They package the nominated short animation, feature and documentary films into a program that runs in theaters across the country so that film fans can check out ALL the nominees before Oscar night. Come to the Enzian this weekend to see today’s short filmmakers, tomorrow’s feature film directors. This trailer has a sample of their work.
Israeli filmmaker Dror Moreh persuaded six different chiefs of Israel’s domestic secret police, Shin Bet, to sit and be interviewed for his eye-opening documentary “The Gatekeepers.” It’s a film that takes the long view of Israeli-Palestinian history, but not the ancient view.
Whatever age-old enmities exist between the Jewish state and the Arabs it displaces, the film focuses on the 45 years since the Six Day War, the policies of tit for tat killings, terrorist bombings, reprisals and intrusive settlements and gets at the reasons neither side can make any headway making peace with the other.
It’s shockingly even-handed.
Moreh is up for the Oscar, and I figure he’s the underdog in that best documentary field — “Searching for Sugar Man” is probably the favorite.
Got questions for him? Comment below.
There are rules to this super-hero/super-villain game, and they’re laid out by the title character in the chatty new animated adventure comedy “Megamind” starring Will Ferrell.
“Good receives all the praise and adulation. Evil is sent for quiet time in the corner.”
More to the point, notes Megamind, whatever perks come with heroes and bad guys, “The bad don’t get the girl.”
Ferrell provides the title character’s mustache-twirling voice in this farce about an alien baby who grew up to be Metroman, and the alien baby who grew up on Earth to be his nemesis — Megamind.
Brad Pitt voices Metroman, the toothy hero who bathes in applause and thwarts the hapless Megamind at every turn. Megamind is so clueless he can’t even pronounce the name of their hometown correctly. “Metrocity” sounds like “atrocity” coming out of his pursed blue mouth.
The plucky TV reporter Roxanne Ritchi (Tina Fey) documents Metroman’s heroics and always figures in Megamind’s evil plans.
“Could someone stamp my Frequent Kidnapping Card?”
Woody Allen’s oft-repeated modus operandi is that he has an idea, jots it on a slip of paper, shoves it into a desk and then takes it out later and makes a movie out of it.
What was on the the slip of paper that led to “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger”?
“Round up the usual stars in my thrall, move to London for a stretch and bore them and the audience to tears?”
A mirthless, joyless comedy with nary a hint of romance, mystery or justification for its existence, it joins “Hollywood Ending,” “Anything Else,” “Whatever Works,” Cassandra’s Dream” and other recent clunky, tone-deaf Allen films that plainly should have remained weak, undeveloped ideas tucked inside that infamous desk.
The dotty Helen is where we “begin,” our bored narrator tells us. She (Gemma Jones) has gone to a mentalist as a 
way of keeping her out of her daughter (Naomi Watts) and husband Alfie’s (Anthony Hopkins) hair.
“You’re bathed in a rose colored light, my darling,” Cristal coos, and Gemma rushes off to pop in on her frustrated daughter and her more frustrated husband (Josh Brolin) and give them the good news.
Of course, Helena’s husband is leaving her. Alfie is having the latest mid-life crisis in British history.
“”She already has me dead and buried.”
Daughter Sally is well into her 30s and impatient with her once-promising writer-husband Roy (Josh Brolin) to have a child and get on with their lives, with or without him publishing a new novel. Roy is frantic to avoid those phrases, “once promising” and “washed up at 38.” But the new book won’t do it for him. Cristal predicts it.
But Roy’s eye strays to the apartment across the way, where a flutist (Freida Pinto) practices and occasionally undresses. Vintage Woody dialogue?
“It’s beautiful, the Boccherini.”
“You know his music? I’m impressed.”
That could lead to something. In Woody World, even boorish lumps like Roy (Brolin totes around an extra 30 pounds) know their classical music and charm svelte Indian artistes with their crude come -. Yeah, he tells her he’s watched her undress. Pinto doesn’t quite play that as a turn on, and without that heat, this affair-to-be makes no sense.
Roy calls her his “muse,” and proceeds to plot his way out of an unhappy marriage and back into writing success.
Sally, meanwhile, is smitten with her handsome gallery-owner boss played by Antonio Banderas, like most in this cast, given nothing to do. Bland “poker partners,” bland college pals, Allen has cluttered this smorgasbord with assorted servings of lukewarm porridge for characters.
Thank heaven Alfie hooks up with a tall, thin hooker, played with ’80s era Woody Allen zest by Lucy Punch. Common, cheap, and shrill, Charmaine is funny in every scene and Punch makes the most of her every moment 
on camera. Her presence tips us that maybe Woody intended this to be a comedy. Otherwise, we have no clue.
The writing is old — cobwebbed cliches about tea and palm readers and infidelities and Boccherini.
