Category: Movies

Helena Bonham Carter shows her range and sexes up a role as a witch:

Bonham Carter says she had a big say in creating her character’s voluptuous-but-disheveled look.

“At first they thought, ‘Oh, we’ll just put her in a sack,'” Bonham Carter said. “But I said, ‘There’s no way I’m going to wear a sack. I’ve got to be a sexy witch.'”

Well, color me shocked. After all, she did the same thing to a monkey, for crying out loud. If you’re looking for a non-sexy sort of character, you probably don’t select Helena Bonham Carter for the role.

When my wife came home from a recent evening event, she saw that I was watching Alex & Emma on DVD. “You’re watching a chick flick!” she said.

“I am not,” I defended, “It’s an author flick.”

Allow me to justify my behavior.

Although I concede that it has all the earmarks of chick flick feminine wish fulfillment:

• No-nonsense working woman
• With a lot of opinions, with which she is forcefully forthcoming
• And “quirks” identify her as high-maintenance and probably controlling when they exist in a woman in real life
• Meets a flawed but cute man
• Whose initial impression and silly bachelor ways she overlooks
• And they fall in love.

Friends, I agree, those are the earmarks of a chick flick. However, this particular movie plays upon those conventions and, although they sucker women into thinking the movie is directed at them, it’s not. It’s every author’s fantasy fulfilled:

• An author living in a comfortable loft downtown (Boston, not St. Louis)
• Tricks an innocent stenographer to his lair
• Where he dictates a potboiler novel,
• A follow-up to a wildly successful debut novel,
• Pausing only to nail a woman who looks like Kate Hudson
• And when he completes the draft in 30 days
• The publisher loves it without a single jot of revision required
• And immediately pays the author a six-figure advance.
• Meanwhile, the author tells the stenographer he “loves” her
• And she buys it
• So he will get to nail her again.

You tell me who gets gratified more from this movie.

The blogosphere, built of fanboys of science fiction, politics, or sometimes both, is abuzz about the Entertainment Weekly The Sci-Fi 25 top 25 science fiction things in the last 25 years, has this to say about #16, The Thing:

Recently, there’s been talk in Hollywood of remaking The Thing. Please don’t. For the love of God, we’re begging you. After all, this streamlined exercise in subzero paranoia cannot be improved upon.

This is amusing to some of us who realize the 1982 film was a remake of a 1951 film entitled The Thing From Another World.

Don’t remake the remake because its subzero paranoia could not be improved? Hollywood 2007 surely differs; why, it’s a parable about modern politics, somehow, making George W. Bush and the American military responsible would speak more truth to power.

In the pool, I’m taking the spot where alien is replaced with military experiment on Iraqi/general Arabic prisoner gone wrong.

Want to know why I never went to Hollywood? Because my stone-cold attractivosity would melt the cameras. Jessica Biel understands:

Last summer’s The Illusionist may have given her résumé a prestige boost, but Jessica Biel says “it’s still a struggle” to get the parts she wants – partly because she’s too sexy.

We should form a support group, but I think my wife would disapprove.

(Link seen on Boots and Sabers; in lieu of actually finding something on my own, I am merely republishing their content.)

I watched 300 on Tuesday night. Before the movie, in the 25 minutes of previews/commercials preceding the movie, the trailer for an upcoming film called Pathfinder played.

Remember, friends, Joe Williams of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and others widely panned 300 as a jingoistic propoganda piece, and it was a stylized depiction of historical events.

Pathfinder, on the other hand, is the story of Viking raiders in historically inaccurate headgear who come to North America to pillage the native American villiages. They leave behind a child whom the natives spare and raise. When the Vikings return some years later, the child has grown up a killing machine, and he takes the Vikings on and looks like (according to the trailer) he beats the snot out of them.

