Forces of Evil On A Bozo Nightmare

Eight of the worst films of the early 1990s.

About half a dozen things wrong with the era are in this picture.

When assorted by quality, the movies of any given period resemble a pyramid, or a mountain: the bottom is the part that’s hardest to get around or avoid. There are far more bad movies than good ones, and really, really awful films – films that can make you angry they even exist – outnumber the movies that deserve lasting notoriety. Yet our culture is mesmerized by irony (a trend that started – ironically – in the 90s), so as a bitter result many of these craptacular failures linger on, year after year.

The early 90s were not the best handful of years for American cinema, but they weren’t the worst, either. Earlier this week we mentioned seven good films from the period that deserved more recognition. Listed below, as threatened, are eight misfires from that same pocket of history. A couple of them are justly forgotten; some were notorious in their time and then forgotten later.

And we understand that every film is somebody’s favorite. We hope yours isn’t found below.

Highlander 2: The Quickening (1991) An early cable TV mainstay, the first Highlander was an overachieving B-movie about immortal humans fighting among themselves for the prize of omniscience. For the sequel, the creators made the immortals dissidents from the planet Zeist instead, exiled here by its dictator (Michael Ironside).

Also, this time around the noble immortal Conner MacLeod (Christopher Lambert) teams up with a freedom fighter (Virginia Madsen) to overthrow the corporation that’s keeping Earth locked in perpetual night. Overly violent, yet pompous thanks to a global warming subplot, the film buried the franchise for years, until the first film got a TV spinoff that jettisoned almost everything about the sequel.

Hudson Hawk (1991) The early 90s were also a time when studios were still working out the bugs of making ultra-expensive blockbusters that people would get excited about seeing. Hudson Hawk, a smart-assed caper comedy starring Bruce Willis and the last dregs of the Bruno shtick he’d worked through the 80s, goes nowhere while spending piles of cash on pretty much everything – sets, stars, special effects, the works.

Yet the film died hard, becoming a punchline and euphemism for “megaflop” until Battlefield Earth stole that dubious distinction in 2000. Not the absolute worst film of the era, except that Tri-Star expected people to line up for tickets. And play the video game. And collect the plastic cups, all to pay off its wretched excess.

The Vanishing (1993) We figure in his fifty-year career Jeff Bridges has only made maybe four or five really lousy films. This remake of the 1988 Dutch thriller Spoorloos, directed by that film’s Geroge Sluizer, can without doubt consider itself one of them. Cast somewhat against type as Machiavellian serial killer Barney Cousins, Bridges steamrolls over costar Kiefer Sutherland (playing a boyfriend obsessed with finding his girlfriend, one of Cousins’ victims) so completely that the psychological tug of war between the two collapses under its own lopsided weight.

The original film understood how to build ambient dread out of the unknown, and the fear of knowing something you have no choice but to learn; The Vanishing telegraphs everything rather than take its time or risk boring its audience, then changes the script to give the story a happy ending. Ah, Hollywood.

Threesome (1994) Like the similarly disingenuous Reality Bites released the same year, writer-director Andrew Fleming’s (Hamlet 2) romantic comedy attempted to cash in on Generation X’s coming of age with this pretentious soap opera about three Gen X’ers – two guys and a girl – sharing a college dorm suite. The script contains every indie trope that got beaten to death throughout the decade: the world-weary voiceover narration, the superficial sex, the self-consciously “witty” vulgarity, the abrupt and unearned emotional reversals.

Stars Josh Hamilton, Stephen Baldwin, and Lara Flynn Boyle are good-looking, vacant, and stiffly deliberate, as if they’re aware they’re in a movie “with a message.” Gen X’ers stayed away in droves, even while the demographic-targeted soundtrack became a hit on college radio stations.

There’s no trailer for the film on YouTube. Just searching the film’s title is awkward enough.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1992 and 94) We mention these two together because they were part of the era’s trend towards high-budget monster movies made by the era’s top talent. Francis Ford Coppola helmed the lush Dracula version, starring the reliably fearless Gary Oldman (The Dark Knight) as the titular count and Anthony Hopkins as his nemesis Van Helsing.

