A late entry into this year's Oscar race, this film based on a best-selling novel tells the story of an orphan girl who goes to live with a German couple (Geoffrey Rush and Emily Watson) as WWII breaks out and they help to shelter a Jewish refugee. Seen by some as a children's film, but you know how the Academy loves that WWII subject matter. The movie comes out Nov 15th.
Happy Birthday Ang Lee
One of our best and most eclectic directors was born today. From period epics to forbidden love stories, hulks and visual 3D extravaganzas, the Taiwanese-born master has proven that he can tackle just about any subject on screen, but if you had to pinpoint it I suppose you could say that he connects to stories about emotionally closed off people entrapped by their surroundings. in honor of the two-time Oscar winner's birthday, here's a tribute that takes a look at my three favorite Ang Lee films:
1) Sense and Sensibility (1995) Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet
Still one of his best movies, this exquisite Jane Austen adaptation introduced Kate Winslet to the world and possesses one of the most heartwrenching happy endings you can imagine.
Trailer:
2) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) Chow-yun fat, Michelle Yeoh
This crossover hit was a cultural phenomenon with some of the most amazing action scenes ever put to film, plus two butt-kicking heroines (Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi) in lead roles to boot.
Trailer:
3) Lust, Caution (2007) Tony Leung, Tang Wei
Kind of a divisive movie, but I think one of his best and most underrated, that explores the duplicitous relationship between a Chinese spy in World War II-era Shanghai and the sadistic government agent she is forced to seduce.
TRAILER #2: "Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues"
The new trailer for Anchorman 2! Coming out Dec 20th.
REVIEW: "White House Down" (2013) Channing Tatum, Jamie Foxx. Dir. Roland Emmerich
Roland Emmerich seems to have a thing for the destruction of U.S. monuments, often in the most epic ways imaginable. White House Down continues the ongoing cinematic attack on the White House, after this year's Olympus Has Fallen, and fits right in with all the summer movies that signaled apocalyptic, world-ending catastrophes.
Unlike Olympus Has Fallen, however, or even last spring's Man of Steel, Emmerich is a guy who's always in on the joke, and the same usually goes for the people in his movies, most of them never forgetting to crack wise every other second even as they're running for their lives. Or, in this case, as the president of the United States sticks his head out of a speeding limousine to shoot a rocket launcher at terrorists on the White House roof. Yes, that is as ridiculous as it sounds, and you better believe that Emmerich knows it. This is an extraordinarily silly movie and so incredibly over the top that I have to admit the ludicrous nature of events was consistently entertaining, if not for one second remotely plausible. But just because I wasn't bored doesn't mean I can recommend it.
What this movie wants to be is kind of a throwback to the '80s and '90s action movies where a human everyguy hero (rather than a super one) steps up and saves the day. In fact there are a number of direct nods to DIe Hard specifically, as Channing Tatum plays former marine John Cale who applies and is rejected for a presidential secret service position, only to be thrown into the job haphazardly when right wing psychopaths take over the White House and threaten the president while he's on a tour of the building with his daughter. Now he's got to protect the president and rescue his kid, while navigating his way around the invaders- so he's essentially in the Bruce Willis role, and for good measure they even get him into a wife-beater for half the movie.
Tatum is actually pretty good in the film, and he possesses a lot of charisma as he portrays a fundamentally decent, good natured everyman in crisis, and Jamie Foxx also does a good job underplaying as Obama-like president James Sawyer, who's peace plan to pull all our troops out of the middle east (talk about a liberal pipe dream) rattles the defense industries and their right wing allies, including those in Congress, who respond by taking up arms against the president. It can't help but draw comparison to our current political climate, even in this insanely exaggerated metaphor, but a black president under full blown attack by white supremacists and war crazy neo-conservatives is a scenario that's striving to make some kind of a statement, wouldn't you say?
But any underlying themes are never pushed very far, as this movie is mostly about explosions and watching every single part of the White House get destroyed, whether by bullets, fire, rocket launchers, missiles, exploding cars, you name it. It's ridiculously over the top and might be more of a guilty pleasure if it wasn't for that fact that everything looked so fake! And this really bothered me- the backgrounds in this movie are clearly phony- every time someone is outside you can see rear projection behind them, including driving scenes and fights atop the White House roof. It's so distracting that the only time you can't see it is when Cale and President Sawyer are inside the building trying to get away through the elevator shafts and basement tunnels. That's just poor filmmaking and there's no excuse for the effects being so cheap (and if Roland Emmerich, the director of Independence Day is known for anything, it's usually not bad special effects).
All in all, the cheap production values and insanely nutty plot turns (this is a movie where the office of the presidency actually gets handed off three times in one day) make this film hilariously awful and weirdly entertaining at the same time. Kind of a mixed bag, but is it worth it even for die hard Channing Tatum fans? Nah.
