One thing I've noticed about most epic sci-fi/fantasy stories is that they're essentially about war, albeit disguised and softened with weird monsters, robots and other creatures with funny names. There's usually a bad guy (with a reallysinister sounding name) who wants to take over the world or something similar, and a reluctant hero -- plucked from his comfortable, yet mundane home -- who has to stop him. The trick is to make it all fun. Because let's face it, we humans love war. If we didn't there wouldn't be so many movies and books about war, as well as -- you know -- real wars. (More specifically, I think, we love watching them, rather than fighting in them.) The Lord of the Rings trilogy worked so well because Peter Jackson projected his own twisted glee into every frame; he loved making those movies and it showed. The characters felt an anxious anticipation toward the battle, like a buildup, and the battles themselves were explosive releases. The new film The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, the second in an unfortunately ongoing series, treats war as if it were already played out, rather than happening before our eyes. It's a dead dog dull bore of a movie, but that won't stop it from making a fortune. (See also Jette's review.)
This comes courtesy of ComingSoon.net, who had the exclusive debut. You can head over there for a super huge version if you like. It's a good looking poster, and a big improvement over the cartoonish promotional artwork from the first film. I dig the simple, to-the-point posters like this, so much classier than cramming the entire cast in. It does seem as if he has wandered into sepia-toned Sparta, though.
It's been two-and-a-half years since we watched the Pevensie children come to life on the big screen in Disney's splashy adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but for the characters, only a year has passed between those adventures and the ones in the new movie, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. Well, time is funny like that when you're dealing with the magical land of Narnia, as the storyline of this movie amply illustrates.
The structure of events in the movie is actually an improvement on the C.S. Lewis book, opening with a captivating chase scene as young Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes) attempts to escape from his Uncle Miraz (Sergio Castellito). Miraz has been scheming to steal Caspian's throne and now wants him dead. But Caspian's tutor gives him a magical horn, the horn of Queen Susan, to summon help in time of need. When Caspian blows the horn, suddenly Lucy, Edmund, Susan and Peter are pulled out of a London Tube station (which was the first scene in the book) and into a world of wild, wooded ruins that turns out to be Narnia, thousands of years after they've left. However, Caspian thought he was summoning kings and queens, not British children, and how can these kids help him regain the throne and help Old Narnia? And where is Aslan the Lion in the middle of all this?
I'm beginning to believe that no one really wants to watch movies anymore. Or, at least, they don't want to actively watch them. Big movie theaters are hurting with the advent of saucy home theater systems, and it seems like most people would rather curl up on their couch then head out for the big community experience. We've already heard arguments about the mass distractions that are attached to home viewing, but I never thought that it would become part of the movie experience. The Hollywood Reporter posts that Walt Disney is itching to use Blu-ray's Live technology to make a more interactive movie experience. But they're not talking about the Choose Your Own Adventure sort of fare. They're adding a whole lot of bells and whistles to their classics. First up, my favorite Disney film ever -- Sleeping Beauty.
Luckily, it doesn't seem to be presenting anything that will make me want to go out and get a new player. It's all movie distractions. It might be cool that the menu will have a customized version of Sleeping Beauty's castle that will reflect your weather conditions, but that's just fluff. Besides that, there's just things to distract you from the film -- integrated chats on the movie screen, customized video messages to insert into the movie, the option to mail clips to friends, trivia games, and the option for a constant stream of web trailers.
Did the art department at Fox apply some Photoshop to an actual childhood photo of Rainn Wilson? It sure looks like a young Dwight Schrute to me.
This is the poster for The Rocker (click image to enlarge), a comedy starring Wilson that's due this summer. Wilson plays a guy who got kicked out of a hair band in the 1980s and now, 20 years later, joins his nephew's upstart band as a means of reclaiming his former glory. The director is Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty), with a screenplay by Maya Forbes (various Larry Sanders Show episodes) and Wally Wolodarksy (various Simpsons episodes).
