Miscellaneous Debris, August 2009 Edition

Our irregular roundup of other news worth blogging about.

Buffalo Tom said it best: “Summer’s gone, can’t wipe it off my hands.” Labor Day is just around the corner, bringing this summer of cinematic discontent to a close – and look how it’s ending with a whimper, at that. The fall season begins with the holiday weekend, meaning that by and large the days start getting shorter, the temperatures get cooler, and the movies get better. Autumn is our favorite time of year for film, offering as it does a middle ground between the loud, no-thought-required spectacles of summer cinema and the increasingly inert prestige pics that dominate the winter months.

For this year especially, the fall movie season is a welcome sight, offering not only a variety of films but a pretty interesting cluster of stuff we’re excited about checking out. September offers new work by Steven Soderbergh and Mike Judge, while October releases include the latest from Michael Moore, the Coen Brothers, Spike Jonze, and the long-awaited film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

In the meantime, here’s the latest of our semi-monthly compendiums of topics that never got a full post.

Still no Citizen Kane Blu-Ray

1. A recent article by MacClean’s Canadian online edition brought some disturbing news that was nevertheless not exactly surprising: the amount of classic cinema making its way to DVD is diminishing, with future Blu-Ray releases even more precarious. Even the once-faultless selection of films issued by the Criterion Collection is waning.

What’s wrong with the DVD and especially the Blu-Ray markets right now is a lot like what went wrong with the American automobile industry: keep making tons of the same stuff almost nobody wants, and eventually no one’s going to want any of what’s around. Classic movies are a niche market, and they’re expensive to remaster and package. But they’re important to preserve, important enough to supersede the studio’s profit margin. For that matter, the studios have a responsibility both to themselves and to our culture to preserve their best works, and if this means letting releases of modern drivel wait a while or receive diminished production runs, that’s the cost of  the pedigrees the studios perennially trade upon. Alternately, Warner Brothers’ recent rollout of their burn-on-demand library of archive titles is a huge step in the right direction.

2. Because we grew up in the 1980′s, the golden age of product placement in film, we’re pretty much inured to its proliferation across the modern television landscape. While we don’t watch 30 Rock or Damages, two shows who’ve drawn the heaviest flack for product placement deliberate or otherwise, this summer both Rescue Me and Leverage have taken the marketing gimmick to a whole new egregious extreme. Rescue Me is the worse of the two, including transparent plugs for Samuel Adams, Vitamin Water and the Volkswagen Routan into its storylines. They only narrowly beat out Leverage ‘s persistent and loving close-ups of the Hyundai Genesis, however.

3. Speaking of the 80s, producers at Lakeshore Entertainment this week announced they’re working to bring the cult 1988 classic Heathers to television as a regular series. Not to second-guess, but if you’ve ever wondered what Christian Slater’s snarky sadist J.D. would be like as a sullen hipster, you may soon find out. Apparently the new show won’t involve the movie’s muder-the-popular-bitches plotline, which would kind of make it just like any other rich-teen soap opera already around.

Our Guy: Baldwin

4. In our May edition of Miscellaneous Debris we lobbied for Battlestar Galactica alum Michael Trucco to win the coveted lead in Warner Bros’ upcoming live-action The Green Lantern. The part of lead GL Hal Jordan went to Ryan Reynolds, and we think that’s great. If the script includes his character, we want to suggest Adam Baldwin for the role of Guy Gardner, Jordan’s maniacally bull-headed alternate in the interstellar Green Lantern Corps. Baldwin’s turn as the similar Jayne Cobb on Firefly and Serenity was underrated and unfairly overlooked by mainstream audiences, and he’s long deserved a part in a big project where he can show his swaggering cool. (Incidentally, he bears no relation to the clan of Baldwin brothers.)

O'Loughlin

5. We’ve come to believe that if Skeet Ulrich’s fans ever joined forces with the boosters of Moonlight‘s Alex O’Loughlin, their combined fervency would split the entertainment industry in half. Both actors’ fans are motivated, loyal, and protective of their star in ways that are both impressive and a little intimidating. And both groups get something to cheer about this fall: the Ulrich co-starring Armored opens in December, while the long-delayed O’Loughlin-featuring Whiteout debuts in just two weeks.

6. You’ve probably seen the promos somewhere already, but the “STD for your TV” anti-sitcom It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia starts its fifth season on FX September 17. Season 4 was uneven (to say the least), but when this show is on its game it’s possibly the funniest thing on pay or broadcast TV. The setup is sitcom simple: four deadbeats share ownership of a bar. Everything after that gets perverse real quick:  the bar is a pit, the friends regularly conspire to screw one another over, and bad things inevitably ensue. Nothing is safe, not even cats:

7. Ever follow something you wished were a lot better, but you watch it anyway? ABC’s interplanetary soap opera Defying Gravity has the potential to become a vastly better show than the hybrid it is right now, a flagging and listless affair that could variously be better titled “Lost” In Space or Gray’s Astronomy. The largely talented but somewhat overloaded cast, including Office Space‘s Ron Livingston and Dead Like Me‘s Laura Harris, struggles with stories that go all over the place but never really gel into anything compelling. That the show is on at all is more evidence of ABC’s weird and self-sabotaging fickleness: they’re willing to develop offbeat shows (this, Life On Mars, The Unusuals) but quick to cancel them if they don’t immediately catch on with the public and critics, as Lost did. Meanwhile the network obviously has an abundance of faith in its new David Goyer-created sci-fi series Fast Forward, the previews of which have “hit” written all over them.

8. To close on another science fiction note, here’s a rarely-seen deleted vignette from the 1982 classic Blade Runner, featuring weary detective Rick Deckard’s (Harrison Ford) hospital visit with Holden (Morgan Paull), the cop injured by replicant Leon’s (Brion James) rocket pistol attack at the film’s beginning. Deckard’s boss (M. Emmett Walsh) and his flunky (Edward James Olmos) watch them on close-circuit television. NSFW warnings are in effect:  

We’ll return next Wednesday. Have a good weekend.

