Miscellaneous Debris: July 2010 Edition

Our end-of-the-month wrapup of reviews, news, and observations that didn’t get a full post.

Here come the dog days of summer, but it’s not a complete loss. For as blah as the summer has been so far - and it’s been a giant yawn, by and large – the coming weeks show plenty of promise. In the meantime, last weekend’s San Diego Comic-Con and the upcoming fall television season has given probably half the Internet several weeks worth of blogging and complaining fuel.

Some of our own complaints and blogging fuel are listed below. All opinions are our own, and as always they’re presented in no particular order of importance.

1. Actually, first things first: Mad Men‘s fourth season premiere was a virtuoso bit of television, as good if not better than the series’ vaunted pilot and a jump ahead in quality from the season three debut. With its characters entering the post-JFK era – some leaping, some getting pulled along by the undertow of changing times – the show seems at once re-energized and recommitted. Jon Hamm continued to bring new range and depth to Don Draper, as Matthew Weiner’s script stood the character on his handsome head, while Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) and Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) finally emerged as the confident grown-ups fans have waited for them to become.

Weiner made some comments last spring that the show would only run six seasons, and it’s not hard to see this ep as the halfway point in the story’s evolution. This coming week’s episode reveals – just in time for summer – the first-ever Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce Christmas party.

2. It’s fun to get what we want. After complaining last year that we wished some former A-list leading men deserved and were due for comebacks, two of our picks have movies opening this week and next. Kevin Kline’s indie comedy The Extra Man, co-starring Paul Dano and John C. Reilly, opens in limited release this weekend. Next week’s The Other Guys, starring Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell, co-stars Michael Keaton; we’ll mention again that The Merry Gentleman, Keaton’s directing debut, remains one of our favorite films released since this blog began a couple of years ago.

In the meantime, here’s the trailer for The Extra Man:

3. Nothing came out of the San Diego Comic-Con that really amazed us, but a few things surfaced that sort of disappointed. We’ve made the case before that Joss Whedon isn’t the best choice to write or direct the upcoming Avengers movie, but now that he’s confirmed to do both we’ll give him an even chance. Mark Ruffalo (Zodiac) is a trade-up in replacing Edward Norton as the Hulk, and it’s good to see Jeremy Renner finally confirmed as Hawkeye. All the same, it’s still a bummer to hear that Avengers founding member and mainstay Hank Pym will not appear in the film. The full cast list was revealed at the convention’s panel.

For no good reason, here’s an episode of The Avengers: United They Stand cartoon from the late 90s. Actually, it’s so painfully 90′s it might as well be sporting a pair of Doc Marten’s and a Friends haircut.

4. Better late than never: we’re happy to report that The Unusuals, the exceptional police comedy-drama that Renner headlined last year, has been available on DVD for a while now. Co-starring Terry Kinney, Amber Tamblyn, Adam Goldberg and Harold Perrineau, the show mixed black humor with sometimes surreal drama and plot twists, creating something unlike anything else on network television. Naturally, it lasted just ten episodes before ABC pulled the plug. Renner immediately went on to acclaim in The Hurt Locker, so hopefully the network regrets its cancellation. Nine episodes are available for streaming on Netflix.

5. October sees the release of The Social Network, which except for its pedigree might seem cause for suspicion; still, an Aaron Sorkin script directed by David Fincher is too good to pass up, and anyway a film that’s intelligently made about current events is seldom a bad thing, if ever.

Based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires and starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake, the film chronicles the rise of Facebook. By the way, please join our Facebook group.

The film opens nationwide October 1.

6. In previous installments of Miscellaneous Debris we chastised both Rescue Me and Leverage for their egregious product placement, devoting too much time to mentioning or in some cases outright singing the praises of their commercial sponsors. Happily, both shows have toned that down quite a bit in their current runs. After a hit-or-miss second season, Leverage seems to have found its legs, with each episode by and large more entertaining than the last. Meanwhile Rescue Me, though too quick once again to fall back on the Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary)-as-human-trainwreck plotlines, has returned to ideas from earlier seasons that worked well before getting abandoned. In particular, the ace comic chemistry between firefighters Sean Garrity (Steven Pasquale) and Mike Silletti (Mike Lombardi) and the reappearance of slain firefighter Jimmy Keefe (James McCaffrey) improve every episode in which they’re used.

