Oh boy. The new trailer for Kenneth Branagh's Cinderella, which is apparently a straight remake of the 1950 animated feature, brings back shades of Maleficent for me, which means I had a hard time keeping my lunch down as I watched this. Sorry, but that's an experience I'm still not quite over yet. This looks absolutely awful, and Disney seems intent on tarnishing the reputation of their beloved classics in every way possible. CG mice? Costumes that look borrowed from the Disney World employees? I fear for the tastes of this generation's children if they're growing up on this crap. I can promise you right now that a better live action version of the Cinderella story is Drew Barrymore's Ever After, from 1998. Make your kids watch that. Seriously, compared to this, that movie now looks like the Citizen Kane of fairy tale re-imaginings.
Blu-Ray Pick of the Week: "It Happened One Night" (1934)
An essential blu-ray pick this week is Frank Capra's classic screwball romantic comedy, and it just so happens to be one of my favorite movies of all time. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert take to the road, she's a runaway heiress and he's a newspaper reporter chasing a big story- hijinks ensure of course, along with romance and one of the great "jilted at the altar" wedding scenes. This movie kind of invented the blueprint for romantic comedy and the best and most amazing part about it is that it all holds up 80 years later. Trust me, you won't find such a perfect blend of sophistication and romantic chemistry in a single movie made today, which makes this film feel shockingly fresh and completely satisfying- it's a true gem.
Original 1934 Trailer:
TRAILER #2: "Inherent Vice"
Paul Thomas Anderson himself cut this new UK trailer for Inherent Vice, and I still can't wait to see it, despite the fact that it was ruled out as an Oscar contender practically the minute it was seen at the NYFF. Too weird and zany for the Academy, proclaimed pretty much everyone. It still looks hilarious though, and I'll take wacky and weird P.T. Anderson any day compared to just about everything else that comes out on a regular basis. We don't get enough of that stuff:
TRAILER: "The Peanuts Movie"
Well, I still think it's a little disturbing to force the Peanuts to become monstrous CGI creations in this new movie, but at least it looks like they're staying as true to the old designs as possible. Of course, you know what would make them even closer? Yeah, doing a traditional 2D movie. Why do they have to be updated like this? Will kids really not watch anything hand drawn anymore? It's not like they know any better. I assume parents are the ones familiar with the Peanuts anyway. But this is coming out next year, whether I like it or not, so here's a first look at Snoopy. Sigh.
BOX OFFICE 11/14-11/16: 'Dumb and Dumber To' Comes Out On Top
Despite horrible reviews, there remained enough of a devoted audience to the iconic 20-year-old Farrelly Brothers comedy to mount a win at the box office for Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels, whose Dumb and Dumber To came in first place with $38 million and a "B-" Cinemascore. Obviously it was never a movie made for critics, so it shouldn't be surprising that fans of the original didn't care about the negative response, but it's hard to say if it will stick around longer than a weekend, considering the audience reaction was fairly tepid as well.
Meanwhile, Big Hero 6 was a close second, pulling in $36 million for the weekend, which is a miniscule drop from last week (in fact, it's the best second weekend for a non-Pixar Disney animated film ever), and I'd say this looks pretty set to stick around for quite a while, as kids are clearly loving it. Interstellar dropped to third with $29 million, but that's actually a pretty good 39% drop from last week too, so those two films are clearly benefiting from some good word of mouth. The new release Beyond the Lights came in fourth with $6 million and Gone Girl remained in the top five for its seventh week with another $4 million, showing some amazing staying power over its run.
Top 5:
- Dumb and Dumber To- $38.1 million
- Big Hero 6- $36 million
- Interstellar- $29 million
- Beyond the Lights- $6.5 million
- Gone Girl- $4.6 million
In limited release, Foxcatcher opened extremely well on 6 screens, for a $48k average, but we're now in the time of year where awards buzzed, limited release films will have a lot of great openings but not necessarily expand well as they are platformed out. It's hard to say what films are going to catch on with the general public. Case in point, Birdman and Whiplash, which are starting to suffer some as they expand to more theaters, despite the critical acclaim. Finally, Jon Stewart's Rosewater opened for a modest $1.2 million from 371 theaters. Next week it's the big Hunger Games movie, so you can expect that to dominate everything for a while, as it aims to top the year's box office for the second year in a row.