So, thematically, we have a white man raised by savages–sorry, living-in-tune-with harmony oppressed victims–who goes onto slaughter his own kind for their imperialism. Based on actual events? No, a remake of a a 1987 movie. Except that the 1987 movie had different tribes of Scandinavia as the victims. They were changed to native Americans because that’s one more easy button to push, no doubt. Fortunately, though, the new filmakers left the raiders as Vikings and didn’t go whole hog and make them time-travelling Nazis or greedy businessmen. Subtlety.

I can’t wait for the big media reviews to call this a bit of jingoism in favor of rebeling against one’s forefathers’ beliefs, violently. Since it’s not an apostate being marked for death, it’s rebellion against white bread America (well, Scandinavia, but white bread), I expect its potentially propogandaish themes will be overlooked.

Me, I probably won’t see the film to judge its individual merits, but it doesn’t look interesting enough for me. That’s a matter of individual taste, though. Throw in a couple of mutants and maybe Adam Sandler, and I’d be there.

Joe Williams of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch pans 300, but it would be a better panning if it wasn’t so steeped in ignorance and mandatory thoughtsophistication. Choice bits:

Frank Miller is the biggest name in American comic books — or graphic novels, as his fans call them.

Is he demeaning graphic novels, or does he truly not know the difference between comic books and graphic novels? When in doubt, suspect ignorance, I say.

Armed only with shields and hoary slogans about freedom, the Spartans repel wave after wave of Persians.

Hoary slogans about freedom. Williams is above falling for those.

Persia became modern-day Iran, and it is surely no accident that the “Asian hordes” are depicted as dark-skinned degenerates. Some of the Persian warriors resemble Japanese samurai, some seem to be wearing Afghan burqas and the ruthless King Xerxes is bejeweled and effeminate.

Student of history trying to obscure the truth, or ignorant? Ignorant, probably, of the extent of the Persian empire that would feature many of those myriad peoples. Further, Williams seems to want to obscure the fact that throughout recorded history does actually feature occasions where the dark-skinned Other did invade the lands of lighter skinned folk. Much like lighter skinned folk have done to the Other. It’s more a matter of human nature than racial or ethnic differences, although cultures have differed in their warmaking sentiments and strategy.

I’d like to see the movie, and Joe Williams has never really influenced me before. I think his columns are more about his delicate sensibilities than the actual movies, but sometimes, that’s all a critic has going for him.

UPDATE: More reviews and reviews of reviews:

• Ace takes issue with Slate’s review.

  (Anonymous commenter pointed this out in comments before I could post the link, but you people who don’t bother to read the comments might like it, too.)

• CNN sees it through the prism of a Republican administration:
  

  Nevertheless, it’s not so much the body count or even the blood lust that’s disturbing. It’s that the film, with its macho militarism, seems out of step in a war-weary time.

• Oddly enough, Duane Dudek of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel sees an underdog story:
  

  Neither history nor cinema is especially well served by “300,” which is, nonetheless, a remarkable intersection of technology and imagination.

  The battle at Thermopylae in 480 B.C., a suicidal last stand by an army of Spartans and Thespians estimated at about 5,000, against Persian invaders, estimated at from hundreds of thousands to millions, set the stage for a later Persian defeat and for its own transformation into a metaphor for the ages.

  Of course, Dudek probably recognizes the national anthem is a song about perservernce and not bombing the hell out of innocent native peoples, too, so he’s hardly qualified to be writing for a newspaper.

As I settled down to watch The Keys of the Kingdom, 20th Century Fox presented me with this particular guitar-driven, almost-a-music-video reminder that I should not pillage:

As a matter of fact, 20th Century Fox sees fit to entertain me with this little bit of nagging every time I put the disc in or start the DVD player. Since I stop and start these old timey movies often, that means I see the PSA over and over and over again.

But here’s a little clueflash for you, 20th Century Fox: The people who buy black and white movies from 1944 for $7 from Sam’s Club are not the people who download the latest Vin Diesel flick from BitTorrent. We’re the committed consumers, right? We’re shelling out cash for your deep catalog stuff. So punishing us by hectoring us not to do something we don’t do annoys us.