7. Ten years ago, Ang Lee’s martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon caused something of a quiet sensation, re-defining how audiences (particularly sci-fi and fantasy audiences) thought about the limits and potential of the action film genre. The  film’s luxurious cinematography and eye-googling special effects, combined with a simple but moving story of revenge and deferred love, made larger Western franchises including the then-popular Matrix and Star Wars prequel trilogy seem instantly cumbersome and outdated. Subsequent imitators and similar wuxia efforts trickled through Western multiplexes for years afterward.

A Blu-Ray edition was released this month (a previous edition was available in a three-film wuxia box set), and though we haven’t seen it yet we can only imagine how Lee’s incredible vision appears in high-definition. If you haven’t seen the film, you should. If you have, it might be time to revisit it.

8.  Criterion has officially announced the Blu-Ray and two-disc DVD release of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line. Set to debut September 28, Criterion’s edition includes a new digital transfer supervised by Malick, thirteen minutes of outtakes, interviews with cast members, newsreels of the actual fighting on Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands, and audio tracks of the Melanesian chants heard throughout the film.

To reiterate what we said a couple of months ago: Upon its 1998 release the film was unfairly ignored by a public that preferred the more simplistic jingoism of Saving Private Ryan (released earlier that year) or felt leery of its sorrowful, meditative tone. Nevertheless, Malick’s eye for arresting imagery didn’t dull one bit after an almost twenty year hiatus from filmmaking; the trailer alone is more picturesque than the entirety of most films, and also more moving. 

Our annual summer hiatus runs through next week. We’ll return Tuesday, August 10 with more of what you come here for. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel

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Miscellaneous Debris, April 2010 Edition

Commentary and analysis of interesting stuff that didn’t get a full post.  

April’s over, and the summer movie season is chomping at the box office bit. There’s not much going on in movies right now, but like most Aprils that dearth of films – leftovers, misfires and films little-loved by their studios – pretty much represent the lull before the storm. (An exception being The Losers, a film we liked more than we thought we would.) The sequel to Iron Man, which most fans of the original have been looking forward to since its closing credits, opens next weekend; meanwhile the heavily-hyped remake of A Nightmare On Elm Street finally opens tomorrow. In the coming weeks – May alone – we’ll see the premieres of Robin Hood, Sex and The City 2, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and Shrek Forever After. June promises a similar metric ton of movies with budgets in the eight- and nine-digit range.  

In the meantime, here’s our favorite news items and topics we thought were worthy of discussion and/or coverage, even if we never got around to blogging about them all on their own. They’re in no particular order of importance.  

1. A couple of years or so ago we called Ang Lee’s Ride With the Devil to task for its choppy narrative structure and uneven performances. A just-released Criterion Edition premieres the director’s cut of Lee’s (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Ice Storm) Civil War saga, along with a new screen transfer and some pretty straightforward extra features. Though often well-staged and intelligent, the barely released 1999 theatrical version promised more than it ultimately delivered, especially in the way of performance: many of the supporting characters, including roles played by Skeet Ulrich and the suburb Jeffrey Wright, got short shrift despite hints of richer work left on the cutting room floor. Hopefully the ten restored minutes smooth out these problems, letting the film it could have been emerge. It’s available in both DVD and Blu-Ray formats, in keeping with Criterion’s aggressive new high-def release strategy.  

Wow: Blunt

2. There’s no poster image or teaser trailer available yet, but we’re still intrigued as all Hell by the upcoming The Adjustment Bureau, starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt as potential lovers kept apart by mysterious and possibly sinister forces. Damon plays a firebrand congressman fascinated by a beautiful ballerina (Blunt), despite strange circumstances that continuously work to keep them separated. Writer-director George Nolfi (The Bourne Ultimatum) loosely based the script on the Philip K. Dick short story “The Adjustment Team,” in which reality is carefully managed by unseen but powerful orchestrators. The film also stars Anthony Mackie, John Slattery, Terrence Stamp, Daniel Dae Kim and Shohreh Aghdashloo. It’s currently slated for a late September release.  

The film probably won't contain this many characters. (Damn.)

3. In other upcoming movie news, though some sites – including imdb.com – are reporting it as a done deal, Joss Whedon is still not confirmed to direct the upcoming The Avengers. While on press junkets for his own Iron Man 2, executive producer Jon Favreau has told audiences there’s no deal “in stone” for Whedon to handle Marvel’s team of superheroes, which include Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, and The Hulk.  

