While Jennifer's Body reaffirms the status of its leading lady Megan Fox (yes, she can act, at least in this role!) and writer Diablo Cody (Juno and The United States of Tara weren't flashes in the pan, honest to blog!), the person with the most to win or lose is perhaps director Karyn Kusama. After her indie debut Girlfight was praised to the heavens, she was KO'd by her follow-up, the 2005 flop Aeon Flux. Kusama's long since written it off as studio meddling, but I thought this week it'd be the decent thing to take another look at what went wrong -- and perhaps a little bit right -- with the live-action adaptation of the beloved 1990s anime.
more »
Had I gone through life never having seen a movie in which a dad and his son wrap themselves up in filthy Timberland outerwear and wander aimlessly around fire-ravaged back country meant to resemble a post-apocalyptic America, occasionally stumbling into entire families swinging by their necks from barn rafters and hungry bands of cannibals who eye the younger of the two as if he were a delicious turkey drumstick, I think I would have been OK. But I have seen that movie, and it's called The Road.
more »
At a glance, The Joneses seems like a can't-miss and must-miss proposition all at once: Filmmaker Derrick Borte's feature debut. A cast comprising Demi Moore as David Duchovny as the parents of a mysteriously affluent and happy exurban family (with next door neighbors played by Glenne Headly and Gary Cole). Ben Hollingsworth and shirt-allergic starlet Amber Heard as their kids. A semi-secret first-act plot twist and oddly vague plot details beyond that. Potential bidding-war fodder or gimmicky letdown. And after all that, The Joneses did wind up missing -- but only by this much.
more »
Hometown boy Atom Egoyan hasn't world premiered one of his film in Toronto in 25 years, back when his debut Next of Kin launched one of Canadian cinema's most illustrious (if spotty) careers in 1984. So it's fitting and truly refreshing that his return home Sunday for Chloe also represented a return to form -- an engrossing, suspenseful, brilliantly acted melodrama loaded with surprises and risks. And that's not even counting the part where Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfried wind up in bed.
more »
[Editor's note: This review was originally published Sept. 11, 2009, as part of our TIFF coverage.]
Less than 24 hours after watching George Clooney sit across from an Iraqi goat and telepathically snuff it out of existence, I was watching him do essentially the same thing to a stream of ill-fated members of the American workforce in Up in the Air, Jason Reitman's astutely observed and surprisingly uplifting meditation on one man's pathological tendency towards isolationism. That that man, Ryan Bingham, would choose the career path he did -- working for a third-party concern leased out to corporations who'd rather avoid the face-to-face messiness of large-scale layoffs -- only serves to enable his particular form of sociopathy. Ryan crisscrosses my land and your land like a mighty, modern-day Paul Bunyon, proudly wielding his axe and swinging his downsizing blows so efficiently, he's often out the door before his targets even realize that they've been reduced to stumps.
more »
War is hell -- that's a well-established fact. But war is something else, too. War is weird. Particularly the war that began eight years ago today, fronted as it was by a puppet President who liked to play flight suit dress-up. Its tyrannical despot target was found living like a well-heeled mole in a tunnel beneath the ground, and his tribunal and execution would bring such matters into the YouTube era. Meanwhile, his loyal footsoldiers (or were they our allies? It's so hard to tell) were sequestered behind prison walls, where they were subjected to exquisitely perverse human rights violations -- everything from waterboarding to cheerleader formations to Barney the Purple Dinosaur singing "I Love You" at ear-shattering volumes on infinite loop.
more »
"Hell is a teenage girl," viewers are warned in their introduction to Jennifer's Body, a funny, brainy, mildly flawed effort that should at least temporarily put to rest the debate over whether Megan Fox is more than just a pretty face. Her performance is indeed high among the reasons to see the film, as are those of Amanda Seyfried and Johnny Simmons and the bleaker-than-ever genre conflations of sex, youth and death. To wit: If hell is in fact a teenage girl -- a notion both screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Karyn Kusama purvey with a bracing lack of irony -- then where does that situate the men who chase her? And are all hells alike?
more »
In the pilot episode of the CW's Melrose Place revamp, an uppity bitch is pushed into a pool. Hooray! A return to form! Except this time, the bitch (Sydney from the old series) has been stabbed to death, a plot point which owes more to the new show's more obvious forefather Veronica Mars. In fact, though the Melrose Place premiere poses a mystery to us, it also solves another: You can successfully remake a classic TV show, as long as you amp up the camp.
