In every way, Marc Webb's (500) Days of Summer is conceived to be the ultimate mix CD. It's so specifically tailored that it will make certain audience members think "It's like this movie was made for me!" (even if Fox Searchlight hopes that enough moviegoers respond to it to effectively disprove that argument) and it skips around in its romantic chronology so much that it resembles a nonlinear reshuffling of carefully labored-over track numbers.
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As evidenced by its record-testing midnight engagements, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is probably just as (if not more) review-proof as any movie this summer. It's usually an observation reserved for the inauspicious likes of Transformers and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, with their pots of gold at the ends of two crap-colored rainbows. Yet it's equally important to note for something as fantastic as Potter, which, for all its elegance, drama, beauty, humor and gravity, is still widely perceived as little beyond a movie for kids and the geeks they grow into. That may or may not be enough for Warner Bros., but after a long, tough summer at the movies, adults deserve something with this much class.
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What happens when you entrust a Korean actress and cosmetics model to a Luc Besson protege, recruit them to adapt a celebrated Japanese anime title in English, and give them a visual effects budget that makes Megan Fox's ghetto demonface look extravagant? Blood: The Last Vampire happens. And boy, am I glad it did.
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"It's beyond gay," claims Ben (Mark Duplass) of Humpday's central premise -- that Ben and his friend Andrew (Joshua Leonard) will make a sex tape with each other to settle a dare, despite both men being straight -- and in a way, it truly is. Too often, "gay films" like Brokeback Mountain are simultaneously embiggened and diminished by pundits eager to proclaim how the gay content is merely a metaphor, an exotic lens for straight people to project their own familiar issues through. That concept actually works for Humpday, though: These are straight people afraid they're growing too domesticated, and through the looming, outré bet, they can confront their own cultural timidity (and, by extension, their tendencies for self-congratulation) head-on.
Also, it's funny.
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While considering ways to approach a review of Brüno, the quite funny if membrane-thin new comedy from Sacha Baron Cohen, I first lamented not having written about Borat in 2006. Then it would be easy: Just lift the copy into a new document, change some names and locations, do a find-and-replace with the words "Kazakh" and "gay," riff on homophobia for a bit, and end it. Done. And why not? If it's good enough for Baron Cohen as an A-list screenwriter/provocateur, then shouldn't it be good enough for me?
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For an artist as history-obsessed as Michael Mann, it's a wonder he's made only three period films in 30 years. It's even more surprising how wildly their quality swings, from the dynamic, violent romance of The Last of the Mohicans to the paper-thin biopic Ali to this week's middling Public Enemies. Mann's style may remain consistent throughout, offering his same moody riff on a classic American folk tale. But what happens when the filmmaker's even more preoccupying theme -- crime, and the men who practice it -- has its own stake in Enemies' John Dillinger myth? A schizoid mess, that's what.
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For a show about a man with a large, um, gift, HBO's new comedy Hung has remarkably few penis jokes. This is HBO, so the expectations of quality are unreasonably high for anything they produce, but it is safe to say that Hung (premiering Sunday) transports the fictional American gigolo to new heights. A lower middle class Midwestern male prostitute may not sound like a hero for our times, but when the going gets tough, the tough get hoing.
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The opening scenes of My Sister's Keeper depict a family that razzes one another at the dinner table, cavorts on a backyard trampoline and blows bubbles at each other for laughs. It seems like a great group to be a part of, unless your raison d'être is a walking blood and bone marrow bank for your leukemia-stricken sister. With that responsibility on your shoulders, the vacations to Montana and day trips to Malibu might not seem so blissful and you just might seek medical emancipation from your parents. It sounds like the set-up to a Law & Order episode, but as My Sister's Keeper progressed through the memories of a family, it dawned on me that these are somewhat real characters reacting to real dilemmas. Wait, actual emotional depth in an American movie? A movie starring Cameron Diaz? It's crazy, I know.
