Tomorrow's the big day, when I'll be posting my 2007 Ten Best List, but to warm you up, here's something for the more negative among my readers:  the Ten Worst Movies of 2007.

1.Epic Movie:  A sad travesty of Epics, Movies and Comedy, confusing namedropping, celebrity impersonators and really bad hip-hop musical numbers with jokes.  I saw nothing less worthy of theatrical distribution this year.
2.Premonition:  Until my dying day, it will nag at me:  did anyone involved with the production of this misbegotten Sandra Bullock thriller actually understand it?  Because if they did, they're far ahead of me and the hundreds of you who've read the review after searching some variation on "Explain Premonition".  Sorry, folks, there's no blood in that stone...
3.Aliens vs. Predator:  Requiem:  That two once-great franchises have been reduced to this glorified direct-to-video knockoff is enough to make a grown geek cry.  Pointless and amateurish, and also casually sick in a way that makes a person wonder about the mental health of those involved...
4.The Seeker:  The Dark is Rising:  "Hurry, Will!  Find the Sign!"  You have now heard fifty percent of the dialog from the bizarrely cheap fantasy mishmash Fox tried to slip past us this October.  Alternately embarassing and incoherant, a new low for Harry Potter knockoffs.
5.Next:  OK, let's say I put aside my 16.5 million questions about how Nicolas Cage's ability to see two minutes into the future works when his actions keep changing the time between now and the two minutes from now that he's seeing; this is the best story filmmakers could tell about said ridiculous power?  Cage throws in the towel early and Jessica Biel has never been less interesting. 
6.Hitman:  Strip away all the sci-fi elements from the popular video game series (as this film version unwisely did), and what are you left with?  A whole lot of pointless gunplay, Russian Mob cliches, and a hero who'll kill anything that moves but is afraid to see a naked woman.
7.Dragon Wars:  Or, my fear of life after a lengthy writers' strike.  A big-budget Korean-made FX spectacular about fantastic monsters attacking Los Angeles made with so little understanding of its' target hemisphere I don't know whether to laugh or cry (neither did the cast...).  Didn't any of the American actors involved ever want to take the director aside and say "No only does no one talk like that, no one thinks like that and no one lives like that, either."?  At least the dragons looked good.
8.The Darjeeling Limited:  Wes Anderson overload:  three brothers drift about the Indian countryside doing things that symbolize things we'd need to see the movie 67 times to understand.  You guys go ahead without me.
9.No Reservations:  A weepy, poorly developed dramatic vehicle for Catherine Zeta Jones as a sad, emotionally cut-off chef became a wacky comedy thanks to an overcranked Aaron Eckhart and mugging musical montages.  Neither actor's movie worked.
10.P.S. I Love You: Another group of characters I hope never to spend time with.  Hilary Swank loses her husband (Gerard Butler) to cancer, but he Just Won't Die, sending her letters designed to make her wallow in his death forever or get on with her life, whichever comes first.  Filled with shrill characters, poorly thought-out scenes, the worst love interest (a positively weird Harry Connick Jr.) ever, and a lot of women's shoes.

12/5/07

Today the award season really kicked into gear with the announcement of its' first actual winners care of the shadowy National Board of Review.  For those seeking only to place early Oscar bets, bear in mind that the NBR is better at framing the argument that picking any ultimate winners (only American Beauty among the last 10 NBR Best Pictures went on to win the Academy Award).

Winners first, then commentary:

Best Film
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

Top Ten Films
(In alphabetical order) 
THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD 
ATONEMENT
THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM
THE BUCKET LIST 
INTO THE WILD 
JUNO 
THE KITE RUNNER 
LARS AND THE REAL GIRL 
MICHAEL CLAYTON
SWEENEY TODD

Best Foreign Film
THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY

Top Five Foreign Films
(In alphabetical order) 
4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS 
THE BAND'S VISIT 
THE COUNTERFEITERS 
LA VIE EN ROSE 
LUST, CAUTION

Top Five Documentaries
(In alphabetical order) 
DARFUR NOW 
IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON
NANKING 
TAXI TO THE DARKSIDE 
TOOTS

Top Independent Films
(In alphabetical order) 
AWAY FROM HER 
GREAT WORLD OF SOUND 
HONEYDRIPPER 
IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH
A MIGHTY HEART 
THE NAMESAKE
ONCE
THE SAVAGES
STARTING OUT IN THE EVENING 
WAITRESS

Best Actor
GEORGE CLOONEY, Michael Clayton

Best Actress
JULIE CHRISTIE, Away From Her

Best Supporting Actor
CASEY AFFLECK, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Best Supporting Actress
AMY RYAN, Gone Baby Gone

Best Ensemble Cast
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

Breakthrough Performance by an Actor
EMILE HIRSCH, Into The Wild

Breakthrough Performance by an Actress
ELLEN PAGE, Juno

Best Director
TIM BURTON, Sweeney Todd

Best Directorial Debut
BEN AFFLECK, Gone Baby Gone

Best Adapted Screenplay
JOEL COEN and ETHAN COEN, No Country For Old Men

Best Original Screenplay
DIABLO CODY, Juno and NANCY OLIVER, Lars and the Real Girl

Best Documentary
BODY OF WAR

Best Animated Feature
RATATOUILLE

I'm on record about not being down with the whole No Country For Old Men lovefest, but it's certainly no surprise to see it start to pick up some hardware.  Ditto most of the other honorees, with the biggest surprise certainly being Julia Christie's Best Actress award for the Alzheimer's drama Away From Her.  I had expected Ellen Page to win for Juno, but instead she was exiled to the Breakthrough Actress category.  I'm against Breakthrough awards, which are awfully subjective (hadn't she already been noticed by critics in Hard Candy and audiences in X-Men:  The Last Stand?) and just as often an excuse to deny a younger performer the top prize.  Of course, the early part of the Award Season is filled with asterisky awards like Best Directorial Debut (kuddos to Ben Affleck, whose Gone Baby Gone filled me with an irrational dread of the city of Boston) and the Freedom of Expression Award (a tie between Denzel Washington-directed The Great Debaters and the animated Persepolis).

On a personal level, I was most pleased with the Supporting Actress win for Amy Ryan, whose impersonation of morally bankrupt trash in Gone Baby Gone is so pitch perfect that I'm as irrationally afraid of her as Boston.  I also really enjoyed George Clooney's work in Michael Clayton and was happy to see In the Valley of Elah and Waitress on the Independent Film list.  Tim Burton as Best Director for Sweeny Todd is a bold pick:  otherwise, the NBR lived up to its' reputation for making safe choices that won't make them look too foolish if no one else follows their lead.  But give them credit:  it takes guts to go first.

11/30/07

Whoa, look what's snuck up on us again:  the awards season!  While the actual crowning of winners from among the field of all 2007 releases will not begin until December 5, when the mysterious National Board of Review announces its' picks, Wednesday saw the announcement of the season's first nominees. They come from the Spirit Awards, formerly the Independant Spirit Awards before corporate ownership of just about all the former Indie studios made the "I" word obsolete.

I've got to admit, there's very little here that I've seen.  In fact, there are exactly two things, Steve Zahn's intense supporting performance in Rescue Dawn and the late Adrienne Shelly's boldly charming screenplay for Waitress.  I'm kinda surprised to see those movies not getting more love from Film Independant, the body that selects these day-before-the-Oscars trophies, but they do confirm Juno and I'm Not There as significant contenders throughout the awards season.  I'm very interested in the former, having loved to death director Jason Reitman's debut Thank You For Smoking, not so much in the later, which seems to hinge on an obsessive interest in the life and career of Bob Dylan.

Or maybe they confirm nothing.  I'm as big a champion of independant thought as the Spirits are of Independant Film, and so I have to admire the way they tend to exist outside the mainstream of the awards season (last year's Best Feature nominees included American Gun and The Dead Girl).  But there are limits, and you have to go back to 2002 (the unjustly Oscar-snubbed Memento) to find the last time the Best Feature winner wasn't one of the five Best Picture Oscar Nominees.

So, with a hearty "Gentlemen, start your engines!" here are the Spirit Award nominees:

BEST FEATURE
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"
"I'm Not There"
"Juno"
"A Mighty Heart"
"Paranoid Park"

DIRECTOR
Todd Haynes - "I'm Not There"
Tamara Jenkins - "The Savages"
Jason Reitman - "Juno"
Julian Schnabel - "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"
Gus Van Sant - "Paranoid Park"

MALE LEAD
Pedro Castaneda - "August Evening"
Don Cheadle - "Talk To Me"
Philip Seymour Hoffman - "The Savages"
Frank Langella - "Starting Out in the Evening"
Tony Leung - "Lust, Caution"

FEMALE LEAD
Angelina Jolie - "A Mighty Heart"
Sienna Miller - "Interview"
Ellen Page - "Juno"
Parker Posey - "Broken English"
Tang Wei - "Lust, Caution"

SUPPORTING MALE Chiwetel Ejiofor - "Talk To Me"
Marcus Carl Franklin - "I'm Not There"
Kene Holliday - "Great World of Sound"
Irrfan Khan - "The Namesake"
Steve Zahn - "Rescue Dawn"

SUPPORTING FEMALE
Cate Blanchett - "I'm Not There"
Anna Kendrick - "Rocket Science"
Jennifer Jason Leigh - "Margot at the Wedding"
Tamara Podemski - "Four Sheets to the Wind"
Marisa Tomei - "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead"

SCREENPLAY
Ronald Harwood - "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"
Tamara Jenkins - "The Savages"
Fred Parnes & Andrew Wagner - "Starting Out in the Evening"
Adrienne Shelly - "Waitress"
Mike White - "Year of the Dog"

11/25/07

Last night I fired up my DVD player and got a look at the new Unrated cut of Live Free or Die Hard, something I've been anticipating ever since learning that while we Americans had been stuck with a watered-down PG-13 version, International audiences saw the film in the R-rated form which was so clearly intended.  I'm not somebody who comes out of PG-13 movies complaining that they weren't violent or gory enough, but when you try to strip the profanity from a sequel to the most joyously profane action movie ever made, you've crossed the line.  Well, now it's back (the Collector's Edition package I purchased includes both the theatrical and unrated cuts) and I, for one, was delighted to hear John McClane's language appropriately resalted.  I mean, come on, the man's catchphrase is “Yippie Ki Yay, Motherf***er”!  Let him do his thing!

I liked the movie even more this time around, and not just because of the swearing.  I generally find that when a movie is good enough for you to overlook its' flaws, you say that the first time, but really do it on subsequent viewings.  I barely noticed Cliff Curtis's pointless squad of investigators or the fact that John's daughter Lucy disappears for more than half the film, because I knew all that coming in.  And those action sequences... man, I could watch Bruce Willis and Justin Long duck between two cars while another one bounces over their heads a thousand times and it would still make me jump!