The film is flawed everywhere: Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves are as flat as ever portraying doomed lovers Jonathan Harker and Mina Murray, and Hopkins – the decade’s highest-paid scene chewer - hams away as usual. Oldman, in a scrotum-shaped wig and old lady nightgown, tries to keep up with the increasingly overheated proceedings. Coppola’s direction and production design are bloated and unconvincing, making fans of the novel take umbrage to its liberal additions of blood-drenched sex and violence.

The film made money anyway, and two years later Coppola produced a Frankenstein film directed by rising triple threat Kenneth Branagh, who cast himself as the mad doctor and Robert DeNiro as his creation. The result, somewhat surprisingly, was bleak, turgid, and opaque while struggling beneath the same middlebrow overreach that doomed Dracula. None of the actors are really bad, though DeNiro often seems uncomfortable in period dress, possibly because Branagh and co-star Helena Bonham-Carter (Fight Club) always seemed to be in movies about Victorian England.

Critics at the time wondered if Branagh was out of his element or in over his head, and the film’s box-office failure delivered his until-then wunderkind career trajectory a punishing blow that hasn’t truly recovered yet.

Jade (1995) A film seemingly assembled in studio committee for box office success, William Friedkin’s (The French Connection) Jade aimed to recreate the kinky titillation success of screenwriter Joe Eszterhaus’ previous Basic Instinct. Featuring emerging leading men David Caruso and Chazz Palminteri alongside rising screen vamps Linda Fiorentino and Angie Everhart, the story of a gruesome murder linked to a sex club among San Francisco’s political elite was nevertheless muddled, hard to follow, and surprisingly light on sex appeal.

Friedkin, known for his gritty ultra-realism, was a poor choice to realize the story’s stylish affluence, and Caruso and Palminteri failed to generate chemistry with their gorgeous co-stars. The result was a dull potboiler uncomfortable with itself.

Exit To Eden (1994) A “comedy” about an island of dominatrices and the love slaves they love, this notorious bomb film inexplicably stars Dan Aykroyd and Rosie O’Donnell as New Orleans cops going undercover to catch a gang of jewel smugglers, and – and! – it’s directed by Gary Marshall, the creator of Happy Days. Not funny and aggressively unsexy despite Dana Delaney’s (Body of Proof) warm turn as a mistress learning to soften up, the all-over-the-place vibe isn’t helped by O’Donnell’s smarmy narration or the smutty jokes that seemed a cop-out from the issues that Anne Rice’s original novel eagerly confronted.

Even today, it’s hard to imagine the film’s target audience. Was it people who thought Julia Roberts should have worn more studded leather in Pretty Woman? Those who thought Aykroyd was sexy? Bondage enthusiasts who wanted to laugh at themselves? YouTube doesn’t have much of this film. Perhaps that’s just as well.

- Michael Kabel

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70′s Crime Cinema: The French Connection

William Friedkin’s gritty masterpiece defined cop movies for a more cynical era.

The obsessive, street-hardened detectives on a collision course with a charming, elegant villain. The friction between local police and their arrogant, meddling federal colleagues. The urban decay that whittles morality down to killer instinct. 1971′s The French Connection might not have invented all the tropes that have since become the vocabulary of police procedural movies and television, but it brought them all together and made telling a cop story any other way seem like bullshit. The film was a game changer, much like Citizen Kane was for the biography and Blade Runner was for science fiction. And like those other classics it’s sometimes tricky to watch the film now without letting its legions of derivatives distract from its gripping audacity.

Based on real-life events and constructed with meticulous attention to realistic detail by director William Friedkin (The Exorcist), The French Connection was adapted in part from Robin Moore’s book of the same name but drew additional technical advice from the main characters’ real-life counterparts, who also played supporting roles in the film. The story’s premise is brutally simple: two NYPD narcotics detectives, Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle and Buddy “Cloudy” Russo, stumble upon word of a major drug influx while staking out a low-level wiseguy (Tony Lo Bianco). Sensing something big, the detectives resolve to stop the importation no matter how much extra work that entails.

