Review: X-Men: First Class

Clumsy, hollow prequel makes for summer’s first train wreck.

Neither a fresh reimagining of the stagnant X-Men film franchise or a back to basics return to what made Bryan Singer’s first two efforts in the series often (if never completely) enthralling, director Matthew Vaughn’s X-Men: First Class struggles to find its narrative footing and then collapses beneath a Frankenstein script and leaden, arrythmic pacing. Squandering an intriguing retro setting and a premise that ought to write itself on derivative and pained action sequences and mawkish dramatics, the film amounts to a long, tired rehash of a lot of hoary marketing gimmicks. And amid a widely divergent field of performances it includes an aggressively terrible performance by a veteran character actor who ought to know better.

The film starts with a scene lifted verbatim from Singer’s vastly superior X2, detailing Erik Lensherr’s - the boy who will grow up to become Magneto – struggles in a Polish concentration camp during World War II. This film continues his ordeal under scientist/cackling maniac Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), whose sadistic methods kickstart the young mutant’s abilities. Meanwhile in England, a young Charles Xavier befriends homeless, shape-shifting waif Raven, promising her a safe haven despite her otherwordly appearance.

Probably just a headache: McAvoy as Charles Xavier

Jump ahead to the early 1960s, when Shaw is under investigation by the CIA for interfering with U.S. military operations. Agent Moira McTaggert (Rose Byrne) infiltrates his casino/brothel and witnesses the mutant powers of several of his henchmen, but is dismissed by stodgy superiors who use her findings as evidence women shouldn’t be operatives. Instead, she contacts Oxford University grad Xavier for insight into mutations. Though the young geneticist’s earnest briefing is likewise met with skepticism, he and Raven are recruited by an agency scientist (Oliver Platt) to head up a division of mutant spies.

An aborted attempt to catch Shaw brings Xavier into contact with Lensherr, who’s spent his adult life stalking his former tormentor around the world in search of vengeance. Lensherr reluctantly joins the fledgling group, accompanying Xavier on a recruitment drive around the country. The script uses a familiar structure for this, one for which TV Tropes.org has a pretty ironic name, and it allows for a surprise cameo given extra spice by the precise use of an f-bomb.

The children of the atom model their fall catalogue.

The new recruits, who include a cab driver named Darwin (Edi Gathegi) who can adapt instantly for any situation and a stripper with dragonfly wings (Zoe Kravitz), continue their training until Shaw orders an attack on their compound. The resulting combat under Vaughn’s orchestration becomes both belabored and mean-spiririted, with repeated and derivative violence that fails to establish the bad guy’s menace so much as their one-dimensionality. One of Xavier’s team is murdered, and another defects, in efforts the script ostensibly intends to bring context to the Xavier-Magneto struggles of the later films. In fact it returns to that ambition time and again (at 132 minutes long, it’s got plenty of time) but seldom completely pulls it off.

Because Xavier, Lensherr, and Raven (played in adulthood by Jennifer Lawrence) are the only fully developed characters the script allows, the rest of the “first class” are practically cyphers, distinguishable solely by their powers or, more cynically, their boy band-esque personality types: the bad boy (Lucas Till), the sensitive one (Caleb Landry Jones) the geeky one (Nicholas Holt). Their training, free of the government’s meddling – us kids can do it for ourselves! – goes off with little impediment or setback, save the semi-humorous kind typical of such sequences. The evil mutants working for Shaw – teleporting Darth Maul knockoff Azazel (Jason Flemyng) and Euro-chic tornado thrower Riptide (Alex Gonzalez) – are similarly underdeveloped.

Shaw’s master plan sets the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Xavier, Lensherr and the gang scramble to stop. The ensuing set piece makes for the film’s best sequence, allowing all the mutants to finally let loose with their powers. Though too much of the sequence details the U.S. and soviet navies looking on in fear and hostility, until its conclusion the battle is well-orchestrated and even suspenseful, a welcome relief after the previous plodding 90 or so minutes. Having said that, plot holes and continuity errors trouble its narrative coherence all the while.

When the battle’s over and the character interaction resumes, the film again finds itself in trouble. The reasons for Xavier’s confinement to a wheelchair are revealed with the grace of a sledgehammer, and with a bathos that defies common sense. Lensherr’s character arc ultimately lands him on the side of the devils, as we knew it would, and in joining him Raven becomes the terrorist Mystique (Rebecca Romihn puts in a cameo as her grown up self, too.)  The film can’t resist indulging in multiple denouement, letting Xavier and Lensherr both come to their epiphanies about their identities.

Fassbender is compelling and charming as the haunted Lensherr, and Lawrence is affecting as the shape-changer with no sense of herself. The worst turn, ironically, belongs to the film’s most seasoned veteran. Bacon is hammy and nonchalant playing a villain who ought to be halfway between Dr. No and Dr. Mengele, and his nonchalance works against the film’s sum dramatic weight. In terms of performance his idea of evil apparently runs more to Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor than Heath Ledger’s Joker, in a way that sometimes patronizing; at other times the apathy seems to waft off him. Another weak turn comes from January Jones, playing Shaw’s operative/concubine Emma Frost. Perhaps because of the 60′s setting she recycles her Betty Draper iciness, but only to diminishing returns.

The film’s screenplay carries no less than six writing credits, including Singer and Vaughn both, and the confusion typical of too many cooks in the storytelling kitchen create persistent, debilitating troubles that the final film product never takes time to figure out. At the risk of second-guessing, it’s sometimes tempting to try to spot the segments that must have come from the aborted Magneto-only prequel rumored several years ago, and then to call out the parts that must have accumulated with successive treatments – the toyetic Azazel, the tween-friendly Xavier recruits, the cursory understanding of Cold War geopolitics. All in the name of money, of course, and served up with enough bombast that maybe you won’t notice. X-Men: First Class is a film that doesn’t expect very much from itself. It hopes you won’t either.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: Inception

Christopher Nolan’s intriguing thriller is a dream come true, for better and for worse.

Inception will amaze you as long as you want to be amazed. If you’re skeptical, you’ll likely feel less so. If you start to think about its mechanics and workings for too long, it might even disappoint. It’s not a film that ages well in the days after viewing, needing your more or less unqualified complicity to really work while you’re viewing it. And like the dreams at the center of its story, logic and internal cohesion sometimes break down, and not everyone within is convincing.

