Movies opening this week
The Eye
Strange Wilderness
Below the jump: Over Her Dead Body
Gossip Morning
Cecily files via email:
I am in LA, and the gossip is that in LA, celebrity gossip is a normal part of local news coverage. Go figure. On the 6 am news I have heard about Britney Spears (I am at UCLA today too, but not in the psych ward), Star Jones, and paparazzi laws!
- Entertainment Tonight was to run a video of Heath Ledger at a drug-laden party (though apparently there is no footage of him actually doing drugs), but Hollywood publicists and stars pressured the outfit to drop the video. Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman, Josh Brolin, and Sarah Jessica Parker all sent emails.
- Grey’s Anatomy star Justin Chambers recently checked himself into the same UCLA psych ward as Spears. Chambers was suffering from “exhaustion” and a “sleep disorder.”
- Actress Julianna Marguiles has given birth to a boy, Kieran.
Phyllis Stein’s Review of Trailers
I saw the original Funny Games and I HATED it. A split pea green movie about a family vacation taken down by two sadistic, menacing, sociopathic teenage torturers, this was not the movie to see on a date, with a friend, a loved one, alone, or ever again. It wasn’t that it was so scary or effective, but that it was seriously bent, brutal, excessive, and in love with itself. Now the shot by shot remake by the original’s German director Michael Haneke is gaining buzz from star power with Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, and Michael Pitt, and I can’t emphasize enough how much I will not be going to see this movie.
I also probably won’t go see Bonneville, though not because it looks so god awful but because a movie about middle-aged women is bound to be in the theaters for about eight minutes. Starring two people (Jessica Lange and Kathy Bates) and one alien (Joan Allen), Bonneville is about three friends who take a road trip to deliver the ashes of Lange’s dead husband to California. The trailer makes a gauzy picture of friendship, self-discovery, and other such drivel, but there is something to say for Kathy Bates doing anything on screen. She makes drivel sing.
Reel Geezers: Marcia and Lorenzo review There Will Be Blood
Phyllis Stein’s pals Marcia and Lorenzo, aka Reel Geezers, are fast becoming the Mole’s favorite film critics. Here they offer the best review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood that we’ve heard or read.
When Quentin Tarantino gets upset, he talks like a character from a Quentin Tarantino movie
And here, from the recent Sundance Film Festival, is proof. I don’t know whether the shooter was a paparazzo or a fan/blogger–a distinction that Tarantino himself rarely makes, either, from the sound of it.
Gilliam may finish Ledger’s last movie with computer-generated Heath
When Heath Ledger died midway through the shooting of director Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, the first rumor was that the project would die; the second, that Ledger’s part might be reshot with Johnny Depp. Now, as Christopher Campbell notes at Cinematical, another actor in the movie (Christopher Plummer) is suggesting the movie may be finished using CGI effects to reproduce Ledger in the remaining scenes.
We’ll forgo the Re-Animator jokes and simply note that the movie business has come a long way since the ’50s, when Bela Lugosi died at the start of production of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space and was replaced by a chiropractor holding a cape across his face.
More: This Terry Teachout essay about how death can boost an artist’s career appeared in the Wall Street Journal a few days before Ledger’s death, but Amazon DVD sales figures prove it goes for Ledger, too.
Buzz trailer: Sundance hit Smart People
The movie, which stars Dennis Quaid, Ellen Page, Thomas Haden Church and Sarah Jessica Parker, opens nationally on April 11. Read reviews from Sundance at First Showing and /Film.
The MPAA needs a new shill in Congress, and a new accountant
California Democrat Howard Berman, the man known as Congressman Hollywood during his time as chair of the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property, will likely leave that post to chair the much more prestigious House Committee on Foreign Affairs (whose current chair, Tom Lantos, is retiring for health reasons), according to Nate Anderson at ArsTechnica.
