Miscellaneous Debris, May 2011

The summer movie season is a swimming pool. This is the diving board.

Winter may have the prestige pictures and springtime has the festivals, but for those of us who love watching movies, summer is the time to go. It’s like a trip to the circus, or an amusement park; the winter prestige releases  are like a classroom excursion to the museum and the festivals a Sunday afternoon trip to the eclectic bookstore Uptown (or Midtown, or whatever your city calls that area.)

Here’s our list of news that didn’t get a full post over the last couple of months, but probably deserved it – our commentary on items worth discussing. All opinions are just that, but as always feel free to post your own in the space provided. Thanks, and have a fun holiday weekend.

1. Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life won the Palme D’Or at the 64th annual Cannes Film Festival on May 22, despite a contentious reception that had some people booing its screening while others cheered. By some accounts, the film – about the meaning of life in the cosmos filtered through the life of a 1950s Texas family – is Malick as his most – well, Malick, and audience’s take on it will likely depend on how well they appreciate the writer-director’s meditative style.

Kirsten Dunst won best actress for her starring role in auteur provacateur Lars Von Trier’s apocalyptic thriller Melancholia. French actor Jean DeJardin won best actor, for his performance in the period romance The Artist.

Tree of Life opens May 27 in selected cities; Melancholia opens November 4. As of press time The Artist has no US release date listed on IMDB.

We hear the beaver did great work.

2. Going from controversial success to almost unmitigated failure, director Jodi Foster’s attempt to resuscitate buddy Mel Gibson’s career with the odd melodrama The Beaver opened to just $107,000 in limited release May 8, with subsequent box office so small that distributor Summit Entertainment has scrapped plans for a wide release. The film earned mixed reviews, alongside the predictable speculation about the state of Gibson’s career moving forward.

As a comeback vehicle, The Beaver is probably just too weird: Gibson ‘s last effort, the far more conventional revenge thriller Edge of Darkness, broke even on its $80 million budget in worldwide release.

We were going to post a trailer for The Beaver but the hell with it. Here’s the drug bust scene from Lethal Weapon instead:

Did Riggs every get that Christmas tree? We’ll never know.

Ulrich on L&O:LA

3. As long as we’re on the subject of failure, here’s a recipe for how to tank one of the year’s most promising television dramas: put it on extended hiatus, release the cast member with the organized, devoted fan base, and then reschedule it behind a drama that was doomed almost from its start, runnning the episodes blatantly out of their production order. That’s what NBC had the brains to do with Law & Order: Los Angeles, the latest incarnation of the aging franchise but a worthy successor to the “mothership” original series that the Peacock Network canned last year.

Had the show continued, its breakout star would likely have been Corey Stoll, whose Detective Tomas “TJ” Jaruszalski gave laid-back California mellow a fresh coat of cool. On that note, NBC’s The Event (the show’s ill-starred lead-in) features Jason Ritter, Ian Anthony Dale, Taylor Cole and Sarah Roemer, whom we see as some of the biggest stars of 2013 or so.

4. From the “we should have reviewed this a while back” desk: A&E’s original drama Breakout Kings continues to surprise with its shrewdly intelligent writing, building all its half-dozen interpersonal tensions to a slow boil week by week. The cast’s chemistry, bumpy in the first episodes, has improved as the show nears the end of its first season (to middling ratings).

Jimmy Simpson, formerly the scene-stealing Liam McPoyle on It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, brings the best work playing a gambling-addict psychiatrist, and plotlines often pause to let him take center stage with his Hannibal-Lector-gone-geek weirdness. Meanwhile The Wire‘s Domenick Lombardozzi has a beefy intensity that evokes the early work of Gene Hackman, and Laz Alonzo (Avatar) brings retro cool to the center straight-man role.

Breakout Kings‘ season finale airs May 29.

5. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides had a $90 million opening weekend, the biggest of the year so far, but some analysts wonder if even that amount has Disney shivering its timbers. The studio predicted the film would enjoy a $100 million opener – an amount still less than the openings for the series’ two previous installments – but that analysts likely felt was conservative given the additional revenue from 3-D and IMAX showings.

