Posts Tagged ‘Glenn Lovell’

Best, Worst, Most Disappointing of 2011

01/15/2012

by Glenn Lovell

For those of us who spent a good part of the year in the dark — blinking through as many as four or five films a week – the news that annual ticket sales were at a 16-year low hardly came as a shock. Half the time Hollywood seemed to be in a haze, the other half running scared, cranking out one CG-driven escape after another. It got so bad during the summer months that titles and alternate universes blended. Did I experience that rogue planet in “Thor” or “Green Lantern” … or “Transformers: Dark of the Moon”?

Of course it didn’t help matters that in 2011 we had more alternatives to the tiresome, cell-phone-friendly megaplexes than ever before. I lost count of the number of films I discovered on PPV, a week or two before they were reviewed in the local paper. Add to this streaming Netflix, a boon to adventurous souls looking for interesting indies that somehow went without distribution. (This is how I discovered South Korea’s tricky “I Saw the Devil,” Italy’s rapturous “Come Undone,” and, from 2008, the French-U.S.-Mexican “Julia,” starring Tilda Swinton as the most unrepentant drunk since Nicolas Cage in “Leaving Las Vegas.”)

Not surprisingly, the best films were the smallest, in terms of budget not originality. In no particular order, the titles that reawakened my passion for flickering celluloid:

The Best ... "The Artist"

1. “The Artist.” A clever homage to silent Hollywood, circa 1927, that beseeches, “Open your eyes – and listen!”

2. “Win Win.” A low-budget charmer starring Paul Giamatti at his rumpled best. (The sadly overlooked “Terri” could easily share this spot.)

3. “The Help.” Sure it’s slick, old-fashioned storytelling, but Tate Taylor’s adaptation of the Kathryn Stockett bestseller about segregation in 1960s Mississippi proved the year’s most engrossing melodrama. Expect scads of Oscar nominations, starting with Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Jessica Chastain.

5. “The Debt.” A rich, multilayered mystery-espionage thriller that commented on the nature of courage. Helen Mirren and Chastain played the same women separated by 30 years of lies ‒ and a nasty facial scar.

6. “Melancholia.” Lars von Trier’s meditation on encroaching Armageddon, when madness proves the only sane response.

7. “Drive.” A retro crime thriller – Jean-Pierre Melville meets “Bullitt” starring the new King of Cool, Ryan Gosling.

8. “Limitless.” Like Alice, Bradley Cooper pops a pill for the ultimate out-of-body experience. Credit director Neil Burger for the year’s most novel sci-fi allegory, told with just the right blend of humor and suspense.

9. “Shame.” The seemingly everywhere Michael Fassbender in a dark, stripped-down tale of guilt and addiction. Academy, when filling out your nomination ballots, don’t forget Carey Mulligan as Fassbender’s even needier sister.

10. “The Descendants.” Alexander Payne’s long overdue follo to “Sideways” is a quirky dramedy about second chances. George Clooney is wonderful as a preoccupied Hawaiian attorney juggling, very badly, family tragedy and in-fighting.

Year’s best foreign film: Takashi Miike’s “13 Assassins,” a stunning, subversive variation on Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai.” Does anyone now going stage battle scenes better than Miike?

Year’s biggest disappointment: “The Tree of Life,” Terrence Malick’s most personal and, thanks to a fragmented, jump-cut-happy narrative, least accessible movie. Think the Scopes Monkey Trial battled to a draw. Both creationists and atheists had reason to grumble.

As usual, there were enough bow-wows to fill a large kennel. Ten that barked loudest:

1. “Cowboys & Aliens.” Like baked beans on freeze-dried ice cream.

2. “Super 8.” Spoof or homage? Only diehard Spielberg fans knew for sure.

And the worst ... "Super 8"

3. “The Rite.” Anthony Hopkins’ excuse: “Devil made me do it!”

4. “Arthur.” The old drunk act, minus a modicum of charm.

5. “The Thing.” Prequel or remake? Who cares.

6. “Hall Pass.” We didn’t expect anything of this Farrelly brothers farce and weren’t disappointed.

7. “Dream House.” When it comes to ghosts, who ya gonna call? Not Daniel Craig.

8. “Just Go with It”/“Jack and Jill.” For those Adam Sandler fans craving seconds.

9. “Straw Dogs.” Peckinpah gutted for stock home-invasion thrills.

