Month: November 2010

Fruits of the Hallows.

With young Master Potter set to commence his crying jags through the wilderness at midnight, the Deathly Hallows crop of trailers has sprung…

It Goes to Eleven.


Another revolution has come and gone, and, as of today, Ghost in the Machine is 11 years old.

[0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.]

Obviously, the movie reviews notwithstanding, it’s quieter around here these days, both due to time constraints and job-related circumspection. But, even in a state of fitful slumber, the ghost carries on. If this is your first time here or you’ve been hanging around for over a decade now, thanks, as always, for stopping by.

Tales of Yankee Power.

What better way to celebrate eleven years of GitM than a ninth cuppa Bob (and my first in three years)? (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) The freewheeling Bob Dylan continued his never-ending tour Saturday night at George Washington University, and while the haters are hatin’, I knew what I was getting into — Dylan croaking his way through rockabilly versions of his classics — and had a grand ole time. Here’s the setlist:

Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 | Senor (Tales Of Yankee Power) | Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues | Just Like A Woman | Rollin’ And Tumblin’ | Tryin’ To Get To Heaven | Summer Days | Desolation Row | High Water (For Charley Patton) | Simple Twist Of Fate | Highway 61 Revisited | Ain’t Talkin’ | Thunder On The Mountain | Ballad Of A Thin Man

Encore: Jolene | Like A Rolling Stone

So, if you’re keeping score, that’s a full five tracks from 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited. For me, the highlights of the evening were Ballad of a Thin Man, from that album, and especially Senor, from 1978’s Street Legal — one of my top 10 favorite Dylan songs (and one I missed during Bob’s 2005 Beacon stand.)

As far as the new stuff goes, I’d rather have heard any other Time Out of Mind track over “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven” (well, except “Make You Feel My Love“), and “Ain’t Talkin’,'” off of 2006’s Modern Times sounds to me like Dylan trying a bit too hard to be Dylanesque. That being said, “High Water (for Charley Patton)“, off of 2001’s “Love and Theft (is that album really a decade old now?) sounded as lean, mean, and vital as I’d ever heard it. It’s rough out there, high water everywhere…but it’s good to know Bob’s still keep on keepin’ on regardless.

Retread, Extremely Dull.

To complete the pre-election backlog at last, Robert Schwentke’s by-the-numbers action-comedy Red, which I caught a few weeks ago at the Uptown, is…really forgettable. I mean it. It can’t have been more than a month ago since I saw this flick, and yet, even with its impressive A-list cast — hey, A-listers have mortgages too — Red already has that half-remembered did-I-watch-this-on-television haze about it in my mind.

For a dumb action-comedy, Red is neither particularly action-y nor particularly funny. (It is plenty dumb, tho’.) The film’s killer app — Helen Mirren as a badass assassin — doesn’t show up till halfway through the movie, and even then is criminally underutilized. It has one of the most annoyingly intrusive, jingly-jangly Oceans’ 11-wannabe scores this side of The Informant. It can never decide on a tone, and veers from broad, Naked Gun-style antics (see, for example, everything involving bazookas) to half-hearted stabs at being taken seriously. And, with the possible exception of Bruce Willis doing the hero-walk out of his moving car (to save you money, it’s at 1:40 in the trailer), there’s just very little to write home about here…or even on GitM about, for that matter.

But, write I must, so let’s take it to the synopsis: If you just watched the aforementioned trailer, you’re already basically up-to-speed. In brief, Frank Moses (Willis, on autopilot) is an ex-CIA spook who’s not handling retirement well. He spends his days tearing up his pension checks so he has an excuse to phone up the friendly and equally lonely cubicle-rat Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker, deserving better) — They make small talk about romance novels and avocadoes and whatnot. So far, so good. Red has an off-kilter feel to it at first that seems like it might be going somewhere. Unfortunately, we’re only maybe six or seven minutes into the film, and then the bullets start raining down like a hailstorm of stupid.

