodes of "Men" on CBS average 14.7 million viewers. Reruns on CBS rake in nearly three quarters of the audience, and it is also popular in nightly syndication on local TV stations.
It's now unclear whether new episodes will ever be made, however, according to people familiar with the matter.
CBS' and Warner Bros.' decision Thursday came less than six hours after Mr. Sheen went on an erratic rant in a radio interview against topics as varied as Alcoholics Anonymous, Thomas Jefferson, and "Men" co-creator Chuck Lorre.
CBS Corp. CEO Leslie Moonves learned of the radio rant while at a party the company was hosting for investors in midtown Manhattan, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Mr. Moonves spoke by telephone with Bruce Rosenblum, president of Warner Bros. Television Group, the person said. Together, the two men decided to pull the plug.
"Based on the totality of Charlie Sheen's statements, conduct and condition, CBS and Warner Bros. Television have decided to discontinue production of 'Two and a Half Men' for the remainder of the season," the companies said.
When she was on location in Chicago shooting Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller, North by Northwest, her co-star, Cary Grant, took her to see a show. “A buzz went up in the audience the moment he was recognized. It was like a wave of adulation rolling round the theater. I found it overwhelming and a little scary. I was thrown by it. And I asked him, ‘How do you handle this, because I know I couldn’t?’ It was almost as if he were talking about someone else when he said, ‘They’ll tell their friends tomorrow that they saw Cary Grant. It makes them happy!’”
A Lone Voice Crying In The Wilderness
The King's Speech" is a heartwarming, "Masterpiece Theatre"-type affair about King George VI, who conquered a serious speech impediment and, with the able assistance of a saucy Aussie therapist, taught himself to address his countrymen in public during their finest hour. This is a very nice story, and even though the film fudges the facts—Edward VIII and his Nazi-loving wife get off pretty easily—it definitely achieves what it sets out to accomplish. The performances are very good, the dialogue is crackling (except when the king stutters) and the lighting could not be better. Moreover, the way Helena Bonham Carter jauntily cocks her stylish chapeaux is enough to convince you that the Queen Mother herself has generously returned from the dead to do a nice little cameo.
That said, "The King's Speech" is basically a film about what positively smashing folks the royals are. It's a film that's infatuated by those awfully swell people up at Balmoral who wear kilts and shoot foxes. Americans used to turn up their noses at this sort of stuff. But that was before "Upstairs, Downstairs" and Merchant & Ivory intoxicated the entire republic with the rustle of crinoline and the shimmer of lace. "The King's Speech" is not, after all, a film about a Welsh coal miner who overcomes a speech impediment. It is not a film about an Aussie doughboy trapped on the beach at Gallipoli who overcomes a speech impediment. It is a film about spiffing chaps and the spiffing folks who help them to be even more spiffing.
Grand Old Party Member: An Interview With Clint Eastwood
If he wasn't a Democrat back in 1992, was he an independent? "No, I was a registered Republican," he confesses happily. "I became a Republican in 1951, the first year I could vote. Eisenhower was running [for president] and we were all in the Army. He ran on the fact that he'd go to Korea [and end the war]. I don't know if that was anything more than a show, but he went there, and the Korean War did end." He then adds with a smile, like the easy-going Eisenhower Republican he is, "But I've supported Democrats along the way."
Hollywood Ending: Why Do Some Movies Get Made?
"The Green Hornet" may not be the end of movies as we know them, though the people who made this atrocity were certainly in there trying. The question—which rises to the level of an industrial mystery—is, trying to do what? Turn a dumb concept into a smart entertainment? Save a dim production by pouring a fortune into stupid effects? (The budget was reportedly as high as $130 million.) Kill the special-effects industry by doing a parody of its excesses? The effect of those effects, and of the cheesy 3-D process pasted on as an afterthought, is simply numbing. The film's only unqualified success is the end title sequence—because it's genuinely stylish, because it looks like it was shot in genuine 3-D and, most of all, because it's the end.
When Todd Met Sallie: Reinventing the Romantic Comedy
When they were top executives at Citigroup Inc., Sallie Krawcheck and Todd Thomson had a well-known rivalry.
Mr. Thomson, Citigroup's swaggering young chief financial officer, would regularly challenge Ms. Krawcheck's performance numbers during her presentations to the management committee, according to Citigroup executives. Ms. Krawcheck, the high-profile head of the Smith Barney unit, would visibly roll her eyes during Mr. Thomson's flashy speeches, in which he would sometimes wear a leather jacket and blare rock music. Both were part of the horse race to succeed Citigroup founder Sanford I. Weill as CEO.