Visually gorgeous and packed with suspense throughout its hefty 2 1/2 hour runtime, Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to The Dark Knight arrives in multiplexes as probably the most anticipated movie of the summer, and most people will likely be indeed wowed. Nolan reportedly worked for a decade on the script, moving it through horror and heist movie genres and refining the dream logic and its trip-wired narrative implications. The final product, as with so many of his films, is a combination of several styles and forms, and he makes them fit together seamlessly. Still, a succession of colorless performances and murky internal logic keep the film from gaining the narrative momentum of The Dark Knight or even The Prestige, Nolan’s 2006 similar examination of reality’s slippery surface. Ultimately, the new film is neither a misstep nor a leap forward.

Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) works in a vaguely suggested near-future as an “extractor,” pulling information out of his targets’ unconscious minds by invading and manipulating their dreams. When he and his cohort Arthur (Joseph Gordon Levitt) fail to extract information by Saito (Ken Watanabe), one of their assignments, they’re compelled to work for him or face the wrath of their previous employer, who its said severely punish unsuccessful operatives. Except Saito doesn’t want information withdrawn from a mind but rather planted into the head of the son (Cillian Murphy) of his business rival, the better to prevent his competitor’s incipient monopoly. This act of imbuing information – the inception of an idea - is much trickier, and one with which Cobb has a complicated and haunting history. Meanwhile, Cobb doesn’t travel into dreams alone: he carries the spectre of his dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), a presence that actively works against his efforts in the dreamscapes.

Cobb agrees to the assignment, in part because of Saito’s promise to help him return to the United States, where the children whose faces he literally can’t bear to imagine reside. Cobb is wanted, it seems, as a suspect in Mal’s death. Journeying instead to Paris and elsewhere, he recruits a new team consisting of a forger (Tom Hardy), a chemist (Dileep Rao), and Saito. Cobb also employs a neophyte dream “architect” named Ariadne upon the recommendation of his ex-father-in-law (Michael Caine.) Despite Arthur’s misgivings that Cobb’s guilt and fear will sabotage the mission, the team embarks into the scion’s mind, invading multiple levels of his subconscious to reach the heavily guarded area where Cobb can implant the spore of an idea.

The levels are for the most part exquisitely staged set pieces, with the final level – a snow-capped, mountaintop fortress worthy of a James Bond villain – offering particularly impressive visuals. The crumbling, tide-battered metropolis that represents the underbelly of Cobb’s own consciousness is also specatacular, as much if not more so than the folding streets profiled in the film’s marketing campaign. If only everything worked as well, or with such imagination. For as lovely as they are to look at, there’s a depressing literalism to the elements of the dreams presented: safe places in the mind are castles and fortresses, inner turmoil is depicted as roiling surf, protectors and defenses are presented as soldiers and military hardware. It’s not a bad creative strategy, per se, but it’s not a complicated or original one, either, and serves to lend an air of predictability to the film that it doesn’t deserve. Perhaps that was Nolan’s intention.

More troubling is an in media res approach to the dreamscape idea and to the explanation of its mechanics. The script offers an explanation that the technology was originally developed by the military, and its various drawbacks and pitfalls are explained and at times – such as Arthur’s weightless jaunt through a hotel – imaginatively staged. At other times, the method of presenting information as it becomes necessary for a given character to know gives the impression, somewhat inaccurately, that the script is making up the rules as it goes along. Nolan surely had all his ideas thought out in the decade leading up to the script’s completion; the invitation to wonder otherwise is distracting, and unfortunate. For the film’s many intelligent ideas to work, every idea and every detail has to make sense. This happens most of the time, but not all, and the one’s that don’t work, such as the collapsing bridges and mirrored walls, seem especially conspicuous in contrast.

The production design is nothing short of breathtaking, with interior and exterior spaces alike having a lived-in realism that contributes miles of authenticity to even the most fantastical story elements. As an example of Nolan and his production team’s persuasive savvy: Cobb and his accomplices are attached to their target’s conscious via wires that connect to the wrist, eschewing the visual need for the complicated and often unconvincing headgear featured in similar movies like Brainstorm and Strange Days. It’s a small choice, but a compelling one nevertheless.

Perhaps the biggest problem comes from a cast that most often isn’t up to the material, with DiCaprio especially lacking the dramatic muscle to bring Cobb’s character to its complete potential. Playing a man that’s a fugitive from himself, his country, and his family and who can find solace only in his nightmares, DiCaprio summons only lukewarm pathos, never letting his own box office persona become submerged within his character. Page, too, seems out of her depth as Ariadne, and somewhat lost without the zingy, snark-flavored dialogue of her earlier films. By contrast Cotillard, lovely and fragile without ever seeming weak, gives the film’s best performance. You understand why Cobb couldn’t stand her absence, even if DiCaprio can’t convey as much on his own. Murphy, Levitt, Watanabe, and Hardy are all good, if underused in favor of more face time for DiCaprio and Page.

(A smaller note about the cast: Tom Berenger makes a brief but welcome appearance as the scion’s advisor, marking something of a trend in Nolan’s films: he seems to enjoy hiring 1980s-era leading men for supporting parts, having used Rutger Hauer and Eric Roberts in earlier films. With a third Batman film in pre-production, Michael Pare and Steven Bauer should start polishing their resumes.)

Ultimately, Inception is a triumph of ambition but not of achievement; it’s unlikely that it would have been made at all had The Dark Knight not made a bazillion dollars, but it speaks to Nolan’s artistic integrity that for his next effort he set his artistic bar even higher. It’s too simple, and unfair, to say he couldn’t have topped The Dark Knight because his whole body of work suggests that he can and that he will. Inception, the epitome of a three-star film, is a narrow miss on the way to that eventual realization. And like any dream if you want it to amaze you it will, but its impact will fade as it recedes into memory.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Dreary, disappointing prequel arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray this week.

Since his introduction as an adversary for the Incredible Hulk thirty-five years ago, the Marvel Comics character Wolverine has come to symbolize a particular type of comics storytelling. Far from the gifted aliens, self-improving millionaires or brilliant scientists who traditionally make up the bulk of comics’ protagonists, the mutant known simply as “Logan” had powers thrust upon him not once but twice. Born a mutant and later subjected to military experiments that enhanced his natural abilities even further, his adventures are violent, uncomplicated, and thick on the spy/military tropes found in drugstore paperbacks and B-movie combat actioners.

