FilmFemme

Brad Grey & Sumner Redstone (this photo is not from the event I went to)

I will be the first to admit that I kind of squandered the time I spent at the USC School of Cinematic Arts (which was called the School of Cinema-Television way back in the day when I went there).  I went to all my classes and wrote my papers and stuff but I didn’t take full advantage of the faculty or of the cool events that were hosted on campus.  Of course, now that I’m in the real world and getting really panicked about things like SQUANDERING MY ENTIRE LIFE, I sometimes go to the events on campus that I get those annoying emails about.  Tonight, USC and dean of the cinema school Elizabeth Daly hosted a discussion with Viacom Chairman and all around media mogul Sumner Redstone, moderated by Paramount Pictures CEO Brad Grey.  Even though I’m generally wary (read: terrified) of industry-types since my stint as a talent manager’s assistant, I was really excited about the opportunity to see these two bigwigs in conversation.

And guess what?  It was disappointing as hell.

I showed up at the new SCA building early because I was assured the event was “oversold” to ensure capacity.  I didn’t even get to bring a +1.  The theatre (a shiny new lecture hall with a huge screen and state of the art projection that didn’t exist at all a mere 4 years ago) did end up full, but there was hardly the clamoring for seats that I imagined.  So, that’s annoying right off the bat.

As the theatre was filling, a number of VIPs took reserved seats in the front row, including Redstone, Bob “The Kid Stays in the Picture” Evans and other Hollywood business luminaries that I didn’t recognize.  I did see Redstone pinch Evans’ cheek, so that was kind of awesome.

Dean Daly introduced her pal Brad Grey who introduced his boss, Sumner Redstone by way of a 10 minute video about the guy’s life.  I had already read his wikipedia article on my phone while I was waiting for the program to start, but it was kind of interesting to see Bill Clinton and Les Moonves expound on the guy’s life.  One problem I had though, that I often have with things like this, is that the silly bio video just wasn’t very cool.  With the resources of Viacom at your fingertips, the technology that made Transformers 2, you can’t put together a slick and awesome mini-biopic?  All you can give me is a split screen with a talking head on one side and some lame word like “vision” on the other side?  That sucks. (more…)

I’ve gotten to the point in my tenure as a Netflix customer (I like how they call it “member” like it’s exclusive) where movies will show up in my queue and I will have no idea what my thought process was when I decided to add them.  Such was the case when Overnight showed up in my mailbox last week.  But, I don’t have cable and I’m too broke to go to bars, so I watched it.  Overnight is basically a documentary about any and every asshole aspiring screenwriter that you have ever met.  Now, there are plenty of perfectly nice aspiring screenwriters, but if you have met one of these asshole ones, you know who I am talking about.  Overnight follows one Troy Duffy beginning as his script for The Boondock Saints is bought by Harvey Weinstein with Duffy attached to direct with a $15 million budget.  Duffy dismisses the cynical naysayers (e.g., realists) that warn him it could all go to shit tomorrow.  He knows that won’t happen to him because HIS SCRIPT IS SO AWESOME AND HE IS SO AWESOME AND FUCK EVERYBODY THIS HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH LUCK HE IS AWESOME.

Then everything goes to shit, he takes the script somewhere else for less than half the budget, signs away his rights to DVD profits and makes The Boondock Saints, which I watched on Saturday.

Overnight is a pretty decent documentary. At the very least, it does a good job conveying Duffy’s brand of assholery which I have been in the vicinity of a few times in my life.  So after watching it, and considering I knew people who counted it among their favorites  (e.g., my old roommate who in retrospect I like well enough but whose opinion on film I never really respected in the first place) I figured I should maybe see The Boondock Saints, so I bumped it to the top of my queue.

