SBR Serves Turkey For Thanksgiving

Celebrating the cinema of Turkey, the land that copyright infringement laws forgot.

Batman, pop. 246,700

We couldn’t help but laugh at the recent news story about the mayor of Batman, an actual city in Turkey that’s about the size of Glendale, Arizona, suing Warner Brother and The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan for copyright infringement. Turns out the honorable Huseyin Kalkan wants some of the bazillion dollars that film made at the box office last summer, and even blames a number of unsolved murders and a spike in female suicides on the “psychological impact” the film has had on Batman residents. What makes this idea funny, as several other news sources have pointed out, is that we’re pretty sure they’ve heard of the Caped Crusader in Turkey.

Batman (kind of)

Batman the superhero, as you probably already know, has been a comics mainstay since his 1939 debut and has starred in six other theatrical releases, several 1940s era movie serials, a 1960s television series, an amusement park ride, and more cartoons than there are Republicans in Texas. The number of action figures made in his likeness runs into the hundreds, and they’re sold the world over. Bats is so world famous, there’s even a Turkish version of the 60′s Batman television series. Like everything else ever put to film or video, there are excerpts of it available on YouTube:

Which actually brings us to a larger point: They must not have copyright regulations in Turkey, because there’s… ahem, derivatives, of most geek culture works already in place. The Turkish versions are pretty much always fast-paced and action packed, which again for the sake of polity actually means they’re really, really broad. Take for example the Turkish Star Trek:

As the clip shows, the Turkish Captain Kirk is much better at walking than most American actors, though the language barrier makes impossible any attempt at understanding why a peasant hangs out on the bridge, pestering the ostensibly more legitimate crewmembers.

And where there’s Star Trek, there has to be its dumber, often more fun cousin Star Wars, right? 1982′s Dunyayi Kurturan Adam (“The Man Who Saves The World”) used bootlegged footage from Star Wars Episode IV as well as stock footage of American and Soviet test rocket flights. The musical score to this clip’s interminable opening credits sounds like public access television music from the 0970s, and it only gets worse from there.

Not content to hit George Lucas up once, Dunyayi Kurturan Adam also pilfers the theme to Raiders of the Lost Ark as well as Battlestar Galactica. Eventually achieving cult status simply for its awfulness, it spawned a 2006 sequel, though just like Lucas’ recent efforts some fans complained the follow-up was a letdown.

Given Marvel Comics’ love for merchandising, we’re not entirely sure this next clip is even a bootleg. 3 Dev Adam (“Three Mighty Men”) was a startingly low-budget, brazenly lurid 1973 abomination depicting an ersatz Captain America stopping an evil, pudgy Spiderman ripoff from running amok through Istanbul. Cap was joined in his efforts, for some reason, by a copy of the legendary Mexican luchadore El Santo. Spiderman and his two girlfriends mostly just torture and kill people in depraved ways or have sex in front of puppets. If you’ve never seen a man killed with guinea pigs before, here’s your chance:

Probably the single most trivial thing you will learn this week: 3 Dev Adam co-starred Turkish actor Aytekin Akkaya, who also appeared in Dunyayi Kurturan Adam.

That’s about all we can stand this week. We’ll be back Monday with our review of Australia. Have a happy, safe holiday weekend.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Miscellaneous Debris, November 2008 Edition

Think of this as a Movietone newsreel in blog form.

Join our new Facebook page

Life on Mars.

So we’re almost out of November and the fall prestige movie season still pretty much sucks. Man, there’s been such a drought of good stuff opening the last few weeks – at least where we live - that we’re even sort of looking forward to Australia, if only for the chance to visit a movie theatre. (We like the chewy Junior Mints at our local multiplex.)

The following is stuff we thought worth mentioning but not blogging about for a whole entry. It’s pretty much headed into our mental circular pile, but then again it’s also something of a slow news week. We’re feeling kind of sarcastic right now, too.

1. Speaking of Australia, kudos to its marketing team for the People magazine cross-promotion just as the film opens nationwide. Any other magazine, any other movie, and that same trick would just seem crass. For the record, we have nothing against Jackman himself. God knows he carried The Fountain on those broad shoulders of his.

Bringing sexy back: Jackman

2. Ralph Fiennes continues his life’s mission to make the ultimate pseudo-indie historical romance with next month’s The Reader. He’s getting close: this one looks like they took a bunch of other faux-arthouse flicks and combined them into a monstrous Wienstein Brothers version of Serpentor. As you read this a Barnes & Noble is setting up an endcap to promote a demographic-specific tie-in, while somewhere else Anthony Minghella is smiling.

3. We’ll go ahead and call next year’s Best Picture Oscar now: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button will beat out Revolutionary Road, though Kate Winslet will get Best Actress. Also, Valkyrie’s Tom Wilkinson will get Best Supporting Actor.