- Michael Kabel

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Preview: The Informant!

Matt Damon stars in Steven Soderbergh’s true-life “tattle tale.”

One of the several September releases aimed at audiences old enough to remember the socially-conscious films of the late 60s, 70s and early 80s, director Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! puts Matt Damon in a truth-based story of corporate whistleblowing, big business skulduggery, and runaway hubris. The manic trailer (below) notwithstanding, the film has pretty much everything going for it: a sharp supporting cast, a topic that couldn’t be more relevant if it tried, and perhaps most importantly a leading man just now coming into his prime. And Soderbergh, by training and inclination, is still probably the right director for the job.

Damon plays Mark Whitacre, an Ivy League biochemist and rising executive at agricultural megalith Archer Daniels Mildand who in the early 1990s became an informant for the FBI. Company executives, it seemed, were meeting regularly with their competitors to fix the price of lysine, an amino acid food additive. The real Whitacre, who suffered from bipolar disorder, wore a wire for more than three years to assist the FBI investigation, taping meetings in cities throughout the world.  In the film (based on the 2000 book by Kurt Eichenwald), the constant threat of discovery leads Damon’s character towards the brink of nervous collapse as the stress combines with his affliction.

The corn identity: Damon

As a novel twist full of the moral acrobatics Soderbergh loves, Whitacre was embezzling millions from ADM while working for the FBI, a revelation that eventually led to a weighty jail sentence. Playing a bad guy-turned-good guy-doing-bad requires a certain versatility to keep the audience’s sympathies in check without mugging or jumping up and down in intensity. Damon, who’s played everything now from a siamese twin to a cowboy, can make it work if anyone can.

Offering a fresh change from the usual studio faces, the supporting cast is full of people we haven’t seen a thousand times before: Scott Bakula and The Soup‘s Joel McHale play Whitacre’s FBI contacts, while Melanie Lynskey (Away We Go) plays his wife. Also appearing in various roles are Clancy Brown, Tony Hale, Soderbergh regular Eddie Jemison, and Patton Oswalt.  If you’re going to make a comedy it makes sense to get Oswalt and McHale, as they’re two of the funniest comics around right now.

The film itself seems like a return to the mainstream for Soderbergh, even though only two years have passed since the release of Ocean’s Thirteen. Deliberately eclectic in his choice of projects, most of his output since the turn-of-the-decade heyday of Erin Brockovich, Traffic and Ocean’s Eleven has consisted either of highly-polished but offbeat fare (Solaris, The Good German) or small-scale experimental efforts (Bubble, Full Frontal). To be blunt, neither type has often been very interesting to watch, and the two Ocean’s sequels were a case study in diminishing returns. Che, his four-hour biography of Che Guevara, was a hit at Cannes but drew clamorously mixed reviews upon its limited U.S. release, as did his most recent The Girlfriend Experience.

Nevertheless,  Soderbergh works best with mid-scale character studies of odd individuals in precarious situations – The Limey and King of the Hill are still among his most well-realized works, and The Informant!‘s premise is nothing if not topical in this era of the Ponzi scheme and the free-money bailout. It may still be too soon to get any catharsis about that most recent big-business buffoonery, but on the other hand it couldn’t hurt to try, either.

 

The Informant! opens nationwide September 18.

- Michael Kabel

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Woman On The Verge: Gloria Grahame

Five haunting performances from film noir’s troubled femme fatale.

She wasn't hard to look at, either.

Hollywood too quickly forgets its stars, discards its leading women quicker still, and is sometimes merciless with performers considered “difficult.” Possibly no other actress of the post-war generation was so under-appreciated, or so self-sabotaging, as frequent film noir temptress Gloria Grahame.

Beginning as a contract player in light comedies for MGM (discovered by no less than Louis B. Mayer himself), her screen persona – made of equal parts fragility and resolve, mixed with a beauty that suggested the girl next door gone a little astray  -  never entirely caught hold with the public, even as she worked in classic films with the biggest movie stars of the era. Still, she was able to create a unique place for herself in film history, part sex symbol and part actor’s actor, combining the sensuality of Marilyn Monroe with the craftsmanship of a trained stage actress.

Grahame’s big break came in 1946 while on loan to RKO Pictures, playing party girl Violet in Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life. She worked constantly through the late 40s and into the early 50s, despite personal problems, crippling self-doubt, and a stormy reputation that dogged her career. A marriage to Rebel Without A Cause director Nicholas Ray (the second of four) began in trouble and ended in lurid scandal, though he directed her in In A Lonely Place, probably her best performance.

The five films below represent some of her best and also some of her most defining work. All are available on DVD.

Crossfire (1947): RKO bought out Grahame’s contract in 1947, rushing her into this mystery about returning G.I.’s and the murder of a sympathetic Jewish civilian. Grahame’s role, as a weary dance hall girl longing for a better life, formed the beginning of her noir screen persona: the slightly damaged goods trying to regain her footing in the tough man’s world of the city. Her time before the camera amounts to one long dialogue with troubled GI Mitchell (George Cooper) and a few other small scenes, so that her part is ultimately little more than a reprise of It’s a Wonderful Life‘s Violet. Nevertheless, she’s irresistable when compared to the middle class entitlement of Mitchell’s bland, Donna Reed-esque wife (Jacqueline White).

The film belongs to its male stars, Roberts Mitchum, Young, and Ryan, three tough men at odds over the brutal crime. Yet Grahame’s performance remains the most memorable, full of longing and the self-defensive cynicism that would become the trademark of dozens of film noir “dames” yet to come.

