The race for Awards Season film releases has begun to heat up with trailers for American Hustle and The Butler already showing some major front-runners for the major awards at the end of the year.
We now have another trailer release for a film that looks to join in on all the end of the year awards scramble. It’s the latest film from George Clooney (doing a trifect as writer, director and actor) which sports an impressive ensemble cast that includes Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, John Goodman, Bill Murray, Jean Dujardin and Bob Balaban.
The Monuments Men is based on the true story of archivers, museum directors, art restorers turned soldiers tasked with saving the cultural and fine arts treasures stolen by Hitler’s Nazi forces during World War II. As the war begins to turn again the Nazi’s this group of unconventional soldiers must prevent these treasures from being destroyed as part of Hitler’s “scorched earth” policy when it comes to the cultures he has deemed unworthy.
The film itself is adapted from the book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel. There’s a camp out there who doesn’t look at Clooney’s work as anything but OScar-bait whenever they come around every other year, but there’s no denying that the man can direct and act. The question now is whether The Monuments Men will finally give Clooney that final push into getting his first Best Director Oscar.
The Monuments Men is set for a December 18, 2013 release date.
I’ve watched this trailer a few times and I have yet to see either Matthew McConaughey or Zac Efron.
3) Mikey (1992)
However, the Paperboy isn’t the only psychotic child around…
4) Crazy Mama (1975)
I don’t know about you but I was getting disturbed by all those crazy kids. Let’s go back to a more innocent age…
5) Battle Beyond The Sun (1960)
This was a Russian film that Roger Corman brought over to the United States. A young Francis Ford Coppola shot the scenes with the space monsters. I’m not even going to say what the monsters look like…
6) Robot Monster (1953)
Yes, I know we’ve shared this one before but seriously — don’t we all need a Robot Monster in our life?
The second film of Marvel’s Phase 2 for it’s Cinematic Universe comes in the form of Thor: The Dark World. I’m sure the title should give as to which of the Avengers character is front and center for this Phase 2 film.
Above is the official theatrical poster for the film which has a strong fantasy, Drew Struzan feel to it. That’s more than appropriate since Thor bridges the gap between the more grounded superheroics of Midgard’s (that’s Earth to the layman) heroes (Captain America, Black Widow, Hawkeye and Iron Man) and the more fantasy and scifi denizens of Asgard like Thor and the upcoming film, Guardians of the Galaxy.
While this latest trailer released by Marvel is not the footage that was shown to Hall H attendees during Marvel’s panel at this year’s Comic-Con, it still manages to show some new footage in addition to one’s already shown at the initial teaser earlier. For one, it has more Loki (which is smart of Marvel since Loki has become this Cinematic Universe’s resident bad boy everyone seems to love or hate to love.) and it also shows some hints at the darker, grittier look that Alan Taylor looks to bring from his time as director of episodes of Game of Thrones for HBO.
Natalie Portman’s character, Jane Foster still seems to come off as not belonging to this ensemble, but there’s still chance that the finished product will flesh her out and her relationship with Thor to everyone’s satisfaction.
Thor: The Dark World is set for a November 8, 2013 release date.
During my sophomore year of college, I was acquainted with a bearded sociology major who would tell anyone that he met that he was a communist. He also insisted that he was a revolutionary in the tradition of Che Guevara though, for the most part, he never seemed to do much more than hang out in the lobby of Bruce Hall and yell at the top of his lungs. When he wasn’t attacking George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, he was busy quoting Karl Marx and telling people about how communism would fix all of America’s problems. He would also get very upset if you called him a socialist. “No,” he would say, “I’m a communist and I’m proud of it!”
I have to admit that I usually went out of my way to avoid him and I would cringe whenever I would hear him shouting my name and inviting me to come sit down next to him so he could attempt to give me my daily indoctrination while he stared at my breasts. I could never summon up much enthusiasm for his ideology or his idolization of Hugo Chavez. It all sounded rather dreary and boring to me.
