Also: "Fatty displays his skill at organic auto-tuning. Cort drags his kids to the mountains and shoves their faces in a snowbank. What could possibly happen when you mix Muppets and 'Battlestar'? The 'Lone Ranger' remake: Who the hell could possibly WANT such a thing? 'Ghostbusters III' is happening whether you want it or not. And the unofficial 'Goodfellas' sequel is a Marky Mark movie based on a video game."
Movie review in the Wednesday, Nov. 24 Oregonian....
Christina Aguilera has magnificent pipes, and if you like hyper-produced, brass-heavy show-pop that winks at the cabaret tradition, you'll probably dig the "Burlesque" soundtrack. Every song is engineered to be a blockbuster, and occasionally Xtina tags out so Cher can step in the ring and warble a power-ballad.
Unfortunately, the movie they built around that soundtrack is a clichéd drag that wastes talented actors.
Aguilera blandly plays an Iowa gal who flees to Hollywood in the movie's first two minutes with vague singer/dancer ambitions. She works her way onstage at a failing L.A. burlesque club and into the hearts of characters better-written in a million other films -- the brassy owner (a bemused-looking Cher), the smart-aleck stage manager (Stanley Tucci), the jealous star (Kristen Bell), the predatory rich guy (Eric Dane), the cute bartender (Cam Gigandet).
The songs are fine, but sound less and less like venue-appropriate showtunes as they go along (and everyone looks like they're lip-syncing to perfectly produced vocal tracks even when we're told they aren't). The drama is telegraphed and glossy and un-fascinating; the edges have been belt-sanded until any camp value is lost. And it's filmed in that "Moulin Rouge"/"Chicago" style where you see half a dance move before the shot cuts -- which somehow makes a lot of difficult, sexy work seem simultaneously frenetic and boring. ________
During the Friday, Nov. 19 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, we talked about "Harry Potter" and my (barely contained) video-game addiction. Also! "Fatty's weirdly sad story about his last time mobile DJ-ing; the fate of 'Portlandia'; the fusillade of trailers Hollywood shoveled out the door; the frightening and disconcerting world of 'Cars 2'; and some other garbage."
The somber (and pretty terrific) "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1" tells roughly half the story of the final book in J.K. Rowling's boy-wizard series -- but it also plays like two different movies stitched together.
For a while, it feels a bit like a WWII thriller set in occupied France, if France was a giant Renaissance faire. After the brutal assassinations of "Half-Blood Prince," Lord Voldemort's allies have seized the Ministry of Magic in a coup d'etat. Voldemort's Gestapo-style shock troops now roam the halls of wizard government, nabbing low-level bureaucrats and subjecting them to kangaroo courts and ethnic cleansing. (Amusingly, Rowling has constructed a world in which someone can be burned for not being a witch.)
And Harry Potter is now a fugitive, shuttled to safe houses by a dedicated resistance.
The first half of "Deathly Hallows: Part 1" is a major break from the school-year structure of the earlier films, but it still feels more or less like the "Harry Potter" fans have come to expect -- albeit with a few more character deaths than usual and a heartbreaking moment in which Hermione (Emma Watson) erases her parents' memories of her for their own safety. The pace is still brisk and the set pieces are still outlandish, and returning director David Yates ("Order of the Phoenix,""Half-Blood Prince") still has a surprisingly light touch during moments of low-key banter between Harry, Hermione and Ron (Rupert Grint).
I've heard people give Yates flak for making the "Potter" series feel like a megabudget TV miniseries, but personally I love that he's not particularly showoffy -- he throws away special effects that would have been the entire point of a scene earlier in the series. And I really love the way he's let his young stars breathe in their roles; he's more interested in faces than pixels. Yates also pulls off the nearly impossible task of lending gravitas to scenes in which people are dressed in bright velvety robes and funny hats shooting at each other with wands. He may be the Irvin Kershner of this franchise in that regard.
Three sequences in this first half are thrillingly staged: a magic motorcade of Harry impersonators trying to get our hero to his next safe house; a diner wand-shootout that plays like an attempted mob hit; and Harry, Ron and Hermione getting in way over their heads as they sneak into the Ministry of Magic looking for clues.
And then, following a bright flash of light, we're in the woods -- and the "Potter" series takes a fascinating, slow detour.
I haven't read the books, but I gather that the long interlude in "Deathly Hallows" in which Harry, Ron and Hermione sit in a tent and teleport about the countryside and stare meaningfully into the distance and figure out what to do next while bickering amongst themselves was going to be the hardest part of Rowling's books to adapt, despite featuring the fewest special-effects challenges. Fans have described it as patience-testing on the page: Rowling slams the story into low gear and starts piling on more backstory and characters and "Fellowship of the Ring"-style quest objects than narrative tightness might favor. By film's end, our heroes are looking for objects containing Voldemort's essence, a sword and a trio of objects Death gave to three brothers a long time ago -- plus maybe some paperwork. Frodo would have choked on that sort of multitasking.
