"Sperminator!!!" There's your trenchant Arnold Schwarzenegger dig of the day. Arnold knocked up a lady, see, and it wasn't Maria Shriver, who is famously his wife. That's the big-time joke of our now. Great. What a happenin' occasion to remember Arnold's single worst film (emphasized because I can't believe there's a clear standout -- and Arnold even acknowledged it himself), the 1985 box office fiasco Red Sonja.
Opening today in theaters, the 3-D action curio Priest seems to have designs on a pair of audiences once thought irreconcilable: Young, overserved vampire-genre devotees; and the older, Christian demographic that loves its religious mythology with a healthy side of moralized violence. Each has their blockbusters, and ne'er the bloody twain shall meet. Until now.
Watching True Legend, a wuxia film crossed with classic vaudeville, it's hard to figure out who's borrowing from whom anymore. The storybook set-up places us in the middle of the Qing dynasty, where a new warrior emerges "from the ashes of chaos." Soon that warrior is at the center of a battle that features camera and prop choreography that would make Busby Berkeley eat his porkpie hat, bloody spit-takes to shame all three Stooges, and a combination of sword work and breakdancing that could sell a studio on Breakin' 3: Up the Yangtze. When the late David Carradine shows up and the film suddenly enters a turn-of-the-century fight/jazz club, the cameo itself seems to have zig-zagged between Hong Kong, Hollywood, and back again before arriving on the screen.
One of the two interesting questions posed in Hesher is whether the title character of Spencer Susser's aggro stomp through the seven stages of grief is beyond metaphor or metaphor is beyond him. Evidence for the latter is ample: Less a human being than a set of sloppy impulses, he speaks directly but strictly in assorted vulgarities, oblivious to behavioral or conversational nuances that lay outside his basic instincts. And yet the world he invades -- a home that seems lodged in standing water, and the lives of its three grieving inhabitants -- accommodates more than one literary device, and the script points directly to metaphor and our ability to grasp it several times. Susser alternates between floating the possibility of Hesher as an enlightening, instructive force, Mary Poppins-style, and yanking him down to Earth, where he's simply a strutting, sickening id at large.
Bridesmaids is the Bride of Frankenstein of contemporary comedies, a movie stitched together crudely, and only semi-successfully, from random chick flick and bromance parts. The picture stars, and is cowritten by, Kristen Wiig, whose doodlebug timing may be some sort of genius. Judd Apatow is one of the producers, which means it has that hip, knowing Apatow swagger. Paul Feig, whose credits include episodes of The Office and Arrested Development, directs. But Bridesmaids moves in tentative, jerky steps. Plenty of bits made me laugh, but much of it didn't sit right afterward, not least the wallflowery self-pity -- masquerading as "We can be as gross as the guys are!" empowerment -- of the basic premise. Bridesmaids obviously strives to seem modern, but too often it mistakes crassness for freshness.
Cultivating a longing for a time one didn't live through is nostalgia's version of unrequited love. The result is pure, unfiltered by memory, uncolored by disappointment, sustained by imagination and its very impossibility -- a bulletproof romantic play. I was weaned on reruns of Happy Days and Grease, then The Wonder Years and Stand By Me, and I bet Skateland writer and director Anthony Burns was too.
In the first scenes of Everything Must Go, a lightly sketched study of a man stripped to his possessions, Nick Halsey (Will Ferrell) loses his job and finds his home locked down and his belongings purged onto the front lawn. He's a George Jones song playing in the Arizona suburbs, under terribly sunny skies. He's also a character in a closely observed indie, where such conceits tend to form shallow puddles for splashing, rather than deep flows of feeling or tidal wave themes.
Like all responsible Movieline readers, I'm strapping my debit card to my garter and seeing Bridesmaids this weekend. A few times, perhaps? In the name of hilarious lady ensembles? Indeed. And not just because I write about the potential for female-driven comedies in my spare time, but because Bridesmaids seems like a watershed moment of sass and brass in this very slim genre, which brings us to today's Bad Movie We Love: the hokey, pointless, and righteous 2009 non-hit Spring Breakdown.
It's a good thing Kenneth Branagh shows no inclination -- yet -- of becoming a politician. If Thor, his magnificent thunderclap of a movie, is any indication, he'd surely be gunning for world domination: The picture is grand in the Wagnerian sense, an opus orchestrated by a wild man wielding a movie camera instead of a baton. Even so, Branagh manages to maintain a sense of humor about himself, and about this material. In the Branagh world, gods and men mingle freely -- the human element counts as much as the spectacle does. This is the only instance I can think of in which a director's large-scale version of Hamlet ended up being the perfect training ground for making a great comic-book movie.
To the extent it wields any notoriety at all, Passion Play will be remembered for two qualities: First, the 20-year process of screenwriter Mitch Glazer to develop and finally film this, his feature directing debut. Second, its missed opportunity in making the most of meaty, counterintuitive roles for its stars Mickey Rourke, Megan Fox and Bill Murray. On paper, this should have worked -- and worked well.
There Be Dragons screened early in the morning following the president's midnight announcement that Osama bin Laden had been, to use a phrase adopted by the movies as its own, taken out. A revenge hangover clouded the room. "It's New York," one man said. "I want to see the body." "I'm not saying he's not a monster," a woman replied. "I just don't want all this hoo-ha." Jokes about the hastily written Hollywood version of the raid that killed the world's most famous terrorist were thin. "Too bad he wasn't a woman," someone -- a man -- ventured. "We'd see it on Lifetime next week."
To love grindhouse cinema is to forgive the limitations of low budgets, bad actors, and cheesy premises milked for their lowest common denominator thrills; to intentionally make grindhouse cinema is to welcome the laser scrutiny of the film geekerati, a much greater artistic gamble. Miss the mark with that audience and you get a box-office nightmare -- just ask Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. But hit the B-movie sweet spot just right, as Jason Eisener mostly does in his gleefully gory Hobo with a Shotgun, and you could find yourself living the dream.
Wedding season has arrived, taffeta skirts swishing, which means wedding movie season is making its stilted march close behind. Like a cannon shot of confetti in the eye, Jumping the Broom is first out of the gate, and its guest list is long. Visited upon this wedding day dramedy are in-law clashes, racial tension, class conflict, cold feet, maternity drama, inter-familial crack-ups and an extended debate about the relative couth of the electric slide. There's hardly room for a man and a woman to meet and fall in love, which explains those pretenses being dispatched within the first four minutes of the film.
As horrific as Something Borrowed is, it's compelling in its own sick way. Watching it, I kept wondering: How will this dreadful group of self-centered people work out their asinine problems, most of which have been caused by their own willful stupidity and/or their inability to read the most basic emotions of the people around them? Hardly romantic and barely a comedy, Something Borrowed hovers in that damp gray region of movies that are often characterized as "cute," though it has barely enough character to stand up even to that bland adjective.
It can't be easy to put serious depression on the big screen. Forget that depression isn't widely understood or simple to understand -- its symptoms are just plain undynamic. Wanting to sleep all the time, or being unable to sleep at all; trying to hold your life together when it feels as if you're sleepwalking. How do you show those things and keep an audience awake at the same time?
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