I recently found myself thinking about those days in Bruce Hall lobby after I watched the 1952 anti-communist melodrama, Big Jim McLain.
Produced by and starring John Wayne, Big Jim McLain was made at the height of the red scare. Produced in full cooperation with the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, Big Jim McLain was meant to be an answer to all those weak-willed liberal types who claimed that the committee was going too far in its hunt for communist subversives.
Big Jim McLain starts out with a thunderstorm. While stock footage of lightning illuminates the screen, a medley of patriotic songs play on the soundtrack and a somber-voiced narrator quotes The Devil Vs. Daniel Webster.
Suddenly, the scene changes. We’re in Washington D.C. and we’re watching a meeting of the House Un-American Activities Committee. A shifty little man with a beard is being interrogated by the members of the committee. They ask him if he’s ever been a communist. He takes the fifth amendment. He’s asked if he would ever take up arms against the United States. Again, he pleads the fifth.
The camera pans back to reveal two remarkably tall men listening to the man’s testimony. They both share the same look of disgust, a look that leaves no doubt how they feel about this sleazy little subversive and his constitutional rights. They are Big Jim McLain (John Wayne) and his partner, Mal Baxter (James Arness) and they fight communists.
Suddenly, we hear the familiar sound of John Wayne’s determined drawl on the soundtrack and we realize that Big Jim McLain was using multiple voice-overs long before Terrence Malick even made his first film.
Wayne, speaking in character as Big Jim, explains that he and Mal have spent the last few months proving that the witness is a communist. And now, they have no choice but to watch as he hides behind the constitution. We’re told that this communist will be able to return to his position of teaching economics at an unnamed “north eastern college.”
That opening scene pretty much tells you everything that you need to know about the ideological outlook of Big Jim McLain. The government is looking out for our best interests, outsiders are dangerous, and good men know the importance of following orders.
HUAC sends Big Jim and Mal to “the territory of Hawaii,” where they hand out a lot of subpoenas, conduct a smattering of illegal wiretaps, and try to figure out who is actually in charge of the local communist party. Along the way, Big Jim meets and romances a naive secretary named Nancy (played by Nancy Olson). Nancy just happens to work for a communist doctor but we know that she’s okay because she’s the widow of a serviceman.
Big Jim McLain is a real curiosity piece, a true product of its time. Perhaps not surprisingly, the film really does feel like a time capsule. Full of simplistic characters and nonstop speech-making from John Wayne, it’s easy to laugh at and dismiss a film like this.
Then again, the main idea behind Big Jim McLain seems to be that the government is justified in doing anything to fight its enemies and that anyone who openly questions or disagrees our leaders most be either evil or mentally incompetent. Just how much has our culture changed since then? How different is anti-communist crusader Big Jim McLain from those who today continually assure us that we have nothing to fear from the NSA? One gets the feeling that if this film were made today, Big Jim would be hunting down Edward Snowden and directing drone strikes against America’s enemies.
Perhaps for obvious reasons, Big Jim McLain is a fairly obscure film. I first found out about it from reading J. Hoberman’s Army of Phantoms. Oddly enough, within a day or two of my reading about it, Big Jim McLain turned up on TCM. It’s not a very good film but, in the best exploitation tradition, it is a document of its time and therefore, worth seeing as a piece of history.
As for the communist of Bruce Hall, he ended up dropping out at the end of the semester and, apparently, he later turned up in New York doing the whole Occupy Wall Street thing. I’ve been told that he was recently spotted in Austin, still wearing his Che Guevara t-shirt.
One thing’s for sure.
Big Jim McLain would have taken him out with one solidly placed right hook.
Finishing off my Pacific Rim soundtrack trifecta is the Mako Mori theme by Ramin Djawadi.
