Miscellaneous Debris, May 2010 Edition

The end of another month means our monthly roundup of news and analysis miscellany. 

Well, that was May 2010, and as far as films go it was distinctly underwhelming, with the television landscape not looking an awful lot better. The biggest releases of the month both disappointed, with neither Iron Man 2 or Robin Hood meeting the promise that their predecessors or creative talent suggested. With three new large-scale films - Prince of Persia, George Romero’s Survival of the Dead, and the already dated-looking Sex And The City 2 slamming into multiplexes this week there’s no doubt the summer season is upon us. (We remember when the Memorial Day weekend was the starter. Like the holiday season, summer comes a little earlier every year now.) 

At the end of every month we roundup some news, information, and analysis that we never got around to giving our complete blogging attention. They’re listed below, in no particular order of importance. 

 1. What exactly was so disappointing about Iron Man 2, or for that matter Robin Hood? Both films look superb “on paper,” and the spectacles inherent in their concepts alone promised at least diversionary thrills. In retrospect, now that the buzz around both films has dissipated, we think Iron Man 2 suffered from a surplus of corporate enthusiasm. With too many new characters – the film desperately wants audiences to demand Black Widow and War Machine spinoffs – too many storylines and too little time for character development, the whole effort feels in retrospect like clanging, top-heavy overkill. 

Robin Hood, meanwhile, seemed entirely the answer to a question nobody asked. Glum, excessively violent, and sometimes almost misanthropic, it was a new look at a character that most audiences possibly weren’t thinking needed a  gritty treatment. On the other hand, it may age better than Iron Man 2, growing a respecting fan base with DVD and cable showings.  

No future: FlashForward

 2. The ratings deathmatch between FlashForward and V, ABC’s two sci-fi franchise hopes once touted as the heirs apparent to Lost, came to an end with V getting the second season greenlight and FlashForward airing its season finale May 27. Ratings analysts had speculated that the network would renew one – and only one – series, and a modest late season bump in V‘s ratings let it edge ahead. We’re not going to armchair showrun either series, but FlashForward had potential it deferred too long; V needs to turn the heat up on most of its plotlines and jettison at least two characters if it has a chance of growing a larger audience. Now comes news that ABC may revive Alias, which seems like a knee-jerk reaction to losing Lost. 

3. On the far other end of the television series lifespan graph, Law & Order is also cancelled after a mere twenty – count ‘em, twenty – seasons. By way of perspective, the people born the year it debuted are in college now. (Unfortunately, it falls just a single season short of the longest-running drama series record still held by Gunsmoke.) Its cancellation might be something else to blame on the Jay Leno debacle: had NBC not shuffled everything to accommodate Leno’s 10 PM time slot, Law & Order might have held on to a larger audience as more people could actually find it on the schedule. All is not lost, however. Franchise mastermind Dick Wolf plans to explore other avenues for the show to continue, including a two-hour TV movie as a last resort. Meanwhile NBC plans to trot out Law & Order: Los Angeles this fall.

We miss seeing Bridget Fonda.

 4. Quentin Tarantino’s most accomplished but least appreciated film is on track for the prequel treatment. Writer-director Daniel Schechter (Goodbye Baby) has adapted Elmore Leonard’s novel The Switch, which featured several of the characters that later appeared in Rum Punch, the novel Tarantino reworked into Jackie Brown. Specifically, The Switch relates an early crime adventure of Ordell Robbie and Louis Gara, the roles played in Jackie Brown by, respectively, Samuel L. Jackson and Robert DeNiro. Tarantino reportedly won’t be involved in the project, which is tentatively scheduled for a 2011 release. The search for a director and cast is currently underway. 

5. We’ve eagerly, obsessively collected and even suggested ways to build your own, and this July 13 Warner Bros resumes their Film Noir Classics box set collection with a new four-disc set. Volume 5 includes eight films, a slight downgrade from Volume 4, which boasted ten, but also showcases lesser-known works from noir auteurs including Anthony Mann and Robert Fleischer. The charmingly noirish titles include Cornered, Desperate, Backfire, and Crime In The Streets. 

Continuing the noiry excitement, two weeks later Paramount Pictures releases its own trio of offerings, including the William Holden-Barry Fitzgerald noirish thriller Union Station, the Charlton Heston-starring Dark City, and the Alan Ladd vehicle Appointment With Danger. 