In A Lonely Place (1950): Grahame met Ray while co-starring in his “woman’s noir” A Woman’s Secret the year before, and the director would later refer to that first film as “a disastrous experience, not least of all because I met her.”  Their second collaboration, based on the pulp novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, was by contrast a noir masterpiece: dark and romantic, with wry and melancholy comments both on the movie industry and about the gender roles found in even casual relationships. Off camera, Grahame struggled for co-star Humphrey Bogart’s acceptance throughout production, largely because Bogart had campaigned unsuccessfully for wife Lauren Bacall to get her role.

Lucky for Grahame that didn’t happen. Playing the salvation-promising Laurel Gray oppostie Bogart’s explosive screenwriter Dix Steele allowed her to project calm and poise after years of vamping. The scene below comes just after Gray provides Steele with an alibi in the disappearance of a nightclub hat-check girl:

The Bad and The Beautiful (1952): Grahame spent the two years after In A Lonely Place going through the bad girl motions in routine fare like Macao and The Greatest Show On Earth, but rebounded by joining the ensemble cast of Vincente Minnelli’s meaty show business expose. The rise and fall of a studio executive (Kirk Doulgas) is told through the reminiscences of a director (Barry Sullivan), a screenwriter (Dick Powell), and an actress (Lana Turner). The twist is that all three have good reasons to hate him, as their flashbacks illustrate.

Grahame plays the screenwriter’s lascivious, slightly manipulative Southern debutante wife, bringing more versatility and charm to the character than was probably intended. It’s a small but crucial part, as her fate defines the executive’s ultimate act of treacherous ambition. By making the character so endearing, so out of place among the Hollywood shark race, Grahame helped move the whole movie where it needed to go – no small accomplishment considering her heavyweight costars. The Academy noticed, awarding her the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

The Big Heat (1953): Fritz Lang’s furious tale of a cop (Glenn Ford) out for vengeance against the gangsters who killed his family includes so many archetypal noir story elements that it can function as an introduction to the genre all by itself. It’s a violent, stark, brutal film, muscular and remorseless in the self-assured way only 50s cops dramas could manage.

Playing the sexpot bad girl yet again, this time Grahame’s floozy gets the chance to repent after her thug boyfriend (Lee Marvin) scalds her face with a pot of hot coffee. But previous to that she’s his equal in malice, blowing through his cash and mocking his fear of the syndicate leaders that outrank him.

Grahame, versatile as ever, makes her previously amoral character capable of provoking real pity once she’s disfigured. Her revenge, fueled by self-loathing,  is chillingly convincing – and no wonder. Always conscious of her looks and disdainful of a creased upper lip she considered ugly, Grahame resorted to plastic surgery and cotton implants to straighten out her lipline. At least one botched procedure left her upper lip paralyzed and her face seemingly frozen.

Odds Against Tomorrow (1959): Grahame’s career cooled following a disastrous turn as Ado Annie Carnes in Fred Zinnemann’s screen adaptation of Oklahoma!, amid reports of difficulty on the set and fights with co-stars. Four years later, director Robert Wise cast her in a small but memorable role in his noir about a gang of payroll robbers derailed by the slow-boiling racism of its members (Robert Ryan and Harry Belafonte.) Grahame’s role is once again small, but helps embellish the monstrous egotism of Ryan’s ex-con antagonist.

Considered by some the last true noir of the genre’s classic 1950s era, the film was also Grahame’s final screen appearance for seven years. She turned to television and stage work both in the United States and Britain, eventually making something of a shabby return to the screen in 70s B-movies such as Chandler (1972) and Mama’s Dirty Girls (1974). She died of peritonitis after surgery for stomach cancer, aged 57,  in 1981.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard

Raunchy used-car comedy isn’t a classic, but it’s not a clunker either.

When we previewed this movie a few weeks ago, we talked a lot about how The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard might – if it was good enough - become more than an end-of-summer diversion, how it might make itself a touchstone for America circa 2009, when the car industry and local dealers nationwide are literally begging for customers. Though the film never quite reaches that level of relevance, first-time director Neal Brennan and second-time screenwriters Andy Stock and Rick Stempson manage to create a reference point for something else: the archetypal adult comedy of the late 00′s. Because of that, and sometimes despite it, the film is often riotously funny.

Like Talladega Nights and seemingly dozens of other Will Ferrell movies (Ferrell and frequent collaborator Adam McKay co-produced), The Goods puts an alpha dog personality in a working-class situation for trashy comic effect, relying on a barrage of potty language, sexual innuendo and slapstick violence to crowd-surf the audience from one gag to the next. Thrown in for good measures: a cast of misfits, some lovable but most weird; an improbably warm-hearted romantic interest; and a shaggy plot hinging on either family or personal honor. In fact, the film doggedly follows that blueprint, moving its characters from one gag or situation to the next while barely slowing down to establish context or meaning to the jokes. You laugh a lot while it’s happening, even as you’re aware the film could be doing better.

The saving grace is that most of the jokes are funny – sometimes very funny, with at least three extended gags that detonate with explosive comic payoff.  ”Used car mercenary” Don Ready (Jeremy Piven) and his team of high-pressure sales experts are hired by failing Temecula, California car patriarch Ben Selleck (James Brolin) to get rid of 200 cars over the Fourth of July weekend. Because the process of inventory liquidation only has so much comic potential, the script comes fully loaded with character baggage: Ready is haunted by a previous failure that ended in the death of his best friend. His teammates are bizarrely distracted by various sex-charged problems: oversexed  Babs (Kathryn Hahn) lusts after Selleck’s man-child son (Rob Riggle); sensitive Jibby (Ving Rhames) longs to “make love” to a woman (as opposed to just having sex); financial wizard Brent (David Koechner) finds himself the reluctant object of Selleck’s homosexual advances.