I was, however, disappointed by the absence of any deleted scenes.  Did they really intend to discard Lucy for all that time?  To not show any non-participant in the action affected by the “Fire Sale” Computer Hacking scheme (which, in an aside to my readers, I should again point out has no basis in reality)?  As creative choices go, that's just f***ed up.

11/23/07

These are exciting times, faithful readers!  The Palace is the proud recipient of its' very first promotional screener, a DVD copy of the indie metaphysical thriller Imagination sent to me by the filmmakers.  I watched it Wednesday night, then let it swish around in my brain for a couple days and a review is now online. 

I don't know how other online critics watch their screeners, but given the significance of the event in the history of this site (and the fact that I'm a little bit crazy), I put maximum effort into replicating the movie theater experience as well as I could.  I turned off the lights, shut off my cell phone, and positioned my chair directly in front of the TV with a bag of microwave popcorn (not as good as what I'd get at any of the local theaters, making me feel a little better about the outrageous prices I pay) in one hand and a fountain soda purchased at the local Turkey Hill mini-mart in the other.  OK, I admit it, I cheated once and did what I often wish I could in the theater:  after a key bit of dialog I wanted to hear again, I rewound and did just that.  Having seen Click, I wish for no such real-world power, but it was nice to at least be able to control the movie experience in my own home.

I've sweated the whole thing out a little bit:  the movie's got issues, and I worried both before and after seeing it about being able to write the same review I'd have written had I paid seven bucks for the pleasure.  But I'm pretty pleased with the results.  If the review piques your interest, Imagination has screened at a few West Coast theaters and will continue to pop up in selected cities up to its' video release next February.  See the official site for details.

11/20/07

I saw the movies change once before.  In June, 2003, I saw Jurassic Park at the Cinema World 6 across from the Nittany Mall in State College, PA.  It marked my first encounter with DTS Digital Sound, as well as the special effects revolution that would basically make it possible for ANYTHING to be depicted on-screen.  But that was just a tweaking of the existing product compared to what I saw two nights ago when I ventured to the Great Escapes Elite 14 (previously raved about below) to see Beowulf in the new RealD 3-D process.

RealD isn't to be confused with the breakthroughs that were sound and color:  there's never going to come a time when EVERY movie incorporates it (the glasses really aren't worth the trouble for the average romantic comedy, not to mention the hit any date movie would take by requiring guys to look so much like Drew Carey to watch it).  But for what it does, it's a comparable leap forward. 

So, you whose state still doesn't have a RealD-equipped theater might ask, what exactly does donning those goofy glasses do for you?  First, while traditional 3-D pretty much broke things down into 3 areas (a background, a screen level and a foreground), RealD totally opens up the screen to the point where you could lay down 20 dominoes and be able to see each one specifically in front of the next.  For that matter, it's possible to see that the backs of large objects are farther away from you than their fronts.  Plus, it's not just about throwing things at you or jabbing you with swords and spears (although that's never been cooler):  textures themselves are more vibrant, more REAL than in conventional movies.  Water, from the moment it pours over Beowulf's title, is the most notable example, but the disgustingly diseased mass of the monster Grendel is so realistically rendered, I felt like I could (but certainly didn't want to) reach right out and squish my finger right into his head.

Gone are the days when conventional 3-D pretty much covered everything you were seeing with Jell-o Paper:  RealD is capable of colors just as vibrant as any other movie.  And released from the ugly looking constraints of its' predecessor, the process can really work wonders for an action sequence (the climactic Beowulf vs. Dragon battle is a wonder to behold).  I really can't wait until a top-shelf action director (no offense, Bob Zemeckis) gets his hands on it.  Oh, wait, James Cameron's Avatar (due to open the 2009 Summer movie season) will be shown exclusively in RealD.  Now THAT'S gonna be something to see.

There are limitations.  Up and down panning made the screen blurry, including the closing credits.  And, of course, we've yet to see if RealD even works with live action, as every movie I've heard mentioned is either entirely or primarily animated.  I know that while most of Avatar will be done with CGI effects, some of it will feature live actors.  That interests me quite a bit.  But until I see a real-life landscape as convincingly RealDized as Zemeckis's computer ones were, 3-D will never be anything other than a cool novelty.

A VERY cool novelty...

11/10/07

For me, the opening of a new movie theater always has a Christmas Morning quality to it:  I attend close to a dozen area theaters on a semi-regular basis because they've all got their strengths and weaknesses and the variety helps to spice up my unusually high amount of moviegoing.  So any new toy under the tree is welcome, but a brand-spankin' new theater also promises previously unseen technological advances, new concession stand innovations, and seats so comfortable I'll never want to get up.  Last night, the Harrisburg Mall welcomed a new complex that with a notable lack of humility has dubbed itself the Great Escapes Harrisburg Mall Elite 14.  And it is the greatest movie theater I have ever visited.

The relentlessly comfortable rocking seats with their optional armrests are familiar from another Great Escapes venue that opened two summers ago in Lebanon, but the look of the place blows me away.  Flashy, ever-changing neon colors drift up and down the walls of the lobby and a hallway filled with little Movie Palace entrances for each screen also arched by flashy swirling color.  The presentation that waits inside is just as strong.  I was at Lions for Lambs on Screen #3, not even the best they have to offer, but the large digital picture was unthinkably crisp and clear (better even than the digital presentation I've experienced at the AMC Empire 25 in mid-town Manhattan) with sensational sound I can't wait to sample on a movie that's more sound-reliant.  Even the popcorn was well above-average, and I can't wait to give the Nachos a whirl.

The best is yet to come:  the Elite 14 is the first Digital 3-D location in our area, just in time for next weekend's ballyhooed Beowulf release, and I'm excited for the chance to pay (gulp) eleven dollars for this new movie experience (is it too much to ask that I'll be able to keep the glasses and not have to pay the $2.00 surcharge for future 3-D movies?  Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is).  A review, of course, will follow.

11/5/07

So it begins...

The Writers Guild of America is now on strike, with both they and their opponents among the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (admit it, you've never heard that name before) claiming to be dug in for a long, long haul.  Obviously, there's some posturing there:  nobody goes on strike with a public face of "Man, we can do this for a week, but then we REALLY need to get back to work!".  But I do fear the worst, particularly now that the Alliance represents a collection of International conglomerates more than simple studios and networks as in past negotiations.  And conglomerates don't deal with unions, they seek to crush them. 

With that in mind, it's not just the fact that I've dabbled in screenwriting myself that has my sympathies with the WGA.  This isn't like the last contract negotiation 3 years ago when the Guild's strike threat was based primarily on their wounded feelings that movie credits give directors more weight than writers.  It's not even just about "more" money:  it's hard to trust the Producers' contention that they should be able to screen, broadcast or stream TV shows and movies for "promotional" purposes without paying residuals.  Before you know it, lawyers would be coming up with justifications for EVERY broadcast to be a promotional one and residuals as we know them would be a thing of the past.  Should you or I really care?  Maybe not, but I'm a worker, not an owner, and my sympathy is pretty much always with the guy trying to get a piece rather than the one trying to keep the whole pie.

So what does it mean for us as movie buffs?  In the short term, not much:  TV fans will be hit hard and fast, but the Summer blockbusters of 2009 are already set to shoot over the winter with scripts that have already been locked.  Of course, the quality of those screenplays is up for debate.  We all know what kind of writing the average blockbuster offers with a full compliment of scribes doing their best for every day of the shoot.  A Justice League of America movie whose script hasn't been touched by a soul in the 4 months before shooting began?  Makes me a little antsy.

Just a few first impressions, I'm sure we'll have plenty of additional chances to chat about this before any contract is signed.

10/22/07

After a weekend battle with a computer virus (damn you, anonymous foreign hacker with nothing better to do than replace my files with Trojan copies!!!), I'm back up and running and ready to tackle a backlog of titles starting with the site's 100th review, of In the Shadow of the Moon.  The milestone, coming exactly 292 days after Apocalypto became the first of the site's original seven reviews to be uploaded on January 4, arrived a lot faster than I expected, indicating that I clearly need more hobbies. 

From the best of those hundred movies (Hairspray) to the worst (Premonition), I want to thank everyone who's read the reviews, added this site to their Favorites or just stopped by looking for pictures.  It's great to be able to add my two cents to the Net-wide discussion of cinema.  Moving forward, I'm really hoping to find time to update this blog a little more often, as well as planning a feature article on favorite Christmas movies, my Second Annual Ten Best List, the bitching and moaning that can only mean the 2008 awards season, and perhaps a stab at joining the Online Film Critics Society.

Onward and Upward, here's to the next 100 reviews!

10/17/07

I don't know what it is about the business side of the entertainment industry that fascinates us so, but I know it fascinates me.  Maybe it's that creeping feeling that the TV shows we watch and the kinds of movies we love exist only at the whim of a bunch of incompetents who're not taking proper care of them.  It is true that if you don't pay attention to the TV ratings, you'll be blindsided when your favorite shows are canceled.  And if you weren't watching the box office, it probably caught you off-guard when studios stopped churning out those Ring-inspired Japanese horror movies about a year after they stopped making money.  All this leaves a person feeling powerless over the future of the media, which in turn leads to a lot of backseat programming and scheduling.

Which brings me to my point.  If a person feels a certain sameness setting in on their moviegoing from week to week, it might have something to do with a fall movie schedule even more homogeneous in its' own well-intentioned, R-rated, deliberately paced, relentlessly adult-skewing way as the Kids Of All Ages-friendly Summer that proceeded it.  Starting on September 7 with Shoot 'Em Up and 3:10 to Yuma, the major studios have gone to the R rating early, often, and pretty much every time in between.  A couple of these movies (Resident Evil:  Extinction and The Heartbreak Kid, for instance) have aimed to be popular entertainment, but by and large it's been deliberate paces, ultra-violence and stone cold serious subject matter (most of it either directly or indirectly about the War in Iraq).  Nothing for me as a serious adult moviegoer to complain about, but an odd way to run a railroad.  To go an entire movie season with The Game Plan and The Seeker:  The Dark is Rising as the biggest releases targeted at the audience that does most of the ticket buying strikes me as poor planning.  No wonder few of the fall's titles (and there were some great ones, like the aforementioned 3:10 to Yuma and In the Valley of Elah) found an audience.  Only Game Plan ($58 million) and 3:10 ($51 million) have amassed the 50 million dollars most blockbusters claim in a single weekend, while this same period last fall produced three movies that passed $70 million, led by The Departed's 132.  There's simply too much product targeted at an audience that's always difficult to reach (former Sony head John Calley once said that the audiences for this sort of fare “need to be dynamited out of their homes”).  It's also put the studios in direct competition with the art house fare (like Across the Universe and Eastern Promises) that starts to rev up its' Oscar season around this time.  Where were the heavy-lifting dramas as Summer counter-programming?  And couldn't anybody find an animated movie (even a crappy one) to release this fall? 