The two are nobody’s idea of white knights: Doyle especially drinks too much, bullies women and minorities, and smacks around suspects and informants with an almost palpable glee. Russo, quieter and more methodical, abets Doyle’s rampages through intelligence gathering and measured consideration. They want wire taps to pursue the investigation, but the mistakes of Doyle’s past make the necessary clearance harder to obtain from their captain (Eddie Egan, the real-life Doyle). Russo gets the court orders but also the hostile assistance of two federal agents (legendary stuntman Bill Hickman and Sonny Grosso, the real-life Russo) who want the case for themselves.

Meanwhile the drugs, about $35 million worth of grade-A heroin, arrive in  the city hidden within the car of a French television personality, placed there by Marseilles shipping magnate Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey) and his enforcer Nicoli (Marcel Bozzuffi). Upon their arrival in New York, Charnier and Nicoli find themselves under surveillance by Doyle, Russo, and the federal agents. But Doyle especially finds himself outmatched in short order by the suave Charnier, who smugly dismisses Doyle’s tail by outwitting him on a subway platform.

The film is distinguished throughout by its lack of explanation. There are no moments of clarification in the Captain’s office, no recanting of the details so that the audience can vicariously refresh their awareness of plot points. Friedkin and screenwriter Ernest Tidyman build an undertow into the film’s momentum, so that the viewer is pulled into and then along for the events as they happen in furious succession. Frankly, that speed does the movie a service, because careful or dogged examination will reveal any number of plot holes and gaps in logic that will likely annoy the very left-brained among its audience. But the filmmakers meant to engage the senses, not the mind, and in that sense the fluid plot works like a Swiss watch.

The centerpiece of the film, of course, comes in the legendary car-vs.-subway chase, in which Doyle madly attempts to overtake Nicoli’s hijacked train car on its overhead track. It’s here that the detective’s relentless drive gets stripped bare of job or duty and the obsessiveness beneath its surface grows exposed. What’s amazing, and what future derivatives would cheat, is the realism of the chase. The traffic lights don’t turn themselves off, and the streets don’t empty of pedestrians. The entire sequence took weeks to shoot over several locations, and included all manner of clever lens techniques and editing sleight of hand.

Make no mistake: Friedkin, Hickman and their crew accomplished all that without a single pixel of CGI.

The film’s third act relates the taking apart and reconstruction of the drug-laden car and the eventual bust of the New York criminals as the sale is concluded. Doyle, Russo, and the federal agents corral the criminals inside a trash-collecting facility on a tiny island outside the city (New York in miniature, really), precipitating a bloody shootout that moves Doyle’s character completely over the edge of morality. The tortuously ambivalent ending denies the viewer any real satisfaction, followed by postscripts that play out almost tauntingly rote. The film doesn’t end so much as it ceases to share information with the viewer.

But like the tonally similar Bullitt three years previous (the films share a producer in Philip D’Antoni) that sense of lacking resolution captured the decade’s mood of weary cynicism. There are no easy answers and no one heads home satisfied or even vindicated, if they get to go home at all. Though Doyle and Charnier would have their reckoning in a largely forgotten sequel released four years later, the ambiguity of this film keeps its point separate and inviolate. In displaying Doyle and Russo’s brutality, The French Connection along with Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (released the same year) began to craft what would soon be known as the anti-hero, and their success opened a floodgate of tough-guy performances good and bad that have continued ever since. Though modern actors like Bruce Willis, Clive Owen and many others have made a career out of such parts, in 1971 they were a new film species as different from their more heroic predecessors as those characters were of the Keystone Kops a generation before them. They were heroes of their time, for better but especially for worse.

And while future marketing wizards would label their approach to the world as “in your face” attitude, nevertheless there’s something more slippery at play in Hackman and Sheider’s performances. It would seem somewhat stupid, in retrospect, if cinema came out of the 1960s with the same perspective it had before that decade’s upheaval. By building protagonists out of flawed men, Friedkin, Tidyman, Hackman and Sheider were moving closer to true realism by accepting the world everyone was handed and then willfully grounding their performances and their entire films inside it. “Realistic” has since become an empty phrase in describing fiction, but forty years ago it was a goal to chase.

