I'm a huge fan of the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World comic book series written by Bryan Lee O'Malley (he's sort of Asian, much like myself). I was handed one on a recommendation from Berman Bothers himself, Loni Berman, and spent several of the next few subway rides rolling through each volume (they take about an hour to read through, very quick, like cheetah). Scott Pilgrim and his merry cohorts in their band Sex Bob-omb inhabit a hilarious, anime/gamer infused world that's a highly stylish, boy-dream setting for a charming and breezy romantic comedy. Mr. Pilgrim has the hots for Ramona Flowers, is being chased by Knives Chau, and is forced to fight Ramona's 7 evil ex-boyfriends (well one of them is well read it! Or watch the movie).
You have Michael Cera (not my first choice to play Scott) and all sorts of fun supporting cast members. What's great about the comic and hopefully what's great about the movie, which comes out tomorrow, is that even if you're not into the references and style, you understand the manic nature suits the story well and gives it a wacky bravado. I'm excited as any, and it's a great way to end the summer in my opinion. If it disappoints, I'll have to hadouken the theater usher.
In celebration of this film adaptation, I have two t-shirts to give away courtesy of Universal Pictures! You can see what they look like below. One is for guys (red). One is for girls (black). Both are size large. You want to go to there.
Guy Shirt: Red Scott Pilgrim T-shirt with full Scott Pilgrim logo on front and “An epic of epic epicness” tagline on back. Girl Shirt: Black ladies t-shirt with lighting Bomb logo on the front and Scott Pilgrim logo on back nape of neck.
(I'll get pictures up tomorrow)
Now, for those of you who know our very own resident film critic, Roger Ebert's absolute favorite (from FilmCritic.com no less, featured on the homepage) Chris Cabin, you know he wishes he were Scott Pilgrim. Michael Cera too, but I'd rather be Chris Evans. He also owes me a beer from my birthday, so we'll as usual set him up with a Chris Cab-tion contest. You know the drill; comment to enter to win:
"I'll extinguish you"
For more, visit the pretty sweet official website. Or, just do like I do and play Scott Pilgrim Punchout until your head explodes. Basically there's a ton of cool things to check out and I would expect nothing less from an Edgar Wright directed film.
I'll consider all entries through Monday August 16th. Maybe a day after. Who knows?
I haven't done a poster critique in a while so let's do a whirlwind to make up for it. First up: Athlete, which I know nearly nothing about, but it comes out on DVD March 9. There are several different posters floating around but a couple of them are pretty striking but a bit vague about what the doc is actually about. My favorite is the version above and there's a couple of things I really love about it. The text is your usual inspirational stuff and written in a gritty handwritten way, but I like the fact that the socks are pulled up; it's not a stylish look and that's gives a sense that the film is less about posturing and machismo and more of the heart of what it means to be an athlete. I kinda hope that whoever this photo is of, that he or she is a character in the doc.
The next poster I'm looking at is Courier. Sure it's in development, but from the poster maybe they should just label it as "sucking." There's a lot of things wrong with this one upon closer inspection. A lot of the space feels either unused or useless; the numbers scrolling over the background map feels really cliched.
What's really bad is the copy; writers of Wanted is ok but who gives a shit about any of the Resident Evil movies, much less their director(s)? Adrien Brody is a lot of things but he's not an action guy, which is what the film is saying to me with the gun and the suit and the macguffin. It already feels miscast, maybe they leave his name out of it. He looks like he has a weak frame and those Diet Coke commercials ("HAY BRODY") tried to make him look cool but he just doesn't look cool. The tag line for the poster, "He Delivers", is just stupid. I think I've seen this movie before, it's called Transporter, Transporter 2, and Transporter 3. I'm sure this is a mock up but even at that it's pretty bad.
Next up is banner artwork for Expendables. I'm not totally into the poster with the back tattoo, just because it just kind of looks silly, trying too hard, etc. This though, is pretty awesome: Winged shiny skull? Fuck yeah. Blood text extension of 'Semper Fi' to 'Semper Fight'? Jizz. Weird combo of aforementioned Transporter actor, Sylvester Stallone (extraordinary director? Nope), and Jet Li. And he doesn't play an evil Asian dictator.
The last one for now, and what I think is the most interesting is Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, the sequel to the Academy Award winning (a weak year perhaps?) Wall Street. Oliver Stone still seems like a scary asshole who would be a horrible father but I like the two initial posters that have surfaced for this.
There are some differences between the two, namely the presentation of Michael Douglas's more powerful father figure type character in the first one and an aging mentor type in the second one. Alternately, you can say Shia LaBeouf's character is two shades of young upstart. If you look closely, the rendition of the posters is what makes it cool and very old school, almost 70s. Throw in the simple font and you have a throwback poster style. It gives the characters weight and a timeless quality, as if what they are about is something important and elite. I also like the accessories shown, LaBeouf's pocket handkerchief and Douglas's pocket watch chain in the first poster. I also like that in the second poster especially, LaBeouf's profile is in a light background and Douglas is in the dark. Of course the trailer is kind of meh but these posters do this business film justice. I'm not a huge fan of the subtitle, but it's not a huge deal.
