Day: February 10, 2010

Times Online DVD guy Michael Moran has written a fairly brutal pan of Joe Johnston‘s The Wolfman.

“As a late night DVD guilty pleasure with a bottle of wine and a playful disposition, it will probably make quite a few people very happy. As a 21st Century big screen experience, it’s something of a howler.

“The Wolfman opens, naturally, with a ‘boo’ sequence to give you the idea that you’re watching some sort of horror flick. After that you are necessarily treated to a big ugly lump of exposition that explains what Emily Blunt is doing there and why Benicio Del Toro is an English gentleman with an American accent.

“After that, you might expect a steadily escalating series of thrills leading to a gory climax. You would be mistaken. The Wolfman limps along as if it has a thorn in its paw.

“There’s some backstory about a dark secret in Benicio’s and dad Anthony Hopkins‘ family past which quite honestly blows the movie’s big reveal for all but the most inattentive viewers.

“The movie’s one genuinely chilling moment occurs in flashback, with an unsettlingly dreamlike scene of Benicio and his now-deceased brother being haunted by some freaky night-time homunculus. There’s a little Shining topiary tribute too, just for laughs.

“Then poor Hugo Weaving shows up as Inspector Francis Aberline, a police detective based (as everyone who has seen From Hell will already have spotted) on Frederick Abberline, the real-life head of the Jack the Ripper investigation.

“Until the film’s flabby midsection eventually morphs into a lycanthropically hairy climax Hugo drifts around the movie without a whole lot to do. Blunt does something similar while a pitchfork-wielding posse of disposable villagers slowly assemble themselves into a sort of one-stop werewolf buffet.

“If you’re sensitive about that kind of thing there’s some borderline racist dialogue about a nearby encampment of Gypsies to pass the time until we actually see a werewolf.

“The Gypsy encampment is presently laid waste by a mysterious beast. There’s one of those annoying moments that you get in horror flicks where a crowd of witnesses magically evaporates when they’re inconvenient. For that matter the grand old country house in which Hopkins lives is similarly deserted, with nary a servant to be seen except when two of them need to drive Blunt to safety in the middle of the night.

“Fans of weird Victorian lunatic asylum stuff will be pleased to hear that there’s some weird Victorian lunatic asylum stuff, with an hilarious action scene involving doctors who are so scared that they’ve forgotten how a door works, followed by a mad chase through a nicely realized late-Victorian London which rather unwisely invites comparison with the peerless An American Werewolf In London.

“What really cripples the move is that Del Toro is playing someone who has no character, just a bundle of characteristics. We know he went to America as a child, we know he’s back as a man. He seems not to have had any life between those events. There’s no pre-existing romantic involvement to prevent him getting together with his dead brother’s fianc√©, and the experience of being half-killed by a ravening werewolf seems to affect him not at all.

“Hopkins is similarly insouciant, reacting to an assortment of family tragedies with equanimity and even, apparently, playing a jolly harmonica when he has just visited his son in a ghastly lunatic asylum.

“Throw in some really very disappointing effects work — and don’t forget the film has been directed by a special effects master, with creature effects by revered werewolf supremo Rick Baker — and you know you’re in trouble.”

This just-posted Joy Behar Show clip of Huffington Post editor Roy Sekoff and Jackie Collins passing along an anatomical observation about John Edwards (which allegedly comes from someone who’s seen the Edwards-Hunter sex tape) is…how to describe? It’s stunning to consider how far down into the swamp Edwards has sunk. On the other hand this is the first semi-positive news about the guy since the summer of ’08. The content is icky, but it provided the first real laugh of the day. I’m sorry.

Vanity Fair‘s John Lopez has attempted to explain how the Academy preferential voting system is much more of a good thing than a bad thing. “The Academy grabbed our attention this year by expanding the best-picture nominees to an all-inclusive field of 10,” he begins. “But amid all the [talk] about whether or not this devalues Oscar, no one seemed to notice that the Academy also switched to a preferential voting system for the Best Picture category.

“That is, until Steven Zeitchik at the L.A. Times exposed the system, painting a nightmare scenario in which the most popular film doesn’t win; The New Yorker‘s Hendrik Hertzberg wondered if the new system might favor Hurt Locker; and Awards Daily mused that broad Academy love for Quentin Tarantino‘s self-proclaimed masterpiece Inglourious Basterds could let it pull an upset.