Ready himself woos Selleck’s daughter Ivy (Jordana Spiro), despite her engagement to weaselly import car salesman/boy-band vocalist Paxton (Ed Helms). The film knows – and we know it knows – that the two are going to end up together, and their courtship has a going-through-the-motions quality despite Spiro’s effortless charm. Ready also finds a potential son in Selleck’s youngest employee Blake (Jonathan Sadowski), a junior salesman with all of his signature moves. While the setup offers numeous character and gag possibilities, the film never really gets the story thread moving. As with the other plotlines, it’s one more thing in the circus of the film’s action.

But despite all the characters and the bevy of jokes the film still sometimes manages to lose its momentum, especially during a plot twist late in the second act that feels forced to the point of snapping. Amplifying this problem is another issue, one of comic pitch: rather than lose additional time by going for depth, director Brennan chooses instead to make the movie louder, ever louder. When Ready has his most sincere moment, it’s at the top of his lungs; characters incessantly shout at one another. Such zeal works in skit comedy, but repetitive scenes in a 90 minute film drag on the audience’s patience, raising the bar for the next gag to regain the comic momentum.

Piven charges Ready’s character with sleazy confidence, probably the only way to play such a outsized-by-design personality. Yet he sometimes stumbles giving Ready vulnerability or warmth. Hahn, Rhames and Koechner all make the most of their parts, each of which comes down to a single character point: the horny one, the sweet one, the smart one. Charles Napier, Tony Hale, and Ken Jeong are all endearing as Selleck’s beleaguered employees, while Craig T. Robinson steals his scenes as a defiant disc jockey in charge of music for the three-day sellathon. By contrast, Helms plays the smug Paxton as a variation of Andy Bernard, his character on The Office, while Riggle xeroxes Steve Carrell’s turn in Anchorman to play the childish Steve Selleck.

Ultimately, reviewing the theatrical release seems an almost academic exercise, given the inevitable unrated DVD version that’s sure to arrive mere months from now. The Goods is that kind of film, and when watching this current iteration you can often pinpoint which edits trimmed additional material from various scenes. That’s not entirely a bad thing. Like Anchorman with its companion movie and the “unbearably long, self-indulgent director’s cut” of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, an enlarged Goods is probably a better film all the way around, with greater character development and more patience at developing its setups. Which is not to say you should wait for the rental so much as consider this release a demo for the souped-up version still to come. America has a love affair with cars and movies both, and unrated editions and director’s cuts have become just next year’s model of the same make. Still, this version of The Goods is good enough to deserve seeing now.

- Michael Kabel

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Preview: Whiteout

Antarctica-set mystery arrives in theatres next month.

September brings the long-awaited arrival of Whiteout to American movie theatres, coming after a decade of false starts, numerous sojourns in development hell and two years of waiting for distribution by Warner Brothers. Directed by Dominic Sena (Kalifornia), it’s based on the Oni Press comics series created by Greg Rucka, a former detective novelist who’s become one of the most reliably excellent comics talents of recent years. With a unique setting and perspective, the film could offer crime film devotees the most unusual premise since at least Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia seven years ago.

The white-knuckle story is set amid the wastes of Antarctica, where research stations from numerous countries coexist without any official government and darkness lasts six months of the year. With only three days before twilight, a dead body is discovered on the ice, apparently thrown from a plane.  The region’s sole American law enforcement officer, Deputy U.S. Marshall  Carrie Stetko (Kate Beckinsale), tries to solve the first murder in the continent’s history while weather conditions outside the remote and distant stations take cataclysmic turns for the worse. As she investigates she realizes the murder may tie into a bigger mystery more than 60 years old.

For a landmass with no permanent population, there are plenty of good looking men. The film also stars Gabriel Macht (The Spirit) as a United Nations operative investigating the murder and Alex O’Loughlin (Moonlight) and Columbus Short (Quarantine) as pilots assisting or hindering Stetko’s investigation. Tom Skerritt returns from wherever he’s been the last few years (Antarctica?) to appear as researcher Dr. John Fury.

The mystery surrounding the film itself, and the chief cause for skepticism about its quality, is why Warner Bros. waited so long to distribute it. Beckinsale is a dependable if somewhat less than captivating B-movie anchor after the Underworld series, while the concept is almost startling in its simplicity. Maybe they were chilled by bad example: 2007′s 30 Days of Night, another thriller set in perpetual cold and darkness, made money yet didn’t really set the box office afire. Regardless, a September debut offers probably the best venue for a thriller of this sort, as it’s a kind of buffer between the money machines of summer and the prestige rollouts of winter. (Last September’s big movie: the espionage chase piece Eagle Eye.) We imagine two hours or so of watching Antarctica’s triple-bel0w-zero temperatures will comfort us about our own oncoming winter cold, to boot.

But for many the real draw is seeing one of Rucka’s works finally hit the big screen. Fans have waited years to see one of his series – which also include the British espionage series Queen & Country and the short-lived DC Comics 24-meets-Justice League hybrid Checkmate – jump to film. Complex female characters who are equally strong and vulnerable are something of Rucka’s stock in trade, and if the screenplay carries that strength over Beckinsale may have found the defining role that’s eluded her even after a decade in Hollywood. Co-stars Macht, O’Loughlin, and Short have Journeyman Star written all over them, each having already done competent work (we’ll forgive Macht his lead in The Spirit) while waiting for their breakthrough parts.

 

Whiteout opens nationwide September 11.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: Mad Men Season 3 Premiere

Season opener of the critcal darling series shows its characters coping with the weight of prosperity.

Flagrantly ambitious, willfully literary, and as polished as a new Zippo, the third season opening episode of AMC’s Mad Men had all the trappings that helped make its first two award-winning seasons head-spinning good. All the performances were there as good as ever, the dialogue was crackling, and there were twists and turns throughout its multi-faceted storylines. That’s the good news. The bad news: the strain was starting to show a little, as some plot contortions seemed a bit forced, and the character movement a little willful, a bit in service to plot. For the first time, an episode reached.