This slightly messy lull makes "Deathly Hallows: Part 1" even more of a talky, problematic, calm-before-the-storm film than "Order of the Phoenix." But Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves successfully tackle the challenge the same way Yates tackled it in "Phoenix" -- by seizing the opportunity to deepen character relationships. Essentially, the filmmakers gamble on (and reward) the audience's built-up love for these characters, and win.
The entire cast does the subtlest work we’ve seen in a “Potter” film, right down to the supporting and single-scene players. For one small example, Tom Felton has replaced Draco's childish snarling with overwhelmed, wide-eyed fear.
The film continues the tone set by "Half-Blood Prince" that we're leaving childish things behind, that human and magical concerns are starting to mingle in a grown-up way. (In the case of one scene I'll call "The Temptation of Ron," it mingles in a surprisingly grown-up way; the movie earns its PG-13.) When "Part 2" hits theaters eight months from now, I suspect I'll appreciate the buildup to a (literally) explosive finale. It's going to be a long wait. ______
(146 min., rated PG-13 for some sequences of intense action violence, frightening images and brief sensuality)Grade: B-plus
During the Friday, Nov. 12 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, we reviewed like five movies really, really quickly -- including "Skyline," "Unstoppable," "Morning Glory," "Four Lions" and "Monsters." We also sexually objectified Cameron Crowe and debated the plural of the word "ninja." Long story. Sleep deprivation may have been involved.
Director Tony Scott's runaway-train action flick "Unstoppable" is semi-remarkable for what it doesn't contain.
It has no mustache-twirling villain. Its heroes aren't particularly superheroic. It contains very little obvious CGI. It isn't frenetic or too ridiculously overblown.
Instead, it takes its time -- a strange thing to say about a 98-minute movie -- to plausibly set up a disaster scenario based very loosely on real events. A dumb miscalculation by a railyard employee (Ethan Suplee) sends an unmanned train loaded with molten phenol on a wild, increasingly destructive ride through Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, a rookie conductor (Chris Pine) and a cranky driver (Denzel Washington) in the runaway train's path grow annoyed with each other and the bureaucrats working the problem, and may or may not try out a few high-risk solutions of their own, with the help of a sympathetic dispatcher (Rosario Dawson) and a visiting federal inspector (Kevin Corrigan).
It's important not to oversell "Unstoppable." It's Tony Scott having earnest fun smacking around our nation's railway infrastructure -- between this and "Top Gun," he's the master of American steel, and of the smashing of it -- while throwing in some stripped-down mentor/mentee dynamics for the sake of drama. (He also has Washington's daughters working at a Hooter's for the sake of gratuity, though I'm told this detail came out of Scott's actual research with railroaders.) That said, Scott's execution of the formula is so confident that "Unstoppable" also happens to be one of the most straight-up entertaining popcorn flicks I've seen all year.
Pine cements his movie-star status by holding his own against Washington. Scott somehow keeps finding new ways (with cinematographer Ben Seresin) to shoot the two of them in an engine compartment, and also stages some of his best action scenes in a career full of them: The stunts here are metal-crushingly spectacular and refreshingly physical, and Scott doles them out sparingly enough that they're dramatic instead of merely noisy. The plainspoken story also becomes a nice little salute to can-do blue-collar knowhow -- to the men and woman who actually oil and drive and fix stuff while the rest of us watch TV. ______
(98 min., rated PG-13 for sequences of action and peril, and some language)Grade: B-plus
So I interviewed "Bloom County" creator Berkeley Breathed for Ain't It Cool News. I think I'm legally allowed to die now.
Berkeley Breathed spent years saying in interviews that no one would want to buy an omnibus collection of his rude, rash and much-loved 1980s newspaper comic "Bloom County." So how the hell did editor Scott Dunbier finally talk Breathed into allowing IDW to publish the five-volume "Bloom County: The Complete Library"?
"By getting Scott to agree to do it himself," wrote Breathed in an e-mail. "It's really 'Bloom County by Scott Dunbier' now. A jaw-droppingly monumental job, compiling all that stuff. Most of the originals looked like the Dead Sea Scrolls. The difference being that my material actually did prove that Jesus existed."