My ability to go to the movies relies on studios bringing in enough dollars to keep the theaters open.  Let's pick up the pace, guys.

10/5/07

More changes on the site to report:  to make the Blog Archive easier to navigate, I've decided to change the monthly archive pages to bi-monthly, allowing you to read twice as many back entries on each page.

I've also added a new page called Revivals to collect my thoughts each time I get a chance to see a movie that's not a current release on the big screen.  I caught Poltergeist at one of those CineMedia Fathom national revival showings to promote an upcoming 25th Anniversary DVD release.  I'd considered doing stories about older movies in the past, but watching a movie on DVD or TV is so different from seeing it in the theater.  You can get yourself as nice a TV as you want, but a movie is never the same when you're surrounded by the distractions of your daily life (yeah, the theater offers its' own distractions at times, but they're part of the movie experience).  But on those occassions where I do get to see an older movie in a theater, I'd like to pass along my thoughts on how it's held up over time, and I'll do that on this new page.  I've also decided to mix those reviews in with the ones on my A-Z archive pages to keep everything as cross-referenced as possible.

I also added new reviews of The Kingdom and In the Valley of Elah that were REALLY hard to write.  I have to say that I don't relish the thought of spending large portions of the fall writing reviews of movies about the War in Iraq simply because I don't want this to become a political site, but it's hard to express sincere feelings about such movies without getting all liberal on you.  So I ask your patience in that regard:  anybody who believes you can really have an apolitical reaction to a political movie is fooling themself.

9/6/07

Yes, the Summer Movie Season is gone.  Now come two interrelated questions:  1)What are the most interesting movies due during the Fall Movie Season, and 2)What IS the Fall Movie Season.  Let me answer 2) first:  in my anal mind, a month can only fall during a single movie season.  So Entertainment Weekly can preview the movies of November and December now as part of the Fall Movie Preview and then do it again at the end of October as part of their Holiday Movie Preview if they want, but I will never consider a movie released after Halloween part of the Fall season. 

There.  I said it.

Now, down to business.  Your results will vary, but these are the half-dozen titles that quicken my pulse as I look to the next two months:

3:10 to Yuma (Sept. 7):  Russell Crowe vs. Christian Bale sounds good enough for me.  Add a spiffy Western concept (lifted, of course, from the 1957 original) and a kick-ass trailer, and I'm ready to rumble.  A great thing about action-Westerns:  they're so hard to get made anymore that when one makes it all the way to theaters, it's usually because it's got the goods (not so much for artsy revisio-westerns, which is why I'll likely skip The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford on Sept. 21).

Shoot 'Em Up (Sept. 7):  Again, have you seen that trailer?  Granted, the level of cool it suggests is a lot easier to pull off in 2 minutes than 90, but Clive Owen vs. Paul Giamatti is another matchup I can't wait to see.  Mid-air shootouts don't hurt either.

The Brave One (Sept. 14):  Big Jodie Foster guy that I am, I'd be looking forward to this even if I hadn't been so jazzed by the similar Death Sentence.  Of course, being second in the movie business can be trouble in the best of times, but watching one of Hollywood's most intense and intelligence actresses unleash her inner maniac should be something to behold.

Dragon Wars (Sept. 14):  I say this all the time on this site, but You Know Who You Are, and I know that when the most expensive movie Korea's ever produced unleashes an army of monsters on modern-day LA, I'm gonna be there.  Unless, of course, it doesn't play within 100 miles of my house (come on, Freestyle Releasing!).

Michael Clayton (Oct. 5):  There are, as near as I can tell, three George Clooneys.  The check-cashing celebrity (see Ocean's anything and any post-Out of Sight starring role in a Steven Soderberg movie), the maniacal comedian who works with the Cohen Brothers (his O Brother, Where Art Thou performance is one of the most risk-takingly insane a Leading Man's ever dared to give), and the dramatic actor who actually comes to play.  It seems like Clooney #3 is on hand for the directorial debut of one of my favorite screenwriters, Tony Gilroy.  Plus, I'm a big fan of Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton and both are lend support to this slick-looking legal thriller.

30 Days of Night (Oct. 19):  It's the Mother of All High-Concepts!  Vampires strike an Alaskan town where the sun won't rise for a month, while director David Slade promises to put the teeth back in the Vampire genre.  And, again, have you seen that trailer?!?

Plenty of other potential in the coming months, but those are my favorites.  Since four of the six come in the next two weeks, we'll find out soon if my Fall instincts are any better than my Summer ones.

8/26/07

As time goes by, the presence of the many commercials and promotional documentaries that now precede movies in the theater has gone from outrage to nuisance to white noise, at least for me.  At least in most cases.  Probably the single biggest disadvantage to going to the movies a lot is that I see this “pre-show” filler over and over, and some of the more irritating examples start to feel like bamboo under my nails.  Some ads are a pain (the Sprite “sublimeinal advertising” campaign probably holds the record), but there's nothing as unwatchably painful as a bad “Coca-Cola Refreshing Filmmaker Award” ad.  Sometimes these little shorts can be fun (I loved the one where the guy who camped out months ahead of time to get tickets for a blockbuster found himself trapped in his tent when they finally went on sale), but I just hate the current film, with the guy who seems to gain magic powers from caffeine.  Irritating special effects, an irritating lead performance... the thing just irritates me.  It doesn't even have anything to do with movies, content instead to serve as a particularly unrefreshing Coke commercial.  Incidentally, just what is the criteria by which the Refreshing Filmmaker Awards are selected, anyway?  Are film schools really chock full of young directors making Coke ads and dreaming of getting to annoy the hell out of a national audience with them?  Horrifyingly, there is an Official Website that answers some of these questions, although it only attributes the final decision to a “Red Ribbon Panel of Judges”.  Whether this is superior or inferior to a “Blue Ribbon” panel, I have no idea, but I suspect it includes the same people who picked those On the Lot directors...

But as much as the RFA bugs the hell out of me, it's still just trying to sell soda.  The current Regal Cinemas “Please silence your cell phones” ad wants to Change the World.  It tells the strange story of a vaguely saintly Hispanic woman drawn to a crowd being addressed by entirely saintly Academy Award Winner Forrest Whitaker while another man translates his speech into Spanish.  What's he saying?  Well, apparently we all have the power to change the world if only we'd stop and listen to the voice inside us.  The woman's cell phone rings, ruining everyone's chance to listen to their Inner Voice and preventing all manner of positive change.  So, she rudely ignores whoever was calling her (“What's that, Ma?  A heart attack, you say?  Sorry, I've got an Inner Voice to listen to.”), sets the phone to mute and joins in a moment of silent self-discovery.  Which is kinda odd because we're being told to silence OUR cell phones so the person next to us will not be distracted from two hours of relentless noise they're hoping will prevent them from having to listen to their Inner Voice (it'd probably just nag them about how much money they spent on their soda and popcorn anyway).  Every time I see this ad, my Inner Voice tells me that doing a really good job playing Idi Amin is a really bad criteria for Sainthood.  And then I resolve that the next time I'm sitting at a movie next to Forrest Whitaker (or any past winner of the Refreshing Filmmaker Award), I'm not only leaving my cell phone on, I'm turning up the volume.

8/21/07

I love going through the Latest Visitors stats I get from Crosswinds, which hosts this site:  one of the coolest parts is looking at the Google search terms that brought people here.  Although this site is really just about movies and my opinions of them, I get a lot of Googlers looking for the facts behind those movies, to the point where I sometimes wonder if I shouldn't update my reviews with little FAQ factoids at the bottom.  For the last couple months, America's biggest concern seems to involve Live Free or Die Hard, and the question of whether there's any such thing as a hacking “fire sale” like the one depicted in the movie.  I did a little research of my own, and the answer seems to be a resounding “NO!” with a few chuckles of bemusement along with it.  So we can all rest a little easier, since if any real human needed to do what Bruce Willis does in that movie in order to save our precious public utilities, we'd all be in a lot of trouble.

All this gets me thinking about the most FAQs of the searchers who land in my humble pages.  Here are a few other things that, if you're here, you might be curious about.

-No, I can't really “explain” the ending of Premonition.  I do, however, break down why it makes no sense exhaustively.  Hope that's good enough.

-There's no such person as Nicolas Garrigan, the irritatingly unlikable “hero” of The Last Kind of Scotland.  The Garrigan character is a composite in the truest sense, I've been able to find real-life information about virtually everything that happens to him in the movie, but each incident happened to a different person and in less dramatic fashion.  Hopefully some of those people were less insufferable.

-As far as my research has been able to determine, there hasn't been any public reaction to The Queen by any member of the House of Windsor.  It's funny to read UK newspaper and magazine articles on the subject and see the gaping holes where a US publication would go looking for reaction.  But I suppose if the Royals weren't somehow inherently “above” dealing with or reacting to their public, the movie wouldn't be about much of anything.

-If you're looking for the lyrics to songs from the movie Music and Lyrics, you can find them here.

-Sorry, I'm not going to go looking for nude pictures of any cast member of Reno 911:  Miami.  I'm not really sure why you're doing it, either...

7/19/07

Second viewings are about 3 things: 
-seeing a movie for what it is rather than what you'd hoped it would be
-watching for details (visual or storytelling) you missed the first time around
-the internal consistency check:  does this story hold water when you know where it's going.  For that matter, does it get better when you know where it's going?

My second viewing of Transformers earlier this week passed all three counts with flying colors.  I did, in fact, enjoy Michael Bay's game of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots a lot more the second time around for all three reasons.

-Transformers is, as I've mentioned in my original review, quite broad.  Broader, really, than any action movie should be.  But once the shock of that wares off, a second viewing shows that it's no Godzilla:  Bernie Mac's one scene is kinda nasty, and the endless, horrible scene where the Autobots try to “hide” outside Sam's house while his parents skulk around was even worse once I'd already seen it (OK, I liked the moment when the parents are overjoyed to see that their loser son is hiding a beautiful girl in his room, but that's a long way to go for a mild laugh).  In fact, I got up and went to the restroom during that sequence, came back and it still seemed to drone on for another ten minutes.  Yikes!  But on the plus side, John Turturo and Anthony Anderson seemed much more consistently in character than they'd seemed the first time around, even if Agent Simmons' underwear embarrass the filmmakers at least as much as they do him.

Another 2nd viewing advantage was being able to be patient with the movie's pace.  The first 90 minutes seemed awfully draggy to me the first time around, but I think a lot of that had to do with anxiety that Bay was never going to get around to delivering the goods.  Knowing that the climax is as goods-packed as can be, I was able to sit back and enjoy the deliberate build-up.

-There's so much visual business going on with the Autobots and Decepticons that one could just hit freeze-frame on the big screen and look them over all day.  I'm sure I'll be noticing new details on their amazing frames the 20th time I see the movie.

As a newcomer to the Transformers universe, it was also nice to have been able to touch base in the media with all the different in-jokes and reference to Transformers lore the movie contains and then notice them in their proper places.

