Seeing Hellboy II the other night reminded me that the films of Guillermo del Toro are as good as it gets in the fantastical horror realm. They've got first-class effects, wit, invention, soul, visual economy, emotional gravitas. The monsters are beautifully particular, the performances have warmth and authority, and the camerawork and the cutting are grabby and fast but this side of hyper.

The problem is this, and it's not so much Guillermo's fault as the action-fantasy genre: I'm sick to death of watching stuff getting wrecked and smashed and shattered and blown into a million pieces...Read More

I can't remember the last time I've taken such an instant dislike to an actor as I have to Josh Peck, star of The Wackness (Sony Classics, 7.4 in N.Y. and L.A.) It's lazy to do this, but I can't express it any better than I did last April: "Peck obviously does well at playing young urban white guys who talk in a street argot that is part imitation 'black' and part whatevuh," I wrote last April, "but in any case suggests a total inability to convey an air of refinement and higher education.

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I can't embed this Channel 4 promotional ad for a series of Stanley Kubrick films they'll be showing, but it's ingenious -- a carefully choreographed, superbly designed and exquisitely cast tribute to The Shining. The sets, the haircuts, the mood of it...perfect! Except I can't find the actor playing Kubrick or Jack Nicholson. I guess I need to watch it a few more times. (If it's embedded somewhere, please send along the code.)

"Channel 4 has painstakingly recreated the set of Stanley Kubrick horror film The Shining," the story reads...Read More

I'm sorry, but Meryl Streep's use of the word "miasma" in the previous story reminded me of the character named "Miasmo" in Peter Yates' The Hot Rock ('71), and that led to finding this scene on You Tube. Hands down, it's the best acted and most convincing dumb hypnotism scene in the history of American cinema.

In an interview with The Guardian's Stuart Jeffries, Mamma Mia! star Meryl Streep has more or less said that the reason she's starring in this new movie musical is because of the roundabout influence of Osama bin Laden. Because of the 9/11 attacks, she means. More particularly because of the effect that a matinee performance of Mamma Mia! on the Broadway stage had upon a group of 10 year-olds, including her daughter Louisa, not long after the attacks.

Mama Mia! star Meryl Streep; Osama bin Laden.

I knew...Read More

God grant me (a) the serenity to accept the bad movies I cannot stop from being made that I will probably wind up seeing anyway because I have to try and stay current because I write a daily column, (b) the courage to refuse to see the really bad films that come along that are truly bad for your soul, like Wanted, and (c) the wisdom to know the difference.

Some Came Running's Glenn Kenny feels that a certain James McAvoy line in Wanted -- "Six weeks ago, I was ordinary and pathetic, just like you" -- indicates that screenwriters have contempt for their audience. "What is this bullshit?," Kenny asks. ""Have screenwriters become so defensive /resentful on account of churning out quasi-nihilistic, faux-convoluted, graphic-novel-mytho-Babel tripe like this that they feel compelled to lash out at the audience that laps their nonsense up?" Uh, yeah...kinda.

A gaffe, as Michael Kinsley famously wrote, is when you blurt something out that everyone knows to be true (like Samantha Power callingRead More

I now have good reason to doubt Glenn Erickson's review of the Blu-ray Dirty Harry disc that I linked to and commented about yesterday. Erickson was cool with Fox Home Video's controversial Patton Blu-ray disc, but has claimed that the Dirty Harry disc shows "heavy tweaking to minimize grain, sharpen contrast and brighten colors" and that "heavy processing has given most night shots an almost unnatural look."

The reason is that transfer guru and unrequited grain-worshipper Robert Harris doesn't agree, and neither, according to a well-placed source, does Clint Eastwood...Read More

The trailer for The Day the Earth Stood Still (20th Century Fox, 12.12) with Keanu Reeves (as Klaatu), Jennifer Connelly, Kathy Bates and John Cleese. Directed by Scott Derrickson, written by David Scarpa. I copied the code from some Russian site called Ru Tube. YouTube had it up for a bit before it was pulled. It probably won't last very long here also. It's also watchable on this fan site.