No wonder, given the expectations surrounding it. Mad Men has picked up media attention as it’s picked up accolades, and at least a few critics and many fans have held it up as the last bastion of good television in the growing wasteland of cheap reality show filler. For all that pressure, it’s entitled to take a warm up lap coming out of the gate. We just hope that all it was.

Spoilers begin here:

The episode – titled “Out of Town” - opens roughly six or seven months after the conclusion of Season Two. Don and Betty Draper (Jon Hamm and January Jones) are expecting their third child, with Betty showing and Don haunted by the memories of his own dark childhood. The two are getting along, even affectionate towards each another. There’s no bliss, however, at Sterling Cooper, where the agency’s new British parent corporation is laying off workers left and right (“a third of their workforce,” one of the Brits explains to another.) The reshuffling extends to naming both Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) and Ken Cosgrove (Aaron Staton) to the coveted Head of Accounts position, replacing the gone and apparently forgotten Duck Phillips (Mark Moses) as well as his replacement Burt Peterson (Michael Gaston). Actually, the previously unseen Peterson’s explosive departure from the Sterling Cooper offices provides a rare break from the show’s low key, polite intensity.

Meanwhile Draper and artistic head Sal Romano (Bryan Batt) head to Baltimore to assuage concerns from one of the agency’s leading clients, the raincoat manufacturer London Fog. While there the two stay at the real-life historic Belvedere Hotel, and as Draper dallies with one of their flight’s stewardesses, Sal comes close to realizing a long-repressed desire with a hotel employee. Both are interrupted by the hotel fire alarm, and Draper’s hurried descent down a fire escape gives him inadvertent knowledge of Sal’s secret.

That moment provides the episode’s most glaring hijack, and feels of several similar moments the most forced. It seems unlikely that Draper, who gropes women in public restaurants and bullies clients into accepting giant campaigns, would bolt at the sound of an alarm. It’s also unreasonable to think that the deeply-closeted Sal would forget to pull the drapes, especially in what was established last season as his hometown. (Sal’s Bawlmer roots are only referred to elliptically, but we can’t help but feel they deserved more attention. He’s one of the show’s more intriguing characters, and the chance to delve into his background feels missed.)

Back at Sterling Cooper, Campbell is livid over being made to share his promotion, ignoring both Cosgrove’s and his wife’s advice that the Brits want them at each others throats. Actually, how the two men accept the same good news – Campbell groveling and stammering, Cosgrove charming and nonchalant – nicely thumbnail their characters’ personalities. Other cast regulars have just enough screen time to ostensibly set up oncoming storylines: the resplendent Joan Halloway (Christine Hendricks) is miserable under the new administration, especially when dealing with a pompous male Brit secretary (Ryan Cartwright). Peggy Olson is working on accounts and – so far – not much else, while Harry Crane (Rich Sommer) has grown into his role as head of the agency’s television department.

The British presence in the office gives a tangible feeling of oppression to the Sterling Cooper offices, with even senior leadership like Bert Cooper (Robert Morse) feeling the miasma. Only Roger Sterling (John Slattery) seems immune, having returned from a honeymoon with his new trophy wife apparently too happy to notice everyone else’s misery. For the show, the “occupation” hopefully won’t drag out through the whole season, because as yet it’s a plot point that could quickly grow tedious. Not that it should get ditched, but as rendered the constant unwelcome presence is an awkward status quo to stretch over thirteen episodes.

Which is not to second-guess either the show’s direction or its creators. Even an hour of Mad Men that’s only very good puts it head and shoulders above almost everything else on right now, as the half-dozen stylistic touches not covered here easily proved (For example, the name “London Fog” as a metaphor for unhappiness under the Brit’s supervision). In suggesting the show has big things on the horizon, this episode definitely accomplished its goals. It just looked like the writers and cast were working hard to do it. To paraphrase an ad slogan, we never want to see them sweat.

- Michael Kabel

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Dog Days of Movie Summer

New and recent releases to check out in the heat of August.

August is practically halfway over – already, with only a few weeks left until Labor Day and the “official” end of the summer movie season. We’ve said several times before that the summer of 2009 wasn’t exactly one for the memory books, though now we see it has the potential to end strong. Several films are out now and several more are still come this month, and some of them even look promising.

Here’s the rundown of most of  the major openings, as well as an independent we think might have some potential. All release dates are for American markets, so some may not be accurate for international audiences.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (opened August 7): A week after its opening, the consensus of those who’ve seen this toy movie comes down to something like, “It wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been.” You know movies collectively are in a funk when the best thing said about a week’s tentpole opening is that it wasn’t the crap people were expecting. And people were expecting crap - there was heavy expectation for months that it would emerge as the grand flop of the summer.

In the unlikely event you don’t already know (and knowing is half the battle), the movie’s about a squad of government soldiers attempting to stop a terrorist group, and it’s based on a groundbreaking line of Hasbro toys from the 1980s. Dennis Quaid, Sienna Miller, and Channing Tatum star.

Julie & Julia (opened August 7): Lonely housewife and white collar drone Julie Powell (Amy Adams) tries to make all the recipes in Julia Child’s (Meryl Streep) memoir/cookbook My Life In France in a single year. Based on the chick lit bestseller (itself the first book based on a blog) and directed by Nora Ephron (You’ve Got Mail), the film is half Powell’s story and half biography of Child’s rise to becoming arguably the most famous chef in history. It’s a woman’s film, though it’s almost certainly better than last summer’s Streep offering, Mamma Mia! Stanley Tucci (Big Night), who we wish made more movies, plays Child’s husband.

Our full preview includes the trailer and a more in-depth plot summary and analysis.