Wolverine as a superhero is not a genius, not a strategist and not even much of a thinker, really. He’s a brute force of nature with no end of machismo, a lowbrow hero for our ever-increasingly lowbrow culture. So if X-Men Origins: Wolverine is not an especially well-thought movie, if it places its expensive emphasis on action over clarity of plot and characterization, then in a shabby sense it’s true to its subject. Does that make it a good movie? No, though its range of flaws makes it a bad one.

Directed by Gavin Hood (Rendition), the film opens with a visually and narratively murky prologue that shows Logan (Hugh Jackman) as a young boy escaping the murder of a man who may be his father. He’s abetted by his playmate Victor (Liev Shreiber), who also may or may not be his brother. Possessed of special healing powers that make them both more or less immortal, the two go on to serve in every major conflict of the next 130 years, depicted as a thrilling opening credits montage that has the pair laying waste to enemy soldiers from several armies (They always pick the right side to join.) In time they’re recruited into a special military unit composed of mutant soldiers whose leader, Colonel Stryker (Danny Huston), encourages their growing bloodlust. Logan quits the group when their – and Victor’s especially – savagery pushes him to his ethical threshold.

Jump ahead six years – David Benioff and Skip Woods’ script lets its chronology all over the place - and Logan has found solitidue in a new life working in Canada’s logging industry while romancing a local school teacher (Lynn Collins). But her apparent murder at Victor’s hands drives Logan back into Stryker’s influence. Offered the chance to have all memory of his dead love erased, he volunteers for an experiment to coat his bones with a special alien metal called “adamantium” that will make him virtually indestructible. Once so empowred, the rest of the film finds Logan getting revenge against Victor and Stryker, and liberating Stryker’s gulag of mutant prisoners on Three Mile Island.

Perhaps part of the problem is the murky structure of their source material. As their most popular character, Marvel has revised and re-imagined their hero’s origin story multiple times over the years, the better with which to entice audiences into buying “now it can be told…”  comic “events.” Possibly as a consequence, Benioff (Troy) and Woods (Swordfish) have a lot of complicated and tangled back story to address while keeping the action moving. But like the recent Watchmen, their screenplay puts spectcle above narrative, so that fight scenes (or, more frequently, Victor’s cruel execution of his targets) are constant and prolonged. That’s at least true enough to the genre: the basics of the superhero story has always boiled down to “come for the action, stay for the pathos.” Comic books are by design a visual medium, and character depth is actually a fairly recent development in their history.

Still, for an action movie the special effects should be better – really, they have to be for the film to be worth the audience’s time and money. And for a film both prefacing and expanding on the already profitable X-Men movie franchise (composed so far of two good movies by Bryan Singer and one terrible one by Brett Ratner), they should be better still. Instead, the fight sequences – and there are many - are redundant and blurred, with CGI that’s convincing only about half the time. It’s hard not to think that with such an expansive cast, many of whom also have super powers, the money was spread too thin. A scene in which Logan toys with his new metal claws while at a bathroom counter is especially unconvincing. Most unconvincing, given the carnage, is the lack of blood onscreen, obviously removed for the sake of that crucial PG-13 rating.

Jazz hands, with claws: Jackman

Making his fourth screen appearance as the hirsute Logan, Jackman is serviceable as always, but he’s seldom given anything to do except respond to events surrounding him. For an action hero he’s curiously passive until circumstances demand his attention. He’s also never entirely sympathetic as a character, as there’s no explanation for why he fought in so many wars or why he feels repulsed by his “brother’s” violence in the first place. After 150 or so years together, you’d think he’d know his constant companion better. Jackman is also given to striking dubious poses before running at his enemies, throwing his arms and legs into weird Tai Chi-like contortions that often look mannered.

Shreiber, playing the borderline feral Victor as a method exercise in animal snarl and pent-up menace, nevertheless shows again why he’s among the most underrated American actors working right now. Ryan Reynold’s (Definitely, Maybe) charm is underused as the wisecracking ninja Wade, while the normally wooden Kevin Durand (3:10 To Yuma) is effective buried beneath layers of fat suit padding as The Blob. Collins (True Blood) as Logan’s doomed love Kayla Silverfox does the best she can with a stock role that begs for further development. Despite an intermittent gumbo drawl, Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights) overachieves as the fan favorite mutant Gambit, a character whose appearance in a Bourbon Street nightclub is one of the film’s few truly suspenseful moments.

It’s no coincidence the film appears on home video so quickly. Debuting at the top of the box office with a strong $87 million opening weekend, it nevertheless sank quickly thereafter as comics fans gave only lukewarm response. And no wonder.  Wolverine is not a good film, but more significantly it is not a good film even for the kind of movie it is. Logan may not be a genius, but his long-awaited solo feature shouldn’t be so dumb.

-Michael Kabel

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(Note: A previous version of this review appeared for the film’s theatrical release.)

Review: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

The fan-favorite mutant superhero’s beginnings get a sluggish and unconvincing film treatment.

Since his introduction as an adversary for the Incredible Hulk thirty-five years ago, the Marvel Comics character Wolverine has come to symbolize not just that comics company but a particular type of comics storytelling. Far from the gifted aliens, self-improving millionaires or brilliant scientists who make up the bulk of comics’ protagonists, the mutant known simply as “Logan” had powers thrust upon him, not once but twice: he was born a mutant and later subjected to military experiments that enhanced his abilities even further. His adventures are violent, uncomplicated, and thick on the spy/military tropes found in drugstore paperbacks and B-movie combat actioners.

Wolverine as a superhero is not a genius, not a strategist and not even much of a thinker, really. He’s a brute force of nature and a scrapper with no end of machismo. So if X-Men Origins: Wolverine is not an especially well-thought movie, if it places its expensive emphasis on action over clarity of plot and characterization, in a mean sense it’s true to its subject. Does that make it a good movie? No, though its vast array of flaws and mistakes make it a bad one.