4. Characters welcome, schedules not so much: USA Network postponed the debut of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, shoving it back from a November 7 premiere to an unspecified date early in 2009. What’s even more irritating for the show’s fans is that USA did this after months of promoting the November air date on its airtime and website - even IMDB didn’t get the memo. Presumably the switch gets the long running cop drama, which just traded Chris Noth for Jeff Goldblum, out of its planned Friday Night Death Slot and into a schedule berth where people might, you know, watch it. Also, in the meantime it means the network can air more reruns of The Starter Wife. And who doesn’t want that?

5. Overrated, middlebrow director Sam Mendes wants to direct a film version of the overrated, lowbrow late-90s DC comic book Preacher. A critical darling for years after its release, the book was a bloody, self-consciously hip revenge/road movie saga that borrowed from a series of 1970s-era B-movie genre sources but never quite lived up to its potential. The screen rights became available after HBO dropped plans for an ongoing series. Mendes is reportedly now shopping for a script.

6. Hey, Oz fans: Dean Winters apparently looks set to join fellow alumnus Lee Tergesen in the recurring cast of ABC’s good but underperforming Life On Mars. The show’s on hiatus until the end of January, but if you’re a fan of Oz or any of the other shows to feature both actors – Homicide: Life on the Street, Rescue Me, L& O: Criminal Intent, probably others – take a chance on the increasingly David Lynch-esque Life On Mars.

7. Not that the people supporting California’s Proposition 8 would likely see a movie with Sean Penn or even one directed by Gus Van Sant, but had Milk come out sooner it might indeed have swayed more of this years’ all-important undecided voters. And between David Fincher’s Zodiac and now Milk, 70s-era San Francisco is starting to look like a uniquely strange and compelling place and time.

Please spay or neuter your pets.

8. On behalf of the Humane Society, please do not give a live puppy, hamster, or cat to children smitten with one of the CGI products featured in Bolt. Studies show in many cases children lose interest and the animals become abandoned or neglected. Give the kids an official stuffed animal instead – there’s probably a truckload of them at Target and Wally World by now.

9. We’re looking forward to Whiteout already, even if its release date is still ten months away. Finally(!) a film version of a Greg Rucka story, this one a murder mystery set among the scientific research stations of Antarctica. In the meantime we’ll keep our fingers crossed for film versions of Queen and Country and especially Checkmate.

10. We’ve said this before, but we’ll say it once more: we’re still looking for someone to design a new blog header. If you’ve only come here for pics of Hellboy, if you’ve wandered over from Skeet Ulrich’s fan community, of if you just know something about graphic design, please email us. We’d like to work with you.

11. Finally, not a lot of people saw The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford , but as the trailer below demonstrates the visuals alone make it worth the rental. A supernova supporting cast and career highlight performances by Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck only accentuate the film’s unforgettable, Terrence Malick-esque visuals. Highly, highly recommended.

We’ll be back next Wednesday. Have a good weekend.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Preview: Star Trek

Boldly going where plenty of other blogs are also going this week.

The trailer for J.J. Abrams’ $150 million reboot of the beloved, maligned Star Trek franchise debuted this past week, igniting lots of controversy but promising at least plenty of curiosity. Going on the two slam bang minutes of the trailer alone, we can already see lots of potential and maybe a couple of problems. (Update: read our review here.)

The original geek culture obsessoin, the Star Trek franchise – six televisions series, ten movies, innumerable novels – has a well-established continuity and canon that’s revered, to put it politely, by its tens of millions of fans. (Memory Alpha, the leviathan Trek wiki, is the gold standard to which all other fan wikis aspire.) Abrams and his fellow producers have avowed to keep as much of the original TV series’ continuity as possible (though they’ve apparently already written out Kirk’s best friend) while making the basic premise more contemporary. That seems like a good thing and a bad thing. Probably no ”trekker” is interested in seeing a sexier Enterprise crew flit about in a generic space-opera adventure. On the other hand, and to be bluntly honest, a lot of the original 1960s series looks dated as all hell when viewed today. The film will have to strike that fine balance to really please longtime fans while bring in new ones. To speculate wildly, it looks to do just that… but only barely.

The film’s story circles around the earliest days of the starship Enterprise, when it was still under the command of Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood, The Sweet Hereafter). Starships are under attack by a Romulan aggressor named Nero (Eric Bana, Munich), including the ship commanded by James T. Kirk’s (Chris Pine, Bottle Shock) father. Kirk, a lifetime discipline case, is at Starfleet Academy but wants to get out and fight as soon as possible. The Enterprise,  with Kirk stowed away, races to stop Nero.

