Day: July 11, 2009

You can tell within seconds that John Huston‘s Moby Dick understands the look and culture of mid 19th Century New England, and that you’re in the company of seasoned actors and a sturdy script. I’ve been a fool for this film for years, largely due to my love for Oswald Morris‘s desaturated half-color, half black-and-white scheme, achieved by the blending of a color and a monochrome negative in post.

If you’d asked me a few years ago (sometime, say, between ’01 and ’03) if I thought Mary Louise Parker was a firecracker, I would’ve said, “Uhh, well…she’s attractive but not really.” MLP used to be a semi-struggling actress who did solid work in films like Fried Green Tomatoes and Angels In America, and on-stage in productions like Proof. Then she began starring in Weeds four years ago and now she’s totally reinvented as smokin’ material.

More power and all that, but this Esquire snap sums it up.

If I gave a damn about comic-book superhero geek culture, which I very proudly don’t, I’d be asking if the casting of Ryan Reynolds as the Green Lantern for Warner Bros. takes the wind out of the sails of the Deadpool movie he’s also supposed to star in for 20th Century Fox.

If you add the minor fantasy figure of Captain Excellent, the blonde-haired spandex superhero Reynolds played in Paper Man, which opened the Los Angeles Film Festival about three weeks ago, that makes three super-stud roles for the guy. Has any name actor ever played even two separate superheroes in the same approximate time period? If I were Reynolds I’d eighty-six Deadpool. No actor should do more than one.

The Lantern deal also means, of course, that we’re going to have two superhero movies with the word “green” in the title within two years of each other — The Green Lantern and Seth Rogen‘s Green Hornet movie. Isn’t that kind of dumb-sounding?? Is there any chance of George Clooney signing to play The Green Gzornplatt for Sony?

A friend sent me two links to two negative Hurt Locker reviews on Breitbart.com — review #1 and review #2. “Right-wing guys have a problem with this film,” I wrote back. “For whatever philosophical, physiological or emotional reason they can’t seem to roll with it. Obviously off on their own beam and preaching to a select chorus.”

“Agreed,” he said. “But thought you might want to put it up on your site and let your readers give ’em what for. Sometimes it’s informative to get opposing views. I would have thought the right-wingers would have rallied behind this film as an example of the bravery and focus of our troops, etc. But I guess unless a movie is directed by a right-winger like Cyrus N. it doesn’t pass the smell test with the conservative crowd.”

The Twitter crowd seems to like it.

The idea is to listen to the clip and name the film it’s taken from without thinking about it. If you can’t name it within 15 or 20 seconds, forget it.

Before this morning I’d honest-to-God never heard of Tiptoes, a 2003 dwarf movie with Matthew McConaughey, Kate Beckinsale, Peter Dinklage and Gary Oldman. I love how the second-rate narrator calls Oldman’s CG-enhanced acting “the performance of a lifetime.” (Thanks to HE reader Mark Smith.)