How is everyone having sampled “fired up and ready to go” (Obama first, then Clinton and McCain) different than Obama sampling Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick‘s “just words” riff? There’s nothing to get into here. It’s small. The desperation of the Clinton team is sad. Obama and Clinton are now in a statistical dead heat in Texas and they’re scared.
What I’m about to say I say as an effete white guy who’s owned exactly two hip-hop albums in his life (Dr. Dre‘s The Chronic and Wu Tang Clan Forever), but there’s a reason that sampling — the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an element of a new recording — became a common music industry practice in the ’90s without this or that performer freaking out and yelling “plagiarism!” like Hillary spokesperson Howard Wolfson did yesterday.
Obama wasn’t stealing from Gov. Patrick by taking his words — he was reusing them as an element in an Obama speech. (He said the words a bit differently than Patrick, employing that special Obama pizazz.) You can’t expect the Hillary whitebreads to understand this, but this is basically why Obama said earlier today it’s “no big deal.” I also think he could have observed the rules and attributed the quote to Patrick, but to have done so would have interfered with the rhythm, and for a gifted orator rhythm is more than half the game. So that was another factor.
Is there anyone who doesn’t suspect that Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (New Line, 4.25) will somehow play fast and loose, water down or otherwise make light of that deplorable situation? I don’t know the plot or the shot, but if you saw the first film you know the director-writers (Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg) and their basic attitudes and instincts. That said, it’s probably better to have made some kind of comedy with a Gitmo backdrop than not. Better to have it out there than pushed aside, I mean.
Kal Penn, John Cho
Legendary photographer Bert Stern has re-shot his 1962 Marilyn Monroe nude photo session with Lindsay Lohan substituting. The shots appear in the current (2.18) issue of New York. Intriguing shots — okay, alluring — but why did the session happen? Obviously because Lohan is trying to get back into it somehow. She’s trying to launch a new impression of herself that might sink in and shift attitudes.
Her career was considered all but finished after the last drunk-driving incident. The box-office disappointment of Georgia Rules and the total wipeout of I Know Who Killed Me seemed to destroy the myth of her box-office heat, if she ever had any. The last thing she did of any note was get randy with three guys while she attended the Capri Film Festival. What else is there to do except resuscitate the ghost of Marilyn Monroe and similar ploys?
The idea of Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law co-performing or additionally playing Heath Ledger‘s character in Terry Gilliam‘s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a noble gesture on the part of the actors. Admirable, compassionate. It’s going to result in a slightly confusing narrative, but Gilliam’s films unfold that way regardless so no harm done.
Ledger’s footage was shot in London (i.e., mainly exteriors) — the other three will perform green-screen scenes. The common character, “Tony,” is “transported into three separate dimensions [that] Ledger accesses via a paranormal mirror, and which will “now be inhabitated by Depp, Law, and Farrell,” an Variety/AICN story informed.
The trailer for Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D (New Line, 7.11) tells you it’s more of a kiddie movie — a logic-free comedy for anyone over the age of 8, or anyone who happens to be a cretin — than any kind of half-gripping adventure-thriller.
It seems to want to be a poor man’s Indiana Jones film (including a Temple of Doom thrill ride on a train track inside a mine) but the trailer is basically selling a goofy-ass special-effects ride about a visit to the Bullshit Adventure Theme Park where everything can and will happen on an expedition to the earth’s core.
Brendan Fraser, Josh Hutcherson and Anita Briem are the three travellers who run into hot lava, oceans, dinosaurs and whatnot. Pretty much the same stuff that James Mason and Pat Boone encountered in their 1960 adventure flick of the same name. The difference is that the ’60 version had a scowling second-banana villain who referred to the experience of nightly sleep as “little slices of death.” I’ve never forgotten that line. Going to sleep is, in a sense, like dying…or so Carl Sagan once remarked.
The Mummy films killed Brendan Fraser’s believability factor. He pocketed those fat paychecks, but his name became synonymous with second-tier, FX-driven adventure fantasy that didn’t add up for anyone except the moron crowd that will pay to see anything as long as they can guzzle their 32-ounce Cherry Cokes and gorge on gallon-sized containers of popcorn dripping with anhydrous butterfat.
