Spike Jonze joined Sundance's opening-night madness on Thursday, debuting his brand-new short I'm Here as part of the festival's rock-solid Shorts Program One. Which sounds a little yawnily non-descript, I know, until you break its four terrific films down as the ones by a former Oscar nominee, two future Oscar nominees, a Kennedy clan representative and Sweden's bright new hope -- all of whom were on hand, with Jonze weighing in on video after the jump.
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This week marks the publication of Showgirls, Teen Wolves, and Astro Zombies: A Film Critic's Year-Long Quest to Find the Worst Movie Ever Made, a rollicking new tome by Movieline's "Bad Movies We Love" guru Michael Adams. Part comic memoir, part grueling critical experiment, Adams's book chronicles his journey through more than 350 of the most obscure, confounding, surprising, and yes, appalling cinema known to man. In this Movieline exclusive excerpt, Adams unearths not only one of the very worst films, but one of the worst genres as well.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, whenever we'd go to visit my grandfather in his leafy suburban abode, my younger brother David would race out into the old man's garden to capture little lizards basking in the morning sun. Once we'd tired of our catch-and-release program, we'd spend the afternoon luxuriating in the spare room that contained decadence beyond compare in the form of a second TV, free of parental interference. On such days, there was one show that unfailingly made our world a bigger, more fascinating place: In Search of... Part National Geographic documentary, part Twilight Zone, it was narrated by Star Trek's Leonard Nimoy with the cool detachment of his half-Vulcan science officer. While his investigations into killer bees, ancient astronauts and Stonehenge were, quite frankly, f*cking awesome, it was Bigfoot who always stood head and shoulders above the rest.
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The Book of Eli presents an interesting case for the post-apocalyptic film -- a microgenre most recently bolstered by films like Children of Men, I Am Legend and The Road -- as the re-birth of the western, but beyond that it's pretty dumb. The latter film hews most closely to The Book of Eli (directed by the Hughes brothers, their first film after a nine-year hiatus) in structure, theme and palette: rather than using the distancing tropes of science fiction to envision a blighted future, both treat a ravaged United States like a new and yet recognizable frontier.
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Turning a fabulously operatic, thematically replete true-life tale into a frosted slice of dinner theatrics, The Last Station conveys nothing more convincingly than its own self-regard. The story of Leo Tolstoy's last days, in exile from his own home, his wife, and possibly the social movement he spearheaded toward the end of his life, rivals any the great novelist could have dreamt up for himself. And yet The Last Station, adapted from Jay Parini's 1990 book by writer/director Michael Hoffman, seems to have been mounted by everyone involved like it was their own private troika -- a period vehicle which might carry them to award glory, or the set of their next self-regarding costume piece.
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"Looks good!" Those words, from my 4-year-old daughter, don't usually inspire horror, especially in this age of sublime children's movies, from Up! and Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs to Fantastic Mr. Fox and Coraline. But when they're uttered in response to The Rock sprouting wings in the name of kiddie comedy, my only recourse is a silent resolution: We'll catch the Tooth Fairy when Ava's much, much older; when she's 50 and I'm sucking food through a straw and no longer able to summon the mental energy to use the Neural Changer on my old Sony Holograph. And glancing further down the list of coming "attractions," there are 10 more titles in 2010 I plan on avoiding as long as I can until, bad-movies sucker that I am, my curiosity gets the better of me. (Find conveniently, refreshingly brief trailers where available.)
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Last night at CAA, Movieline was granted access to the first public showing of Casino Jack, George Hickenlooper's Jack Abramoff biopic starring Kevin Spacey as the arch D.C. villain. Amid a screening room packed with agents and insiders sat stars Kelly Preston and Jon Lovitz ("Who CAA turned down!" he proclaimed, indignantly), as well as the likes of Julia Roberts and The War Room producer R.J. Cutler, all curious to see how Hickenlooper fared with the potentially tricky material. He fared very well, it turns out.
