Today’s lesson from the past comes from 1950. Harry Truman was in the White House, UN peacekeepers were in Korea, and Gloria Swanson was killing William Holden on Sunset Boulevard. Meanwhile, the American family was apparently built upon a foundation of repression, conformity, and good table manners.
Or, at least, that’s the impression that one gets from watching A Date With Your Family.
A Date With Your Family is a 10 minutes education film that was apparently meant to encourage families to eat more and talk less. Not only does this film explain the importance of the family dinner but it also makes several other relevent points. For example:
2) “With your own family, you can relax. Be yourself. Just make sure it’s your best self.”
3) “These boys greet their Dad as though they were genuinely glad to see him, as though they really missed him”
This film also explains the importance of looking “pleasant” for your husband when he gets home from a hard day at the office, of not spending too much time on the phone, and of not talking about anything that might upset the family’s patriarchal unit.
Personally, my favorite moment is when “Daughter” won’t stop talking at the dinner table and the rest of her family gives her the exact same look that my older sisters always used to give me.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while then you probably know that I absolutely love Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 film The Room. I love it for its off-center dialogue, for Tommy Wiseau’s interesting performance, and for the scene where Tommy says, “Oh, hai, doggy.”
(Of course, the main reason that I love it is because Tommy screams, “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” at one point.)
I also know that several of our loyal readers love Star Wars.
So, what could possibly be better than a viral video that combines my love of The Room with your love of Star Wars?
How about two videos that do just that?
I found these videos on YouTube and all credit for them should go to the enigmatic artist known as noisyimp.
I’ve mentioned in the past how much I love the old “educational” film from the past that were designed to keep stupid people from doing stupid things, like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, attempting to steal copper wiring, or driving too fast without a license.
That last issue is the one that is dealt with in the 1976 short film (and time capsule), Joy Ride. In Joy Ride, two teenagers go to a little league game, have an existential crisis, steal a car, talk about the inherent weirdness of names, and play lots and lots of pinball.
It’s easy to make fun of a film like Joy Ride but I have to admit that I’m strangely fascinated by this short film. Between the ennui-soaked conversation of the two protagonists and the frequent use of jump cuts and zooms, it’s hard not to feel that if Jean-Luc Godard ever made a driver’s ed film, it would look something like Joy Ride.
I also have to admit that I enjoyed the use of the “You broke my car so I broke your jaw,” song.
So, when Jeff and I went and saw To Rome With Love on Friday, one of the trailers that played before the film was for the upcoming Tom Cruise action film, Jack Reacher. The audience started snickering the minute that Cruise first showed up in the trailer and was openly laughing by the time Cruise was saying, “Remember, you wanted this.” I’ll admit that, while I didn’t laugh, I did smirk a little because, seriously, we all know that Cruise has probably said the exact same thing at least once to Katie Holmes.
On a perhaps more serious note, the laughter highlighted the central question of Tom Cruise’s career right now. Will audiences continue to take seriously a man who apparently accepts the existence of Evil Lord Xenu and who strikes many people are being just a little bit creepy? True, it didn’t keep people from seeing the latest Mission Impossible film but then again, that film was sold less as a Tom Cruise film and more as the continuation of an established franchise.
I’ve never read any of the Jack Reacher books but they’ve apparently got a pretty devoted fan base* and, just to judge from some of the comments that I’ve seen online, a lot of that base is not that happy about Cruise playing the title character. Apparently, the literary Jack Reacher stands 6’5 and Tom Crusie … well, Tom Cruise doesn’t. In fact, Cruise appears to be the shortest person in this trailer.
Paramount is planning to release Jack Reacher on December 21st, presumably hoping to draw in filmgoers who are looking for an alternative to snooty Oscar contenders.
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*Apparently, Stephen King is a huge Jack Reacher fan which, to be honest, doesn’t fill me with hope. Just judging from his occasional columns for Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King has terrible taste.
As a film, Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World is kinda like this cute guy that I once sat behind in a creative writing class. He talked so passionately about his writing that it made it even more disappointing when he finally showed me what he had written and it turned out to be the blandest rip-off of Kerouac that I had ever read. Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World has such a great trailer and such a great cast that it’s impossible not to be disappointed even more than usual that the actual film is mediocre.