more »
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Plan 9 From Outer Space, Edward D. Wood Jr.'s legendary turkey in which alien humanoids in model-kit flying saucers resurrect Earth's recently deceased... in a peaceful bid to convince humanity not to develop a weapon that'll destroy the universe... by exploding sunlight. That famous plot, while an oddball cross between The Day The Earth Stood Still and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, is the least schlocky element of Wood's opus, which, among its litany of cinematic sins, features a cemetery of toppling cardboard gravestones, blinking dead people, boom mic shadows so frequent they ought to credited as supporting players, stitched-in footage of by-then-dead Bela Lugosi and lines like, "A flying saucer? You mean the kind from up there?"
Wood wrote and directed his sci-fi schlocker in 1956, but it didn't limp into cinemas for almost three years, and then only about 20 prints were struck. And it would take another two decades hence before a new generation (and later, of course, Tim Burton) enshrined it in the cult canon once and for all. So take a minute or two in this anniversary year to reflect on the Bad Movie We Love that, more than any other, taught us to love bad movies.
more »
When it comes to contemplating the misfortune of Mike Judge's Extract, part of me wants to just refer you over to Beavis and Butthead's own review and be done with it. Insight-challenged as they are, the revival of Judge's most famous leading men crystallizes his complacency in ways that make seeing his new film almost irrelevant: It's regressive and unfunny, yet it winks with a sort of sleepy, Last-of-the-Bozos zeal that defies you to really dislike it. But can they -- or Extract, for that matter -- make you care in the end?
more »
Just so we're clear, Mitch McCabe's gripping, grotesque plastic surgery documentary Youth Knows No Pain (premiering tonight on HBO) is not quite about plastic surgery. Nor is it really about the "anti-aging industry," the designated euphemism for the $60 billion subculture comprising said surgeries, wrinkle creams, injectables, implanatables and numerous other treatments used to preserve Americans' illusion of freshness, fitness and vigor. Rather, Youth is about the dynamics of vanity -- particularly that of its filmmaker, who, along with so many of her subjects, seems too preoccupied with fending off age to contemplate that she's old enough to know better.
more »
I doubt Ang Lee approached Taking Woodstock with the same sense of historical timing that the rest of culture exploited this summer, when the music festival's 40th anniversary catapulted it back into a sort of reissued big-money consciousness. The Oscar-winning fimmaker said he simply wanted a break from his "abyss of tragedy," and that Elliot Tiber's memoir about providing Woodstock's operational nexus was the story that would set him free. Maybe it did, maybe it didn't, but for viewers, it's all the same. Just swap flimsy nostalgia for nihilism, and there you are.
more »
Patton Oswalt is on the record as saying that you shouldn't expect laughs when you come to see Big Fan, and you won't hear me convincing you otherwise. The veteran comic appears here Paul Aufiero, perhaps the most forlorn sports enthusiast in the history of movies, single-handedly devastating his beloved New York Giants' season with one episode of questionable judgment. It's grounds for farce in the hands of most other filmmakers -- but not those of Robert Siegel, who mined similar, single-minded downer territory in his screenplay for The Wrestler. There, we witnessed the dark side of athleticism. Here, in Siegel's directorial debut, he and Oswalt explore the dark side of fandom. Alas, only one of them has the chops to pull it off.
more »
Watching World's Greatest Dad is like sucking on a candy-coated battery, one fully charged with angst and anguish and unrelenting bitterness that periodically gives way to one of the year's sweetest, sincerest character dramas. And at least until a gang of careless reviewers and journalists spoiled its central plot point after its Sundance premiere, it was even one of the year's most shocking films.
more »
As the bloody sectarian horror show of Northern Ireland in the 20th century has tapered off in the headlines, so has much of its currency in the movies. A few Irish Republican Army gems peek out from time to time (recent Cannes award-winners The Wind That Shakes the Barley and Hunger come to mind), but on the whole, the subject has become almost as quaint as the townships where so many of its earlier films unfolded. Which makes 50 Dead Men Walking both the last of a dying breed and a rejuvenating marvel of sorts: Quintessential IRA grit and exploitation cinema balled up in one fierce package.
more »
