Donnie Darko appears to be having more trouble with the timestream (at least as far as I can ascertain without sound) in the CGI-heavy full trailer for Mike Newell’s The Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, with Jake Gyllenhaal, Gemma Arterton (late of the last Bond), Alfred Molina, and Ben Kingsley. (Does Kingsley say no to projects anymore?) Eh, it looks like The Mummy meets one of the later Pirates movies, but I guess it could be fun in a turn-your-brain-off, two hours of air conditioning kind of way.
Tag: Cinema
A Star is Bored.
But, all that being said and Mulligan’s future potential aside, I didn’t find An Education to be all that interesting a film, sadly. And if you took her away from its center, you wouldn’t be left with very much movie at all. Here’s the set-up: It’s 1961, and while Betty Draper is chafing at the oppressive confines of suburban domesticity in the former colonies, young Jenny (Mulligan) is being groomed for an Oxford education by her social-striver parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) and her elite private girl’s school, mainly just so she can go get her M.R.S. Her English teacher Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams) thinks Jenny should aim much higher than a well-off husband and pursue the academic life she seems clearly suited for. But Jenny — a budding Francophile and connoisseur of fine art, fine literature, and fine smokes — wants more out of life than either the domestic or academic path provides.
Enter David (Peter Sarsgaard), a thirty-something fellow who spies Jenny out in the rain with her cello one afternoon and offers her a ride home in his spiffy automobile. This should probably set off bells and alarms for Jenny (and her parents, who soon meet this potential beau and rather illogically warm to him), even if they’ve never heard the Police song. But, as we’re still a few years shy of Emma Peel and Swinging London, or for that matter the lads from Liverpool, David seems like a pretty good opportunity of escape for young Jenny. He goes to concerts and auctions in the city, hangs out with interesting people (Dominic Cooper) and their well-meaning girlfriends (Rosamund Pike), and generally seems to be much more a Citizen of the World than anyone in the stuffy suburbs. But is it possible that David is just too good to be true? Well, it wouldn’t be much of a movie otherwise, now would it? And sure enough, one she gets past all the preening finery and being tipped in cigarettes, Jenny finds herself peering into the corners of a very Dark Life.
There are a lot of little things that don’t really work in An Education. Some of the characters are written too broadly. particularly Alfred Molina as Jenny’s overbearing-with-a-heart Pop and poor Rosamund Pike as a dim bulb London party-girl. The ending seemed way too overdrawn to me — Yes, adulthood is mostly a condition imposed by the passage of time, but I still think it takes more than one dodgy and/or bad relationship to become mature and worldly-wise. And, like I said above, I don’t think it makes much sense, given how protective they are of her at first, that Jenny’s folks would go along for the ride as they do here. They would have to be willfully obtuse not to catch on what a weekend in Paris would entail, for example.
That being said, the biggest problem here is that Peter Sarsgaard seems miscast to me. He’s an actor I usually root for, but he’s way too creepy to be plausible as a suitor Jenny might actually be interested in. (Either that, or he carries the baggage from too many creepy roles in the past. As David Edelstein noted, he gives off a definite Malkovich vibe here, and the occasionally slipping accent doesn’t help.) This is a part I could see Ewan MacGregor or James McAvoy or Orlando Bloom (originally cast in the Dominic Cooper role) pulling off with more aplomb. But Sarsgaard just seems too blockish and needy to me in the part, and any gal as ostensibly on-the-ball as Jenny is portrayed here to be would see through his wheedling and double-talk pretty quickly, I should think. Just because the year is 1961 doesn’t mean young women (and their parents) can’t spot an obviously bad apple. But here’s hoping Mulligan fares better in her next few roles, which are no doubt forthcoming.
Single White Human, Looking for Group.
They don’t care what’s in your character bank: Paraplegic veteran Sam Worthington rolls Draenei and goes native in the brand-spankin’ new second trailer for James Cameron’s Avatar, also with Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang, Giovanni Ribisi, and Michelle Rodriguez. (Well, actually this trailer has been floating around in bootleg form for a few days now, but I figured this movie more than most needs to be judged and/or appreciated in hi-def.)