6. At the risk of jumping to conclusions, Criterion may release their edition of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line if a bare-bones preorder page at Amazon.com proves to be correct. Based on the novel by James Jones, author of From Here To Eternity (and featuring many of the same characters, albeit renamed), the film structured the events of World War II’s Guadalcanal campaign into a series of vignettes about the men fighting it, taking in every human emotion and failing along the grueling way. 

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; the trailer alone is more picturesque than most films. 

 

Here's looking at you, kid.

7. Finally, we want to invite you to post your feedback. In a weird inverse ratio, the number of comments posted to our site has dropped off even while our traffic has steadily grown. Discussion being the root of understanding, we’d like to hear your own ideas, especially about some of the more obscure material we blog about. If you’re just posting a comment to build links, however, don’t waste your time. We delete those immediately, without approval.

Next week we’ll be back with a review of Prince of Persia. Have a good Memorial Day weekend and remember to stay safe on the roads.

- Michael Kabel

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Miscellaneous Debris, September 2009 Edition

A round up of news, rumors and opinions at the edge of the fall season.

September’s pretty much over, and the whole industry greets the coming of autumn and winter not with cooler temperatures but with meatballs. Lots and lots and meatballs. Once again a CGI spectacle rules over adult-oriented films like The Informant! and Surrogates, even while the rest of the Top 10 looks like a scrap heap. The coming months at least bring a few intriguing films: the Gerard Butler-Jamie Foxx ne0 noir Law Abiding Citizen, the perfect storm of hipsterness Where The Wilid Things Are, the Coen Brother’s A Serious Man, and dozens of others. So there’s light at the end of the tunnel, even as the days grow shorter.

The following few news items are a miscellany of observations and opinions we’ve built up over the last month. The opinions are our own, though you’re welcome to discuss.

Does it still happen if no one's watching?

1. As far as box office goes, September was notable not for what made money but for what didn’t: Jennifer’s Body, the double flash-in-the-pan teaming of Megan Fox and Diablo Cody, was dead on arrival despite a saturating media campaign. Meanwhile the Jennifer Aniston romantic drama Love Happens (which we like to call Pointless In Seattle) also went nowhere, even in a year in which other romances like The Proposal and (500) Days of Summer have exceeded box office expectations.

We think the lesson to be learned is pretty simple: people are bored, and ready for something new and fresh. Aniston and Fox are both overexposed, though Proposal star Sandra Bullock isn’t. The public won’t pay money to see faces they see too much already, for free, on magazine covers.

2. We bitched some about the season premiere of Mad Men, but the show has gotten substantially better with each episode, and the last couple especially can stand with the best of the series. Watching the Sterling-Cooper ad agency unravel from within is a suprisingly gut-wrenching process, even as Don and Betty Draper (Jon Hamm and January Jones) seem to prepare themselves to finally go their separate ways. Cheers also for bringing back Draper’s nemesis Duck Philips, played so well by Mark Moses.

As last night’s episode, “Seven Twenty Three,” was the halfway point of the seasons, we’ll risk predicting that by season’s end both Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss) and Don Draper have left Sterling Cooper, either by choice or through firing. We also hope there’s some resolution to Joan Halloway’s flailing marriage, though we can’t help but see domestic violence on the horizon.

Jon and Kate plus hate.

3. Has reality television finally, at long last, neared its tipping point? Scandals such as the murder mystery surrounding VH1′s Megan Wants A Millionaire and the ongoing tabloid marketing scheme that is the Gosselin’s marriage seem to be the kind of negative-buzz generating backlash events that signal the end of a trend. We hope so. In roughly a decade the advent of “reality” based television has rearranged the television landscape, and largely for the worse. As the major networks grow increasingly desperate, quality programming has fled to some cable networks, while other cable channels, such as VH1 and especially TLC, cater to a lower denominator than was even thought to exist ten years ago. Television does not have to be a vast wasteland, the efforts of most reality programming to the contrary. Enough already.

4. One potential bright light for network scripted drama arrived last week in the form of Flash Forward, the ABC sci-fi drama adapted from Robert J. Sawyer’s novel by David Goyer (The Dark Knight) and Brannon Braga (Star Trek: Enterprise). The Goyer-directed pilot was a long way from perfect, lacking as it did the confidence and effortlessness that accompanied previous landmark debuts such as ER and Lost to the screen. We’re also not sure about star Joseph Fiennes’ ability to center the somewhat expansive cast, which includes Courtney B. Vance, John Cho, Jack Davenport, Dominic Monaghan, and Gabrielle Union.

