Tag: Cinema

First Batty, now Booth.

Beware the finger of death, Confederate conspirators. Former fugitive, scoundrel, and president Harrison Ford is slated to track down Lincoln’s assassin in the forthcoming film Manhunt. Ford will play Everett Conger, the retired cavalry officer who helped catch John Wilkes Booth at the Garrett farm, near Port Royal, Virginia, twelve days after Lincoln’s shooting.

More than Half-Full.

The new trailer for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire premiered this morning, and it’s nine kinds of great — I didn’t have much faith in Mike Newell at the outset, but this looks like it may have turned out even better than Cuaron’s Azkhaban. Check out Mad-Eyed Moody, Cho Chang, Rita Skeeter, the lovely ladies of Beauxbatons, and is that You-Know-Who at the very end? Update: There’s also a new international trailer floating around.

Daemonlover.

“I’m thinking that it’s just a movie about a little girl who’s looking for a family, so it’s still just all about emotions. It doesn’t matter how big or small it is, you still have to turn up with a camera and some actors and try to make it convincing for an audience.” Shopgirl director Anand Tucker talks briefly about His Dark Materials, his next project.

Grimm Fandango.

Finally, the Labor Day nightcap was Terry Gilliam’s latest outing, The Brothers Grimm, which has been getting panned in the reviews. Well, it’s not as bad as it’s being made out to be, but I can’t say it’s very good either. Long-time Gilliam fans will probably get a kick out of seeing his eye applied to several classic fairy tales — I sure did. But ultimately the film is a mess, with subpar special effects and a terrible, terrible script that borders on the incoherent. In fact, I can’t figure out for the life of me how Ehren Krueger (and, while I’m hating, Akiva Goldsman) keep getting gigs…they’re out-and-out hacks, the Paul Anderson and Brett Ratner of screenwriting. Brothers Grim indeed.

So, what’s good? Well, as you might expect, the best parts of the film are the Gilliamesque visual flourishes. When the movie involves enchanted forests or sleeping beauties or malevolent mirrors or little red riding…capes, Gilliam is in his element, and his kid-in-a-candy-store enthusiasm is infectious. If you’re a aficionado of the guy, these moments almost make the film worthwhile on their own…almost. Art direction aside, however, the effects often have a real budget FX-house look to them. (Memo to the studios: CGI and werewolves don’t ever seem to mix — cf. this, Underworld, American Werewolf in Paris, etc.) If your tale involves a man-wolf of any kind whatsoever, use an old-school make-up guy like Rick Baker or Rob Bottin.)

And, the story…oof. For what it’s worth, Matt Damon (Will) and Heath Ledger (Jakob) both acquit themselves admirably as the brothers/ghostbusters, and Damon in particular has a gleam in his eye that suggests he’d make an even worse movie if it meant he could continue to hang around the Gilliamverse. But the Brothers Grimm are cursed with a grafted-on fraternal backstory — Will wants to protect Jakob, Jakob wants Will to believe in him — that feels artificial from the start and forces them to spit out increasingly unwieldy chunks of character development as the movie progresses.

Worse, scenes just happen one after another with no feeling of narrative development at all. The brothers are in a dungeon, no…the forest, no…the dungeon again, and so on. The brilliant Jonathan Pryce is wasted in a subplot involving a French general that never makes one iota of sense. (Mackenzie Crook, a.k.a. Gareth from The Office, is also wasted, in more ways than one.) And Pryce’s henchman, the usually amiable Peter Stormare, singlehandledly ruins every scene he’s in with a grotesquely hammy performance of Olympian proportions — seriously, he makes Anthony Hopkins in Bram Stoker’s Dracula seem like Ralph Fiennes in The Constant Gardener. Conversely, the film could have used a good deal more of Monica Bellucci’s evil queen (but, to be fair, most films, and most endeavors in life, could stand to use more Monica Bellucci…the world would be a happier place for it.)