Anyway, so far, so good. Ribisi and Rodriguez seem a lot like Paul Reiser (Burke) and Jenette Goldstein (Vasquez) from Aliens respectively. And while a lot of the “Dances with Thundersmurfs” hectoring out there can be chalked up to the usual aggro-fanboy haterade, Avatar‘s whole central plot-line does seem pretty doggone similar to Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai, Dune, or any other flick/book you can name where a good outsider throws in with the “noble savage” locals to beat back the massively superior technological firepower of the would-be colonialists. (“This is our land!!” It is? No, it’s their land, buddy. Ease up with your bad self.)
Still, it’s gonna make for some amazing eye candy, that’s for sure. And as long as the Na’vi don’t squeal like Ewoks or Gungans as they fight, I should be able to dig it.
Mandela and the Madhouses.
As with the other day, I can’t seem to make Quicktime happy at my workstation here. Nonetheless, it appears Matt Damon has gone from exposing his conjoined twin’s involvement in the WMD fiasco to ending apartheid in the new trailer for Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, with Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela. Busy fella.
Also in today’s trailer bin, two second looks at worlds gone mad: Mia Wasikowska finds Through the Looking Glass is still crazy after all these years in trailer #2 for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, also with Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway, Stephen Fry, Michael Sheen, Crispin Glover, Timothy Spall, and Christopher Lee. To be honest, it looks a little too Burton-y to me, if such a thing is possible for a property like Alice.
And Leonardo di Caprio is still losing his cool on The Island in trailer #2 for Martin Scorsese’s recently kicked-to-2010 Shutter Island, also featuring Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, Michelle Williams, Patricia Clarkson, Elias Koteas, Jackie Earle Haley, and the eminent Max Von Sydow. Eh, this looks better than most January fare.
Hard Times in the Emerald City.
Somebody was going to get to the bottom of this whole WMD thing eventually — it might as well be Jason Bour…Oh, wait, he’s not Bourne this time? Well, close enough for government work. Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass reunite in the new trailer for Green Zone, verrrrry loosely based on Rajiv Chandasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City and co-starring Amy Ryan, Brendan Gleeson, and Greg Kinnear. Great cast, and Greengrass hasn’t missed yet — I’m in.
Let the Wild Rumpus…Mope.
I know this film is eliciting some very positive responses, and I definitely admired the craftsmanship on display. WTWTA is not a bad movie, nor is it an embarrassment or anything like that. But, as the movie moped along, I kept having the same reaction to it: I just don’t remember my childhood, or Sendak’s book for that matter, being so emo. Sure, I guess I remember being angry or depressed or sad every so often — nothing a good 30 minutes with the Star Wars figures couldn’t remedy — but that didn’t mean there was always a Cure song ready to break out right around the corner. (That was adolescence.) And I just don’t get the sense that nine-year-old children really spend a lot of time pondering things like the Finite, their feelings, or their soon-to-be-lost innocence. They live in the moment. They just are.
In fact, to my mind all the introspective, autumnal, fall-from-Eden-type musing on hand in WTWTA is less a tendency of irate 9-year-olds than it is one of writerly adults…particularly, grandiloquent and exceedingly self-absorbed writerly adults like Dave Eggers, who penned the screenplay here (and accompanied it with a 300-page fur-covered “novelization.” That’s almost a page for every word of Sendak’s original book.) Your mileage may vary, of course — Clearly, the movie is affecting a lot of folks pretty strongly. But Where the Wild Things Are did not much speak to my inner child. In fact, my inner child was pretty well bored by it.
I would guess most people, in America at least, know the story of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are — either they read it to a child or remember reading it as a child. (I’m in the latter group, so the quotes below may be inexact.) Nonetheless, in the original story, Max is a bit too bratty to his Mom one night (“Feed Me, Woman!“), is sent to his room as a consequence, and enjoys a reverie in which he is King of the Wild Things. (“Let the Wild Rumpus Begin!“) Eventually, as his anger dissipates, Max grows homesick and returns “home” to a nice meal. The End.