The release date is Aug. 1, but it's premiering at the CineVegas Film Festival in June, so we should have a review for you then. The premise is good, the cast (which also includes Christina Applegate) and personnel are good, and August has been a fertile month for comedies in recent years (Superbad, Talladega Nights, 40-Year-Old Virgin), so we're keeping our fingers crossed for this one.
(And is it me, or is this poster a tad Apatow-esque?)
The MPAA's rating system is flawed and arbitrarily enforced, and the system itself is corrupt. I urge one and all to see the enlightening This Film Is Not Yet Rated for ample evidence of this -- or, if you prefer, just watch The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and marvel at how such a violent movie magically got the kid-friendly PG rating.
I didn't know the rating before I watched it, and I didn't remember, off the top of my head, whether the first Chronicles of Narnia was PG. (It was.) As Prince Caspian unfolded, I noted that there was an awful lot of stabbing, throat-slitting, and other killing, though I also noted that it was almost entirely bloodless. I figured it was the lack of gore that had prevented the film from being rated R, and that it was instead a moderately violent PG-13.
So I was flabbergasted to discover afterward that it was rated PG. Mind you, I have nothing against wanton violence and destruction in film -- it just needs to be labeled properly. Prince Caspian has (no spoilers here) several large-scale battle scenes, akin to Lord of the Rings in size and scope, with people and magical creatures slaying one another right and left. In a scene of hand-to-hand combat, someone slices off someone else's head; in the next shot we see the head, still in its helmet, on the ground next to the body. Elsewhere, there's a massive slaughter while good guys are forced to look on, powerless to help.
We're just over a week and a half away from seeing Harrison Ford run around as Indiana Jones for the first time in almost twenty years in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and hopefully not collapse in an arthritic fit. Of course, that means putting out a collection for Indy buffs to buy -- just in time for a late-night triple feature before the big release. However, unlike the Die Hard re-do, which stripped tons of extras away, and other releases that just fill up landfill space, there is a perk in this whole money-grab: aside from getting them as a collection, you can pick them up for the first time separately.
That's music to my ears, since I detest Temple of Doom, and would be happy not to see it again. Pick up one, pick up a few, or pick them all up in the Adventure Collection, which is just the three special editions in a fancy cardboard box. Each disc has a bunch of extras -- intros, interviews, special effects, storyboards, and more. Some is old footage, but there's lots of new bits as well -- including a look at Skull on the Last Crusade DVD. Buy the Collection | Buy Raiders | Buy Doom | Buy Crusade
Whether or not shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force or The Simpsons succeeded in translating their television dynamics to the big screen depends on your point of view, but the release of Speed Racerthis weekend raises a more specific question about the viability of turning an animated series into a live action spectacle on the big screen. The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkleand Underdog both suggest how this goal can go wrong -- namely, by imploding on its absurd conceits. You may disagree with the inclusion of some of the following titles, all of which culled their material from animation, but it's fair to say that each of them takes its subject matter at face value, allowing the natural ingredients of the original sources to remain intact. Well, maybe not Super Mario Bros., but that one is a special case (fire away, if you must). Until somebody makes an Animaniacs movie with real actors, I'm sticking to this list.
Robert Altman's offbeat ode to the famous Fleisher cartoon starring the spinach-eating strongman and his darling Olive Oil is the great misunderstood work of the director's career. Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall manage to bring utterly ridiculous characters into a realm of believability that you could never imagine when watching the show. Suddenly, Popeye made sense -- goofy, almost surreal sense, but sense nonetheless -- in the real world. Thanks to veteran adult cartoonist Jules Feiffer's screenplay and a soundtrack so catchy Paul Thomas Anderson borrowed from it twenty years later in Punch-Drunk Love, the classic status of Popeye can't be denied.
With five nominations, it looks like Superbad will be the star of the 2008 MTV Movie Awards, and its three jubilant male leads -- Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse -- deserve the kudos. But one major talent behind the whole affair has stayed relatively anonymous while these young up-and-comers bathe in the spotlight: Director Greg Mottola. The erstwhile independent filmmaker, responsible for some of the best installments of Arrested Developed and Undeclared, launched his career a solid decade before the rise of Judd Apatow with a charming little low budget comedy called The Daytrippers. Starring Stanley Tucci, Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber,Parker Posey and a host of other fantastic character actors, the film follows a wildly dysfunctional family over the course of a single day, as Davis, playing a worrisome housewife, tries to track down her unfaithful husband (Tucci).