Scarpa's script may, I'm reading, be based more closely on Harry Bates' 1940 short story called "Farewell to the Master...Read More

During a q & a session following a Los Angeles Film Festival showing of Boogieman, the superb Lee Atwater doc, I asked a question about the differences in the political climate of 20 years ago (i.e., during the Bush-Dukakis presidential race) and today, and said that I don't think that racial attitudes are quite as fearful and retrograde as they seemed to be in '88. I was obviously referring to the Obama ascendancy, but some in the audience flat-out laughed at me for saying this.

The night before last I happened to watch 48 HRS....Read More

"For those who are quick to call Hancock 'a mess' or the third act 'a huge left turn' or Variety's hypetastic Last Action Hero-like or whatever euphemism they are using this time, I offer this very serious suggestion -- see the movie again. If they still don't see how well the tapestry is woven, I will leave them to their myopia." -- Opening graph of David Poland's spoiler review of Hancock, which went up (I think) the night before last. See it again...

"The new Blu-ray of Dirty Harry prompts mention of the heated web debate about whether or not studios are over-enhancing older films for hi-def," writes film.com's Glenn Erickson. "Irate bulletin board posters have singled out Patton, as Fox's Blu-ray has been enhanced to minimize natural grain, presumably because Blu-ray proponents think that the format means 'no grain.' Patton was so bright and clear in its 70mm theatrical presentation that ordinary viewers are unlikely to complain. This reviewer wasn't offended either.

"Dirty Harry on Blu-ray is more complicated. The Blu-ray disc shows heavy tweaking...Read More

Too many actresses are treated like race horses. They're allowed to race for a certain period, and then they "age out" and are put out to pasture. Is this what's happened to Rene Russo? She was looking good during the Clinton years, gliding along there in the early to late '90s (In the Line of Fire, Get Shorty, Tin Cup, The Thomas Crown Affair). And then...?

The last beam-ups were costarring roles in two movies released three years ago -- Two for the Money with Al Pacino and Yours, Mine and Ours with Dennis Quaid...Read More

John McCain "was down at the end of the table and we were talking to the head of the [Nicaraguan] guerilla group here at this end of the table and I don't know what attracted my attention," Republican Sen. Thad Cochran recounted earlier this year, according to the Sun Herald's Michael Newsom. "But I saw some kind of quick movement...and I looked down there and John had reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar...Read More

The Western Writers of America have come out with a list of the 100 top westerns of all time. Variety's Anne Thompson, in an uncharacteristic burst of passion, has written that "they should be ashamed of themselves for these woeful rankings." I don't have the same likes and dislikes but I certainly don't feel...you know, disdain.

The WWA's Top Ten: Shane, High Noon, The Searchers, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Dances with Wolves, The Wild Bunch, Red River, Tombstone, The Magnificent Seven and Open Range.

HE's Top Twelve: ...Read More

I should have thought longer and harder before writing that Akiva Goldsman most likely wasn't to blame for Hancock's horrendous third act. HE reader "Richardson" did a good job earlier today of persuading me to reconsider. As he put it, "I can't see how you can blame Will Smith for major script problems when Goldsman is the credited re-writer who defanged the script. Same as [he did on] I Am Legend. You can blame Smith for approving Goldsman as the writer, though, since he surely did that."

Only in the film industry have I seen people laugh

Off to that screening (which I'm late for) -- back around 3 pm. In the meantime, please review this astounding summary of right-wing talkshow and blogger reactions to WALL*E. Consider this Glenn Beck quote in particular: "I can't wait to teach my kids how we've destroyed the Earth. I can't wait. You know if your kid has ever come home and said, 'Dad, how come we use so much styrofoam,' oh, this is the movie for you."

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A reader remarked in response to yesterday's Hitchcock/Truffaut item that Alfred Hitchcock looked like one of those recumbent tubbos from WALL*E, and I had to respond immediately to that. I'm re-posting here to give it the proper attention because it's a fairly major point:

"No -- he was Alfred Hitchcock, and therefore brought things to the table that were so creatively ripe, rich, eternal, fascinating and delectable that his physical proportions are anecdotal, at best. Same deal with Orson Welles (starting in the mid 1950s), Guillermo del Toro, Diego Rivera, Charles Laughton...Read More

HE reader Mark Edward Heuck has passed along the art below with the following message: "Alcoholic drifter with superhuman powers and antisocial feelings -- check. Saves good-looking stranger who dedicates themselves to superhero's career rehabilitation -- check. Starring Academy-Award nominated actor in the lead - check. Showstopping musical numbers written by Rocky Horror Picture Show creators -- uhhh, hold on." Has anyone ever seen this Alan Arkin film? I don't even remember it.