To throw in our two cents, without ambiguity: Whedon is the wrong choice for The Avengers. Its very concept suggests a scale and scope that do not play to the writer-director’s strengths, and to try and shoehorn the two together wouldn’t benefit either. To be less charitable, we don’t think Whedon’s recent efforts are on a par with his earlier work: 2005′s Serenity was a muddled and solipsistic bit of nastiness, while Dollhouse was a mixed success at best. We’d much rather see him attempt a Marvel franchise closer to his own style, such as Elektra (we’re not forgetting about the Jennifer Garner trainwreck) or possibly Firestar.  

4. Just about matching the retro magnificence of last year’s Watchmen viral videos, the following spot for the Lots-O’-Huggin Bear from Toy Story 3 perfectly replicates children’s commercials from the decade that was pretty much a golden age of toys. Just watching it once got us thinking of similar products from the era, including Teddy Ruxpin and the weird, weird My Buddy doll for boys. The video below perfectly captures the fashions and 10K graphics of the era, while the clogged tapehead static at the bottom of the image is a stroke of authentic genius:  

 

Let's do the time warp again.

5. The May sweeps period begin today, so if you’re hoping your own favorite low-rated television program gets renewed for another season this is the time to watch or to write its network. For weeks now we’ve been following the slow ratings erosion of ABC’s once and presumed hits Flash Forward and V on great sites like tvbythenumbers.com as a kind of loose experiment, tracking the series’ episode quality from week to week and comparing it against the posted ratings the next day. 

Of the two shows, though both are borderline we give V the better chance of renewal. The central cast is smaller (and presumably cheaper), the storylines pick up steam with each passing week, and we suspect its long-range dramatic possibilities are greater (Flash Forward is already flailing somewhat in this regard; the conspiracy behind the time-jumping blackouts remain frustratingly vague in motivation.) On the other hand Flash Forward is a solid hit overseas, especially in Europe, and it’s apparently something of a bargain to produce, as well. The network will announce its fall season May 18. 

6. Sometimes ignoring the ratings is a good thing. Despite its under-performance this spring, TNT has renewed Southland for a third season to begin airing in 2011. The “second” season aired by the network consisted of episodes that original network NBC had ordered but not broadcast, and featured a streamlined structure that focused on self-contained stories with greater emphasis on individual characters. TNT would be wise to allow show creator Ann Biderman and staff to continue that momentum. Southland has the potential to become as  good as show as ER or Biderman’s previous NYPD Blue, but like countless other ensemble cast shows that rose to greatness it needs time and breathing room to develop. 

7. Finally, Serena Bramble’s “valentine” to film noir has been all over the online world for a while now, but we’re so amazed by it we want to include it on our site as a way of saying thank you. Presenting some of the genre’s finest work meticulously and often brilliantly set to Massive Attack’s aural bombing raid “Angel,” the montage is a six-miuntes and change crash course in what makes noir so haunting, and why its fans hold it in such romantic regard. If you’re a noir fan already, the video can act like a brochure to explain its smoky charms to the uninitiated. 

 

We’ll be back next week. Thanks for reading. 

- Michael Kabel

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Miscellaneous Debris, February 2010 Edition

The latest installment of our Movitetone-newsreel-in-blog-form recurring feature.  

Seriously, is it Spring yet? Like a lot of the United States, winter’s icy fingers continue to clutch and grab at us even while February goes out like a lamb. A frozen solid lamb, encased in thick, sticky ice. We didn’t get to the movies much this month, mainly because a lot of the new releases didn’t interest us and anyway we were working on other things. Still, a few items popped up on our radar, and they’re listed below in no particular order of importance.  

All opinions are our own, by the way. They may be different from yours. That’s okay.  

1. Following up our earlier obituary for Brittany Murphy, the Los Angeles Coroner’s final report  indicates there were no signs of drug or alcohol abuse, and that the actress’ body was not dangerously thin at the time of her death. The 84-page report was released Febuary 25, and reiterated earlier conclusions that Murphy’s death was accidental but also preventable, and that no foul play was suspected.  

2. Ungracefully moving from the tragic to the inane, rumors circulated the Internet this week that John Krasinski (The Office) may sign to play Marvel Comics’ super-patriot Captain America. We’ll just add our voice to the chorus of skepticism. Krasinski isn’t a bad actor, yet we don’t see him as the World War II battlefield leader that the script to The First Avenger: Captain America reportedly requires. Of the possibilities mentioned in this latest round of rumors, we’d probably go with Scott Porter (Friday Night Lights), even though we think most of them – including Michael Cassidy, Mike Vogel, and Chace Crawford – are all too young for the role. Remember that Iron Man was a surprise hit thanks in large part to the irresistable performance given by a 43-year old Robert Downey, Jr.  