* 1/2
Movie of the Day: "Corpse Bride" (2005)
Tim Burton week continues with this underrated gem from 2005, a lovely little musical starring the voices of (who else?) Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter. Depp is Victor, a befuddled engaged man in Victorian-era Europe, who accidentally weds Emily, the dead corpse bride, when she rises from the grave after he unknowingly places his wedding ring on her finger. Gorgeously animated in stop-motion, this was a pure labor of love from Burton and works as a decidedly sweet romantic fantasy. With music by Danny Elfman, you should do yourself a favor and seek out this wonderful little movie as Halloween draws ever closer.
Trailer:
POSTER: "Captain America: The Winter Soldier"
The poster for the new Captain America movie has arrived. In this sequel set in the present day, Steve Rogers teams up with Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) to face down the new villain Winter Soldier. The trailer's due on Thursday.
Blu-Ray Pick of the Week: "The Uninvited" (1944)
Another timely Halloween release (and another completely awesome Criterion cover- these guys really know what they're doing), this movie has the distinction of being one of the earliest serious takes on the "haunted house" genre. It's a genuine ghost story, one of the very first, even though there'd been plenty of monster movies before (Frankenstein, Dracula, etc.). Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey play a pair of siblings who movie into a creepy old English mansion with, you guessed it, a shady past. Perfect time to check this out.
Original 1944 Trailer:
Steve McQueen on Tavis Smiley
The best interview I've seen yet with the director of 12 Years a Slave, which has tied Gravity for the very best reviews of the year. McQueen's gotten the reputation for being a bit prickly in interviews, but this is a really interesting conversation about the film and all the talk it's stirred up about everything from slavery to civil rights and the Obama era. Really worth listening to.
Movie of the Day: "Beetlejuice" (1988)
Tim Burton seems like another perfect director to tip our hat to this month, as pretty much any of the characters in his movies would make perfect Halloween costumes. And given the latest rumors that he and Michael Keaton are reuniting to make a sequel to this film 25 years later (whether or not that's anything close to a good idea), it seems especially fitting to look back at Beetlejuice first in our "Movie of the Day" series this week, celebrating the films of Tim Burton. Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis star as the young couple who die in a car accident and return home as ghosts to find a new family inhabiting their house. They decide to contact the "bio-exorcist" Beetlejuice, to scare the new people away, but soon come to regret the decision. Michael Keaton plays the title character of course, in a funny, weird, and totally off-the-wall performance, and those are adjectives that describe the whole movie in a lot of ways. A zany, weird little oddity that's a kick to see again all these years later.
Original Trailer:
REVIEW: "The Bling Ring" (2013) Emma Watson, Leslie Mann. Dir. Sofia Coppola
In 2009 a series of robberies took place in the Hollywood Hills, where several celebrity's homes were burglarized and millions of dollars worth of property was stolen. The gang that was perpetrating these robberies comprised a group of teenagers who became known as the "bling ring," and in her most recent film, director Sofia Coppola dramatizes what happened and attempts to explore the mindset of these already privileged, celebrity obsessed teens, mostly young women.
Lost souls amidst luxury has been the special focus of Sofia Coppola's films (aside from her first, The Virgin Suicides). One senses she herself feels the identification with these insiders, having grown up in Hollywood as the daughter of the legendary Francis Ford Coppola and in the shadow of his success. But that identification she feels with her subjects gives her the unique ability to make us feel entirely apart of these worlds she explores, like we're on the inside track with her, seeing and experiencing all that her Marie Antoinette, or Bob Harris, or Cleo Marco is going through. This approach works again with the gang in The Bling Ring, but there's a bit of a distance this time that prevents us from getting inside the heads of these vapid, shallow teenagers, and the points Coppola wants to make about youth obsessed celebrity culture are made within the first 30 minutes. After that it seems there's not a lot left to say.
The movie starts out with the gang's ringleader Rebecca, befriending outsider Mark, who appears to be gay and ostracized from others, desperate to fit in with somebody at his new school and eager to go along with anything his new best friend does. Rebecca is probably the most interesting and the most removed from us, because she seems to possess a cold, almost sociopathic focus on the lives of celebrities she follows online, and she and Mark google their houses and systematically break into their homes, often walking in through the front door when, amazingly, many of these people leave their houses completely unlocked. While inside, they take anything they want (she calls it "going shopping"), jewelry, cash, clothes, and either keep it or sell it for drugs at various hotspots they frequent. The stolen items help them gain access to celebrity hangouts, where they can feel like part of the scene and the lifestyle they want so badly. Over time, their gang gets bigger, and Emma Watson joins the crew as Nikki Moore, the most vapid and phony of the bunch who already seems wealthy and over-privileged, giving the desperation of this gang to be a part of this lifestyle an even greedier, excessive material focus that seems pathological.