Ultimately, the Brothers Grimm is less grim than it is sadly pedestrian, and it has to be counted as a occasionally diverting swing-and-a-miss for Gilliam. But, I’d say that’s more due to the weakness of the material here than it is Gilliam, who shows flashes of his usual mojo. As such, I still have high hopes for Tideland, which, thankfully, is right around the corner.

Man of Constant Sorrow.


Next up on the Labor Day bill was Fernando Meirelles’ well-received The Constant Gardener, starring Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz in a sort-of action-romance-thriller-edutainment about the extreme shadiness of the Pharmaceutical Trust’s clinical trials in Africa. (Or, put another way, it’s The Limey meets Hotel Rwanda meets The Bourne Supremacy meets The Girl in the Cafe.) At its best, The Constant Gardener is a compelling travelogue and a resonant Soderberghian love story, anchored by a great performance by Fiennes and solid supporting work by Weisz, Bill Nighy, and others. (By the way, nothing screams “English conspiracy” quite like the presence of Gerard McSorley, who plays a pharmaceutical tough here. Between him and Pete Postlethwaite flitting in and out, this occasionally seemed like In the Name of the Father transported to Kenya.) But, Gardener also suffers some of the defects of Meirelles’ earlier film, City of God, namely an overreliance on shaky hand-held camera work and a plot that strains credulity often enough to detract from the overall experience.

So the upshot is this: Fiennes, the titular gardener, is a kindly and reclusive British diplomat in Kenya with an ill-defined job and a young new activist wife (Weisz), whom he met-cute (well, sorta) at a lecture he gave back in England and married after a whirlwind romance. When Weisz is found murdered on a desolate, unforgiving stretch of African road beside her colleague and possible lover (Hubert Kounde), Fiennes is forced to abandon the orderly and carefully tended confines of his mental garden and embark on a quest to discover both why she was killed and how she lived. Along the way, he finds that large pharmaceutical companies, the nemeses of his slain wife, have been rigging clinical trials and, worse, hiding the fatal side effects of their drugs by erasing the existence of poverty-stricken Kenyans who were administered them (How these fatal side effects were supposed to go over once these drugs went on the market is left unexplained.) Whatsmore, he soon finds his superiors at the embassy (Danny Huston, Nighy) have been steadfastly looking the other way, and that the global reach of Big Pharma isn’t above using strongarm tactics to ensure the truth never gets out…

The Constant Gardener is expertly acted and expertly put together, and it’s deserves the high praise it’s been getting — it’s easily one of the better films of this year so far. Nevertheless, I had nagging problems with the movie. For one, while I have no doubt that Big Pharma is up to many grievous misdoings in Africa (and elsewhere) in the name of the almighty buck, and I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if they have unctuous corporate flaks cooking books and crossing the palms of anybody it might help them to buy off, I had trouble believing that they were this kind of shady, with a seemingly universal intelligence capability and more agents than SMERSH. (Also, while I’m sure this type of trial-tinkering probably happens, the real pharmaceutical conspiracy — as others have noted — is how companies simply ignore medical crises in the developing world and attempt to ban the use of generic drugs in devastated areas.)

Also, while I could see how Fiennes’ character might be this clueless about his wife’s life-work if he had seemed more distracted during her lifetime, as played he’d have to be willfully oblivious to miss what’s going on. (Perhaps his almost-disturbing passivity is the point — the script seems to say as much at times — but I still felt it rang false.) Add an overdose of shakicam work (don’t sit too close) and some rather pointless action sequences (the late second act car chase, the bandit attack) and The Constant Gardener falls out of the top echelon of all-time-great films. But, in an otherwise down year for movies, Gardener is an adult, intelligent thriller and a believable romance that’s well above the mean and well worth catching.

The Worst Joke Ever.