For newspaper-comics fans of a certain age, Breathed was sort of the Chuck Jones of the funny pages -- a storyteller with ridiculously sharp comic timing who worked with a cast of talking animals and screwed-up humans. He could make you laugh with tiny facial expressions and anarchic bits of slapstick, much of the latter involving a diseased cat. Drawn in feverish, last-minute all-nighters, the strip was so reckless and awesomely crass that finding it on the same page as "Marmaduke" and "Garfield" almost felt like getting away with something. Breathed tends to play his gifts down in interviews: He told me he was "destined to be an outsider" in the cartooning community -- despite winning a Pulitzer prize for it in 1987, at age 29 -- "because cartooning was a means to an end: humorous expression and storytelling in whatever medium would have me. Cartooning happened to lay in my path and I rode it." He's selling himself wildly short. If Bill Watterson was Disney Studios, Breathed was Termite Terrace -- and part of the last truly comedically badass trio of newspaper cartoonists, along with Watterson and "The Far Side"'s Gary Larson.
Breathed ended his second "Bloom County" sequel strip, "Opus," in 2008, and seems to have quit the business for good this time (his third attempt, after retiring "Bloom County" in 1989 and "Outland" in 1995). These days, he develops TV projects and makes children's books, including "Mars Needs Moms!" -- which is being made into a film by Disney and Robert Zemeckis' production company. (A teaser trailer should debut any day now.) He's also become something of an elder-statesman cartoonist, which probably gives him hives: He enjoyed a blockbuster appearance at his first San Diego Comic-Con this year, and starting in February 2011, he'll have his first-ever retrospective exhibit at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. "The show is scheduled to run February to June, and will be split between Berkeley's children's-book work and 'Bloom County,'" said Dunbier. "There will be a reception at some point with Berkeley in attendance."
Almost exactly one year ago, I interviewed Dunbier for Ain't It Cool News about his mad scavenger hunt to assemble "Bloom County: The Complete Library." Now Dunbier's paved the way for an AICN interview with Breathed himself -- in support of the just-released "Complete Library" Vol. 3. Breathed agreed to be interviewed by e-mail, as is his wont. He answered over 40 questions -- talking about deadlines, copyrights, Watterson, Schulz, Trudeau, college, editors, newspapers, disrespect, IDW, "Opus," the Internet and Hollywood triumphs and horrors. (God, the stuff about the Weinsteins.)
"Due Date" is a black-hearted puree of "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" and several other road comedies -- in which an architect (Robert Downey Jr.) and a foolish, marijuana-loving aspiring actor (Zach Galifianakis) get thrown off a plane and are forced to bond as they drive from Atlanta to Los Angeles, trying to make it before Downey's wife (an utterly wasted Michelle Monaghan) delivers a baby.
The movie doesn't contain a lot of laughs, frankly, and I think that's a conscious decision by director/co-writer Todd Phillips ("The Hangover"). The movie seems to be striving to be a comedy of tone and discomfort -- something in the neighborhood of "The Cable Guy" or a really dark "Bottle Rocket" -- where the humor lies in the sheer strangeness and meanness of the characters' behaviors rather than in overt one-liners and slapstick.
At least I hope that's the case, because in my opinion the overt one-liners and slapstick on display in "Due Date" aren't particularly funny. They're along the lines of Galifianakis having a funny walk and posing for stupid actor headshots and sticking his belly in Downey's face and thinking William Shakespeare was actually a pirate named "Shakesbeard," plus a running gag where Galifianakis insists he's not a child and then Downey asks him if he remembered to use the restroom before they leave -- and guess what, he hasn't! And the things that happen to a coffee can full of human remains are "outrageous," sure, but I can't say they're clever; "The Big Lebowski" did it better. One of the points of ridicule in the movie is that Galifianakis aspires to appear on "Two and a Half Men," but I'm not sure the broad jokes in this flick are necessarily superior.
I'm also on the fence as to whether or not the comedy-of-tone stuff works, because that tone doesn't feel completely under control and doesn't seem to have much of a point beyond its amusing misanthropy, interrupted by abrupt shifts into sentiment and male bonding -- usually involving Galifianakis becoming actorly for a moment and weeping for his father. (To be fair, the sudden emotional lurching may also be intentional and conceptual.) And because it's a Phillips film, there's some well-staged car mayhem, but after it happens, I couldn't figure out why the rest of the film didn't involve an interstate manhunt. That lack of follow-through becomes sort of a story pattern.
That said, I'm still chewing on the movie, and Downey's great in it -- I love that he never ever gets that crinkly precious heartwarming smile that Steve Martin sported in the last few minutes of "Planes, Trains." Still, this feels like minor Phillips to me -- something in the neighborhood of 2006's "School for Scoundrels," quality-wise, though with a much grimmer heart. _____
We also recorded another "Midnight Movie Commentary" -- this one for "Planes, Trains & Automobiles." In attendance: Cort, Fatboy, Erik Henriksen, Dave Walker, and yrs. truly. _____