Mixing warm humanity with pitch-perfect screwball timing, Daytrippers marked the sort of debut that told you a filmmaker had a big career ahead of him. After a modest premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival, it landed at Cannes, barely got a theatrical release and promptly vanished thereafter. Mottola turned to TV work, and slipped out of the film scene for a good ten years. These days, it's no easy task to track down Daytrippers on DVD -- you can nab second-hand copies on Amazon for decent rates, but not a single retail outlet carries it. Aside from the occasionally airings on cable, the movie has vanished.
While Hong Kong filmmakers have a gift for action, they tend to overdo it in the melodrama department, at least when it comes to watching their films through Western eyes. Perhaps the worst Hong Kong film I've seen to date is Jackie Chan's Heart of Dragon (1985), which features Jackie caring for his developmentally disabled brother (played by goofball Sammo Hung, who co-directed). All the heartstring tugging made me want to claw my eyes out. Or take another look at a masterpiece like John Woo's The Killer and you'll see an operatic hugeness to the emotional scenes -- especially between men -- that an American would never even dream, much less dare. These folks have an extremely high tolerance level for sentimentality; it takes an enormous amount before their sap detectors begin going off.
The same goes for action director and one-man HK film industry Johnny To (also known as "Johnnie To Kei-Fung"). To was a fairly minor director during Hong Kong's exciting late 1980s/early 1990s heyday, when imported films began to tantalize American viewers bored with big explosions and Vietnam rescue flicks. His biggest credit was as co-director on the exceptional supernatural superhero movie The Heroic Trio (1992). But after the 1997 handover to China, when most other filmmakers withdrew or abandoned ship, To flourished and eventually became the country's most successful and exciting filmmaker. His action hits included: The Mission (1999), Running Out of Time (1999), Help!!! (2000), Fulltime Killer (2001), Running Out of Time 2 (2003), Running on Karma (2003), Breaking News (2004), Election (2005), Triad Election (2006) and Exiled (2007), along with some 40 other films.
With only a handful of films to his credit, Sixth Generation Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke has become one of the world's great master filmmakers, and he has the lack of distribution to prove it. Like many other greats from Orson Welles to Hou Hsiao-hsien, he has struggled to get spectators and his movies together at the same place and the same time. His film Still Life won the Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival and promptly sat on the shelf. It received a cautious and limited release in New York earlier this year, but since it never turned up on the West Coast, the San Francisco International Film Festival picked it up as an entry in the 51st fest (after failing to secure it for their 50th), and it opens at the end of this week at the Roxie Cinema. It's by far the best film I've seen in this year's fest, and it probably would have been the best of last year too.
Catching an afternoon screening of Iron Manlast weekend, the questionably denigrating representations of Afghani villains bugged me less than the bizarre cultural references in the trailers preceding it -- especially when it came to accents. Three previews in a row contained characters speaking intentionally mangled English, a fact all the more recognizable because all of them were played by well-known actors. You Don't Mess With Zohan showed Adam Sandler as a tough Israeli hair stylist. The Love Gurupreview found Mike Myers blabbering on with South Asian inflections. Rounding things out in perhaps the most innocuous case, Cate Blanchett popped up as a Communist baddie inIndiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Are these gross caricatures or fair play?
We've touched on this issue before, but it looks like each month the trend gets a little stronger. There's edgy and there's a line: Borat may or may not send the wrong message, but the character's faux Kazakh accent tells you a lot about the way Americans tend to judge foreigners on the basis of their less-than-perfect English. The specific nature of the satire gives Cohen's performance an underlying purpose -- unlike, say, Love Guru, which seems more like a chance to ignorantly marvel at Myers' ability to turn Indians into a continuous punchline. Recently, a few Hindu groups launched protests against the film. This could mark uncharted terrain for Myers, who did not, as far as I know, get lambasted by any hippies after the first Austin Powers.