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'Gone Girl' Tops the Hollywood Film Awards
The Hollywood what awards, you ask? Yeah, well, last night the 17th Hollywood Film Awards were held and televised for the first time ever, which meant a bunch of stars actually showed up. But, the event itself is pretty much a joke, since obviously very few people have seen the movies yet, and these prizes they give out are chosen by a group of 12 anonymous people. Seriously, nobody knows who they are or what they do. Shady as all get out, right? So it's basically a two hour ad for the movies that are going to be coming out soon, but sometimes they do honor a bunch of eventual nominees and even winners. So here's who got some free publicity last night:
Best Picture- Gone Girl
Best Actor- Benedict Cumberbatch "The Imitation Game"
Best Actress- Julianne Moore "Still Alice"
Best Supporting Actor- Robert Duvall "The Judge"
Best Supporting Actress- Keira Knightley "The Imitation Game"
Best Director- Morten Tyldum "The Imitation Game"
Best Writing- Gone Girl
Best Ensemble- Foxcatcher
Best Animated Feature- How to Train Your Dragon 2
Best Breakthrough Actor- Eddie Redmayne "The Theory of Everything"
Best Breakthrough Actress- Shailene Woodley "The Fault in Our Stars"
Best Breakthrough- Jack O'Connell "Unbroken"
Best Breakthrough Director- Jean Marc Vallee "Wild"
Best Comedy- Top Five
Best Blockbuster- Guardians of the Galaxy
Hollywood Career Achievement Award- Michael Keaton
Best Cinematography- Birdman
Best Score- The Imitation Game
Best Costumes- The Grand Budapest Hotel
Best Editing- Fury
Best Sound- Gone Girl
Best Visual Effects- Transformers 4
Best Make Up- Guardians of the Galaxy
Best Production Design- Maleficent
My guess is 20th Century Fox paid a lot of money to get Gone Girl that Best Film prize, since it's on the cusp of Oscar recognition, if at all. But the The Imitation Game did very well here, collecting Director, Actor, Supporting Actress, and Score, and that film is predicted to score big with Oscar as well, so maybe they're right on that one. Either way, it is the official kickoff to awards season, since these shady little trophies are the first to be given out. From here on in, it's a long road ahead.
At least Ben Affleck's speech was pretty funny, acknowledging the general sham of this awards group:
And here's Johnny Depp, clearly drunk on stage as he presents Best Documentary:
TRAILER #2: "Two Days, One Night"
An official US trailer for Belgium's Foreign Language Oscar entry, Two Days, One Night, which was very well received at the Cannes Film Festival this year. Marion Cotillard is also in the hunt for a Best Actress nomination for this movie, but that all depends on how many people actually see it. It's set to come out in limited release on December 24th:
REVIEW: "A Most Wanted Man" (2014) Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rachel McAdams. Dir. Anton Corbijn
When Philip Seymour Hoffman passed away suddenly last spring, it felt like a major talent was being struck down and ripped away from us in his prime. If anyone needed any more proof of that, his last starring role is a fitting tribute, because it's honestly one of the best performances of his career. And what a career it had been, one that included great character turns in films like Capote, The Master, The Savages, Doubt, Almost Famous and countless others.
You can go ahead and add Anton Corbijn's tightly wound spy thriller A Most Wanted Man to the list, because Hoffman brings his special brand of world weary cynicism and cold professionalism (not to mention an impeccable German accent) to the role of German intelligence agent, Gunther Bachman, who leads a team that tracks down terrorists in Hamburg, one of the leading cities for jihadists en route to other countries. This is a lean, tightly plotted, highly procedural tale of espionage, based on the 2008 novel by John le Carre, who also wrote Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Le Carre can always be counted on to weave meaty and complicated spy thrillers juggling many different themes, and this one is no different, but set in the present day, which ties it to the ongoing efforts of international spy agencies to combat Islamic terrorism.