In our next installment we’ll look at The French Connection‘s creative and spiritual true successor, a great movie that’s grown  lost in its predecessor’s long, dark shadow.

-Michael Kabel

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Seven More Crime Classics from the 70s

The rest of the best from the golden age of gritty crime thrillers.

The 70s were not an optimistic time, and most American cinema carried and echoed that cynicism. Cop films were no exception, eschewing the traditional white hat/black hat simplicity in place since the 1950s in favor of darker shades of gray among its cops and crooks alike. Looking past the “D’Antoni Trilogy” of Bullitt, The French Connection, and The Seven-Ups, movie theatres of the era were held down by dozens of gritty police and crime thrillers, many of which rivaled or in some ways surpassed the blueprint those three films delineated. Known for their realistic settings, amoral protagonists, and meticulous attention to violent detail, the era’s crime films were often as bleak and unremitting as the real-life stories that sometimes inspired them.

The following list includes films that exemplified the crime genre. The edges of film genre are seldom clear and almost never straight, but the list includes films of a certain recognizable kind but deliberately omits others. There’s no question that Chinatown, for example, was one of the 70s best films. Including it as a crime film, however, both sells its considerable achievements short while ignoring the criteria of texture and mood that defines most “crime” films of the period. Likewise for other films such as Taxi Driver, Murder On The Orient Express, The Godfather and its sequel, The Parallax View, Dog Day Afternoon, and no doubt many others.

In chronological order:

Shaft (1971): The decade saw the rise (and fall) of the blaxploitation sub-genre, typically low-budget efforts that brought the new cop movie morality to the inner city, a locale where in the real world crime and corruption were reaching catastrophic levels. Films  including Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Dolemite, Black Caesar,  and Super Fly pitted strong black men against, alternately, evil white people, crooks, mobsters, revolutionaries and politicians.

The mack daddy of them all, however, was 1973′s Shaft, an eye-popping swirl of color, attitude, and especially violence. Richard Roundtree played the titular private detective on the trial of a local kingpin’s kidnapped daughter, bucking criminals and cops with help from a Black Panthers-like revolutionary cell. Touted as “The Black James Bond,” Roundtree reprised the role of John Shaft in three sequels, though none match the original. (Note that the following is a fan-made trailer.)

 

Dirty Harry (1971): A film that’s become somewhat archetypal over time, Don Siegel (The Killers) directed this ultra-violent crime thriller about rogue San Francisco Police Inspector “Dirty”  Harry Callahan, a role that after thirty-eight years and four diminishing sequels has become synonymous with star Clint Eastwood’s public and screen image. The plot puts the remorseless Callahan against a serial sniper loosely based on the real-life Zodiac killer, then at the height of his reign of terror over the Bay Area.

The story is straightforward and the characterizations rote, but Siegel keeps the mounting tension taut as piano wire. Callahan and “Scorpio” are both unstoppable objects, making their inevitable collision loom mercilessly over the audience. At leat the trailer gives fair warning:

The Getaway (1972): Mastermind criminal Doc McCoy (Steve McQueen) is paroled from a Texas prison on the condition that he plan a bank robbery for corrupt businessman Jack Benyon (Ben Johnson). One of the businessman’s goons kills a security guard during the heist, and Doc and his wife Carol (Ali McGraw) flee to the border at El Paso while eluding pursuit by Benyon and the killer. McQueen and MacGraw became real-life lovers during filming despite her marriage to producer Robert Evans, making them a kind of 70s Brangelina. Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch) directs the sleek, swift-moving thriller purely for the sake of entertaining the audience, who loved the palpable chemistry between its stars. A 1994 remake starring then-married couple Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger flopped.