Jackman, Shreiber compare mutton chops

Directed by Gavin Hood (Rendition), the film opens with a visually and narratively murky prologue that shows Logan (Hugh Jackman) as a young boy escaping the murder of a man who may be his father. He’s abetted by his playmate Victor (Lieve Shreiber), who may or may not be his brother. Possessed of special healing powers that make them more or less immortal, the two go on to serve in every major conflict of the next 130 years, depicted in the film as a thrilling opening credits sequence. In time they’re recruited into a special military unit composed of mutant soldiers and led by a Colonel Stryker (Danny Huston) who encourages their bloodlust. Logan quits the group when their – and Victor’s especially – savagery pushes him to his ethical threshold.

Hello! Collins as Silverfox

In time Logan finds serenity working in Canada’s logging industry while romancing a local school teacher (Lynn Collins). Her apparent murder at Victor’s hands drives Logan back into Stryker’s influence, where he volunteers for a special experiment to coat his bones with a special alien metal called “adamantium,” making him all but indestructible. The rest of the film is Logan seeking revenge against his Victor as well as Stryker, and liberating Stryker’s gulag of mutant prisoners on Three Mile Island.

As their most popular character, Marvel has revised and re-imagined their hero’s origin story multiple times over the years, the better with which to entice audiences with “now it can be told…” comics events. As a result, the script by David Benioff (Troy) and Skip Woods (Swordfish) has a lot of complicated and tangled ground to explain and cover. But like the recent Watchmen, their screenplay puts action above narrative, so that fight scenes (or, more frequently, Victor’s cruel execution of his targets) are constant and prolonged. That’s true to the genre: the basics of the superhero story has always boiled down to “come for the action, stay for the pathos.” Comic books are by design a visual medium, and character depth is actually a fairly recent development in their history.

Still, for an action movie the special effects should be better – really, they have to be for the film to be worth the audience’s time and money. And for a film both prefacing and expanding on the already profitable X-Men movie franchise (composed so far of two good movies by Bryan Singer and one terrible one by Brett Ratner), they should be better still. Instead the fight sequences – and there are many - are redundant and blurred, with CGI that’s convincing only about half the time. It’s hard not to think that with such an expansive cast, many of whom also have super powers, the money was spread too thin. A scene in which Logan toys with his new metal claws while at a bathroom counter is especially unconvincing. Likewise many of Shreiber’s leaps and twists as the feral Victor and Will.i.Am’s blinking teleporting  as soldier John Wraith. Most unconvincing, given the carnage, is the lack of blood onscreen, obviously removed for the sake of that crucial PG-13 rating.

Jackman, making his fourth screen appearance as the hirsute and claw-brandishing mutant hero, is serviceable as always, but he’s seldom given anything to do except respond to events surrounding him. For an action hero he’s curiously passive until circumstances demand his attention. He’s also never entirely sympathetic as a character, as there’s no explanation for why he fought in so many wars or why he feels repulsed by his “brother’s” violence in the first place. After 150 or years together, you’d think he’d know his constant companion better. Jackman is also given to striking outlandish poses before running at his enemies, throwing his arms and legs into weird Tai Chi-like contortions that sometimes look mannered.

Bonjour! Kitsch as Gambit

Shreiber, playing the borderline feral Victor as a method exercise in animal snarl and pent-up menace, nevertheless shows again why he’s possibly the most underrated American actor working right now. Ryan Reynold’s (Definitely, Maybe) charm is underused as the wisecracking ninja Wade, while the normally wooden Kevin Durand (3:10 To Yuma) is effective buried beneath layers of fat suit padding as the Blob. Collins (True Blood) as Logan’s doomed love Kayla Silverfox does the best she can with a stock role that begs for further development. Despite an intermittent gumbo drawl, Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights) overachieves as the fan favorite mutant Gambit, a character whose appearance in a Bourbon Street nightclub is one of the film’s few truly suspenseful moments.

On the other hand, David Fincher and Brad Pitt can take comfort that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button no longer represents the most superficial treatment of New Orleans in recent cinema history. The French Quarter club and alleyway look fake and modeled, provoking a realization (for me, anyway) of how many of the other sets and set pieces also looked inauthentic. It’s hard to set wirework indoors, but sets don’t have to look like sets, and they shouldn’t look fake.

The film debuted at the top of the box office with a strong $87 million U.S. haul, and anyway it’s the kind of release that on many levels is only a preview of the expanded director’s cut version that’s inevitably released on DVD and Blu-Ray. But word of mouth is everything with comic book films, and if fans don’t warm to the liberties taken with the larger X-Men mythology they’ll likey stay away. Wolverine is not a good film, but perhaps more importantly it is not even a good film for the kind of movie it is. Logan may not be a genius, but his long-awaited solo feature shouldn’t be so dumb.

-Michael Kabel
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Miscellaneous Debris, April 2009 Edition

Our semi-regular compendium of movie, TV and DVD news of general interest.

The summer movie season is just around the corner

Something we didn’t realize when this blog started up a year ago: it takes more time to research and keep up with what’s forthcoming than it does just watching and reviewing films. That makes us think sometimes that we should narrow our focus. But where’ s the fun in that? Trailers, after all, are the only good reason (besides good seats) to get into the theatre early.

Every month or so we make a list of items and news stories that maybe don’t warrant a full blog post of their own. Some excite us, some bore us, one or two irritate or even piss us off a bit. But they’re all worth mentioning at least for their conversational value.

1. Though there’s not much going on by way of new releases lately, the good news is that the summer movie season starts three weeks early this year, with the release of X-Men Origins: Wolverine on May 1, followed by Star Trek just a week later and Terminator: Salvation only two weeks after that. That’s three blockbusters before Memorial Day, traditionally the kickoff of the summer blockbuster avalance.

He also once played Orson Welles

2. Speaking of the Wolverine movie, we can see both sides of the flap about its illicit appearance online this week, but on the other hand it’s not that hard to predict some things about it. Based on what we know, we can assure viewers that 1. Hugh Jackman will give a very good (but not great) performance, 2. Ryan Reynolds will have all the best lines and 3. Liev Shreiber will act circles around everyone else. And the ending will remain open for a sequel.