The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard (opens August 14): With the exception of the dark horse The Hangover, most male-oriented comedies flopped hard this summer. Land of the Lost and Year One were deservedly dead on arrival, Funny People had naysayers announcing the end of the Apatow Dynasty, and Bruno came and went pretty fast. Meanwhile traditional female-centric romcoms like The Ugly Truth and especially The Proposal might as well have had licenses to print money.

But the guys’ comedies get one more chance with The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, the directing debut of Chappelle’s Show writer Neal Brennan. Jeremy Piven plays a used car uber-salesman hired to clear out a lot of 200 cars over the Fourth of July weekend. Abetting him are Ving Rhames, David Koechner, and Kathryn Hahn. The Hangover‘s Ed Helms, Jordana Spiro, and James Brolin also appear.

Our full preview includes the hilarious trailer and some ideas about why this might be the role Piven was born to play.

District 9 (opens August 14): A thriller in the vein of Species and Alien Nation, first-time feature director Neill Blomkamp’s gritty story imagines a world where aliens have lived in a kind of apartheid among the people of South Africa for decades. When a human inspector (Sharlto Copley) assumes some of the aliens’ DNA, the ruthless international corporation running their ghetto chases him through their sprawling encampment.

Peter Jackson directed the film, which only took shape after the long-ballyhooed film translation of the Halo video game fell apart. Not to second guess, but some images from the film’s TV spots suggest it’ll carry the glum meanstreak that resurfaced in Jackson’s work about two thirds of the way through Return of the King and helped make King Kong almost unwatchable. We hope not, because the film’s setup is fascinating, and there’s always room for another good science fiction film on our viewing schedules.

We’ve got a a preview of this one, too, that includes more background on Blomkamp as well as the film’s setup.

The Time Traveler’s Wife (opens August 14): A woman (Rachel McAdams) spends her life loving a man (Eric Bana) who, thanks to a rare genetic anomaly, compulsively travels through time. Based on the bestselling novel by Audrey Niffenegger and directed by Robert Schwentke (Flightplan), the film’s emphasis apparently rests on the romance side of the story.

Bana and McAdams should by all rights be bigger stars than they currently are, but this sort of sci-fi tinged melodrama doesn’t seem likely to push them up to the A-list. Early reviews have been mixed and often seemingly skewed to how much individual critics cared for the source novel.

We just compiled our list of favorite time travel romances earlier this week.

Inglourious Basterds (opens August 21): Universal’s marketing the living shit out of this on television, so is a synopsis really necessary? Writer-director Quentin Tarantino has said the film is his masterpiece, though what that could mean after the cinematic lip-syncing of Kill Bill and Grindhouse is anyone’s guess. As with so much of his recent work, it’s based on a cult film from the 1970s and reportedly continues his withdrawal from cinematic realism (which was never exactly his strong suit anyway.) History buffs will likely be less than pleased to know he’s changed the ending to World War II.

We imagine Tarantino’s fans (and we imagine there are less of them than in years past) will cheer while most everyone else remains indifferent. And yet, for all that we still love Jackie Brown.

Big Fan (opens limited release August 28): A parking lot attendant (Patton Oswalt) who’s also a New York Giants megafan struggles to cope with getting beat down by his favorite player. Kevin Corrigan and Michael Rapaport co-star, while Robert D. Siegel (The Wrestler) writes and makes his directing debut.

Actually, the script was one of The Wrestler’s biggest problems (we didn’t like the film), suffering from the same pretentious airlessness that’s also creeping into the edges of the trailer below. Still, Oswalt is exactly the actor to tackle a part like this, while Corrigan and Rapaport are the go-to guys for playing working-class Atlantic Northeast.

Monday we’ll have our review of The season 3 premiere of Mad Men. Have a good weekend.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: I Love You, Man

Sometimes-charming, often flawed bromantic comedy debuts on DVD and Blu-Ray this week.

The big question surrounding I Love You, Man as a film is the same dilemma no one ever wants to ask themselves about their romantic relationship: if you lower your expectations, and if you don’t ask for too much, is it okay when all is said and done to not feel slightly disappointed? Long on setup but middling on ambition and payoff alike, it’s a mildly underachieving film with a few laughs and no sense of having wasted time when the credits roll. That will likely be enough to satisfy most casual viewers, and indeed it’s a film that’s almost impossible to take seriously. It does skirt around and run from some interesting questions, however, questions that deserve more attention than they’re given.

Paul Rudd (Role Models), an affable comic presence if any exists in film right now, plays newly engaged real estate agent Peter Klaven, a man so comfortable around other women that he’s never felt the need, outside of a few acquaintances at his fencing club, to forge camaraderie with other men. When he overhears his fiance Zooey (The Office‘s Rashida Jones) complaining that his lack of male friendship might cause problems in their upcoming marriage, Peter resolves to find a new male friend. His gay brother (Andy Samberg, Hot Rod) sets him up on man-dates – social, non-romantic events that aren’t meant to lead to anything sexual. This being a comedy made in early 21st Century America, of course the man-dates are disastrous.

His luck changes when he happens up on Sidney Fife (Jason Segel), a laid-back investments counselor with plenty of masculine energy. “You seemed like a good dude,” Fife tells Klaven at the end of their first man-date. This lone, direct statement provides the bulk of explanation in what the eccentric Fife would see in the nebbishy, vaguely effeminate Klaven. The two hang out in Fife’s man-cave jamming to Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” or drinking beer, or walking up and down the Venice Beach boardwalk. Klaven’s growing self-confidence – and lack of time to spend helping Zooey plan their wedding – leads to tension between between his love and his new best bud. A third act of awkward misunderstandings and sorrowful longing ensues.