-Another 2nd viewing benefit for a Transformers newbie such as myself was another chance to take stock of all the different Autobots and Decepticons in play, and to better understand the logistics of the climactic Royal Rumble.  In terms of motivation and strategy, it holds together very well, with the one exception that the Decepticons seem to give up a few good shots at Sam to turn and fight Autobot pursuers.  But I guess they're all really pissed at each other.

Anyway, to summarize, I had an even better time soaking up Transformers' pleasures in a nearly empty mid-week screening than I did in a packed house on its' opening night.  And I can't wait for the Autobots to roll out in the inevitable sequel in a couple years.

6/21/07

Last night's AFI 100 Years... 100 Movies 10th Anniversary Edition made for surprisingly entertaining television, moving like lightning through a truckload of great clips and old stories (yeah, we've heard a lot of them before, but once you've made Jaws, you've earned the right to be a bit of a bore about the defective mechanical shark).  It tickled me to hear Harrison Ford say that he doesn't “like to be around people who don't have a sense of humor”, and made me wonder how he'd click with Dustin Hoffman, who could barely talk about Tootsie (“It was never a comedy to me!”) through the tears (seriously, all you need to know about the insane level of emotional commitment that makes Hoffman one of the best ever is in that anecdote).

As for the list itself, it's really hard to argue with the picks too much because you're talking about funneling the taste of millions through millions of potential titles.  Obviously, the list still represents the tastes of an older school of film criticism than my own.  But it's a fairly good representation of the consensus of everyone who cares about this sort of thing, and while it may have dug in its' heels on some subjects (we'll get to the silent movies in a minute), it's fun to watch it grow up in others, like substituting In the Heat of the Night for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and acknowledging that The Jazz Singer's Historic First status is not the same as being an All-Time Great.

In case you missed it, the top 10 were:

1.Citizen Kane (same position as the 1998 list)
2.The Godfather (up from #3)
3.Casablanca (down from #2)
4.Raging Bull (up from #24)
5.Singin' in the Rain (up from #10)
6.Gone with the Wind (down from #4)
7.Lawrence of Arabia (down from #5)
8.Schindler's List (up from #9)
9.Vertigo (up from #61)
10.The Wizard of Oz (down from #6)

Dropping out of the Top 10 were The Graduate (#17, down from #7) and On the Waterfront (#19, down from #8).

Overall, while the top 10 was consistent, turnover was a theme of the evening.  Almost a quarter (23 to be exact) of the titles were new, but not necessarily the way you'd expect.  Only a trio of movies (#89 The Sixth Sense, #83 Titanic, and #50 Lord of the Rings:  The Fellowship of the Ring) were from the years since the prior list, and in fact the new edition showed a greater fondness for Really Old Stuff like silent movies (only three made the '98 list, while 5 turned the trick this time, led by City Lights shooting from #76 to #11, and the two highest debuts:  The General at #18 and Intolerance at #49) and the Marx Bros. (A Night at the Opera debuted at #85, bumping 1998 #85 Duck Soup up to #60).  Intolerance presented voters with a less controversial way to honor the talents of D.W. Griffith than the infamous Birth of a Nation and it (#45 on the 1998 list) was the highest-ranking movie to drop off altogether.  The movies of the 50's took a big hit, with From Here to Eternity (#52 in '98) being the 2nd highest ranked movie to disappear, and both James Dean flicks (#59 Rebel Without a Cause and #82 Giant) getting shown the door.

Once again, the AFI and myself split on the cream of the crop.  Checking out my 10 Greatest American Movies list (see below in my previous blog entry), my top two flicks (Schindler's List and Citizen Kane) both cracked the Top 10, #5 Dr. Strangelove dropped 13 spots to #39, and #6 Star Wars rose two places to #13.  Otherwise, the voters again resisted The Matrix, Planet of the Apes, Airplane!, Field of Dreams, The Adventures of Robin Hood and Die Hard.  I'm curious to see what the list looks like, say, 30 years from now when people who grew up with the same movies I did will represent the majority of voters.

As for my predictions, I picked 5 movies to rise and 5 to fall and was pretty pleased with my prognosticating skills.  To rise, I picked Raging Bull (up 20 spots to #4, cha-ching!), To Kill a Mockingbird (up 9 to #25, score!), The Silence of the Lambs (probably the victim of the bad taste of its' sequels and prequels, it dropped 9 spots to #74, doh!), Pulp Fiction (up just a single notch to #94, that'll do) and The Searchers (the leading “hey, I thought YOU'D vote for that!” movie of the previous poll, it shot up a whopping 84 places to #12, WINNER!).  To drop, I tabbed The Graduate (down 10 places to #17), Forrest Gump (down 5 to #76), Birth of a Nation, Amadeus and Dances with Wolves (all gonners!).

Now, can I predict that in 10 years someone will be paying me to make predictions for the third list?  Just a thought...

6/17/07

Ten years ago, the American Film Institute celebrated “The first hundred years of American movies” with their much ballyhooed  “100 Years... 100 Movies” list.  It was the product of voting by more than 1500 filmmakers, performers, executives, historians and critics to determine the 100 greatest American movies.  This coming Wednesday, in a much quieter fashion, AFI will unveil the first of what they hope will be a decannual (that's once every ten years, our collective Word for the Day) update of the list in a national CBS-TV broadcast.

I'm actually pretty jazzed about this. I'm a big list hog and I really love to watch how perceptions change over time.  Plus, now that I've got my own online movie soapbox, it gives me an excuse to chime in on my own thoughts about the Greatest American Movies.  Just for fun, I took the AFI ballot (400 movies from which the voters were allowed to choose:  I checked around, but couldn't find out how many they could vote for, but they were allowed 5 write-ins) and from its' selections picked my own top 10.  As you'll see, I weild a pretty strong bias for both the films and filmmaking styles of my lifetime (which began in 1972), and for the sci-fi genre:

10.Die Hard (1988)-The seminal modern action movie.  Lone Righteous Man John McClane (Bruce Willis) prowls the uncompleted upper floors of a downtown office tower battling a quasi-terrorist (Alan Rickman) who hides naked greed behind phony radicalism and his small army of goons who hold McClane's wife (Bonnie Bedelia) and her co-workers in the pristine, holiday-decorated floors below.  It's ironic to watch today and see how the huge, “relentless” action pace it established actually seems kinda leisurely today, but that's because it pulses with real character with real humanity in a way most of today's blockbusters can't stop long enough to imagine.
9.The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)-The Father of Movie Escapism:  Errol Flynn's Sir Robin of Locksley rallies the men of Sherwood Forrest to battle the foppishly diabolical Prince John (Claude Rains) and his henchmen while awaiting the return of King Richard the Lion-Heart (Ian Hunter).  Perhaps the most high-spirited adventure movie ever filmed, the ultimate fantasy of righteous Nobility, and a Technicolor marvel of costume design the likes of which we'll probably never see again.
8.Field of Dreams (1989)-A unique fantasy Masterpiece.  Farmer Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) heeds the words of a mysterious voice that asks him to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield.  Baseball might not inspire the same unquestioning mythic love as it did prior to the 1994 strike, but there's no disputing the power of this most casually magical of all movie fantasies or its' endlessly ripped-off final shot.
7.Airplane! (1980)-Surely I can't be serious to consider the Mother of All Film Parodies one of the greatest American films!  Well, I am serious, and stop calling me Shirley.  In the 25-plus intervening years in which the work of Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker and David Zucker has been copied and rehashed beyond all recognition (yes, Epic Movie, I'm talking about you), it's easy to forget what a pure, joyous act of movie mania it was for these guys to make an airborne disaster movie so utterly ridiculous in every way except that every one of its' characters treats it as a matter of life and death.  Almost certainly the funniest movie ever made, and also one of the most brilliantly deconstructive. 
6.Star Wars (1977)-The ultimate act of cinematic escapism, George Lucas's tribute to the serials and samurai epics of his youth is kind of like a fever dream at a toy store:  picking up several chapters into a serial we've never seen (at least until his prequel trilogy spoiled the joke), depositing us into a universe of bizarre creatures unlike any seen before to tell a story of heroism and destiny that's the template for just about every sci-fi/fantasy blockbuster to follow.  No sci-fi epic can top its' mixture of innocence and slickness.
5.Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)-Stanley Kubrick's Masterpiece is the last word on both the folly and the horror of our nuclear age.  Peter Sellers gives the best multiple-roles performance ever as a heroic Captain trying to prevent a nuclear Holocaust, the clueless President trying to make sense of it, and the mad German scientist who knows everything there is to know about the end of the world.  Hilarious, terrifying and brilliant, sometimes all at once.
4.Planet of the Apes (1968)-Those damn, dirty apes allowed not only Charlton Heston to turn in the greatest Action Hero Star Turn ever, but Rod Serling to craft his most enduring sci-fi metaphor for the human condition, one that resonates just as perfectly today as when it was originally filmed.  A time-tripping astronaut (Heston), lands on an alien planet “where apes evolved from men”.  But nothing is as it seems...  Endlessly quotable dialog, the best creature makeup ever, and don't get me started on that final shot.
3.The Matrix (1999)-Yes, it revolutionized the modern action movie with bullet-time photography, and packs more relentless action thrills into two plus hours than just about any movie ever.  But the best, and most underappreciated part of The Wachowski Bros. Masterpiece is the way its' story of a cubicle drone hacker (Keanu Reeves) with a secret destiny to battle the Machines that control his life is the ultimate metaphor for generations of modern workers stuffed into tiny irrelevant boxes while unseen forces hold their potential in check.
2.Citizen Kane (1941)-What can I say about Orson Welles' un-biography of William Randolph Hurst that hasn't already been said?  One of the few true quantum leaps in narrative film, it can fairly be called the first modern movie, with its' hissable yet tragic protagonist, puzzle box structure and twist ending.  And unlike so many classics that ask us to place ourselves in the shoes of the craftspeople and audiences of their time, Kane demands not one bit of compensation to captivate sixty-five years after it was made.
1.Schindler's List (1993)-A work of pure, unbridled humanity that almost stands apart from all other films in its' ability to move and inspire.  The true story of Nazi Oskar Schindler's secret plan to buy freedom for Jewish workers during WWII was filmed by Steven Spielberg with all the skills and tricks he learned making great popular entertainments like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws and E.T., and the combination is devastatingly powerful.  All-time great performances by Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley and Ralph Finnes help set us up for a final shot unlike any other.  Wow.

...but that's just me.  Only 4 of these 10 (The Matrix was made after the list was created) made the cut 10 years ago.  Since we've never done this before, it's hard to say exactly how faithful the new list will be to its' predecessor, but I did put a little thought into movies from last time's list whose stock seems to have risen or fallen in the intervening ten years.