A necessary sequel? Probably not; but an old school look is one of the best decisions.
An aria by Handel soundtracks the opening salvo of the entity henceforth to be known as Lars von Trier's Antichrist. Underneath the operatic swell, a series of slow-motion, black-and-white movements details a married couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) losing themselves in a particularly encompassing bout of pleasure while their toddler climbs up to the windowsill and falls to his death. A moment of this plainly ridiculous segment even features a close-up of genital insertion while the two are showering, catching glimmers of the bathroom light in the cascading drops of water.
Despite numerous reports that von Trier's lunatic cannonball into the void of art-horror is insufferable from frame one on, this stiff introduction counts as one of only two moments that deserve to be so harshly judged. For most of the films 100+ minutes in fact, von Trier orchestrates an effective look at grief gone mad, tucked away in a remote cabin the couple has named Eden. It is in said cabin that Dafoe's manipulative psychotherapist takes Gainsbourg's struggling PhD candidate to work out her grief and remorse through a series of exercises he has planned, including a rather fruitless attempt to figure out what she is really scared of: Husband, herself or just the plain evil of nature.
Then, as the film's now-canonical central quote pronounces, chaos reigns. A storm of acorns rattling Eden's roof and Dafoe confronting an animatronic fox eating its own intestines in the woods are fanciful lead-ins to the orgy of clitoral castration, penis-smashing and wanton mutilation that dominate the film's final quarter. As her madness begins to bellow in fits of screams and accusations, he finds a scrapbook of witches and pagan rituals performed by women that she has collected and entitled "Gynocide", which may or may not be a tip of the hand from the film's director.
The clutter is immense; noisy, showy and often times deliberately assaultive towards von Trier's (perhaps misguided) concept of inactive cinema. The Danish enfant terrible has consistently incurred bloodlust from the cinema community for his happily malevolent, wildly ambitious canon of experiments in genre mechanics. Over the years the results have swung from triumphant (Dogville, Europa, Breaking the Waves) to provocative (The Idiots, Dancer in the Dark) to imprudently polemical (Manderlay, Epidemic) but they are never films unfit for discussion or boring, for that matter.
Antichrist is no different; but for the first time in his career, von Trier's narrative diversions feel self-conscious and without meaning. The director has said that the film was birthed from a case of severe depression that he looked to excise through the filmmaking process and it's not hard to imagine his more brutal diversions (the fox, the raining acorns, a living burial) as cathartic responses to a dark psychotic state. But underneath the melee lies a tenebrous piece of traditionalist 1970s horror, something Polanski wouldn't have been completely incapable of creating in his heyday. Von Trier's structure here -- bouts of concentrated form interrupted by puerile intimations towards the avant-garde -- suggests a tightly paced art-horror film that was assailed by the director's own psychological dissonance.
That being said, Antichrist does contain one consistent element amongst its anarchy and that is Ms. Gainsbourg. Certainly one cannot discount the reliable Dafoe, who employs his distinct intensity and snarl here with sincere discipline, but Gainsbourg's dedication to von Trier's vision -- something which has been argued as wildly anti-woman and covertly pro-feminist -- is quite simply astonishing. Whether furiously masturbating against the bare, impious roots of a tree or trembling and torturing herself in their barren apartment, Gainsbourg's physical manifestation of one woman's hell is unshakeable. The same thing cannot be said, in whole, about Antichrist whose director seems too distracted by his own demons to dedicate himself to his characters' demons.
Antichrist is playing at the IFC Center in the West Village (ah, those were the days at the Waverly bar).
Chris Cabin is our very own resident film critic. You can find his reviews mainly at AMC's FilmCritic.com.
The Boondock Saints is a horrible movie. In fact, personally, it's one of my top 5 least favorite movies of all time, up there with such luminaries as Empire Records and Love Actually. I've actually been punched for voicing such an opinion of The Boondock Saints' first go around, and after I saw Overnight, the documentary about the writer and director Troy Duffy, and realized how much of a ridiculous person he is, it only strengthened my resolve.
The first film not only had a terrible plot, poor character development, crappy action sequences, and an awful "commentary" ending, but there are so many "Boston" movies such as Gone Baby Gone and Monument Ave. that are just so much better. Granted, this is an action movie in the John-Woo-rip-off mode and thus can be held to different standards as those dramas, but I don't find anything in this movie to recommend. It's a sociopathic film that has no reflection on the characters portrayed; Willem Dafoe's tranny FBI agent is such a retardation and Billy Connolly's Il Duce doesn't seem to have much of a purpose. Forget the Irish theme supposedly drawn up by the fact that the two leads are Irish Catholic vigilantes who society is sort of led to believe that they are doing good. Sure, they are getting rid of the baddies. But the action scenes are just awful I think; they are overcomplicated, and the slow motion has no beauty to it; and the staging is abhorrent because there is actually very little grit to it. Duffy is trying to make something shallow and stylish out of something that should be more brutal and less fanciful. Maybe it would come off more interesting if he actually cared about his two lead characters, Irish brothers who think they are on some mission from God. That character motivation alone is just kinda nuts but in Duffy's hands is all the more frustrating for the caricatures he creates. There is something freaky about how they kill for God, but Duffy doesn't do anything with it. He just goes along which makes me think that he's just some religious nutjob making a movie about religious nutjobs.