3. Rescue Me, FX’s series about a New York City Fire Department crew and the families that love but often fall victim to their angst, premiered this week after an eighteen-month hiatus. The episode was entertaining but not quite exceptional, about as good as the show ever was during its uneven first season. Still, it had the fesity energy that later seasons lacked, abetted in no small part by charismatic performances from Robert John Burke as an alcoholic ex-priest falling off the wagon and a show-stopping turn by Michael J. Fox as a new boyfriend for Janet Gavin (Andrea Roth), the oft-separated wife of main character Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary).

4. Recent news stories show that movie theatre attendance has risen significantly since last October, when the worldwide economy more or less went to Hell in a bucket. To quote the Propellerheads and Shirley Bassey, it’s all just a little bit of history repeating: the movie business has traditionally thrived during hard times, and no wonder. People looking for diversions from their circumstances have lots of time to kill, and movies are nothing if not an escape. With a summer loaded with science fiction and action franchises just around the corner, Hollywood could be in for a banner year.

5. Some of the most vivid examples of films that both reflected and capitalized on the nation’s Depression-era restlessness got a DVD release this week with Universal’s Pre-Code Hollywood Collection box set. Turner Classic Movies has already released several similar box sets celebrating Hollywood before the sanitizing Hays Code, though we’re tempted to get this newer package just for its films’ lurid titles: The Cheat, Torch Singer, Hot Saturday, Murder At The Vanities, Search For Beauty, and (our favorite), Merrily We Go To Hell. The various films include performances by Fredric March, Tallulah Bankhead and Cary Grant.

6. From the “lurching into self-parody” desk comes news of Sam Raimi’s latest, which if nothing else boasts a title that would right in with the aforementioned set: Drag Me To Hell dusts off the “gypsy curse” conceit for a thriller about a loan officer (Matchstick Men‘s Alison Lohman) stalked by bad juju after foreclosing on an old woman’s mortgage. The stunningly cheesy trailer below seems to include its entire first act. Now, wait and see if somebody doesn’t trot out the old “zeitgeist” and “cultural barometer” arguments to validate the film’s existence. It opens nationwide May 29.

Really, Life On Mars creators? Really?

7.  Two shows that fought continuous battles for survival came to a conclusion over the last couple of weeks, with at least one serving its definite coda. Life, a hypnotically offbeat cop drama starring the singular Damian Lewis, aired its second season finale (and likely series conclusion) that efficiently wrapped up (almost) all its open plots and subplots while bringing closure to Lewis’ tortured Detective Charlie Crews. By total contrast, a week before ABC’s Life On Mars aired a series finale that packed an explanation for its time-lost Detective Sam Tyler (Jason O’Mara) so out-of-left-field, so contrived, that the show’s creators might just as well have walked on camera and given their audience the finger. Look for details in articles with names like “Worst Show Finales” in the years to come.

8.  There’s a logic that goes you can remake a film only if the original wasn’t very good. But what about films we love for their weaknesses? A remake of 1981′s Bullfinch’s Mythology-via-Star Wars cult classic Clash of the Titans is up for remaking, this one reportedly co-starring no less than Liam Neeson as Greek god patriarch Zeus and Ralph Fiennes as his villainous brother Hades. Sam Worthington (Terminator: Salvation) will star as the heroic Perseus, and Alexa Davalos (Defiance) plays his true love Andromeda. The film is slated for release next March.

9. If you’re not already familiar with DC Comics’ long-running hero Green Lantern, get ready to hear a lot more about him over the next twenty months. The comics company plans a massive summer crossover, ominously titled The Blackest Night, about Green Lantern Hal Jordan and the far-ranging Green Lantern Corps (a kind of interstellar police force) waging a “war of light” against the reanimated dead heroes of the DC Universe (And that body count is a lot higher than you’d think). July sees the release of Green Lantern: First Flight, a straight-to DVD animated feature film about Jordan’s recruitment into the Corps, with voice talent by Law & Order: SVU‘s Christopher Meloni and Battlestar Galactica‘s Tricia Helfer. Finally, a live-action feature directed by Martin Campbell (Casino Royale) is slated for a December 2010 release.

10. Finally, something that actually rates at least one blog posting of its own. A couple of weeks ago we ran a long article hoping for, among other actors, a career rebirth for Michael Keaton. May 1 sees the limited release of The Merry Gentleman, a moody neo-noir with religious overtones that marks the errant leading man’s directorial debut. Keaton also stars as Frank Logan, a contract hitman who moonlights as a tailor while contemplating suicide. He becomes involved in a low-heat romance with Kate Frazier (No Country For Old Men‘s Kelly MacDonald), a woman fleeing her abusive husband (Bobby Cannavale, The Ten) and pursued by a cop with bad intentions. The trailer’s evocative atmosphere and deliberate tempo look promising for fans of such films (like us), as well as its premise, which reminds us an odd bit – in a good way – of John Dahl’s dark comedy You Kill Me. 

We’ll be back next week with previews of some of those summer blockbusters. Have a good weekend.

- Michael Kabel
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We Handicap the Academy Awards

Just what the Internet needs: more speculation and second-guessing.

The 81st annual Academy Awards takes place this Sunday, oddly coming just after the movie industry’s biggest January to date. The ceremony is hosted by Hugh Jackman, who when considering some previous hosts (Billy Crystal, David Letterman, Bob Hope) is if nothing else probably the best-looking emcee since Douglas Fairbanks had the honor back in 1929.

Oscar speculation is something of an irresistable sport for us, sort of like armchair quarterbacking if we gave a rat’s ass about football. That’s true this year especially, when there’s a broad spectrum of talent and nominations competing against one another. Some of the nominees, in fact, transcend even the idea of a yearly award: one nominee has already achieved almost mythic status just six months after its film’s debut. (Yep, that one.) And a few of the nominees, to be blunt, don’t actually deserve any positive recognition.

What follows is our list of who we think will win the award, who we think should win, and some random observations about why the tween won’t necessarily meet. As we haven’t seen everything in every category, remember this is all just healthy speculation mixed with research of critics we respect and what we know about Academy voting behavior in years past. We haven’t included all the categories for those same reasons, as well. A full ballot can be found at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ official website, which is found here.

Actress In A Supporting Role: Should win: Viola Davis, Doubt. Will win: Amy Adams, Doubt. Adams is a rising star with a previous nomination and leading lady good looks – a winner the Academy can feel good about coronating. Davis (Nights in Rodanthe) is a veteran character actress who disappears into parts, especially in the Steven Soderbergh films Out of Sight and Solaris.  Adams gives a fine performance, but Davis shines in her too-brief screen time. Dark horse: Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler. Tomei might pick up the award if enough voters want to bury the urban legend that she didn’t truly win for My Cousin Vinny.