Despite its fashionable “bromantic” twist, there’s little about co-writer/director John Hamburg’s (Along Came Polly) script (written with Dr. Doolittle scribe Larry Levin) that doesn’t feel painstakingly formulaic. All the elements of modern middlebrow-hip comedy are on ready display: there’s a gag about bodily functions, in this case vomit. There’s the post-ironic fetishizing of a classic rock band, in this case Rush. A faded celebrity from twenty to thirty years ago appears as himself (Lou Ferigno). Every character, no matter their age or education, swears like a sailor jailed on shore leave. As for the plot, it’s possible that Hamburg et al. are co-opting every plot contrivance and shopworn gimmick of traditional romantic comedies as  a means of subversively poking fun at the romcom genre. If only anything else about the film were so clever such a idea might become at least a little credible.

Perhaps the film’s most annoying flaw rests with the superficiality of the script’s attitudes towards both sexes. Men are childlike, buffoonish, and desperate for company from either sex. Women are hostile, judgmental, and as often as not mean-spirited. That’s probably true at times, but not to the simplistic extremes presented here. I Love You, Man, like dozens of other romantic comedies, moves on a straight line despite its characters or their relations to one another. If women have to be sanctimonious and men cretinous to get each scene’s point across, well then that’s what’s necessary. It doesn’t help that Zooey’s best friends are sitcommish cliches: Denise (Jamie Pressly) is a shrill smartass in a nasty marriage; Hailey (Sarah Burns) is so pathetically lonely she tells guys about her wedding plans five minutes after meeting them.

The cast members do the best they can, though, and their innate likeability raises the film several notches. Rudd doesn’t push the envelope of his acting repertoire, which means he’s charming and funny and earnest. Segel, slightly more ambitious playing the zen slacker Sidney, struggles with finding his character’s basis; you can see him reaching for something in several scenes. As for the supporting parts, it’s a shame Jones isn’t given more to do except smile or frown according to the situation. J.K. Simmons and Jane Curtain show up to play Peter’s parents, while Samberg is miscast as his brother. Pressly could teach a graduate seminar in playing snarling sexpots, and her scenes with Jon Favreau (the only one here playing against type as her brutish husband), in which the two negotiate sex in exchange for favors (“You’re wearing a cheerleader outfit tonight if I do this.”) provide some of the film’s most quotable dialogue.

If I Love  You, Man were a better film it might raise questions about masculine identity in the  post-Sexual Revolution, post-metrosexual landscape. In a culture filled with the idea of men as pets (the docile milquetoasts of Generation Y) and romantic masculinity as a fantasy notion (Twilight) there’s a lot of ground to cover on what being a man actually entails. God knows there’s more to it than gets presented here. A light comedy isn’t the place for a referendum on gender identity, but in bringing the subject up it seems that the film ought to provide at least a theory. Failing that, more laughs than it does.

- Michael Kabel
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(Note: an earlier version of this review originally appeared for the film’s theatrical release.)

Time Enough For Love

Five love stories with a time travel twist.

Seeing the trailer for the upcoming The Time Traveler’s Wife got us thinking about other love stories hinging on the science-fiction trope of time travel. There’s more than you might think. The blending of the two genres also serves a more pragmatic purpose, too, bringing the male-friendly sci-fi genre together with the female-dominated romance.

Actually, science fiction authors have understood this from the beginning: H.G. Wells included a love interest for the hero of his The Time Machine – the progenitor of most time travel stories – and more recent successes like Quantum Leap and even the Terminator series played on the bittersweet pathos of lovers separated by and through time.

We have mixed expectations regarding The Time Traveler’s Wife. Though screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin did pen the 1990 scare-your-ass-off thriller Jacob’s Ladder, director Robert Schwentke’s only major directing credit so far was the 2005 Jodie Foster vehicle Flightplan. Audrey Niffenegger’s bestselling source novel looks like weapons-grade chick lit but was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction; yet the film’s emphasis, judging by the trailer, is on the romance side of the story. Stars Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana are always welcome screen presences, though, and are almost certain to generate more heat than Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock managed in 2006′s vaguely similar The Lake House.

There are more time travel romances then the five listed below, though these are the ones we can recommend.

Time After Time (1979): Speaking of Wells,  co-writer-director Nicholas Meyer (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) adapted Karl Alexander’s novel about the author (Malcolm McDowell) time-travelling to the present day in pursuit of Jack the Ripper (David Warner.) The movie Wells finds love with bank employee Amy Robbins (Mary Steenburgen, Step Brothers) but (because they’re in a movie) she becomes the Ripper’s next target.

Though its premise may politely be described as “contrived,” the film works largely because all three principals are at the top of their games. McDowell is charming as a Victorian Utopianist lost in Disco Era Manhattan, and Steenburgen is as lovely and graceful as ever. On the other hand, you sort of expect Wells and Jack to square off more than they do, building more tension for the inevitable plot twists that happen later. With a heavyweight ringer like Warner playing history’s most notorious killer, the tension is there from jump.

Somewhere In Time (1980): A playwright (Christopher Reeve, Superman) falls in love with the woman (Jane Seymour) in a portrait he finds at a resort hotel. Using hypnosis, he travels back to 1912 to find her, even as her manager (Christopher Plummer) conspires to keep them apart.

The elaborate plot, written by Richard Matheson and based on his own novel, includes lots of smart paradoxes and complications. Unfortunately Reeve is somewhat miscast as a brainy playwright desperate to find his romantic ideal, though Seymour is spot-on as a Victorian stage actress. Director Jeannot Szwarc (Jaws 2) soaks the film in soft-focused opacity to recreate the sumptuous pre-World War I era, even if its pace often stalls out.