So quoting the Bible is cool? Yes when Jules does it in Pulp Fiction, because at the end it becomes a key character beat for him.
Two guns and slow motion? Yes when John Woo does it.
Hanging from the ceiling by a wire? Yes when Brian De Palma does it in Mission: Impossible (even though that movie kinda sucked too).
Violence and religion? Yes when it was called Mean Streets or State of Grace. Or The Apostle if you include baseball bats.
Oh and the second one is coming out at the end of the month. Seeing Duffy's face intro the trailer on the Rotten Tomatoes version makes me want to smash my computer screen. He's so smug. The fact that Peter Fonda is in this just screams "I did it for the money." And the fact that Judd Nelson is in it, well that's just a neutral addition.
That's right, all of these trailers have so much in common: action stars, ridiculous lines, and this panache that can only be described as intangible, so whatever objections you have, you're totally wrong because you just can't touch it.
Expendables (with a release date of August 20, you know it'll be worth it):
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (Herzog let's Nick Cage do his batshit stuff):
The Tooth Fairy (with that 'you can't handle the tooth' tagline, I'm totally hooked):
Note: The Informant! is playing at most theaters in the city and in Brooklyn, go here for showtimes. Poster courtesy of IMP awards.
As has been widely reported, Matt Damon gained 40 pounds to play whistleblower Mark Whitacre, the mustachioed high-level exec at Archer Daniels Midland who became an informant for the FBI sometime in late 1992, in Steven Soderbergh's odd new film The Informant! Hidden behind a pair of thick frames, adjusting his toupee as much as his mood, Damon's Whitacre is plain, greedy and fantastical; the sort of man who sees himself not only as a corporate hero in any one Michael Crichton novel but also reflected in the Tom Cruise who embodies those righteous corporate ethicists on the big screen. He has ideas and big plans, ones that he believes could be jeopardized at any moment by a random tapped phone.
And yet, he is, as several people involved with the real Whitacre have opined, a sort of national hero. A biochemist who had to "learn business," Whitacre supplied hundreds of tapes -- audio and visual -- to the FBI between 1992 and 1995 that fueled the Justice Department's case against ADM leading to the agribusiness conglomerate paying well over $500 million in settlement and class action cases. The catch, of course, was that while playing avenger, Mr. Whitacre forgot to disclose kickback funds that may have reached more than $11 million. Faithful to his wife of 20+ years, the father of two adopted children and one of his own, he is a liar and a thief but it would seem, in Mr. Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns' eyes, that every good corporate man has an accepted level of corruption going in; even the ones who want to clean up the joint.
Scored by Marvin Hamlisch in what, at first, seems like a bid at kitsch, Damon's guileful do-gooder opens the film by explaining, both to the audience and his child, how corn is in everything you eat, touch and steal. At ADM, his work has largely focused on lysine, the amino acid that his company frames their price-fixing scam around. It's his wife Ginger, dutifully played by Melanie Lynskey, who prods him into confessing the price-fixing scam to Special Agents Shepard (Scott Bakula) and Herndon (Tony McHale). Professional if just a bit zealous, the Agents sum up Whitacre as both brave and boring. In a brilliant bit of screenwriting, the action and dialogue are repeatedly overshadowed by Whitacre's voice-overs, delivering monologues on an array of throwaway facts including polar bears, being kind and tie sales in whispery chatter reminiscent of Godard's hovering prognostications from his 60s salad days.
An extension of these monologues, Soderbergh's aesthetic is a marvel of bourgeois bad taste. Made with the washed-out precision of cheap 80s television, editor Stephen Mirrione and production designer Doug J. Meerdink work with director/cinematographer Soderbergh to invoke the nausea of upper-class lethargy. But despite this bravura tribute to mediocrity, The Informant! Is not a sweet movie nor is it a placid one. Whitacre embodies the mindset of the current business construct: I'll open the closets as long as you don't stare at my skeletons.
Softened ever-so-slightly by the admittance of bi-polar disorder, Whitacre's infuriating inability to own up to his own malfeasance may not have been sold so easily if not for Mr. Damon who has rarely been so clever and never been as funny as he is here. Seeing as he is constantly surrounded by a rogue's gallery of lawyers and co-workers, Soderbergh pulls a masterstroke by casting many of the smaller roles with stand-up comedians and television actors -- Patton Oswald, Tom Wilson and Tony Hale all show up in minor roles. It plays directly towards Soderbergh's central premise: The characters primarily responsible for our current crisis are so off-the-chart self-serving, greedy and absurd, that you really have no choice but to laugh at them.
Even as it points to our current state, The Informant! also contemplates the grand lunacy of how we pick our heroes. Is Whitacre to be admonished or celebrated? Despite his presumptuous greed, he helped bring in one of the great monopoly schemes in history and remains, to this day, a good father and husband. As we begin to heal from the bruises of the Bush era and weather the outlandish accusations made against honest reform, The Informant! speaks to a generation where the concept of honesty has an 80% mark-up.