3. If you’re not already watching Southland, the serial drama TNT rescued from the ever-widening NBC vortex, the show’s second season begins this Tuesday, March 2. Its initial half-dozen or so episodes had some rough patches, including a surfeit of characters jockeying for clarity in the breakneck plotlines, but the episodes themselves were excellent more often than not. So far the standouts among the cast are Regina King as a LAPD homicide detective slowly buckling under the strain of her job, and Shawn Hatosy as a gang task force agent trying to balance a neurotic wife (Emily Bergl) with working against a ruthless gang that may have him outsmarted.  

  

4. With the Academy Awards just nine days or so away, we’re still mulling over our predictions. We sort of expect Avatar to get Best Picture, given the Academy’s hunger for populist appeal just now, though we’re usually and embarrassingly wrong about such things. If we got to choose the winners, we have to say we’d pick The Hurt Locker from the (long) list of nominees. At the least, that film’s Jeremy Renner deserves the Best Actor nod.  

We’ll have our complete list of awards picks next week.  

5. A recent viewing of The Magnificent Seven got us to wondering who’d play the mighty group of gunfighters in a new version. We’re actually a little surprised Hollywood hasn’t tried it already. (The burly excess of the upcoming The Expendables with its vaguely similar concept notwithstanding.) We imagine Chow Yun-Fat in the Chris Adams role (played in the original by Yul Brynner), with George Clooney as Vin (Steve McQueen) and Clive Owen as the knife-throwing Britt (James Coburn.) We can also see Mad Men‘s John Slattery as the dapper, nerve-wracked Lee (Robert Vaughn) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the firebrand Chico (Horst Bucholz). Finally, who better than Javier Bardem to play the bandit king Calvera (Eli Wallach)? Post your own ideas below, please, but here’s the trailer to the original:  

  

6. Pixar’s John Carter of Mars project keeps picking up talented cast members, and as longtime fans of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novels we keep getting more enthused for the film, the studio’s first attempt at live action. Besides stars Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins, the cast now also features Mark Strong (Sherlock Holmes), Ciaran Hinds (There Will Be Blood), Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad), Willem Dafoe (Platoon), Samantha Morton (In America), Polly Walker (Rome), Thomas Haden Church (Sideways) and Dominic West (The Wire).  

The swashbuckling story (think Lord of the Rings crossed with Star Wars) tells of an American Civil War officer’s adventures on the barbaric world of Mars, or Barsoom, eventually uniting its several warlike races. Burroughs wrote more than a dozen stories set on the fictionalized planet, so Pixar undoubtedly has trilogy or more in mind. The film is set for release in 2012.  

Ask your parents: Leno

  7. We harbor little respect for the man and even less affection, but Jay Leno’s return to The Tonight Show and NBC’s willingness to bring him back on at the expense of the much funnier Conan O’Brien indicates something that a lot of the entertainment media likes to pretend doesn’t exist: the millions of television viewers who don’t give a shit about what’s hip or edgy or even on the pop culture radar at all.  As commentator Steve Sternberg points out, Leno’s audience isn’t anywhere near the over-celebrated 18-24 demographic, and likely remained unphased by the public sentiment that bolstered O’Brien in the recent debacle. We imagine Leno’s fan base typically skews toward having plenty of money, too, a quality we’re sure advertisers find appealing.  

8. Finally, we recently saw – and loved – Robert Siodmak’s 1948 film noir Cry of the City, starring Victor Mature and noir heavyweight Richard Conte (The Big Combo) in some of their finest performances. Lieutenant Candella (Mature) stalks career criminal Martin Rome (Conte) through as realistic a ghetto as was put on film up to that point. The film isn’t as famous as Siodmak’s next effort, Criss Cross (which we frankly find a little overrated), but it’s every bit as enjoyable for noir afficianados.  

The film isn’t available on DVD yet, but it is available on YouTube, and Fox Movie Classics has aired it several times recently, as well.  

  

We’ll be back next week. Thanks for reading.  

- Michael Kabel 

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Miscellaneous Debris, June Edition

Items of interest and observation that don’t merit 750-1000 words.

