Category: Movies

With Fireproof (only one paper reviewed it? Really? I hear showings for Saturday night here in St. Louis are already sold out) opening this weekend and An American Carol next–both to limited release–will boffo numbers for both refocus Hollywood money men on making films that people want to see that portray Christianity favorably or lampoon the taboo subjects of Liberalism?

Who am I kidding?

Today he announces:

Simply put: my wife got me a collection of 100 Mystery movies on DVD for my birthday, and I’m going to watch them all. This feature will run at least once a week, and will range from the boring – like our first one, alas – to the really, really bad.

My wife gave me the very collection for Christmas a couple years ago. Lileks is already further into it than I am.

In a review of Hancock, St. Louis Post-Dispatch cinema critic Calvin Wilson tosses in this aside critical not of the movie, but of plebes who go to films for their own pleasure and not for edification through serious cinema:

That probably won’t bother the film’s core audience, which is happy to see Smith in just about anything except “Ali.”

Dude, they didn’t exactly clamor for The Legend of Bagger Vance either, ainna?

Instapundit links to a couple of The New Republic takedowns of the new M. Night Someguyan movie The Happening, saving me a couple bucks on seeing a film that ultimately would have cheesed me off. Go head, click here and here, read the spoilers, and know why I’d have been peeved.

However, in the biggest meta-twist of any career (and I’ll guess that Shyamalan’s career is officially over now), the finally movie suggests that the protagonists of his earlier films were actually the bad guys. That’s right: The Sixth Sense‘s burglar, Unbreakable‘s Mr. Glass, Sign‘s aliens, and that mermaid film’s anti-mermaid contingent were actually the good guys, doing the work of the Trees.

Game on for DiCaprio:

The word bounding out of Hollywood this week is that “Titanic”-star Leonardo DiCaprio is intent on doing a gaming-related pic about Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and the Chuck E. Cheese’s pizza chain. DiCaprio would star as the entrepreneur and, Game Guy presumes, bring a little of the on-screen spice he demonstrated in such flicks as “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” and “The Basketball Diaries.”

DiCaprio as Blinky or Clyde, maybe. DiCaprio as Bushnell? I’ll never look at my Ataris the same again.

What do you get when you cross Lileks with Kim du Toit? Something like this: a post with screen caps of an attractive old timey actress.

This particular actress, June Howard Tripp, appeared in a hand’s worth of British films in the early part of the 20th century, most of them silent. She was born in June 1901 and died in January 1985 according to the IMDB bio.

I’m posting these photos of her because 1)I thought she was cute and 2)The Internet apparently doesn’t have many photos of her on it. These stills are from the 1927 Hitchcock film The Lodger.

Click for full size
June in a flapper hat.

Click for full size
June with big smile.

Click for full size
June with concerned look.

Click for full size
June serving breakfast.

Click for full size
June with eyes raised heavenward.

There, that should help make sure my content column is almost as long as the sidebar. What, with over five years’ worth of weekly archives, it gets hard sometimes.

Also, she was a cutie. Relative to the rest of the cast of the movie, anyway.

Hypothesis:

Morgan Freeman in uniform = good, though.

Evidence against: Dreamcatcher.

In Lileks defense, I happen to be one of six people in the country to have watched Dreamcatcher.

According to the Washington Post, numerous filmmakers are going ahead with anti-war films:

On Sept. 14, Warner Independent Pictures expects to release “In the Valley of Elah,” a drama inspired by the Davis murder, written and directed by Paul Haggis, whose “Crash” won the Academy Award for best picture in 2006. The film stars Tommy Lee Jones as a retired veteran who defies Army bureaucrats and local officials in a search for his son’s killers. In one of the movie’s defining images, the American flag is flown upside down in the heartland, the signal of extreme distress.

Other coming films also use the damaged Iraq veteran to raise questions about a continuing war. In “Grace Is Gone,” directed by James C. Strouse and due in October from the Weinstein Company, John Cusack and two daughters struggle with the loss of a wife and mother who is killed on duty. Kimberly Peirce’s “Stop-Loss,” set for release in March by Paramount, meanwhile, casts Ryan Phillippe as a veteran who defies an order that would send him back to Iraq.

So Hollywood is going to try to educate us how to think, again. I have a bit of advice, Hollywood: If you’re interested in how the heartland (read: your customers) thinks about their country and its military, perhaps some comparisons are in order.

Title	Budget	Box Office	Difference
300	65,000,000	210,614,939	145,614,939
Jarhead	72,000,000	62,658,220	9,341,780
Rambo: First Blood Part II	n/a	150,415,432	n/a
First Blood	15,000,000	47,212,904	32,212,904
Born on the Fourth of July	n/a	70,001,698	n/a
Courage Under Fire	n/a	59,031,057	n/a
Three Kings	75,000,000	60,652,036	14,347,964

I realize this is not a comprehensive survey of box office and really reflects my own taste as much as anything else, but the more, erm, message-driven reeducational sorts of films don’t seem to do so well as the patriotic or less nuance-principled films, at least domestically.

But maybe Hollywood isn’t making films for us any more; perhaps they’re focusing on the foreign markets or on impressing themselves and the Academy.

However, allow me to predict that this story will participate in next year’s “Box Office Revenue/Ticket Sales Continue to Decline” story. Followed, no doubt, with industry claims that piracy is causing it instead of disconnect between the moviemakers and movienotgoers.

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.)