10.  “Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows.” The game’s afoot! NOT!

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Memo to AMC: Block Phones!

10/20/2011

Memo to AMC Theater Management:

Hey, guys, thanks for those new cell phone PSAs ‒ the ones using the Muppets and those cute flying apps.

They’re funny and creative. I love seeing Fozzie Bear talking on a banana as Miss Piggy shushes him.

One problem: The spots are next to useless.

After sitting through “Footloose” at one of your San Jose houses and watching cell phones pop on one after another like Christmas lights, I’d go further ‒ your new spots are not only useless, they encourage cell phone use during the movie by making a joke of the practice.

Cell Phones: No Laughing Matter

The thinking now among repeat offenders: If management thinks it’s funny, it’s obviously no big deal.

In other words, you’re contributing to a problem that’s grown to epidemic proportions and caused a noticeable drop in movie attendance.

What you should be doing is taking a tougher, less conciliatory stance, like the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin. Management there lays it out, plain and simple: “If you talk or text during a movie, we kick you out.”

And they do, as an angry voicemail — turned into a hilarious Drafthouse PSA — attests.

Why don’t you follow suit? I’ll tell you why. You’re afraid of offending your worst customers and losing their business. You’ve capitulated by accepting cell phones as a minor nuisance.

Worse, you’re in bed with the cell phone companies. That Kermit and Miss Piggy PSA, besides being a promo for Disney’s new Muppet movie, is brought to us by Sprint, the very folks who profit from cell phone use in theaters.

You need to get control of this problem. Fast. A while back the National Association of Theater Owners petitioned the FCC to follow France’s lead and block cell phone reception in theaters. That effort went nowhere as NATO yielded to pressure from special interest groups. Their tired argument: We need our cell phones with us at all times, in case of an emergency. Phone jammers, they also protested, infringe upon our First Amendment right to act like jerks in public.

If you want to do something worthwhile, AMC, scrub the lip-service PSAs and make your theaters no-reception zones. Sure, you’ll lose some customers. But you’ll win back better ones.

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Cry Wolf

10/09/2011

I don’t know about you, but I sit up when I hear about a new survival adventure. I admit it, I’m a sucker for these movies. I like seeing people battle the elements and survive through ingenuity and sheer force of will

Looking back, I can remember savoring “Five Came Back” and the original “Flight of the Phoenix,” about downed planes in the Amazon and Sahara. Others in this sub-genre that spring to mind: “Inferno” with Robert Ryan, “The Naked Prey” with Cornell Wilde, “Man in the Wilderness” with Richard Harris, “The Emerald Forest” with Powers Boothe, and Lee Tamahori’s much-underrated “The Edge,” with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin being pursued by a particularly nasty Kodiak bear.

Neeson (far right): What price survival?

If one were to analyze our attraction to these movies, it would probably come down to some atavistic yearning to return to nature … or reading “Robinson Crusoe” and “Coral Island” as a kid.

That certainly would account for the more recent successes of “Cast Away” and “127 Hours.”

All of this is a roundabout way of saying I’m looking forward to Joe Carnahan’s “The Grey,” starring Liam Neeson and Dermot Mulroney. The good news: Neeson, Mulroney and four other oil-rig workers have survived a hellacious plane crash. The bad: They’re in the middle of the frigid Alaskan wilderness and a pack of timber wolves have their scent.

Here’s the preview for “The Grey,” which made me salivate like a schoolboy. The film opens Jan. 27. We’ll report back then.

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“Lion” Kinky

09/27/2011

Uncle Walt must be rolling over in his grave (or cryogenic chamber, if those conspiracy buffs are to be believed).

Today I called up a trailer at IMDb.com for “Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)” and what did I see as a lead-in?

A preview for Disney’s Blu-ray edition of “The Lion King.”

That’s right, the most popular G-rated animated feature of all time was paired with IFC’s  unrated sequel to Tom Six’s “Human Centipede,” now being promo’ed as “the sickest movie of all time.” In the new installment, a chubby, pop-eyed sadist named Martin seeks to improve on Dr. Heiter’s experiment in gastrointestinal fusion by suturing a dozen human guinea pigs butt to mouth.

I may be wrong but I don’t think this is what “Lion King” songwriters Elton John and Tim Rice meant by “Circle of Life.”