 

The Fourth of July is more or less the halfway point of summer, meaning we’re virtually halfway through the biggest movie season of the year. And yet for a while now we’re been just trying to stay awake. Far from anything really memorable, summer 2009 will likely go in the books as more memorable for what it wasn’t than what it ever was. Films are making money, by and large: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen had its 200 million dollar opening week, putting it on a fast track to top the summer’s current money maker Star Trek. But there’s no surprise, crossing-demographic runaway blockbuster this year, compared to 2008′s The Dark Knight or even Iron Man. The big summer movies, immediately recognizable as such, are marching through the theatres with dreary precision, one giving way to another like multimillion dollar dominoes.

Still, movie news keeps accumulating. The following list includes some observations, ideas, and occasional snarky remarks we’ve compiled while working on longer pieces. All the opinions are just our own, of course.

1. Is the lowest common denominator approach that’s been stifling the selection of available Blu-Ray format titles finally beginning to thaw? Recent weeks saw such classics as The Seventh Seal, Dr. Strangelove, and Last Year at Marienbad making their debut on the high-def medium, classing up shelves usually dominated by much lower brow fare. Fans of foreign cinema will be glad to know that Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha makes its Blu-Ray debut August 18, while Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing debuts just this week. We imagine Sal’s Pizzeria looks great in high definition.

We expect lots of this.

2. Meanwhile, the Lord of the Rings trilogy seems to be inching closer to a release of its own, according to this report, even though a release of the films’ straight-to-DVD expanded versions will wait until the 2011 premiere of The Hobbit. The three films collectively made just shy of three trillion dollars in worldwide box office receipts, so why Warner Brothers would drag heels on releasing a full edition in the meantime is anyone’s guess. Maybe they’re as pessimistic about Hobbit co-director Guillermo Del Toro’s vision for the LOTR prequel as we are?

Box office 'Deliverance': Ferrell in LOTL

3. In a summer with no surprise hit (yet), what about the bombs? So far Terminator: Salvation, Angels & Demons, Land of the Lost, and The Taking of Pelham 123 have all fallen short of expectations, while the mid-range budgeted Year One also seems destined not to recoup its money. Poor word of mouth hurt Terminator, and Pelham 123 likely should have come out later in the year, when more adults frequent multiplexes. As for Land of the Lost, Angels & Demons and Year One, we’re blaming audience shtick fatigue in all cases. We’ll tempt fate here and predict that Bruno also disappoints: previews make it out to be nothing more than Gay Borat, and audiences may take a “been there, done that” attitude as a result.

Just dandy: Depp

4. If Universal pushes Public Enemies any harder they’re going to risk a groin injury. The seemingly relentless advertising campaign, already somewhat misleading in depicting Michael Mann’s reported character study as an action-adventure romp, has commercials all over television, mostly featuring Johnny Depp’s good looks. We expect very good things from the film, but if early audiences feel baited and switched the film could likely join the crowd of turkeys mentioned above. It’s also not a good sign that all the rave critical comments used in the TV ads are from Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers, who’s essentially the go-to guy for movie critic testimonials.

The cast of The Nine

5. DirecTV deserves some applause for bringing two of HBO’s most acclaimed dramas that aren’t The Sopranos to a wider audience. Last month the satellite provider began airing reruns of Deadwood and Barry Levinson’s landmark 90s-era prison drama Oz on its The 101 channel, presenting them uncut and without commercials. Coupled with its resurrection of worthy but prematurely cancelled network dramas Smith and The Nine, the all but unknown The 101 offers better summer programming than the major networks.

Not your father's G.I. Joe - and that's the problem.

6. The rumors about fired directors and other postproduction crises surrounding G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra only throw fuel on a bonfire of backlash for a film that’s due to premiere for another five weeks yet. Part of the cynicism, and a big chunk of the problem, is that the creators have violated a lesson that Hollywood seems to finally have learned about adapting comic books: don’t screw with what endeared the subject matter to audiences in the first place. Past superficial costuming similarities in some of the characters, the film bears little resemblance to the 80s cartoon and toy line, trading loyalty to that nostalgia for some generic looking Michael Bay-style histrionics. The producers should know better. And knowing is half the battle.

7. Continuing his long odyssey through the entirety of genre flick purgatory, Nicolas Cage will appear next March in Swordfish director Dominic Sena’s sword and sorcery horror adventure Season of the Witch. Cage plays a knight transporting a witch to a group of priests who will determine if she started the Black Plague. Ron Perlman (Sons of Anarchy) and British actress Claire Foy (Little Dorritt) co-star. Hard to believe Cage was once considered one of America’s most potent leading men, with versatile turns in Leaving Las Vegas and Red Rock West. But, films like this, Knowing and Bangkok Dangerous must be making money somewhere, because they keep getting made.