In all the breathless excitement, possibility and release date for Iron Man 2, it's always good to step back and hear from the main men. You might be surprised (and maybe relieved) to know they haven't really started thinking about the sequel yet. On the other hand, one immediately begins to panic, thinking "Dear God, they won't actually ditch Jon Favreau, will they?"To answer that,Entertainment Weekly sat down with both Robert Downey Jr. and Favreau, the weariness apparent in their voices as they tried to actually comprehend doing it all again.
Let's start with Stark himself on where the sequel will go. "There's this idea of Terrence [Howard] putting on a suit and coming back as War Machine, who is pretty iconic in the Iron Man and Marvel universe. Just seeing where it can all go, but grounding it in a very modern mythology. I see it as the greatest dysfunctional family story ever told .... In The New York Post a couple days ago, [there was a cartoon] of Iron Man suited up, and he's telling the governor even his super-powers can't get him out of the budget problem. That was what Jon was hoping for and excited to see the most, the idea that Tony Stark and Iron Man can become part of the cultural fabric. When we heard posters were being defaced to promote political or social ideas, he just got such a hoot out of that."
I'm doing things a little different this week. Peter has covered this week's great releases in his column, noting flicks like Teeth and I'm Not There. For you Hilary Swank lovers, there's some post-death love after the jump, but below is a collection of film spoofs, rather than a plain ol' film.
After Fox canceled the Seth Green-starring Greg the Bunny, it seemed like that was the end of the show. But like some other Fox victims, that wasn't the end. There was a bit of a hiatus, and then IFC jumped on board and allowed Greg to get cinematic and merge television land with movie land. The result -- a whole bunch of puppet movie spoofs. Click here to get an idea of what you'd be in for. It's not every day that you get to see a puppet embodying Frank Booth.
This release includes spoofs of movies like Monster and American Movie, plus the 2005 reunion special that takes on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Rain Man, and more. As for guests, this batch includes Seth Green, Sarah Silverman, and Adam Goldberg.
I don't know a lot about Speed Racer aside from what I've gleaned from the theme song over the years -- apparently, the young man's a demon on wheels -- so, in many ways, I'm the best possible audience for Larry and Andy Wachowski's new big-screen interpretation of the character. Originally a Japanese animation program exported and re-dubbed for the American market in the '60s, Speed Racer has now been revived and revitalized for now. And the Wachowskis have created a blast of pure pop family fun; Speed Racer's a bright, bold visual spectacle designed for kids.
And why shouldn't it be? Or, rather, how could it not? This is a property where one of the supporting characters is, after all, a monkey; any fully-grown individual hoping for an adult action film or racing realism is looking in the wrong place. Speed Racer plays like a car-crazed visual wonder -- it looks and feels like what pop artist Roy Lichtenstein would dream if you locked him in a room full of gas fumes, gave him only candy to eat and showed him nothing but Tron, Indianapolis 500 footage, episodes of the '60s Batman TV show and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. All at the same time. With the volume very, very high.
I'm beginning to believe that no one really wants to watch movies anymore. Or, at least, they don't want to actively watch them. Big movie theaters are hurting with the advent of saucy home theater systems, and it seems like most people would rather curl up on their couch then head out for the big community experience. We've already heard arguments about the mass distractions that are attached to home viewing, but I never thought that it would become part of the movie experience.
The MPAA's rating system is flawed and arbitrarily enforced, and the system itself is corrupt. I urge one and all to see the enlightening 
Indiana Jones -- The Adventure Collection.jpg)
With five nominations, it looks like 
Catching an afternoon screening of 
In all the breathless excitement, possibility and release date for Iron Man 2, it's always good to step back and hear from the main men. You might be surprised (and maybe relieved) to know they haven't really started thinking about the sequel yet. On the other hand, one immediately begins to panic, thinking "Dear God, they won't actually ditch 
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Insert Caption: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian_thumbnail.jpg)
SCOOP: Spider-Man 4 and 5 Might be Shot at the Same Time!
Cinematical Seven: Disney's Awesome Live-Action Kid Adventures