IT IS FUCKING AWFUL.  It is corny.  It is cliche.  And the writing.  The By Troy Duffy script that Harvey Weinstein took an interest in at some point (probably while he was drunk) is the worst part of the whole mess.  This movie sucks.  It wants to be Pulp Fiction so badly, but it has none of the wit or attention to things like, you know, character or production design or, like, making sense.  Sources (the internet?) tell me that this movie reached some kind of cult status on DVD.  That is something I cannot understand AT ALL.  It’s not good.  It is NOT A GOOD MOVIE.  This is not a matter of opinion.  This is not because I was in a bad mood when I saw it.  I was eating cheese and getting high: I was in a great mood.  A wonderful popcorn action movie mood.  But this movie sucks.  It sucks so bad.  And it wasn’t bad because I had already seen Overnight, either.  Knowing the extent of Duffy’s jerkoffishness was the only thing that actually held my interest.  That and Willem Dafoe as a homophobic gay FBI agent.

Fuck you, Troy Duffy.  Seriously.  I hate you.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a screening of Wes Anderson’s newest foray into style and humor (most people call this a movie), Fantastic Mr. Fox.  I don’t normally use phrases like “I had the pleasure of..” but it really was a pleasure!  I don’t mean like the dirty, carnal pleasure I get out of something sexy and dark like, I don’t know, My Own Private Idaho.  It was more like the cheery, warm please of macaroni & cheese.  But not the orange Kraft Dinner dinner kind.  The expensive kind covered in fresh bread crumbs with some Gruyere (the snobbiest of cheeses).

The movie is based on a story by Roald Dahl.  I’m not familiar with this particular story, but I get the feeling that Anderson added a lot more to it in this imagining.  Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) is an aging reporter who longs for one last chance to act like a fox (i.e., harassing and stealing from farmers) despite the reservations of his wife (Meryl Streep).  With the help of his inept but well meaning friend Kylie (Wally Wolodarsky) he orchestrates his last big score.

Since a movie needs conflict, something goes awry and Mr. Fox, Kylie and the rest of the animals have to go about finding away to survive an all out assault from a trio of evil farmers.

And it is soooo cute.

I’ll certainly admit to being a big fan of Wes Anderson.  Rushmore is definitely among my most favorite movies of all time.  It doesn’t take a film major to realize that, though the scripts are rife with clever humor and the stories are fun and quirky, what sets his films apart from any number of other indie-quirky-cutesy movies is the obsessive attention to production design and the ephemeral idea of good taste and style.  Wes Anderson has style in droves.

With this in mind, I think Anderson left what will be a lasting impression on the genre of stop motion animation.  The details of the characters in Fantastic Mr. Fox are exquisite (there is another word I don’t use very much).  Their furry little faces gleam, their character traits are as alive, distinguishable and compelling as any (dare I say more compelling than more) live actor.  In short, this movie is beautiful.  Now, I saw Wall-E and I saw Up.  To me, these movies rely on tugging heartstrings and, at times, very effective character development to be compelling.  When CG animation looks “good” it looks “real.”  This movie doesn’t look real, it looks beyond real.  It looks alive and magical.  It still has a cute story, some very funny scenes and even very memorable voice performances, but what really makes it special is that it is so fun to look at.  Even if there was no sound,  it would be visually compelling.  I hate to make yet another corny statement about it, lest I be branded some kind of Wes Anderson fangirl (um…) but in short, this movie is more than a movie — it’s art.

When I was in high school I remember trying to go see Amores Perros (written by Guillermo Arriaga) at the cheap theatre near my school with two of my girl friends.  But after the very opening scene that involved bleeding dogs, we had to leave and we ended up seeing Blow instead.  It’s not a decision I regret, but at this point, nearly 10 years later, I’ve still only seen one of his films and that was 21 Grams  (he also just wrote this, like Amores Perros it was directed by Alejandro Inarritu)which I thought was OK but not brilliant.  Now that I’ve seen The Burning Plain, I’m even more suspect of his other films.