Picks to Rise
#24 Raging Bull
#34 To Kill a Mockingbird
#65 The Silence of the Lambs
#95 Pulp Fiction
#96 The Searchers

Picks to Fall
#7 The Graduate
#44 The Birth of a Nation
#53 Amadeus
#71 Forrest Gump
#75 Dances With Wolves

Just hunches.  I suspect that the crème de la crème at the top will be mostly unchanged.  For the record, these were the Top 10 ten years ago:

1.Citizen Kane
2.Casablanca
3.The Godfather
4.Gone With the Wind
5.Lawrence of Arabia
6.The Wizard of Oz
7.The Graduate
8.On the Waterfront
9.Schindler's List
10.Singin' in the Rain

I will, of course, be blogging the hell out of my reaction once the list is announced.  Good to mix a little Classic Talk in with the Summer Movie Season!

5/31/07

A little housekeeping as I conclude my 5th month online, with another record number of page views (thanks everybody!).

-I've added two new archive pages; the Blog Archive, with little month-by-month summaries of what I talked about and links to those pages and the Alphabetical List of Reviews, a simple page of titles and star ratings for those looking for something more complete and less detailed than the A-Z Archive pages, with their tiny little movie posters and opening paragraphs of the reviews.

-To make both of these features and the Feature Article Archive page that already existed easier to find, I've created a new navigation box and put it at the bottom of every page of the site (NOT an easy thing to do).  Now, you can access the home page, all 26 letter-by-letter archive pages and those 3 master archive pages from anywhere on the site.

-And yes, I know one of these days, I'll need a search engine...

5/25/07

On the thirtieth anniversary of its' release, some Star Wars memories:

-1977:  At the age of 5, George Lucas's Masterpiece became the second movie I remember seeing in a theater (following the awe and majesty of Dino De Laurentiis's King Kong).  I honestly couldn't tell you the date, or even the month, but it was at the now-defunct Tremont Theater in, yes, Tremont, PA, a second-run house that was still able to pack 'em in at that time.  How much I actually remember seeing the movie at that time is hard to say.  I have clear flashes of my emotions at the sight of those nasty Sandpeople (scary!) and the exciting climax (Wait!  Darth Vader is getting away!  Somebody go stop him!).  But more than what the movie meant to mini-me, I certainly remember wallowing decadently in a seemingly bottomless pool of hype.  I remember the Topps card set, with its' wonderfully cheesy blue starfield backdrop, and the action figures, those amazing little 3 ¾ inch doppelgangers Kenner cranked out by the dozens.  Retractable light sabers hidden up the characters' arms?  Little pieces of plastic with two armholes wrapped around the characters' backs as cloaks?  Genius!  And "characters" like Hammerhead, Walrusman, and Snaggletooth became, in their own kiddie-mongering way, as important as Luke, Han, and Leia.  Like so many of my generation, a lifelong obsession with extending my love of the movies into unbridled consumerism was born.

-1994:  By my 22nd birthday, the uber-franchise of my youth had been driven underground, deemed quaint and uncool by the press and rarely mentioned in polite cinematic conversation (think Titanic today).  But the love of all things Star Wars continued to simmer under the surface.  The USA Network had started running it and its' sequels in all-day marathons of “The vision that attests to the power of three” to packed TV lounges at Penn State, where I was at the time.  And some campus group or other (the details escape me) managed to rent State College's now-defunct State Theater for three consecutive  Wednesdays for charity showings of the trilogy. Star Wars made a great birthday present, and the Nittany Lion faithful turned out in force.  I remember the spectacle of waiting in line for 45 minutes for ticket sales to begin as people piled up behind me around the block.  And yes, many were in costume (these were pretty much the only movies I've ever seen with people dressed up, not really a Central PA thing).  By then, Star Wars had so reshaped the industry that people took it for granted, but it was amazing to see it on the big screen with adult eyes and feel its' influence echoing in the summer movie spectacles that had become commonplace.  And it was still a pretty damn cool space opera to boot.

-1997:  The rest of the world realized what I already knew based on those three nights three years earlier:  there was still a LOT of interest in Star Wars.  When George Lucas cagily chose a dead late-January/early Feburary weekend to unleash Star Wars:  The Special Edition, it shocked the world with a 32 million dollar weekend.  On February 1, I arrived at Harrisburg's (still open) AMC Colonial Commons 9 in the morning to find that all the day's shows were already sold out.  So, it was off to the now-defunct Carmike Cinemas 2 in Pottsville's Fairlane Village Mall for a look.  The result?  A movie that still holds up amazingly well, a few good new establishing shots, a totally pointless sequence where Han has the same conversation he just had with Greedo with Jabba the Hutt and, well, Greedo shooting first.  But we're celebrating today, so I won't get into it.  On March 8, I finally did get to Colonial Commons for one last look at the movie that started it all (and my only one at a theater that's still open, what's up with that???).  No Special Edition costume sightings.  Not really a Central PA thing.

Add about fifty more viewings on cable, VHS, and DVD, and that's my Star Wars story.  I hope you've taken a moment on this Pearl Anniversary (yes, I had to look that up) to reflect on yours.

Happy Birthday, Hammerhead!

5/17/07

A few “Is it just me?” observations:

-Twice within the last three weeks, I've seemed to be the only American impressed by a Lionsgate release that hid deceptively smart content beneath a “moron movie” exterior.  Last week, it was Delta Farce, the wonderfully silly Redneck comedy that'll have to pass for commentary on the war in Iraq until bigger Hollywood names find the guts to take on the subject.  Two weeks earlier, it was the truly excellent action flick The Condemned, a WWE production about the perils of using the suffering of real people as TV entertainment.  I get that when your movie stars Larry the Cable Guy or Steve Austin, you're going to lose a lot of people at “my movie stars Larry the Cable Guy or Steve Austin”.  But I'm pretty amazed to see the virtual absence of critical support and the box office crash-and-burn of both movies.  I know this is a dangerous question to ask on a film criticism site, but sometimes I do wonder “Is everybody else crazy or do I just have no taste?” 

-While Americans line up around the block to partake in the mediocre pleasures of Spider-Man 3, I can't remember a time when I've found the rest of the screens at multiplexes in my area so empty.  Within the last month, I've been the only person at showings of In the Land of Women and The Invisible, and it was just me and the friend I went with (if you're reading this, Hi, Maria!) at Blades of Glory.  I've been going to the movies regularly since 1990, and prior to this past winter, I'd only been at two movies by myself and one with just me and my sister (if you're reading this, Hi, Tammy!) in my entire life.  It has seemed to be an exceptionally bad year to be a non-blockbuster.  But with even TV ratings at record lows, could it be that America is taking a break from “entertainment” and actually going outside, reading books, or checking out my latest reviews?  Granted, it's more likely they're just trying to get their six hundred bucks out of that new PS3...

-I'm not interested in seeing Shrek the Third.  There.  I said it.  Thought the first one was OK, and both sequels have looked kinda painful.  The whole Shrek phenomenon gives me a scary vision of what sci-fi fanatics like me must look like to non-fans.  I never even knew there were Disney Geeks, but the whole Shrek franchise is built on the notion of audiences full of people crying out: “He-he, he said 'Cinderella'!”  Pathetic.  Nothing like the sophistication of me watching Free Enterprise and saying “He-he, he said 'Khaaaaaaaaan!!!!'”.

5/6/07

Just when I thought I'd ranted and raved enough about how disappointed I was by Spider-Man 3, last night I happened to catch its' predecessor, Spider-Man 2 on cable.  I hadn't seen it in a couple years (I'd really meant to re-watch my DVD copy last week, but didn't get around to it), so while I could easily see how inferior the new sequel is, I didn't realize just how great the gap was in virtually every aspect of the production.

Obviously, there's the performances.  Alfred Molina's Doc Ock is one of the greatest Supervillain performances in movie history, shining both as an evildoer and his sympathetic alter-ego, so some dropoff there was to be expected.  Indeed, the performances by Topher Grace and Thomas Hayden Church are the best ones in the new movie.  But the change in the “regulars” is downright shocking.  Toby Maguire, who fused heroism, doubt and love so perfectly in first two movies, is out to lunch in a role that asks him to be only smug, mean or “good”.  All the dark shading is gone from James Franco's Harry.  Watching him break that mirror and discover his father's legacy is enough to make a fan weep at the missed opportunities.  Now he's not even so much mad as just working Really Hard to keep his voice deep.  And listening to Kirsten Dunst delivery Mary Jane's climactic speech at Pete's apartment, it's amazing how little feeling of any kind she seems to muster this time around.  Almost as amazing as seeing how little writers Sam and Ivan Raimi and SM2 writer Alvin Sargent seem to think it takes to break this wonderful couple up.  I'm working on walling SM3 off in my brain so its' ruinous handling of these characters, and the lack of enthusiasm the cast showed for playing them, doesn't destroy my joy in future viewings of the other two movies.

But there's a lot more to it than just the people.  Take a look around Peter's apartment, Harry's mansion, any of the movie's spaces, and while the walls and furniture are unchanged, they don't even look like the same places.  We call that “cinematography”, folks, and while Bill Pope did the honors on both movies, the lush, cinematic spaces of SM2 have been replaced by bright, TV sitcom-like color schemes for the sequel.  Doubly weird for a movie that's ostensibly “darker” than its' predecessor.  Danny Elfman's trademark skill as the composer cradles every moment of SM2 in mood and thrills.  I only noticed Christopher Young's work on SM3 when it was reverting awkwardly to Elfman's themes.

Sam Raimi's done enough damage to his own legacy both as writer and by directing the actors, but his struggles extend to the handling of the action sequences.  Watch the climactic battle between Spider-Man and Doc Ock, with all its' different layers of danger coming from all sides, the realistic weight and inventive use of all the material being pulled in by Octavius's machine, and the way important character beats between Peter, Mary Jane, and Octavius are playing out throughout the scene.  Then compare (SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!!) with the SM3 finale, that long, overblown, unmotivated tag team match between Venom and Sandman/Godzilla (why on Earth does he look that way?  Because he's pumped full of rage from one brief conversation with a creature he doesn't know about how “The Spider doesn't want to let you help your daughter”?  When he's going to be positively marshmallowy when he speaks to Peter after the fight ends?) and Spider-Man/”New Goblin”.  First, there's the movie's action strategy.  Character #1 punches Character #2 so hard #2 is made to fly really far, possibly through some window or wall.  Then, Character #2 returns the favor, with no real accumulation of damage or injury until someone finally strikes a blow that Really Hurts.  There wasn't one moment in the movie where I felt the need to duck or wince for any of the characters (and I do that at the movies ALL THE TIME) because there's no weight or stakes to any of the fighting.  As for the characters, any real reconciliation between Peter and Harry is ruined by the Butler Ex Machina who alerts Harry to his CSI-like findings about his father's death, making forgiveness unnecessary.  And from there all the talk between Peter and Eddie Brock is for nothing (yeah, I enjoyed the “I like being mad” line, but it's still just posturing).  And what does Harry's death really do other than get The Ugly Guy out of the way? Yes, he sacrifices himself for Peter, but in just the kind of “I get out of this sort of thing every single time the movie doesn't need to kill someone off” scenario that doesn't really suggest he even needed saving.  At least Doc Ock's out-of-control machine demands a sacrifice, and who other than the man who made it happen?  All Harry's really guilty of is the movie's Cardinal Sin of not asking the right people the right questions.  Peter's forgiveness of The Sandman is an interesting moment, probably the only one in the film that's truly well-acted by Maguire, but it's too little, too late.

