Not Coming to a Theater Near You
You know him?”
“Not socially. His name’s Jaws, he kills people.
Maybe it was the somber mood of the day – I watched Stalag 17 way back on November 11th – but I was left feeling puzzled and vaguely disapproving of this Second World War POW-camp classic. The story follows captured American soldier Sgt. J.J. Sefton, accused by his fellow prisoners of spying for the Germans after two of his fellows are killed in an escape attempt. Alright so far. But where The Great Escape leavened a very serious story with occasional doses of humor, Stalag 17 seems to do the opposite, filling the bulk of the movie with goofy sidekicks and light-hearted quips, interrupted by the occasional burst of deadly machine gun fire from the camp guards or a sudden outbreak of self-policing violence among the prisoners. I wonder if the movie’s proximity to the end of the war might be a factor – if humor was the best tool for tackling a subject that was still so fresh? In any case, if you like your war movies solemn and reverent, this may not be your best bet.
by Eva Holland | Source: Paramount DVD
18 Jan 2010 4:37 PM | Comments (1)
King Creole isn’t your standard Elvis flick. Sure, there are girls and baddies and bad one-liners – and, of course, a soundtrack’s worth of songs – but the whole thing is a few notches darker than, say, Blue Hawaii. 23 year-old Presley seethes convincingly as Danny Fisher, a high school flunk-out caught up in the crime and intrigue of 1950s New Orleans. The interspersing of death and despair with some truly goofy moments can be jarring, but the music – mostly a mixture of big-band NOLA jazz and early rock’n’roll – and the black-and-white French Quarter footage alone were enough to keep me happy throughout.
by Eva Holland | Source: Paramount DVD
18 Jan 2010 4:11 PM | Submit Comment
It’s 1986. Landover, Maryland. Judas Priest is playing the USAir Arena. Dokken opening. Two guys with cameras hit the tailgate. The short documentary, really just an extended montage, is exactly what you would expect.
And yeah, there’s a lot of implied condescending sniggering, a lot of scoffing at the mullets and rolling eyes at the shirtlessness and giggling at the unknowingly hopeless women who want to “jump Rob Halford’s bones”. But the thing I took away most from the 20-minute gonzo cult treasure was this:
My god, there are NO fat people there.
So who are we, with the advantage of hindsight, to feel superior?
by Katherine Follett | Source: hulu.com
17 Jan 2010 7:52 PM | Comments (2)
In Miguel Arteta’s Youth in Revolt, based on a series of short stories of C.D. Payne, Michael Cera plays Nick Twisp, a winsome sixteen year old hung up on Sheeni Saunders, a girl with fundamentalist Christian parents and a thing for Jean-Paul Belmondo. In order to be with her, he needs to get kicked out of his mom’s house, which means transforming himself into a juvenile delinquent named François and committing grand arson. This conceit allows Cera to take a novel approach to the problem of typecasting by playing a variation on the ineffectual-nice-guy character we know from Arrested Development, Superbad and Juno as well as the alpha male alter ego of same. This lets Cera show off what he does best — he’s the reigning king of the flustered, awkward reaction — while also stretching out in some impressive new directions: turns out he can do sociopathic intensity too! Luckily the film is able to match him in both sweetness and rage. Recurring references to Sheeni’s crush suggest a desire to make a teen Breathless, but Arteta’s direction has a controlled wildness and a knack for casual blasphemy that suggests Luis Buñuel remaking Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Rarely has a comedy surprised me so often without once violating its own tone or logic. The icing on the cake is the squad of expert character actors who inhabit the film’s margins: Steve Buscemi, Fred Willard, Mary Kay Place, M. Emmet Walsh and Justin Long are all familiar enough faces, but they’re rarely as funny or effective as they are here.
by Evan Kindley | Source: 35mm print
15 Jan 2010 5:21 PM | Submit Comment
The third (and hopefully not last) entry in the Transporter series opens with a scene unthinkable in either of the two previous movies: Frank Martin (Jason Statham) and Inspector Tarconi (Francois Berleand) in a boat, fishing on a lake. The short-lived tranquility of the scene is something of an anomaly in the series, as is the actual meeting of Martin and Tarconi (something that was always thwarted in Transporter 2). The apex of the joke, however, is Martin’s costume: instead of his iconic chauffeur’s uniform, he appears in full fishing regalia. The joke relies on the success of the franchise, and ultimately confirms Statham’s star status. His persona—hardboiled with a hint of sarcastic charm—is so solidified that a mere change of costume and scenery can immediately evoke laughter.
Overall, Transporter 3 is a vast improvement over Transporter 2, but the first film is still the best. Increased emphasis on Statham’s character (no Matthew Modine, no annoying children), and the chase scenes are more grounded and rely less on hyperbolic stunts. The plot gimmick that Statham can’t stray too far from his car (or else the bomb attached to his write will explode) is an interesting constraint that keeps the story focused and saves it from excessive, unnecessary digressions.