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I saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen minutes after emerging from an advance screening of Brüno -- the latter of which is under strict review embargo -- and while the two releases couldn't be more different, the double feature offered a vivid cross-section of the current state of American mass-marketed pop culture. What's clear is this: If you expect to make a dent in the summer blockbuster landscape, too much is never enough.
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It's not quite the Class of '88 reunion that it sort of strives to be, but Cheri -- the reteaming of Dangerous Liaisons partners Stephen Frears, Christopher Hampton and their extraordinary muse Michelle Pfieffer -- does revive the trio's unique, painstaking sophistication for a grown-up audience in need. And just in time, really, though the film's clashes of wills come almost as fast, fierce and protracted as the sprawling robot battles against which it's counterprogrammed in theaters. At least it's only half as long -- and you won't have to worry about a sequel.
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There are a few events in the early lead for this summer's Biggest Hollywood Shame -- Land of the Lost doomed by mismarketing, Eddie Murphy disappearing from the face of the planet, and Kathryn Bigelow's instant classic The Hurt Locker opening in the long, dense shadow of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Skeptics about the latter might argue that the films have different audiences, with Locker's cerebral thrills playing skillfully against Michael Bay's megabudget bombast, but that's slightly missing the point. The Hurt Locker is a kind of win-win for a new era, a relatively cheap, mass-market actioner that can please viewers and studios alike. It's not quite enough to say, "More like this, please." You really do have to ask: "Why aren't there more like this?"
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Woody Allen hasn't made any secret of the recycling job that is his new film Whatever Works, first written three decades ago as a starring vehicle for Zero Mostel and exhumed from his desk in a pinch when a looming SAG strike threatened Allen's brisk film-per-year output. It's an interesting admission -- perhaps the most interesting thing about the film, in fact, which Allen revived instead with Larry David as his brilliant, misanthropic surrogate and Evan Rachel Wood as his nubile Southern muse. We always knew he was kind of a dirty old man, but what's a dirty old man without an imagination? Now we know.
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Nurses know more than doctors, have a tremendous gift of empathy, break rules to save lives and don't get enough respect. I get it. I really do. While nurses in the real world rarely receive the props they deserve, TV nurses like Carol Hathaway (ER) or Carla Espinosa (Scrubs) demonstrated that a nurse can toil away in the land of MD's, receive little credit and lots of blame, and still look good doing it. Sure, it took a couple decades to undo the damage done to the profession's image on film by Louise Fletcher's devastating portrayal of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but the regard for nurses is high enough that Showtime produced Nurse Jackie to play off that saint-in-scrubs image. With cable television moving deliberately in the direction of more complicated female roles, TNT's new nurse-hero drama HawthoRNe feels anachronistic and miscalculated. Jada Pinkett Smith is long overdue for a star vehicle, it just seems like she should have bought a newer model.
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Exhausted the classic canon? Fed up with the current cinema of remakes, reboots and reimaginings? This week The Cold Case exhumes the best surrealist noir you've never heard of.
If a "Hollywood insider satire whodunit slasher" was announced today, you'd be forgiven for rolling your eyes in expectation of a Friedberg-Seltzer atrocity with a title like Hacky Movie. But if, reading on, you saw the words "shot as a B&W German Expressionist noir on one set in Boston", your contempt might be replaced by something approaching incredulity. Even harder to believe is that such a film already exists and that it's virtually unknown.
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James Franco has been dabbling in directing for a while now at New York University's film school, where he has acknowledged the influence of poetry on his early short work. Not just any poetry, though -- we're talking about Anthony Hecht's blisteringly homoerotic piece The Feast of Stephen, Franco's adaptation of which screened here at CineVegas. And when it comes to nailing the tone, vitality and flopping penises of his source material, the fledgling filmmaker is unquestionably in a league of his own. Let's break down the festival's gayest film (with spoilers!) after the jump.
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