Movie Nation

Posts like this one, on Gawker, make my head hurt. “Which is worse, talkers or ‘shushers’ at the movies?”

What, now it’s the people who want to watch the MOVIE who are the “a–holes”? Really?

It’s like re-opening the global warming debate. With somebody who wants to pollute to his heart’s content, without a care to how the rest of the world feels about it.

It all started with this Hunter Walk “think piece” about ways theaters should reach out to short-attention span types like himself. Lights on in theaters, free wi-fi.

Hunter Walk is what happens when, well, I’d like to say “When cousins marry” but I’ll just leave it at “not raised to consider the rest of the human race” when some impulsive/compulsive need of his arises.

Anil Dash followed up with more of the same.

Let me see if I can speak for the “shushers,” the reluctant folks who can only endure so much of your boorishness, your faux clever commentary on what is happening on the screen, your inability to concentrate on anything for an hour and a half.

The movies aren’t a “monastic” experience, but going is akin to dropping in to church. Where texting, chatting, and generally putting MY impulses ahead of YOUR need to experience something larger than you is frowned upon.

We go to the movies — most of us, anyway — to lose ourselves in the story and world on the screen. The screen is larger than us, dominates us and sucks us in. If you’re 14 and watch most of your movies on an iPad, you don’t get it and maybe never will. So that’s why I’m laying out that as a basic concept.

It ruins the $14 experience for everybody if you insist on lighting up the theater with your own mini screen several times during the showing. It spoils the movie — not every movie, but any movie that doesn’t involve Vin Diesel or Guillermo del Toro — to carry on an audible, rude, running commentary that you and your often doltish friends think is clever.

As a few commentors on the Gawker post note, this is aggressive behavior and unless one wants to fume or let your aggression stand, you’re going to be shushed.

If your parents never taught you manners, that you are not the center of the universe and that you’re not that damned clever, then somebody needs to alert you to these facts. Briefly. As politely as possible.

The fact that so many rude people FLIP OUT when they’re shushed tells you loads. They realize they’re being rude and hate being called on it. That fits right into the aggression thing.

Maybe cinema drafthouses/restaurants would be the right place for his “multi-tasking” movie viewing. Until that happy day, leave your phone off, keep your comments to a minimum and if you need to have a conversation, wait to watch the movie on your phone. Small screens suit small minds.

But a rule of thumb for Hunter Walk and others who haven’t quite caught on? Most people with any manners at all recognize that the world is a lot more civil when we live by that old Will Rogers maxim — “Your right to swing your arms stops just short of my nose.”

Bruce Willis has had a few testy moments these past few weeks — getting snotty on a British radio show over his box office flop “Red 2,” without provocation, for instance.

And now he’s out of “Expendables 3” and Harrison Ford will step in and cash a check. Maybe Willis didn’t want to be bothered with Stallone’s dopey mercenary action comedy. Maybe he’s had enough of ensemble work, even though his “Die Hard” days as leading man are done done done.

But Stallone alleges Willis wanted $1 million a day for like three days of work. While it’s just the sort of demand you make when you don’t want to do something, it makes Willis look bad.

Bruce Willis has had a few testy moments these past few weeks — getting snotty on a British radio show over his box office flop “Red 2,” without provocation, for instance.

And now he’s out of “Expendables 3” and Harrison Ford will step in and cash a check. Maybe Willis didn’t want to be bothered with Stallone’s dopey mercenary action comedy. Maybe he’s had enough of ensemble work, even though his “Die Hard” days as leading man are done done done.

But Stallone alleges Willis wanted $1 million a day for like three days of work. While it’s just the sort of demand you make when you don’t want to do something, it makes Willis look bad.

Take a gander at the pitch for writer-director Fred Zara’s kickstarter film on a lowly dishwasher who can “read” people and tell me it’s not commercial in an indie sense. Get Paul Dano as your lead and this thing has Fox Searchlight written all over it.

There are funnier cartoons than the “Cars” universe of movies, and smarter ones and animated films with more heart.
But there’s nothing like the “World of ‘Cars'” for toy tie-ins, or so the reasoning must have been for “Planes,” the worst of the animated blockbusters to come our way this summer. A bland, joyless plucky-little-plane race comedy, it’s even more starved of jokes than Pixar’s “Monsters University,” as if that was possible.
“Planes” is about a crop duster named Dusty who longs to be more “than just what I was built for. I’ve flown thousands of miles and I’ve never been anywhere.”
His elders (Cedric the Entertainer) might remind him that “You were built for seed, not speed.” But Dusty longs to escape Propwash Junction, and with the help of his fuel truck pal (Brad Garrett) and trusty mechanic forklift (Teri Hatcher), he might just get into the round-the-world race and win fame and glory.
So it’s “Cars II” with planes. Or “Turbo” without the snail.
They cast salty comic Dane Cook as the voice of Dusty, and gave him nothing funny to say. Garrett, Hatcher, Stacy Keach (playing a grizzled World War II F4U Corsair), funnymen John Cleese and Cedric the Entertainer, funny woman Julia Louis-Dreyfus (as a French-Canadian race plane), all great voices playing trucks or planes, none of them with anything amusing to work with.
A few national stereotypes — stuck-up Brit, Latin Lover — don’t deliver laughs, either.
Like “Cars,” this was based on an idea from studio head John Lasseter, who apparently is surrounded by “Yes” men and women. Nobody was there to tell him that wonderfully detailed animated airplanes — “Skipper,” the Corsair, remembers his combat days in a vivid recreation of World War II at one point — do not a movie make. A perfect 1930s Gee Bee racer replica isn’t funny, even when it’s given a Mexican accent.
Casting two actors from “Top Gun” to voice Navy jets? Giving sports announcers Brett Musberger and Colin Cowherd (as a blimp) race coverage announcing jobs? Real side splitters.
“Planes” looks, sounds and feels like a direct-to-video project, which in an earlier age when people still bought DVDs it would have been. In theaters, it’s nothing more than a laughless 90 minute commercial for toys available at a retailer near you.
(“Planes” may be the worst reviewed Disney cartoon — ever)

MPAA Rating: PG for some mild action and rude humor
Cast: The voices of Dane Cook, Stacy Keach, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Brad Garrett, Teri Hatcher
Credits: Directed by Klay Hall, screenplay by Jeffrey M. Howard. A Walt Disney Studios release
Running time: 1:30

One of the unwritten rules of summer is that no movie opens in August when it could have opened in May, June or July. In other words, action pictures, franchises, comic book films, animated movies, sci-fi, big comedies — if the studio has faith in them they’re opened when they have a chance to make serious summer money.

The exceptions — “ParaNorman,” “Signs”, a Bourne movie or two — prove the rule. Maybe “Elysium,” “Planes” and “Kick-Ass 2” will join that list.

But “We’re the Millers”? The studio knew it had an inferior product that would have been lost in June or July.

“Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters” is more affirmation that Percy won’t replace Potter, no matter how the similarities between the two pile up.

Bad to very bad reviews for the both of them. And wait til you see how Disney’s “Planes” is shot down on Friday.

August, a dog days dumping ground for movies that couldn’t compete earlier in summer.

British actor Ben Whishaw is the quirky, brainy head of British Intelligence’s Q Division in the Daniel Craig incarnations of the James Bond movies.

He’s been at home in many a period romance and seems almost typecast as the Byronic poet “type.” Films such as “Brideshead Revisited,” “Bright Star” and “Perfume” stick with you. But he was in “The International” and a wide variety of other genre pictures as well.

Last weekend, he announced to a British newspaper that he’s gay and that he’s married.