Y’see, a crack team of assassins have been sent to kill Frank in the dead of night for some reason, and they end up firing so much lead into his Cleveland home that the entire structure comes tumbling down. (Wouldn’t this draw unwanted attention to your ostensibly black-ops hit? Oh, whatever.) Frank, of course, survives this demolishing unscathed. And after abducting his new friend Sarah (shades of Knight & Day here — no better way to win a lady’s heart, apparently, than by absconding with her against her will), he decides to get the old “Retired: Extremely Dangerous” band back together to figure out why he’s been targeted.

And why is that, exactly? Well, long and boring story, really, but it has something to do with an old mission in Guatemala where the current vice-president (Julian McMahon, feeling as TVish here as he did in Fantastic Four) kinda sorta lost his mind and started shooting up the place. More important for our purposes is the band in question — Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Mirren, and Brian Cox. That’s a pretty solid traveling troupe if you’re looking to do some actorly jamming for a few hours, and particularly when you have occasional fun special guests like Ernest Borgnine and Richard Dreyfuss (who’s basically reprising his role from W) waiting in the wings.

Only problem is, it doesn’t play out like that. Freeman seems bored, and you can’t really blame him when the only thing the script calls for him to do is [spoiler] give a Shawshank-y farewell speech and die…twice. Meanwhile, Malkovich, playing an ex-agent who was dosed with LSD for decades, goes Method: He skips right over funny and lands on the creepy, off-putting-homeless-guy side of crazy. (As far as Malkovichian CIA romps go, I prefer Burn after Reading.) Mirren, as I said, is underused. And Brian Cox…well, Cox can be a very good actor (Manhunter, The 25th Hour) or, when in it for the paycheck, an absolute, William Hurt-like hambone. (The Ring, Troy.) As a vodka-swilling, back-slapping, overly-emotional ex-KGB kingpin, guess what he’s like here? When you’re even in spitting distance of out-hamming Dreyfuss in a motion picture these days, that’s no mean feat.

Oh yeah, Karl Urban (still channeling Bones from Star Trek) is skulking around in this too, as the Agency’s muscle. He’s ok, I suppose — He gets his hat handed to him by Bruce Willis decently well. But his entire character arc is laid out the first time he looks askance at his sinister, take-no-guff handler (Rebecca Pidgeon), so there’s a lot of waiting around for his inevitable crisis of conscience to take hold. In the meantime, there’re a lot of explosions and bullets and stuff, all set to that godawful, its-ok-you-can-laugh-now score.

In the end, Red is slow-witted, dull, nonsensical, and even a bit sadistic — drink every time someone gets abducted, tied up, beaten up, or interrogated. But, more than anything it’s just…forgettable. Who knows? Maybe the CIA has been hard at work on a nefarious plot to redact Red from my brain. If so, I salute them.

Mulholland Hive.

While early reviews of Skyline — the L.A. alien invasion happening today — seem to suggest it’s a catastrophic event alright, Marine Sergeant Aaron Eckhart looks to take back the City of Angels from the extraterrestrial hordes next March in the new trailer for Jonathan Liebesman’s Battle: Los Angeles, also with Michelle Rodriguez, Ramon Rodriguez, Bridget Moynahan, Ne-Yo and Michael Pena. Looks like decent eye candy, I suppose, even if they lifted the basic conceit of this trailer from the Gears of Wars commercial. Lemme guess, Michelle Rodriguez will be playing Vasquez-lite again, yes?

That Facebook Movie.

With the election at last behind us, for better or worse, I’ll hopefully be able to keep up better on the movie review front for the rest of the year. At the moment, tho’, there are two films still in the backlog. First up, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman’s overrated and exploitative faux-documentary Catfish.

