2009: SN&R’s film critics preview this holiday season’s fare
Ablang
By Daniel Barnes, Jonathan Kiefer and Jim Lane
http://www.newsreview.com/sacramento/content?oid=1295268
Every fall and winter, Hollywood ups its output and unleashes its post-
summer, adult and family-friendly fare, which usually features the
biggest of big-name draws and the most inflamed of swollen director
egos. Consequently, this also is that time of year when SN&R’s film
critics Daniel Barnes, Jonathan Kiefer and Jim Lane batten down the
hatches for a roller coaster of blown budgets, bad third acts and
lowly junket hacks’ bothersome Oscar-vote incontinence, er,
insistence. Thankfully, like Musketeers, these pages have a trio to
fight the good celluloid—and digital 3-D—fight. Here’s their look at
what’s coming down the pipe.
A disturbing bunch
I’ve never been a huge horror fan, but just as young starlets and cub
directors are inexorably drawn to this popular but disreputable genre,
my status as the “new guy” on SN&R film pages means that I’m the one
usually assigned to review them.
So, although Halloween II did not screen for critics, I drew the straw
on its opening weekend. And I was all prepared to catch the showing at
the United Artists in Laguna. But when I got online to check the
running time, I noticed the Motion Picture Association of America’s
description:
“Rated R for strong brutal bloody violence throughout, terror,
disturbing graphic images, language, and some crude sexual content and
nudity.”
Typically, the MPAA warning label is a terse statement describing the
film’s objectionable content: “profanity,” “adult situations,”
“pervasive Ryan Reynolds.” But this description of Halloween 2, nearly
three haikus’ worth of syllables, uses the word “terror” as though an
afterthought to the really fucked-up shit on display and breathlessly
strings together three adjectives without commas, as though utterly
“terror”-ized.
So what did I do? I put away my keys and settled in to watch The
Brothers Bloom on DVD, utterly content to be a complete wuss.
It’s not that I hate horror films (the originals of Dawn of the Dead
and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are among my all-time favorites in any
genre). I’m just usually not in the mood for graphic mutilations,
eviscerations, decapitations, surgical gore, torture, engorgements,
necrophilia, face stabbings, throat stabbings, anus stabbings and so
forth.
Unless, you know, it’s integral to the plot.
Here’s a fun fact: There’s a horror film released every other week!
You’d think that with such market saturation, studios wouldn’t need to
double-down on their release schedule during the traditional scary
movie month of October.
But they did, just to screw me. The Woody Harrelson comedy Zombieland,
Night of the Demons, a remake of The Stepfather (spoiler alert: The
stepfather did it), Cirque du Freak, Saw VI, the 3-D rerelease of The
Nightmare Before Christmas and The House of the Devil are among the
films hoping to scare audiences shitless this October.
The most frightening moments, however, may end up being unintentional.
Drew Barrymore directs Ellen Page in the roller-derby comedy Whip It;
Clive Owen goes soft in The Boys Are Back; the Vince Vaughn comedy
Couples Retreat reportedly had a troubled production; the sequel to
the trenchcoatiest movie ever made, The Boondock Saints II: All Saints
Day, premieres; Gerard Butler serves up tea-party torture porn in Law
Abiding Citizen; Nacho Libre director Jared Hess displays another
“unique” vision in Gentlemen Broncos; and I Hope They Serve Beer in
Hell proves that, from now on, every gross-out comedy gets a
theatrical release in the hopes it becomes the next The Hangover.
Finally, the bald grave robbery of Michael Jackson’s This Is It, whose
trailer alternates shots of acrobatic back-up dancers with slow-mo
footage of a wraithlike Jackson shuffling away from a press
conference, could be the most disturbing of the bunch. (D.B.)
Sweep the leg, Bobby: Robert Downey Jr. goes mixed martial arts in Guy
Ritchie’s first post-Madonna effort, Sherlock Holmes.
Thanksgiving consequences
The “serious” movie season may ratchet up a notch in November, but
there will be plenty of less pretentious fare.
The first weekend brings us The Box, from cult director Richard Kelly
(Donnie Darko), about a mysterious man (Frank Langella) who offers a
young couple (Cameron Diaz, James Marsden) a box that will give them
$1 million if they open it—but somewhere, someone they don’t know will
die.
The Fourth Kind goes Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters one better,
taking us from meeting aliens to being abducted by them, with Milla
Jovovich, Elias Koteas and Will Patton.
And for conspiracy buffs and readers of Jon Ronson’s mordantly funny
book The Men Who Stare at Goats, there’ll be a star-studded movie
version, with Ewan McGregor as an Iraq war reporter whose meeting with
a self-described “Jedi warrior” (George Clooney) leads him on a
rollicking, hair-raising investigation of the U.S. military’s
experiments in paranormal warfare.
On November 13, director Roland Emmerich, that master of CGI
apocalypse, brings out 2012, a title taken from the pop-culture idea
that the ancient Mayan calendar predicted the end of the world in said
year. John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, Amanda Peet, Thandie Newton,
Oliver Platt and a cast of computer-generated billions suffer the
consequences.