Who Is Salt?
Well-paced, with an excellent supporting performance from Liev Schreiber (who, if Hollywood had a lick of sense, would be cast as the next Jack Ryan), and even patriotic in spots, “Salt” delivers a fine old time at the movies. But it does feel like a relic, like something you watched on HBO a zillion times during the summer of ’83. That’s not necessarily a negative. But it does take something away from what could’ve felt like a more vital, urgent and relevant story.
We currently live in a world packed with very real dangers courtesy of Islamic terrorism, North Korea, Iran and Marxists who with the help of Oliver Stone are sowing seeds of anti-Americanism South of the Border. And still, though set in the present, “Salt” chooses Russians for its villains. Stranger still, they aren’t even present-day Russians but rather Soviet-era villains who want the current Russian president assassinated because of a lingering, two decade-old grudge regarding détente and the loss of the Cold War.
As a film fan willing to suspend as much disbelief as humanly possible, choosing Soviet-era Communists is a bridge too far. The decision to avoid portraying America’s smorgasbord of real antagonists as the film’s fictional ones is such a self-conscious choice that it hangs over the entire movie, especially after a brief opening sequence set in a North Korean prison that ends up feeling like an anachronism. This creative decision probably has something to do with race. After all, Soviets still piqued over glasnost perfectly fit the mold of Hollywood’s favorite villains: old white guys.
First of all, if you haven't seen Salt, you're really missing out on a serious, professional grade action film that combines the best elements of The Fugitive, The Bourne Identity, The Boys From Brazil, and those paranoid Seventies movies like The Parallax View. And forget all the tabloid stuff about Shiloh and Brad Pitt. Angelina Jolie absolutely carries this film, creating a near mythical action hero out of the tough, enigmatic Eve Salt. Like The Fugitive the movie is one long chase, with Salt's loyalty and motivation always in doubt. She is a CIA agent who goes on the lam after a Russian defector fingers her as a mole that is part of a secret KGB sleeper cell activated after decades spent infiltrating the West. Salt constantly challenges the audience's expectations; we see her doing all sorts of "bad" things - beating up NYC cops, assassinating the president of Russia, refusing the flinch at the death of a loved one - yet we root for her because we can't quite believe that Salt really is an Evil Commie Agent. Like The Bourne Identity the action is two-fisted and believable, even as it becomes increasingly wild, building to an incredible climax in the White House Situation Room. Great stuff, and definitely worth seeing in the theater if you can.
So, now Nolte wants us to somehow make Salt into a "contemporary" film with jihadists or what have you? That might work except for one thing. You need to be able to have Angelina Jolie play a Muslim. And not just any Muslim: she has to be one that was raised from birth to infiltrate the US as a carefully trained sleeper agent whose handlers have invested literally decades of time and expense in getting Jolie and her colleagues to the point where they can try to destroy the US. Is that something that Osama Bin Laden can cook up in a cave? No. You would need a state sponsor like Iran or Saudi Arabia for that, which means Jolie would need to be an Arab or a Persian. Are you seeing a problem, yet, or do you need to watch A Mighty Heart again?
The fact is that Jolie would not be able to play a "contemporary" villain because she simply doesn't look like one. (I refuse to consider Caucasian "Muslims" like Chechens or Bosnians). And without Jolie, Salt wouldn't be nearly as good. She doesn't just carry the film; she's in practically every scene. Whatever she's doing, she does it with a ton of confidence and charisma that only the true greats - I'm thinking John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Sean Connery, Gregory Peck, etc. - could manage. Even when she's not on-screen, someone is looking for her or talking about her. Jolie is Salt and it's damn hard to imagine what other female American actress could have played the role with as much star power and brio. Hell, there aren't even many men who could have handled it. (you have to shake your head at the thought of Jolie sharing a bed with someone who stars in movies with names like Babel or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Benjamin Button?? What the hell is that?!)
No, the fact is that a movie should entertain before it does anything else, and Salt accomplishes that worthy goal with gusto. I'll let Syriana fans get their rocks off with "contemporary reasonance."
But Will It Play In Jakarta?
When director Adam McKay pitched a sequel to his 2004 hit movie "Anchorman," he thought it would be a no-brainer for Hollywood.
The $20 million comedy, starring Steve Carell and Will Ferrell, grossed more than $90 million at the box office. But only $5 million of that came from ticket sales abroad. Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures nixed the sequel this spring, fearing the comedy's uniquely American brand of humor wouldn't play abroad.