At this point in the series, you could put Statham in a car and have him chase after most anything and I’d watch it for 90 minutes.
by Cullen Gallagher | Source: Lionsgate DVD
13 Jan 2010 11:21 AM | Comments (1)
The debut feature by “In Da Club” music video director Philip G. Atwell is a confusing yet exciting collision of the FBI, Chinese Triads, and Yakuza. Jason Statham plays a determined FBI agent looking to avenge the death of his partner by a deadly assassin known only as Rogue, played by Jet Li. Rogue’s mission, it seems, is to double cross every organized crime and government agency on the face of the planet. Ancient stolen treasure (gilded horse statues!) is passing hands, the perfect example of a MacGuffin that no viewer could care less about. Instead, viewers are like the FBI in the movie: they enjoy watching Rogue single-handedly wipe out all the Triads, basically doing their work for them. Statham and Li have the right amount of charisma for their roles: enough humor to make their one-liners entertaining but not cheesy, and enough swagger to seem undeniably badass.
by Cullen Gallagher | Source: Lionsgate DVD
13 Jan 2010 10:36 AM | Submit Comment
1984 was probably the year I made contact with the cinema (I was seven at the time), and this film is among the first I can remember seeing in a movie theater, along with Ghostbusters, Star Trek III, Gremlins, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I suppose 2010 was an “event” film upon its release and therefore something my parents thought I ought to be exposed to. But of course, twenty-six years later, in the very year from which the film takes its title, one really only remembers 2010 as a marginal sequel to one of the greatest movies of all time, one whose rather party-pooping function is to explain away all the forward-thinking psychedelic weirdness of ‘68 and to replace it with something vaguely Spielbergian.
Of course, much had happened to the Hollywood space opera in the interim between Kubrick’s film and Arthur C. Clarke’s 1982 novel (which he tellingly subtitled Odyssey Two), so it’s no shock that the shadows of E.T. and Close Encounters loom fairly large here. What is surprising is that the writer-director-cinematographer(!) commanding this high-profile follow-up should be Peter Hyams. He had earned his sci-fi street cred, such as it was, with 1977’s Capricorn One, a blunt and amateurish film that has the distinction of being the most anti-NASA/space program film ever made. (It’s also a rogue’s gallery of desperate, sagging late-70s B-listers, including Elliott Gould, James Brolin, Brenda Vaccaro, Sam Waterston, Karen Black, O.J., and Telly Savalas.) Hyams partly made up for it with the rather taut, High Noon-derived space station thriller Outland (with Sean Connery), and indeed the best scenes in 2010 involve similarly tense spacewalking, but such beginnings hardly place one in an ideal position to follow in the footsteps of the greatest science fiction film, like, ever.
To make matters worse, Hyams penned his own screenplay based on the Clarke novel, peppering the entire film with banal expository voiceover, often in the form of reverb-heavy letters to and from Earth. The closing lines, from Roy Scheider’s Dr. Heywood Floyd, inaptly convey the gravitas of mankind’s first contact with an extraterrestrial other as a sort of intergalactic rental agreement:
You can tell your children of the day when everyone looked up and realized that they were only tenants of this world. We have been given a new lease and a warning from the landlord.
The dialogue (including one memorable exchange between Scheider and John Lithgow about ballpark hot dogs) is also disastrously corny, but Hyams has a good cast, and in any case they’re bound to be more conventionally sympathetic than Kubrick’s characters. To borrow Network’s archetype-descriptors, Scheider is the crusty, but benign astrophysicist who enlists Lithgow and Bob Balaban (as HAL’s programmer/best friend) to figure out just what happened on the Discovery’s mission to Jupiter. Because this is the 1980s, when all serious movies where obliged to address the threat of nuclear annihilation in a syrupy, toothless manner, the Americans must pal up with the Russkies to figure out the whole business, occasioning supporting roles from Helen Mirren as a hot Russian cosmonaut named Kirbuk (Kubrick backwards, sorta), MacGyver’s boss Dana Elcar as a somewhat unconvincing Soviet bureaucrat, and of course Elya Baskin, the go-to Russian character-actor of the mid-80s and beyond the infinite.
But the film definitely has its moments. For all of the flaws in the film’s dorky writing and truly ham-fisted editing, Clarke’s story is pretty good, and whatever cosmic strangeness is explained is done so via Keir Dullea, strolling through the film with a creepy grin on his face, vaguely prepping us for “something wonderful.” He visits his wife (Mary Jo Deschanel, mother to both Donna Hayward and Zooey Deschanel) through the TV and spirits into his bed-ridden mother’s hospital room to brush her hair, then has an odd conversation with Scheider while morphing from man to old man to really old man to fetus, à la 2001’s final sequence. HAL also gets some great scenes, including some fun stuff with Balaban who wakes him up from slumber only to later convince him to commit A.I. suicide. (Earlier, Balaban has an icky, semi-romantic scene with another computer, the SAL-9000, huskily voiced by an uncredited Candace Bergen.)
Still, the lingering problem is that Hyams is no Kubrick – or Spielberg – and the amount of attention to verisimilitude in the prior film is sorely missed here. Spacecraft soar across the surface of Jupiter with absurdly unconvincing speed and a great deal of noise. Didn’t everybody know, at least by 2010 if not 1984, that in space no one can hear you talk about hot dogs or nuclear war? You would think that Hyams, given a new lease on Kubrick and Clarke’s vision, would’ve at least been told by the landlords to keep the noise down.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: MGM/UA DVD / Netflix VOD
02 Jan 2010 2:31 PM | Comments (5)
