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What’s your favorite scary movie?
C’mon, it’s Halloween. How could I not ask the time-honored question: What’s your favorite scary movie?
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Home > Blogs > Movies & TV blog > Archives > 2005 > October
October 2005
‘King Kong’ is three hours long
E! Online confirmed Thursday via Yahoo! News that Peter Jackson’s much-anticipated King Kong remake is 3 hours long.
Variety reported Wednesday that the move to release Jackson’s full-length cut — a decision made after Universal execs flew to New Zealand to see it — will up the movie’s cost to a whopping $207 million.
I’ll give you a minute to take that in.
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From Rocky to Rambo, it’s time for Stallone to stop trying
Just ten days after it was widely reported he would write and direct the SIXTH Rocky movie, the Associated Press is reporting that Sylvester Stallone will reprise the title role in a new Rambo picture — the fourth, for those of you who lost count at zero.
Obviously, the demand is there. I mean, if the American people didn’t have an appetite for watching the dreams, ideals and aspirations of a 59-year-old man shattered slowly, painfully, and disgracefully, they wouldn’t have re-elected George W. Bush. (Fun Fact! Sly and Dubya share the exact same birthday: July 6, 1946.)
Is this really necessary? If Stallone wants a comeback, why not do it Kirstie Alley–style? Self-deprecation isn’t sexy, but it gets the job done. How about a documentary about Stallone’s mid-life crisis, and how he tried to take it out on the world by reviving two franchises no one ever cared about.
Dude, why can’t you just buy a sports car like everyone else?
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‘North Country’ obvious, ineffective
OK, so I know there are probably people who still think and behave like everyone in North Country, but I guess I’m lucky enough not to know any of them.
The movie by Niki Caro (Whale Rider) posits Charlize Theron as a mine-worker who sues her company after she and her co-workers endure extensive sexual harrassment, on the order of near-rape, feces-covered walls, all sorts of name-calling, and semen-stained sweatshirts. One woman is even toppled over in a Port-a-John.
Watching all this unfold is not unlike watching a movie about the Holocaust, or Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, about the Columbine massacre, or The Passion of the Christ: There is a caustic sense of inevitability about it. These women will be tortured by barbarians. In the end, they will win their lawsuit, and Clarence Thomas will be confirmed to the Supreme Court.
Is watching this movie supposed to serve as some sort of atonement? Watch what these women were put through! When he saw The Pianist in 2002, Esquire critic Mike D’Angelo complained, “Now, I understand that this story needs to be told again and again and again — but really, must it be told in quite so pedestrian a fashion?”
Theron’s Josie is a sympathetic character, but there are no gray areas that reflect real life situations which might actually be useful to everyday people. The actions of the men she works with are indefensible. Until she sues, she’s a lifelong victim. In this movie, you can count the number of good, decent people on one hand — everyone else is pure evil. Movies have the power to make us consider our own lives — our words, actions, and our sense of humanity. But that can only happen if we see ourselves in the characters onscreen.
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Barb is so right: Hitchcock marathon to die for
I’d planned on posting about the upcoming TCM Hitchcock marathon, but Barb has done the heavy-lifting for me over in Chick Chat. Check out her post with the details.
If you’ve never seen a Hitchcock movie, you really don’t know anything about movies. Up until recently, Rear Window was my favorite movie of all time. Vertigo is usually pegged as one of the ten best movies ever. And don’t miss Strangers on a Train, Shadow of a Doubt (Hitch’s favorite), Rebecca, Rope, Frenzy, and The Lodger. But: No North by Northwest!?
Get thee over to Chick Chat to speak up.
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‘Domino’ is one of the worst movies of the year
A dozen music videos might be trapped inside Domino, but if there’s a movie to be found in Tony Scott’s ball-breaking ode to ADHD, it’s buried deeper than the woman who inspired it.
Keira Knightley’s turn as the tough-talking titular character — English model-turned–bounty hunter, Domino Harvey — is mighty impressive, and supporting players like Mickey Rourke and Edgar Ramirez make great efforts to keep this fast-sinking ship afloat. But Scott’s overbearing direction is the man-made disaster that undoes Domino. If Scott works at 24 frames per second, two dozen of those frames could be completely different. When Christopher Walken, as a hilarious reality TV exec, is pegged as having “the attention span of a ferret on crystal meth,” you wonder if it’s a commentary on the movie he’s in.