Already the subject of lukewarm reviews, the film faces stiff competition in the coming weeks for the all-important 18-49 demographic, with The Hangover 2 opening this weekend and X-Men: First Class the week after.

6. A better show than anyone who’s never seen it realizes, FX’s Archer is much more than the genre-spoofing jokes its tame promos would indicate. Not for the faint of heart or gentle of stomach, it’s nevertheless a very smart, very dark comedy that most often recalls the first-season heyday of Arrested Development (partly a small wonder, given the bevy of AD veterans among its voice cast.)

Sterling Archer (H. Jon Benjamin) is the premiere secret agent for the quasi-governmental agency ISIS, run by his domineering, emotionally withholding mother (Jessica Walter) and staffed by a crew of sexual degenerates and deviants (voiced by, among others, Judy Greer and Chris Parnell.) Arrogant but achingly aware that his stunted maturity comes from a miserable childhood, Archer carries out missions with fellow spy and bittersweetheart Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler) while avoiding the machinations of the KGB, rival spy organization ODIN, and pretty much the entire world. Meanwhile the ISIS staff carries on workplace satire that would strip the paint off NBC’s cute/wacky/cute Thursday night sitcoms.

The second season recently concluded, with reruns currently appearing sporadically amid FX’s schedule.

7. With The Dark Knight Rises officially in production as of last week, the film’s official site released this picture of Tom Hardy (Inception) as the monstrous gang boss known as Bane.

In the comics, Bane is a criminal genius who uses a volatile steroid known as Venom to augment his musculature, giving  him incredible strength and terrific rage. Raised from childhood in the Caribbean prison of Pena Dura but eventually dominating its inmates through sheer intimidation, he journeyed to Gotham City to beat that city’s own “ruler by fear” – Batman. In his bid to conquer Gotham’s underworld he fought the hero hand-to-hand in a brutal Batcave-set duel that ended when he snapped Batman’s spine.

Currently reformed, more or less, he works with other villains-for-hire The Secret Six, whose perversely witty book is among the best DC publishes each month. Bane also previously appeared in 1997′s little-loved Batman and Robin, where he was played by the late wrestler Jeep Swenson.

8. Finally, because no one wants to work when the weather is nice, here’s Christian Bale in a clip from the unfairly ignored Harsh Times to help you articulate your workplace frustrations. Just let his words ring through your head when your coworkers annoy or frustrate.

We have a review of this film and several other worth-seeing Bale films in this feature from 2009. Finally, it should go without saying but nothing about his clip is SFW.

We’ll return next week with a review of The Hangover 2. 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, August 2009 Edition

Our irregular roundup of other news worth blogging about.

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

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

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

Still no Citizen Kane Blu-Ray

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

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

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

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

Our Guy: Baldwin

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

O'Loughlin

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

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

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

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

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

- Michael Kabel

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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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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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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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Ten Lessons Learned In Fifty Posts

Wisdom gleaned from 50 blog entries.

Since the middle of March or so, we’ve kept our promise to update at least every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with more updates whenever we could. In that time, we think (and hope) we’ve all gotten better about our reviewing skills and posting content of value and entertainment to the public. We’ve certainly built a small but loyal audience, and if we haven’t thanked them lately we’d like to do so now.

So, here’s 10 things we’ve learned about film, the Internet, and blogging itself in those fifty posts. In no particular order of importance:

10. If you want traffic, you’re going to have to use social bookmarks. There’s really no way around it.

9. It’s unbelievable how personally some people take the term “forgotten.”

8. Never underestimate the ferocious loyalty of Skeet Ulrich’s fan base.

7. Most people online are genuinely considerate and gracious, especially at LAMB and at sfsignal.com. But a few people elsewhere are neither.