“Primed by our own love for Tarantino’s revisionist spaghetti-Holocaust drama (and inspired by Mark Lisanti‘s creative vision of how the new voting works), we at Little Gold Men figured that running a thought experiment — How could Basterds take the whole souffle? — might help us and you decipher the dark magic behind the Academy’s system. Our conclusion: the Academy might just have saved democracy.”

Referring to President Obama‘s shockwave of an interview with Bloomberg News, in which he once again caressed and winked at bankers by rhetorically kissing their asses, N.Y. Times coluimnist Paul Krugman has asked “how is it possible, at this late date, for Obama to be this clueless?

“First of all, to my knowledge, irresponsible behavior by baseball players hasn’t brought the world economy to the brink of collapse and cost millions of innocent Americans their jobs and/or houses.

“And more specifically, not only has the financial industry has been bailed out with taxpayer commitments; it continues to rely on a taxpayer backstop for its stability. The point is that these bank executives are not free agents who are earning big bucks in fair competition; they run companies that are essentially wards of the state.

“There’s good reason to feel outraged at the growing appearance that we’re running a system of lemon socialism, in which losses are public but gains are private. And at the very least, you would think that Obama would understand the importance of acknowledging public anger over what’s happening.

“But no. If the Bloomberg story is to be believed, Obama thinks his key to electoral success is to trumpet “the influence corporate leaders have had on his economic policies.” We’re doomed.

I honestly found David Denby‘s review of the Red Riding Trilogy better written, easier to understand and more thematically satisfying than the trilogy itself. By all means see this British-made miniseries if you’re so inclined, but my advice is to read Denby’s review and save yourself the grief. If for no other reason than the fact that the north-country accents are all but indecipherable. The only way for Americans to watch this immersion in murk and depression is to wait for a subtitled DVD.

Andrew Garfield, Rebecca Hall in Red Riding: 1974.

I hated Andrew Garfield‘s character in Red Riding: 1974. You know a movie isn’t quite working when you start rooting for the hero to be killed.

HE’s Moises Chiullan vigorously riffs on how Surrogates, the Bruce Willis flick now available on DVD/Bluray, “directly confronts the addiction to little lit-up screens and avoiding real social contact in the world.”

Anyone can repeat a generic list of worthwhile train movies. The very best is John Frankenheimer‘s The Train — no arguments! — followed by The General, Runaway Train, The Lady Vanishes, The Darjeeling Limited, Narrow Margin, Silver Streak, etc. But one that’s been more or less forgotten (and which isn’t half bad) is Francis D. Lyon‘s The Great Locomotive Chase (’56), a Civil War actioner that costarred Fess Parker and Jeffrey Hunter.

It’ll never be anyone’s idea of a great film — it was a family-friendly Disney production — but it’s a completely decent one as far as it went. Tidy and focused, a story that moves right along, reasonably sturdy performances.

Best of all is a quietly touching finale in which Parker, a Yankee train-hijacker condemned to hang, shakes the hand of Hunter, his Confederate pursuer, with the idea that Union and Confederates will one day be friendly when the war is over “so I’d like if if we could shake now,” etc.

The Great Locomotive Chase was shot in an early permutation of CinemaScope (i.e., an extra-wide 2.55 to 1 aspect ratio).

Has anyone ever mentioned that Up co-director Pete Docter looks like a cartoon character? It’s mainly that exaggerated jaw. I’ve been trying to put my finger on it, but it hit me last night — he’s almost a dead ringer for a thinner version of “Mr. Incredible” in Brad Bird‘s The Incredibles.

Up director Pete Docter; Mr. Incredible.

It’s no good when characters afflicted with galloping lycanthropy turn into actual wolves. I like my werewolves to be hybrids — hairy creatures with human-type bodies who run around in a kind of half-crouch position, and who sometimes keep their shirts on when they transform. Benicio del Toro‘s Wolfman beast follows this mode. Ditto Jack Nicholson in Wolf, Oliver Reed in Curse of the Werewolf, Lon Chaney in The Wolfman, etc. I hated John Landis‘s decision to turn his American Werewolf in London star David Naughton into a four-legged wolf with paws and claws.

“In one small experiment on sexual response to food scents, vaginal and penile blood flow was measured in 31 men and women who wore masks emitting various food aromas. This was the study that found men susceptible to the scent of doughnuts mingled with licorice. For women, first place for most arousing was a tie between baby powder and the combination of Good & Plenty candy with cucumber. Coming in second was a combination of Good & Plenty and banana nut bread.” — from a 2.9.10 N.Y. Times story by Sara Kershaw.