In the continuity of the television series, the Romulan Star Empire (like the Klingons, but smarter and based on the Roman Empire) fought a long and mutually devastating war with Earth, a war that ultimately led to an uneasy peace and the founding of the United Federation of Planets. Unlike the Klingons, the Romulans never really show their soft, honorable center or come around to being good guys after all. They’re are bent on continuous Imperial expansion, including Earth and its allies, such as Spock’s home planet of Vulcan. Basically, they’re the worst kind of scary adversaries, more so than the Klingons for their intelligence and guile. (Read our recent feature Great Trekspectations for a more in-depth explanation of the war.)

The trailer looks to get that spirit of a Federation just asserting itself, and of a glittering 23rd Century, even if the use of antique sportscars and gratuitous flashes of lingerie look, well, stupid. In fact the trailer’s whole prelude, with a prebuscent Kirk slo-diving out of a convertible, seems a little ridiculous. We’re also not sure showing the Enterprise getting built on Earth is a smart idea. We understand Abrams’ point that the movie has to get grounded on Earth before heading off into space, but the ship looks weird and awkward half-built in a field. Besides which, the unveiling of each new Enterprise in spacedock is sort of a Trek tradition, and ignoring it means turning the film’s back on many a fan’s warm memories.

On a brighter level, while Pine is still something of an unknown commodity some of the other casting is nothing short of inspired. Zachary Quinto (Heroes) looks born to play Spock, and Greenwood is an excellent choice to play the doomed Captain Pike, a role played on the TV series by Jeffrey Hunter (The Searchers). Simon Pegg as Scotty and Karl Urban as Bones McCoy have reportedly built their performances as tribute to, respectively, James Doohan and DeForest Kelley. Bana has never really gotten the attention he deserves, but Abrams and co-producer Damon Lindelof love their villains – look how Lost has turned into The Aventures of Ben Linus, Super Genius - so Nero’s character almost certainly won’t suffer for depth or screen time. And of course, Leonard Nemoy will return in a time-travel sequence, though The Shat has sadly opted not to participate.

So, the trailer. It’s a little too action-packed, maybe, but that’s what early teaser trailers are supposed to be. In particular, watch for the images of the Enterprise corridors, which look gorgeously futuristic, and listen for Pegg’s Scottish cadences. They’re the parts that will relieve old-school Trek fans while possibly exciting newcomers to the franchise. The film opens May 8, 2009.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Review: Quantum of Solace

An anguished Bond for these anxious times.

There’s a theory, which I don’t necessarily believe is airtight, that the James Bond movies often reflect the spirit of the times of their release. Sean Connery’s films showed the Cold War as a Jet Age go-go romp, while the Roger Moore years of the 1970s were self-loathing and oversexed. Timothy Dalton’s late-80s/Early 90s films were directionless and tepid, while Pierce Brosnan’s luxuriated tenure in the late 90s and early 00′s was cleverly marketed but not particularly substantial.

I think the creators of Quantum of Solace, and also its predecessor Casino Royale, want to bulldoze any such ambiguity. Their Bond is a secret agent for right now: resentful and vaguely bitter, and more than a little pissed off at his surrounding turn of events. This political relevance, mixed with jaw-dropping stunts equal to the Bond tradition, make the new film a hell of a ride. It might be the shortest Bond film yet and the most expensive, but you won’t feel the one or begrudge the other.

Picking up almost immediately where Casino Royale left off, the film presents Daniel Craig’s muscular, almost thuggish Bond determined to get vengeance for the death of Vesper Lynd, his lover in the previous film who died protecting him. When a betrayal close to M (Judi Dench, splendidly imperious as ever) almost causes her death, Bond lights out to track down his only lead. Along the way he crosses paths with Camille (Olga Kurylenko), a Bolivian Secret Service agent who’s infiltrated Lynd’s organization on her own mission of vengeance. Their righteous paths intersect at Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), a land developer with a cruel agenda beneath the Bolivian desert.

The plot only gets trickier from there, expanding to include a cat and mouse game above an opera house in Austria, a firefight amid a roaring inferno within a luxury hotel, and an intense airplane dogfight and parachute drop in dizzying closeup detail. Again, the senses of modernization and of back-to-basics is unmistakable: the Bond of the nifty gadgets is gone, replaced by an agent fighting the laws of physics to stay alive. Even when Craig gets the chance to be smug, as when discovering the cabal’s members at the opera house, or when indulging in a fling with British embassy worker Strawberry Fields (Gemma Arterton), the surrounding menace makes the bon vivance seem elusive at best.