I told you in my review that I'd still be going on about this movie in ten years.  You know I'm not gonna stop in one day :-)

I've read that the movie shattered all known box office records over the weekend:  I'm always happy to see our embattled movie theater industry get the boost, but I'm curious now to see how all those ticket buyers react.  Am I the only one who found this sequel heart-breakingly sub-standard?  I'll have to work on getting my hype hat on for the Pirates of the Caribbean finale on Memorial Day, but it's gonna be hard to move past this disappointing start to my favorite movie time of year.

4/30/07

A quick check of the calendar informs me that it's April 30, meaning that we're days away from the start of the Summer Movie Season!  It also means that we're days away from the end of that amorphous Winter/Spring Movie Season that covers the cold, inhospitable time from New Year's Day to the 1st of May.  Since these were also the first four months that The Palace was open for business, I thought it was worth a little look back.

Clearly, for moviegoers, those 4 months were all about 300, the quotable Spartan epic that's grossed $206 million to become the first movie released in March to ever top the $200 million mark.  Wild Hogs, the wonderfully entertaining biker comedy, was the only other movie north of $150 million, while Ghost Rider and Blades of Glory (still hoping to get to that one) also cracked the $100 million mark.  Meet the Robinsons ($88 million and counting) will probably join them for a total of five nine-digit blockbusters for the season.

Only fair, since with just a handful of titles left to see (I'm locked in on The Invisible, a couple others remain as possibilities), I came out with five four-star movies for the same period.  I agreed with the moviegoing public on Hogs and the Robinsons, and added Hot Fuzz and flops Zodiac and The Condemned to my list.  If forced to make a choice, I'd have to go with Zodiac or Fuzz as the year's best movie to date, although I don't think I've seen a true lock for my year-end Top 10.  Last year's above-average winter/spring season produced exactly half of my 2006 Top Ten (V for Vendetta, Thank You For Smoking, Inside Man, Akeelah and the Bee and United 93), so the dropoff in quality has been considerable.

My readers must be sadists, because far and away the most popular review on the site to date was also the season's worst movie:  Epic Movie, the barely-professional “comedy” that made me fear a future where just yelling “Pirates of the Caribbean!” and playing some hip-hop music counts as a spoof.  Perhaps the most popular Google search that led people to the site was the many variations on “explain the ending of Premonition”.  Dammit, Jim, I'm an amateur critic, not a miracle worker!  But if you ever do find anyone who can explain it, please send the link my way because I can't wait to hear.  Luckily, I suspect far fewer viewers will shell out dollars for the year's third one-star movie, Next, arriving as it did just a week before the Summer.

Despite 300's success, it was mostly a slow season at the box office, which always worries me as someone committed to the theatrical experience.  But I suspect that the blockbuster-packed Summer season on the way will correct that.  I'm committed to having a Spider-Man 3 review online Friday night, and then we'll be ready to really get down to the business of moviegoing.  Gentlemen, start your engines!

3/29/07

Over the weekend, I was in New York City and had a chance to hit the AMC Empire 25, the Mega-Theater in Times Square, as I try to do once or twice a year.  The theater itself is nothing special:  although it sports some monumentally comfortable padded, reclining seats, the concessions are below-average even by the standards of my area (the vicinity of Harrisburg, PA).  In fact, I'd say I go to several better pure theaters (shout-outs to the Cinema Center of Camp Hill and the R/C Hanover Movies 16) regularly.  But what makes the NYC movie experience special isn't the presentation, it's  the content:  when you're in the Big Apple, you can actually go to see all the movies that national newspapers and magazines like to pretend everyone has a chance to see (I cashed in that chance on the Korean sci-fi/horror/comedy The Host, check out my review).  I understand that prints and advertising are expensive, but the one thing I've never grasped is why we don't have a more functional second-run circuit for non-blockbusters in the multiplex age.  Certainly once the Empire 25 is done with that print, I find it hard to believe that there wouldn't be more money in just one of my area multiplexes devoting just one of those tiny little screens in the back to it for an exclusive area engagement than being just one of a dozen locations within driving distance where I can still see Dead Silence.  Hell, if you only want to have 2 showings a day and give the other two to the evil puppets, shouldn't providing consumers with more choices make economic sense?

I can only complain so much, of course:  scrolling through the archives will show you that I had my shot at most of the awards season's offerings, and I have the good fortune to have two art houses (shout-outs to Annville's Allen and Harrisburg's Midtown Theaters) within driving distance.  But the holidays are one thing, and the rest of the year is something else entirely.  Even with all these options, the Summer is often a hard time for the trickle-down theory of film distribution.  Usually one or two movies are nationally designated as the “art house” releases everyone will get (last year it was Robert Altman's cute swan song A Prairie Home Companion), while everything else that's not a 3,000 screen blockbuster never dares to venture outside a handful of “major cities”.  And I'm not happy about it!  In the era of 500 TV channels and 5 billion (or so) websites, there really should be a better way to get more movie choice to audiences all over the country.  We've long heard digital distribution trumpeted as the answer, but can we really trust that access to prints is the reason more movies aren't more widely available?  I'm always suspicious of corporations asking me to accept a lower quality product (and the experiences I've had with digital projection so far tell me it's just that) that lowers their costs in exchange for benefits that I don't have in writing.  I know that a lot of people would like to just cut to the chase and have independent and foreign films released more quickly (even simultaneously) on DVD, but that's just throwing in the towel.  I feel like every movie is better in a theater, and I hate seeing a really good movie for the first time at home and knowing that I'll never get to see it the way it was intended.

So, what's the answer?  For one thing, if you're not happy with the movie choices you get, do what you can to support your local theaters when they try to push the envelope.  If a chance booking of something odd on Screen 14 doesn't sell any tickets, that's not gonna encourage anyone to do it again.  And if you're lucky enough to have a local theater that's not part of an impersonal chain, make sure management has your wish list.  Even if you are a fan of impersonal chains, it never hurts to speak up.

To summarize:  choice is good.  The Host wasn't bad, either.

3/13/07

There's been a lot written lately about the “disconnect” between audiences and critics relating to the new hit Wild Hogs.  As you can read yourself in the review I just posted, I loved it.  As you can read elsewhere, most paid critics beg to differ.  I noted with interest that most friends I've recommended the movie to have replied that they thought it looked good, but that it's gotten bad reviews.  It's gotten me thinking about the role critics do and should play in our moviegoing.

As you can tell from the sheer volume of films I've reviewed since starting the site back on January 4, I go to the movies A LOT.  As such, I can afford to never let myself get talked out of something that looks good to me by one, two, or two hundred bad reviews.  And I honestly don't know anyone whose taste matches mine closely enough that I'd avoid something I'd planned to see just because they gave it the thumbs-down.  On the other hand, always on the lookout for new titles, my antennae do perk up when I start to hear big buzz about a new movie.  Big reviews for something that wouldn't ordinarily get them will usually send me to flicks that I'm on the fence about, suck as last year's delightfully disgusting Slither.  Other times, the simple act of synopsizing the plot, even in a bad review, will call my attention to a movie that sounds better when described than it looks in a trailer.  Previews for The Santa Clause 2 kept the movie's highlight, the dictatorial Toy Santa doppleganger who takes over the North Pole, hidden.  But anytime I hear about an Evil Santa in a kid's movie, I have to take notice, and I ended up loving it.  Sometimes all critics need to do, be their thoughts good or bad, is to let you know a poorly promoted movie exists.  The “Matrix meets Fahrenheit 411” thriller Equilibrium never played anywhere I could go to see it.  But from the moment I heard it described (in mostly negative reviews), I knew I had to seek it out.  Again, I loved it.

So clearly, for me, critics do have a place in steering me toward movies I might not see if left to trailers and Entertainment Weekly articles alone.  But I think the most satisfying thing I get from reading them is the act of checking out reviews AFTER I've seen the movie (and now, after I've written my own review, lest my own impression be colored by that of others).  It's a lot of fun to “compare notes”, shaking my head in disgust when they “don't get it”, hopefully nodding in agreement when they do, and even getting food for thought from those who saw themes or connections that hadn't occurred to me.  I've really missed Roger Ebert while he's been ill:  while he can be maddeningly pompous at times, he also turns a phrase like nobody else and can put my own thoughts into words a thousand times better than me... when we agree (Ebert and I are the charter members of the Dark City fan club).

What shouldn't critics be?  For one thing, you should never let me or anybody else tell you that a movie IS bad, or good for that matter.  It's all subjective, folks:  a movie doesn't even really exist until your brain processes the flickering frames.  If your own sense of humor, life experience or simple preference responds to what you see, who am I to tell you that it's crap?  We're both right, of course, but only within the confines of our own heads.  Film criticism is, first and foremost, a discussion.  There are no right answers, and anyone who tells you otherwise is just afraid of losing their job.  Learning why others enjoyed movies you didn't can aid in your own cinematic education, someone might even be able to turn you onto a movie by putting it in the proper context or illuminating what's really going on with all that crazy symbolism.  Just don't let some guy tell you your taste sucks because he knows who Andre Bazin is and you don't.

If there's gonna be one guy who loved a movie and one guy who hated it, I wanna be the guy who loved it.  I guess which you'd rather be is a pretty basic personality test, and I suspect most magazines and newspapers generally hire the guy who'd rather hate it.  After all, if given the choice to read about a movie someone either loved or hated, I generally prefer the bad review.  I think most of us do.  But that's something to keep in mind when you wonder why movies you like keep getting trashed by “the critics”.  Another thing:  don't let the press convince you that there's some critical uni-mind out there that determines a film's absolute worth based on whether it has the nice red tomato logo or the nasty green splatted one on Rotten Tomatoes.com. I usually find, when I fall in love with even the most reviled of films, that I can go fishing and find that one critic who really responded to it.  And as long as there's two of us, then nobody can say we're crazy!

So, whether you dare to let me recommend movies to you, wish to compare notes with me about films you've already seen, or just can't read enough movie stuff, I encourage you to use the Palace as you will.  But always keep in mind that YOUR opinion is the one that really matters.  After all, it's not some critic's eight bucks you're gonna lay down at that box office.  And that goes double for the popcorn, the price of which we can all give a firm thumbs-down.