The screenplay is by Richard Kelly, who wrote and directed Donnie Darko, and is apparently incapable of making movies any less complicated than that one. The plot of Domino jumps through and over and around itself so many times that Scott, by running earlier scenes in reverse, literally undoes major developments. Sometimes there’s humor, but no time to appreciate it. Other times Domino tries to hit emotional cues, but Scott’s entire style has worked so hard to distance us from involvement — pumping up the retro-pop soundtrack when a man’s arm is ripped from his body with a shotgun, one blast at a time — so that we not only feel nothing, but are also bullied into thinking it’s glamorous and sexy.
Not only is Domino one of the worst movies of the year, it lacks any sense of morality. When Domino has to kill a whole slew of people to serve the movie’s climactic shootout — after she’s told us that she’s never killed anyone, and hopes to never have to — we don’t feel the pain of her compromise. Instead we’re bombarded with the supposed visceral thrill of the action.
I’m sure that a good movie remains to be made about a bounty hunter. Maybe even a good one about Domino Harvey. (Perhaps that one will even be true: Despite being “based on a true story,” Domino’s entire DMV plot is an invention of its screenwriter.) To start, I suggest Mr. Scott run his entire movie backwards, and undo it all.
Area showtimes [DDN]
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Catching up; ‘Wallace & Gromit’
As I might’ve mentioned, a whole slew of movies opened last week, and I saw exactly none of them, because I was in Chicago, seeing other movies. I would’ve liked to have caught up with a few of them this week, but then I was laid up sick in bed. The only movies I saw the last few days was a mini-marathon I’ve entitled, “Apropos of Nothing.” Punctuated every two or three minutes by the sound of me blowing my nose, it featured The Way We Were, Broadcast News, The Fly and — oh, yes — The Fly II.
Among the movies I wish I had time to see were Two for the Money, Waiting…, Proof, Thumbsucker and Crónicas. I did finally catch up with Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were Rabbit Saturday afternoon. I must admit I found it amusing, but not much else. Like most people, I certainly don’t want to undermine Aardman Studios’s artistic achievement (led by directors Nick Park and Steve Box). But I do find myself wondering why you might dedicate five years and such painstaking work to a movie that’s merely adequate.
Most critics, of course, can’t laud the movie enough. I certainly see its charm, and if you’ve got kids, it’s probably the best movie out right now. But still, I must confess, at 100 minutes, it was a bit of a drag.
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‘2046’ will probably benefit from big screen
Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 has the look of a dream, but for a lot of people, it will be a nightmare.
It’s a sequel-in-spirit to Wong’s previous film, In the Mood for Love, which I quite liked. If you haven’t seen it, you should. If you have, you may want to see 2046, but you shouldn’t expect much of a narrative, though there is some; or chronology, though there is much, and in many directions.
Tony Leung plays Chow, a writer who was also the hero of In the Mood for Love. He lives in a hotel room across the hall from room number 2046. Chow is a playboy, and after a while he becomes infatuated with a high class call girl named Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi).
Her relationship with Chow is not the first or last, but one of many we observe. 2046 weaves together threads of love, heartache and loneliness with the twin concepts of time and loss. It travels back and forth between this century and the last one on a mysterious train that may be the subject of a science fiction novel that Chow is writing. Nothing is clear. This makes it at once fascinating and frustrating.
Michael Sicinski, for instance, loved it the first time, and found it lacking the second. The first time, he says, he must have bent “2046 into a non-narrative experience of perpetual presence. … It’s as though I was describing another film.”
Roger Ebert admires the film’s style, but has trouble pinpointing its substance. He says it “exists primarily as a visual style imposed upon beautiful faces.”
And it is beautiful. So much, in fact, that one is tempted to forgive its excesses, its impenetrability. But is it not the artist’s duty to give form to his experience? To convey and express his feeling with shape and clarity? If so, 2046 is a failure.
I must of course confess that I’ve yet to see 2046 on the big screen, but its area debut at the Little Art this weekend gives me a much needed opportunity to revisit it. If you know Wong’s work, I still encourage you to see it, if only so we might help each other understand it.
Get showtimes [Little Art Theatre]
‘Happy Endings’ saved by dynamite cast
Happy Endings, which opened today at the Neon, is a movie that works in spite of itself.