"At the end of the day, the economics of the business have changed—there is so much more pressure to play globally, and we couldn't fight that," says Mr. McKay.
The rising clout of international audiences is a sea change for Hollywood. Decades ago, a movie's foreign box office barely registered with studio executives. Now, foreign ticket sales represent nearly 68% of the roughly $32 billion global film market, up from roughly 58% a decade ago, according to Screen Digest Cinema Intelligence Service.
The Last Pictureshow
The folks who made the new GI Joe movie have not made their masterwork available for critic's screenings. Movie buffs love to chuckle over such naked displays of authorial guilt - hey, they must know it sucks, too, right? - but, frankly what's the point of having the W$J's movie critic spend 2 hours watching a movie inspired by a toy line? The review practically writes itself, and the W$J's readers are not likely to have watched the movie anyway. Still, the W$J's Joe Morganstern cares enough to try to write a review based on nothing more than the trailer: GI Joe The Rise of Cobra
Like, I said, the review practically writes itself. A better focus may have been to ask why the producers of "GI Joe," the original "real American hero," felt compelled to assemble "the best operatives in the world," rather than an all-American crew of stock archetypes and ethnic stereotypes like Hollywood used to do for B-17 bomber crews.The first thing that happens in the trailer involves the Eiffel Tower, which is hit by a missile and makes a splash by falling into the Seine. I don’t like movies that trash the Eiffel Tower, although I loved “The Lavender Hill Mob,” in which Alec Guinness’s mild-mannered bank clerk smuggles gold bars out of England by turning them into Eiffel Tower paperweights.
The second thing involves an actor intoning, voice-over: “We have never faced a threat like this. A team is being assembled. They’re the best operatives in the world. When all else fails, we don’t.” Even apart from the actor pronouncing “assembled” as “assimbled,” the speech suggests a sound clip from an early rehearsal of a junior-high-school pageant. I don’t like movies with bad actors reading dumb lines.
Morganstern likes to declare that movies based on toys are a sign of cultural decline, but surely the de-patriating of an American icon - even if in toy form - is a much more potent symbol of such decline.
Untragically Hip
Even from beyond the grave, the Mitchell Brothers continue their crusade to ruin as many lives as possible and lower the tone of the overall culture. First, Jim and Artie set up their peep show/striptease "Theatre." Then they took porn movies mainstream with "Deep Throat." Then, Jim murdered Artie (while trying to "save" him) and spent 3 years in prison. Jim finally gave up the ghost a few years back, although the Mitchell's Bros. Theater continues to do gang busters business.
All the while, the Brothers were literally the toast of the town, as much a part of SF's "free wheeling" culture as bath houses and the Grateful Dead. They even had political patrons (just like Jim Jones!); ex-DA Terence Hallinan was their attorney, for example, and Willie Brown showed up at Jim's funeral. If SF has "guys behind the guys," surely the Mitchells were among that select group. We thought we would be spared any more from the Mitchells when Jim died, but the ghost is still in the machine: Porn King's Son Held On Murder Charge
The Mitchell Brothers family, which pushed all things X-rated into San Francisco's social consciousness and was later rocked by fratricide, has recorded a tragic new chapter with the arrest of the son of one of the porn kings on charges of bludgeoning to death the mother of his young daughter.One thing you have to realize is that Jim Jr. is a rich kid - a trust fund baby who "owns" the Mitchell Bros. Threatre through a trust set up by his dad. The Mitchells were a millionaires, and Jr. grew up very comfortably in Marin County. So spare me the "another tragic chapter for the Mitchell family"-style headlines. People have been winking and chortling over the Mitchells for decades even as the sleaze and criminality of the whole family has become more and more obvious.James Raphael Mitchell of Pittsburg, the 27-year-old son of Jim Mitchell, allegedly beat Danielle Keller to death with a baseball bat Sunday evening at the home she shared with her mother in Novato, then fled with the couple's daughter - who turned 1 year old that day.
With police around the state hunting for him, Mitchell was arrested just before midnight after he pulled off Interstate 80 in Citrus Heights (Sacramento County). His daughter, Samantha Mitchell, was unharmed.
Only SF's progressive Left could simultaneously lionize a pair of violent pornographers on one side of the City while standing up for "exploited" women on the other. By contrast, "hypocritical" conservatives only have to worry about the occasional adulterer. I know which side most of us would choose, if a time came for choosing.