In the movie, however, the story has been expanded in various ways. Max (Max Records) now has a older sister (Pepita Emmerichs) who seems to feature prominently in his imaginings (Lauren Ambrose.) Ok, fine. Mom (Catherine Keener) has an exasperating job and a new boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo). Eh, Ruffalo is pretty overexposed, but he’s here for all of 10 seconds, so no harm, no foul. And the now-highly mopey “Wild” Things (James Gandolfini, Chris Cooper, Catherine O’Hara, Forest Whitaker, Paul Dano) sound like Snuffleupagus, think like Eeyore, and are all in dire need of prescription-strength antidepressants and/or therapy. Uh, hold on…what?
Oh, ok, they’re all psychological manifestations of Max’s various black moods — snippy downer (O’Hara), feeling ignored (Dano), etc. — give or take the quick-to-anger Carol (Gandolfini), who may or may not be a proxy for Max’s father, the best friend Max never had, or even Max himself. And now these Mopey Things want a king, except the monarchy of Max the First keeps letting everybody down. Perfect government, it seems — even on issues as innocuous as dirt-clod fights and fort-building — is as ephemeral as everlasting innocence, the feeling of being loved, the last shaft of sunlight wending through the forest at twilight, our own human frailty…wait a second, stop the reel. Wasn’t this movie supposed to be about a little kid hanging with monsters?
Props to Jonze and Eggers for trying to do something different, I guess. When you put WTWTA up against recent hackmeisterly cash grabs like The Cat in the Hat, well, there’s no comparison really. And the creature FX here are simply stunning, so there’s that too. Still, I found myself increasingly put off by all the overwrought glumness on display in WTWTA. Max and the Wild Things should be primal little hellions, unstoppable forces of Nature. They should not be miserably sad head cases, or at least they weren’t in my imaginings. And I don’t think the problem is I’m too adult for this movie — This version of WTWTA ends with a misplaced Grey Havens-y, “I’ll miss you most of all, Scarecrow!” farewell on the beach, where Max and the Wild Things howl in lament at the passing of childhood. All I could think was “What’s the problem here? I was howling along with Berk just this morning.”
Which reminds me — I’ve always found Philip Pullman to be a considerable wanker, but it was thinking about a central conceit of his His Dark Materials trilogy that crystallized one source of my discontent with WTWTA. I guess, like Pullman and unlike Jonze and Eggers, I don’t necessarily see growing out of childhood as such an inexorable loss of innocence or horrible fall from Eden. Rather, I think kids — myself back in the day included — are mostly primal, needy, and half-formed (like Lyra), and becoming an adult is instead a boon, a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, an expansion of the possible. It is a door opening, not a door closing. Well, you definitely don’t get that sense from Where the Wild Things Are. In fact, if my own younger days were as flat-out miserable as those of poor Max here, childhood’s end couldn’t have come fast enough.
When a Problem Comes Along.
As the film begins, the surly teen in question, a young Texan by the name of Bliss (Page), has just let down Ma once again, by dying her hair blue before the latest stereotypically stifling beauty pageant. (Page didn’t bug me so much in Juno — I blamed the excessive quirk then on screenwriter Diablo Cody. But, for some reason or another, I found her “who-me?” simper and hipster-schtick irritating pretty quickly in this film.) Anyway, Ma (Harden), a postal worker with her own beauty-queen dreams deferred, takes the blue-hair fiasco as well as she can, but it doesn’t change the fundamental problem for Bliss. She — and her best friend Pash (Alia Shawkat, a.k.a. Maeby Fünke) — are just dying in this one-horse town.