8. Finally, Ang Lee returns to theatres with August’s Taking Woodstock, a based-on-true story about the small Upstate New York town that more or less played host to the Woodstock music festival (the original one in 1969, not the corporate crap in the 90s.) Though comedy is probably no one’s first thought when discussing the meticulous Lee (Brokeback Mountain, The Ice Storm) the unpretentious feel and goofy spirit in the trailer below looks all kinds of promising. The broad ensemble cast includes Eugene Levy, Emile Hirsch, Zoe Kazan, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Paul Dano. It also stars Liev Shreiber as a gun-toting transvestite, which we hope was actually a common sight at the over-revered music concert.

Join us Friday for our review of Public Enemies. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel
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Five Good Books That Should Be Great Movies

Great novels that are due and overdue for a leap to the big screen.

Ignatius Reilly, the poster child for Development Hell

Books, as we’ve said before, are like movies that play in your head. Good books are movies you don’t mind watching over and over again on the screen in your mind. The film industry has appropriated all kinds of books virtually since its inception, taking material from the best fiction and nonfiction as well as from the lowest genre potboilers. There’s just no way of predicting how a book will translate: Hollywood has made masterpieces out of humble paperbacks but also made garbage of bona fide classics. Films and movies aren’t exactly alike, but they’re close enough in structure and pacing that it’s sometimes hard to believe filmmakers could screw up excellent source material. But they manage.

We were excited by recent news announcing that Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars novels are headed for filming soon, at last bringing two classics of science fiction into cinema. The following is five additional examples of worthy books we’d like to see on the screen, if only so that cinema’s much wider audience can take notice of their superb stories. Just for the sake of variety, we’ve tried to include samples of literature of many different styles and periods.

Life During Wartime, by Lucius Shepard (1987) Shepard’s Cold War thriller is part horror tale, part allegory and part military war epic, forming a mosaic of genres typical of his strange genius. Set amid a U.S.-led guerrilla war in Central America, the story follows infantryman David Mingolla as he joins an elite cadre of psychic tacticians but finds his fledgling abilities much much vaster than he realized, allowing him to bend reality to his will and challenge the other psychics manipulating world events. Suggested cast: We imagine Jeremy Renner (The Unusuals) playing Mingolla, with Vinessa Shaw (Two Lovers) as his adversary and kindred spirit Deborah. Imagine the film as: A cross between Scanners, Apocalypse Now, and The Matrix. Ideal director: David Cronenberg.

The Big Nowhere, by James Ellroy (1988) A homophobic sheriff’s deputy, a mafia thug and an anguished investigator desperately pursue a brutal serial killer through McCarthy-era Los Angeles while communists, gangsters and politicians jockey for power. The second and arguably the darkest of Ellroy’s “L.A. Quartet” cycle of novels, it’s similar in tone and structure to L.A. Confidential but even bleaker and more cynical. And its ending, for better or worse, is anything but “Hollywood.” Suggested cast: Ryan Gosling (Fracture) stars as the self-loathing Deputy Danny Upshaw, alongside Michael Hogan (Battlestar Galactica) as repentant enforcer Buzz Meeks and Dean Winters (Oz) as weary crusader Mal Considine. No one on Earth should be allowed to play the monumentally evil Dudley Smith except James Cromwell, who nailed the same role in L.A. Confidential. Imagine the film as: Chinatown, Body Double and Manhunter combined. Ideal director: James Gray.

Five Skies, by Ron Carlson (2007) Three men – a petty criminal, a recent widower, and a Hollywood construction foreman – work at building a stunt ramp beside a gorge in the Idaho wilderness, all so that a female stunt driver (think Danica Patrick) can jump the ravine on Pay Per View. The three men confront their past as the ramp slowly takes shape and form. Suggested cast: Damian Lewis (Life) stars as the guilt-ridden foreman Arthur Key, alongside Chris Pine (Star Trek) as thief Ronnie Panelli and Sam Elliott as the heartbroken Darwin Gallegos. Imagine the film as: The Wages of Fear and Tender Mercies merged with Days of Heaven. Ideal director: Terrence Malick.