2/26/07

Last night, movie history was written in stone.  Among the movies released in 2006, future generations will revere films we despise or have barely heard of.  Some critical and box office favorites will fail to stand the test of time or hold up to repeat viewing.  Others' greatness will only become clear in light of repeat viewing or in the context of their filmmakers future works.  But the 2007 Academy Award winners will never change.  Five, ten, a hundred years from now, they'll likely make even less sense than they do today, but they will always stand.  And that's what makes them so fascinating, even if I can't imagine how you could have gone through the movie year we just did and come out thinking The Departed was the best film made all year.

But I've already made my feelings on that subject clear.  The show itself was above-average.  You'd have to be hard-hearted indeed not to have been happy for Martin Scorcese, not only finally winning the Oscar that had eluded him all these years, but being presented it by his old friends George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Frances Ford Coppola.  I loved how palpable his fear seemed while the camera lingered on him before his name was read:  indeed, once they'd gone to all that trouble, if he wasn't winning tonight he truly might never!  Speaking of people who likely never will win, perhaps the sweetest moment of the evening was Ennio Morricone's acceptance speech for his Lifetime Achievement Award in Italian while presenter Clint Eastwood helpfully translated.  His 1988 loss for The Untouchables (one of the greatest movie scores ever written) to The Last Emperor still defies belief.  Other highlights:  the hilarious Will Ferrell-Jack Black-John C. Reilly musical number that poked fun at comedians'  need to take on serious roles in hopes of winning awards, the fun performance by the Hollywood Sound Effects Choir, and the way the orchestra coming up on Al Gore's “announcement” nicely poked fun at the Gore lovefest that his starring role in Best Documentary winner An Inconvenient Truth made inevitable.  Worst moments:  the horrors of pointless montages of “International” and “American” films (and what exactly was Will Smith saying when introducing Michael Mann's US montage?), the horrible “Oscar fun facts” that were read off when people were making their way to the stage (“Martin Scorcese calls The Departed the first movie he's ever made with a plot” Ugh!), and every time someone whipped out one of those little folded-up pieces of paper so cynically designed to look like the person had chosen it themselves (tough when they were all identical) to read their pre-written acceptance speeches.  If having Carrie Fisher and company “help” you to write an interesting speech ahead of time was their goal, it failed miserably:  no one read their speech well, making all that “as a child, I saw movies only from the back seat of my parents' car at the drive-in” stuff seem canned no matter how sincere it might have been if people hadn't been reading.  Unlike many fashion watchers, I'm there for the movies, so I'll notice how everyone's dressed but not obsess over it to the point that my observations mean anything.  However, I should point out that Phillip Seymour Hoffman's hair was in serious need of an intervention.

I just don't know what to say about those people who shaped themselves into different movie logos behind a lighted screen.  It was pointless, it was silly, and it was amazing.

Ellen DeGeneres was a fantastic host, her self-deprecating style a perfect contrast to the inherently over-blown nature of the ceremony.  She kept the sucking-up to the nominees to a minimum and also didn't take cheap pot shots at them.  Moments when she snuck up to Scorsese to pass him a screenplay and Eastwood to have her picture taken nicely captured the notion of the evening as a celebration for movie fans, and I loved her Carson-like skill bouncing back from a bad joke (“I'd hate to have to follow that up!”).  I don't expect this to have been a very highly-rated Oscar telecast given the low profile of the nominated movies, but I hope she doesn't follow in the footsteps of Steve Martin and Jon Stewart, both of whom were not asked back after good hosting jobs due to bad numbers.

I should also point out that I was 8-for-10 on My Predictions, missing only Alan Arkin's genuinely shocking Best Supporting Actor upset, and the Lives of Others Foreign Language Film upset I'd hedged my bets on. Return of the King aside, you always have to worry that Academy members won't give a fantasy film like Pan's Labyrinth a real shot.  That did still surprise me, particularly after Pan upset the heavily favored (and more deserving) Children of Men for Best Cinematography.

At last, after all my hoping, frustration and complaining, the 2007 Oscars are in the books.  It's time to turn our focus 100% to the films of 2007 and leave the Academy to work on that cool-sounding museum until at least September.

2/20/07

I'm on the record as being pretty surly about this year's Awards season.  I know, I know, neither the Oscar voters, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Screen Actors Guild, nor anyone else actually changes the movie year that just went by with their choices.  It's not just that I felt like so many of the great movies I saw last year saw their awards hopes fizzle out in favor of lesser titles, it's that the whole process, even opposed to what we saw just a few years ago, feels wrong.  Here's what bothers me about the way the awards game is played these days:

1.The “Message” Vote-You see it all over society:  don't vote for the best political candidate, vote for the one who “Sends a Message”.  Don't sentence criminals or award civil verdicts based on the actual crimes committed, “Send a Message” to society.  And don't vote for the movie, performance, etc. that you honestly felt was the year's best, cast your vote to rectify a past slight or “say something” about the industry or society at large. These factors had so much to do with last year's win by Crash:  the studio campaigned hard to actors based on the fact that its' huge cast included someone who was a friend of virtually every academy member and that the film had been shot in Los Angeles, thus giving jobs to L.A.-based actors.  The notion that this film (about a city in which everyone's actions are driven by blind, judgmental hatred of their fellow man) was an object of civic pride took such hold that LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa declared a day in its' honor.  Oscar campaigning has always been shameless and irritating, but I just can't stand the notion of asking people to vote against their taste.  “Look at my movie, it's great!” is a whole different matter than “You may not love The Departed, but I know there's a Martin Scorsese movie you do love, pretend you're voting for that!”  And don't get me started on bowing down to Babel's multiculturalism as a substitute for quality.

2.The Pack Mentality-A couple dozen bodies present awards during the “awards season” but for the purposes of this discussion, let's consider the National Board of Review, the New York and Los Angeles Film Critics Circles, the National Society of Film Critics and the Golden Globes to be the 5 major pre-Oscar awards for actors and actresses because they date back several decades.  In 1977, these bodies named the following people Best Actor:  John Travolta, Art Carney, Richard Dreyfuss, John Gielgud and Richard Burton.  In 1987, it was Michael Douglas, Jack Nicholson, Steve Martin,  and Robin Williams.  1997's winners were down to Nicholson, Peter Fonda and Robert Duvall.  And this year, only Forest Whitaker and Sasha Baron Cohen have picked up hardware, with Whitaker actually being honored by all five bodies and Cohen slipping into a tie among the Los Angeles critics and picking up the Comedy Golden Globe.  On the Actress side, among all the different bodies tracked by the Internet Movie Database (23 in total), a whopping ONE (the Austin critics, who opted for the otherwise ignored Ellen Page in Hard Candy) has selected anyone other than Helen Mirren in The Queen.  I loved both Whitaker and Mirren, don't get me wrong.  But can anyone honestly say they're so great that no reasonable group of movie buffs, starting from scratch, could select anyone else?  Or is it that what everyone's trying to do now is not to tell you who they think was the best, but who they think is going to win the Oscar?  Do people fear sounding wrong if they don't select the person everyone else has selected?  Food for thought.

3.Forced Misapplication of Categories-No, I never agreed that Anthony Hopkins was a Lead Actor in Silence of the Lambs.  Most people, including the Academy, disagreed.  But the National Board of Review and the Boston Film Critics agreed with me.  And there was no other actor who clearly outranked him in the Silence ensemble.  This year, the only possible argument that Whitaker is the Last King of Scotland's lead actor is the fact that he's top-billed.  The story is 100% from the point of view of James McAvoy's character, who's also in every scene.  Yet not only has everyone marched in lock-step in awarding his performance a citation, but EVERYONE gives him Best Actor.  Why?  Because FOX Searchlight told them to, campaigning for him as an Actor rather than a Supporting Actor.  I liked Blood Diamond better than The Departed myself, but do you really think Leonardo DiCaprio's Best Actor nomination would be for the former rather than the later had Warner Bros., the studio behind both films, not designated his Departed performance a Supporting one in hopes that he'd land nominations in both categories?

I know, I know, it's all just politics.  But shouldn't some things in society NOT be politics?  Does anyone actually like politics?  Wouldn't we be better off if everybody just told us what their favorite movies and performances were?

OK, the bitching is out of my system, so enjoy my low-snark Oscar Preview.

2/11/07

It's been over a month already, and the Palace has taken off a lot faster than I expected.  My Epic Movie review alone has almost 60 hits since Feb. 1, and I've been excited to see my pages turning up prominently in Google search results.  Welcome to all the new visitors coming from there and the Internet Movie Database.  For that matter, thanks to everybody who's taken the time to check out the site.  I hope this is just the beginning.  In the interest of keeping the site growing, I've made some changes I thought were worthy of comment.

First off, I've created 26 alphabetical archive pages, allowing you to browse all the reviews I've posted even after the movies are no longer in theaters.  You'll find links to those pages on the Index page as well as at the bottom of all reviews.  I've also added my e-mail address to every page, feel free to let me know what you think of the site.  All that work led to a bit of a backlog on new reviews, but now I'm back with Oscar contenders Notes on a Scandal, Pan's Labyrinth and Volver.  After I get to The Last King of Scotland in a few days, I'll be ready to put together my Oscar preview.

1/29/07

I'm often confused about the amount of venom that gets directed at the self-congratulatory nature of the Hollywood awards season.  Yes, these are mostly about people giving each other, and in some cases themselves, awards, but the same can be said of every industry and a fair number of workplaces.  The difference in this one is that we actually want to watch them do it.  If you don't, it's easy enough to look away.  Or use the remote control to fast-forward to the winners, as I did with last night's Screen Actor's Guild Awards.

I don't know what it is about the SAG awards that makes them the most painful awards show to watch... no, wait, I do.  It's that unlike the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes (and honestly, you've got to get into pretty high numbers on your cable dial if you plan to actually watch another movie awards show), the SAG ceremony is completely inbred.  No one can win who didn't vote, and almost no one who didn't vote is in attendance.  No need to kiss up to some unknown “Academy” or “Association”, the only people you need to kiss up to at the SAGs are... “US”.  And God, do they ever.

I'm glad these folks love being actors, really I am.  I'd love to be doing something for a living that I got real fulfillment out of myself.  But what I wish you'd see more of from this mutual admiration society is what we got from Greg Kinnear's “Only one of these women has played hopscotch with me...” intro to the Best Female Actor in a Supporting Role award:  a sense of camaraderie and fun.  Instead, we get that same weird, solemn, “If I act too casual, God will take my career away” vibe that infects everything from the speeches (who knew Hugh Laurie could even be that respectful...) to the decision to call actresses “Female Actors”.

Thus, the Fast-Forwarding.

As for the awards themselves, they continue to suggest we could have called the whole second half of this season off except for one show where Forrest Whittaker, Helen Mirren, Jennifer Hudson and Eddie Murphy get their trophies.  And before one puts too much stock into the notion that the Best Ensemble Acting prize for Little Miss Sunshine means they're now the Best Picture favorite after winning the Producers' Guild Award a couple weeks ago, remember that this same Ensemble acting award has gone to the likes of Sling Blade and The Birdcage in the past.  In fact, that very tendency to come out of left field, the one that had them giving Best Actor to Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, for instance, was sadly missing last night.