The opening of The Burning Plain is similarly uncomfortable with a haggard and naked Sylvia (Charlize Theron) sucking deeply on a cigarette and kicking John (John Corbett) out of her room in the small hours of the morning.  Frigid and blank, Sylvia’s character is no mystery and when we shortly find out that her lover is also her employee at an upscale restaurant in addition to being married to another woman, Sylvia’s unfeeling attitude towards him is not a surprise.  But just as the drama is ramping up in this dreary Portland debauchery, we’re transported to New Mexico where an adulterous couple has been burned alive in a mobile home, leaving their children to pick up the pieces.  Without giving anything away, these two stories eventually catch up to each other and weave together.   (more…)

Less Than Zero and Rules of Attraction

I’ m going to do my very best to keep these two movies from running together in my head because despite their differences they are both about (1)Rich attractive kids (2) who like sex (3) and drugs (4) and do both a lot.

In Less Than Zero, a young and pouty Robert Downey, Jr. plays Julian, a recent high school graduate and drug addict with a rich father.  His two best friends are Clay, an adorable Andrew McCarthy in pushed up sleeves and Blair (of course her name is Blair), a perpetually astonished Jami “can’t spare a square” Gertz.  Clay and Blair are dating right up until they graduate from their posh Los Angeles high school when Clay goes off to college and Blair stays behind to pursue her modeling career.  Of course, as soon as Clay crosses the city limits, Julian and Blair fall into bed together and it’s all fucked.

In Rules of Attraction, Jami Gertz’ wide-eyed insecurities are replaced with the slouching bohemian elegance of a pixie/punk Shannyn Sossamon who plays Lauren.  Lauren is student at Camden College, of many deciduous trees and picturesque snowfall — not to mention all the glory of liberal arts decadence and indulgence.  However, she is determined to stay pure, despite the urgings of her loose roommate Lara (Jessica Biel).  That is, until a fateful encounter in a hallway with Sean Bateman, a brooding and sinister looking James Van Der Beek.  Sean likes Lauren, too, but with one manipulative and untruthful word, Sean and Lara fall into bed together and it’s all fucked.

Do you see how I might get these two a little bit confused? (more…)

A while back I wrote a serious review of Last Chance Harvey that may as well have been “Last Chance Gillian” because I sent it to this website (which will remain nameless) for a chance to write movie reviews for them, but I never got to.  There was no money in it, so I’m only bitter that they didn’t even bother getting back to me.  I never got around to posting the review here probably because I secretly hoped I would still hear from them.  This was in January.  Anyway, I’m not going to bother with the links as this backstory has already annoyed me enough.  But here’s the review.  It’s pretty fucking insightful and totally deserving of no money, I think:

The 2008 awards season is now in its death throes, being as it’s 2009, but it still seems prudent to make some generalizations about what seems to be the most compelling fodder for “good” films last year.  One central theme that doesn’t seem to be getting old is the single, aging man, searching for something to bring meaning to his life as he starts to see his own mortality on the horizon.  The most obvious instance this year, of course, is Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, but the same elements weave themselves through Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and even arguably both of Kate Winslet’sshowcase pieces The Reader and Revolutionary Road.  Though it has garnered fewer accolades than most of these films, Joel Hopkins’ Last Chance Harvey, which went into wide release January 16th, is deserving of a spot on this landscape.

Dustin Hoffman, an actor that is probably no longer concerned about his own legacy (though  he may cringe a little at Mr. Magorium’sWonder Emporium), plays Harvey Shine, a failed jazz pianist and commercial jingle writer who travels to London for his daughter’s wedding.  Struggling to find meaning in his work and out of place in the wedding party, things are bad enough when his daughter, Suzy (Liane Balaban), tells him that she wants her stepfather, the improbably tan and impossibly charming Brian (an improbably tan and perfectly charming James Brolin) to give her away.  Harvey attends the wedding, smile pasted on, then dashes off to Heathrow to get back to New York in time for a meeting.  Meanwhile, Emma Thompson as single and cynical but charming Kate Walker is caring for her neurotic mother, being set up on blind dates by her co-workers and dreaming of a career as a novelist.  Naturally, they meet at the airport and despite Kate’s reluctance, the pair strike up the only kind of friendship that movies need: unlikely.  Immediately, there is a palpable realism about their interactions.  It isn’t the electric but ultimately fleeting sparks of a storybook romance.  Instead it is an understanding, laced with skepticism.  An instant trust underlined with pragmatism.  In short, something akin to real life.