Screenwriters Paul Haggis (Crash) and Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (Die Another Day) keep the tension mounting, closing in the walls on Bond and whomever chooses to side with him. When Fields is murdered, her body allows a clever homage to a classic Bond image that also makes a shrewd comment on how standards of wealth have changed in the last half-century. It’s a startlingly clever story beat, made all the more memorable by this new Bond’s compassion for her fate. But her death also gets Bond’s agent status revoked, so that for the film’s third act he’s acting of his own will. Fittingly, Craig plays his role as a man who buries his pain just deep enough to keep him on mission.

Director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball) keeps the script’s momentum moving, even if some of the non-action sequences have trouble finding an effective pace. Watch Camille’s first conversation on the dock with Greene – it drags on and on, while Bond waits around off-camera. A later scene between Bond and Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) flies by like a bullet, not entirely making sense nor earning its keep in the plot. But the action sequences are the film’s strength – along with Craig’s increasingly Robert Ryan-like charisma – and those are superbly pulled off. Fans of the Jason Bourne trilogy will recognize those films’ influence in Bond’s fistfights, including an early apartment-set dust-up between Bond and a hitman that ends with such glacial calm that the audience is tempted to mistake what’s happening.

Craig is ably assisted by a stronger than usual cast. Kurylenko brings depth to the tortured Camille, while Dench’s M conveys a subtle maternal instinct for Bond that doesn’t impede her professionalism. Amalric is wonderfully reptilian as the conniving Greene, and Giancarlo Giannini (Man On Fire), reprising his Casino Royale role as Mathis, communicates both class and an oddly endearing Old World melancholy. Bond films have traditionally used their supporting casts as little more than talking window dressing, so the overt attempt to flesh out the human wreckage left in Bond’s wake is both overdue and welcome.

One final caveat: the film assumes its audience clearly remembers the events of Casino Royale, so a repeat viewing of that original before seeing this sequel will likely help you avoid confusion. Though it’s not necessary, it’ll help you understand the larger forces at work within the overarching story, forces that extend into the next installment even as this film concludes.

- Michael Kabel
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Captain America Film Retrospective

Celebrating (?) the announcement of a director for the upcoming Marvel Comics film.

The news this week that veteran director Joe Johnston (Jurassic Park 3, Hidalgo) has signed to helm Marvel Film’s upcoming The First Avenger: Captain America didn’t exactly make us explode with enthusiasm. We like Cap, have since we were kids, and we’ve got the longbox full of back issues to prove it. Coming on the news that Kenneth Brannagh would direct Thor, the man behind Jumanji taking on the Avengers’ leader was bittersweet news at best. UPDATE: the ad that aired during the Super Bowl didn’t look too shabby, even if it’s editing makes the term “teaser” seem a bit too generous.

Nevertheless the bar for this latest version is set really, really low by previous attempts to translate the Star Spangled Avenger from comics to cinema and television. Whether from their low budgets or low ambitions, or both, the hero known to fans simply as “Cap” has had an especially pungent run of bad luck. Moreso, for sure, than even Spider-Man and the Hulk, who’ve also got plenty of bad adaptations lurking in their respective histories.

What is it about Cap that makes the transition so hard? Is it the deceptively simple concept of a patriot trying to embody his country’s ideals? Does such undiluted optimism about America not figure into the modern cultural zeitgeist? Like Superman, Captain America is an idea meant to be writ larger than life, a central figure on an almost mythic stage. Maybe it’s that huge presence that makes flawed adaptations seem so much worse: the Hulk only looks silly in an unconvincing special effects sequence. A guy wrapped in a flag just looks sad, as some of these adaptations plainly illustrate.

Captain America (1944): Boasting the odd distinction of being the most expensive Republic movie serial ever made, this 1944 Saturday-matinee series recast the captain as District Attorney Grant Gardner (Dick Purcell), who used a gun instead of Cap’s trademark shield. The super-soldier serum that gave him his powers is not used, and the villain is a saboteur called The Scarab. The series actually met with a warm response from some critics, who praised its elaborate stuntwork.

Captain America Animated Series (1966): Marvel’s top-tier characters all got their own quickie cartoons in the mid-60s, only a handful of years into the company’s reformation. The rushed and bargain basement production shows in every turgid frame of the clip below, much of which looks lifted directly from the actual comics’ art. Actually, the finished product is typical of  the cartoons Marvel was putting out at the time. For the truly curious, or for those just wishing to punish their eyes, many of them (including episodes  starring Iron Man and The Hulk) are availabe in their grueling entirety on YouTube.

Captain America and Captain America II: Death Too soon (1979) These two made-for-TV films, released within a year of one another, recast their hero as the son of the original and a surfer dude on a custom street bike. The first telefilm depicted the new Cap (Reb Brown) battling a group of terrorists trying to blow up Phoenix (Phoenix?) with a hydrogen bomb. Death Too Soon, markedly the better of the two films, included Christopher Lee as a touring company Dracula and Connie Sellecca as Cap’s love interest.