Chris Cabin is the resident film critic. You can catch him at AMC's Filmcritic.com. Or win a pair of Yo La Tengo tickets to their Roseland Ballroom show next week by commenting on his recent Cab-tion contest.
The opening of Judd Apatow's third film Funny People sees Adam Sandler when he was still young, making a prank phone call to a local deli. It was shot by Mr. Apatow while Sandler and he were living together in LA and though it is a real video that pre-dates Sandler's salad days on SNL, it is also meant to be a video tape of George Simmons, the absurdly wealthy comedy kingpin Mr. Sandler plays in Apatow's latest two-hour-plus comedy.
Unlike the protagonist of Apatow's last two films, it is not maturity that is weighing on George but rather mortality; though, it could be argued that the latter informed the hesitancy towards the former. George has recently been diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia and has taken on an experimental regiment to attempt to beat it. A box-office tyrant, George has starred in such films as Merman, My Best Friend is a Robot and Re-Do, in which a wizard turns him into a baby with the brain and face of an adult; he shows nothing but disdain for all his films as he contemplates oblivion.
George exists in a dream world where comedians are so rich they don't even have to bother with being funny. Ira (Seth Rogen) has just begun a hopeful ascent to such a world. After working days at a deli counter, Ira goes home and writes stand-up material with roommates Leo (the invaluable Jonah Hill) and Mark (Jason Schwartzman) that he hopefully gets to peddle at the legendary Comedy & Magic Club in Hermosa Beach.
Here, Apatow sets up an immediately intriguing dynamic. Mark acts in a cheesy sitcom called Yo Teach! and makes more money in a week than Ira makes in a year; Leo gets more notoriety at the clubs and is a more popular performer in general. Apatow never attempt to justify why Leo and Mark are more successful than Ira past the fact that Mark knows how to sell himself and Leo is, quite simply, funnier than him at this specific interval. It gives both Ira and his struggles (on and off-stage) more definition.
After a grimly narcissistic set at the club, George asks both Ira and Leo to come write jokes for him. Feeling he's owed one, Ira takes the job for himself and neither Rogen nor Apatow slink away from the cordial backstabbing that many Hollywood careers are based on. Soon enough, Ira is writing for George and becoming his sole confidant, pressuring him to make peace with family, friends and colleagues before it's too late. "I think I played it all wrong" says George before he is informed by his Swedish doctor (Torsten Voges) that the leukemia has apparently been cleared from his system.
Life as he knew it can now continue but, after seeing death, George wants a crack at the normal life. This is where Laura (Leslie Mann, the off-screen Mrs. Apatow) comes in with her high-pitched voice and waves of dirty-blonde hair; "the one who got away" as George puts it. Now married to an Australian businessman (Eric Bana) with two kids (played by Apatow and Mann's daughters, Iris and Maude), Laura divulged that she still was in love with George when she found out he was dying. His rebirth seems the perfect platform for them to reunite, with Ira playing chaperone.
Like any celebrity, George wants for a normal life but never stops to think if he's capable of one. For him, death was his one brutal glance at the one thing that all humans, private jet or not, have to face eventually. He regresses in character to who he was before fame but when it comes surging back into his bloodstream, he can't ignore his given nature. Ira cries when Laura puts on a tape of her daughter singing "Memory" from the Broadway show CATS but all George can do is look at updates for a possible sequel to Re-Do and remark how his druggie friends might get a kick out of the "Memory performance. He is an entertainer and cannot help but see the funny side of things; he is not programmed naturally for compassion. The populous is the only thing he could ever commit to.
Apatow's apparent touchstone here is the early work of James L. Brooks, especially the excellent Broadcast News. Similarly, that film dealt with the moral highs-and-lows of modern television; entertainment versus insight and information. Funny People is less biting than that film but the interplay is similar. The way Holly Hunter softens her blow when William Hurt brings her a human interest story mirrors Rogen's hesitation to let George really have it when he realizes he's breaking up Laura's marriage. There's also the communal nature of the comedy world that gives the film a very distinct flavor of insider drama; Paul Reiser, Sarah Silverman, Eminem and Ray Romano all make great cameos.
Apatow softens his blow at the very end but I found myself overwhelmed by the ambition and overall craftsmanship of Funny People. Even the transitions seemed less bumpy after a second viewing. Sandler is playing a fascinating version of himself here and part of the pull of the film is considering just how much of George is Sandler. And despite the fact that Rogen's character is prominent throughout, there is no question that this is George's film, deeply affected by the throws of humor and fame. Early on in the film, George refers to humor as a necessary defense he developed to please and quell his father and at the heart of Apatow's film is the question of rehabilitation even from the most basic parts of our character. In the end, George finds a healthy way to channel his need for laughs with Ira but the bug is still there and it seems clear that it always will be.