Hopkins, whose only credits are a short entitled Jorge and a lauded but little seen feature called Jump Tomorrow (which appears to be based on Jorge), ambitiously wrote Last Chance Harvey with Hoffman and Thompson in mind.  The fact that they both agreed to be a part of the project speaks volumes about the strength of the script.  Both Harvey and Kate are the kind of sympathetic and well-developed characters that any actor surely longs to play.  Hopkins’ choices as a director are simple and effective.  As the pair stroll the streets of London, he lets the scenery and his impeccable actors tell his poignant story without interference. Hoffman especially makes easy work of defining himself as Harvey.  It takes only a few words and movements to establish the complex relationships that exist between himself and his daughter and his ex-wife (Kathy Baker).  As much as any of this year’s awards fodder, Last Chance Harvey is a simple story of redemption.  Admittedly, significant portions of the film are not comfortable to watch because Harvey is enduring an awkward struggle, but like his character, the film redeems itself with the one thing that no one seems to be able to resist right now: hope.

Raise your hand if you kind of have a big ol’ crush on Sam Rockwell!  Me!  Me!  I do!  Looking back over his filmography it was probably the underrated Matchstick Men where I first really saw him and it was definitely last year’s Choke that sent me over the edge to full-fleged crush status.  He was even a charming relief in the mostly mediocre Frost/Nixon.  He manages to convey an attitude that straddles a line between self-deprecating and entierly arrogant.  He frequently seems tired and overwhelmed, like it’s just been so much work getting to where he is that maybe he needs to sit down for a minute.  He’s always  little bit dirty.  And his new vehicle Moon let me in on another secret: he has a hot ass.  I’m not one of those girls that’s always like “Ooh, look at that guy’s ass!”  For the most part, I could give a shit.  But I’ll be damned if his ass didn’t look really good in those space jumpsuits.

All of this is to say that if you swoon at the sight of quirky indie bad boy Sam Rockwell like I do, you will probably find Moon to be wholly watchable.  If you are ambivalent or hold any negative feelings towards him, well, you might not.

The year is…sometime in the not so distant future.  Sam Bell (Rockwell) is working alone on the Moon, seemingly mining resources for use as energy back on earth.  He spends his days in the station with no companionship besides intermittent video messages from the company for whom he works and his wife and daughter and a space computer voiced by Kevin Spacey.  As the film begins he is nearing the end of his 3 year contract and preparing to return home to earth.  Unfortunately, something goes awry and when he returns to the ship after crashing his moon-mobile (I’m certain there is a more technical term for this) he finds himself face to face with a hotter, meaner, better groomed version of himself.  At first it’s impossible to tell if this is real or if so much time alone in space with KevinSpaceyComputer has caused him to go insane.  We quickly realize that the former is true and the two Sam Bell’s have to both figure out why there are two of them and how they will get back to earth unharmed.

The premise of Moon treads familiar science fiction ground and while it is an intrinsically interesting idea, something is missing in its execution.  The pacing of the film is uneven: it’s slow to get started then throws a lot of information at you, rapid fire.  Combined with direction that is passable at best and characterization that never goes quite as deep as I wanted it to left Moon without the stakes that it needed to be a really good movie.  By the end, I was still interested but the amount that I actually cared about the outcome was slim to none.  It also suffered from overscoring which is admittedly a pet peeve of mine but makes it that much easier to dismiss dramatic events with a frustrated eye-roll. 