Captain America (1990): Another low-budge effort from a period in Marvel-inspired cinema that also included a Roger Corman-produced Fantastic Four film that was never even released, this 1990 attempt starred Matt Salinger (Revenge of the Nerds) as the captain and Scott Paulin as his archnemesis The Red Skull. Veteran character actors Ned Beatty and Darren McGavin wander into frame on their way to the pay window. 

Captain America: The First Avenger opens nationwide July 22, 2011.

- Michael Kabel

  :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Five Recent Films You Shouldn’t Miss

Better to light a candle than curse the darkness.

Im ready for my close-up, Mr. Eastwood.

What a barren past couple of months for quality movies: Pride and Glory and Eagle Eye were terrible, Zack and Miri Make A Porno was worse, and we’ve already forgotten about W.  On the mediocre level, Changeling (“I waanntt MY sonnn!”) and Burn After Reading have both met with thunderous shouts of  “meh” from most critics, the public, and especially us. Seriously, Hollywood, so far a $20 million dollar western starring Ed Harris is spanking everything else you guys can crank out. On the upside, though, we expect great things from Slumdog Millionaire, if and when it eventually opens here in the hinterlands.

But rather than just bitch, we want to champion the five films below. They’re all better than “pretty good” and they all certainly offer more for your time than a couple of hours of not being bored or offended. And they’re all available on DVD, so there’s no reason not to get them from your local store or a subscription service. As always, they’re in no particular order.

The Visitor: Veteran character actor Richard Jenkins (Frances McDormand’s lovesick boss in Burn After Reading) gives a rare but commanding lead turn as a lonely widower drawn into the lives of the illegal immigrants (Haaz Sleiman and Danai Gurira) squatting in his spare apartment. Written and directed with perfect emotional pitch by Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent), it’s the kind of film that, with an actual Movie! Star! in the lead, would probably command a wheelbarrow full of awards. It should win them yet, despite, and nevertheless. A character study rooted in character and not performance that respects the audience’s intelligence and challenges them at the same time. Read our full review here.

Zodiac: David Fincher’s exhaustive, exhausting true-crime thriller about the search for a serial killer in Northern California boasted a stellar ensemble cast (Robert Downey, Jr., Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo and a dozen others) and enough tension to fill six mainstream horror movies. Too intellectual for the slasher movie audience and too grim to be a critical darling, it’s still a near-flawless piece of filmmaking. A series of set pieces, including a genuinely terrifying interview with the man (Fargo’s John Carroll Lynch) police think committed the still-officially-unsolved murders, linger in the memory even as whole movies from the same timeframe dissipate. We’ve already sang its praises at length, but its good enough to recommend several times.

Gone Baby Gone: The somewhat condescending reviews of this heartrending thriller, based on a Dennis Lehane novel, all amounted to the same insight: “Holy Shit! Ben Affleck’s a good director!” But his directing, able though it is, remains only part of the story. Leads Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan also surprise as lovers tormented by the memory of a missing child, while Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris turn in typically flawless work as policemen investigating the same case. In Affleck and cinematographer John Toll’s creative eye, the entire city of Boston becomes an almost living force, leading the characters separately to redemption and ruin. The DVD includes several behind-the-scenes featurettes that together amount to a filmmaking primer. Read our full review here.

We Own The Night: Dismissed as a rote genre exercise by critics who lack patience for overachieving film noir, this character study of two brothers (Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg) caught up in the 1970s Manhattan drug wars seems poised to become a minor classic for noir connoisseurs. Writer-director James Gray (Little Odessa) set the film at the height of New York’s crime epidemic, and the period details lend layers of texture without indulging in retro fetish. One particular set piece, a rain-soaked car chase soundtracked to the beat of windshield wipers, is as good a sequence of its kind since the heyday of William Friedkin. Probably Wahlberg’s finest performance yet, and supporting cast members Robert DuVall and Eva Mendes also turn in memorable work.

Young @ Heart: A British television documentary released theatrically here in the States last May, Young @ Heart depicts the efforts of the eponymous Massachusetts senior citizen’s vocal group to mount performances even while illness and death deplete their members. What could have been a ghoulish or ridiculing depiction of golden years hubris turns in director Stephen Walker’s hands into a tribute to the members’ simple strength. The antidote to every tearjerking, cloying On Golden Pond derivative or “old folks-get-young-again” formula comedy ever made, Young @ Heart is an honest, forceful presentation that’s not once saccharine – a rare movie trick. Read our full review here.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Preview: Valkyrie

Tom Cruise leads the true story of the plot to assassinate Hitler.