That post 9/11 setting (as the prologue describes for us) gives this movie a brutally realistic atmosphere infused with hardworn intelligence officers, seeking to get the job done through any means possible. Bachman is no idealist, and is willing to step outside the bounds of the constitution to complete his task, but he's been thwarted before from outside interference by the Americans and German security officials, who are threatening to do so again with his current operation. The complicated plot reveals itself meticulously, as we first see Gunther and his team at work tracking a Russian suspect named Issa Karpov into the city, then recruiting assets from the various players he comes in contact with- first, a banker played by Willem Dafoe, then an immigration and civil liberties lawyer played by Rachel McAdams (not as successful with the accent). Through these interactions, we find out Gunther's ultimate goal, which involves turning Issa's contacts into allies and allowing, even manipulating him, into going through with his intended financial transaction in order to follow the money, which will eventually lead them to an even bigger target.
It's tough, painstaking work, and we see in this movie that most espionage activities involve the long, laborious tasks of listening and waiting, sometimes following, but always more waiting. Corbijn takes us into the environment of spies, who mostly mill around in storage rooms and back offices with low lighting, Hoffman embodying the weary and exhausted nature of his job with every subtle expression that crosses his face. He rarely lets us in on his thinking, and this movie is entirely focused on the plot, yet because of Hoffman, we are drawn into his character, so much so that the final, startling act of the movie has an absolutely devastating impact, one that will stay with you long after the credits roll. It leaves you with a feeling of hollow cynicism, this after you already assumed Gunther was a man who couldn't possibly be any more cynical. Even the biggest skeptics among us are capable of being duped, and there are no promises and no one within the intelligence world whose word is to be trusted.
This is a film that can run a bit dry at times, and it challenges you to keep up with the plot, but if you do you are vastly rewarded in the end, and left with an emotional and devastating gut punch that hits you stronger than anything else in a film I've seen this year.
* * * 1/2
TRAILER #2: "Fifty Shades of Grey"
Here's the latest trailer with the latest Beyonce song blasting over the ending to hold over the fans of this massively successful book. It still looks like bad fan fiction come to life, but hey, that's exactly what the book was, so it's probably a faithful adaptation:
TRAILER: "Song One"
I admit I'm not the biggest Anne Hathaway fan, and nothing in this trailer looks likely to change that. It appears to be a sappy melodrama about folk singers in Brooklyn, but the real kiss of death is the release date, which is January. I've said it before, January is a dumping ground for new releases, just about any film that gets released in January tells you that the studio behind it thinks it's a stinker. So, yeah, not a lot of confidence in this.
REVIEW: "Interstellar" (2014) Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain. Dir. Christopher Nolan
Christopher Nolan's Interstellar is a lot of things. Like Inarritu's latest film Birdman, this is a movie that wants to combine many different genres at once- sentimental family drama, sci-fi adventure, space epic, a progressive vision of the future, a treatise on the value of love above all else...you get the idea, or you will when you see it. Also like Birdman, it's not entirely successful at everything it's trying to do, and some parts of it work much better than others- unfortunately, here it's a lot clearer which parts do and don't, and that's because Nolan is a much more straightforward, structured visionary (if you want to call him that) than Inarritu. The stuff that works, works very well, and the stuff that doesn't...well, it really doesn't.
But one of the things he was lucky enough to get very right here was the casting, and with Matthew McConaughey and Jessica Chastain as the lead characters in this film, I confess to feeling more attachment to them emotionally than I ever have to any of the characters in Nolan's other films, and that's an achievement. The people in his films are usually cold, distant archetypes, there to recite dialogue in ways that get across his ideas- his worlds are mostly cerebral and he's been criticized for being unemotional with his characters. The entire first act of this film seems designed to respond to those critiques, as he builds up McConaughey's all American good old boy Coop to be a widowed dad (of course) saddled with two kids and a farm with acres of cornfields, all part of a distant future where the earth has run out of food, leaving everyone who's survived to take up a useful profession, like farming.
But Coop is educated and trained as an engineer and pilot, so he longs to be able to use the skills he has acquired to go beyond this world, and maybe look for others instead. The building of emotional bonds between Coop and his kids, especially his precocious 10-year-old daughter Murph, and the set-up of their existence in this future may be more sentimental than Nolan fans are used to, but I think it works well in bonding the audience to these characters as people, and I appreciated that effort, because it causes us to care when the special effects extravaganza portion of the movie takes over. And it does indeed take over, lasting the vast majority of the film, which is undoubtedly what most will find to be the most entertaining part. But I was pretty okay with the world establishing, and it's more the space and planet hopping activities where my restlessness began to grow.