The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford  (1927) Easy to visualize as a costume drama with an edgy anger to it - an antidote to the huffing and puffing Oscarbait of recent years – Ford’s Victorian Era novel swirls around two married couples spending weeks together over twenty years at a German spa. The titular good soldier, Edward Ashburnham, is a perfect English gentleman except for his almost compulsive need to seduce women – including his friend’s wife. Long praised as an influential work both for its structure and style, the book was previously a 1981 telepic, so its time has easily come round again. Suggested cast: Liev Shreiber (Defiance) and Cate Blanchett (Bandits) play Ashburnham and his lover Florence Dowell; Robert Downey, Jr. costars as the cuckolded John Dowell alongside Maggie Gyllenhaal (The Dark Knight) as Leonora Ashurnham. Imagine the film as: A mix of Last Year At Marienbad, The Ice Storm, and The English Patient. Ideal director: Michael Winterbottom.

Night Train, by Martin Amis (1997) Amis’ critically-lauded 1997 fling with the hardboiled detective genre features an alcoholic, emotionally crippled police detective trying to solve the apparent suicide of a beautiful scientist with every reason to live. The investigation takes a turn for the darkly existential, and Amis twists conventions further by making the troubled detective a woman, too. The novel’s abrupt ending is like two fingers joliting out of the page, poking you in the eyes. Suggested cast: Laura Linney (Breach) plays the self-destructive Detective Mike Hoolihan, Amy Adams (Enchanted) plays the deceased Jennifer Rockwell, and Paul Schneider (Away We Go) co-stars as Rockwell’s lover and suspected killer Trader Faulkner. Imagine the film as: The Pledge, Prime Suspect and Laura compressed into a brainy whodunnit. Ideal director: John Dahl.

- Michael Kabel
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I Don’t Need Your Civil War

Why are so many films set around the Civil War so terrible?

At least the poster was cool.

A late holiday weekend viewing of Ang Lee’s barely-released 1999 effort Ride With the Devil got me thinking about movies set during the War Between The States (or, depending on where you live in the South, the “War of Northern Agression.”) For as many very good or great films have been made about Vietnam, and of course World War II, there’s actually precious little good fimmaking about the war that:

1. retains the highest number of American casualties;
2. gave birth to the Gettysburg Address, probably as important a document to American notions of identity as the Declaration of Independence;
3. inflicted wounds on the sense of America as a unified place that in many ways have never healed.

With such fertile material for filmmaking – to say nothing of the tragic, almost mythical characters that led and served in the war – it’s a bit confusing why Hollywood hasn’t returned to this particular well more often than it has. Is it because studios market films to northern and southern states alike, and it’s hard to depict the Civil War without choosing a side? It can’t possibly be lack of interest – Ken Burns’ 1990 The Civil War miniseries not only drew viewers in record numbers but redefined American public broadcasting’s very programming shape and texture.

Once upon a time in the Midwest: Ulrich, Kilcher, Maguire

Ride With the Devil manages to deal with the war without actually getting into its main theatres, focusing instead on the bloody guerrilla warfare between the Union Army and Confederate-sympathizing “bushwhackers” that ravaged parts of Missouri and Kansas. A little-known pocket of American history, the fighting was as savage – and as cruel – as any modern conflict, yet perhaps because of its irregular structure these brush fire wars get short-changed in the history texts. Working from Daniel Woodrell’s novel, Lee focuses the film on the insurgent efforts of several bushwhackers, played by Tobey Maguire, Skeet Ulrich, and Jeffrey Wright, to harry and disrupt the Union’s presence in the region. Muddying an already difficult and unfamiliar premise, McGuire’s “Dutchie” Roedel is from a Union-sympathizing family, while Wright’s Daniel Holt is an emancipated slave fighting for the Southern cause out of loyalty to his emancipator (Simon Baker). Taking place over several years – an epic scope, if not scale – the film eventually orients on Roedel’s efforts to escape the fighting while caring for his dead friend Jack Bull’s (Ulrich) lover (Jewel Kilcher) and child, following a well-staged but historically  ineffective raid on the Union colony of Lawrenceville, Kansas.

The film’s pacing is turgid and uneven, and details from James Schamus’s script often come across undernourished: events happen that beg for context or further elaboration but get dropped in favor of action sequences that in their turn are never fully utilized. The lack of focus in a film dependent on geography makes the effort as a whole feel rootless and restive with the scenes it chooses to present. Maguire’s soporific performance doesn’t help ground the film, either, and potentially intriguing performances by Ulrich, Kilcher, and the always proficient Wright become neglected as the plot unfolds. The end result is something like a collection of scenes starring the same actors that never adds up to a film, or even a narrative statement.