The Money-Pitt
Bay Area baseball fans got more than a little excited when they learned that Steven Soderburgh was developing a movie version of "Moneyball" starring Brad Pitt. We wondered, "who will play Art Howe?" "Would the A's uniforms be authentically green & yellow?" and other important matters. But, it's all come crashing down. The suits at the studio pulled the plug just five days before shooting was to begin: Money Worries Kill A-List Film At the Last Minute
The pro-Soderbergh spin is that those dumb beancounters got scared because he was making an "art" movie, not a commercial one. The studio says, "Hey, the guy showed up with a new script that was completely different from what we were expecting." No one seems to have considered a more fundamental question: could "Moneyball" the book been made into an interesting/entertaining "Moneyball" the movie? I think the answer is "No."Just days before shooting was to begin, Sony Pictures pulled the plug on"Moneyball,” a major film project starring Brad Pitt and being directed by Steven Soderbergh. The last-minute demise of a prestige picture is a rare spectacle in Hollywood — one that is painful, expensive and damaging to all involved. This one is estimated to have cost Sony $10 million in script development and costs like scouting locations.
But such disasters may become more common as an increasingly nervous film business comes to terms with a sharp decline in home video revenue and with the diminishing leverage of even the most popular A-list stars, like Mr. Pitt.
“They’re much more careful about doing a movie just because a star wants to do it,” said Eric Weissmann, a longtime entertainment lawyer who recalled the days when Warner Brothers made a film, “An Enemy of the People,” based on an Ibsen play, largely because Steve McQueen wanted to do it.
Representatives of Sony, Mr. Pitt and Mr. Soderbergh all declined to discuss “Moneyball.” But accounts from more than a dozen people involved with the film, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid damaging professional relationships, described a process in which the heady rush toward production was halted by a studio suddenly confronted by plans for something artier and more complex than bargained for.
This is not to say that the "Moneyball" story isn't interesting. Small market baseball team takes on the big-money teams using innovative player evaluation techniques, rather than simply looking to sign the biggest a**hole power hitter on the market? Sounds like a great idea - for a book. But, the "Moneyball" A's never won a World Series, had few - if any - interesting personalities, did not fill McAfee stadium with fans, etc. There is simply no drama there. (Actually, the fact that the "Moneyball" A's never won a World Series is reason enough not to make this movie. I am pretty sure that it is an iron-clad rule of baseball movies that the team win the league championship at the end of the story). Contrast this with the LaRussa-era A's with their quirky/genius pitchers, juiced up Bash Brothers, tyrannical manager, and World Series win. Someone could make a great baseball movie with that material. But a movie about sabremetrics? Unless Soderbergh was planning to have Billy Beane get involved in some John Nash-style mad scenes, it's hard to see the entertainment you could find there.
Even if you could make a movie out of "Moneyball," I don't think Soderbergh is the right man for the job. His style tends to be a little dry, which would not work well with a baseball movie. Also, I know this is heresy, but his skills as a filmmaker have visibly declined over the last 5 years since his peerless "The Limey"/"Out of Sight"/ "Oceans 11"/"Traffic" run. And, not to be insulting, but he looks like he might have some "issues" regarding jocks dating back to junior high school. I wouldn't trust him to know how to make a decent baseball movie, as he shows little sign of having any feel for the game and the players.
(Not only that, Soderbergh and the studio demonstrate their baseball cluelessness by completely missing the biggest baseball story from the last 10 years: "blue collar" team with a passionate fan base, but which has a history of runner-up status, hires a boy-genius GM and Bill James, the actual inventor of sabremetrics, to put together a team of quasi-mythical characters that defeats the Empire, and wins the World Series. Pretty close to the "Moneyball" storyline, if you ask me, and I suspect a lot more people would want to see a movie about the Boston Red Sox, than the Oakland A's. Have your people call my people, Steve.)
Soderbergh was planning to spend $60 million on this movie, which is about $40 million more than this story deserves (query to "progressive" Soderbergh: how much of that money was going to go to an expensive unionized crew?). Old Hollywood "magic" was often accomplished on much lower budgets, adjusted for inflation. Soderbergh himself has made excellent movies on shoestrings. Now, he indulges himself with 4-hour biopics about jerk-communist Che Guevara and baseball movies about the dullest aspects of baseball. Perhaps this is a wake-up call to Soderbergh, and others like him, to try to rediscover the artistic virtues of thrift.