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Adapted from C.D. Payne's 1993 triptych (three installments were published in one volume), Youth in Revolt took so long to make it to the screen it's practically a period piece. And while its star, Michael Cera, could not be more of-the-moment, the casting is a perfect fit: Cera's expertise in playing the moon-faced aspirant is largely derived from the bewilderment he seems to radiate at being caught out of his time -- a diffident, longhand wisp lodged in a vulgar, thumb-typing world. As Nick Twisp, adolescent narrator and hero of his own beleaguered, lonely life, Cera pulls from his usual hoodie full of tricks, and that's just fine: Pathologically incapable of a stale moment, as far as I'm concerned Michael Cera is better at playing Michael Cera than most actors are at playing anybody else.
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If you've seen the poster for Leap Year, Anand Tucker's big, rattling snore of a romantic comedy, you know how it ends. Amy Adams + Matthew Goode = True Love Forever. If you've seen any of screenwriting duo Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont's previous films, including Made of Honor and Surviving Christmas, you can anticipate pretty much every frame of its doggedly, almost abrasively cut-and-paste plot, from the opening montage of Boston real estate fluffer Anna's (Adams) life, which runs with Swiss Watch precision -- except for that dang doctor boyfriend (Adam Scott) who seems to love but won't marry her -- to her bitter humbling in the Irish countryside and wacky circumstantial bunk-up with an earthy chauffeur named Declan (Goode) who shows her the error of her tight-assed, materialistic American ways.
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Shot in color and then scaled back to a matted black and white, the look of The White Ribbon is rarely one of stark contrasts; rather it is composed from an infinite palette of shades of grey. Everything about the film's masterfully executed aesthetic suggests harmony, order, the absence of extremes, exquisite deliberation; initially a soothing technique -- so pleasing in its symmetries -- director Michael Haneke teases dread and uncertainty from classical form. By the end of 144 unsparing minutes, a sort of seduction has occurred: the frame, again almost oppressively flawless, is filled with the German villagers, neatly arrayed and at perfect attention during their weekly church service. The choir children sing like angels. But did I just see what I think I saw? And what I didn't see?
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For the first 20 minutes or so of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Terry Gilliam's latest labor of love and chaos, I fought off the suspicion that I'd rather be watching a documentary about the film's blighted production. This is partly Gilliam's fault -- the introductory sequence is painfully oblique, laborious in its attempts at whimsy and off-kilter charm -- and partly that of Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, whose Lost in La Mancha, a chronicle of Gilliam's disastrous attempt to adapt Don Quixote, was as layered and entertaining as the director's best work, all of which is over a decade behind him. Famously hamstrung by the January 2008 death of its star, Heath Ledger, Imaginarium was saved by the subbing-in of three actors to cover Ledger's unfinished scenes; the film then faced the death of one of its producers and continuous funding and sale snags. The Gilliam curse was beginning to outpace, in reputation and dramatic flair, the actual films he had so much trouble making. In deciding to complete and release Imaginarium, Gilliam and Co. had accepted a challenge from the gods; this demands respect. Audiences will be similarly challenged to accept this film on its own terms, of which there are plenty, and separate its already sizable mythology from its more meager, but perfectly respectable, mortal offerings.
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As the new and implausible Sherlock Holmes, Robert Downey Jr. again lends his eccentric charms and complexly freighted persona -- post-meltdown, he has cultivated and strategically deployed a hair-trigger vulnerability, as though complete dissolution is always one of twelve steps away -- to a role that doesn't deserve them. Guy Ritchie and a posse of screenwriters (including Anthony Peckham, who wrote Invictus) seem to have reconceived Arthur Conan Doyle's methodical, champion sleuther with Downey in mind; now he's more of a self-destructive wag with a sociopathic commitment to sussing out everything from advanced chemical reactions to your fiancée's psychological profile. As the central bad boy in Ritchie's painfully macho, laboriously kinetic conception of a spooky, nineteenth century murder mystery, Downey pushes his own schtick to its logical end -- tedium -- and then somehow lugs it right on through to the other side, arriving at something like grudging admiration. That's dedication, but is it art?
