“Queen of Versailles” is a documentary that plays like a pilot for a reality TV series. You think the Karadashians are trashy, that “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” was a high-carbon-footprint divorce waiting to happen?
Wait’ll you see see the Siegels of Orlando!
“The Big Year” is a comedy about competitive bird-watching. It stars three of the biggest stars from two generations of screen comedy — Steve Martin, Owen Wilson and Jack Black. So there’s little time for waxing poetic about our feathered friends, no lingering shots of the lovely, elusive and rare spotted woodpecker or pink-footed goose these men pursue to the ends of the continent.
The movie’s a lot like the pursuit itself — manic birders, pressed for time, jetting and driving and boating hither and yon, trying to pile up the most species sightings in a given year, not really appreciating the winged wonders in their midst.
Considering this cast, it’s not particularly wacky, either. That’s in keeping with the source material, reporter Mark Obmascik’s dry and perhaps lightly amusing book about three obsessed and very different birders piling up the numbers in the biggest birding year ever.
Maybe it went down something like this.
The day begins with the march of the downsizers — those “consultants” hired by big businesses to come in and do the dirty work of laying people off. Maybe one of the guys they cut (Stanley Tucci) is in charge of “risk management,” and maybe he’s been working on something. If he’s a loyal soldier, and somebody dependent on his severance check clearing, he alerts an underling (Zachary Quinto).
And that young guy does the math. They’re “exposed,” in a big way. And “once this gets going in the wrong direction,” their 107 year old firm, Wall Street and the world’s economy will tumble off a cliff. How that firm, its leaders and its foot soldiers react to this nightmare scenario is the subject of the superb Wall Street thriller “Margin Call.” Over the course of hours, fateful decisions will be made, employees will face moral and ethical choices and all of it will have to happen in utmost secrecy.
“These people,” Quinto’s math whiz Seth mutters and the outside world, “walking around with absolutely no idea of what’s about to happen.”
“Margin Call” isn’t a sermon, it’s a dissection, an all-star big-name top-to-bottom/bottom-to-top analysis of the sorts of people and the kind of mindsets that brought the world to its dire financial state today. The casting is spot on. Paul Bettany is the free-spending role model of what employees at this place aspire to be — greedy, self-interested, driving an Aston Martin. Kevin Spacey is the seemingly heartless boss whose callousness masks inner pain.
scuss This: Comments(2) | Add to del.icio.us | Digg it
The bottom line on any horror picture is clear cut and simple.
How many times does it raise the hair on the back of your neck?
How often do you jump?
And how much fretting do you do about where you kept that night light you put away years ago?
I’m gathering up the emails from studio publicists, one and all. Going over the 2013 release slate, compiling the list.
There’s a pretty thorough one at Comingsoon.net, an epic undertaking. Heaven knows how many woman/man hours it takes to compile it. But the studios change their minds about release dates willy nilly, so sometimes they’re late getting the changes. So when Fox tells me that Walter Mitty isn’t opening Dec. 25, well, multiply that hassle times a dozen studios and you get the idea.
Looks like an interesting year, on first blush. Will “Anchorman” return? Along with the Little Mermaid and two more Star Wars movies converted to 3D?
Does Henry Selick’s new stop-motion animated picture have a title, and/or a release date? Will “Walter Mitty” land on Christmas Day?
So many questions…Below the page break, find my working list — titles and dates shifting like ice floes on the Talkeetna.
Bullets, bullwhips and beatings produce slo-mo geysers of blood. Pistoleros launch into soliloquies on slavery and the German Siegfried myth.
“Django Unchained” is set in Quentin Taratino’s pre-Civil War South. Another indulgent movie from the cinema’s reigning junk genre junky, “Django” mashes together 1960s Italian “Spaghetti Westerns” and ‘70s American “Blacksploitation” pictures.
Hey, he got away with a fantastical World War II Holocaust revenge picture (“Inglourious Basterds”). Why not a “revenge for slavery” romp?
For those who simply cannot get enough of Middle Earth, Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” promises to be the ultimate Travel New Zealand mini-series. He and his “Lord of the Rings” team have taken J.R.R. Tolkien’s dense but slight and more comical “Rings” prelude, a quest to slay a dragon and blown it up into a trilogy.
And since the first installment, “An Unexpected Journey,” clocks in at almost three hours, well you see what lies ahead of us.
The settings are gorgeous. The effects are Next Generation spectacular. Well, most of them. Gollum looks more real than ever.
But in building in a prologue, in transposing character from the “Rings” films into the narrative, and in having the luxury of including “Hobbit” minutia by that fateful, cynical decision to cash in for three films here, I have to say the bloat shows. The hardcore faithful won’t admit it, but they could have told this entire tale in three hours.
Ian Holm, in the days before the party that set “The Lord of the Rings” in motion, narrates his first great adventure to his nephew Frodo (Yes, Elijah Wood). In his youth, he was rousted from his comfy hobbit hole by the great wizard Gandalf (Sir Ian McKellen).
And in his youth, he looked an awful lot like Martin Freeman, a bit of inspired casting that pays off right away. Not only does he look like a younger Ian Holm, the actor’s quirky Dr. Watson (to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes) sensibility in the latest British TV version of Sherlock Holmes shines through here. No one is better suited to be this “reluctant hero.”