Actor In A Supporting Role: Should win: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight. Will win: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight. The Academy would have to be blind not to recognize Ledger’s landmark performance, even as it snubs director Christopher Nolan and the film itself in their respective categories. Dark horse: Michael Shannon, Revolutionary Road. Shannon’s performance was a single bright light in an otherwise dreary spectacle; any other year and he’d be a shoe-in.

Actress In A Lead Role: Should win: Melissa Leo, Frozen River. Will win: Kate Winslet, The Reader. Leo’s turn in the downer Frozen River brought her the attention she’s deserved at least since 21 Grams six years ago. All the same, The Reader marks Winslet’s sixth nomination without a win, and her turn as a Nazi cougar is the kind of showpiece performance that wins awards. Dark horse: Meryl Streep, Doubt. We imagine by now Streep’s name appears on the Academy’s ballot template.

Actor In A Lead Role: Should win: Richard Jenkins, The Visitor. Will win: Sean Penn, Milk. Jenkin’s perfect-pitch turn in the indie The Visitor was a study in fine acting, but it lacked the showiness of Penn’s turn or the topical edginess of Gus Van Sant’s biopic. Dark horse: Frank Langella, Frost/Nixon. Langella inhabited Tricky Dick’s persona with uncanny grace and skill. He also once played Skeletor opposite Dolph Lundgren. He’s a fine actor, but something like that casts a long, deep shadow and anyway Frost/Nixon isn’t the kind of film the Academy likes to celebrate. The Wrestler lost a lot of buzz once people actually saw it, which unfairly hurts Mickey Rourke’s chances.

Writer (Adapted Screenplay): Should win: Peter Morgan, Frost/Nixon. Will win: David Hare, The Reader. Morgan adapted his own play to the screen without losing intensity or focus, but veteran playwright Hare (The Hours, Damage) and The Reader have the pedigrees and controversy. Dark horse: Eric Roth and Robin Swicord, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Roth and Swicord built a lot off of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, even if most of it wasn’t particularly well-developed. Still, the Academy loves a romantic epic.

Writer (Original Screenplay): Should win: Courtney Hunt, Frozen River. Will win: Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, and Jim Reardon, WALL*E. Though both films deserve to win, WALL*E‘s conspicuous absence from the Best Picture nominations cries out for a consolation prize. On the other hand, if Leo doesn’t get the Best Actress nod then voters might choose to reward Hunt for writing and directing in one swoop. Dark horse: Martin McDonagh, In Bruges. First-time writer-director McDonagh’s offbeat story of assassins-in-crisis was a hip hit, and like Cody Diablo last year he’s an edgy new talent to watch.

Directing: Should win: Of the nominees, Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire. Will win: Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire. Boyle’s film is conspicuously absent in the acting categories, and giving him the statue for his long career of work will offset the sting if voters opt not to give the mixed-reviewed Slumdog the Best Picture statue. Dark horse: Neglecting to recognize Nolan for The Dark Knight was a bit of stodginess that the Academy will likely regret in years to come. It’s a virtually flawless work that transcends its genre basis without compromising any of its elements.

Best Picture: Should win: Possibly Frost/Nixon, but they all stand in the shadows of non-nominees The Dark Knight and WALL*E. Will win: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Lush, elaborate and non-confrontational but socially relevant thanks to its Hurrican Katrina subplot, Button is the kind of uplifting epic the Academy has liked in the past. Dark horses: both Slumdog Millionaire and The Reader might overcome slow-percolating backlashes if voters find Button too long and too lightweight.

The following video shows clips of every Best Picture winner, from 1928 to 2006. (So there’s no clip for No Country For Old Men.)

- Michael Kabel

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Review: The Wrestler

A powerful performance by Rourke gets pinned to the mat by heavy-handed script and direction.

As discussed in numerous media outlets (including our own retrospective last week), actor Mickey Rourke is enjoying a career resurgence for his turn as the title character of director Darren Aronofsky’s latest film The Wrestler. Though Rourke probably gives the performance of his life, it’s still not enough to salvage the film from the sadistic, simplistic vision of director Darren Aronofsky and screenwriter Robert D. Siegel.

Rourke plays Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a one-time wrestling superstar fallen into obscurity twenty years after a history-making match. Reduced to performing in school gymnasiums, Randy nevertheless continues to be revered by small children, his fans from the old days, and especially his fellow athletes – until he suffers a steroid-induced heart attack.  No longer able to wrestle, he diverts his energies to strengthening his relationships with the women in his life: Pam (Marisa Tomei), a middle aged, single mom/stripper; and Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood), the daughter he abandoned years earlier. Through a series of misfortunes – partly of his own making -  Randy finds himself alone again, compelled to reenter the ring for one more chance at glory.

Rourke’s performance is materful in its versatility, seamlessly changing back and forth between broken old man, lovable clown, veteran warrior and ticking time bomb. Two scenes in particular give Rourke the chance to shine in his vulnerability: as he pleads with his doctor to call him “Randy” even as he receives a potentially fatal diagnosis, and later when he tries to shower in an undersized bathroom stall without getting his bandages wet. That one shot, to the film and Rourke’s credit, is a truly heartbreaking depiction of a basically decent guy in desperate need of a little self-control.

But ironically the nuance of Rourke’s performance stands in stark contrast to the merciless heavy-handedness of Siegel and Aronofsky. Like the rabid fans roaring and chanting with Randy’s every move, the film’s creators seem to take perverse pleasure in watching the Randy endure pain – not from the barbed wire and staple guns strewn about the wrestling ring, but rather from a gauntlet of rejection and disappointment relentlessly pummeled upon him. This string of pathos-inducing defeats provides fertile ground for Rourke the actor to prove that he’s still got it, but for the audience such an exhibition of brutality isn’t revelatory so much as it becomes tedious and tiresome. 