I enjoyed watching Moon, but it’s the kind of movie that you’re not going to keep thinking about when it’s over…unless you see it on Netflix and wonder “why wasn’t that movie better”*

*or, “Sam Rockwell has a hot ass”

I was just lamenting the other day that I really don’t get to do enough drunk blogging anymore because I don’t really have the internet at my house.  But really that just stops me from drunk *posting* not drunk blogging.  So, the original intent of the Drunk Reviews tag was to both watch and review the movie while I was drunk I am going to make an exception tonight.  Because I am drunk and I already have 3 movies that I watched and need to blog about.  So at least one of them will be a drunk blog.  Holy shit that was wayyyy too much explanation.

On Sunday I was supposed to see that movie about Nazi zombies (does anyone else have trouble reaching the “z” on the keyboard?  It’s very uncomfortable) but instead I saw Up.  I really don’t like the title of this movie.  I want it to have an exclamation point or, something.  Another word, I guess.  The Fantastic Adventures of a Clinically Depressed Elderly Man and a Racially Ambiguous Child who Lacks a Father Figure might be good.  A little wordy, though.

I wasn’t head over heels for Up, but it is recognizably well done.  The animation specifically is very impressive.  Sure, the story (is it an allegory?  I’m going to have to google that) is charming in a Pixar-y way.  It’s impossible not to cheer on the protagonists, Carl and Russel, who are both adorable and earnest in their own ways.  The thing about the absent father I feel like has been Done to Death.  Sure it’s a problem that plagues America (I don’t even know if this is true, but I’m sure it must suck when this happens) but you can bet your sweet ass (WTF, why did I just say that?) that someone would have been up in arms if the kid (Russell) with an absent father had been African-American.  I mean, right?  Because then it would have been saying something about the irresponsibility of black men towards their children like that one time that Bill Cosby told black people to stop spending their money on sneakers.  Did my blog just suddenly get controversial?  Anyway, that just kind of annoyed me.  The missing dad part, not black people.  I actually don’t remember seeing any black characters in this movie, except at the very end.

What I did like was the really dumb talking Golden Retriever named Doug.  He was funny, even if his schtick got a little old.  I used to have a Golden Retriever.  She was really sweet but dumber than a brick.  Poor Claudia.

I was also kind of offput by how much littering happened in this movie, especially considering that WALL-E, Pixar’s last offering, was basically 90 minutes of “Don’t Litter” propaganda.  Russell and Carl go to the remote jungle, the whole point of it being that it is remote and secluded and “a land lost to time” and they just leave all kinds of shit everywhere.  They unload a whole house full of furniture right there on the jungle floor, they release all kinds of balloons into the atmosphere (also, come on guys, BALLOONS CAN’T LIFT A HOUSE!) and eventually (SPOILER!) they just leave a whole fucking house!  Right there at the top of a waterfall!  Maybe most kids aren’t going to take away any messages about littering in the rainforest from this movie, but it just seemed kind of weird to me.  Yes, this is actually something I thought about while watching Up.  No, I am not a dirty hippy.  It’s just weird, right?

Hola, amigos. What up? I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I got real busy re-reading all the Jim Anchower columns over at the Onion.  Then I smoked a huge bowl and two weeks later, here we are with a much delayed review of Star Trek.  I might catch a lot of flack for never having seen any other Star Trek movie (including Wrath of Khan) but I did spend quite a few of my precious childhood hours watching Next Generation reruns with my dad.  I had a huge crush on Data.  I guess not that much has changed since I’m still mainly attracted to guys who are completely emotionally unavailable. 

But regardless of my lack of Trek-exposure, I really enjoyed JJ Abrams’ reworking of the original characters.  Firstly I’d like to go on record saying that “Star Trek is a sexy Sci Fi romp through space and time!” you know, in case anyone wants to quote me on that.  Because damn, there was a lot of hotness in this cast.  I know that Chris Pine’s Kirk was probably meant to take the sexy cake (mm, sexy cake) but I’ll be damned if I didn’t think Spock (Zachary Quinto, who is apparently on some TV show about heros or something, whatever, who watches TV anyway?) was way hotter.  Sure, Kirk’s bad boy, devil-may-care attitude is certainly attractive, but something about the vaguely adrongynous, definitively logical and very well groomed Spock was just HOT.