As chair of the intellectual property subcommittee, writes Anderson, “Berman has consistently backed stronger IP rights for all industries that want them. He’s been behind the push to make radio stations pay performers for playing their music (instead of just paying the songwriters) and has backed the MPAA’s campaign against colleges and universities. Berman has also argued for “reforming” the DMCA on the grounds that it did not go far enough, and he has backed the PRO-IP Act, a bill that Google’s top copyright lawyer has called the most ‘outrageously gluttonous IP bill ever introduced in the US.’”
One possible replacement: Virginia Democrat Rick Boucher, whom Anderson called “a voice of sanity in a cacophony of idiocy.”
More intellectual property news from Movieland: The Motion Picture Association of America has admitted that the estimate of movie thefts via campus file-sharing in a 2005 report it released was three times too high.
New Movies Opening This Week
Untraceable
How She Move
Sneak peek: Trailer for Steve Carell’s Get Smart movie
Have you noticed how badly Steve (cash in while you can) Carell’s taste in movie projects blows? Not every time out, but the ratio so far is not encouraging. Hard to know what to make of his upcoming movie version of Get Smart, the 1960s sitcom created by Mel Brooks that starred Don Adams.
But there’s a sneak preview (with Spanish subtitles) at YouTube. See what you think…
Phyllis Stein’s Review of Trailers
As an old and cranky person, I am sick of movies about precocious boy teenagers, their eccentric mothers, and the uptight millieus in which they inevitably live. It’s more of the same in Charlie Bartlett, about a clever troublemaker boy who gets kicked out of so many tony schools he is forced to go public, makes friends by becoming the crank psychiatrist who dishes out prescription drugs to all the misfits who pour their hearts out to him, and wins the hearts of a kindly principal and a cute rebel girl. Barf.
In another fairy tale, Penelope, a girl is cursed with the nose of a pig. Starring Christina Ricci and Reese Witherspoon, who sports a hairdo straight of Alicia Silverstone’s Excess Baggage, this is a movie that was made at least two years ago and has been languishing ever since. It was the first movie Witherspoon made after winning an Oscar, and I think it’s meant to showcase the fact that she can be snappy even though she’s a serious actress. Regardless, the reason to see this is to revel in Catherine O’Hara’s remarkable ability to be the most appealing unappealing person on screen.
Pics and gossip from the X-Files movie sequel
I didn’t even realize there was going to be another X-Files movie until I saw Christopher Campbell’s post at Cinematical, but I’m all for it. Anything that keeps David Duchovny from shooting more episodes of Californication is all to the good.
New on DVD: Confessions of a Superhero
I’ve heard good things about Matt Ogens’s documentary on four scraping would-be actors in Los Angeles who make their living playing costumed superheroes outside Grauman’s theater, and today it’s out on DVD. [More background at the movie’s website.]
Below: the Confessions trailer
New Movies Opening This Week
If you brave the cold, it should be warm at the movies…
27 Dresses
Phyllis Stein’s Review of Trailers
I have a young woman friend who knows something about infertility treatments and the comedy that ensues. So I had her watch the trailer for the new Tina Fey/Amy Poehler comedy Baby Mama, about a successful business woman who wants to have a baby but can’t get pregnant (Fey) so she hires a woman (Poehler) to do it for her. This is what she had to say:
“Well, Phyllis, I guess you can’t expect a comedy to be accurate about things like inseminations, injectable drugs, and surrogacy, and really, why should it be? (Not that funny and accurate are mutually exclusive, even in this case.) What got me more is how the surrogate here, like in so many other Hollywood productions where one woman is giving a baby to another, is made stupid, ignorant, and the butt of all the worst jokes. Just like in Friends or Sex and the City or pretty much any other thing I can think of except for Juno (which I did not love–sorry America!). You can tell from the start that the moral of this movie will be: How two very different women discovered they are not so different after all. That said, Poehler and Fey can make a pretty good pair, so jokes better be great. Otherwise, this movie is going to SUCK.”
In other trailers, Strange Wilderness has a bunch of dorkus TV people making a nature program so banal and stupid even the TV executives are ready to can it. Steve Zahn is funny, but it looks like it’s about time to lay off the botox and other prettifying agents.