Chris Cabin is THE resident film critic and his opinions do not necessarily reflect those of the Kings County Bop. You can find his reviews at AMC's Filmcritic.com as well as linked from Rotten Tomatoes, complete with several comments, none about his facial hair.
Our resident film critic Chris Cabin weighs in on his top 10 films of the year thus far (since we’re a little over half way, and because awards season seems like it never ends with all that patting on the backing and what not). Here it is, complete with trailers for each. Never heard of these films? Find out more at IMDb and get crackin'! The KCB is particularly interested in Hunger fo sho.
01. The Headless Woman: A work of concentrated discombobulation and exacting mood. A woman runs over something in the road, hits her head and for the rest of the film she doesn't know what's going on. Neither do we really, thanks to the young Argentinean master Lucretia Martel's lean, focused formalism but that's what makes it one of the best films of the year. It's a mystery film where the questions posed by the narrative are engulfed by the provocations made by the filmmaking.
02. Silent Light: Like Martel, Mexican troublemaker Carlos Reygadas holds nothing back on his third masterfully crafted film. An agrarian staging of Dreyer's Ordet? Or just a Mennonite ethnographic study with a script? Reygadas has been cast-off as pretentious but what else would you expect from a filmmaker bold enough to attempt greatness?
03. Hunger: The debut of the year by a country mile. British video artist Steve McQueen's highly photographic retelling of the last weeks of IRA martyr Bobby Sands is brilliantly fragmented, awake with inciting clamor and at war with the clarion beauty of its compositions. A step forward from Paul Greengrass' excellent Bloody Sunday, McQueen has located the fight rather than the folklore of the IRA.
04. Summer Hours: Long past prolific, Olivier Assayas' latest is arguably his most refined and clearly his most personal film to date. Globalization hits home when three siblings decide to sell the family house following the death of the family's matriarch. French to the bone, this surpassingly delicate tale finds Assayas cozy at home after years in techno-espionage and turning his camera into a fluidly expanding family tree.
05. The Hurt Locker: Kathryn Bigelow's monumental Iraq Occupation film has its roots in both action and war but it is devout to both in ways few directors could stomach. For a triptych of bomb-disposal specialists, headed by Jeremy Renner's devastating William James, war may be an addiction, an anesthetic to the complacency of real life or just something they're good at. Crafted in terms of time and clarity of motion rather than spectacle, this is Bigelow's most triumphant moment and, by a wide margin, the best film about the current mental state of our soldiers I've seen.
06. The Limits of Control: Bad-mouthed and labeled monotonous by nearly every critic around, Jim Jarmusch's latest film could be renamed Variations on a Scene. Space is a key factor in Jarmusch's entire oeuvre but here, the movement and position of actors and camera become the focus itself, accompanied by a sea storm of chrome ambience courtesy of Japanese psych-metal outfit Boris. Jarmusch has called his film Point Blank remade by Rivette but his disregard for the constraints of storytelling and devotion to the medium places him in ranks with the greats, if he wasn't there already.
08. Tulpan: Buster Keaton moves to Kazakhstan? Not really but Sergei Dvortsevoy's astounding, original comedy certainly has invested itself in silence and the physicality of its actors. It's a simple story really: Boy meets girl, gets rejected by girl, falls for girl, gets rejected again and then helps deliver a newborn lamb. Ethnographic immersion played as minimalist romantic comedy, Dvortsevoy has made an exception first narrative feature coming from a life of documentary filmmaking. Life on the steppe becomes tradition's last stand while the titular tulip dreams of life at college, away from her alien birthplace.
09. Beeswax: Far from the portentous expectations of the Mumblecore movement, Bujalski now seems one of the strongest of American indie filmmakers, rightly in the same wheelhouse as Kelly Reichardt, So Yong Kim and other erstwhile Mumbler Aaron Katz. Set in suburban Texas, his latest is about early, sticky fumblings towards adulthood, typified by the social, romantic and economic hamstrings encountered by a pair of twins. Refined and more at ease with its habitats than his last two features, Bujalski's film still enjoys a good awkward moment but the scenes feel less fetishized. Neither softened nor unfocused, Bujalski is maturing while many of his compatriots are stuck in adolescence.
10. 35 Shots of Rum: Has Claire Denis given in and made something resembling a conventional narrative? You bet, but this is in no way a bad thing. In fact, it illuminates the director's most evocative gifts -- compositions of echoing desperation, her precise sense of movement and tone -- and places them in the context of artful melodrama. In this case, it's the story of a father and daughter living in the same rise as his ex-lover and her smoldering, wandering love interest. Feelings are hurt and hearts are broken but there's a harrowing mortality to Denis' world that belies the poetic lilt of the imagery. It is the director's most outwardly inviting film but it also may lay claim as her most transfixing.
My friend at All Ears All Eyes All The Time blog is taking it upon himself to revisit all the James Bond films (we're still looking for odds and ends, but he's starting with the major ones for sure). Personally Quantum of Solace left a funny taste in my mouth, but I still thought it was a solid action flick.