Ever heard the Tom Cruise formula for box office success? Time magazine pointed this out a few years back:

1. Cruise’s character is the best of the best at his job, until
2. a twist of fate makes him lose his edge and/or frames him for a crime. Suddenly isolated and persecuted, he has to 
3. go on a quest to regain his mojo and/or redeem his good name.

Try it; a few prestige appearances notwithstanding, it plugs pretty well into most of his work since Top Gun in 1986 (It’s not airtight. Don’t post comments saying, ‘But what about Vanilla Sky/Magnolia…’) On another level, a lot of Cruise’s best films are historical pieces. Born On the 4th of July remains arguably his finest performance, and The Last Samurai was actually pretty underrated.

All this makes his new collaboration with the writer-director team responsible for The Usual Suspects seem both promising and a little suspect. Promising because it’s based on a hell of a true story; a little suspect because The Last Samurai also shoehorned a true story into the Tom Cruise money machine. Still, it’s hard to imagine co-screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie (The Way of the Gun) writing anything formulaic, and director Bryan Singer (X-Men, X2), when he’s on his game, can deliver suspense by the truckload. And the supporting cast is nothing if not qualified for just this sort of high-tension drama.

Don't be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi party.

Cruise plays Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a high-born tank commander and somewhat reluctant Nazi who frequently opposed Hitler’s military strategies as well as the persecution of religious minorities and prisoners of war. In 1944, after receving an eye injury in North Africa during a British air attack, he was sent back to Germany and soon recruited into a plot to assassinate Hitler. Following the events of D-Day, these German rebels were convinced the war was lost and wanted to sue for peace in an attempt to prevent further loss of life. However, small accidents and bad circumstances kept the attempt on the Furhrer’s life from reaching success. The conspirators were discovered and executed following speedy, stacked trials.

Singer and co-producer McQuarrie have assembled a squadron of seasoned, intelligent actors to play the doomed cabal, including Terrence Stamp (The Limey), Kenneth Branagh (Henry V), Tom Wilkinson (Batman Begins), Eddie Izzard (The Riches) and Bill Nighy (Notes On A Scandal). The events leading up to the July 20, 1944 attempt – including a bomb, planted by Stauffenberg, that detonated but failed to kill Hitler – could make for suspense in much less capable hands; having such master craftsmen together is a treat all by iteslf for those of us who enjoy polished, naturalistic acting. For his part, Singer could use a critical hit (Superman Returns pretty much sucked) and his interest in Nazi lore (Apt Pupil) lends itself perfectly for this weird, largely unknown episode of World War II.

Scheduled just in time for the post-holiday season crash, Valkyrie opens nationwide December 26.  

UPDATE: Read our review of the film here.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Preview: Slumdog Millionaire

Danny Boyle’s indie festival hit about true love, poverty in India, and game shows.

A darling of this year’s independent festival circuit and already generating glowing reviews online, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire might be the kind of film that’s a sanctuary for those of us wishing to avoid the more pedigreed Oscar-bait arriving now in theatres. It might also be the hip film whose quality can’t back up its hype but goes on to gather more hype and praise anyway. One way or the other, its brilliant premise makes for a potentially fascinating story of love, poverty, persecution, and a game show. What else to expect, at this point, from the mercurial Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later), a director who’s never quite achieved the recognition he deserves?

Eighteen year old Jamal Malik (Rev Patel), an orphan from the slums of Mumbai, India, only has one question left to answer on that country’s version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?  Then police arrest him the night before the final taping, alleging someone so poor couldn’t possibly know so much – he must have cheated. As he’s questioned by an inspector (Irfan Khan), he reveals that the 20 million rupee prize is insignificant; what he wants is the devotion of his vanished love Latika (Freida Pinto), who loved the show. Jamal retells the story of his life in flashback, explaining the sources of his wisdom and why he must win for the sake of that love.

Boyle’s films never lack for energy, and he’s one of that dwindling breed of directors who also want to make a point with their body of work. Sunshine notwithstanding, he rarely makes a middling film, either: his work is either insipred (Trainspotting, Millions) or… awful, honestly (A Life Less Ordinary, The Beach). Still, the energy of his rapid camera movement would seem a perfect – if odd – fit for both game shows and Bollywood alike, and the story is nothing if not instantly compelling.

A few odds and ends to discuss while getting coffee or standing in line for tickets: the script by Simon Beaufoy (Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day) is adapted by the novel Q and A, by Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup. As might be expected form a Boyle film (we’ve still got our Trainspotting soundtrack), the use of music is reportedly brilliant. British-born actor Patel got the part after an exhaustive search for an Indian-born actor produced no one Boyle felt right about casting. The film opens today in limited theatrical (read: arthouse) release.

