In 1840s Baltimore Edgar Allen Poe (John Cusack) joins forces with a stalwart detective (Luke Evans) to catch a serial killer who’s apparently been inspired by Poe’s writings, and whose next victim may be Emily (Alice Eve), whom Poe is in love with…Jesus! A movie can’t be funded until it’s ground down into genre mulch and made to closely resemble other films of its type (i.e. Sherlock Holmes, From Hell, Sleepy Hollow). 19th Century arterial splatter with lots of fog.
It’s called The Raven, and it comes out of 3.9.12. Here’s the Apple trailer.
The images in Pedro Almodovar‘s films are always luscious, sensuous, refined to perfection. Paying $200 to own 600 of them (including some never-before-published personal photos) to have and hold seems like a good deal to me. Taschen’s “The Pedro Almodovar Archives“, edited by Paul Duncan and Barbara Peiro, will hit stores on the same day that The Skin That I Live In (Sony Classics, 10.14) opens.
Rushkoff’s points are that (a) mainstream media types are having a hard time understanding the groundbreaking nature of the protests because they’re thinking in 20th Century street-protest terms while Occupy Wall Street is a “patient” internet phenomenon and (b) the discussions heard in Liberty Park about the 1% vs. 99% economic inequities have been, he feels, “more profoundly intelligent” than anything heard on network talk shows or in the halls of Congress addressing same.
My decision to fly back to Los Angeles on Saturday morning now seems like a major miscalculation. Not only will I miss seeing My Week With Marilyn at the Sunday press screening, but the just-announced “work in progress from a master filmmaker” that will screen on Monday night at 7pm. “The film is due to be released in theaters this year,” says the official announcement.
Not the “scariest, snarliest bulldog in the pen” but “the most powerful man in the world”? When Clint Eastwood‘s Harry Callahan called the .357 Magnum “the most powerful handgun in the world”, I believed him. But the Hoover description seems grandiose.
Early last July ESPN’s Bill Simmonsconfided that he’d seen Jason Reitman‘s Young Adult (Paramount, 12.9), and that Charlize Theron ‘s lead performance was a career landmark for her. Trailers always lie but this one suggests, at least, what Theron’s performance might be. Is anyone getting a sense that Simmons may have been right?
“Remember when we said earlier about Tom Cruise being Tom Cruise and how he needed Jerry Maguire [to do that], and how you watched for two hours…?,” Simmons said. “And this is Tom Cruise throwing 98 miles an hour? Charlize Theron has never had a movie like that. Monster shoudn’t be her defining movie…she gained 35 pounds and made herself ugly [for that], and she’s beautiful. She’s never had a really good movie that she was really good in in which she was also beautiful.
“And it made me reevaluate her career…that’s how good I thought she was in [Young Adult]. She knows that you know that she knows she’s beautiful. I’m glad she made this movie. People will feel differently about her after they see it.”
No superhero movie can work if it appeals only to ComicCon fanboy types. It has do that deep-theme, double-intelligent, heavy-lifting thing (like Captain America did) to attract skeptics and haters like myself. I don’t see this happening with Joss Whedon‘s The Avengers (Disney/Marvel, 5.4.12) because Whedon is an unregenerate, comic-book-worshipping, fanboy-servicing journeyman — not an art-visionary director like Cameron or Fincher or Del Toro, strictly a fantasy-realm clock puncher.
And after all the X-Men movies, who wants to slog it out with another superhero ensemble piece?
The problem with Douglas Rain‘s HAL voice being Siri’ed, of course, is that he no longer has that voice. His 2001: A Space Odyssey dialogue was recorded 44 or 45 years ago, when Rain (born in ’28) was in his late 30s. He’s now 83, and his voice surely has that vaguely fluttering, higher-pitched old man timbre. Apple needs to find a Rain-sounding guy to pinch-hit. (Thanks to HE reader Mark Frenden.)
If an opener has an under-60% Rotten Tomatoes rating, it’s probably a wash. If it’s under 30% it’s a must-to-avoid. But if it’s at 10% or lower, some kind of exceptional chord has clearly been struck. (Note: as the RT rating will change as the day wears on, I’ll re-adjust and rephrase.)
Movieline‘s latest Oscar Index is a typical example of how clubhouse, path-of-least-resistance spitballing manifests when you’re tasked with reconfiguring these charts week after week. It’s all about familiar emotional default. Take your standard Spielberg kowtowism, ignore the tendencies on view in his last war film (i.e., the one about Martians, particularly the happy finale) and throw in the recently-dropped War Horse trailer, the horse all but crying in close-up…obviously the Best Picture contender to beat. Simple, easy and who’s to dispute?
In my somewhat more real-worldish Oscar Balloon chart Moneyball and The Descendants share the top two positions followed by War Horse (because the saps will always champion shameless-emotional-appeal movies of this sort), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Help, The Artist (its fate will depend on how well it does with the public) and Midnight in Paris. I’ve heard that the tone of The Iron Lady is “light”, but that needn’t be a problem in itself, if true. J. Edgar is in limbo for the time being, based on something I heard last weekend. I’m not sure that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy will be judged as Best Picture-type contender — it’s more of a Gary Oldman-for-Best Actor show.
Almost a month ago I ran my review of George Clooney‘s The Ides of March (Sony, 10.7). It opens tomorrow so here it is again: “[This] is a smart, taut political thriller — well-acted, gripping (particularly after the shit starts hitting the fan in Act Two) with a chilly, bitter edge. Plus it packs a stiffer punch than Beau Willimon‘s Farragut North, a 2008 political play that Clooney and Grant Heslov adapted for the screen, and in so doing added a third act involving sexual indiscretion.
“Is Ides about us on some level? Does it reflect or shed light upon some universal current that we’ve all come to know and understand? No — it’s a high-end, thoroughly adult popcorn movie, and that’s totally fine. There’s nothing to bitch about or put down here. Well, you can but why? To what end?
“The plot is about three shrewd political operatives (played by Ryan Gosling, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti) working for a pair of Democratic Presidential candidates during the Ohio primary. One of them is an (relatively) blunt-spoken liberal played by Clooney, called Mike Morris, and the other we never meet up close.
“What is Ides basically saying? That big-time politics can be a rough snarly game, and that being dedicated and hard-working doesn’t mean jack — you can still get taken down if you don’t play your cards extra-carefully. And the game isn’t just rough and snarly as it basically stinks.
Here’s where the mild spoiler stuff begins, if you care…
“The piece starts to get interesting when Gosling’s Stephen, a young hotshot aide to Clooney, slipping into a semi-casual affair with Holly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood ), a 20 year-old who works for the Morris campaign as an intern. And then we learn that someone else has had it off with Holly…all right, I’m not saying any more.
“But is a little action on the side really shocking in a campaign environment? Or in the world of politics itself? Post-Anthony Weiner what’s so bad about a politician (or his campaign manager or whomever) having an affair or a one-nighter with a more-or-less willing participant? Sounds pretty tame to me.
“One of the strongest lines in the film, spoken by Gosling, goes something like ‘you can go to war or ruin the economy or protect the rich, but you don’t get to fuck the interns.’ But don’t you? I mean, isn’t that par for the course? And does anyone really care? I realize, of course, that some people do care, still, but I sure as hell don’t, and no one who’s been around does so, you know, let it go already.
“The bottom line is that The Ides of March does the job of a good political thriller — it grabs and rivets and enthralls — and that’s fine with me. And it ought to be fine with everyone else. It’s worth the price of admission.”