The opening scene of Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World finds Dodge (Steve Carell) and his wife parked off the side of the road, listening to a news report informing them that, in 20 days, a gigantic asteroid named Matilda is going to crash into the Earth and end existence as we know it. Dodge responds to the news by saying that he thinks that he missed their exit on the highway. His wife responds by silently getting out of the car and running away into the night, never to be seen again. It’s a brilliant opening and it filled me with false hope for the rest of the film.
Anyway, Dodge continues to go about his life even as the countdown to end of it commences. He goes to work, he goes to a depressing dinner party, and occasionally, he stops moving long enough to watch another random person commit suicide in front of him. Yes, Dodge is pretty depressed but luckily, there’s a manic pixie dream girl (Kiera Knightley) living in the apartment below him. When rioting breaks out, he and Knightley escape to the countryside where they search for both Dodge’s high school girlfriend and an airplane to allow Knightley to fly back to England and see her parents. Along the way, they fall in love and the entire film pretty much falls apart.
Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World is at its best during the first fourth of the film when the emphasis is on dark humor and the absurdity of the situation that Dodge has found himself in. Unfortunately, once Carell and Knightley leave the city and find themselves traveling through the most prosaic countryside imaginable, the film seems to be unsure of just what exactly it wants to be. The mix of dark humor and uplifting message is an awkward one and the end result is an uneven film that, ultimately, is just too bland to suggest that we should care that the world’s going to end.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to truly forgive Steve Carell for leaving The Office and turning my favorite TV show into The Ed Helms Show. However, when I blink enough times that I can actually look at things from a perspective beyond my own selfish concerns, I can see that Carell made the right decision. Steve Carell is a film star and that’s proven by the fact that, even when he’s appearing in a mediocre film, he’s still compelling to watch. As uneven as Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World is, Carell gives an excellent performance. I think the secret to Steve Carell’s on-screen charisma is that he’s got the saddest eyes in the movies. There’s a sense of real sadness and regret to every character that Steve Carell has ever played and, as a result, he can make the weakest of material seem poignant. As disappointing as Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World is, it remains watchable and that’s almost totally due to Steve Carell.
For the past 5 months, every time I’ve gone to the movies, I’ve seen the trailer for Oliver Stone’s new film, Savages. It’s a pretty exciting trailer, featuring sex, violence, and Taylor Kitsch’s abs. Despite Oliver Stone’s recent track record of making preachy, boring films, that trailer got a lot of people excited about the prospect of seeing Savages.
Well, the film has been released, I’ve seen it, and you know what? Sometimes, trailers lie.
Savages is the story of Chon, Ben, and O. Chon (Taylor Kitsch) and Ben (Aaron Johnson) sell the greatest weed in the world and O (Blake Lively) is the woman who loves both of them at the same time. O, by the way, is short for Ophelia and she narrates the film in such a monotonous style that I have to admit that I was shocked to discover that she actually knew she was named after Hamlet’s doomed girlfriend. Chon is a violent former Navy SEAL while Ben is a laid-back buddhist who wants to get out of the drug business so he can devote his time to environmental activism. (Zzzzzzzzzz….)
Ben’s marijuana becomes so legendary that soon, a Mexican drug cartel led by Salma Hayek decides that both Ben and Chon are going to work exclusively for them. Ben and Chon refuse so Hayek sends Benicio Del Toro to kidnap O and hold her hostage until Ben and Chon come around. Ben and Chon, however, have plans of their own…
On the positive side, Hayek, Del Toro, and John Travolta (playing a corrupt DEA agent) all give excellent performances that would seem to indicate that they — as opposed to everyone else involved with Savages — understand that they’re appearing in an expensive B-movie. They openly devour every piece of scenery in the film and have a fun time wringing every ounce of melodrama out of their pulpy dialogue. These three actors are fun to watch and it’s a shame that the same can’t be said for the other half of the film’s main cast.
Jennifer Lawrence was originally cast in the role of O but she dropped out of Savages so that she could star in The Hunger Games. The role was recast with Blake Lively, who looks like she could be Jennifer Lawrence’s older sister but who, as an actress, has never exhibited the type of wounded determination that has become Lawrence’s trademark. As played by Lively, O is such a passive character that it’s difficult to really care that much about whether she survives or doesn’t. Instead of being a strong, independent woman who is unashamed of her lifestyle, O just comes across as a spoiled and vapid pawn, a possession who is traded between the film’s various players. It doesn’t help that Lively delivers her heavy-handed narration in a flat monotone that makes her come across less like a hard-boiled survivor and more like a spoiled rich girl trying to sound jaded. Every time I heard her refer to Chon and Ben as being “my guys,” I just wanted to scream at the screen, “No, you stupid bitch, you belong to them! They don’t belong to you!”
