Day: June 13, 2012

That 43% Rotten Tomatoes rating for Adam Shankman‘sRock of Ages obviously means that some are cutting it a break. (I love Andrew O’Hehir’s rationale that “it isn’t trying to be real — it’s trying to be faker than any fake thing has ever been before.”) But one guy who’s always been partial to musicals (and who creamed over Dreamgirls) is MCN’s David Poland, and his decision to not be kind to this spoof of the cranked-up ’80s rock scene is telling, I think.

Choice portions: (a) “Shellshockingly bad…worst wide-release film of the summer so far, going away…Project X was more coherent…such a total, horrifying waste”; (b) “I am just stunned that so much talent came to so little…scene after scene, I just couldn’t believe what I was watching…tone deaf”; (c) “Trying to analyze [this] film feels a bit like trying to dissect diarrhea…I felt physically abused by the time the movie ended, like I had suffered a bad case of Jukebox Musical’s Revenge”; (d) “It is utterly soulless…it has no joy…it has no real passion”; (e) “You really have to go back 30 years to find a movie musical this bad. And at least Grease 2 offered a young Michelle Pfeiffer. And Julianne Hough, you may have many talents but you are no young Michelle Pfeiffer.”

Yesterday Digital Bits editor Bill Hunt reported that Warner Home Video has set the “cold war classic” Ice Station Zebra for Bluray release on 10.9. Those three words make Hunt sound like a kiss-ass. Shot in 70mm and released in a roadshow format with an overture and a general air of pomposity, Ice Station Zebra (10.23.68) was mostly regarded as a mediocrity. Read Roger Ebert’s review…read anyone’s. And don’t listen to any fanboy crap about it being a guilty pleasure.

Yes, any film shot in 70mm (Daniel L. Fapp delivered the stately, studio-house-style cinematography) warrants consideration as a Bluray, but the only truly good thing about this film is Michel Legrand‘s score.

John Sturges directed from a script based on by Alistair MacLean‘s 1963 novel of the same name, and co-written by MacLean, Douglas Heyes, Harry Julian Fink and W.R. Burnett.

Rock Hudson phones it in as a sub commander. He’s never seemed more narcotized and disconnected and bored. Hudson could deliver when motivated, but when he was bad he really stunk. He was sufficient in Giant and in those Douglas Sirk melodramas, and he peaked in those Doris Day comedies, but load him down with rote dialogue in a lead-balloon film like Ice Station Zebra, and he was almost the Rob Pattinson of his day.

Patrick McGoohan‘s played another perverse intellectual nutter, and was the only one with any snap or bite. Ernest Borgnine and Jim Brown were wasted.

Here’s Legrand’s overture:

And here’s the core of the exposition:

In the trailer for Sinister, Vincent D’Onofrio explains to Ethan Hawke that a supernatural predator who feeds on the souls of children is called “Bucchool.” That’s what I’m hearing, at least — Horst Buccholz + ghoul. Which sounds an awful lot like “Bud Ghoul.” To further complicate matters, First Showing‘s Alex Billington is calling this spook “Mr. Boogie.” What’s that, an old blues musician playing in a New Orleans saloon? A loan shark character left out of Scorsese’s final cut of Goodfellas?

Scott Derrickson‘s Sinister played at SXSW screening last March. Hawke plays himself playing a true-crime novelist in a movie. He and the family move into a new house that has a horrific history, blah blah. It was co-written by AICN’s “Massawyrm”, a.k.a. C. Robert Cargill.

“The scaled down nature of the production is impressively old school,” wrote Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn. “Producer Val Lewton, who invented this game in the ’40s with low -budget studio efforts like Cat People, would have loved it. The ghostly visuals creeping into the plot retain an especially chilling value for the lack of information accompanying them, and the supernatural figures are among the scariest to appear in an American horror movie since The Grudge.”

Earlier this evening the Expats.cz guys took me to a “Meme Fest” (i.e., 90-plus minutes of YouTube classics) at Prague’s Bio/Oko, a combination theatre/bar that caters to a hip crowd and is more or less Prague’s Film Forum or Nuart. Would you sit with 70 or 80 too-easily-amused people to watch a lot of YouTube stuff (maybe 40% of which I’d seen) on a big screen? I did. For an hour. Until my patience ran out. But I loved visiting the Bio/Oko, and I loved the Jack Rabbit Slim’s car in the orchestra.

The Expats.cz team (l. to r.): Radka Peterova, Content Manager; Olga Langova, Account Manager; Monika Petrasková, Admin; Jan Purkrábek, Content Administrator; Martin D. Howlings, Managing Director; Jason Pirodsky, Editor.

Read more

“Now that Mad Men has drawn to a close and we prepare to spend the rest of the summer looking back on a particularly dense season, we can reflect on all the clues that led to one of this year’s biggest plot turns — Lane Pryce‘s suicide,” writes Vulture‘s Matt Zoller Seitz. “The show’s death obsession dominated recaps and comments threads throughout the last twelve weeks, and with good reason. Every episode contained one or more hints that a major character would die.

“Indeed, more so than any other season of Mad Men, this one earns the adjective novelistic. No single episode can be considered wholly apart from any other; each chapter replenishes the death/mortality motif in imaginative, sometimes playful ways.”

“This video essay, titled ‘A Death Foretold,’ collects a few of the more obvious and subtle predictors from season five. The piece is a joint effort by me; writer Deborah Lipp, who recaps the show for my IndieWire blog Press Play and co-publishes the Mad Men-centric blog Basket of Kisses; and Kevin B. Lee, the site’s editor-in-chief and in-house cutter.”