To Siegel’s credit, the film couldn’t provoke such an intense reaction if the character of Randy the Ram weren’t so endearing and so sympathetic. Still, the disjointed progression of the film’s narrative makes the story’s weaknesses difficult to ignore. Randy’s centerpiece monologue to his daughter, a genuinely touching piece of screenwriting, ultimately suffers from a complete lack of escalating tension: Randy and Stephanie are casually walking the Jersey Boardwalk one moment, then he’s suddenly baring his soul to her the next with no set-up in between. Other such shortcuts undermine the integrity of the film as a whole, particularly in the third act when Pam has a change of heart that’s too easy and too neat to come across with any credibility. The end result feels rushed, as if Siegel is so anxious to hit the big showcase moments that he steamrolls over the details. He wants the payoff without putting in the necessary hard work.

It’s therefore no surprise that any attempts at symbolism or metaphor are patronizing and paper-thin, perhaps best evidenced by an early scene in which Pam compares Randy the Ram to Jesus Christ. Similarly, Randy can’t build relationships with the two women in his life, so he returns to the glory and camaraderie of the wrestling ring where he (presumably) dies of a heart attack. He dies of a broken heart, you see? Ugh. Making matters worse, Aronofsky’s choppy editing and awkward transitions only heighten the narrative disconnect.  Subtlety has never been his strong suit, and unfortunately here he returns to the tawdry heavy-handedness that permeated 2000′s epically overrated Requiem For A Dream. Aronofsky’s fixation with employing shock value for its own sake is most apparent in a graphic tryst between Randy and a fetishist barfly, a scene that’s so clumsily handled it plays as film school amateurish.

For that matter, the exceedingly violent wrestling sequences are a paradox: while considerable screen time is devoted to depicting the physical and psychological toll that the sport inflicts upon its participants, Aronofsky still can’t stop himself from staging the actual matches as an adrenaline-heavy joyride. Far from making some kind of an artistic statement, the director plays it as safe as he can – disingenuously deriding the savagery of the sport for the film’s art-house target audience but without alienating any potential cross-over appeal that might lure actual wrestling fans ( the parents who brought their ten year old to the screening I attended) to the ticket booth.

As for the supporting cast, Wood perhaps best exemplifies the inelegance of Aronofsky’s approach to his cast: her eyes, face and voice all convey the intensity of her character’s heartache even as her hands slash the air in a series of awkward gesticulations. The actress obviously possesses the talent and the chops for her difficult role, but she’s sorely in need of, well, direction. That makes Aronofsky’s obvious disinterest in developing her character all the more disappointing.

A sloppily staged production of a lazy script, it’s hard not to think of The Wrestler without reminding oneself of Monster or The Last King of Scotland­ -films that are all but forgotten after the Academy Awards save for the charisma and craftsmanship of their stars. With Rourke the current Hollywood darling du jour, let’s hope his future projects will utilize his resurrected talent with more grace and restraint.

- Stephen Kabel
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Posting Bale

Three between-the-Batman films starring Christian Bale, cinema’s covert leading man

Christian Bale has built a career of taking roles that would scare off most actors and break other, less intrepid leading men in half. Even momentarily ignoring (if such a thing is still possible) his three most famous films – the two Batmans and his turn as serial killer Patrick Bateman in American Psycho- his resume reveals a variety of parts in a swath of films that are connected only by what they’re not: they’re not crowd pleasers. No romantic comedies, no sweeping historical romances, nothing that lets him play to the Oscar highlight reel or get his face on the cover of slick magazines. He’s an actor that acts.

He also apparently likes to work. Between 2005′s Batman Begins and last summer’s The Dark Knight Bale starred or co-starred in six films in virtually as many genres. If not every film was a jewel – 3:10 To Yuma is an abject lesson in how to make every wrong decision when producing a major motion picture – the majority of the work was in accomplished, successful films and under the direction of very disparate creative visions. Perhaps the three best are explained below:

2005′s Harsh Times, written and directed by James Avery (Training Day, Street Kings) casts Bale as Jim Luther Davis, a not-especially-bright Army Ranger returned to his bowels-of-L.A. home turf after years of service in Afghanistan. Davis has two humble goals for the rest of his life: to marry his impoverished Mexican sweetheart and bring her to the states; and to join either the LAPD or “the feds” so as to better enhance his standing among the lower echelons of the city’s crime community.

Bale plays Davis as DeNiro’s Travis Bickle crossed with Martin Sheen’s Kit Carruthers, a slow-boiling psychopath fired up by a can-do optimism that in its own way is boyishly charming. Endlessly rolling through lower-class Los Angeles with his best bro Mike (Freddy Rodriguez) in search of jobs, pot, or booze (whichever they find first), Davis slowly comes unglued as his two dreams align themselves at cross-purposes. The LAPD rejects him after he flunks their psych evaluation; the Department of Homeland Security, represented with opaque paternal cheer by ace character actor J.K. Simmons, has lower expectations. They want Davis on a field exercise in Columbia (“I’ll tell people who to shoot,” he tells Mike) but that means abandoning his fiance in her Mexican tenement. The pressure of choosing, weighed down by his lingering psychological scars, eventually crush him.

Avery’s directorial debut shows his Scorcese-like ambitions still just outside his grasp – it’s not unfair to call the film Mean Streets of L.A. – but he’s adept at making the city shift and groan with texture and nuance. Bale wanders through its environs slightly nervous and a little annoyed at the same time, as if the place itself was too different and too intimidating to reconcile with his expectations.

The prospect of Bale at odds with Hugh Jackman – Batman versus Wolverine! – as Victorian Era magicians in an escalating game of oneupsmanship must have brought thousands of comics fans to see 2006′s The Prestige, based on a novel by British writer Christopher Priest and directed by Batman auteur Christopher Nolan. Rival illusionists once apprenticed to the same master, (Ricky Jay, whose very appearance virtually counts as a pedigree) the two men are disciplined, obsessive, and driven in their quest to outdo one another after a tragedy drives them apart. Nolan frames the movie as a magic trick itself; it’s the kind of film that some guess its big twist halfway through while others need its shell game explained to them in the lobby afterwards.

Bale plays his Alfred Borden as a well of cold fury and restraint, never letting the audience see him moving things “behind the scenes” in his mind. Jackman is warm, charming and personable, qualities that themselves may be an illusion. Michael Caine brings his usual effortlessness to the role of magician’s valet; Scarlett Johansson, David Bowie, Andy Serkis and Roger Rees also appear as men and women caught in the two men’s colliding orbits. Bowie especially is a weird but apt choice to play the mad inventor Tesla, a man worthy of a big-budget biography if ever one lived.