Rickman’s big fall in Die Hard
The most hateful thing about stupid adventure films — about all adventure films made by people given to mediocre thinking and imagining, especially since the success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — is how falling from any height never results in any harm to anyone. You can fall from a 75-story building, from a mountaintop, from a cliff, from a stepladder — and you will never, ever be hurt. And I mean not even bruised. There’s a trailer clip of the Journey 3D trio free-falling for several seconds — long enough to fall from the height of two World Trade Center towers stacked on top of each other — and they’re saved by falling into a pool of water.
Falling is one of the most fearsome real-life horrors imaginable, but on-screen it’s become an exercise in casual gymnastics. Think — when was the last time anyone died or was even injured from falling in a major action-adventure film? Was it Alan Rickman‘s fall at the end of Die Hard, which was 20 years ago? HINTERLANDS WARNING! SPOILER AHEAD!: (Blankety-blank‘s death fall in In Bruges and Martin Sheen‘s in The Departed don’t count because these films were straight dramas.)
The Journey 3D director is Eric Brevig, who’s mainly worked in special-effects (his only previous directing gig was for Xena: Warrior Princess on the tube in ’95). The screenwriter is Michael Weiss, whose previous credits are War Stories with Oliver North” (1 episode, 2006) and The Remarkable Life and Mysterious Death of General Patton (2006, TV episode).
In the 2.25 New Yorker, critic David Denby has written a lengthy love letter to Joel and Ethan Coen, beginning with an awed description of the first 20 minutes of No Country for Old Men.
(Illustration by Robert Risko)
Then he rolls the clock back to 1985 and Blood Simple and reviews the highlights of their career, tracing their gradual evolution from sardonic snickering jokers who often seemed outside their material to masters of austerity and dry irony and chilling silences, first in Fargo and then, 11 years later (and after at least a couple of films that seemed minor, if not out-and-out shortfalls), in No Country.
And then comes the wind-up to the finale and you think, okay, here we go, the crowning final paragraphs in which Denby will drape a red-velvet cloak over the Coens’ shoulders and annoint No Country as their ultimate, Oscar-worthy triumph and….wham, he trashes the ending.
“No Country is the Coens’ most accomplished achievement in craft, with many stunning sequences, but there are absences in it that hollow out the movie’s attempt at greatness,” he writes. “If you consider how little the sheriff bestirs himself, his philosophical resignation, however beautifully spoken by Tommy Lee Jones, feels self-pitying, even fake.
“And the Coens, however faithful to the book, cannot be forgiven for disposing of Llewelyn so casually. After watching this foolhardy but physically gifted and decent guy escape so many traps, we have a great deal invested in him emotionally, and yet he’s eliminated, off-camera, by some unknown Mexicans. He doesn’t get the dignity of a death scene.
“The Coens have suppressed their natural jauntiness. They have become orderly, disciplined masters of chaos, but one still has the feeling that, out there on the road from nowhere to nowhere, they are rooting for it rather than against it.”
My God, those are the same beefs levelled against the ending of the film last May when it first showed at Cannes! Perceptions evolve, you move past, the fog lifts.
The last 20 minutes of No Country are about gathering forces and the tentacles of fate reaching round and grasping with unstoppable force. The movie becomes destiny itself — that thing you can’t see coming and can’t stop. It assumes the shape and inevitability of night. It becomes, in short, God-like, which is to say terrible, impassive, cruel. It isn’t very comforting (except in the words of Mr. Jones as he speaks of his dear departed father), but man, it sure holds you in its grip.
Speaking of Mandingo and ostensibly “shocking” inter-racial sex, it would have been mildly interesting if the Film Forum had decided to include Sidney Lumet‘s Last of the Mobile Hot-Shots (’70) in its currently runnng Lumet retrospective, which goes until 2.28.
I’ve only seen a portion of Hotshots, but it has a reputation of being extremely talky and dull. (The screenplay is by Gore Vidal, adapting a Tennessee Williams play called Seven Descents of Myrtle.) It has a suggested oral sex scene near the end in which Lynn Redgrave kneels before Robert Hooks, an African-American actor who’s worked almost exclusively on TV ever since. Mildly controversial for its time, but the movie mainly just blows a lot of florid air.
James Coburn plays Hook’s half-brother who marries Redgrave on a TV show and brings her back to his family’s run-down plantation, which is threatened by a rising river (and we know what that means!).