As for “her guys,” Taylor Kitsch is believable as a killer but not as a stoner. (Kitsch’s character comes across as if he’s been snorting cocaine as opposed to smoking weed.) Aaron Johnson, meanwhile, is a very believable stoner but he’s a lot less believable once his character becomes a killer. Unfortunately, neither Kitch nor Johnson show much in the way of charisma in this film and that’s a shame because both of them have shown in the past that they are capable of giving good performances. (Seriously, just check out Aaron Johnson’s performance in the criminally underrated John Lennon biopic, Nowhere Boy.) With neither Chon nor Ben being all that interesting, the film ultimately becomes a rather empty display of style.
And there’s no denying it — Savages has got style to burn. Oliver Stone shows here that — despite such anemic recent films as Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps — he still knows how to film an explosion. Unfortunately, there’s not much going on beneath all of that style and the end result is a film that mostly succeeds in making both sex and violence boring.
It’s not necessarily that I think it’s going to be a great film or because I’ve suddenly managed to figure out the appeal of Shia LeBouf (though he does look about as appealing as I’ve ever seen him look in the previews for this film).
No, I’m looking forward to Lawless because it looks like it’s going to be a stylish and sexy throwback to the classic gangster films of the past. As I’ve been saying for a few months now, Lawless captured me the minute I saw Gary Oldman firing that tommy gun and smirking at the camera. Add to that, this film’s original trailer also featured Tom Hardy at his Tom Hardiest and Guy Pearce with one of the weirdest movie haircuts (not to mention accents) ever.
(Plus, the film apparently features dancing! Yay!)
A second trailer for Lawless was released earlier today and you can view it below. While this second trailer contains many scenes that should be familiar from the first trailer, it also puts a lot more emphasis on the film’s violence in general and Tom Hardy in specific. I have to wonder if that has anything to do with all the buzz surrounding Hardy’s villanous performance in the upcoming Dark Knight Rises.
Lawless opens August 31st and I know I’ll be there.
I have to admit that, before I saw The Amazing Spider-Man on Tuesday, all I knew about the character was that he could climb walls, shoot webs, and that Tobey Maguire played him in three films, two of which were fun and one of which wasn’t. However, my boyfriend is a Spider-Man fanatic so, on Monday night, I asked him to tell me everything that he knew about the character and everything that I should know before I even tried to write a review of this latest film.
“Everything?” he asked.
“Everything,” I replied, “I mean, I know about the spider bite and his uncle and Kirsten Dunst and all that. How much more could there be?”
Well, he told me how much more there was. A few hours later, I threw up my hands in exasperation and jealousy while shouting, “Well, if you love Spider-Man so much, why don’t you take him to the movies!?” Being the wonderful and patient guy that he is, Jeff explained to me the many reasons why he prefers my company to Spider-Man’s. While most of those reasons would probably be considered too TMI for me to go into too much detail about on this site, it was still nice of him to reassure me. The fact of the matter is that Spider-Man has became a cultural icon, a figure that is now known not only to the cute guy who grew up with him but also to people, like me, whose knowledge of costumed super heroes is pretty much limited to what shows up on the movie screen.
Perhaps that’s why Marc Webb’s reboot of The Amazing Spider-Man has been so highly anticipated. Having seen it, I’m happy to say that the film, while uneven, has plenty to please both fans and newcomers alike.
The first part of the film pretty much retells the familiar origin of Spider-Man. Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) is a nerdy high school outcast who lives with his aunt and uncle (Sally Field and Martin Sheen). A scientific genius, Peter is bullied by jocks and spends his time pining for a girl who he can’t work up the courage to talk to. One day, Peter gets bitten by a radioactive spider and soon, he has all the powers of a spider. At first, Peter has a selfish reaction to his new powers and he sees little reason why he should use them to protect a society that has rejected him. However, that all changes once Peter’s saint of an uncle is killed by a criminal that Peter earlier refused to help capture.
As many critics have pointed out, this is all familiar to anyone who saw the first Spider-Man film but that familiarity doesn’t detract from the film’s effectiveness. The fact of the matter is that Spider-Man, much like Batman, has become a part of American folklore. These are stories that are meant to be told and retold with each teller bringing his own unique spin to the material.