The first two parts of this trio were the theme to Pacific Rim and the theme to Gipsy Danger. Both were composed by Ramin Djawadi (the film’s composer) and featured lead guitar work by Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine. My third choice and latest “Song of the Day” was simply titled “Mako”. This part of the soundtrack occurs primarily during a Drift sequence in the film that becomes the unifying thread to the relationship between Rinko Kikuchi’s Mako Mori character and IDris Elba’s Stacker Pentecost role. Ramin Djawadi has singer and songwriter PRiscilla Ahn join him in this song as we see an important backstory play out within the Drift. It’s Mako’s past history with the kaiju and Stacker and why she’s so determined to become a jaeger pilot despite her adopted father’s reservations.
With this track we see that Djawadi can handle emotional musical pieces as well as the more hard rock and chest-thumping sections of the film’s score. It helps to have Priscilla Ahn’s melodic harmonizing backing up Djawadi’s composition which starts off gradually and dream-like before it transitions into a soaring string movement that Djawadi’s mentor, Hans Zimmer, wished he could pull off.
To say that the Pacific Rim soundtrack was just as awesome as the film it was composed for would be an understatement. These three choices were just my personal favorites. There were more throughout the 25-track soundtrack and each and everyone of them fits the film perfectly.
Rowena Morrill is considered to be one of the first female artists to have an impact on paperback cover illustration. After receiving a BA from the University of Delaware in 1971, Morrill studied at the Tyler School Of Art. After a period spent working for an ad agency in New York, she designed her first horror cover in 1977. Morrill’s paintings have appeared on hundreds of paperback covers and in magazines like Omni, Playboy, Art Scene International, and Print Magazine.
If nothing else, this episode will always be remembered for confirming what all of us ladies already knew. High heels are murder!
Seriously, if you had any doubts about whether or not Sarah Newlin (played, with manic glee, by Anna Camp) truly was batshit crazy, all you had to do was watch tonight’s episode.
First off, she’s refusing to tell anyone that Gov. Burrell is dead and it wouldn’t surprise me if she’s got his severed head in the trunk of her car.
Secondly, when Mrs. Suzuki came by Vamp Camp to check out what was going on with the Tru Blood production, Sarah ended up chasing her through the prison. Now, I’ve seen enough horror movies to know that it is next to impossible to successfully run away from a crazed maniac while wearing high heels. That still doesn’t stop Mrs. Suzuki from trying but, once she ends up tripping on a steel grating, Sarah proceeds to beat her to death with one of her own high heels. Underneath the grating, a grateful group of male vampires feast on Suzuki’s blood. “Thank you, Jesus!” an orgasmic Sarah proclaims.
This macabre chase scene — coming towards the end of tonight’s episode — perfectly sums up season 6 of True Blood. It was over the top, silly, melodramatic, vaguely sordid, and yet definitely effective.
Mrs. Suzuki was murdered to prevent her from telling the FDA about Sarah’s plan to give all the vampires Tru Blood that’s been spiked with Hep V. The first batch of infected Tru Blood was given to the prisoners during tonight’s episode. James, the hot new vampire who Jessica is now in love with, warned the Rev. Newlin not to drink the infected blood. This led to Sarah demanding to know why Newlin was refusing to drink the blood. Since Newlin is a weasel, he quickly revealed the names of every vampire who knows the truth about the new Tru Blood.
As a result, Newlin, James, Pam, Tara, Willa, and Jessica all found themselves in that white death chamber that Bill keeps seeing in his visions of the future. As Jessica quickly figures out, this is where they’re going to stay until the sun rises, the ceiling opens up, and they’re all burned to death.
Bill, however, has a plan. As he tells Sookie, he wants to allow all the vampires at Vamp Camp to drink Warlow’s blood so that they can be immune to the sunlight. Warlow tells Sookie that he’ll only do it if Sookie agrees to be “his.” So, once again, the future of the vampires pretty much depends upon Sookie surrendering any shred of independence from the whims and needs of the men in her life.
So, as must happen at least once during every season of True Blood, Sookie prepared to sacrifice herself. She took Bill to the faerie dimension so that she could give herself over to Warlow and then Warlow could give himself over to Bill. However, as soon as she and Bill arrived, they discovered that Eric had gotten there first and had already drained Warlow.