Postscript: “Human Centipede II” — determined to be utterly reprehensible and without a shred of redeeming social value — has been banned in the U.K., a distinction it shares with Tod Browning’s “Freaks,” Brando’s “The Wild One,” Roger Corman’s “The Trip,” Tobe Hooper’s “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and Wes Craven’s original “Last House on the Left.”

“Banned in Britain!” — the trailer proudly trumpets. You’re right, you can’t buy this kind of advertising.

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“Tingler” Terror

09/06/2011

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about …

Word arrived yesterday of an incident that brought a queasy sensation and again raised the question: Are our megaplexes a potential terrorist target waiting to happen?

The Columbus Dispatch reported an 8-year-old boy was rushed to the hospital Sunday after being jabbed in the back by a needle that had been wedged in a theater seat. It was no accident. The sewing needle, protruding from the top of a ballpoint pen, formed a makeshift hypo. Authorities said that the boy, apart from being “a little shaky,“ was fine and that they were testing the needle.

No doubt a teen prank or the work of one very twisted individual, the incident nevertheless points up how vulnerable our nation’s theaters are.

Stuck in our seats, for real?

Who among us hasn’t felt a twinge of anxiety when something brushed up against his leg in the dark of a theater? We are, for all intents and purposes, totally exposed to whatever’s out there.

As far as I can tell, local theaters are only protected by exit signs, smoke detectors, ushers and the occasional rent-a-cop. The National Association of Theater Owners has been surprisingly mute on the topic, choosing instead to concentrate on movie piracy and the closing gap between theatrical openings and VOD. Little wonder Homeland Security has designated movie houses, along with malls and hotels, “soft targets.”

This, despite the fact that theaters in Pakistan and other Asian countries have become easy terrorist targets. Karachi, 2001: “A bomb exploded in a crowded movie theater Sunday, killing at least one person and wounding five others.” Peshawar, 2009: “A powerful car bomb blast at a movie house … killed six people and injured 75.”

At the risk of sounding like an alarmist, the little boy in Columbus reminds us that we can never be totally sure what awaits us in the dark. William Castle, the master of gimmick horror, played on this innate fear with his “Emergo” skeleton and vibrating seats. Last weekend’s stunt, however, left no one giggling. It was like “The Tingler,” only for real.

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Peck-’n-pawed

06/20/2011

Two films, one about to open, the other still on the drawing board.

Both bad ideas.

Do we really want to see a redo of Sam Peckinpah’s ultraviolent “Straw Dogs,” this time pairing James Marsden and Kate Bosworth in the Dustin Hoffman-Susan George roles?

Do we really want to see Tom Hanks (white, middle-aged, righteous) battle Somali pirates (black, young, fanatical) in an announced high-seas docudrama that graphs “Black Hawk Down” to “Cast Away”? If Spike Lee hasn’t already spoken out against this project as a potential minefield of Third World stereotypes,  stay tuned.

In 1971, when we were still in Vietnam, Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” tapped into something dark and primordial, the lengths to which an ordinary man will go to guard hearth and home … the bloodlust that’s in each of us, whether we want to own up to it or not.

Not surprisingly, “Bloody” Sam was then reading Robert Ardrey’s “Territorial Imperative,” which, for the director, answered questions about why one man shoots another when he steps over a boundary line.

If the trailer for his long-delayed September release is any indication, Rod Lurie is attempting to goose his stalled feature career with a baldly cathartic home-invasion thriller a la “Last House on the Left” and “Cape Fear.” Peckinpah’s rite of passage, whether you bought into it or not (I didn’t), was deeply personal, as much self-justification as self-analysis. Lurie’s updated “re-imagining” smacks of crass commercialism.

While the basic situation and signature battle cry (“I will not allow violence against this house!”) remain intact, Lurie and company have made a number of telling changes. In the original, Hoffman’s David Sumner is a mathematician on sabbatical in Cornwall, England, at its most foreboding. Hoffman, no one’s idea of a classically handsome leading man, made perfect sense. His Sumner was fussy, nattering, preoccupied. The remake takes place in Shreveport, Louisiana, thereby forfeiting much of the stranger-in-a-strange land paranoia. (The novel, “The Siege of Trencher’s Farm,” hinges on British resentment of brash, know-it-all Yanks.) Marsden’s Sumner, besides being a conventional pretty boy, is a struggling screenwriter. (Like the one who came up with that profession?)