Serpico (1973): Director Sidney Lumet (Twelve Angry Men) returned to the theme of police corruption time and again through his career, though probably none of his works equal the haunting intensity of this true-life story of whistle-blowing narcotics detective Frank Serpico. Shunned and eventually set up for a near-fatal shooting by his NYPD colleagues, Serpico (Al Pacino) personified the righteous outcast persona typical of 70s film protagonists, as the film’s grim ending perfectly demonstrates. Pacino was only just coming into his commanding screen presence, and the on-location shots of a crime-devastated New York showcase Lumet’s attention to precise realism. The two reteamed for the bank heist classic Dog Day Afternoon two years later.

 

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973): The poster on the left isn’t meant to be cheap -  it’s just that this film about the working class ranks of the Boston underworld is actually that stark and bleak. Faced with an impending jail sentence, low-level hood Eddie Coyle (the great Robert Mitchum, kicking off a late-career resurgence) agrees to snitch a gang of home invaders to the feds, only to learn that the gang was already caught that same morning. Meanwhile the Irish Mob, believing Coyle was actually the informant, sends his friend Dillon (Peter Boyle) to kill him in retribution. Mitchum and Boyle, two consummate pros, build their characters comfortably and with unforced but nonetheless mounting tension, while great turns by unjustly forgotten character actors such as Richard Jordan, Steven Keats and others fill in the grimy, desperate world they inhabit. Peter Yates (Bullitt) directs, and the film will see a long-anticipated DVD release this May.

The Conversation (1974): Francis Ford Coppola made this smart conspiracy yarn between the first two Godfather sagas, distilling the decade’s paranoia and fear of technology into an intense character study chock full of irony. Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who leads a life of deliberate isolation from others while keeping morally removed from the consequences of his discoveries. Haunted by a previous mistake that left three people dead, he becomes obsessed with the meaning of his latest taped investigation, ultimately finding himself the target of eavesdropping and pursuit for reasons not immediately apparent. The script was written in the mid-60s, yet the film saw release during the height of the Watergate scandal. A pre-Star Wars Harrison Ford makes a rare screen appearance as the heavy.

The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three (1974): A British mercenary (Robert Shaw) and his three henchmen hijack a crowded New York subway train and demand a million dollar ransom. A Transit Authority detective (Walter Matthau) scrambles to stall the gang, which includes former subway system employees who know how to exploit the weaknesses in its safety features. Directed by veteran TV director Joseph Sargent, Matthau and the versatile cast imbue the film with a cynical New York humor, while Quentin Tarantino lifted the hijackers’ color-coordinated code names for his Reservoir Dogs. A remake, starring Denzel Washington in the Matthau role and John Travolta as the hijacker’s ringleader, is scheduled for release this June.

- Michael Kabel
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70s Crime Cinema Preview: Bullitt

Celebrating some of the great crime films of the decade known for moral ambivalence.

American cinema experienced a golden age in the 1970s, and no genre had more of a rebirth than the crime thriller. Films such as The French Connection, Dog Day Afternoon, the Dirty Harry series, and The Conversation (among many others) constructed a new voice to the structure and narrative of the typical cops-and-robbers saga, which since the late 1930s had maintained and languished in an instructional, moralistic tone. Reflecting the uncertainty of the era, the new crime films boasted morally ambiguous protagonists who often brandished the same ruthlessness as their opponents. The films were an idea whose time had come, and their brooding relativism would inform not only other crime movies but also the science fiction and Western genres throughout the 1980s and 90s.

But as proof that time hates a calendar, the new breed began two years ahead of their decade with the 1968 release of Peter Yates’ Bullitt. The gritty story revolves around loose cannon Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen), a San Francisco police detective charged with protecting a mob witness until a district attorney (Robert Vaughn) can bring him to trial. But Bullitt’s assistants fail to guard the witness from mob hitmen, and it falls to Bullitt to uncover the wide-ranging conspiracy behind the attack.

Bullitt the character is archetypal of the 70s crime cinema anti-hero: noncomformist even among other cops but especially with respect to his superiors, he’s what in today’s parlance would be considered a “rogue.” Ignoring the district attorney and a writ served against him, he enlists his girlfriend Cathy (Jacqueline Bisset) into the investigation, which soon reveals that the witness Bullitt’s men guarded was not actually a mob witness at all but someone else entirely. Horrified by the scene of a dead body, Cathy attacks Bullitt with recognition of his world. “You live in a sewer, Frank!” she screams, presaging the appalled love interest archetype that would also become a mainstay of cops-on-the edge actioners. Bulitt then has to stop the true mob witness from escaping the country that same day.