6. We like WordPress’ old publishing controls better.

5. If you try to debate film with Anil Usumezbas, make sure you bring your A game.

4. Our most positive review: The Visitor. Our most negative review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

 

 2. When pressed for content, post a funny YouTube clip.

 1. It’s a great shame that the talent and the money in the entertainment industry almost never seem to find each other. That seems so simple, but it’s true.

Thanks for reading, and please keep checking back to see what we’ve got going. We might surprise you. We’ll probaby surprise ourselves.

best,

The Screaming Blue Reviews Staff

Mad Towns and Swing Men

Presenting five more concepts for sexy dramas set in other eras.

Mad Men may be the best drama on television, and last week’s Swingtown pilot was intriguing enough to merit watching the next episode tomorrow night. But it seems like they’ve both struck on a golden idea for our troubled times that isn’t so startling: show us how people loved and made love and lived in other time periods. Because the present sucks, there’s a natural impulse to look back to a golden past soft-focused by nostalgia. Ironically, that same desire to go back to the “good ole days” really originated in the 1970s, when Happy Days and its 1950s-set spinoffs ruled prime-time television. Now we look back to that time period as simpler and more liberated by comparison.

Of course Mad Men and presumably Swingtown offer more than just a trip in the Wayback machine – there’s incredible writing and acting, as well. In other words, they’re what every television show should be, no matter when it’s set. Still, we have to wonder if this “the way it was” concept can’t be taken a little further, or at least exploited a bit more. For example:

Suffragette City: The story of a group of women reaching a sexual awakening and finding their political voice in the years leading up to and during World War I, when women couldn’t vote and only men were elected to public office or served in the military. Gretchen Mol stars as a middle-class woman determined to obtain the right to vote, partly because her British-born husband is off fighting the war in Europe. Subplots include the prohibition movement, an Italian immigrant family moving into the neighborhood, and the aftermath of Reconstruction. Also starring Stuart Townsend as her husband and Deadwood‘s Timothy Olyphant as the temptingly sexy local party organizer.

Victory Radio: A young married couple (Connor Trinneer and Sophia Myles) moves to Los Angeles shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, taking work at an aircraft plant manufacturing bombers while volunteering nights with the Citizens’ Patrol. The rapidly growing city of Los Angeles forms a vivid backdrop for love and the search for identity, with its itinerant migrant workers from Oklahoma, waves of Mexican immigrants, and old California money all mixed together – even while the threat of Japanese invasion seems certain. As the war years drag on, the young couple encounters romance, temptation, and violence. Also starring Michael Moriarty as the plant foreman and Gena Rowlands as the wife’s mother.

St. Elmo’s Fire: Chronicling the further adventures of the characters from the 1985 Brat Pack melodrama as they enter their adult lives at the tail end of the 1980s. The group encounters stalled careers and the responsibilities of parenthood while also coping with the effect of AIDS on dating, the divorce epidemic, and the after effects of years of substance abuse. Chad Michael Murray revives the part played by Emilio Estevez, while Adam Brody takes over for Rob Lowe. Arcade Fire updates the John Parr theme song.

Melrose Place: To be honest, we’re only suggesting reruns of the 1990s prime time soap. Its attention to style and fashion was so cynically precise during its time that when viewed now it seems almost larger than life as a period piece. The Desperate Housewives audience gets to see a lot of that show’s cast, only younger, while those of us who remember the ‘90s (most of it, anyway) get to enjoy a window into an actually simpler time. Speaking of which…

The Low Unknown: Generation X becomes thirty-somethings in this black comedy set during the years between 9/11 and the election of 2008. While hoping to someday start families, a group of eight men and women who work two jobs each must first confront skyrocketing energy costs, dwindling standards of living, crippling student loan debt, a shrinking job marketplace, foreign outsourcing, and even a global climate crisis – all without losing their minds but while keeping their values in the age of “truthiness.” The cast of 90s-era Next Big Things includes Skeet Ulrich, Julia Stiles, Rachael Leigh Cook, Monica Potter, Alicia Witt, Edward Furlong, Giovanni Ribisi, and Sean Patrick Flannery.

- Michael Kabel

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