Dreamworks is late to the summer animation party this year, with “Epic,” “Monsters University” and “Despicable Me 2” beating it to the box office. Could this be the class of this year’s class of cartoons?
With Disney’s “Planes” due out in early August, they’d better hope so.
“Turbo” has great voices, a funny idea (a racing snail) and a Wednesday (next week) opening day.
Before our eyes, Oscar winner Jeff Bridges is turning into Nicolas Cage.
The Dude’s a Knight in “Seventh Son.”
Say it ain’t so, bro.
Love that MLParker. Yes indeed. She was a bit of an acquired taste, early in her career — flaky, funny at times. But flaky always.
She has come into her own since “Weeds” though, and her sense of playful transgression is always on display in the “RED” (Retired Extremely DAngerous”) movies. She and David Thewlis have a killer interrogation scene in “RED 2” that I hope to talk to both her and Thewlis about.
But for now, just hunting for questions for her. Got a suggestion? Post it as a comment. And thanks.
The Danish child abuse melodrama “The Hunt” is earning the best reviews of the weekend. For a topical film about the falsely accused, a Lifetime Original Movie in Danish if you will, it’s quite good.
Warners’ latest incredibly expensive summer extravaganza, “Pacific Rim” is earning better notices than “Man of Steel.” Will this silly Godzilla/TRansformers/Starship Troopers mashup make any money? Maybe. In the countries around the Pacific Rim. Love that Ron Perlman. As does Guillermo del Toro.
Adam Sandler rounds up everybody he knows and loves for “Grown Ups 2,” a lazy, junky, not at all funny summer comedy that apparently appeals to some. How many? Surely his audience is aging out of the movie going habit. He’s not in the same league with Apatow’s disciples, the “Hangover” crowd and today’s current crop of funny folk. It is earning the worst reviews he’s ever gotten. And that’s saying something.
But Jeff Garlin’s my-pals-and-me comedy about Little League parents from Hell — “Dealin’ with Idiots” earned decent reviews. So this formula can work. Sometimes.
Even “V/H/S 2”, an omnibus horror collection which has a few good shorts, and a few bad ones, gets a pass from most. Me? Sort of.
“Pawn Shop Chronicles” could have been a cult hit. It’s not good enough, or quite bad enough to manage that. Mostly awful reviews for this one. I still love the idea of a “Redneck Pulp Fiction.” But the violence passes most people’s turn-off threshhold. It kills the fun.
“The Hot Flashes,” Susan Seidelman’s menopausal basketball comedy starring Brooke Shields, Virginia Madsen, Camryn Manheim, Wanda Sykes and Daryl Hannah isn’t going to cash in on the basis of good reviews. Formulaic, tepid in the laughs department. Well intentioned, but…
Friday AM means it’s time for my weekly chat with Mike Bianchi and Brian Kravitz over at “Open Mike,” the Greater Orlando market’s morning sports talk megashow.
It’s on 740 The Game, in case you’ve forgotten.
We’ll chat about “Pacific Rim,” the Godzilla meets Transformers comedy where the actors — save for Ron Perlman and Charlie Day — don’t matter.
And we’ll rip into “Grown Ups 2,” a ride off into the sunset or Adam Sandler and his HUGE posse of hangers-on — jocks included.
“Pawn Shop Chronicles” opens fairly wide this weekend, and here in Orlando. A redneck “Pulp Fiction”? Why didn’t somebody think of that before?
And Enzian, the arts theater, has booked a late night serial killer comedy — “Sightseers” — from the UK. Daft, scenic, bloody and darkly funny.
That’s the conversation parameters that we’re covering, 745 AM on 740 AM. Or listen in online.
It’s the story of Walt Disney’s courtship of “Mary Poppins” creator P.L. Travers.
Sounds more fun than this trailer — at first — suggests. Tom Hanks is Disney, his fellow Oscar winner Emma Thompson is the almost un-courtable Travers. But then it finds its footing and we get a hint of a story we don’t know at all — the REAL meaning of “Mary Poppins.” I am intrigued. A couple of laughs and a lump in the throat moment, too. The real story was apparently unpleasant for both sides — in the extreme.
Some of the video of SeaWorld accidents is disturbing, and a lot of the footage of orcas — killer whales — being herded so that their young can be grabbed for use in theme parks is heartbreaking.