British sex kitten George was cast to type as Amy: trashy, dumb, insatiable ‒ every brainiac’s wet dream. As filmed by Peckinpah, the rape scene devolved into consensual seduction, thereby igniting feminist protest and setting a new standard for screen misogyny.

Bosworth looks to be an improvement. Let’s hope Lurie has been sensitive enough to let her screams of “No!” mean no.

Somehow, given its exploitation trappings, I doubt that this remake will rise to the challenge.

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Paradise Soon

03/30/2011

Good news, Terrence Malick fans. (Funny how you instantly know who you are.)

The Howard Hughes of American auteurs is due back this spring with his most personal film yet, “The Tree of Life,” starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn as, respectively, father and son processing decades of abuse, physical and psychological.

It has been six long years since “The New World,” Malick’s last film. Even so, we can count ourselves lucky: That’s a hiccup after the 20 years that separated “Days of Heaven” (1978) and Malick’s Lazarus-like return, “The Thin Red Line” (1998).

Next to Malick, Stanley Kubrick, whose output consisted of a niggardly 13 features, was a veritable speed demon.

As amazing as it sounds, “The Tree of Life” — which will be platformed out in late May after premiering at Cannes — is only the 67-year-old Malick’s fifth film. But consider the output: “Badlands” (1973), a dazzling snapshot of ’50s America, with Martin Sheen as the Charles Starkweather-inspired sociopath and Sissy Spacek as his reluctant lover-accomplice; ”Days of Heaven,” a breathtakingly beautiful tale of Heartland greed and betrayal with Richard Gere, Brooke Adams and Sam Shepard; “The Thin Red Line,” Malick’s sprawling, free-form adaptation of the James Jones novel about one of the bloodiest battles of World War 2; and “The New World,” the Jamestown-Pocahontas story as timely metaphor for the rape of a continent. (Malick’s tableaux of Indians eyeing the advancing British ships with curiosity and apprehension caught the beginning of the end for America’s indigenous people.)

Not a blockbuster — or even a modest hit — among them. Indeed, “Badlands,” coming at the end of the counterculture movement, bowed on the bottom half of double bills. That’s how little Warner Bros. believed in it. (I discovered it in a hole-in-the-wall theater on Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles.) “Days of Heaven” proved too pictorially studied for many critics and had the added misfortune of opening in New York during a newspaper strike. “The Thin Red Line” was hopelessly mismatched during a release cycle that belonged to the more conventionally structured “Saving Private Ryan.”

Typically, “Tree of Life” has been kept well away from prying eyes. Still, by reviewing Malick’s track record and the new film’s two-minute trailer, we can predict/assume a few things about the director’s latest, including:

1. It will incorporate voiceover narration, lyrical but often unreliable. “Badlands” was narrated by the Holly/Spacek character; “Days of Heaven” was narrated by Linda Manz, who played Gere’s kid sister; “Thin Red Line” and “The New World” came with a Tower of Babel of narrative voices, which contributed to their clutter and confusion.

2. It will chart Man’s Fall from Grace. In “Days of Heaven,” God’s wrath is visited upon the central characters via fire and locusts. In “The Thin Red Line,” it’s delivered  by enemy machine-guns. In “The New World,” European imperialism reaps disease and starvation. In “Tree of Life,” which takes its title from the Book of Genesis, the apocalyptic shock waves begin with children frolicking in DDT spray.

3. At heart, it will be about the pillaging of our planet, the looting of a once-verdant Paradise. Images of despoliation drive and fascinate Malick, who taught us about global interconnectiveness well before Al Gore.

4. It will be impeccably produced and earn Oscar nominations for set designer Jack Fish and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. Malick attracts and gets the best. From the start, his films have been a feast for the senses. “Days of Heaven,” shot during “the magic hour” (the 15 to 20 minutes before dusk), brought Nestor Almendros an Oscar; Lubezki was nominated for “The New World.”

5. If “Tree of Life” doesn’t show early signs of becoming a word-of-mouth hit, it, like every Malick film to date, will be written off by impatient distributors, including Fox Searchlight in the U.S.

6. “Tree of Life” will split audiences and critics. Some will call it transformative, others will damn it as pretentious, self-absorbed. Malick being Malick, he’ll smile and sit back … and disappear until his muse next beckons.

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