Sofia Coppola wants to comment on today's society and the obsession with wealth, privilege, excess and luxury that infects our youth, who have easy access to track the lives of the rich and famous in far more intimate ways than their predecessors of yesteryear. And indeed, the level of excess is practically overwhelming, as the gang explores every inch of Paris Hilton's mansion, where pictures of herself adorn every wall, along with several rooms full of millions of dollars in jewelry and clothing that seem to be nothing more than decoration. The temptation is understandable and it's hard to feel sorry for any celebrity who's so rich she doesn't even notice when her belongings go missing.
But these observations, as I said earlier, are all more or less made in the first half hour, and the kids' vapid and shallow nature (at least as far as Coppola shows us) prevent them from being interesting enough to care about in any meaningful way. After a while it starts getting repetitious- the break in, the partying, the wallowing- these scenes are repeated ad nauseum until they finally get caught by the police and then sentenced, with no further comment on anything that happens to them. I can't help but wish it dug a little deeper into the life of Rebecca in particular, who is very troubled and seems to have a different kind of background that could offer us some insight into her character, but Coppola seems more interested in the depiction of celebrity wealth and obsession than in what might lead a specific person of more ordinary status into it. It's too bad, because that further exploration would lead to a more insightful movie, as interesting as this one is.
* *
'Saving Mr. Banks' Received Warmly at the London Film Festival
Disney's Oscar hopeful finally had its world premiere today as it closed out the London Film Festival this week. One of the few remaining contenders to be seen (the others are American Hustle, The Monuments Men and The Wolf of Wall Street), the movie received a warm, if not ecstatic reception from critics, with especially high praise for stars Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks as P.L. Travers (the author of Mary Poppins) and Walt Disney himself, respectively. The film tells the story of Travers' two week clash with Walt Disney in 1961 over the film rights to her beloved children's classic. The respectful celebration of artistry and Hollywood itself is always something that's right up the Academy's alley, so I would expect this movie to get nominations for Actress, Screenplay, Supporting Actor (looks like Tom Hanks will get double nodded this year) and likely Picture as well. Director John Lee Hancock's apparently generic direction will prevent this from overtaking Gravity and 12 Years a Slave as the current frontrunners, though. The movie comes out Dec 13th in the U.S.
"In a part once mooted for Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson takes charge of the central role of the waspish P.L. Travers with an authority that makes you wonder how anyone else could ever have been considered." (Hollywood Reporter)
"If someone had to play Disney in a movie, a better candidate than Hanks, himself a gleaming icon of wholesome American entertainment, is hard to imagine. He captures all of his folksy charisma and canny powers of persuasion- at once father, confessor, and the shrewdest of businessmen." (Variety)
"It's funny, moving, and nicely captures the creative process in a way that some movies-about-movies struggle with. That said, it also feels a little disposable and some of that might be down to the bland, workmanlike direction from John Lee Hancock." (The Playlist)
"The movie itself becomes a source of real joy. Enlivened by work from Thompson that should attract awards attention, 'Saving Mr. Banks' manages to convey all this, while remaining a smart, witty entertainment." (The Telegraph)
Here's the trailer again:
BOX OFFICE 10/18-10/20: 'Gravity' Reign Continues, 'Carrie' Stumbles
Gravity pulled in $31 million over the weekend to easily take the No. 1 spot for the third week in a row, an astonishing success so far with $170 million total. It should sail over $200 million by next week and will finish with at least $250 total, but could well make more than, maybe even getting to $300 million by the end of its run. Captain Phillips also held well, remaining at No. 2 with $17.3 million and amassing a total of $53 million, ahead of Argo's $43 million at this stage last year. It should get close to or over $100 million, but with Oscar buzz could retain more if it's kept in theaters the way Argo was.
As for the disappointing new releases, Carrie was expected to do well this weekend since horror films typically perform exceedingly well when they're released near Halloween, but it only scared up $17 million and managed a pretty bad "B-" Cinemascore from audiences. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 pulled in another $10 million for a $93 million total, thanks to zero competition for the family audience, and the Sylvester Stallone/Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie Escape Plan pretty much bombed as it rounded out the top five with just about $9 million. But nothing fared worse than the Benedict Cumberbatch vehicle The Fifth Estate, which opened to the worst wide release debut of the year, with only $1 million.
Top 5:
- Gravity- $31 million
- Captain Phillips- $17.3 million
- Carrie- $17 million
- Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2- $10.1 million
- Escape Plan- $9.8 million
In limited release news, the much hyped 12 Years a Slave opened in 19 theaters and pulled in $960,000 for a per screen average of about $50,000 which is very good for a limited debut. It will continue to expand next week before going nationwide on Nov 1st. And the very well-reviewed Robert Redford drama All is Lost made $97,400 from just 6 theaters, which is a tad underwhelming. Next weekend we see if Gravity can hold onto No. 1 for the fourth week in a row as it faces off against Ridley Scott's The Counselor and Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (I have a feeling this one could beat it, but I hope I'm wrong).