 

-Michael Kabel
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Review: Life On Mars

Take a look at the lawmen. It’s the freakiest show.

Sometimes you can watch a show grow up. ABC’s new adaptation of the cult British series Life On Mars improves with each episode, gathering focus and dramatic momentum even as its talented cast settles into their roles. That’s especially good news in a season of underperforming newcomers and former hits gone woefully askew. While it’s not where it could be yet or even sometimes where it should, the freshman sci-fi/cop drama/bittersweet family story is quickly becoming unmissable television. Like Quantum Leap, another sentimental time travel epic, it’s possibly the kind of favorite that diehard fans revisit for years to come. Still, there’s work to do.

Harveys white shoes made everyone feel awkward: the cast

The premise is a whirligig of genres and normally well-worn plot contrivances that work suprisingly well when stitched together: Police detective Sam Tyler (Jason O’Mara) is struck by a car and knocked unconscious. When he awakes, he finds himself in 1973 – a culture and atmosphere so different from the more restrained, dour Twenty-first Century that he feels stranded on another planet (hence the title, taken from a David Bowie song of the era.) He’s still a detective, assigned to New York’s 125th Precinct under the direction of Lieutenant Gene Hunt (Harvey Keitel). While serving on a police force only just getting used to such “outlandish” notions as Miranda rights and forensic science, Tyler works at reassembling his fractured memories of 2008, guided in part by his love for his girlfriend Maya (Lisa Bonet.)

Man out of time: OMara

He’s often given flashes of modern day hints, usually in sly modern pop culture references (a Nirvana t-shirt, a Mars rover, among others), that his time travel may be a hallucination or something more ethereal. The combined effect is of an entire world that’s a mystery, both in parts and as a whole. The show works best when Tyler keeps his head down and works cases despite the often bewildering change in place and time. He’s got two – possibly one too many – confidantes about his plight, as well: caring policewoman Annie Cartwright (Gretchen Mol) as well as spacey hippy neighbor Windy (Tanya Fischer). It doesn’t help that both are gorgeous and transparently attrcted to the hunky Tyler. But fellow officers, including Hunt and ferret-like Ray Carling (Michael Imperioli), are less than impressed with his forward-thinking police techniques – don’t plant evidence, don’t beat confessions out of suspects – and often berate his sensitivity.

Typical time travel stories involve a lot of retro-smart humor, and so far the show has indulged in such “One day, this will all be…” kinds of fish-out-of-water gimmickry. But excecutive producers Josh Appelbaum, Andre Nemec and Scott Rosenberg (formerly of ABC’s emo melodrama October Road) have with each episode grown into the ramifications of what the time displacement means. The time-travel gimmick is virtually as old as the science-fiction genre itself, but the emotional impact on the traveller is less often attempted and even less often done well. Even when the story’s are rickety, the emotional impact – a recent episode in which Tyler met his mother was a study in bittersweet elegance – remains the story’s redeeming virtue.

Mean Streets: Keitel, OMara

That’s partly because the cast is getting better and getting better quick. O’Mara was somewhat stiff, somewhat bland in the first two episodes, but as the stakes raise for Tyler’s sanity and his growing sense of loss, he’s finding his anguished bearings. Keitel is badly miscast, approaching his character as another bad lieutenant with a good streak buried somewhere inside. An earlier version of the show’s pilot cast Colm Meaney (The Commitments) as Hunt, and it’s hard not to imagine his Irish bulldog charm brought to bear on the gruff Hunt. Imperioli has fun in his snarky Dog Day Afternoon-era Pacino pastiche, though his character may have the most potential in an Andy Sipowicz kind of direction. Mol, luminous in The Notorious Betty Page and 3:10 To Yuma, is underused as a proto-feminist in a male-dominated profession. A solid actress in a compelling part, she needs more to do, currently relegated to a sidecar position as Tyler’s girl Friday.

Police Woman: Mol

The show producer’s have so far displayed a shrewd taste in casting guest stars, putting Oz alumni Lee Tergesen and Dean Winters into important recurring roles. Yet, tomorrow night’s episode (Here come November sweeps) guests Whoopi Goldberg as a racially-charged disc jockey. That could probably go either way.

It’s possible that the show is an ensemble drama that’s yet to realize as much. As the pieces come together that direction is one the show runners should consider continue taking; they’ve certainly got more than enough talent lined up for a long run as such. But the show is worth joining now, while the story is in its early development, because when it hits its stride there’ll be no end in sight. And O’Mara shouldn’t be underestimated; like fellow Celtic imports Kevin McKidd and Damian Lewis, he’s likely an American television star in the making. With any luck, that fame will come as Life On Mars settles down to Earth and achieves its energetic potential.

- Michael Kabel

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Review: Pride And Glory

Norton, Farrell in a clumsy genre exercise chock full o’ derivation.

