I just saw your latest First Blood movie, and I’m happy to report that I liked it. It won’t make my Top 10 list or anything, but it affected me enough to recommend it. I say “affected” and not “entertained,” because frankly, the violence tripped me up. And I say “tripped up,” not as a dis, but as a compliment.
Nobody goes to see a Rambo movie and doesn’t expect violence. I just didn’t expect to feel it the way I did about it. Without turning it into a spoof like Hot Shots, you, to allude to another of your recent dark horse sequels, Rocky Balboa, pack a punch with the intense, bloody violence. At first, it seemed almost comical, but as I realized how there was no amount of tongue-in-cheek intended, I sobered up quickly. I sobered up to the point that I became increasingly more upset with each well-orchestrated action sequence. That was the point, right, to be paralyzed by it, like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, made to feel a repulsion to “ultra-violence”?
Filed under: IN THEATERS — Robert Newton @ 10:34 pm
MEET THE SPARTANS [PG-13]
Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, the crayon-wielding Fakespeares who doody-bombed movie theaters with flat and failingly funny fart-fests like Date Movie and Epic Movie are at it again with their latest spoof. Like a rash with a funny name that just won’t go away, the duo sends up Zack Snyder’s stylish bloodbath 300, among other movies, and the result is the kind of flat-line you get when you hook an EKG up to a potato, a bowl of petunias or Dick Cheney. They can’t even be bothered to come up with funny names for their characters, like in even the most pedestrian of MAD Magazine parodies. And gods forbid should they come up with a damn gag that’s not blue or making reference to the homoerotic nature of a cast of buff, oiled warriors. It’s an approach to the material about as novel as the ass who tries to get laid at a party by doing third-rate Borat impressions, or worse yet, Austin Powers. Someone needs to whisk these guys to an undisclosed location until they can recite every line of Blazing Saddles and Airplane! verbatim, because the only mastery they show here is of the mechanics of the “pull my finger” routine. A clever parody is more than just dressing your sets and your actors to look like Spartans or Hobbits or pirates named Jack. You have to give them something to more to say than what every hack water cooler stand-up mangling a Leno or Conan monologue has already. It’s not too much to ask, considering that movie tickets have already crept past $10.00 in some cities. With this kind of twaddle clogging the megaplexes, it is as if the writer’s strike has already taken its toll, with the studios filming the movies with only a poster as a script. –Robert Newton
A good short film should communicate its key point within its abbreviated time span. That considered, the two spots that MTV’s “Think” initiative has produced to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day are great short films. In 30 seconds, they lodge an uncomfortable nugget in our craws; in one, “Subway,” a metropolitan underground commuter train delivers its passengers to a modern-day concentration camp. In the other, “Family Room,” a family enjoying a quiet evening at home is carted away by jackbooted thugs. Both end with the tag, “The Holocaust happened to people like us.” For the millions of people that only know the word Holocaust second- or third-hand (and routinely employ the words “Nazi” and “Gestapo” as if they were punch lines), these spots help make the events real. You know what the teachers say: “Whatever it takes to get the kids to read Shakespeare.” Check out the shorts and discuss below:
Untraceable falls victim to Hollywood’s unabashed affection for getting more “hip” while making it blindingly obvious that Hollywood still hasn’t the faintest idea how to talk the talk. This serviceable “CSI”-meets-Saw thriller gets the ideas right - gratuitous mass marketing of mankind’s baser instincts - but it fails to make its own plot believable. Were it not for Diane Lane, whose acting chops nearly rescue the film from its own pedantic emulation of numerous twisted celluloid betters, the film would be unwatchable. Fortunately, Lane’s ability to effectively portray the emotions of dedicated mother whose FBI job pits her fears against her own moral obligations gives us something to watch.
Attention all New England Patriots fans! With the Super Bowl fast approaching, now come the inevitable pre-game war cries. We’ve got one for you – a painful music video called “New England, The Patriots and We.” It is a seemingly endless parade of local color showing their hometown pride, much like the “Super Bowl Shuffle” from 1986. Oh, did we forget to mention that this Patriots video was also from 1986? It aired on the short-lived Boston music video channel V66, and thanks to filmmakers Christian de Rezendes and Eric Green, whose documentary Life On The V is now in pre-production, it and the long-unseen exploits of WVJV can be seen again. Scientists now attribute all the hairspray used by the high-haired women in this seemingly endless musical torture as the main cause of global warming (and nostalgic embarrassment). Watch for a fresher-faced Bob Lobel in the mix, along with an assortment of “I remember that guy” and “What ever happened to her?” faces. It’s so bad that you kind of wish that former team owner James Orthwein had moved the team to St. Louis back in the early ’90s (almost).
SAVAGE PATCH KIDS
A talk with Oscar-nominated ‘The Savages’ star Laura Linney by Fred Topel
Ask any actor the generic questions of what attracted them to their latest project, and they’ll give some rehearsed answer about the script or the filmmakers. Laura Linney is aware of this, so was hesitant to give such a response about her latest film, The Savages. However, she has the credibility to back it up.