It was written and directed by Don Roos, who wrote the medium-sized 90s hits Single White Female and Boys on the Side. He’s best known in indie-film circles for his 1998 directorial debut, The Opposite of Sex, in which Christina Ricci plays Dede, a manipulative tart who’s knocked up, goes to mooch off her gay half-brother, and steals his lover after convincing him that he’s the father of her as-yet-unborn baby. She narrates the movie, and says things like, “I don’t have a heart of gold and I don’t grow one later, OK? But relax. There’s other people a lot nicer coming up. We call them losers.” It’s very self-aware — a tactic that was already kind of tired by the time it came out. But it is funny. Every time I see it on TV (it’s frequently on Showtime and Sundance Channel), I stop and follow it through.
So I was mildly anticipating Happy Endings, his third movie1, which reunites Roos with Lisa Kudrow, who was frequently the best part of Sex. Kudrow plays Mamie. When she was a teenager, Mamie had a sexual encounter with her step-brother, Charley (Steve Coogan). She ended up pregnant, and told everyone she’d had an abortion. She never told anyone that she actually gave the baby up for adoption. Now, of course, it’s many years later and Mamie’s been found by Nicky (Jesse Bradford), a wannabe filmmaker who says he knows where Mamie’s son is and that he’ll tell her only if she’ll help him make his first film: A documentary about Mamie’s reunion with her son. Mamie refuses, but still wants to find her son, so she bargains with Nicky to manufacture a totally different movie for him in exchange for the information.
Meanwhile, Charley (remember, Mamie’s step-brother?), has grown up too. He’s gay, lives with his boyfriend Gil, and owns a restaurant. Otis (Jason Ritter) is 19-or-so and works at Charley’s restaurant. He’s gay, but not out, and has no idea that everyone suspects his secret, especially his wealthy dad (Tom Arnold) who supports his son’s band by supplying them with instruments and whatnot. Otis meets Jude (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a singer who ends up joining the band, and who agrees to pose as Otis’ girlfriend in exchange for room and board. Things, of course, get complicated when Otis’ dad has a thing for Jude.
I’m not giving anything away here. I’ve broken the cardinal rule of blogging by going somewhat long with this, and it’s all just the set up. I’ve hardly gone in depth — you’ll know all this in the first twenty minutes, I swear. Trust me on this one.
There’s a third storyline that’s more intimately about Charley and his lover, but that one’s not very interesting. The gay characters in Roos’ movies are usually the most boring. (It’s like he’s saying, Look, if we’re screwed up, at least we’re not as screwed up as you.)
Happy Endings is not a bad movie, but it’s deeply flawed. The trouble is that Roos doesn’t really seem to care about his characters. Like The Opposite of Sex, this movie is keenly self-aware. It’s full of little hints to the audience. I don’t mean to totally rob Roos of the credit — he’s responsible for casting, and the movie is often very funny — but he’s always winking at you, determined to subvert your expectations. These people are just ironic pawns to him.
Lucky him, he’s got a dynamite cast. I want to especially single out Maggie Gyllenhaal, Tom Arnold, and Jason Ritter, but really each and every performance in this movie is absolutely lived in. That’s what I mean about the movie working in spite of itself: With every scene, with every gesture and nuance and bit of heartache, it’s clear that his actors care more about their characters than the man who created them. They make us feel and care for them. Lucky us, that.
1 Although he’s openly gay, Roos doesn’t make “gay movies” so much as he makes movies that treat gays and lesbians like normal people. In spite of this, he was afraid of being typecast as a “gay director.” In 2000 he made his second movie, Bounce, an insipid Ben Affleck-Gwyneth Paltrow romance. It was as forgettable as it was heterosexual.
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Blond Bond will be the best, Ron
Oh c’mon, Ron.
When I heard a few days ago that Daniel Craig would probably be the new James Bond (it’s been all but confirmed; an official announcement is expected tomorrow), I was bowled over. Not because I think it’s a poor choice, but because it’s the best. Better yet, it’s the best choice no one thought of.
Craig might be a no-name to those of you who seem to have stopped going to the movies altogether, but he’s had lead roles in Layer Cake, Enduring Love, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, and Sylvia, in addition to his role in Road to Perdition. Doesn’t that put him about on par with Pierce Brosnan’s standing ten years ago, when he was best known for “Remington Steele?”
In all honesty, the only other actor I’d love to see in the role is Oscar nominee Clive Owen, who was also considered for Bond, and whose performances in movies like Croupier and Closer have made pretty much everyone speculate he’d get the job.