And that, quite simply, is why I love Eric. While everyone else talks and broods, Eric gets stuff done.
Finally, in case you were wondering how long it would take Sam to get over Luna, the answer is eight episodes. Sam returned to Bon Temps for Terry’s funeral and, upon arrival, he discovered that Alcide had rescued Nicole from the werewolves (and, in the process, had surrendered the title of pack leader to Rikki). Sam discovered that Nicole’s pregnant and, within a few scenes, the two of them were declaring their love for each other. Nicole is a boring character and werewolf politics tend to put me to sleep unless they involve Alcide getting naked. Since Alcide kept his clothes on tonight, I have to admit that I pretty much zoned during the majority of the Sam/Nicole/Alcide scenes.
But no matter! Between Sookie preparing (yet again) to sacrifice herself and Sarah getting crazier by the minute, tonight’s episode was a lot of fun. I assume that Eric is now heading towards the Vamp Camp and I can’t wait to see what happens once he arrives.
Random Thoughts and Observations:
Tonight’s unofficial scene count: 48
I always enjoy it when Bill and Eric get to argue. Alexander Skarsgard and Stephen Moyer really throw themselves into those scenes.
Nora may be dead by Lucy Griffiths — much like Arliss Howard and Todd Lowe — is still listed in the opening credits.
Rev. Newlin seemed to have a thing for people who have had sex with Jessica.
I was a little surprised that Alcide didn’t know who Terry was.
I’m proud to say that, in last week’s review, I totally guessed Bill’s plan for Warlow’s blood.
“Mother, I can fly!”
“The only way he’ll agree to help you is if I agree to become his faerie vampire bride! So there!”
“How about that, you motherfucking monster!?”
“I’m trying to decide if I’ll be more uncomfortable in here or out there!”
The most recent entry in the Guilty Pleasure series had Lisa Marie waxing poetically about the idealistic teacher in the “jungle” film The Principal. I counter and follow this up with a similar-themed film called The Substitute that came and went very quickly in the theaters (I’m not even sure if it did or just went straight to video) in 1996.
The Substitute stars veteran actor Tom Berenger (you may remember him in such films as Platoon, Major League and Sniper) as a Vietnam vet mercenary who ends up substituting as the substitute teacher for his girlfriend’s high school class as she recovers from an attack that has left her unable to teach. The girlfriend was played by one Diane Venora who in the very same year was in another little film called Heat by Michael Mann. These two polar opposite films in terms of their “quality” just shows you that when it comes to acting, unless one was a recognizable name then any role is a good role it seems.
Getting back to the film, Berenger’s character is the titular substitute in one of Miami’s worst inner-city high schools where, as the film’s tagline proudly proclaims, the most dangerous things about it was the students. That is until Berenger’s character shows up to find out who attacked his girlfriend and bring down the wrath of God himself (or at least Berenger’s character and members of his old mercenary team).
The film isn’t what one would call very subtle. We clearly see either two types of teachers in this school. There’s Berenger and his girlfriend who care for the young teens (the former woth tough love and the latter going about it in a more liberal sense) and then there are those who have given up on the school and just cashing in on a paycheck. This goes to the extreme with the school’s principal (played by Ernie Hudson) who begins to suspect that the new substitute might be more than he appears.
It’s the passive-aggressive interaction between the two roles played by Berenger and Hudson that made for some of the more hilarious sequences in the film.
Oh, another thing the film also involves a dangerous high school gang that uses the school as if it’s their own little fiefdom and the local drug kingpin using it as a way station to move heroin into the Miami inner-city school system. Oh, did I happen to mention that Marc Anthony plays the leader of the high school gang, because he sure does.
The Substitute almost plays out like how a teacher fed up with the inattentiveness of his students and the stress of doing a thankless job imagines the perfect scenario to “clean-up” the high school. It’s not through coddling and talking things out with the students. It’s about using military tactics to take out the dangers of gangs and drug dealers and tough love on those who are still worth saving.