Back to the Little Miss Sunshine issue for a moment, as the most wide-open Best Picture race in years is our sole respite from all this rubber-stamping.  I feel like what we have here is another Babe or Moulin Rouge!, a movie desperately championed by a faction of the Hollywood community but lacking wide-enough support to take home the Gold.  Granted, there's a first time for everything (certainly no movie like Crash had ever won Best Picture before last year), but this sort of heartwarming indie comedy has “Runner-Up” written all over it.  Even Annie Hall would have a hard time capturing Best Picture today.  However, I do feel like it's got the best Best Picture shot of the three nominees I genuinely enjoyed (Letters From Iwo Jima and The Queen being the other two), so I'm not rooting against it.

Not much ground left to cover between here and Oscar night.  Only the Director's Guild and, to a lesser extent, the Writer's Guild of America, remain to inform our best guesses of what's coming on February 25th.  Remember, Awards Season, it's not too late to show us a pulse.

1/25/07

I'd planned an epic feature article on the Oscar nominations, but after a couple stabs at it, I've concluded I'm both too angry and too bored by them for a detailed breakdown.  I promise something more substantial when it's prediction time:  not only does actually picking winners provide a juicier hook than “These Academy voters are idiots!” but I'll have also seen more of the movies by then.

For now, I can only express disappointment that so many movies I was teased by Critics' Circle and Guild notices for ended up on the outside looking in.  How on Earth can the Academy conclude that the largely improvised Borat is more worthy of a screenplay nomination than Thank You For Smoking?  And for that matter, how does basing a movie “upon a character” make Borat an Adapted Screenplay while Letters From Iwo Jima, whose credits clearly state it is “Based Upon the Book Picture Letters From Commander in Chief by Tadamichi Kuribayashi and Tsuyoko Yoshido” is an Original?  What happened to last year's best movie, Stranger Than Fiction?  And how did United 93 end up having to settle for a Directing nomination for Paul Greengrass and Film Editing?

I feel like the Oscars are caught in a transitional period, although what they're transitioning to is hard to say.  Despite (or perhaps because of) the Best Picture victory just three years ago of Lord of the Rings:  The Return of the King, recent rounds of nominees have shown an outright phobia against the blockbuster, despite the Batman and James Bond franchises turning out two of the best reviewed movies of their respective years (in fact, while I may not quite agree with the widespread love it's received, Rotten Tomatoes' calculations showed Casino Royale to be 2006's best reviewed wide release).  Even the splashy, old-school musical Dreamgirls seems to have been a victim of this trend, its' Oscar-leading 8 nomination rendered asterisk-worthy not just because there's no Best Picture, Director or Screenplay nods among them, but because a whopping three are for Original Songs.  Of the 5 nominated films, the only true hit (and the only one with a big budget) was The Departed.  And honestly, I think Martin Scorsese could be nominated for directing a Star Wars sequel from now until the time when he finally wins that elusive Best Director trophy.

But without the big-budget, the Academy has still had a hard time turning its' head in a truly independent direction.  Instead, they've embraced the late-career renaissance of Clint Eastwood (not that I'm knocking it:  Letters From Iwo Jima is the best of the 5 Best Picture nominees, and I loved Mystic River, although Million Dollar Baby, though sensationally acted, was wildly overrated) and the works of his frequent collaborator Paul Haggis (shudder... Crash may be the worst Best Picture of the last 40 years).  They've stuck close to anything proper and British (again, a successful formula this year, with The Queen being the only other truly great movie in the field of 5) and sought out comedies (the entertaining Little Miss Sunshine) with the air of independence that only an all-star cast can bring.  And, of course, following Crash's example, the likely Best Picture is once again a movie (Babel) that employs a multicultural cast to say something Really Important that would feel at home inside a fortune cookie.  While I'm sure most movie buffs can, just as I did, find something to like in this field, it's hard to imagine anyone thinking its' truly a cross-section of last year's finest films.

But enough bitching.  Allow me to give the Academy some measure of credit for getting a few things right.  Three of the five directing nominees (Eastwood, Greengrass and The Queen's Stephen Frears) did outstanding work.  Will Smith's wonderfully controlled work in The Pursuit of Happyness was a nicely outside-the-box selection in the Best Actor field.  Kuddos also to nominations for the outstanding performances of Helen Mirren, Djimon Hounsou, Mark Wahlberg, and Rinko Kikuchi.  The screenplay nods for Children of Men and The Queen were on-target, as were nods for Children's Cinematography and Editing, Curse of the Golden Flower's Costume Design, Poseidon and Superman Returns' Visual Effects, and all three Animated Feature nominees (Cars, Happy Feet and Monster House, though I actually thought The Ant Bully was last year's best animated film).

And, of course, whenever I get too discouraged about the direction of the Oscars, I find it helpful to look back at the nominees and winners from 15 or 20 years ago and see just how few of them remain well regarded or relevant today.  What the Oscars really mean to Joe Moviegoer is that some interesting titles that would otherwise never find their way to a theater near you will finally do so.  As I've mentioned, I highly recommend that you find your way to Letters From Iwo Jima and The Queen, and I myself hope to find time for The Last King of Scotland, Pan's Labyrinth, and Volver before the ceremony.  You'll find the reviews here when I do, along with plenty more Oscar grumbling before the February 25th show.  And Ellen, in the off chance that you're reading this, PLEASE don't make any jokes about how bad you were in Mr. Wrong.  The evening's going to be painful enough. 

1/16/07

The Golden Globes are in the books and we're turning the corner toward the January 23 announcement of the Oscar nominations.  At this point, I have to ask, can anyone remember a duller awards season?  Set aside, for a moment, that I'm kinda down on the favorites (The Departed was the good side of mediocre, Babel the bad side, and I just can't bring myself to sit through Dreamgirls, at least not yet).  At this point, how many people who're not rabid fans of one of those three movies really care who's going to win?  Granted, it's a tough race to handicap, particularly after last year's Crash shocker, but it's about the only one.  Helen Mirren and Forest Whitaker are so carved in stone as Best Actress and Actor, that, perversely, if anyone were to upset one of them, it would seem like a rip-off.  Mirren richly deserves her honor, and I hope to be able to say the same about Whitaker once I finally see The Last King of Scotland, but without anyone to challenge them, there's no joy to hearing their names read again and again.  Last night, the gracious and funny Sasha Baron Cohen didn't even make a good villain:  part of me was counting on him to unleash some horrible Roberto Benigni act so I could root for him to lose come Oscar time.  No such luck.

Many great movies that were in the mix early in the process (Stranger Than Fiction, United 93, even the so far unseen Letters from Iwo Jima intrigues the hell out of me) have lost so much traction they seem unlikely Oscar nominees.  And The Queen, likely the best movie that will get some nominations, doesn't stand much of a shot to win anything but Mirren's Best Actress and MAYBE a screenplay honor for Peter Morgan.  I liked potential nominee Little Miss Sunshine but A) I didn't LOVE it, and B) It has no chance to win.

Elsewhere, Jennifer Hudson seems like a lock for Best Supporting Actress, although the Supporting Actor race is a big more open (I loved Eddie Murphy's humble speech last night, but I'll believe he gets the Oscar when I see it happen).  I've been fooled so many times by an awards season building up to a quasi-Lifetime Achievement Best Director for poor, good-humored Martin Scorsese that I absolutely refuse to believe it this time.  At least there's some suspense there.

So, what to make of the Best Picture race, then?  Babel's Globe win really gives it momentum because it's the kind of movie the Academy usually prefers to the Foreign Press Association.  And, of course, it's so much like last year's Best Picture, Crash (granted, it's not nearly as bad...).  On the other hand, you can never underestimate a movie whose appeal is to Women of a Certain Age, so Dreamgirls can't be discounted.  And The Departed is a nice compromise, a movie everyone is likely to enjoy at least a little.

But does any of this really matter?  I've wrestled a lot the last couple of years with the question of why the Oscars fascinate me so when my favorites so rarely win.  I suppose it has something to do with the notion of History being written in front of your eyes.  As George Clooney put so well in his acceptance speech last year, every winner's obituary is going to start with that win no matter what else they do.  It just seems lately that the Academy has exceeded even its' usual knack for getting things wrong.  Shakespeare in Love?  The English Patient?  American Beauty?  All already forgotten except for the statues.  Million Dollar Baby and Crash are surely just a few steps behind them.  And yet, there I'll be on the 23rd eagerly checking those nominations, and there I'll be again on February 25 staying up way too late to hear the winners. 

And be mad.

1/4/07

Welcome to Lamar's Movie Palace!  Right about now, you must be asking yourself two questions:  who the heck is this guy, and why do I care what he has to say about the movies?  Well, allow me to introduce myself.  I'm Lamar Kukuk, a 34 year-old guy writing from Palmyra, PA (about a 30-minute drive from Harrisburg).  I've been a movie buff all my life, and like many movie buffs I've dabbled at screenwriting (I've been optioned twice, but never produced).  I've always been a big fan of film criticism, even though I don't agree with a lot of what's written, and I've been devouring reviews online for years (my all-time fav is Roger Ebert:  get well soon, Roger!).  For quite some time, I've had this notion kicking around in my head that if all these hundred of folks I see on Rotten Tomatoes could review movies online, so could I.  And in 2007, I've resolved to take the plunge. 

Whether I have any idea what I'm talking about is for you to judge.  My tastes run toward the commercial and the populist, and I LOVE sci-fi, horror and fantasy.  Hard to imagine a better jumping-off point for what I like than to begin with my 2006 10-Best List, which I've posted along with reviews of all the movies currently in wide release that I've seen.  I've also mixed in a couple major players in the ongoing awards season that aren't yet on video:  if they're not playing near you right now, odds are they will be soon.

So, what can you expect to see at Lamar's Movie Palace?  Reviews of all the movies I see (I generally go twice a week) as I see them, rated on a 4-star scale.  You'll read more good reviews than bad, since I'll only be seeing films I actually expect to like.  I'll post my feelings on current movie news and events here on the Blog:  even if I'm still stinging from last year's win by the awful Crash, I remain a big fan of the Oscars.  And I'm toying with the idea of writing features breaking down some of my all-time favorite movies.

I hope you enjoy your time here at the Palace and come back often.  I'm all about stadium seating, a bag of popcorn with an oversized Diet Coke, and seeing movies in the theater as they were meant to be seen.  Let's get started with my reviews of Apocalypto, Casino Royale, Eragon, The Pursuit of Happyness, The Queen, Rocky Balboa and We Are Marshall.  About as many more will follow over the next week or so until I'm caught up and then we can sit back and enjoy the cinematic splendor of 2007.

Happy viewing!