The sports-inspiration genre will be represented on November 20 by The
Blind Side, based on the story of Baltimore Raven Michael Oher’s early
life. Newcomer Quinton Aaron plays the teenage Oher, with Sandra
Bullock and Tim McGraw as a Tennessee couple who take Oher under their
wing.
Along with that exercise in uplift, there’ll be more sci-fi—comic this
time, and animated—with Planet 51. Dwayne Johnson stars as the voice
of a space-exploring astronaut, with Jessica Biel, Gary Oldman, John
Cleese and Seann William Scott as the little green people among whom
he lands. It’s a bit of an unknown quantity: The writer, Joe Stillman,
is a veteran of the Shreks, but the directors are all newbies (and one
wonders about the wisdom of filmmakers who give us nothing of Jessica
Biel but her voice).
If award voters go trolling back as far as November for movies to
favor, they may look no further than Thanksgiving weekend. Then comes
The Road, from Cormac McCarthy’s novel of a father and son (Viggo
Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee) struggling to survive in a bleak post-
nuclear winter. Critics love depressing themes like this, but whether
Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce and Robert Duvall can help it
find an audience outside big cities (the kinds of places with the most
to lose if McCarthy’s bleak vision comes to pass) remains to be seen.
That same weekend will bring Nine (not to be confused with the
animated 9), director Rob Marshall’s (Chicago) adaptation of the Tony-
spangled Broadway musical, which in turn was adapted from Federico
Fellini’s 8 1/2, about a famous Italian director who doesn’t know what
to do for his next movie. Daniel Day-Lewis (is there anything this guy
can’t do?) takes the role played onstage by Raul Julia and Antonio
Banderas, with a tantalizing supporting cast: Marion Cotillard,
Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson and Sophia
Loren, who’ll end the month on a more festive note. (J.L.)
How to Make Cameron Diaz Look Creepy 101: Director Richard “Donnie
Darko” Kelly hopes to kill all recollection of Southland Tales with
The Box, a supernatural mystery about greed and murder.
Honest winter moviegoing
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. How can it not be with Alvin
and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel finally in theaters? You’re tempted
to stop reading right here, as I am tempted to stop writing, but let
us persist, together.
Space and pride prohibit a Chipmunks synopsis; I’ll just charge ahead
with the assurance that December will be a good moviegoing month,
honest. For starters, maybe all that interesting stuff that was
supposed to open at the Tower or Crest theaters back in October
finally will have arrived. And if not, at least we’ll have the big-
ticket items.
Avatar might be just another film about a reluctant hero leading a
battle to save civilization while on a journey of redemption,
discovery and love, except that it’s the new one from writer-director
James Cameron—the one that’s supposed to make us forget everything we
know about 3-D technology and special effects and how movies work.
True, that result might also be achieved with a blunt force head
trauma or an over-the-top eggnog binge, but most of us will agree that
the experience of a highly anticipated science-fiction epic is
preferable. Sam Worthington stars as a paraplegic ex-Marine on a
distant world, slipping inside big blue human-alien hybrid bodies,
while Sigourney Weaver and Zoe Saldana co-star.
In Brothers, a remake of a 2004 Danish drama, Tobey Maguire plays an
upright Marine gone missing and presumed dead in Afghanistan, leaving
his wife to be looked after by his delinquent kid brother. But the
wife is Natalie Portman. And the brother is Jake Gyllenhaal. Well,
that’s some easy looking, both before and after. Then Tobey comes
home, alive. Ruh roh! The director is Jim Sheridan, whose other
credits include In the Name of the Father and Some Mother’s Son, so we
can at least expect this one to have a handle on family dynamics.
But because one Euro movie do-over per month is not enough, we also
have Everybody’s Fine, a remake of its 1990 Italian namesake. When his
grown-up kids (Drew Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell) all
cancel their plans to visit him for the holidays, an aging widower
(Robert De Niro) springs himself on the lot of them. Not in a Taxi
Driver way, presumably, but in more of a tear-jerking, heartwarming,
Christmas-appropriate way.
Yeah, leave the heavy stuff to The Lovely Bones, director Peter
Jackson’s take on the critically adored 2002 Alice Sebold novel about
a teenage girl (Saoirse Ronan) who watches over her family from the
afterlife after being raped and murdered. Rachel Weisz and Mark
Wahlberg play the girl’s parents, Susan Sarandon her grandma and
Stanley Tucci her killer.
Moving right along, It’s Complicated is the title of writer-director
Nancy Meyers’ new romantic comedy, in which Alec Baldwin and Steve
Martin compete for the affections of Meryl Streep. Sounds simple
enough.
Meanwhile Morgan Freeman finally just goes ahead and becomes Nelson
Mandela in Invictus, a tale of post-apartheid South Africa based on
John Carlin’s book, The Human Factor: Nelson Mandela and the Game That
Changed the World. That should be enough of a draw, but Matt Damon as
a rugby player and Clint Eastwood directing might sweeten the deal,
too.
Finally, with Robert Downey Jr. as the master sleuth and Jude Law as
his sidekick, Madonna-divorcee director Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes
goes balls out. Well, not literally, but if the trailer’s any
indication, he does go shirtless quite a bit. (J.K.)