The plot of the movie doesn’t reinvent any SciFi standards: there are black holes and some time travel and some evil alien race is out to destroy earth.  Kirk & co are brand new recruits and have to band together and overcome their differences (which are many!) and tangled romances (Vulcans make out?  That’s weird) and language barriers (Ok, Charlie Bartlett, we get it, you practiced really hard with a dialect coach) and bumblingness (aw, there you are Shaun of the Dead!) in order to defeat The Hulk.  Yeah, I think I summed it up OK.

I liked all the parts where Kirk was being charming and Spock was being logical and Harold was being kind of chivalrous and cute.  I didn’t like Bones…he seemed like he was trying too hard to be deadpan and it left me uncomfortable (though he was also extremely attractive, so, um, wasn’t so bad).  I also wasn’t a huge fan of Uhura (Zoe Saldana) but I think that probably had more to do with her character who was kind of that stock goody two-shoes chick who refuses to be seduced which is something I don’t really identify with than it did with the actress.

There was also a part where Kirk ends up on a snow planet where I kind of fell asleep for a few minutes.  All that white, I don’t know.  But in general I thought that Star Trek was a really swell summer movie that was fast paced, funny at times and just all around fun, you know?  I like that in a movie.

If you’ve been to the movies in the past year, I can almost guarantee that you saw this trailer at least once. I happened to see it about 12 times (I wish I were exaggerating) and it got to the point where if I heard Jamie Foxx say “I’ve had a few setbacks” and cue the sad cello chord one more time I was seriously going to flip.  But, The Soloist was finally released and after indulging in The Informers (RIP Brad Renfro) and Earth (RIP Elephant) I went to see it.  And it sucked.  I’m going to go out on a limb and guess this is why the release date was pushed back a thousand times and the studio decided not to use it as the Oscar bait that it was so clearly intended to be.

Robert Downey, Jr. plays LATimes columnist Steve Lopez (Lopez? really?), an immature and self-involved guy who is divorced from his editor wife (Catherine Keener) and was recently in a sort of heinous bike crash.  Still scraped and bruised, he meets Nathanial Ayers (Jamie Foxx) in downtown LA, playing the violin.  He finds out that Nathanial studied at Julliard and makes it his mission to help him through a series of front page columns and, you know, hanging out.  Some heavy handed flashbacks provide us with Nathanial’s backstory — turns out the talented musician is schizophrenic and had a mental break down at Julliard, then ran away from home many years before due to his persecutory delusions. 

On the surface, this movie has all the elements of a tear/Academy-jerking drama: two powerhouse stars (who already have Oscars), based on a true story, deals with mental illness and the triumph of the fucking human spirit.  The problem is that it is all on the surface.  Sure, Foxx and Downey give strong performances, they’re good actors.  Robert Downey, Jr. could give a good performance as a bowl of shredded wheat (don’t steal that idea, I’m going to pitch it to Disney/Pixar).  But the whole story is so superficial.  The flashbacks are boring and obvious.  The snippets of Lopez’s failed relationship, including 2 or 3 instances where his ex begs him to call their son with no payoff, are flat and not compelling.  The scene where the unlikely friends go to see the LA Philharmonic at Disney Hall and Nathanial is so swept away by the music that the screen goes black and starts display flashes of color that seriously, literally, look exacty like my MacBook’s default screensaver is just…lame.  I never felt compelled to care about what happens to Nathanial or Steve.  Oh, are they going to learn lessons from each other?  Oh, weird.  Are they both going to be better people for having met?  Oh, wow, that’s great.  Is anything going to explode?  Am I going to care at all?  Oh, yeah, no.  The Soloist is the definition of formulaic and boring.  I will say with enthusiasm that your time is better spent listening to Jamie Foxx’s album.  Have you heard that song “Blame it on the A A A A A Alcohol”?  It’s way more compelling than this movie!