The first two official Bond film reviews are up, starting with Dr. No:
"The recent release of several James Bond films onto high definition Blu-ray discs grabbed my curiosity a few months back and I decided to check out the titles that had been released to nerdily see if the new high definition transfers looked any better than the standard DVDs. As I started doing this, I realized that it had been a while since I watched a few of these Bond movies and in some cases even several years. I decided that I was going to embark on a gigantic undertaking: to re-watch every James Bond film in succession. I’ve been at it for a little over a month now and will be chiming in from time to time to update everyone on my progress and opinions of the films. Let’s begin where else, but the film that started it all..."
for From Russia With Love, which I think is the best Bond film (my personal favorite being For Your Eyes Only and the Dalton films, yeah so sue me), go here.
Needing of a nice dinner and a movie? Why not both at Ortine Cafe on the Prospect Heights/Crown Heights border of Washington Ave. tomorrow night July 7th!
The Kings County Cinema Society (no relation to the KCB other than friendship rings) is hosting a screening of Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious in Ortine's backyard. Get suspicious with your partner over dinner and the Cary Grant/Ingrid Bergman chemistry. Oh and they fight Nazis, something we can all get behind! Photo from Fanpop.
Speaking of Nazis, you can still catch the outrageous flick Dead Snow at almost everyone's favorite uber-indie movie theater, Cinema Village.
Michael Mann's Public Enemies is an honest depiction of a life that could only be true in film. John Dillinger is played by Johnny Depp, another public figure whose inner life is ostensibly unknowable, and his foil, the budding G-man Melvin Purvis, is played by Christian Bale. As Depp plays him, he is a romantic, disciplined figure of the public's mythic conscience; Robin Hood in a three-piece suit with a Tommy gun at his side. Above him, around him and to him, Mann emphasizes not only the birth of organized, capitalist-driven crime but the sheer thrill of being romanced by such a public figure.
At a drab Midwest prison circa 1933, Mann begins with a breathless prison break orchestrated by Dillinger and compatriot John "Red" Hamilton (Jason Clarke) to release the bulk of their Chicago gang, which included mentor Harry Pierpont (David Wenham) and Homer Van Peter (Stephen Dorff). His return to Chicago is marked by a robbery and a meeting with his counterpart Alvin Karpis (Giovanni Ribisi) but is sent into overdrive by the appearance of sassy coat-check girl Billie Frechette, played by the excellent Marion Cotillard. They fall madly in love and stay together even as he is sent to prison again and narrowly escapes capture until his infamous death in front of the Biograph Theater in Chicago in June 1934.
Public Enemies is set during the depression but nothing on the screen suggests the depleted environs, save for the public's love for the concept of simply taking the government's money whenever they please. Mann's film is not a chronicle of American history as much as it is a chronicle of a pivotal point in America's love for crime and their need to know that a life of crime is always possible and that it does indeed pay. A recent New York Times article recounted the production of Public Enemies, which began as a film about Jewish mastermind Karpis, as a hope of chronicling the half-decade or so when Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker and Baby Face Nelson were celebrities of high prestige, hidden in plain sight.
In Mann's film, Nelson is played by the great British character actor Stephen Graham, a force to be reckoned with in Shane Meadows' This is England. He is, along with Karpis and Dillinger, the reason that J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup in fine form) is seeking to turn his Bureau of Investigation into a Federal body, with Purvis as his lead G-man. As fatalistic as the man he chases, Purvis is introduced as he guns down Pretty Boy Floyd (a brief Channing Tatum) in an orchard and exits as the smallest cog in Dillinger's death. Betrayed by father figure Hoover when he is asked to "take off the white gloves," Purvis is, as the film consistently points out, just as disillusioned with the embryonic FBI as Dillinger is with the initial steps of the Chicago mafia's clandestine agreements with law enforcement to cut the chord with Dillinger and his lot.
As with his last film, the nocturnal free-flow Miami Vice, Public Enemies at once works to concrete Mann's immense talents while further pointing out his minor but telling weaknesses. Soundtracked mainly by Mort Dixon's "Bye Bye Blackbird" and other depression-era lullabies, there is still that indulgence in steely electric guitars to emphasize action and pace, less prominent and much preferred over the swells of Audioslave that dogged both Miami Vice and Collateral.
Like The Dark Knight, Enemies is an unlikely summer entry; one that must accept certain conventions to ensure its box office yet consistently upends and reevaluates the very parts of its DNA that make it a hopeful box office titan. Paced smartly and fitted with solid ensemble performers, which also includes the stage actor Stephen Lang and Rory Cochrane as Purvis' partners, Public Enemies enlists digital cinematography in the most provocative commercial form to date, adding looseness and clarity to a genre usually noted for its tight framing. Wielded by Mann's staple lenser, the crafty and deft Dante Spinotti, Mann's camera peers into the film's nighttime siege of Nelson and Dillinger's woodland hideout with an uncanny ease and thrilling precision; the film's aesthetic feels as if it's on the lam along with its central figure.