Some have called the film as blatantly racist while others have pointed out how it is just an extreme version of the longstanding storyline of the educated and civilized white man saving the “natives” from themselves. What this film has over other school films of similar themes is how it doesn’t try to sugarcoat and hide behind ideals when it comes to it’s story. Plus, it’s such a guilty pleasure to see a typical 80’s action flick dressed up to be a late 90’s film. They really don’t make films like this anymore.
If you’ve been reading this site for the past few years then you know that my favorite time of the year is Oscar season. I love the Oscars.
Unlike a lot of online film commentators, I don’t them all that seriously. Again, if you’ve been reading this site for a while, then you know exactly how I feel about a certain self-important (and self-described) awards diva who is fond of saying things like, “I know the game because I am the game.” You’ll never find me descending to that type of smugness. I’m a fan, not a wannabe insider.
The Oscars are a big, tacky spectacle and that’s why I like them. I let others worry about the political significance of why certain films win or lose. I let others deal in the dreary outrage over the fact that The King’s Speech beat The Social Network.
I just sit back and enjoy the silliness of it all.
So, as you can imagine, I’m excited because today saw that start of Oscar season! The Academy has announced who will host the ceremony in 2014 and the winner is…
Not Seth McFarlane!
Seriously, I get the feeling that’s it’s going to be a very long time before Seth is invited back to the Oscars.
I’m not a huge Seth McFarlane fan but I have to admit that I wasn’t as outraged by his Oscar hosting performance as some people were. Yes, the majority of his jokes were lame and borderline offensive. Yes, there was an undercurrent of misogyny to a lot of what he said and did.
But misogyny is pretty much the fuel that keeps Seth McFarlane’s career alive and that should have been obvious to anyone who has seen anything that McFarlane has ever been involved with. You have to wonder just what exactly the show’s producers were expecting when they picked McFarlane in the first place.
Regardless, after all the criticism that McFarlane generated, the show’s producers have decided to go in the exact opposite direction with next year’s host….
….Ellen Degeneres!
She’s an almost painfully predictable choice but, with the exception of that season she spent on American Idol, I like Ellen so I can’t complain about her getting to host the Oscars for the second time.
That said, I still think they should have given James Franco another shot…
…and kids will be playing it who weren’t even born yet the last time Capcom gave us any news about the status of the main series. Yes, some time next year Capcom will be releasing the first new major title in their petrified RPG blockbuster series since 2002. Western fans have no guarantees just yet–it was only announced for Japan–but there is at least some hope now that Ryu and Nina will be reborn in English once again. The announcement was made yesterday at Capcom’s Network Game Conference, and it’s hard to say just how excited we ought to be. An abandoned western fanbase has been dying for a decade to see classic RPG series likes Breath of Fire, Suikoden, and Final Fantasy reborn or in the latter case resuscitated, but that does not necessarily mean Capcom is going to see a western market or throw enough weight behind this game to effectively appeal to it. Breath of Fire did persist in Japan, like so many other former great franchises, in the form of low budget mobile game spinoffs, and if that remains the most lucrative outlet for JRPGs, then the significance of that 6 next to the title (as opposed to say, 4 Dragon of Ultimate Death 7 Quest Episode 3), might amount to little more than a half-hearted pitch to sell a few more copies. Breath of Fire 6 appears to be technologically bridging the gap between the mobile market and more sedentary gaming, with a touch screen mobile device interface that will also be designed to function on a PC as the same game–not a port–with transferable save states.
It will be worth keeping an eye in the months to follow on just how much Capcom markets this game. If they expect the 6 to sell itself and do little more to promote it, we probably shouldn’t expect (or even necessarily desire) a port. But if they make a big deal about it, then get excited, because I doubt they would put forth all of the necessary effort to create a legitimate, worthy installment to the Breath of Fire series and then forget to ship it overseas.
Through the Shattered Lens 