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I think a lot of people -- particularly the older women it was designed for -- would be insulted by It's Complicated, the latest cashmere and calla lily-scented effusion to waft from the mind of Nancy Meyers, if the director took her DKNY boot off their jugulars long enough for it to occur to them. A big part of Meyers's appeal is her obsessively upscale aesthetic, and the pull she creates toward a cozy, kooky, family-based world of privileged comfort, beauty and affluence is formidable: she wants you to give in, you want to give in -- where's the harm? Well, it's in her blithely loathsome characters, to begin with, but also in her blinkered notion of escapist cinema: not everyone is willing to relax into Meyers's Sonoma-scapes of domestic abundance the way, say, Depression-era moviegoers flocked to see Carole Lombard cracking wise in feathers and furs; the element of fantasy and aspiration is a harder sell in a culture where class striations have perhaps never been quite so raw. Personally, despite my best efforts to settle in and surrender to the "softness" Meyers seems so hell-bent on, the crudeness of the filmmaking and fatuous dedication to cliché kept jerking me back into my itchy street clothes and worn out shoes. Quel dommage pour moi!
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Usually my instinctive reaction to any remake news is to scoff and ask, "Why?" Not so with the recent announcement that James Cameron will be producing another go at the 1966 non-classic Fantastic Voyage. That's because I revisited this childhood favorite five years ago and found it sorely lacking. Another more recent, post-Avatar viewing just confirmed that the King Of The World is the perfect person to take the terrific concept -- an Abyss/Titanic style submarine miniaturized and injected into the Aliens/Avatar-like alien-landscape of the human body -- and make it, you know, actually fantastic. Here's how he'll do it.
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There is a Christmas dinner debate that lives in infamy at my house: It's 1997, and Titanic had been released a few days earlier -- should we go? My brother was almost ecstatic in his derision: James Cameron was a buffoon and no one was going to go see a movie where everybody already knows the end. Nix. I was sure, and looking back I don't even remember why, that the thing was going to be huge, and everybody knew the end to the Civil War too, jerkhole. We didn't go see Titanic. You know the rest. But the fact that people were still shit-talking the prospects of what went on to become the biggest grossing film of all time even after it hit the theaters (but before the first returns came in) says something about the boulder-sized grudge the zeitgeist seems to hold against Cameron. History repeated with Avatar, which the blogging classes seemed only too happy to relegate to the shitcan of overweening hubris. Then the thing actually screened. If whiplash has a sound, last Thursday evening it was reverberating through Cineplex lobbies on either coast, as critics and the commentariat hit the streets, shaking their heads free of three hours on a planet called Pandora and managing only the occasional expletive as they went.
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According to Lilli (Judi Dench), the redoubtable costume designer and major domo to famed Italian director Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) in Rob Marshall's alternately stimulating and enervatingly dull adaptation of the Broadway musical Nine, directing is a highly overrated job. What it boils down to, she insists, is simply answering a series of questions with yes or no, then surrounding yourself with lackeys who will do your bidding. What's missing in this summation, of course, is the degree of difficulty often involved not in making a decision well but in making one at all; the courage -- or, as often, arrogant folly -- it takes to have conviction in your own ideas. In deciding to adapt Nine, itself a musical treatment of 8 ½, Federico Fellini's modernist masterpiece about creative paralysis, megalomania, and indecision, Marshall must have known he'd have a lot to answer for. And while many of his choices would seem beyond reproach -- Should we get giant female stars to shake and shimmy in their underpants? Yesss. Should Daniel Day-Lewis play their dashing ringmaster? Uh, ye-es! -- it's the first and most important question that never gets a satisfying reply: Ma perche? But...why?
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