Not to get too theoretical, and not to oversimplify, but in most cases genre pieces qualify for their genre by exhibiting or implying a certain amount of elements that are recognized as elements, or “forms,” of the genre in question. Identifying these elements, sometimes called “tropes,” is for movie critics and fans often simply an act of intuition. There are also cases where a film carries so many tropes that they’re unmistakably part of their genre and nothing else. By extension, it’s possible to theorize that a film that carries more tropes than any other might be said to be the “most” of its genre.

On that basis, Pride and Glory should qualify as the most Irish-American-New York-cops-in-moral-quandary movie ever. Except there’s a giant difference between “done” and “done well,” and the film manages to successfully pull off almost none of its elements, though pretty much each one evokes memories of better films where they were used with greater grace and less amateurish abandon. A loud, copying, and unconvincing movie with no real point except its own bombast, its combined effect isn’t just bad – it’s actually a discredit to the genre to which it aspires.

Edward Norton plays Ray Tierney, a NYPD detective lying low in the Missing Persons division because of a sketchily drawn episode two years in his past (The audience is never told exactly what.) When four detectives in the department’s 31rst Precinct – captained by his brother Frances (Noah Emmerich)  – are killed in an arrest gone awry, Ray’s father (Jon Voight) demands Ray join the task force assigned to swiftly catch the drug dealer (Ramon Rodriguez) believed responsible. But the investigation, through a series of coincidences and scenes apparently intended to give the cast something to act about, quickly expands to include the family’s brother-in-law Jimmy Egan (Colin Farrell) and his three squadmates.

What ensues is the kind of plot that’s not so much a story as an amalgamation of other stories blended together without regard for structure. There’s betrayal, and murder, and of course innocent people caught in the middle. But Gavin O’Connor’s (Miracle) direction puts one scene right after the other with little in the way of mounting suspense: one thing happens and then another and another. The plotline is straightforward, even if the tension is thin. And with a 125-minute run time, there’s a lot of scenes, many of which mostly contain people staring laser beams into one another or swearing as if vulgarity was getting outlawed the next morning. Ray and Jimmy’s final confrontation in a deserted Irish bar is laughably forced, as is Jimmy’s death at the hands of an angry mob minutes later.

Grand theft movie: Emmerich

One thin sliver of beauty arrives about halfway through, when Francis presents his dying wife with a Gaelic band promising “love eternal.” It’s a sweet scene, played expertly and without bathos by Emmerich and actress Jennifer Ehle, that detracts from the rote events happening elsewhere in the plot. In fact, coupled with a later scene of Francis defusing a hostage situation, you might wish the movie was about Francis and starred Emmerich’s perfectly-tuned performance, instead of Norton’s and Farrell’s faux macho histrionics. Emmerich (The Truman Show, Beautiful Girls) has made a career of playing non confrontational beta male types; his performance here is a revealing breath of fresh, unmannered air.

Nothing on TV: Voight, Farrell

As for the stars, Norton’s performance is no more and no less than adequate to the task at hand. By this point in his career he’s forged a definite screen persona, made from equal parts of his turns in American History X and Fight Club, and now he’s beginning to stick by it. Farrell possibly took the part of Jimmy as an opportunity to play a bad guy; but why, then, is so much of his performance a weird, half-hearted Robert DeNiro impression? Farrell has also become the kind of movie star, it seems, that HAS to have a redemptive death, even when playing the heavy. It also doesn’t help that at least one scene seems shunted into the script by O’Connor and co-writer Joe Carnahan (Narc) in order to give Farrell more screen time. Voight, who should know something about difficult children himself, brings a definite weight to his scenes as the bewildered father, even if his dialogue is relegated to standard plot-facilitating exposition: “I want you on this task force!”; “He was always the thinker, always solving problems.”

Serpico-esque: Norton

I talked a lot at the start of this review about derivation and influence, and to close I’d like to recommend seven films whose influence on Pride And Glory was palpable and immediately obvious. Watching any of these – or watching them all – is certain to be a more rewarding use of time. They’re in no particular order, though I’ve listed three of Sidney Lumet’s films first, for obvious reasons: Serpico (1973); Night Falls On Manhattan (1997); Prince of the City (1981); Fort Apache: The Bronx (1981); Assault On Precinct 13 (1976); Force of Evil (1947); Monument Avenue (1998). I’m sure there’s more, but these came to mind first. And though it’s too contemporaneous to really act as an influence, last year’s far superior We Own The Night, directed by James Gray (Little Odessa), used many of the same forms and the same influences to startling, virtuoso effect. Actually one of last year’s best dramas, it’s worth looking at just for its own sake.

-Michael Kabel
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::