Someday the mountain might get 'em, but the law never will.

For as poorly realized as Ride With the Devil was, it at least didn’t suffer from the embarrassment of disingenuous excess that 2003′s Cold Mountain wore like a pyrite crown. Arguably the purest example ever of Oscar-baiting style over substance, Charles Frazier’s story of a wounded Confederate soldier’s (Jude Law) odyssey to his North Carolina home and true love (Nicole Kidman) was so bogged down by Anthony Minghella’s graceless script and direction, as well as an A-list cast dead set against expanding their established screen personae, that in many ways any sense of story or emotional texture never stood a chance.

Rather than explain an important chapter in American history or translate a well-written (if overrated) historical novel, the film instead reduces the war into a struggle between the beautiful and virtuous and the less beautiful but amorally vicious. Such conflict is possibly accurate, but likely not with the emotional and political simplicity the film chooses to display. Like the recent Kidman-led bomb Australia, Cold Mountain would rather dazzle than get its facts in a row or take the time to show why they are important. That’s fine for weightless entertainment, but when dealing with important history some kind of respect for the truth ought to be a necessary component of narrative integrity.

Kidman in one of her many pristine gowns worn during the film's wartime setting

A film starring an Englishman and an Australian and directed by an Englishman, shot in Romania, perhaps stood little chance of historical veracity. But the truncheon, one-dimensional depiction of most of the supporting characters combined with egregious geographical errors – Law’s protagonist manages to find the Atlantic Ocean by traveling west from Raleigh, North Carolina – undermine its attempts at dramatic weight. If a film gets so many basic truths wrong, why trust its insight into the esoteric? The film ultimately has little answer to whatever routine genre questions (Can love triumph over war? What is the point of conflict? etc) it raises anyway. The ending of the novel, meant as comment on the inevitability of violence, gets reduced by Minghella’s simplistic narrative understanding into another in an interminable parade of brutal acts presumably meant to give pathos but that serve instead only to further numb the audience.

On top of everything else, it's a remake.

Finally, though it’s not explicitly about the Civil War, 2007′s 3:10 To Yuma is enough like the two films discussed above, including reels of stylized violence and centering on a war veteran (Christian Bale), not to invite attention. A would-be Hollywood blockbuster with a heart of pyrotechnics and nothing but money on its mind, the film is neither plausible nor particularly well-crafted. And thanks to at least one spectacularly awful performance, it’s often difficult to watch on even the most superficial action-flick level.

Following a string of plot contrivances, Union Army veteran and hardscrabble farmer Dan Evans (Christian Bale) is given the task of taking roguish, Russell Crowe-like outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) to the government train that will ferry him to prison. But Wade’s gang, led by his protege Charlie Prince (Ben Foster) conspires to stop the delivery, leading to a final shootout that defies the laws of physics and human anatomy. It’s the kind of film where, in a weird inversion of the great Westerns of the 1970s, all the bad guys are bulletproof and all the good guys can’t shoot straight, if only for the purpose of prolonging the gunfire.

It was suggested elsewhere that Crowe and Bale might have challenged themselves by switching parts. That’s a good idea, but all their natural charisma can’t help director James Mangold’s (Walk The Line) distracted storytelling or to alleviate a screenplay crippled by a shapeless second act. Meanwhile Foster, in a part ostensibly created in studio focus meetings solely for the purpose of courting teen moviegoers, is beyond awful as the sadistic Prince. The term “restraint” is apparently not in the man’s acting vocabulary.

The emotional impact of a hotel courtesy phone to the head: Crowe

Hollywood’s love affair with the costume drama knows no bounds, and some of its earliest milestones – Gone With the Wind, Birth of a Nation - dealt with the Civil War at a time when many filmgoers had heard stories of its horror from parents and older siblings. Maybe nearness to the actual events inspires filmmakers to greater attempts at accuracy, as their audiences can readily cry foul if they take too many liberties: there are still World War II veterans around to gauge veracity, and plenty of Vietnam vets as well. Or maybe it’s the lingering presence of the wars’ unreconciled memories that guides writers and directors to create films that do more than favor violence and dogmatc characterization over accuracy and depth. It’s hard to write in a vacuum, and wars are nothing if not loud.

Maybe it’s both. But for as important as the Civil War was to our history, for all the lessons it still has to teach us about America’s purpose and how our differences of culture and values repeatedly tear us apart, it seems the films made about that terrible conflict ought to be better- or at least well-made.

- Michael Kabel
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