This is a movie that’s hard to talk about without giving away its central hook: Let’s just say it’s the “true” story of a young man (Yaniv Schulman) who meets a girl on the Internet and gets more than he bargained for. If you don’t want to be spoiled any more than that, I’d go ahead and skip the rest of this post. (FWIW, there’s definitely a case to be made for having no information on this one: The two friends I went with had no clue what the film was about going in — Was it a vampire movie? A zombie movie? A human-animal hybrid movie? — and so they found it much more suspenseful than I did.) For everyone else, well, I’ll see you in the next paragraph.

Still here? Ok, well, walking out of Catfish, I had two thoughts about it. First, it was at least kinda interesting to sit through a movie about the client-side of Facebook so soon after seeing the server-side tale told in The Social Network. (If you see one movie about Facebook, tho, see The Social Network. It has its problems, but it’s a far, far better film.) Second, I thought the entirety of this movie can basically be summed up in four words: “Psycho preys on douchebag.” Now, upon further reflection, that’s obviously a very uncharitable way of talking about real, honest-to-goodness people. So let me rephrase it: Catfish is probably better described as: Deeply lonely, possibly schizophrenic Midwestern housewife preys on…douchebag.

Seriously, Yaniv, the self-satisfied, Lower East Side-hipster main character we follow here, feels like he just walked out of Cloverfield. He’s just an annoying, deeply pretentious person, and it’s not much fun to spend time with either he or the two directors, who play a larger role in the story as the film goes on and who are, basically, birds of a feather. But that isn’t even why they deserve the moniker — Ye shall know them by their deeds. These guys are douchebags because they pretty clearly set out to make a movie, and their names, by exploiting that aforementioned sad, sick housewife. Catfish spends most of its run trying to make it seem like Yaniv is the unassuming prey of an Internet fraudster. Wrong. He and the directors are the predators here.

As Catfish plays out, Yaniv first gets an e-mail from a young girl in rural Michigan who’s apparently an art prodigy — She sends him a painting of a photo he took for a magazine. Later, he falls into an online relationship with the girl’s attractive older sister. The two text, they chat on the phone, they eventually cyber But gradually, over the course of months (according to the film), Yaniv figures out that the details don’t add up. The songs he’s sent were recorded by other people, the addresses don’t match what Google Earth has to say. And, when he and the directors finally go out to Michigan to figure out the score, they find that both girls, and their many online friends for that matter, were all the figments of one desperate woman’s imagination.

A potentially intriguing story, I guess, if the protagonist was more likable. Or if, you know, the entire series of tubes was restricted only to Facebook or something. But, as Movieline‘s Kyle Buchanan well put it: “I don’t buy it at all; I think the filmmakers knew from the start what they had on their hands, and they baited a mentally unwell woman for almost a year until their film needed a climax.” That was my sense too — In fact, I found it hard to imagine any other possible conclusion.

Are we really supposed to believe that Yaniv and/or his two directors — who are even making a movie about an online relationship, for Crom’s sake — never took the time to google these Michigan girls at some point? I, and most people I know, google each other before a first date. Also, I would tend to think that child art prodigies, who are ostensibly selling paintings for a few thousand dollars a clip, tend to run up some copy in the local papers. Did Yaniv never think to look them up? Didn’t he want to see what other works of art she might have painted? In fact, why are the cameras even rolling in the first place?

One could argue, I suppose, that Catfish just shows the lengths that people — in small-town Michigan and the heart of New York City alike — will go to feel special and/or see their names in lights. But we have a universe of reality shows on television that already make that point. In the end, Catfish could have just been kinda boring. But sitting through the filmmakers and their star here (not credibly) play the dupes for eighty minutes, and then watching them try to pin down their mercurial, sad, and lonely find on camera for the last twenty or so, the experience went from unnecessary to downright unpleasant. So, congrats on that, I guess.

Tiiiiime is On Our Side.