Take the B Train
Grunt. Someone has remade the B movie classic "The Taking of Pelham 123" into a slam-bang Travolta-Denzel summer tentpole. Manhatten Transfer: The Remaking of Pelham 123
Mr. Scott admitted that before working on the movie — a retelling of John Godey’s best-selling New York City subway hostage thriller, made into a classic 1974 movie — he had never been in the subway. “Well, when I say never, I mean maybe once or twice quite drunk at night, when I couldn’t find a taxi,” said Mr. Scott, who was born in England and lives in Los Angeles. But he had been adamant from the time he oined the project that he would do it only if he could film as much of it as possible inside the actual New York subway system, which never stops running, not even for John Travolta, who plays an angry, neck-tattooed hijacker, or Denzel Washington, who plays a doughy, good-guy train dispatcher. (A 1998 television remake, filmed in Toronto, used subway cars that looked suspiciously Canadian.)
Jesus, what's next? A remake of "Breakheart Pass," starring Johnnie Depp? A "grittier" "Horse Soldiers," starring Russell Crowe? (Actually, both of those would kick ass. Cancel my lunch and get Robert Zemekis on the line!)
The real question is whether the new movie will have everything that made the original so good: gratuitious New Yawk attitudes, prodigous cursing, politically incorrect humor about women and minorities, the earnest depiction of transit people going about their business, and the near perfect blend of comedy and violence (the original has a lot of very funny lines, and the occasional violence is brutal and matter-of-fact). Somehow, I doubt any of this will be present.
There was one funny thing in the linked article. For all the talk of Our Crumbling Infrastructure, it is not crumbling fast enough. In fact, efforts to modernize the NYC subways proved ... inconvenient for Les Artistes:
Chris Seagers, the movie’s production designer, said transit officials even allowed the moviemakers to photograph inside the subway’s top-secret new control room in Midtown Manhattan, the largest rail control center in the world, so that they could recreate it — though the actual center was so sleek that Mr. Seagers ended up giving the set a rougher, more municipal patina.“It was almost like the British Library in there, it was so beautiful,” he said of the real control center. “It seemed almost too Hollywood
Your movie ticket dollars at work.
The Squid and the Whale Attack
For decades, independent movie producers in the U.S. have routinely been able to fund their films by selling the rights to distribute them abroad. If the production featured a big-name actor or director, the rights were often sold before the movie was finished, providing producers with 50% or more of their production budget.
But today, due to factors ranging from the credit crunch to burgeoning online piracy, even the biggest names aren't always enough to sell an American film abroad.
Encounters At The End Of The World
This is a rare year in which I actually managed to watch one of the nominees for Best Documentary before the Oscars broadcast. It was "Encounters At The End of The World," Werner Herzog's documentary about the people and fauna that live at the South Pole.
The film is probably best known for the underwater footage showing the odd, alien life forms that live out their lives essentially trapped under ice. The ice lets in quite a bit of light, so this footage is shot with an other-worldly glow. But, it should be mentioned that all of this footage was shot by avant-guitarist Henry Kaiser, whose day job is doing this sort of diving for bio research. Herzog has used this footage elsewhere in his work, but it is always worth seeing
The majority of the movie will be familiar to anyone who has seen one of Herzog's documentaries. Herzog narrates in his inimitable German accent, and is not shy about inserting himself into the story. He interviews the eccentric researchers and wanderers who are drawn to the US research outpost at the South Pole. Everyone Herzog talks to is highly intelligent and many have a touch of whimsy about them. Back in the States, they are undoubtedly Phd's and lecturers, moving quietly through the nation's university system. But at the Pole, they push themselves to the absolute extreme just to do research on seal milk. And, some of these folks also show signs of darker edges. A penguin researcher Herzog talks to seems to go slightly mad as he talks to Herzog, for example.
Although Herzog's work often touches on the environment, he is no Green. His great theme is that nature is too wild and untamable for humans to ever truly conquor. At one point he gripes about Western Greens who fight to save every silly little snail on the planet, but allow human languages to disappear without a trace.
However, Herzog has also caught the apocalypse bug that has taken hold among Greens and scientists. Everyone Herzog talks to in the movie believes that the world is coming to an end through global warming. After watching these highly intelligent people living in extreme conditions, it's not hard to see why they would start to think apocalyptic thoughts like this. Not sure if I'm convinced this should provide the basis for the "Green Economy" that we supposedly need to invest in.
of course, this movie didn't win an Oscar. For one thing, it grows progressively downbeat as the film goes on and the assorted researchers start to get a little nuts. And, Herzog's theme that nature is essentially untamable and inimicable to humans is not a message the typical America Green wants to hear.
