Month: May 2005

Aragoetz.

Courtesy of Cannes, the trailer for David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, starring Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, and William Hurt, is now online (in lousy formats). Seems strangely unCronenberg-like, from the previews…where are the fleshy, pulsating things? Perhaps this is his Straight Story.

360 / 3.

Behold the future: At E3, Microsoft unveils the XBox 360, and Sony shows off the Playstation 3. On one hand, the 360 will “automatically connect and stream digital media — including video and digital pictures — stored on any PC running Windows XP.” On the other, “the PlayStation 3 boasts an engine 35 times more powerful than the PlayStation 2.” Either way, the next GTA should be something else…

Say what?

A.O. Scott gushes over Sith in the NYT: “This is by far the best film in the more recent trilogy, and also the best of the four episodes Mr. Lucas has directed. That’s right (and my inner 11-year-old shudders as I type this): it’s better than ‘Star Wars.’…[it] ranks with ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ (directed by Irvin Kershner in 1980) as the richest and most challenging movie in the cycle. It comes closer than any of the other episodes to realizing Mr. Lucas’s frequently reiterated dream of bringing the combination of vigorous spectacle and mythic resonance he found in the films of Akira Kurosawa into American commercial cinema.” And politically applicable to boot…Ok, I think, despite my best efforts, my expectations are now definitely raised for Wednesday night. (2nd link via Webgoddess.)

Witch is Which?

After a train wreck of an initial trailer, the marketing gurus at Columbia Pictures borrow liberally from Splash in the new trailer for Nora Ephron’s Bewitched. Nope, still won’t see it.

Eternal Crossing of the Spotless Fink.

In between film projects, the Coen Brothers and Charlie Kaufman have teamed up for Carter Burwell’s Theater of the New Ear, a pair of radio plays recently performed at London’s Royal Festival Hall. The cast includes Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, Marcia Gay Harden, and Philip Seymour Hoffman for the Coen’s “Sawbones,” and Meryl Streep, Hope Davis, and Peter Dinklage (taking time off from Lassie, I presume) in Kaufman’s “Hope Leaves the Theater.” (These apparently were also performed in Brooklyn two weeks ago, but tickets were hard to come by.)

In the Key of X.

“‘I think people will find something in the objects to provoke new levels of interest and new levels of scholarship,’ Howard Dodson, chief of the Schomburg, said in an interview. ‘We’ve consciously tried to stay away from putting a heavy interpretative line on it and to let Malcolm X speak for himself.’” The NYT previews the new Malcolm X exhibit, opening at the Schomburg Center next Thursday.

Burying the Hatchet (and the Lede)

“I know it’s a bit of an odd-fellow, or odd-woman, mix,’ she said. ‘But the speaker and I have been talking about health care and national security now for several years, and I find that he and I have a lot in common in the way we see the problem.'” As a testament to politics making strange bedfellows, Hillary and Newt make the rounds. But will this type of bipartisan rapprochement seem antiquated after we enter the Nuclear Age next week?

Not Like Ike.

And here I thought the military-industrial complex speech was prescient…
(Quote and links seen at Medley and birddogged by David Sirota):

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are…a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower, 11/8/54

Welcome to the layer cake, son.

Disgruntled supporters of mutantkind, take heart: X3 is in very good hands. I caught Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake this afternoon, and it’s a smart, stylish, and sublimely smooth British crime film that does Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch one better. Well, ok, Layer Cake isn’t as laugh-out-loud funny as Lock Stock can be at times, but it’s much cleverer than Snatch and, frankly, better-made. And, for that matter, it takes less joy in violence for its own sake than Ritchie’s oeuvre (one grisly scene set to Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World” notwithstanding.) In fact, in terms of tone, Cake is probably more akin to Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast.

Layer Cake centers on cocaine dealer Daniel Craig (burnishing his possible Bond credentials), a consummate smooth operator who treats his criminal enterprise like a business and, as per the usual, is just looking forward to an early retirement around the corner. But his best-laid plans are interrupted by two ugly developments: 1) His boss Jimmy (Kenneth Cranham) enlists him to track down the junkie daughter of even bigger crime-lord Eddie Temple (Michael Gambon, relishing the dark side), and 2) a loose cannon flunky known as the Duke (Jamie Foreman of I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead and Roman Polanski’s forthcoming Oliver Twist) has just rolled in from Amsterdam trying to unload a million doses of Ecstasy (a drug haul with a nefarious history of its own.)

The rest of the movie consists of Craig trying to navigate the increasingly narrow straits between these two troubles, with the occasional aid of muscle Colm Meaney, middle-man George Harris, and a host of other ne’er-do-wells. Essentially, you know the drill — this is a puzzle film in which you’ll have to listen carefully and learn to distinguish between various delinquents with names like Tiptoes, Kinky, Slasher and Shanks. And, while the final few grifts just get a bit too big to be believable, for the most part the story holds together with intelligence and verve, in no small part to Daniel Craig, who’s a magnetic presence here, and Matthew Vaughn, who displays a crisp, confident direction that’s all the more impressive for being showy without ever seeming flashy. To him, his X-Men.