“[T]aken together, it seems clear that while older whites may have broken for Republicans, the rest of the population – i.e. the majority – either broke for the Democrats or only barely moved to the right. And since it’s the shrinking parts of the population – whites and old folks – who broke most for Republicans, it’d be right to conclude that 2010 was a temporary setback for Democrats that can be reversed once the Obama Administration gets its head out of its ass and starts helping people get jobs instead of helping Wall Street get richer.“

Oh yes, it is: Delving into the exit poll numbers for California, Robert Cruickshank points out how the GOP have staked their territory on ground that is fast eroding. “[T]here’s really no evidence that the 2010 election portends long-term doom for Democrats. Instead it is Republicans who are in trouble. They won by appealing to a shrinking group of people who are determined to hog democracy and prosperity for themselves at the exclusion of the young and the nonwhite.” In other words, demography is destiny, and, when it comes to the GOP, to paraphrase the Peppers, even a tidal wave can’t save them all from Californication.

Speaking of Golden State politics: Unfortunately, Prop 19, which decriminalized marijuana usage, also went down to defeat. (A victim of the older midterm electorate, it still pulled more votes than any Republican in the state.) That being said, the die has been cast now — it’s only a matter of time. “‘There’s a fair amount of latent support for legalization in California,’ said Anna Greenberg…’It is our view, looking at this research, that if indeed legalization goes on ballot in 2012 in California, that it is poised to win.”

Tintin Takes Shape.


“The first part of the film, which is the most mysterious part, certainly owes much to not only film noir but the whole German Brechtian theatre — some of our night scenes and our action scenes are very contrasty. But at the same time the movie is a hell of an adventure.“

In the new Empire Magazine, Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson talk The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, and show off the boy reporter’s new Final Fantasy-ish look. (The cover above mirrors a famous drawing of Tintin that I have up in my work-cube.)

In the same story, PJ talks about where he might take Tintin after the Secret of the Unicorn/Red Rackham arc covered in Spielberg’s film. “One of my favourites is The Seven Crystal Balls, so that’s the one I’ve always been thinking of,’ he says. ‘I also really like the Eastern European ones, the Balkan ones like King Ottokar’s Sceptre and The Calculus Affair. I think it’s a terrific setting for a thriller, the weird Balkan politics and the mysterious secret service agents. I think the Moon ones are terrific, but they’d be good for the third or fourth Tintin film, if we get that far. We want to keep his feet on the ground just a little bit longer.” As a Tintin kid, I’m really looking forward to these.

A Long Walk Home.

Another intriguing selection from the trailer bin: Peter Weir, who arguably has never made a bad film, sends Colin Farrell, Ed Harris, Jim Sturgess, and Sairose Ronan on a walk across continents in the trailer for The Way Back. “The book is Rawicz’s account of being captured by the Red Army in 1939 and his journey to freedom with other inmates. The group crossed the Siberian arctic, the Gobi desert and the Himalayas, finally settling in Tibet and India.“

Rumors of her Demise…


“Our work is far from finished. As a result of Tuesday’s election, the role of Democrats in the 112th Congress will change, but our commitment to serving the American people will not. We have no intention of allowing our great achievements to be rolled back. It is my hope that we can work in a bipartisan way to create jobs and strengthen the middle class.“

In a rebuke to the few Blue Dog remnants that have been calling for her ousting, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announces her intention to run for Minority Leader in the 112th Congress. “[D]riven by the urgency of protecting health care reform, Wall Street reform, and Social Security and Medicare, I have decided to run.“

This is excellent news. As I’ve said here before, Speaker Pelosi has gotten things done on the Hill, and the blame for what happened Tuesday does not fall on her shoulders. To the contrary, she was often the only Democratic leader putting up a fight. Also, there is historical precedent: Twice during his long Speakership, Sam Rayburn cooled his heels as Minority Leader, waiting out the GOP blips. As the linked article points out, if Pelosi emulating Rayburn somehow encourages Obama to consider becoming more Trumanesque, well, all the better.