Miscellaneous Debris, June 2010 Edition

Our monthly roundup of news, reviews and speculation that didn’t wind up with a full post.  

It's hot outside.

 The problem with movies is that they’re too often interrupted by the more meager demands and rewards of real life. We meant to go to the movies this weekend but never got around to it, busy instead with one dreary thing after another, and anyway there’s nothing playing at the local theatres that seems exciting (We’re not twelve years old, and as aging Whedonites we don’t care for Twilight).  

Actually, we’re taking the rest of this week off for the Fourth of July holiday weekend, returning Tuesday, July 6. In the meantime, here’s all the stuff we thought mostly worth discussing over the month of June, items that didn’t rate an entire blog post of their own but nevertheless seem noteworthy for one reason or another.  

1. Besides the ignominy of so many thuds, maybe the nastiest thing about this summer of woe for the box office isn’t the quantity of flops but rather the media’s glee in pronouncing several films as failures. We haven’t crunched the numbers, but we don’t imagine 2010 necessarily has more or bigger turkeys than most other summers; without a giant tentpole movie – like the kind Toy Story 3 is shaping up to become – the desperation at the box office has just seemed worse.  

If The A-Team, Prince of Persia, and a few others have underwhelmed, it’s not necessarily a comment on their quality or on the public’s shifting tastes. It means audiences ignored them for whatever reasons normally affect such things, not a little of which inevitably seems to have something to do with marketing. Actually, The A-Team has good word of mouth, as did Prince of Persia. Some of the bombs, admittedly, were odious: both Jonah Hex and Sex and The City 2 were answers to questions nobody asked, efforts apparently massaged into oblivion by studio meetings and conferences. Elsewhere the sharks have circled the Tom Cruise – Cameron Diaz vehicle Knight and Day for weeks; our guess is that the film will quietly make a modest profit.  

2. The idea that such older-skewing films as Knight and Day and Sex and The City 2 should fail echoes a topic that’s gone around for a couple of years now: the idea that the time of the movie for grownups is in its twilight. This summer the two biggest successes so far, The Karate Kid and now Toy Story 3 – are both distinctly kid-friendly. Not to over-simplify, but this is partly because children don’t go to school in the summertime and these two products – both reminders of beloved films from other eras – are likely irresistable to thirty-something parents who remember the one film from their teens and the other from their 20′s.  The films aren’t kids’ movies so much as entertainment that’s palatable all the way around the SUV.  

3. Steve Carrell says he’s leaving The Office at the end of the series’ upcoming seventh season in order to spend more time with his family. We lost interest in The Office a while back – the “Dwight always wins” story policy froze us out – but nevertheless we’re curious to see how they handle Carrell’s exodus. Meanwhile his animated feature Despicable Me opens next week, with his adult feature Dinner For Schmucks (in which he seems to combine his Michael Scott schtick with George Clooney’s haircut circa 1994) opening at the end of the month.  

4. Speaking of that film (and its vaguely amusing trailer below), it’s another project to co-star Zack Galifianakis, his fourth released since The Hangover last year. Nothing against him getting rich, but we’re thinking he might start to worry about over-exposure. The industry has made similar mistakes before: taking a promising character actor and throwing him into every project available at the time seldom turns out well, either for the audience or for the performer. For lack of a better term, we call this accelerated career half-life the Zahn Effect.  

  

Yelchin in Terminator Salvation

 5. With rumors that an announcement regarding the next actor to play Spider-Man just around the corner, we want to officially endorse Anton Yelchin for the role. The young Russian actor did great work in both Terminator Salvation and Star Trek, giving better performances than anyone expected. With the upcoming fourth film reportedly a reboot (goodbye, disco-dancing hipster Spidey), Yelchin is exactly the rising talent that a fresh take on the franchise needs. Now, who to play Mary Jane Watson? Hopefully, Easy A’s Emma Stone.  

6. Mad Men, the best show on TV, makes it season four debut in just under four weeks, on July 25. The sleek new preview poster started showing up online a couple of weeks or so ago, apparently hinting at the wide-open future that Don Draper and his fellow Sterling-Cooper refugees face now that they’ve struck out on their own. We’re also glad to learn, somewhat belatedly, that Jared Harris, who plays sensitive British executive Lane Pryce, has been promoted to regular cast member as of the upcoming season. Plot and story details still remain maddeningly elusive – series mastermind Matt Weiner could/should run the CIA – which makes the wait that much harder. Our own small wish is to see the return of schoolteacher/Barbara Hershey lookalike Suzanne Farrell (Abigail Spencer). 

7. A week later, AMC premieres (or re-premieres, following a June 13 sneak peek) its brainy new thriller Rubicon, starring James Badge Dale as a government intelligence analyst who realizes his bosses take part in a vast conspiracy pulling the strings of world events. Ostensibly a complex, cooly intelligent mind-bender of a serial – think The X-Files without the geeky weirdness – it’s as different from the network’s other two shows as Mad Men and Breaking Bad are from each other. Miranda Richardson, Arliss Howard, and Jessica Collins co-star, with the great Peter Gerety (Homicide: Life On The Street) in a crucial guest-starring role in the pilot. Expect something adrenalin-fueled, like 24 or Alias, and you’ll be disappointed. The show has moodier, slower-burning intentions in mind. 

8. Finally, we can’t think of a better way to celebrate America than with this clip from The Candidate, director Michael Ritchie’s still-topical skewering of politics and the otherwise good people who get drawn into its seductive vortex. Robert Redford plays Bill McKay, the activist running for a Senate seat against a folksy conservative incumbent with the awesome name Crocker Jarmon. Released in 1972, McKay’s exhausted meltdown into a gibberish of buzz words remains hilarious – and relevant – almost forty years later. 

Happy July 4, everybody. God bless America.

- Michael Kabel

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