But the most chilling moments in “Blackfish,” the documentary expose of SeaWorld’s long, ugly history with Shamu and his “big splash” kind, come from a 911 call and the transcription of a police interrogation.
From the 911 call: “A whale has eaten one of the trainers.” This happened in Orlando in 2010, an accident witnessed by thousands and thus too big for SeaWorld to cover up. And from the local sheriff’s department transcripts, which reveal the early stages of the theme park company’s spin on the event, a few blunt lines.
Question: “The arm?”
Answer: “He swallowed it.”
The gist of this documentary, which is built around scores of interviews with ex-SeaWorld trainers, eyewitnesses to tragedies and near-tragedies, and whale experts, is that this “didn’t just happen.” For decades, the film points out, huge, social and roaming killer whales, confined to tiny pens and taught to perform in tank shows at amusement parks, have been involved in incidents and tragedies. Tilikum, the male who killed veteran trainer Dawn Brancheau in February of 2010 was a breeding male who had killed before, and yet was still in the show at SeaWorld Orlando. Many of the trainers unaware of the whale’s deadly past,but they suspected something by the way some company folks acted around him.
“Clearly (management) knew more than they were telling us,” ex-trainer Samantha Berg declares.
Trainers acknowledge that only the most experienced of their ranks are actual “trainers,” that they’re basically smiling performers taking part in activities with animals they don’t fully understand. A veteran diver recalls, with regret, the whale roundups SeaWorld used to run in Washington’s Puget Sound before they were banned from doing that. To a one, the witnesses talk of the personalities, intelligence and empathy of the whales, which never have human “accidents” in the wild. They’re curious about us, even there. And they cry when their young are taken from them. We see it and hear it.
The film is a little monochromatic in its use of trainers. Some have survived “accidents,” yet none of those people were talked to. But otherwise, this is as through a take-down of a business and its practices as you’re likely to ever see.
SeaWorld seemed to collectively bristle at the very idea of the Oscar winning documentary “The Cove,” a film that first pointed the finger at the company’s practices and how it encouraged dolphin roundups (and slaughters). But their corporate heads are going to explode at “Blackfish,” a damning documentary that shows the lies in “the party line” — that orcas’ fins curl naturally (almost never happens in the wild), that they “live longer” in captivity (25-30 years in captivity, a “human lifespan” of 60 years-plus in the wild) and that these “accidents” are always the fault of “the trainers.”
As one tearful ex-trainer says in utter outrage, remembering her friend Dawn Brancheau, one of the smartest trainers out there, “How DARE they.”
(Roger Moore interviews the people who made “Blackfish” here).
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic elements including disturbing and violent images
Cast: Former SeaWorld trainers, whale experts, eye witnesses
Credits: Directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, written by Eli Despres and Gabriela Cowperthwaite. A Magnolia/CNN Films release.
Running time: 1:24
Bill Hader did the Saturday Night Live thing for years. He was most famous for “Stefon,” a homeless gay New York City correspondent who carried a torch for Seth Myers.
And now, as that ends, his movie career is lighting up.
BHader has a string of movies in the can, from voice work in the cartoons “Turbo” and “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2” to “The To Do List,” a summer comedy which I’ll be talking about with him shortly.
Discovered by Megan Mullally, an improv comic and gifted mimic, he plays a lifeguard/pool manager who can’t swim in the daft spoof of summer “coming of age/lose virginity” movies that “The To Do List” is.
Questions for Bill? I chatted with him back when his movie career was just starting (“Superbad” era), so I’m looking for directions to take the interview in. Post your queries as comments. Thanks.
Something about the job that requires a swimsuit says “Not quite an adult yet.” Lifeguards in their thirties (“I’m 29.”) are screenwriter shorthand for “didn’t sell out” (Sam Elliott in “Lifeguard” in the ’70s) but also never grew up — stuck — immature, living for the moment too much. Kristen Bell takes on that sort of character in “The Lifeguard,” that rare movie that doesn’t require her to be a light comedienne. Amy Madigan as her mom? Great casting. Bell’s character gets to face the music, but justify a generation’s ennui about moving back home and not being able to suck it up and get on with it. A movie full of possibilities.