And when the bland narrator (Zak Orth) informs us that this is “our little tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” we aren’t inclined to argue. It’s not easy to call this the worst Woody movie in years, because whatever the charms of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” he’s given us a lot of candidates for that prize, movies that should have stayed in the desk.
Cast: Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins, Gemma Jones, Freida Pinto, Antonio Banderas, Lucy Punch
Director: Woody Allen
Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes
Industry rating: R for some language.
The first good movie of the new year happens to be a “tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme.”
“Beastly” is a high school non-musical updating of “Beauty and the Beast. Witty, warm, well-cast and often wickedly funny, it lets Vanessa Hudgens shine and Alex Pettyfer give a hint of what all the fuss over him is about.
Pettyfer is spot-perfect playing handsome, vain and cruel Kyle, the son of a rich TV anchor (Peter Krause) who taught him “People like people who look good.” Thus, Kyle’s lifelong aversion to “hatchet faces, “guts with butts” and “fattycakes.” But Kyle, the arrogant king of Buckston Academy, is playing with fire when he taunts the school’s resident witch.
Kendra (Mary-Kate Olsen, awesome) may be “Franken skank” to Kyle. But she’s not just dressing like Stevie Nicks and living “Rhiannon.” She casts a spell. Kyle loses his hair, grows scars and pustules and his veins look like the roots of a dying tree. Shallow Kyle has a year to make somebody see past his hideous appearance. He has a year to repent and make himself worthy of someone else’s love.
It looks like an SFX loaded “Another Earth,” with fortunes spent on the whole Kirsten Dunstr drinks her martini up/down, and the like.
“Upside Down” stars Dunst and Jim Sturgess, lovers upside down from each other on twin planets.
Dunst plainly signed up for this remembering how well her FIRST upside down kiss — with Spidey — turned out.
The back story to Disney’s Brad Bird film “1952” is that there was this fanciful, predict-the-future box of plans, notes, etc. from Walt Disney that had that year scribbled on its lid which Disney folks found after his death.
George Clooney was signed up to star in the secretive project, an alien encounter tale supposedly set way back when, whose title today changed to “Tomorrowland.”
Here’s my speculation on what that title change suggests about the plot.
It’s about a guy — let’s call him “Walt” — who has a close encounter, and who then acts on this encounter, creating a theme park and vision of the future built around what he’s been shown/told. Or tries to. Then, he dies and Michael Eisner et al turn EPCOT into a Michael Jackson attraction and over-priced turkey leg restaurant.
“Tomorrowland” comes our way in Dec. of next year.
Steven Soderbergh’s retiring. There’s no getting around it. But people like me keep asking those who work with the director what they’re doing to talk him out of it.
Matt Damon, an old Soderbergh pal and collaborator, said “If you know Steven, he’s a serious guy. And he’s serious about it. So there’s no talking him out of it.”
Gina Carano, the mixed martial arts star of “Haywire” said “He’s not going to change his mind, so I barely even brought it up.” Come on, she didn’t threaten to kick his butt if he went through with it?
“Naah,” she laughed. “But it occurred to me.”
It also occurred to Channing Tatum, whose stock has risen since Soderbergh put him in “Haywire,” “Magic Mike” and “Side Effects,” which opens Feb. 8. “But if you have to force him, well…He’s going away for a while. I expect he’ll come back.”
And Rooney Mara, another star of “Side Effects,” added this in a chat we had last weekend.
“I’d like to take credit for driving him into retirement. Clearly. I knew about it. I asked him, probed him. I did what I could, but clearly he’s made up his mind. He’s not the kind of person to just say something for effect. He’s made a very thoughtful decision for himself.
It’s totally sad. Maybe he’ll come back some day. For now, the next long while, he’s just going to create in other ways. You get to know him, you see how this is going to happen. I think everyone’s going to let him do his thing.”
A clip from the movie, opening in April. Not utterly sold. Kutcher’s as tech-savvy a star as there is in Hollywood. But does he have manic/ruthless/charming/icy in him?
I wonder.
Not every senior citizen passes his or her autumn years in dignity, surrounded by family, respected by the few peers they still have left in this world.
And if the retirees in question are grizzled mobsters, old “made men” who haven’t been in “our thing” for years and years, the last thing they’d ever expect be is dignified.
One might live in denial, straining to act out versions of their younger selves in defiance of the passage of time. Another might have, for all intents and purposes, “checked out” before he checks out.
And one might wear the weight of their years and the guilt of their deeds, hanging on almost out of remorse.
“Stand-Up Guys” is about three aged stand-up guys, a “crew” that hasn’t been a crew in almost thirty years. It has three comically charismatic Oscar winners in the lead roles – Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin — and a plot with room for comedy in it.