Annoyed people don’t make impulse purchases of old, forgotten Academy Award Winners just so they can sound smart or to stock up on trivia.

And, since you asked, the movie was okay. I got a little aggravated when I got halfway through and suspected that the movie was presenting Chicom revolutionaries as heroes and the target of assistance of the Roman Catholic priest (since they were freeing the peasants from the imperialists). In 1944, Hollywood was rooting for the other side there, too. But then I calmed down and remembered that the film, made in 1944, was set some decades prior (during the Taiping Rebellion?). So I suspended my politics and got back into the story. Then Anne Revere made a brief appearance, and I realized the Chinese revolutionaries were probably actually supposed to represent the communists.

Oh, and Gregory Peck is heavily made up as an old man in the framing of the story, and they warbled his voice somehow on the audiotrack. That must have been something in 1944.

Devoted reader Neil sends this link after debating the Top 5 Christmas Movies: Die Hard – The Greatest Christmas Movie Ever:

Here it is, the single greatest Christmas movie of all time — no joke, no doubt, no question, it’s Die Hard. And before any quibbling begins, can we agree, in general, that it’s a good movie? Seriously. Step back from the Christmas assertion for just a moment and consider the film as a whole. Die Hard is a classic.

I haven’t read such insightful, stunning analysis since my last college literary criticism paper.

Brian J. Noggle’s Top 5 Christmas Movies:

1. Die Hard
2. Lethal Weapon
3. Die Hard 2
4. Gremlins
5. Invasion USA

(Originally posted Christmas Eve 2003.)

Hey, it’s opening weekend for Harsh Times, a movie about a violent ex-Army Ranger shooting the hell out of Los Angeles because he likes killing.

Thank you for your disservice, Hollywood.

So I don’t have to: This Just In: Richard Roeper Is A Blantatly Dishonest Leftist Apologist

Frankly, I read this Roeper Chicago Sun-Times column defending V for Vendetta and didn’t think it was much of a threat to our way of life and that it was a fair argument a movie. A movie I didn’t want to see because of its subject matter. The column didn’t change my mind in any fashion, but I didn’t care to comment on it.

Ace does, though, and he delivers a savaging that sways my opinion against Roeper plenty good.

(By the way, congratulations to Richard Roeper for getting the negative blogosphere attention he’s probably craved for some time now. Unfortunately, the big dogs of the blogosphere don’t normally find source material in the Milwaukee, Chicago, or St. Louis papers. Way to go, Richard!)

Gregory Peck is the 1950s Orlando Bloom. Gary Cooper could have beaten him half to death with his left hand, and Cary Grant could have given him a wedgie of a quip that would have sent him back home to momma and his sisters.

UPDATE 00:11:07 If he doesn’t manage that shrew of a wife of his, I’m going to invent a time machine that travels into fictional time, set it back to 1956 Connecticut, and I’m going to introduce Gregory Peck to a little thing called “Taser.” For the simple thrill of it.

UPDATE 00:12:10 Never mind, send back the divorce lawyers instead.

UPDATE 00:17:06 Funny how off-handedly Hollywood whacked America’s enemies (or recent enemies) in the 1950s. Now, of course, heroes cannot even look askew at potential enemies of the Republic.

The Day After Tomorrow for Kids.

The Top Ten Sci-Fi Films That Never Existed.

Inigo Montoya? No. Steve Guttenberg.

(Link courtesy, or direct all blame to, Exultate Justi.)

Because The Girl, The Gold Watch, and Everything had seventies hair.

The Sentinel: Okay, Kiefer Sutherland as a shouting government agent, we can accept, but President Sledge Hammer!? Not so much.

The split second shot (no pun intended) of David Rasche along with the words “the President” were enough to pitch my wife and I into gales of laughter during the preview.

James Frey, author of the fictional A Million Little Pieces, says:

“I think writing a book about this experience would be trying to capitalize on it in some way and that’s not something I want to do at all.”

This does not, however, rule out a movie a la Shattered Glass.