Don't let anyone tell you that the tide is turning on Hancock, and that David Denby's rave in the New Yorker was some kind of indication that the initial bad buzz is not to be trusted and that it's just a matter of the cool people sending out the cool word.

Forget all that. Hancock...Read More

As someone noted yesterday, Tony Ortega's "Trash Talking with Harvey Weinstein" piece, which was posted yesterday on the Village Voice site, recalls the sifting-through-garbage tactics of famed Dylanologist A.J. Weberman. Ortega happened upon a large bin of Harvey's trash in some Tribeca back alley that had all kinds of good stuff, and so he made a piece out of it and even got Harvey to get on the phone.

Harvey Weinstein; Nicole Kidman

The most heartening or encouraging thing for me were the various unsigned Nicole Kidman contracts regarding The Reader...Read More

Here's a tape of Alfred Hitchcock speaking to Francois Truffaut in the mid '60s for the book that eventually became "Hitchcock/Truffaut." The subject, as Hitchcock described, was "a little matter of the physical aspect of the kissing scene in Notorious. The actors, of course, hated doing it. They felt dreadfully uncomfortable in the manner of how they had to cling to each other. And I said, I don't care how you feel, I already know how it's going to look like on the screen.

Alfred Hitchcock

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It's not nostalgia, and it's not a refrain of the "old films are better than the new" crap that the sentimentalists run up the pole from time to time. The fact is that this King Kong vs. T-Rex fight sequence (found about halfway through this clip) is better choreographed, more thrilling and generally more kick-ass than any mano e mano, big monster vs. big monster sequence made since the 1950s -- including, I would add, the battle between the Ed Norton and Tim Roth bulkazoids in The Incredible Hulk.

As part of a discussion of John Horn's recent L.A. Times piece about a visit to the set of Oliver Stone's W, Patrick Goldstein posted a page from Stanley Weiser's script. Noting Horn's observation that the film "is heavily focused on the current president's relationship with his father," i.e., ex-President George H.W. Bush, Goldstein chose a scene in which Bush, Jr. tries to comfort Poppy on the night of his electoral loss to Bill Clinton in 1992.

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The gist of Eric Lundegaard's 7.1 Slate piece (""Why We Need Movie Reviewers") is that critics are more in synch with moviegoer tastes than you might think. The key is to look at how critical favorites have done on a per-screen basis. If you look at things this way, the fog lifts and the blinders come off!

Going by Rotten Tomato ratings, Lundegaard notes that "while there were fewer 'fresh' films (i.e., pics that critics liked) that showed on fewer screens and took in less overall box office, they tended to make almost $1,000 more per screen...Read More

The Hollywood Reporter's Thomas K. Arnold has rewritten a Paramount Home Video press release about the forthcoming Godfather trilogy Blu-ray four-disc package that's coming out on 9.23, and again -- as noted in my riff on Peter Bart's 6.23 Variety blog piece about the package -- no mention of the fact that the restoration guru Robert Harris (Vertigo, Spartacus...

In this stammering Tony Kaye video about his regard for the films of Stanley Kubrick, he talks (at the very end) about an encounter with a friendly payroll consultant. As a way of stirring empathy between kindred souls, the guy told Kaye "he played the ape in 2001...the one who picked up the bone and threw it into the air." As Kaye puts it, "The friendliest person I ever met when I was going bust was the ape in 2001."

I knew in a flash upon watching this morning that Kaye had spoken to Dan Richter...Read More

Three reactions to Eddie Murphy telling Extra's Tanika Ray that he's considering retirement from film acting with comments like (a) "I have close to fifty movies and it's like, why am I in the movies?," (b) "I'll go back to the stage and do standup" and (c) that he "doesn't want to be a part of" Brett Ratner's Beverly Hills Cop 4 because "the movie [isn't] ready to be done."