Made In Heaven (1987): The time travel method in this overlooked melodrama by eclectic director Alan Rudolph (Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Cirlce) isn’t a machine or hypnosis – it’s the afterlife. After dying heroically in the 1950′s, Mike Shea (Timothy Hutton) goes to Heaven and falls in love with a “new soul” (Kelly McGillis) soon to depart for a life on Earth. The powers that be allow him to return to Earth and find her – but he only has thirty years, and they return on opposite ends of the economic ladder. They arrive in the 1980s, which as the trailer below demonstrates was the worst decade ever for men’s hairstyles.

Besides the leads, the film features pitch-perfect turns by Maureen Stapleton, James Gammon, Amanda Plummer, Tim Daly, and Mare Winningham. Debra Winger steals her scenes, however, unrecognizable in an uncredited turn as Shea’s redheaded guardian angel.

Late For Dinner (1991): A cult movie fan’s cult movie, W.D. Richter’s (The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai) weird, oddly-paced romance puts two 1960′s New Mexico everymen (Brian Wimmer, Peter Berg) on the run from the police after a shootout defending their property. Fleeing to Los Angeles, they’re taken in by a scientist (Bo Brundin) who cryogenically freezes them for thirty years. Upon their awakening, the two men attempt to reunite with their family, despite the passage of time and their relative lack of aging.

Marcia Gay Harden plays the wife and sister to whom both men try to return, while 90s indie mainstays Peter Gallagher and Janeane Garofalo also appear.  Like Made In Heaven, the film isn’t available on DVD, though it sometimes shows up on cable movie channels.

Happy Accidents (2000): The time travel edge to writer-director Brad Anderson’s (El maquinista) indie effort saves it from its bevy of period romcom tropes, many of which seem dated just a decade later. Lovesick big city girl Ruby (Marisa Tomei) almost gives up on men until meeting, seemingly by chance, the sensitive and charming Sam (Vincent D’Onofrio, beta testing Robert Goren’s weirdness). They meet cute and have a thrilling romance until Sam divulges he’s from 500 years in the future. Ruby’s taken aback, and Sam works to convince her of his veracity and – you guessed it – save her life from an approaching traffic accident.

Anderson wisely envisions Sam’s 25th Century as a hellish mire of eugenics and deprivation, lending plausibility to Sam’s claim that its inhabitants time travel virtually out of necessity. Tomei and Donofrio have real screen chemistry, and the plot is smart enough to keep you guessing until the last minutes, when everything comes together with an ingenious twist.

- Michael Kabel

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John Hughes: 1950-2009

Writer-producer-director’s films chronicled, inspired much of 1980s youth culture.

John Hughes, the filmmaking mastermind behind such seminal 1980s teen-friendly works as Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off , died Thursday of heart trouble while visiting family in New York City. He was 59 years old.

Besides his cluster of teen-friendly comedies and dramas, his hit films also included National Lampoon’s Vacation, Home Alone, and Mr. Mom. He often directed his own screenplays, and his realistic representations of teen angst led fans and critics alike to consider him an auteur, the cultural voice of the shopping mall generation.

A native of Lansing, Michigan, Hughes began his career as an advertising copywriter in Chicago, later branching out into writing material for stand-up comics including Rodney Dangerfield and Joan Rivers. He joined the staff of National Lampoon Magazine in the late 70s, writing humorous essays and reminiscences including “Vacation ’58.”  Hughes broke into screenwriting composing scripts for the short-lived sitcom Delta House, an adaptation of the magazine’s hit film Animal House. His second feature-length screenwriting effort, based on the vacation essay, became the 1983 smash National Lampoon’s Vacation. The following year he made his directorial debut with Sixteen Candles, a bittersweet comedy that launched leads Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall to stardom.

A string of other teen-specific films followed, though each took an increasingly restless turn. The Breakfast Club (1985), Pretty In Pink (1986), and Some Kind of Wonderful (1987) all centered not just on the frustrations of teen romance but also on class and social divisions among teens and adults like. Hughes wrote and directed arguably his most well-received film, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, in 1987. A buddy/road movie starring Steve Martin and frequent collaborator John Candy, the film was a mild success upon release but has since come to recognition as a classic, with perennial airings each Thanksgiving. Its comic majesty rests on a melancholy undercurrent brought by Candy’s widowed salesman Del Griffith, in what was that late actor’s finest performance.

The soundtracks to Hughes’ movies were often as popular as the films themselves, and the music he used was an important part of his narrative presentation. The bestselling soundtracks to Pretty In Pink and The Breakfast Club helped paved the way for the alternative music explosion of the early 1990s: The Breakfast Club‘s theme, “Don’t You Forget About Me,” was an international number one single for Scottish band Simple Minds, while OMD’s “If You Leave,” from Pretty In Pink, has become something of the default anthem for reminiscences of the era’s pop culture. 

Though it’s tempting to say Hughes’s success ended with the decade he so adroitly portrayed, he closed the 80s on a high note, writing and producing the 1990 blockbuster Home Alone. Sometimes considered a salve for American anxiety about the then-brewing Operation: Desert Storm, it became the third-highest grossing  motion picture of all time. Yet its success was to prove the climax of his career. Subsequent efforts such as Dutch (1991), Curly Sue (1991), and Dennis The Menace (1993) failed to capture critical acclaim or public attention, while two Home Alone sequels garnered only diminishing returns. Hughes’ filmmaking voice, always earnest and seldom reliant on sarcasm, seemed antiquated in the post-ironic snark that dominated 1990′s attitudes, and as a touchstone of 80s fashion and culture he shared in that decade’s disdain for all things related to its predecessor. His last screen credit, for 2007′s Owen Wilson vehicle Drillbit Taylor, was for story only and listed him as Edmond Dantes.

Hughes was a giant influence on our youth, both for the respect he accorded teenager’s emotions and for popularizing music leagues deeper than the lumbering rock and roll and inane synth pop then popular. Our condolences to his friends and family, and by way of tribute here’s a sizable clip from Planes, Trains & Automobiles: 

- Michael Kabel

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