Still, the premise – everyone on Earth gets a 137-second glimpse of their near future, six months hence - is intriguing enough to earn our loyalty for two or three episodes, by which time the show will have probably found its sea legs or not. Ratings for the debut were solid, meaning the show’s fortunes now depend on word of mouth. If not, hpefully ABC will show the series more patience than it extended to other sci-fi fare like Invasion and Life On Mars, neither of which we imagine carried Flash Forward’ s hefty payroll.

Yo ho, yo ho hum: Depp

5. In what must be the answer to a question nobody asked, Disney is moving forward with a fourth installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, this time with or without Johnny Depp’s involvement. Depp is reportedly aware the second and third Pirates movies lacked quite a bit in quality, and wants script approval after former Disney studio chief Dick Cook resigned last week.

Just so this doesn’t go unsaid, Depp’s post-Jack Sparrow career is nothing to crow about: Secret Window, Public Enemies, and Charlie and The Chocolate Factory are nobody’s idea of classic cinema, and the upcoming Alice In Wonderland looks like standard Tim Burton weirdness. Depp might do well to get out the eyeliner once again.

Gong Li in Shanghai

6. A rare highlight of the last Pirates film was Chow Yun-Fat’s appearance as pirate warlord Sao Feng. The long delayed Shanghai, in which Chow co-stars with John Cusack and Gong Li, has been delayed yet again, this time looking at a release sometime next year. Directed by Mikael Hafstrom (1408) and featuring Ken Watanabe and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, the saga of an ill-fated romance in the months leading to the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor seems a treat for older film audiences, offering the kind of film spectacle Hollywood rarely attempts anymore. So why the delay?

7. Finally, we forgot to mention While The City Sleeps in our recent list of movies watched while under the influence of DVR-enabled cinematic insomnia. If you’re a fan of classic cinema, Fritz Lang, movies about newspapers, Ida Lupino, and/or lurid trash, this film has something for you. Basically, its sprawling plot follows the staff of a major newspaper as its department heads race to outdo each other pursuing “the Lipstick Killer,” a freudian nightmare of a serial killer preying on women who live alone.

Lang directs the 1956 film with a kind of dreamlike detachment, keeping the characters in close proximity to one another even as they never really establish meaningful contact, even when intimate. The always-underrated Dana Andrews plays the television commentator leading the hunt for the killer, with Vincent Price, film noir siren Rhonda Fleming, and John Drew Barrymore also swirling around the tangle of events. Part film noir, part melodrama, and part Hollywood ensemble piece, it’s a weird mixture that doesn’t come off as well as it should, yet still remains completely, if cheaply, entertaining.

UPDATE: We’ll be back Monday. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel
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Miscellaneous Debris, May 2009 Edition

Our monthly miscellany of news we like to talk about.

Happy Memorial Day! The weather’s far too nice here to sit in a move theatre, so we’ll likely be heading to the theatres only to check out Terminator: Salvation, and then most likely a late show. (We don’t have to get up.)

With the summer movie season already well under way and the networks presenting their upfronts, there’s a lot going on worth talking about. Especially for television, with at least one network debuting a record number of shows in the fall, the news is thick and deep. The following list only represents some of the news items popping up around the Intertube this week, so we’re sure there’s plenty more to report. Still, this stuff caught our eye, and anyway you’ll have more fun getting outside and enjoying the fresh air and sunshine anyway. The Internet in all its time-wasting glory will be here when you get back.

Coming soon to theatres?

1. Steven Spielberg announced plans this week to produce a biopic based on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. Some King family members are already up in arms about the deal, saying they weren’t consulted on the negotiations. In the meantime, we’ll also continue waiting for Spielberg’s long-awaited bio of Abraham Lincoln, starring Liam Neeson in the role of the Great Emancipator. Rumors of that film have circled since Dreamworks got the rights back in 2001. Neeson, having pulled off the sleeper hit of the year with Taken, says he’s still eager to get into the role.

2. On a completely different subject, we have to repeat how much we’re looking forward to Moon, July’s indie sci-fi effort about an astronaut miner (Sam Rockwell) facing replacement just as his long, lonely tour on the lunar surface draws to a close. There’s never a bad time for smart science fiction, especially those rooted in near-future concepts and especially character-driven performances like this one. (We can’t help but think of Stanislaw Lem’s novel Peace On Earth every time we watch the trailer.) At any rate, we’re hoping the small-scale effort, directed by newcomer Duncan Jones, isn’t completely overshadowed online by the already-percolating hype surrounding New Moon, the sequel to Twilight, set for release this November. We previewed Moon last month, but here’s the trailer once again.