Eddie Murphy; Frank Sinatra.

One, Murphy may be feeling deflated about the tracking on Meet Dave...Read More

A 30-minute iPhone 3G video tour starring that same dweeby-looking Apple guy in his 40s with the conservative haircut and the glasses -- the same guy who's been hosting the how-to video on the Apple site since the iPhone first appeared last summer. Except it's not a quick tutorial for experienced users showing what's new and different. It's a basic tutorial about everything. Oh.

There are two PUMA PACs -- one run by founder and Massachusetts mom Darragh Murphy that stands for People United Means Action, and one run by Will Bowers that stands for Party Unity My Ass. But they're both are about rallying Hillary Clinton supporters believe she lost due to media sexism and who won't support Barack Obama (who, PUMAS believe, were the principal agents of said sexism) are perhaps inclined to vote for John McCain.

Here's a New England Cable News report on Darragh that ran yesterday, and here's a report by Pandagon's ...Read More

An HE reader named Lucas sent me an embedded code for that Travelocity ad I spoke of the other day. The actor is Stephen Full -- here's his reel. The actress is Diane Ruby Lane.

The currents flowing between Will Smith and Charlize Theron in Hancock "are reminiscent of the heat generated by Gable and Harlow, say, or Bogart and Bacall. It turns out that there's a bond between these two (which I won't reveal), and the rest of the movie, which includes some superb comic invention as well as scarily turbulent scenes, grows out of it. Hancock suggests new visual directions and emotional tonalities for pop. It's by far the most enjoyable big movie of the summer." -- from David Denby's New Yorker review, dated 7.7.08.

I've been sitting on this recording of Rob Reiner talking last Thursday to Pete Hammond during the L.A. Film Festival. It's well worth it for the story he tells toward the end about Albert Brooks doing a mime bit on Johnny Carson's Tonight show back in the late '70s or early '80s, and a lesson Reiner learned about how funny is funny even if the audience doesn't laugh. Because they will eventually.

Rob Reiner , Pete Hammond

IGN's Todd Gilchrist is doing the usual somersaults over The Dark Knight -- "an intense, disturbing masterpiece."

From a new Vanity Fair spread about Hollywood's New Wave. I know two of these guys -- Amanda Seyfried, 22, co-star (along with Meryl Streep) of Mamma Mia!, and Kristen Stewart of Into the Wild, Adventureland and What Just Happened?. But I'm just not that into Emma Roberts (Wild Child) or Blake Lively (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants). Okay, I haven't heard of them.

Seyfried, Roberts, Lively, Sterwart.

"If Michael Moore, Oliver Stone or, God forbid, some effete French director had crafted a feature film that was a thinly disguised political broadside portraying Americans as recumbent tubbos who moved around on sliding barcaloungers with built-in video screens and soft drinks always at the ready, don't you think there'd be some sort of notice taken?"

So asks Hitsville's Bill Wyman, the former arts editor for NPR and Salon. His point is that Pixar has done exactly this with WALL*E and that reviewers have barely acknowledged it. Many who have admitted that WALL*E...Read More

One day after Bill Clinton's "Obama needs to kiss my ass before I'll enthusiastically campaign for him" quote was picked up by news services, Clinton and Barack Obama talked on the phone and had a "terrific" conversation, according to this Nedra Pickler AP story filed an hour or so ago.

OBAMA: All right, Bill. How do we do this?

CLINTON: Well, are you ready to kiss my ass on Main Street?

OBAMA: Heh-heh...okay.

CLINTON: I mean, that would work.

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Drew McWeeny's combo-review piece on The Dark Knight and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, posted this morning at 7:38 am, is too sprawling and wind-baggy. He's a first-rate writer but it wore me down. That said, here's the best graph in the whole piece -- a tribute to Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent performance in the Chris Nolan film.

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It is a profoundly good and nourishing thing to find love and peace with a partner, and so here's to David Poland having apparently tied the knot in Bermuda over the weekend. Mazel Tov and best wishes! A good thing to do for a fellow in his mid 40s. And may his first child be a masculine child. Poland is good with kids; I've seen him in action.