The centerpiece of the film is the gripping 11-minute car chase sequence through the San Francisco streets, a set piece that proved so popular with audiences that dozens of imitator films would make its use cliche by the end of the 70s. Yates (Breaking Away) shot the sequence on location, keeping the action not on deserted streets but rather on crowded avenues and through intersections, narrowing the viewer’s perspective while raising the tension.

Small wonder that the film proved a boon to the Ford Motor Company, whose 390 CID V8 Mustang essentially enjoyed a co-starring role as Bullitt’s vehicle of choice.

Other smaller details almost seemed aggressive in promoting a new image of masculine cool: Bullitt’s all-black wardrobe, his sleek underarm shoulder holsters (inspired by legendary SFPD Inspector David Toschi, who served as a technical adviser on the film), and the aforementioned anti-authoritarian attitude all resonated with audiences grown bored with the straight-arrow lawmen that had populated crime movies and television since the heyday of Dragnet in the 1950s. Bullitt and Cathy enjoy a very modern relationship: highly sexualized but with little sense of real commitment. They each have their own careers (she’s an architect) but their lives intersect easily and without strain. Watching the film now, it’s easy and even tempting to misunderstand their dynamic as bullying or one-sided. But Bullitt only pulls Cathy into his world when he has no alternative, implying a protectiveness and trust towards her that stays powerful by remaining unspoken. The film ends with him staring at himself in a mirror while she sleeps in the next room, possibly reasserting his dedication to self-reliance in the future.

Next week we’ll be reviewing three crime films of the 70s, including the Oscar-winner that’s one of the best cop films of all time. Please join us then.

- Michael Kabel
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Miscellaneous Debris: March Edition

Our version of the old Movietone newsreels, but in blog form.

The green tint is the pollen.

Spring is just around the corner, and for those of living in the South that means soupy thick fogs of oak pollen and warmer temperatures occasionally punctuated by slick, sweaty rain. Lucky for us more movies start debuting, and that the theatres showing them are climate controlled. Seriously, if we lived somewhere with better weather we’d probably be doing something else (probably something outdoors.)

March means the downhill homestretch towards the summer movie season, with some distant beeps already popping on the radar for April and especially May. There’s a new Star Trek trailer airing before Watchmen, for example, and a fresh trailer for X-Men Origins: Wolverine is beginning to circle around online. Besides the geek culture stuff, April sees the release of Adventureland for the undergrad crowd and Gigantic for their hipster dorm mates. Grown-ups get State of Play with Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck as well as the long-delayed The Soloist with Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx.

The following items are just a roundup of some topics of interest, movies and news that either don’t merit a full blog post or will bear further previewing and reviewing as more information becomes available. But they’re all things worth talking about right now.

Who watches The Horsemen?

1. Our senses of pity and fair play alike compel us to mention that the movies The Horsemen, 12, Phoebe In Wonderland, and Tokyo! also open this weekend. Probably the coming-of-age Sundance favorite Phoebe In Wonderland and 12, a Russian version of 12 Angry Men, offer the most divergent counter-programming for those not looking for super-heroics. All four movies open “in limited release,” here meaning the arthouses of the larger cities even more so than that phrase usually does.

2. If and when you get tired of hearing about the genius of the original Watchmen graphic novel, Comic Book Resources.com offers an excellent critique and evaluation of the 1986 comics series by veteran comics writer Steven Grant. It’s a note of clarity and scholarship that’s both fair and balanced, to use the cliche. Definitely worth reading.