“You hear that over and over again but when a script is undeniably good, you pay attention,” she said. “It becomes clear to me there’s something to me that something’s going on when I read the script through for the first time and I start working on it before I finish reading it. Your actor brain just turns on. I can’t help it. All of a sudden, ideas start coming and you start hearing the rhythm of things. For a script to be that evolved that early is very rare. It’s happened a few times luckily for me. But it’s not typical.”
Callie Khouri established her career by writing the script (and winning an Oscar) for Thelma & Louise, easily the most enjoyable of girl power movies. With Mad Money, the formula comedy she directs from a script by Glenn Ger, she’s coasting. Any relationship with her earlier work is purely coincidental. Instead this slim, mildly enjoyable caper gets by on the multi-generational appeal of its three leads – Diane Keaton, Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes. Otherwise this is a straight-to-Lifetime vehicle.
Ger’s script is not unlike such comedies as Fun With Dick and Jane and How To Beat the High Cost of Living, where the little guy (or gal or person) concocts a plan to beat the system. In this case it is Bridget Cardigan (Diane Keaton), an upper-middle class suburban matron who faces financial disaster when her upper management husband Don (Ted Danson) is downsized and spirals into depression. To do what she can to offset impending disaster, she takes the only job she’s qualified to do: as a janitor at the Kansas City branch of the Federal Reserve Bank. Once on the job she observes the extreme security that the bank utilizes in order to destroy worn out bills, and she discovers a security breach that she can take advantage of.
The claustrophobic hand-held camera style of filmmaking born of The Blair Witch Project has finally met new heights. Where that film was creepy in its suggestive use of glorified innuendo and our innate fear of being lost in the woods, Cloverfield offers us a Godzilla movie for the twenty-first century, in which 9/11 is revisited on New York courtesy of an unstoppable, unimaginable beasty from the deep blue. Peppered with effective (if not stellar) acting and blended with a dash of humor, it’s a dreadfully fun film that – if you can get past the shaky camera work – is a mid-January treat.
Filed under: IN THEATERS — Robert Newton @ 9:30 am
27 DRESSES [PG-13]
It’s difficult to describe Emmy winner Katherine Heigl’s appeal without sounding like a boor, a chauvinist or Jerry Lewis, so in the interest of saving you, the reader, from terminal eyestrain from reading a long-winded essay about the fineries of the comedic art, let’s just say she’s one funny…person. In the latest comedy from The Devil Wears Prada director Anne Fletcher, “Grey’s Anatomy” star Heigl brings more of the kind of warm, wide grins that she delivered in the 2007 summer hit, Knocked Up. In this one, she plays Jane, a 27-time bridesmaid and expert on planning the weddings of others. Naturally, she has an inability to focus on making happiness of her own. When she meets Kevin (James Marsden), a cynical wedding columnist for a big New York paper, she finds the courage to tell her boss, George (Edward Burns), about her feelings for him. Sure, it’s formula (like My Best Friend’s Wedding minus the charming gay man), and we know who’s going to end up with who and how, but it’s fun and comforting watching them get there. Mardsen, who was spot-on as ‘60s dance show host Corny Collins in the movie adaptation of the musical Hairspray, is a good foil for Heigl’s self-effacing good girl, and they have a nice chemistry. He has the kind of welcoming face and natural charisma that not only makes girls of all stripes ga-ga, but also prompts straight guys to place him on the secret “Guys I’d Kiss If I Had To” list that all straight guys mentally keep. Malin Akerman, one of the bright spots of the Farrelly Brothers’ 2007 remake of The Heartbreak Kid, is good as Jane’s sister, Tess, a spoiled brat much like the one that Cameron Diaz played in Curtis Hanson’s 2005 dramatic comedy, In Her Shoes. And if there were ever an award for Most Seriously Undervalued Comedic Support, then it would go to perpetual sidekick Judy Greer (The TV Set). She plays Casey, Jane’s best friend and sounding board, and while we still want the movie to be Heigl’s, more Judy Greer and less cold fish Ed Burns would be just fine. And not that it matters to anyone but the fetishists, but between the three female leads, there’s nearly 20 feet o’ funny gals here (sounds like the name of an off-Broadway revue). We’ll spare you the “high points of the movie” puns and just say that all the moving parts of this comedy machine work right (even if they are giant parts). –Robert Newton
CATCH HER (AND THE GUY)
Worcester lover Andrea Ajemian has us in her Web By Robert Newton
Man, if I were any more of a fan of local filmmaker Andrea Ajemian, there would be a restraining order involved. While I may not be totally Hinckley for her, I have been known to sing her praises, often and with great gusto. Apart from her obvious drop-dead good looks, perpetual smile and jolt of positive energy she brings to any room, she has ambition and an ability to get others excited about whatever she chooses to bolster by virtue of her involvement, and that’s what’s most attractive about her. The latest project from this charismatic, 32-year-old, Worcester-born, Rutland-raised dynamo is “Worcester Love,” a Web-native series spotlighting the finer – or more precisely, funner – points of our fair city.
RAMBO [R]
MEET THE SPARTANS
MAD MONEY
CLOVERFIELD
27 DRESSES