If Peter Debruge‘s positive Variety review can be believed, Crazy Stupid Love (7.29) is a much better movie than what that dumbed-down trailer has been selling for several weeks. Congrats to Warner Bros. marketing for nearly persuading some of us that this allegedly endearing ensemble comedy, directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (I Love You Phillip Morris), might faintly suck.
“In a time before raunchy, R-rated laffers competed for the how-low-can-you-go prize, the demand for mature, grown-up romantic comedies resulted in pics as wise and wonderfully character-driven as Crazy, Stupid, Love,” Debruge begins. “Old-fashioned as that might sound, there’s a fresh, insightful feel to this multigenerational love story, in which square dad Steve Carell finds himself taking dating tips from ultra-slick ladykiller Ryan Gosling after getting tossed back into the singles scene.
“Instead of forcing the material to go high-concept or lowbrow, Warner Bros. trusts a first-rate cast and rock-solid script to sell auds. Response should be upbeat for this refreshingly upscale offering. Though it refuses to be reduced to a simple, one-sentence pitch, Crazy, Stupid‘s various storylines revolve around the shattered love life of happily married Cal (Carell), who has a midlife crisis foisted upon him when Emily (Julianne Moore), his wife of nearly 30 years, files for divorce.
“No magic body-swapping. No talking hand puppet. Just a sincere, soulful look at how someone who married his high-school sweetheart and never once imagined himself with another woman adjusts to being alone.”
A dissenting journalist confided the following this morning: “Off the record (as I am about to use language I wouldn’t use in a professional context), Crazy, Stupid, Love is phony fucking bullshit of the highest order, an utter wad of falsehood shot through with behavior no human being would actually engage in, with the additional blow of withholding one piece of vital information far, far past when it would have come up in real life for the purposes of a ‘surprise’ in the third act designed to make idiots gasp. It’s horrible, and while Peter Debruge is normally on his game, he is most assuredly not in this case.”
“By finding an ingenious way to streamline a now-familiar genre — and by providing a means to fill up your muggy summer afternoon watching hordes of evil soldiers gettin’ their arsche handed to them by a true-blue Sentinel of Liberty — Captain America: The First Avenger does his country proud.” — from a review by npr.org’s Glenn Wheldon.
“There is something miraculous in what Johnston and company have created from the hero that Jack Kirby and Joe Simon first unveiled in 1941. This is a big-scale movie that feels intimate, an action adventure built with the precision of a thriller, a popcorn lark that quotes knowledgeably from a list of influences as diverse as Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Medal of Honor videogames and Johnston’s own fine 1991 film The Rocketeer.
“It entertains zestily but treats you like a grown up; it has spectacles and sensations and all sorts of gee-wizardry, but there are heart and brains and taste, too. Like the best comic book films, Captain America is a feast of geekery that will gratify the most ardent acolytes of its hero. But it’s likely to amuse, enthrall and satisfy just about anyone with a sense of fun.” — from Shawn Levy‘s Oregonian review.
Fortune has posted a video of Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg chatting with Fortune‘s Andy Serwer to discuss 3D technology and why 2011 movies have so far, in Katzenberg’s opinion, blown chunks. JKatz actually asks for a show of hands to confirm or deny “if the last seven or eight months of movies is the worst lineup of movies you’ve experienced in the last five years of your life.”
“For sure the 3D bloom came,” Katznberg says early on, “and for sure the bloom is off the rose for a moment in time, driven by a singular and unique characteristic that only exists in Hollywood — greed. And, you know, so I think there were, unfortunately, a number of people who thought that they could capitalize on what was a great, genuine excitement by moviegoers for a new premium experience, and thought they could just deliver a kind of low-end crappy version of it, and people wouldn’t care, or wouldn’t know the difference. And anything ?? you know, nothing could have been further from the truth.
“The film business, on the other hand, is extremely challenged right now in ways that I don’t think, certainly not in my career in the industry, have we faced. And it’s a sort of perfect storm, if you will, of a number of factors.
“The first is that driven by the most stressed economy of our lifetime, you know, this recession made every single person look at and reassess price/value in every aspect of their life. Proctor & Gamble deals with it the same way, Wal-Mart deals with it, the way movie companies and studios are having to deal with it, which is, is something worth today to me what I’m paying for it. And people are consciously thinking and making that assessment on a daily basis.
“And what happened is, at the moment in time in which they were making those assessments, in particular about owning DVDs, is also the moment in time in which all sorts of new delivery opportunities presented themselves, which, by the way, are still enormously in flux, and you can’t ?? anybody that would sit here today and say, okay, well, I kind of understand where this all ends up a year, or 18 months, or two years from now, I think is kind of foolish, to be honest. There are so many changing aspects about it. And so we have what is for sure a systemic change in consumer habits with regard to how they consume movies. And what we haven’t yet found is what is that new model.