Craig is, as David Edelstein puts it, “rugged, brooding, English, and … easily the most fascinating actor to assume the mantle since Connery.” To that I’ll add that he’s freaking hot.
Will he revitalize the series? Unquestionably. The actor himself has complained that the Bond movies are about “gadgets instead of feelings.” As he says, “It’s a big machine and it makes a lot of money - so why would you change something that makes a lot of money?” Will he be able to change that? Probably not. But humanizing Bond might be a start.
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What’s your favorite movie? Plus more from Chicago
Forget comedies for a minute. (Though I’m still tallying up the results of that informal poll: What are the funniest movies?) Let’s suspend that discussion momentarily, or at least temporarily relegate it to some parallel universe.
When I saw Stanley Kubrick’s mind-blowing 2001: A Space Odyssey this weekend for only the second time ever, in 70mm at Chicago’s Music Box, it may have supplanted Alfred Hitchcock’s kid-tested, mother-approved masterpiece, Rear Window, as my favorite film of all time.
What’s your favorite movie? Go on: Name one. Or ten. Or a hundred. Regardless of genre or age — if you love it, I want to know about it.
Top five (or six) people I always hope I’ll accidentally meet while in Chicago: Oprah, Roger Ebert, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Scott Tobias, the Cinecast Guys. Helps to know what more than one or two of them look like, I imagine. Who do you want to meet in the Windy City — or any city?
P.S.: My friend Carrie took some awesome photos of the Music Box. Be sure to check ‘em out.
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‘The Shining’ as a feel good drama?
My friend Alexis Larsen — she’s the Editor of GO! here at the DDN — sent me something really hilarious. You may have seen it making its way around the blogosphere. (I think I spotted similar stuff linked from the AV Club.) According to the Tattered Coat:
A post-production house organized a competition where assistant editors ‘re-cut’ trailers for famous movies to try and make them seem like different movies…
Apparently this one was the winner: ‘The Shining’ as a feel good adoption drama (You’ll need Quicktime. Here’s a mirror.)
Chicago: Sorry for my absence the last few days. I was off on an extended holiday garnering absolutely no page views — but still winning last week’s DDN blog competition! I spent the weekend in Chicago with friends shopping and dining. I even had two great moviegoing experiences. I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey in 70mm at the brilliant Music Box Theatre and Dave McKean’s fantastic first film, Mirrormask. More on those later.
Funniest movies: Thanks to you guys for keeping up the conversation on your favorite comedies. I’m still wondering: What are the funniest movies? I’ll try to further the conversation soon.
And remember: Shine on.
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8 new movies open, plus 2 events
In the nationwide pile there’s The Gospel, In Her Shoes (I wrote about that last week), Two for the Money, Waiting, and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
In limited release, Proof opens at Regal in Beavercreek and Showcase Cross Pointe in Centerville; Thumbsucker starts at The Neon; and Saving Face has a Sunday matinee at the Little Art, followed by a brief run Tuesday through Thursday.
To kickoff its “Semester Abroad” series (sponsored by The Downtown Dayton Priority Board and The City of Dayton), Jacques Demy’s classic musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg will play Saturday and Sunday starting at 1 p.m. at the Neon.
On Saturday, Page Manor Twin Cinemas will host “Scarefest,” a horror movie trifecta that starts at 8 p.m. with Freddy Vs. Jason, continues at 10 p.m. with Poltergeist, and wraps up at Midnight with The Blob.
Feel free to use this post as an open thread to talk about the movies opening this weekend.
Get area showtimes, buy tickets [DDN]
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‘A History of Violence’ is very good — but why?
A History of Violence has the title of a message movie. It sounds like it might be about the Crusades or the Holocaust. Instead it’s the new movie by David Cronenberg, the mild-mannered visionary behind 80s genre classics like Scanners, Videodrome, and The Fly remake (available in a new collector’s edition DVD this week). When it comes to violence, his filmography, too, serves as something of a history. Could it be that Cronenberg’s own penchant for the perverse is the true subject of his newest movie?
Well, I’m not sure.
So I’m going to see it again. Meanwhile, I can point you toward a few critics who say it’s a hands-down masterpiece. Steve Erickson says it’s “a vision of American life as a vast role-playing game.” Jonathan Rosenbaum awards it his highest rating. The boys over at Cinecast are pretty sure Cronenberg doesn’t do a single thing wrong.