The film works best during this first half, when Peter is first discovering and learning how to deal with his powers while pursuing a tentative romance with Gwen (played by Emma Stone) under the disapproving eye of her father (Denis Leary), who just happens to be a police detective obsessed with capturing Spider-Man. This is largely because the first half of the film is dominated by Andrew Garfield.
Andrew Garfield has been one of my favorite actors ever since I first noticed him in Never Let Me Go and he brings a wonderfully unpredictable energy to the familiar story of how Peter Parker became Spider-Man. To his credit, Garfield plays Peter as such an awkward teenager that he’s actually somewhat creepy when we first see him. Whereas Tobey Maguire just came across like a shy nice guy, Garfield’s performance establishes Peter as a classic outcast and that gives his heroic transformation an extra poignancy. Unlike a lot of critics, I don’t feel that it’s necessary to praise Garfield’s performance by attacking Maguire’s. Maguire was the perfect Peter Parker for Sam Raimi’s unique brand of pop art. Marc Webb, for the first half of the film, take a far more realistic approach to the material and it’s an approach that’s well-suited to Andrew Garfield’s far more neurotic and internalized approach to the role. If Maguire’s performance owed a lot to Jimmy Stewart, Garfield’s performance reminds one of a young Dennis Hopper. It, of course, also helps that Garfield has a wonderful chemistry with both Martin Sheen and Emma Stone.
Though the audience I was with seemed to disagree, I found the film’s second half to be significantly weaker than the first. The latter part of the film is dominated by a pretty standard super-villian, a one-armed scientist (played by Rhys Ifans) who knew Peter’s parents and whose attempts to regenerate his missing arm leads to him turning into a lizard man who lives in the sewers. Though Ifans is a talented actor and he certainly has the mad scientist look down, his character remains something of a cipher. You’re never quite sure what Ifans is attempting to do or why he’s attempting to do it and, as a result, his final confrontation with Spider-Man is never quite as compelling (or fun) as one would hope. It all feels rather oddly generic.
Complaints aside, I enjoyed The Amazing Spider-Man and I’m looking forward to the inevitable sequel. I’m just hoping that the next film in the franchise has a villain that can match up to Garfield’s interpretation of the lead role.
So, earlier today, I saw a movie called Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World and … well, it wasn’t very good.
But, fortunately, it was preceded by a trailer for a film that’s got me very excited about the future of 2012. That film is Joe Wright’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Just judging from the trailer, it looks like this is going to be a visually sumptuous and intriguing adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel.
It doesn’t hurt that Joe Wright’s last film was my personal favorite of 2011, Hanna.
A frequently asked question: When is John Hawkes going to win an Oscar?
Ever since I first saw Winter’s Bone back in 2010, I’ve wondered just when exactly John Hawkes is going to finally win an Oscar. Unfortunately, he did not win for Winter’s Bone and his chilling work in Martha Marcy May Marlene was ignored. This year, however, he’s back with The Sessions. In this film, Hawkes plays a 38 year-old man who is confined to an iron lung and who is attempting to lose his virginity with the help of William H. Macy and Helen Hunt.
The Sessions has been getting a lot of buzz since it premiered on Sundance. That, quite frankly, makes me wary because I’ve come to learn that you have to take Sundance acclaim with a grain of salt. If Cannes is where people go to be insanely critical, Sundance has a deserved reputation for going overboard when it comes to praise. However, I will take a chance on anything featuring John Hawkes and, just judging from the trailer, it looks like both The Sessions and John Hawkes could be contenders when it comes time to hand out Oscar nominations.
A less frequently asked question: When is Tyler Perry going to win an Oscar?
Most people would probably answer that question by replying, “Never,” and they could very well be correct. I have to admit that I’ve never actually sat through any of Tyler’s Perry’s films and, to be honest, I’ve never really had any desire to. That said, I’ve always been fascinated by Perry’s success and I can’t help but admire the fact that he’s not shy when it comes to self-promotion.
In the upcoming Alex Cross, Tyler Perry will step into a role that was previously played by Morgan Freeman and, if nothing else, it’ll add fuel to the debate as to whether or not Perry is a legitimate acting talent or just a smart businessman. To be honest, the trailer for Alex Cross plays less like a movie trailer and more like a commercial for a movie on Chiller. I think that’s largely because of the presence of TV-movie mainstays like Matthew Fox and John C. McGinley. Still, chances are, Alex Cross will be the first exposure that I (and a lot of other people) get to Tyler Perry as an actor as opposed to just a personality.