Raise the Green Lantern: Trucco

3. Good news and no-news (which is still good news, according to an old saying) for fans of comic book movies. This week reports swirled that Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige and Thor director Kenneth Branagh had selected Chris Hemsworth (Star Trek) to play the titular Norse god of thunder. The next day reports circulated that British actor Tom Hiddleston (Wallander) will play his villainous half-brother Loki. Over on the DC Comics side of things, there’s still no word on casting for the Green Lantern movie, despite filming scheduled to begin in September. As a suggestion to help speed things along, we suggest Michael Trucco (Battlestar Galactica) to play Green Lantern Hal Jordan. He’s a good actor and he looks the part, for whatever such virtues factor into how those decisions are made.

4. One of the (count ‘em) ten new shows announced by ABC for their 2009-10 season this week, Flash Forward has Next Big Thing written all over its expensive-looking trailer. Based on a novel by Canadian author Robert J. Sawyer and developed for television by screenwriters David Goyer (Batman Begins) and Brannon Braga (Star Trek: Enterprise), the network hopes the ensemble drama will serve as a “companion” series – and eventual successor, no doubt – to Lost,which begins its final season starting next January. Flash Forward depicts the aftermath of a mysterious event that causes the world’s population to black out for two minutes and 17 seconds, during which everyone gets a glimpse of their future. The ensemble cast includes Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare In Love), Courtney B. Vance (Law & Order: Criminal Intent), Sonya Walger (Lost), John Cho (Star Trek), and Peyton List (Mad Men).

5. Since we’ve championed the film at least once before for release on DVD and/or Blu-Ray, we’re very excited to announce the Peter Yates’ 1973 crime classic The Friends of Eddie Coyle saw its home video premiere this week – as a Criterion Edition, no less. Among the cool extra features is a reprint of Rolling Stone magazine’s profile of star Robert Mitchum, from the time of the film’s shooting. Apparently Mitchum, already a legendary Hollywood rebel, researched his role as a desperate low-level gunrunner by hanging out with Boston ganglord Whitey Bulger, the inspiration for Jack Nicholson’s character in The Departed thirty-three years later.

Stone Age tools: Black, Cera

6. Have you seen the latest ads for the Judd Apatow-produced, Harold Ramis-directed Year One? So much of this film demonstrates so much of what annoys us most about modern American cinema. A full decade after his distracting turn in the otherwise charming High Fidelity, Jack Black is still doing the same cocky buffoon shtick he’s done in virtually every role since. Likewise co-star Cera, bringing George-Michael Bluth’s amiable timidity to yet another paycheck. Because we know Ramis co-starred in Stripes that same year, we know he’s old enough to remember History of The World Part I and Caveman, both 1981 efforts that covered the exact same lowbrow ground. Here’s hoping that Ramis’ upcoming Ghostbusters 3 will offer better comedy. Failing that, his remake of Meatballs. Yes, Hollywood is remaking Meatballs. You’ve been warned.

7. It’s been a while since we’ve heard from the Skeet Ulrich contingent of our readership, so as a shout to them we want to mention Armored, the September release directed by Nimrod Antal (Vacancy) about a group of armored truck drivers attempting to steal $42 million from one of their own vehicles. Columbus Short (Cadillac Records) leads a cast full of man’s men, including Ulrich as well as Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix), Jean Reno (The Professional), Matt Dillon (The Outsiders) and Fred Ward (Tremors). Nothing closes out summer like a good, gritty neo-noir, and this one, with hints of both Criss Cross and Reservior Dogs, looks to fill that position this year.  A second film with an almost-identical concept is also currently in production, this one starring Eric Bana (Munich) and directed by F. Gary Gray (The Italian Job).

8. Finally, we were saddened this week to learn of the passing of Wayne Allwine, who supplied the voice of Mickey Mouse for thirty two years, from complications of diabetes. He was 62. A lifelong Disney employee, Allwine was only the third voice actor, after Walt Disney and his mentor Jimmy MacDonald, to portray the mouse in movies, television shows, and at the various Disney theme parks. A native of the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, Allwine joined the Disney corporation in 1966, starting in the company mail room before working his way up to sound editing such films as Splash and Three Men And A Baby.  His widow, Russi Taylor, has provided the voice of Mickey’s sweetheart Minnie Mouse since 1986.

We’ll return next Wednesday with a review of Terminator: Salvation. Have a great holiday weekend and be careful on the roads.

- Michael Kabel
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