“You see there’s this cat burglar who can’t see in the dark…” No, not that one…The Aristocrats, which I heard told several times over in the first leg of my Labor Day movie marathon. By now, you’ve probably heard the setup for both the documentary and the joke…but, just in case, a gaggle of famous comedians tell their respective versions of a crusty and filthy old vaudeville yarn involving a “family act” audition in an agent’s office. The name of the act, as the punch-line tells us, is “the Aristocrats” (or occasionally “the Sophisticates” or “the Debonairs.”) The act itself varies in the telling, but generally includes lots of micturition, bowel-loosening, vomiting, sodomy, incest, bestiality, and sundry other vile depradations you usually can only see on cable TV. And the funniness of the joke depends a good deal on the talents and twisted imagination of the teller. All in all, I’d say the movie is funnier than the joke and worth catching (if you’re not easily offended), but it’s nothing you need to rush out and see in the theater.

In all honesty, be it due to exposure to Deadwood, Grand Theft Auto, or the school bus, I found most iterations of the joke less transgressive than they were just repetitive. While some comedians bomb with the joke (Taylor Negron, Lisa Lampanelli, David Brenner, and Emo Phillips, to whom the years have not been kind), others seem to have never heard it (Chris Rock, Eddie Izzard), and still others hedge their bets (Paul Reiser, Drew Carey), I’d say up to 85% or so of the tellers just seem content to swim around in the same sex-and-defecating pool like demented eighth graders afflicted with the giggles. Sick-and-twisted-funny, sure, but not over and over again (which is why the movie wisely begins throwing in a mime version, two magic versions, and other more idiosyncratic iterations after awhile.)

Still, some comedians do shine with the material. George Carlin and Bill Maher in particular offer sound insights into the joke’s past and present. (As Maher and Lewis Black note, the Aristocrats stand in increasing danger of being overtaken by Reality TV.) Martin Mull, Carrie Fisher, “Christopher Walken,” and Sarah Silverman deserves points for telling roundabout or slightly off-kilter versions of the same sordid story. And Bob Saget gets a gold star for performing a bizarre career self-immolation and running with easily one of the most inventive and disgusting versions of the joke…no more America’s Funniest Home Videos, for him, I’d wager. (Jason Alexander’s isn’t bad, either.)

Much is made of a cathartic public telling of the joke by Gilbert Gottfried soon after 9/11, but, frankly, it doesn’t come across. In fact, in a way that version belies the problem I had with most tellings of the joke. By avoiding the 9/11 tragedy to focus on ungodly shagging and bodily fluids, Gottfried wasn’t being transgressive — he was playing it safe (and, to his credit, uniting the comic world with a joke they all shared, which was more likely his intention.) Still, Jeffrey Ross’ riposte to Rob Schneider that night — “Hasn’t there been enough bombing in this city?” — seems closer to the anarchic, tasteless, subversive, and shocking spirit the Aristocrats needs to be anything more than an endless litany of fart jokes. Different strokes for different folks, I know. But, given that I was watching the film while the Aristocrats in office bumbled their way through the tragedy of errors that was Katrina, I just found myself thinking that, in today’s dark times, the strictly vulgarian canoodling of most versions of the joke seemed, well, quaint, out-dated, and devoid of edge…in some ways, even tame, or as tame as a joke involved incest, bestiality, and sodomy can be. (For their part, the masterminds behind The Onion are, I think, the only comedians to broach politics in the film.)

Not to miss the forest for the trees, though, I wasn’t really brooding on this during the film so much as laughing at every third or fourth version of the joke…which, if you think about it, isn’t all that bad a hit rate. So, check out The Aristocrats on cable if you don’t mind the dirty-talk…but, please, don’t try this at home.

Make theirs Marvel.

Marvel Comics signs a deal with Paramount on film rights to ten characters or groups. Ok, Captain America and the Avengers seem like gimmes, but is there anyone out there waiting in line for the Power Pack, Ant-Man, Hawkeye, or Cloak & Dagger movie? Why not throw in Star Brand or Dazzler while you’re at it? This reminds me of the old e-trade ad where the two dot.com guys sign a huge venture cap deal just because they have a website.