But first, we have to explain how Coop gets called away on his mission to the far off worlds in the first place, and it involves the stumbling onto a classic "underground bunker" that's so popular in science fiction, where NASA has been secretly functioning years after it was publicly de-funded. They've been trying to figure out how to move Earth's population to other galaxies, and sending various astronauts to find other worlds and report back with details. Coop of course, is called on to fly their latest mission (seemingly the very day he discovered this whole operation) and he will have to leave his kids behind to do it, which could very well mean he'll never see them again. This is where the authenticity of the earlier family scenes are called into question, because for all his love of the family, Coop really doesn't hesitate that much to leave his kids, and before we know it, he's taken off with a crew consisting of Wes Bentley and Anne Hathaway to track down several planets where potential for life has been reported to exist.
This part of the film is laden with incredible visual effects of course, but you'd expect nothing less after the likes of Inception. Still, Interstellar does a good job at creating moments of wonder, something that was missing in the very structured, puzzle box movies Nolan's crafted before, like Inception and Memento. But his tendency for exposition heavy dialogue is still here, and this time in bouts of speeches infused with details of quantum physics and relativity theory so jumbled that I challenge anyone to keep up with half of anything the astronauts are saying to each other after they leave Earth. To me, this is why many of the scenes in space that aren't directly about planet hopping drag the movie down considerably, and it's only thanks the Matthew McConaughey's always relatable, everyman presence that we're invested in this journey at all. Back on Earth meanwhile, while Coop is off on his journey of discovery, Murph and her brother (who never seems nearly as important to his dad as Murph is- Coop clearly plays favorites here) are aging at a speed much faster than what is passing for the astronauts, and again the most effective parts of the film involve the moments where Coop must see the faces of his kids and realize that he's missed their entire lives in what felt to him like only minutes.
The passage of time is a much pondered theme of this movie, and is explored and quantified in every possible way, much of it in that gobbledygook dialogue (which may actually make some sense to quantum theorists, but not so much to the average viewer), but then in the last third of the film as an amazing, borderline ludicrous but consistently wondrous sequence where McConaughey travels into a five dimensional reality and must communicate with himself from the past. I don't know if any of what happens there makes sense, but I certainly enjoyed it while I was watching it.
That's probably a good way to describe a lot of Interstellar, even the middle part of the film which drags heavily through long scenes and an entire subplot involving a cameo from a major movie star that frankly could have been cut altogether. Same goes for the unfunny and awkward robot sidekick TARS, which comes across as a forced attempt at creating a "lovable" comic relief buddy, and if Nolan's out of his wheelhouse with the emotionalism, imagine his shot at forcing in a comedy only character. Yikes. At nearly three hours long, this is a movie that needed to have some serious fat trimmed off it in the editing room, and had it done that it's possible a near masterpiece could have emerged. As it is now, it's a big entertainment with some great actors doing their best to ground Nolan's lofty and ambitious ideas (Jessica Chastain as the grown Murph again turns in a deeply felt performance that elevates the rather bit part she's given), and that makes it worth experiencing on the whole, because the good parts are definitely good enough to warrant a first viewing, and maybe even a second. And simply by virtue of being worth a second look, that already places it a notch above Inception in my book.
* * *
Blu-Ray Pick of the Week: "Christmas in Connecticut" (1945)
Well, it might as well be Christmas season already, right? The stores have already put out their decorations, and the Hallmark cable channels started playing Christmas movies 24/7 the day after Halloween (not kidding about that). So I'm going to jump into the season by recommending this screwball comedy starring the great Barbara Stanwyck as a single woman in her 30's (the horror!) who works as a columnist giving out homemaking advice to housewives (ala Martha Stewart), a subject that in truth she knows nothing about. So now when her boss wants to bring a war hero to the home of the "best homemaker in America," she's got to put on the show of her life. It's a classic that Stanwyck carries completely with her special brand of streetwise daffiness- it's a good one that should be better known.
Original 1945 Trailer:
