Day: April 11, 2013

Christopher Tookey‘s pan of Oblivion in the 4.11 Daily Mail is funny. He was clearly feeling his hate oats as he wrote it. I’ve been there. I know how it feels. A certain form of exhilaration.

But then I came upon this sentence: “[Tom Cruise‘s] performance here is even more robotic than in his last turkey, Jack Reacher, where he bravely attempted to play a tough guy 12 inches taller than himself.” That’s raw and intemperate. Jack Reacher was an absorbing, finely crafted exercise and an admirable throwback to old-fashioned, less-is-more action values. So right away I pulled back. He’s obviously not stupid but if he missed what was good about Jack Reacher what else has he missed?

Oblivion review excerpt: “As you would expect from a film of this magnitude, the scenery is spectacular. The trouble is that you’d find a good deal more excitement simply by staring into the Grand Canyon. The whole folie de grandeur is ponderous, humourless and derivative. Even the score is a rip-off of Hans Zimmer’s music for Inception.

“If you wish to see films based on similar premises, I would recommend Wall-E, the original Planet Of The Apes and particularly Moon. All are far superior to this.

“After more than two hours, I was surprised to discover that my cheeks were wet. I was, quite literally, crying with boredom.”

I was overseas when Rock of Ages opened last June and I never got around to seeing it on Bluray. But I happened to turn it on an hour ago and I have to admit something. I know the karaoke factor is a problem, but if you half-watch it and don’t concentrate too much on the particulars, it’s spirited and half-tolerable. Do we have a new category here? The kind that more or less irritates if you give it your complete attention but which succeeds as white noise?

Highway 121 heading east toward Sonoma — Thursday, 4.11, 3:55 pm.

Room #247, El Pueblo Inn, Sonoma.

$85 for four days.

A filmmaker friend told me a week or so ago that Steven Soderbergh‘s Behind The Candelabra would screen at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, or about a week before debuting on HBO. Now Deadline‘s Pete Hammond is dishing this also. No official confirmation but it’s happening.

Easily the coolest one-sheet for a film based on a William Shakespeare play ever designed. The Cosmo and the orange slice. You might assume that the first use of a color accent within a monochrome frame in a mainstream film happened in Schindler’s List. But the first time (or so I recall) was actually in Francis Coppola‘s Rumblefish.

Airport interiors are designed to convey a vague sense of serenity and security. Sometimes they do more than that. I’m sitting near a Starbucks alcove inside one of the San Francisco Int’l Airport terminals, and a few minutes ago I felt curiously soothed when I came upon this hanging angel sculpture. So I took a shot of it. And I’m virulently anti-religious. How’s that for a slice of essential 21st Century journalism?

Last week I said “sure, okay, fine” to a four-day visit to the 16th Sonoma International Film Festival. But now that it’s 8:48 am and I have to leave 40 minutes hence to catch an 11:30 am plane to San Francisco, I don’t feel so good. Part of me always rebels when it’s time to pack (and I haven’t even packed yet) and get going that says “God, why did I agree to this? It would be so much simpler and easier to just stay put.”

I was going to wake up at 5:30 am and write my review of Brian Helgeland‘s 42, which I saw last night. I started tapping out impressions late last night. And then I slept through the alarm and woke around 8 am.

I’ll say this much: 42 is okay if you like your entertainment simple and square and instructional, but it felt to me like a film aimed at 10 year-olds, like something the Disney people might have made in the 1950s between The Swamp Fox and The Life and Times of Elfego Baca. I was wondering if Helgeland intended 42 to evoke an old-time atmosphere (the story of Jackie Robinson‘s entry into big-league baseball happens between 1945 and ’47) by deliberately aping the style and mentality of mainstream ’40s and early ’50s films. I was thinking specifically of those three James Stewart-June Allyson flicks they made between ’49 and ’55 — The Stratton Story (another baseball yarn about overcoming adversity), The Glenn Miller Story and Strategic Air Command. Intentional or not, 42 is cut from the exact same cloth.

I also have another riff about To The Wonder in mind, but that’ll have to keep. I leave in 20 minutes. Nah, can’t happen. I’m shooting for a 9:45 am departure.

9:35 am update: I leave in ten. As I was packing the cats were giving me that hurt look — “You’re abandoning us?”

The second trailer for Louis Leterrier‘s trickster-caper-what-have-you. Here’s a 3.24 HE riff. Summit/Lionsgate is releasing Now You See Me on 5.31.