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An hour-long chat with Hellboy II director Guillermo del Toro at the Four Seasons early Sunday evening, from roughly 6 to 7 pm.

We talked a little bit about the film, but mainly we discussed The Hobbit...Read More

Last night Collider's Steve Weintraub was fuming that Variety's Diane Garrett and her editors didn't credit him for breaking a story "last week" that Legendary Pictures is developing some kind of sequel/prequel to 300 that Frank Miller is writing, Zack Snyder will direct and Warner Bros. will distribute.

Garrett posted Sunday night that "another 300 has been rumored from the start, but last week Snyder and the original producing team stoked a frenzy online when they talked about it at the Saturn Awards." The online frenzy, says...

The Quantum of Solace teaser. Reactions?

The Hollywood Reporter's Ray Bennett has raved about Mamma Mia! from London, where it'll open next Friday (7.4). How does a dedicated sourpuss and Europop/ABBA hater cast doubts and aspersions without having seen the film? Obviously he can't and shouldn't. The watchword should always be "try to be fair." The sourpuss can, however, sniff the air for girly-girl fumes, for hints of vapidity or plasticity or anything that feels like excessive fizz.

The word "fun," for example, has been known to strike fear...Read More

It was reported earlier today that Bill Clinton has told confidantes that in order to get his full support in the presidential campaign Barack Obama will have to apologize, beg and grovel like nobody's business. Clinton was quoted as saying, in fact, that Obama will have to "kiss my ass" in order to make things right.

Bill Clinton, George McGovern

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What...another Dark Knight reviewer doing cartwheels over Heath Ledger's Joker? Is this getting tedious or just repetitive? We get it already. Brilliant demonic channeling. The guy's going to win a posthumous Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Warner Bros. will almost certainly run a full-on Oscar campaign on his behalf. Now can we talk about something else, please? I feel like I'm getting beaten over the head here.

Ledger "presents himself as The Joker in a role that defines a career," writes Rope of Silicon's Brad Brevet...Read More

"Curmudgeonly, cantankerous, cigar-chomping Hellboy is a cross between a '40s noir detective and a burning fireplace," writes Variety's John Anderson, "but he's also cool enough to make Hellboy II: The Golden Army the hipster's hit of the summer. It's certainly a more deliberately (and successfully) funny movie, thanks largely to Ron Perlman, who returns with the rest of the cast, and without whom an onscreen Hellboy would have been almost unthinkable.

"Yes, Catholic imagery has always run rampant through helmer Guillermo del Toro's movies, including Pan's Labyrinth, which he made in between the two Hellboy...Read More

Eight or nine days ago the New York Observer's Sarah Vilkomerson wrote one of the funniest observation-and-reporting articles I've read in ages called "You've Got Mail (You Never Open)." And I only happened upon it last night over dinner. Funny because it's true, because it's my life -- because the urban under-45 onliners, one gathers, have become a nation of mail denialists.

"I don't have a fundamental fear or anxiety that makes me avoid the mail," Mark McMaster, a 29-year-old senior account manager at Google, tells Vilkomerson. "It just seems relatively uninteresting...Read More

A convincing report of stepped-up secret covert actions against Iran by the Bushies, as written by New Yorker's Seymour Hersh in a piece called "Preparing the Battlefield." The neocons have only a few months left to try and hurt I'm-a-dinner-jacket. It's a kind of prelude or warm-up, some believe, to the big Israeli bombing of Iran that will happen (if it happens) sometime after the Democratic and Republican conventions. One imagines that $4.40 a gallon will seem like a fond memory if and when such hostilities commence.

The obvious movie analogy to the "my middle name is Hussein!" movement (good citizens symbolically showing support for Barack Obama and flipping off the righties who've tried to use the exotic Middle-Eastern sound of this name to stir fear among rural dumb-asses) is, of course, the "I'm Spartacus" scene in Spartacus (1960). Moving then, moving today.

To emphasize the analogy I tried to find a good-quality letterboxed clip of this third-act moment in Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick...Read More