Day: April 7, 2011

Originally posted on 3.13, re-posted for current NY and LA openings: Super is partly a dark and bracing satire of superhero movies, partly a withering “eff you” to T-shirted ComicCon culture dweebs who live for superhero fantasies, and partly a violent, surreal-ish Troma comedy. However you want to slice it, it is not selling the same old bilge about a lonely neurotic dork finding transcendence and salvation by adopting a super alter-identity and kicking criminal ass and getting the girl of his dreams, etc.

The fact that it’s dopey-funny in a dry and anarchic way doesn’t change the fact that Super is, deep down, a rather harsh and unsparing portrait of marginally sociopathic comic-book readers-and-dreamers (as represented by Rainn Wilson and Ellen Page‘s characters) who are so full of rage and caught up in absolutist fantasy themes that they can’t really process reality, and who hand out severe bloody beatings in an oddly giddy but mean-spirited way.

James Gunn‘s movie, which also delivers sincere-anguished-weeping and praying-to-God scenes, is really quite the original thing. By my standards Super is way, way better than Kick-Ass because the latter was made with an underlying affection for superhero movies & mythology while Super mostly feels contempt for it. It’s the closet approximation I’ve ever seen of my own view of superhero films and fans of same. I now have another fantasy to resort to apart from my dream of strafing the ComicCon faithful in San Diego in an F-14 Tomcat.

It’s about a glum short-order cook (Wilson) who decides to become a vigilante superhero called The Crimson Bolt after his unstable former-addict wife (Liv Tyler) succumbs to the temptations of a of a local drug dealer (Kevin Bacon). Wilson soon after partners with a hyper, semi-delusional comic-store clerk (Page) who dress up in yellow and green outfit and calls herself Boltie.

Saturday, 3.12, 8:40 pm.

It never occurs to Wilson and Page that the kind of justice and punishment they mete out to lawbreakers and selfish ne’er do wells is just as bad and dangerous and socially threatening as anything that riled them up in the first place. When Wilson gets into fights he clubs his adversaries with a wrench, crunching skulls and splattering blood and sending them to intensive-care wards, and Page’s delight and ecstasy when she delivers similar-type woundings is both hilarious and appalling. She’s really quite the loony firecracker in this film — it’s a wicked, super-spirited, no-holds-barred performance.

JoBlo’s Chris Bumbray wrote last September that Wilson and Page’s third-act assault on Bacon’s headquarters “is almost like the superhero equivalent of Taxi Driver” which was precisely my thinking as I watched it last night. In part because I never believed in Taxi Driver‘s post-shoot-out aftermath of Travis Bickle being called a hero in N.Y. Daily News accounts and receiving a thank-you-for-saving-our-daughter letter from Jodie Foster‘s parents and Cybil Shepherd looking at him admiringly and longingly as he drives her home, etc.

The divorcement from reality was total and absolute in Martin Scorsese‘s epilogue, just as the comprehensions of Wilson’s character in Super are saturated with visions of delusion. Okay, at the very end there’s a glimmer of self-recognition and acceptance of the way things really are, but mostly Wilson is DeNiro’s Bickle and vice versa. An excellent thing, that.

2011 looks like the year that Mixed Martial Arts goes mainstream. We’ve got four MMA movies awaiting release and/or in the pipeline, and that obviously spells a trend. And I’ve never watched a mixed-martial-arts bout in my life. Who does? ESPN mainliners, guys who drink Four malted beverage and watch Mexican wrestling, etc.?

Gavin O’Connor‘s Warrior, which allegedly screened through the roof for exhibitors last week in Las Vegas (and which I briefly mentioned earlier today), is one. Another is Michael Tucker‘s Fightville, which generated good buzz at last month’s South by Southwest (Cinematical‘s Eugene Novikov called it “an exhilarating sports documentary and a levelheaded, piercingly intelligent treatment of a touchy subject”). And there’s also Kevin James’ MMA movie for Sony, directed by Frank Coraci (The Wedding Singer, Click, The Waterboy) from a script by Allen Loeb. And of course, Steven Soderbergh‘s long-simmering (some would say endlessly simmering) Haywire.

I completely understand and sympathize with Javier Bardem‘s decision to accept a straight paycheck acting gig (i.e., portraying gunslinger Roland Deschain in a three-part TV mini based on Stephen King‘s The Dark Tower) that’s well beneath his usual aesthetic pay-grade. He’s doing it, almost certainly, to fortify the nest for the sake of his and Penelope Cruz’s recently arrived son Leo. All acting parents do this when a baby comes along — they go for the money and feel just fine about it. Just a fact of life. I’d do the same in his position.

I’ll always be an admirer of Gavin O’Connor for Miracle, one of the best sports movies ever made because — this is important and fascinating — the hockey coach (Kurt Russell) was a bit of a stubborn, obstinate, broomstick-up-his-ass prick, and yet he brought it all home. I just hope O’Connor’s latest, which obviously stars Joel Edgerton (Animal Kingdom) and costars Tom Hardy (and not the other way around, as publicists for the film have it) doesn’t go in for too much hugging and weeping.

Judge: “Somebody has to take the blame for Your Highness. It’s too awful to just ignore or wave off. Pledges of allegiance to basic cinematic-craft standards have to be asserted, and one or two people have to be punished for the good of the community. I’m sorry but sometimes these things have to be done.

“I’ll never believe that former Moviefone editor-in-chief Patricia Chui wrote that incredibly stupid and arrogant letter to AOL freelancers on her own volition, but she had to be whacked for it all the same — same principle here. And I think I’m being liberal by demanding that only two transgressors suffer.”