Depp's performance, calibrated and deployed with a leopard-like charm, doesn't outshine Bale nor does it work to tower above prominent screen partner Cotillard. Mann has always been an expert at harmonious acting: You may remember the scene between Pacino and DeNiro in Heat but it is not the film's most memorable scene. The film, written by Irish scribe Ronan Bennett along with Mann and Southland creator Ann Biderman, is based on Bryan Burrough's astute study of the crime waves prominent in the early 1930s and the subsequent birth of Hoover's FBI; the film's relation to movement and the chase rather than the national reflection speaks to the gone-tomorrow mentality of the era more than the vision of a thousand breadlines. Like its two lead characters, Public Enemies has certain nostalgia for the flash of early crime, the simplicity of it; it has an open distaste for procedure and concentrates on the swiftness and cunning of these jailhouse playboys. Obviously relating to Dillinger and Purvis, Mann chooses innovation over security, a Tommy gun over a ledger.
Chris Cabin is our very own resident film critic. You can find other reviews at AMC's Filmcritic.com. His opinions are not necessarily those of The KCB.
The KCB: Here is a featurette on the crew and staging of a bank robbery in the film; it echoes all of Michael Mann's crime film work, he loves the idea of a crew:
Cabin and I, plotting something at a Brooklyn girl's birthday party only to be foiled by several beverages at what was formerly New Gate Bar and turned into Society.
So yes, I've been putting up Chris Cab-tion contests (and believe me, they'll still run until I run out of funny pictures of Chris Cabin, there's a beaut coming) and being all over the poor guy, but soon we're going to have an extra hand to massage the KCB audience with. Chris, our very own resident film critic, will be giving us his thoughts on current and past movies including the small stuff playing in the New York market (we have to have some sort of foot there don't we) that will test your brain as well as your penchant for artistic value. Y'know, all that Lincoln Center, Cinema Village, Quad/IFC/Angelika fare that is home to some really great movies and some really crappy ones, but it's all indie. Of course, Cabin enjoys the mainstream as well, so you'll get his round up of those.
In the end, his opinions are his own and not necessarily of mine. Maybe I'll even chime in....
More Bar Spotlights and the u-ge to come people, it's almost summer weather!
Well really it's Vancouver Justice. But whatever. The Chan-ster kicks some kei-ster circa 1995 in his first American film. Complete with English subtitles because well...just 'cuz.
The trailer, apart from being kick ass and Johnny Depp assuming a very bravura and tough guy role (something he's rarely been able to do since Donnie Brasco I feel, which is one of his best movies) that probably would go to Sean Penn in the 80s but Depp's got that charm that seems right for the role of John Dillinger.
Mann has always been fascinated by history, especially American crime history (he's always very detailed in his research and has consultants, usually from Chicago). Dillinger's story could be really interesting in his hands because I don't feel like he's out there to sensationalize anything. He'll let the gravity of the actors' work pull people in, but he'll get the details right and hopefully from that a great sense of place will come about. This is a chance for him to do another period piece and he seems to go through phases of what he likes and doesn't like. He's always loved the pulsing electronica soundtracks (evident here), unabashed hard rock music (evident here), and what looks to be a combo of no-nonsense action (evident here) as well as some of his famous wide angles, but less of the static shots of Heat and more of the free flowing cameras of Collateral and Miami Vice (which can be nice, but I still love his more composed feel in Thief and such).
Christian Bale plays a hero, as usual, and he's really good at that anyway, so why not? I'm kind of surprised that someone like Campbell Scott hasn't had the opportunity to work with Mann, I think it would be a great pairing.
And Oscar winner Marion Cotillard finally gets a big American break in what looks to be another in a line of great female characters that Mann has been able to bring to the screen.
I just feel like there is so much to like about Mann's work, and this looks to have potential to be a great rebound after a decent but overall disappointing effort in Miami Vice (I liked it but I couldn't help but feel there was stuff to be trimmed; Collateral was a great exercise and with Vice it just went a bit over the top). He's got a great mix of cerebral and pop and always has pretty sharp scripts that don't insult the viewer's intelligence. On top of that though, he's a filmmaker who understands what moves an audience visually while staying down to earth and authentic. His movies easily get under my skin because there's a comfortable flow, highly stylized and appealing.
I'm going to bet this will be better than The Newton Boys. It could reach great crime drama heights too, with plenty of other films to live up to such as Bonnie and Clyde, The Untouchables, the Cagney thrillers, etc. etc.
I always thought that The Asphalt Jungle was a precursor to Mann's type of filmmaking. Assured visuals, smart criminals with clear motives, a sense of fate and danger that gives the character development and plot a suspenseful cloak. His style is modern though; I wish I could see a movie done like they did in the 30s and 40s, the very stilted production that nevertheless feels like how they made movies in the Golden Age. It's not just the period represented, but the style of the film production. Like The Good German, but more successful.
Anywho, enjoy the trailer over and over again, because one day, Mann's going to get an Oscar of some sort.