What about you guys? Did anyone see this movie over the weekend?
Area showtimes [DDN]
‘A History of Violence’ [Official site]
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What are the funniest movies?
TBS aired Ben Stiller’s Zoolander last night, a movie I’ve always thought was more funny in a theoretical way than an actual one. (It does have one great line, though. Can anyone name the one I’m thinking of?) But this prompted one of my friends to pose the question: What are the funniest movies?
Let’s forget the acknowledged classics if we can. Some Like It Hot, the Marx Brothers, Preston Sturges. (Pretty much anything on this list.) I rattled off movies like French Kiss, a decade-old gem with a dynamite first reel I can recite from memory; Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life; David Mamet’s State and Main; the rarely seen Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie; and a handful of others.
What movies — regardless of how unexpected or obscure — make you convulse with laughter? Propel you into a fit of uncontrolled hysteria? Are most often responsible for that unsightly urine stain on your trousers?
C’mon, ‘fess up.
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Yes, Mr. Rollins, ‘Serenity’ is the best movie of the year so far
In response to our esteemed Arts Editor, Serenity is the best movie of the year so far, and not just because it’s been such a craptastic nine months, but because it’s such a strong film.
Movie nerds of my caliber file away every movie they see for some later use. The most prolific is usually the dreaded year-end list: One’s ten favorite movies from any given calendar year. The strongest movies of 2005 have been blockbuster entertainments with lofty ambitions.
War of the Worlds tackled not only 9/11, but how our society and our humanity are challenged by a trauma with such blunt force as an invasion. But it fumbled in the end, with a ridiculous final act in which Tim Robbins seemed to actively compete for worst performance of the year.
Land of the Dead was spot on when it comes to divisions of race and class in America, and even had some intelligent things to say about the War in Iraq. Plus, it was a knock-out zombie picture. But do you remember any of the characters’ names?
Revenge of the Sith was a dynamite conclusion to an awful trilogy — but, oh, the dialogue — still so clunky.
So a movie nerd like myself is in trouble when he’s mentally writing and rewriting that top ten list all year long. (And I’m not the only one. Here’s a quick sampling: Mike D’Angelo, Michael Sicinski, Bryant Frazer.) How to reward the gusto and ambition of these filmmakers? How to talk about how modern movies and other arts are tackling some of the most universal and controversial topics in our world? If that year-end list is to serve as a time-capsule, how will it reflect our sense of outrage or our patriotism?
Joss Whedon to the rescue.
On both the surface and in its subtext, Serenity achieves what each of those movies set out to. It’s a spectacular adventure movie, with a social conscience and political relevance, and the great strength of three-dimensional characters. It’s a fully-formed, living, breathing reflection of our world, and it seems to have been made with love, humor and passion.
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‘Serenity’ is better than ‘Star Wars’
OK, I bow down to all the Joss Whedon fanatics. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times was spot on when she said Serenity “is more engaging and certainly better written and acted than any of [George] Lucas’s recent screen entertainments.” In fact, I’ll do her one better: It’s better than the original Star Wars.
Like most people, I’m now wondering what I missed when Whedon’s Firefly ran for fifteen episodes way back in 2002. (Lucky us, we can find out on DVD. Slate’s David Edelstein, for instance, is now a self-confessed Firefly freak.)
Serenity’s only flaw is that it’s sometimes too clever for its own good. Other than that, it’s a space opera of the highest order. It’s smart enough to honor genre conventions even as it subverts them. It’s familiar, but not predictable. It might be the movie of the year — so far.
Now I’ve just gotta borrow my buddy Phil’s Firefly DVDs…
Area showtimes [DDN]
‘Serenity’ is No. 2 at box office [AP via DDN]
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Horror movie marathon returns to Columbus
Organizers of the “Return of the Incredible 2 Headed Marathon” at Columbus’ Drexel Theatres posted official information on their Web site. The marathon will start Saturday, October 22, 2005, at 10 p.m. at the Drexel Grandview. It will continue until about Noon on Sunday, October 23. Tickets — $16 in advance, $20 at the door — are on sale now.
Movies expected to be shown include Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, David Cronenberg’s The Brood, “a rare 35mm screening of the Italian cut of Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath,” and the “Ohio premiere” of Three… Extremes, a collection of three short films by directors Takashi Miike (Audition, Ichi the Killer), Park Chan Wook (Oldboy) and Fruit Chan.
Official info. [Drexel]
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