But, on a trip to nearby Austin one day, Bliss finds a D.I.Y.-looking flyer advertising the local roller-derby league, featuring the current reigning rinkstress, Iron Maven, in all her glory. (That would be Juliette Lewis, doing her standard queen-of-the-skanks routine. Weirdly enough, Woody Harrelson brought back Mickey Knox just the week before, and now Lewis is channeling Mallorie again.) Anyway, after a visit to the Big Dance, Bliss is completely smitten with this strange new world of bad-ass chicks and furious body blows. Even better, there’s a spot open on the “Hurl Scouts” — who consist of Maggie Mayhem (Kristen Wiig), Rosa Sparks (Eve), Bloody Holly (Zoё Bell) and Smashly Simpson (Barrymore) — and Bliss just happens to be lightnin’-fast in her old-school Barbie skates. But, even as Bliss grows to relish her new role as “Babe Ruthless,” there’re still the dreams of dear old Ma to contend with…
Although not as surprisingly promising as Ben Affleck’s 2007 directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, Drew Barrymore acquits herself pretty well here behind the camera, all in all. Things move at a pretty brisk clip, and I could generally follow the roller derby scenes pretty well. (It may be the writer or the source material’s fault, but there are definite shades of the Drew Barrymore-produced Donnie Darko here too — in the “Sparkle Motion”-like little sister (Eulala Grace Scheel), the goofball dad (Daniel Stern), and the dysfunctional-yet-oddly-functional parents.)
That being said, there are a few problems here. I went on in my World’s Greatest Dad review recently about the “Big Lie,” usually seen in rom-coms, whereby the audience spends most of the film just waiting for some obvious problem to [a] be revealed and [b] then resolve itself. Well, this movie is based on two of ’em — Bliss is underage for the league, and the aforementioned mother-daughter dispute — and waiting for these cycles to play out frankly isn’t all that interesting. Throw in the usual set of standard-issue sports-movie tropes — the rookie-makes-good sequence, the “getting stronger!” montage, the Big Game — and Whip It is basically cliché grafted to cliché.
All that being said, I still could have cottoned to Whip It more, I think — it has its heart in the right place — if it weren’t one of those movies that plays an arch indie song every time you’re supposed to have any sort of emotional reaction to it. (And don’t get me started on the subplot involving Bliss’ potential emo-rocker boyfriend (Landon Pigg) — That guy just drove me up the wall from Jump Street.) Let me put it this way: Throughout the movie, Bliss tends to wear a Stryper T-shirt, as in the ultra-cheesy Christian metal band from the 80’s. (It becomes a plot point, eventually.) Now, some might see this as a very post-ironic, clever, hipster thing to do. Others might say it seems like trying too hard.
The World According to Mij.
“‘This film integrates my life’s achievements,’ he told me. ‘It’s the most complicated stuff anyone’s ever done.” Another time, he said, “If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.’” On the eve of Avatar, the New Yorker‘s Dana Goodyear delivers a long and interesting profile of take-no-guff, autocratic auteur James Cameron. (“A small, loyal band of cast and crew works with him repeatedly; they call the dark side of his personality Mij–Jim backward.“)
The whole thing is definitely worth a read, but this caught me eye further down the piece: “‘We should ultimately have colonies on Mars, for purposes of expanding the footprint of the human race,’ Cameron says. He shares with the Mars Society the opinion that NASA — on whose advisory council he sat for three years — has become too risk-averse. ‘We’ve become cowards, basically,’ he says. ‘As a society, we’re just fat and happy and comfortable and we’ve lost the edge.’” Listen to the King of the World — he’s dead on.
Wolf at the Door.
Quicktime isn’t playing nicely with my work PC at the moment, so I can’t vouch for its quality just yet. Nonetheless, the second trailer for Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman is now online. Early reports indicate that, true to form, Anthony Hopkins chews scenery herein like it’s his business (and, brother, business is booming.)
Where the Plastic Things Are.
After a decade in the toy chest, Woody, Buzz, and the gang finally get out of mothballs in the trailer for Pixar and Lee Unkrich’s Toy Story 3. It’s been 15 years since the first and ten since the second, so unclear to me why Pixar would endanger its winning streak by going back to this well now. Still, they haven’t let us down yet.