So I was on the wonderful horror site Bloody Disgusting, who revealed the one-sheet and teaser trailer (both below). The trailer starts out kinda nice but I'm not totally convinced, although I agree Ben Foster is the shit (think poor man's Ryan Gosling, from Freaks and Geeks to now, he's got an awesome vulnerability). Oh and Dennis Quaid? The poster is pretty sick though, it takes the minimalist approach of the Saw series (trendy, I know), and kinda vague. But the tubes through the mouth and eyes gives it a medical, experiment feel and that's pretty cool. The fact that he's upside down and all greasy and messed up with the softer outline of his head but the really harsh and dark purple tubing, it's just kind of a sick poster. You don't really know what's going on, and yet it's somewhat fascinating, like the tubes are running through this hollowed out man. Why is he hollowed out? Is something sapping his strength, is this movie about prey and predator? That's what it says to me.
Indiewire has updated their story about New Yorker Films closing its doors. A New York establishment in promoting and distributing independent fare, it will be missed after 43 years of business.
"Founded in 1965 by Dan Talbot, New Yorker has a legendary legacy, boasting a long-standing track record in international film distribution, bringing a staggering number of international auteurs to this country’s movie theaters over more than four decades. The company’s crucial role in establishing a lasting film culture in this country cannot be underestimated. A New York Times profile in 1987, marking a 14-week salute to the company at New York’s Public Theater, listed an illustrious roster of filmmakers whose films were released by the company: Ackerman, Bertolucci, Bresson, Chabrol, Fassbinder, Fellini, Godard, Herzog, Kieslowski, Malle, Rohmer, Rossellini, Sembene, Wenders, Schlondorff, and many others."
Now I had a great boss when I was an assistant at a mid-major, anyone will tell you that (Lori!!). The fact that we were in New York made things a bit different too, but there should totally be a New York version of this with an ad agency or something.
For anyone who's ever been an unglamorous assistant in a glamorous industry, here you go! There are some great LA references. Which is why New York needs a counterpart...
You had a such a great start to a career! Indie darling with Manny & Lo, then following up a few years later with The Man Who Wasn't There, Ghost World, and Lost in Translation, working with top talent and garnering some nominations.
Umm, but we should have seen it coming when you were in Home Alone 3. We should have. Versatility, I can give you that (a different role much of the time, except when you're playing with Rebecca Hall), but range? We mistook your low key charm for some real chops, but please don't do comedies anymore...and don't sing anymore...I have your record on vinyl and it's more authentically unnecessary I guess.
The weird thing is, a film like this might actually be less high concept than people make it out to be. Sure it has outrageous dialogue, but I can't help but think some of the films coming from this pool of actors, writers, and directors has a hint of dialogue-driven, character-focused verve. The movie seems to be about a guy trying to find a best man, which is a simple idea but in the end it's about unleashing an inner energy that seemingly only another man can get out. A mano love story. Is it trying to say something about the sexes? Possibly. But I think before people outright say this group of dudes is a bunch of sexist pervs, I think it's simply films that take a "male perspective" on things but the female characters in the films are always smarter and essentially better people and just as funny.
I Love You, Man comes out March 20th to cure any post-St. Patrick's Day blues, and has a huge cast including Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, Rashida Jones (from the American The Office, and apparently, 7 other TV shows), J.K. Simmons, Jaime Presley, etc.
I immediately got what they were going for in this actually, and although I could see people not understanding it (due to a couple minor errors) I think it works; it reminds me of older, less flashy artwork, like Silkwood, or One True Thing. While those were dramas, and I believe this film is supposed to have more serious undertones than Apatow's earlier works, I think this is an effective, stripped down concept that works a bit better than the split screen-ish stuff of He's Just Not That Into You (the newest poster), The Family Stone or Wonder Boys.
The expressions are pretty good (although Mann's picture seems a bit too airbrushed) and the light coffee background is nice and neutral. Rogen seems like the young sidekick type, a content look with less responsibility. His head on the shoulder suggests a plutonic "hanging around" type character. Sandler, while his range has always been called into question but his performances harnessed in some really good movies (to me, Punch Drunk Love, and Spanglish), has a great, small blank smile, with a seemingly pensive nature underneath. He's got something on his mind, but puts on a face for the other characters, and you kind of see how the dynamics are going to take shape in the film. Mann might play the bright, positive energy that infuses Sandler's world, not only with her smile in the poster but the photo shows her with her arms around Sandler's arm, indicating some sort of love.
This could be a real great direct pairing of Sandler and Apatow, who have been good friends for years now. The poster to me indicates maybe an "indie"(oh you know that kind of vibe) approach in spirit, and there's something confessional about the concept, something that says "this is an actor's film". Even though Rogen and Sandler again aren't known for their range, it could prove promising. The dialogue is sure to be sharp, and Apatow knows his comedy terrain and his style.
I know marketing-wise it's good to mention Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin, but that's where it will probably throw a lot of people off, if they are looking for a film similar to that. Not saying that it won't be, but it doesn't seem cheeky or push witty copy. Maybe if they mentioned "from the creator of Freaks and Geeks" or something a little less well known, I would have been just as drawn in. The star power is there already.
The 'FUNNY PEOPLE' font is nicely, and almost abrasively, thrown in, with all caps and such. Something tells me that this is going to be a dryer film, and I'm intrigued by that as well. The characters could be funny, but the film about them could be coming from a different perspective.
"I'll extinguish you"