Man out of time: O'Mara

3. America’s long war of attrition against quality network television scored another victory this week with ABC’s cancellation of Life On Mars. An upstart show that realized its considerable potential by leaps and bounds with each passing episode, the atmospheric time travel mystery-drama never developed an audience despite repeated chances from the network. The show’s creators will be able to wrap up is outstanding plotlines, however, presumably revealing just exactly why main character Sam Tyler (Jason O’Mara) finds himself trapped in an often-hellish vision of New York City circa 1973.

4. While we’re on the subject of good television, AMC’s weird, addictive original Breaking Bad debuts its second season this Sunday night. Overshadowed by the elegant glare of AMC’s  Mad Men juggernaut, this grimly sharp drama about a dying high school chemistry teacher (Emmy winner Bryan Cranston) manufacturing and dealing drugs to support his family consistently went in unexpected directions its entire first season. Small wonder, considering it was created by Vince Gilligan, the mad intellect who helped create some of The X-Files’ most memorable episodes.

He's the main character, folks.

5. Is it better to burn out than fade away? Besides Life On Mars, several other shows including Life, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Pushing Daisies are all either cancelled or hearing bells toll for their renewal chances. Watching the slow deaths of other longer-running episodics, such as the ones we’ve come to call Name That Cylon and The Adventures of Ben Linus, Super Genius almost make us feel relieved these good shows will wrap before their creative half-lifes expire.

6. Pixar’s summer-debuting Up has a premise that’s ingenious in its simple whimsy and a trailer promising the same wonder-inspiring visuals as so many of the animation maestros’ other productions. Still, it seems at least initially doomed to become a footnote after last year’s masterpiece Wall*E, an approximate Barry Lyndon to that film’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Though such a dismissal is probably unfair, after Wall*E anyone would deserve a victory lap. And given Up‘s septuagenarian protagonist – a dead ringer for Andy Rooney, to boot – it’s now fairly obvious that the animators aren’t even keeping up the pretense of making children’s films anymore.

Up opens nationwide May 29th.

Flavor Flav does not appear in this movie.

7. Looking farther into the summer, July 1st sees the release of Public Enemies, probably the biggest event of the year for crime movie junkies as well as anyone enamored of white-hot leading men Johnny Depp and Christian Bale. Based on the true-life pursuit of gangster John Dillinger (Depp) by FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Bale), the film’s also directed by crime auteur Michael Mann, meaning lots of structure and veracity in detailing Dillinger’s mythic crime career. Depp looks dashing as all Hell in the production photos that have leaked so far, but Bale has a talent for stealing films from his more celebrated co-stars (Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Colin Farrell), and a supporting cast that includes Marion Cotillard, Billy Crudup and Giovanni Ribisi only sweetens the potential. Consider us stoked.

8. We’ve fired some stiff shots at The Office in blog posts past, but the show’s creative staff really needs to stop making such gripes so plentiful. In particular this season’s saturation with Dwight – a character that in the most versatile of performer’s hands would still only merit small doses - is slowly draining the show of the ensemble charm that was beginning to draw comparisons to classic TV like WKRP In Cincinnati and Cheers. Someone suggested that the creators are building Dwight up for a catastrophic fall. We hope that’s the case, because we miss the warmth and slice-of-life sweetness of earlier seasons. And we miss Amy Ryan a lot, too.

9. Sometimes the library of Blu-Ray titles reminds us of a HBO programming schedule circa 1984. Recent releases on the still-not-quite-America’s-format-of-choice medium include Escape From New York, The French Connection, Amadeus, and Gandhi. But overall Blu-Ray seems at times spasmodically self-sabotaging. Amid the marketing of tons of modern cinema drivel, there’s still no word on such all time classics like Citizen Kane or Lawrence of Arabia, or even modern favorites like Schindler’s List and The Return of the King getting the big blue upgrade. The release timeline will likely (and we hope) follow the same paradoxical model as traditional DVD over the last decade: as the format becomes more mainstream, films of less general appeal will see their release. In the meantime, it wouldn’t hurt studios to release some high-profile classics in Blu-Ray now, at a loss, as a sign of good faith to more serious movie collectors.

We’ll return Monday with our review of – what else – Watchmen. Have a good time this weekend at the movies or anywhere else you find yourself.

- Michael Kabel
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