Joel Hodgson et al. set sail on the Cinematic Titanic
We reported a couple of months ago that Joel Hodgson and a number of his colleagues from Mystery Science Theater 3000 (Trace Beaulieu, J. Elvis Weinstein, Frank Conniff and Mary Jo Pehl) would be launching a new movie-riffing site/service, Cinematic Titanic, and now the crew has released its first riffed-up feature film, The Oozing Skull, on DVD ($15.94 at CT).
Here’s the promotional trailer.
Campaign ‘08: So who are Hollywood’s Republicans?
Perez Hilton has a partial list of this year’s political donations from celebs, and as usual it’s dominated by Democrats. There were a few bucks going the other way, however: Kelsey Grammer (Giuliani), SNL producer and both-ways giver Lorne Michaels (pictured; gave to John McCain/GOP; Chris Dodd, Dems), Adam Sandler (Giuliani), and producer of big, shitty motion pictures Jerry Bruckheimer (McCain).
More: Check out the Hollywood Congress of Republicans website, a veritable who’s-who of nobody’s-anybody; and the Wall Street Journal published this opinion piece foretelling a great GOP breakout in Hollywood in 2004. Among the names named: “In addition to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tinseltown rebels include Bo Derek, Bruce Willis, Tom Selleck, Dennis Miller, Mel Gibson, Chuck Norris, Ben Stein, Pat Sajak, Kelsey Grammer, Danny Aiello, Patricia Heaton and James Woods.”
Film Threat picks the top 50 lost movies of all time
Phil Hall of Film Threat Blogs has compiled an interesting list of the most legendary “lost films,” movies (or outtakes) that have been misplaced or thrown away through the years. There’s a lot here that will be unfamiliar to any non-cinephile, but the list is sprinkled with stories concerning movies everyone knows:
“Oklahoma!” – The James Dean Audition. (1954, USA). The 16mm test footage of Dean auditioning for the role of Curly (playing opposite Rod Steiger as Jud) was thrown away after Gordon MacRae was cast in the role.
“The Wizard of Oz” – The Jitterbug Number (1939, USA). This single sequence cost $80,000 to produce and five weeks to shoot, but it was removed from the final version of the MGM classic. The soundtrack recording and 16mm home movie footage of the sequence remain.
“Taxi Driver” – The original climactic shootout (1976, USA). The MPAA forced Martin Scorsese’s to mute the colors in the film’s original bloody climax. The footage from the original full-color climax was thrown away and never seen again.
Movies: The critic who can’t say no
Erik Childress at efilmcritic has named the winner of his annual Michael Medved Bag of Douche Memorial Award, and it’s Pete Hammond of Maxim (pictured), who liked a staggering 70 percent of the movies he saw in 2007.
Skip the essay, though: It’s Hammond’s gleaming blurbage that’s worth a look:
Everyone should see it. (In the Shadow of the Moon)
A must-see movie. (The Number 23)
It’s a must-see movie! (The TV Set)
A must-see film that audiences will love. (The Bucket List)
Do yourself a big favor and put this movie at the top of your must-see list. (Starter for 10)
A movie you must see. (Reign Over Me)
Do not miss this film. (Zodiac)
This is a movie not to be missed (A Mighty Heart)
Movies: Kevin Smith blogs about his new project
The working title is Zack and Miri Make a Porno; it stars Seth Rogen, Jason Mewes, and Elizabeth Banks; and it started in pre-production rehearsals last week.
Kevin Smith blogged about it last Thursday in a long note that reveals little about this project and lots about how Smith’s approach to movie-making has changed in 15 years’ time:
“It’s weird to work one way for so long, and slowly realize it’s not necessary anymore; that it was just something you did when you didn’t know any better. I hired pros; aside from on-set tweaking and an extra take or two, they don’t need to be broken like wild horses or worked like puppets. Those days are behind me now. Now I spend more time thinking about/working on what the flick’s gonna look like - which, I guess, should be the primary job of the director.”
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