“Now, having said that, more people are actually watching movies today than ever before around the globe. The question is, how are they going to do that, how are they going to access it, how much of it is going to be through streaming, how much of it is going to be bundled, how much of it is going to be on a per-play basis, how much of it is going to be digital, how much of it is going to exist in the cloud, and we can go on, and on, and on with all of these things, all of which are incredibly real. And so, right now in the center of that is a change in habits, a change in platform, a change in delivery, and therefore uncertainty and challenges financially.
“A movie experience is a passive experience. The storytelling narrative is something that I think is still a unique and interesting, and valued experience by people around the world. And whether it’s done in a movie theater or in your home, or on your laptop, or iPad, or whatever the device is, people love that passive experience. And we see it, again, there’s more and more consumption of it.
“What all of these devices and social networking things do is they’re going to actually force Hollywood to make better products, because today the thing that is probably most askew in Hollywood is the issue of marketability versus playability. And what that really means is that there is this sort of unholy alliance that has existed forever between art and commerce, show and biz. And today it’s out of balance and it’s too much on the biz, and it’s too much on the commerce and it’s too much on the marketability and the fact is that I’m pretty confident, and let’s do it, because this is supposed to be an interactive experience here, which is could we agree?
“Let me have a show of hands of people that would say the last seven or eight months of movies is the worst lineup of movies you’ve experienced in the last five years of your life.”
What has Katzenberg been watching? The last six and a half months have seen The Guard, Captain America, Drive, A Better Life, The Tree of Life, Beginners, X-Men: First Class, Bridesmaids, Win Win, Hanna, Midnight in Paris, Source Code, Cedar Rapids, Meek’s Cutoff, Super, The Lincoln Lawyer and Jane Eyre. That’s almost 20 films that have been very good, good or better than half-decent.
For whatever reason it’s only just hit me that Martin Scorsese‘s Letter to Elia, a profoundly personal exploration of not only Elia Kazan‘s life and career but the influence his films have had upon Scorsese almost his entire life, is playing for free on pbs.org. If you haven’t seen it and you regard yourself as any kind of Movie Catholic, you must watch it as soon as you can. Who knows? Maybe they’ll take it down tomorrow or next week.
I’d like to catch the ComicCon Cowboys & Aliens screening (which my Universal p.r. pally wasn’t able to get me into), but otherwise it feels just fine not being in San Diego as we speak. Possible compensation: A livestream feed from the Entertainment Weekly guys and NowLive. A little Dave Karger and Anthony Breznican is part of the deal, apparently.
Very impressive sit-up and leg-lift regimen. Seriously. You have to figure some Ford rep said to the milk guys, “Okay, but a torso shot. The moustache is white. People will see it. No closeup required.”
Warner Bros, will be showing Steven Soderbergh‘s Contagion (9.9) in IMAX, according to the new one-sheet. That’s cool. That’s the version I want to see.
“Is Captain America, as some have suggested, a symbol of American proto-fascism or a Tea Party hero before the fact?,” asksNew York‘s Andrew O’Hehir. “One answer to that question is to say that it’s a stupid question to ask about a comic-book hero and another, given the overall left-libertarian leanings of the Marvel universe, is to say no.
“I’m not sure either answer is adequate in the long run, but this origin story effectively ducks the question, by pointing out that Captain America was a weapon created in a moment of global emergency. He’s unquestionably an argument for American exceptionalism, in that he seems cooler, more humble, more self-sacrificing and just flat-out nicer than those who sought to enslave the world. That’s an important aspect of our national mythology, and Captain America is a nostalgic tribute to the time when it still felt true.”
Could a perception that Captain America is a veiled rightwing movie on some level be an unacknowledged, underlying reason why some critics are pissing on it? If this is a factor then I can only emphasize my agreement with O’Hehir and repeat what I said yesterday, which is that it “dream[s] a little dream about what it was to be a true believer during World War II, and to be a kind of goody two-shoes type of guy who wants to serve and salute and defeat the bullies. It’s not in the least bit ‘realistic,’ of course, but it’s a highly sincere and convincing visitation of an imaginary yesteryear.”
Shame on the enemies of this film. It’s simply too well made and too finely honed and harmonized to dismiss as “just another superhero movie.”
Suddenly departed MSNBC guy Cenk Uygur explained tonight on his Young Turks show why he believes MSNBC honchos didn’t invite him to stick around. One reported reason is that Al Sharpton (who may take over Uygur’s former 6 pm slot) recently drew somewhat higher ratings. Uygur doesn’t touch the Sharpton factor but to me his interpretation of MSNBC’s management mentality sounds perceptive.
“[MSNBC] didn’t want to challenge power,” he explains. “The problem with the mainstream media is they’re desperate for access, they don’t challenge the government, they don’t challenge power. And it’s one thing when they give you [that] speech and you’re not sure that it’s true, but when they act upon the speech you’re SURE that it’s true. The point of this show was truth-telling, and you’re supposed to challenge the government…that’s the role of the media.”