Public Defender: “Thank you, your honor, and you are indeed being very reasonable and in fact generous. In anticipation of your honor’s position the defense has already decided upon two names that we hope will meet with your honor’s approval. We’re presuming you agree with the civilized world-at-large that Your Highness star and co-author of the screenplay Danny McBride should pay the penalty rather than director David Gordon Green, who, we believe, was led astray by friendship or….let’s not get into motivation. But we do ask that McBride’s term in movie jail be kept to 24 months, your honor. He’s been funny before and will be funny again. He just can’t be allowed to write a script ever again.”

Judge: “Aahh, but how do you guarantee McBride won’t write another script that gets produced? Who’s to stop him? The same Universal executive or executives who supported and allied themselves with Your Highness could call him during his term in prison and urge him to write another screenplay or two, and when he gets out of jail….wham, another basic violation. No, we have to go farther — we have to enforce the law in a way that will guarantee observance and respect. We have to punish not only McBride but the Universal executives who approved and funded this movie. There may well have been several involved but we’re going to choose one.”

Public Defender: “But your honor, production executives don’t go to movie jail. It’s talent that does that. Movie executives just keep on workin’, truckin’ and enjoyin’ the dough and the perks.”

Judge: “The Universal executive who is finally selected will have to submit to some form of public corporal punishment. Some sort of symbolic humiliation on a twice-weekly basis, let’s say. We have to think creatively about this. Perhaps submitting to a wooden stockade during lunch twice a week? Or a punishment like Eduardo Saverin’s in The Social Network, ordered to carry around a chicken or a rooster, let’s say, and feed it at all hours?”

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“McBride and Green were attempting a deconstruction, in fact a stock-car demolition, of movie competence,” Time‘s Richard Corliss has written. “I mean, adhering to all those standards of quality, coherence, invention — that’s just what The Man wants you to do. Renouncing the silly rules of film craft established over the past century, they have started from scratch, reinventing the wheel by making it rectangular, then blithely propelling it down a hill. The clattering crash you hear is the sound of Your Highness arriving at a theater near you.

“A failed movie is easy to spot; three or four new ones are delivered like dead mackerel to the multiplex each week. But occasionally curious moviegoers will discover an especially rotten specimen of the genus Cinema stinkibus. Entering the theater with low or no expectations, they’ll stumble upon a film of such numbing incompetence that they are forced to realize it’s not just a bad movie but the bad movie — a work of ur-awfulness, counterbrilliance and antigenius.”

So Kat Dennings is a dryer, more deadpan, slightly more opaque version of Emma Stone? Or is Emma a brassier, more mainstreamy, young-Eileen Brennan-without-the-deep-voice version of Kat? Dennings is obviously the erotic raison d’etre behind Daydream Nation (Anchor Bay, 5.6). On the same day her costarring performance in Fucking Thor will also be assessed.

The trailer for Crazy Stupid Love (Warner Bros., 7.29) suggests that Ryan Gosling is playing a glib, semi-shallow, mind-fucking hound. That’s just what the doctor ordered for this fine and exceptional actor who, I’ve long felt, is too caught up in fascinating technique. He needs to play an average dipshit in a semi-average way. Steve Carell, Julianne Moore and Emma Stone costar. The film is written by Dan Fogelman and directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (I Love You, Phillip Morris).

Here’s what I wrote about Gosling during Sundance 2010, after my first viewing of Blue Valentine: “He drives me nuts every time [because] he’s always doing that rop-bop-a-loo-bop, always focused on behaving in his own particular way and making damn sure that we notice this.

“Part of his being inventive and never predictable is that he always imprints and infiltrates each and every film he’s in with a Ryan Gosling mood spray. He’s a behavioralist who lives inside a very deep mine shaft, and when he takes over a movie you’re suddenly deep in that mine with him and noticing that the air is thin and wondering why and feeling it might be time to get the hell out of there, and yet knowing this would be heresy because Gosling is, at the end of the day, a very intense presence with a very shifty bag of tricks that most other actors would never devise, much less resort to.”

The just-out official teaser for Roland Emmerich‘s Anonymous (Sony, 9.23), an Elizabethan period drama that explores whether Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans), the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays attributed to William “Bardo” Shakespeare (Rafe Spall), begins with a present-day sequence in which a lecturer (Derek Jacobi) suggests/speculates that Will “never wrote a word.”

But the teaser, obviously, is selling anything and everything but literary authorship.

Inside Guy: “That’s because it’s not about literary authorship! It’s about more than that, I mean.” HE: “I’ll say…sound and fury, a naked backside, a guy getting his head chopped off.” Inside Guy: “That’s a naked guy, you realize…right?” HE: “So no undraped women?” Inside Guy: “We fought for that and it’s in there. And the guy getting his head chopped off is the Earl of Essex. The Essex rebellion happens in the third act.”

I don’t know, man. Emmerich has always been Emmerich, y’know? A leopard can’t change his spots.

Inside Guy: “You will not believe this is a Roland Emmerich film. He’s truly made a fantastic film, one that has almost nothing to do with his other work. I think it will really challenge some people’s preconceptions about his filmmaking abilities.” HE: “I’m not doubting you for a second, but the Sony trailer is obviously suggesting that Anonymous is right off the Emmerich assembly line…no offense.”

Here’s a high-resolution version of the teaser.

Is this one of those concepts that kicks in nicely as a trailer, but would run out of steam as a feature? Because I love this trailer. If I wasn’t on screening lists I’d definitely pay to see a 94-minute version. Grampires and other FunnyOrDie shorts will screen tonight at downtown L.A.’s L.A. Comedy Shorts Film Festival opener.