If Bale’s Borden is a character with everything inside, conversely the role of Dieter Dengler in Warner Herzog’s 2006 Rescue Dawn demanded that everything be played on the outside. Or rather, what little of Bale remained after losing fifty-five pounds to play the part of a Navy pilot shot down over Laos in 1965. Written and directed by Werner Herzog and loosely based on events covered in his own 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly, the film focuses not on the deprivations that Dengler and the other prisoners receive but instead on the physical and emotional toll their imprisonment inflicted.

There’s a tendency since Midnight Express, almost a tradition, for noble-men-in-prison films to have a grand guignol quality in which the “goody guys’” suffering is played to maximum sensationalist effect as a means of raising the film’s dramatic pitch. For whatever his liberties in rearranging the facts related to the true story, Herzog avoids the pitfall of cheap gore and relies on his actors’ performances to convey their characters’ growing desperation. Bale moves his character from idealistic to determined to resigned, then back to idealistic again once his rescue comes to pass. Herzog follows that parabola by keeping the direction and camera work straightforward (yes, almost documentarian) in style. But he imbues the story with shots of the Laotian jungle, reminiscent of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, that depict the countryside itself as a breathing, vaguely malevolent force. “The jungle is the prison,” fellow prisoner Duane (Steve Zahn) explains. It’s actually the jungle standing between the men and freedom, not the malnourished prison guards or the few  rickety rifles they discard at meal time.

The breakout and flight towards Thailand are terrifyingly realistic, not in an artificial Hollywood sense but in the way such things happen in the world: plans go awry for no reason, luck plays as big a factor as valor, and dangers and good fortune alike present themselves when least expected. If the ending is somewhat hokey, it’s at least deserved and fitting for the triumphant individual Bale so perfectly inhabits.

- Michael Kabel

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Miscellaneous Debris, November 2008 Edition

Think of this as a Movietone newsreel in blog form.

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Life on Mars.

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

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

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

Bringing sexy back: Jackman

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please spay or neuter your pets.

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

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

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

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

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

- Michael Kabel

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100 Posts and Counting…

We’re congratulating ourselves! You should, too!

Yikes! 100 Posts! And we’ve only been at this since last March. Credit our three-times a week update schedule. But it’s still fun. Actually, it’s more fun now that our traffic numbers are rising and we’re getting more feedback.

When we got to the 50-post mark we ran down a list of ten things we’d learned from the experience up to that date. They’re still true, but there are a few other new things we picked up since.

Fitzgerald actually wrote several fantasy stories as a way to make some quick cash.

1. We’re more certain of our mission statement now than we were seven months ago, in no small part because lately the fall season’s ad campaigns are staring once again to piss on our legs and tell us it’s raining champagne. The three big prestige pictures this year, from what we can tell, are Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road, David Fincer’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and future Bravo Network staple Australia, directed by Baz Luhrmann.

Of the three, we’re least leary of Benjamin Button, mostly because Fincher’s coming off his masterful Zodiac and Pitt is actually often at his best when playing more restrained, downbeat roles. We just hope the “I do de-clay-yah!” New Orleans grotesques aren’t as pervasive in the film as in the trailer.

9. Social networking tools like Digg and Twitter are great, and we welcome traffic from them, but there’s no substitute for good word of mouth. We’re getting less bitch mail than we used to, too, so we must be doing something right or anyway better than we were before. That being said, we wish there were more comments coming across our threshold.

The Man

8. Google works in mysterious ways. When we ran a pic of actor Skeet Ulrich on our 50th milestone post, the image somehow topped Google’s search rankings. So far we’ve had more than 300 visitors looking for that one pic.  To Mr. Ulrich’s fans, especially those coming over from Capturing Skeet.com, welcome and thank you. To Skeet himself, we probably owe you a steak dinner or something.

7. Our most popular post is still the “Six Forgotten Sci-Fi Films of the 1970s” retrospective from last May. It’s also the one that’s provoked the most griping, so if you check it out remember that one fan’s “forgotten” film is another fan’s cherished memory.

6. We don’t know if anyone else is laughing at our picture captions, but we’re cracking ourselves up. Editor Michael Kabel grew up reading Creem magazine, and it’s just too much fun paying some homage to that late, lamented mag by following their brilliant example here.

5. One post we wish got more traffic showcased a gorgeous montage of Homicide: Life On The Street images set to Coldplay’s “Don’t Panic.” Really, it’s a profoundly haunting couple of minutes. Here it is again:

Thanks again to easilyjaded2 for creating it.

Hello, I'm Shia LaBouef. I'm an actor.

4. Our worst review remains Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but Eagle Eye only narrowly missed taking that dubious distinction for itself. And in either film’s case, their appalling failure had nothing necessarily to do with mutual participant Shia LaBouef. It’s the films themselves that are godawful, virtually from the ground up.

3. Our posts are getting longer, but there’s more to be said about most films than will fit into a 500- or 600-word essay. Maybe the single greatest advantage of the Internet over print, to quote Walt Disney out of context, is the “blessing of space.” Now, that’s no excuse not to be succinct. But in reviewing some films and analyzing others it’s important to attempt comprehensiveness. Failing that, we’ll try to be funny if not smart.

Running down a dream: The Flash

2. We’ve tried several different types of features, from hypothetical sequels to rewriting underwhelming blockbusters to armchair casting films we know are getting made but don’t trust Hollywood to make the right personnel decisions. Our rewrites of the Star Wars prequels have been the most popular, though we’re not kidding ourselves that poeple are looking for info about the actual films. The post about how to make The Flash movie is a sentimental favorite.

1. Now that the blog’s growing bigger, it’s probably time for some big people clothes. Specifically, we’re looking for someone to create our new header. If you’ve got the design skills and think you can help, please contact us at the email shown back up and to the right there.

To wrap things up, and by way of crossing our fingers for the next 100 posts, the clip below is the famous “cuckoo clock” segment from The Third Man, starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten.

Wednesday we’ll have a review of the new DVD edition of L.A. Confidential. Thanks again for reading.

-Michael Kabel

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