All the dwarves want Bilbo for, of course, is his burglar skills. Not that he has any. But Gandolf told the dwarves, Middle Earth’s homeless diaspora, that this bookish homebody Bilbo Baggins was just the sneaky fellow to take with them as they try to recover the treasure that the dragon Smoag stole from them when he occupied their cavern-city ages ago.
To Bilbo, he says “The world is not in your books and maps. It is – out there.”
So out there Bilbo goes, on “An Unexpected Journey” to the land of elves, and into a Middle Earth made increasingly dangerous by the incursions of trolls and goblins, a hobbit (“halfling”) who acquires an elvish sword, a magical ring, an enemy for life (the fellow whose ring he stole) and the respect of a company of dwarves along the way.
Jackson has the time to settle on details – the moths who fly out of the literally moth-eaten beard of the dwarves. He can show us, in detail, Radagast the Brown (Sylvester McCoy), Gandalf’s nature-loving brother wizard, with a team of rabbits driving his sledge, even if he’s barely mentioned in “The Hobbit.”
Riotous laughs, breathless thrills and weeping pathos — film managed all that when the movies were silent, the movies were black and white, and the movies were shot on actual celluloid.
“The Artist” is a light, sweet, pretty much irony-free tribute to the silent era, an homage to the era when pantomime reached its cinematic zenith — that age Gloria Swanson, as Norma Desmond, remembered with a zeal touching on mania in “Sunset Boulevard.”
“We had FACES then!”
Like “Hugo,” it’s a movie-lover’s movie, a slice of early cinema history. But where that film had an American filmmaker (Martin Scorsese) briefly touching on the cinema’s origins in France, “The Artist” has French writer-director Michel Hazanavicius immersing himself and us in a sublime, serio-comic sampler of all that the silent cinema was, way back when.
Here’s what Omar Sharif, then a young actor who had only worked in Egypt, thought when the offer of a co-starring role in “Lawrence of Arabia” came to him.
“I thought it was a bit of a stupid idea,” he says from Paris. “I mean, there were no girls. All of the actors, me included, were unknowns. There was little action. And a lot of desert. The public won’t pay to see that!”
He laughs at how wrong he was. Fifty years later, “Lawrence of Arabia” is revered as one of the greatest films ever made. Newly restored, it will be in theaters nationwide one night only — Thursday, Oct. 4. And then in November, this newly polished classic will be issued on BluRay.
“It’s an extraordinary film. But when you are about to do it, you don’t see that. You don’t believe it will come out that way. You’re in the desert with unknown actors and David Lean. I had no idea of what I was doing. It was madness.” The film launched the careers of co-stars Peter O’Toole, in the title role, and of Sharif, now 80. He plays Sherif Ali, the friend, fellow soldier and connection between the British officer Lawrence and the native Arabs he would stir to into revolt against the Turks, part of Britain’s World War I strategy to chase Turkey out of the war. “David Lean hated actors. All of us. Well, not me. He took to me, a little bit. He was happy to have an Arab actor, from Egypt. He was kind to me and insisted I stay with him through the whole shoot, even when I wasn’t working. I was his Arab on the set, at his side, for the filming.”
Even when it was new, “Lawrence of Arabia” represented the sort of iconoclastic, uncompromising and detail-oriented movie making that Hollywood has never been known for. Director David Lean (“Bridge Over the River Kwai,” “Doctor Zhivago”) decamped with cast and crew to the desert. And didn’t come back until he had a movie. Today, a James Cameron might try to manage that on sound-stages with actors acting in front of green screens — the settings to be added later. Michael Anderegg, author of the well-regarded biography “David Lean,” has used “Lawrence of Arabia” in college classes for years.
“One question I ask the students is,” Anderegg says, “‘Does it really matter that the sun that rises in the film is a ‘real’ sun as opposed to a CGI sun? The students, of course, don’t think it matters; I, of course, do.”
Sharif agrees. “It matters that when we see that distant speck on the horizon, that it’s an Arab on camel back, slowly making his way into the shot,” he says. “Producers today? They wouldn’t let even David Lean make a movie this way.”
Lean, Shariff says, was not just a great technician (he trained and worked as an editor). He cast his films with people he trusted to flesh out the characters and waited for them to surprise him.
“A very clever man,” Sharif says. “He said, ‘You know better than me how to play an Arab.’ And he left me alone.”
Sharif had worked in Egyptian films for over a decade before “Lawrence of Arabia” came along. He knows that the film changed his life, forever. But he says that Lean was determined to make that prediction come true. “He told me, after the film, ‘I don’t want you to ever play an Arab again. You are going to be a great star. Don’t let them put you in a corner.’ And the next film I did, he had me playing a Russian — ‘Doctor Zhivago.’ I think he did that just to make sure I didn’t play another Arab.”
See Lawrence tonight — Find a theater here — www.fathomevents.com.
Angelina Jolie’s debut film as a writer-director has a cause, vivid characters and a compelling story. An ill-fated romance between Muslm and Serb set against the backdrop of the Bonsian civil war, it’s so involving you may find yourself shouting at the screen for the Muslim heroine (Zana Marjanovic) to make a break for it, abandon her Serb soldier lover (Goran Kostic) and save herself.
And like her heroine, Jolie also struggles with when to get out, unable to trim this involving but slow-in-spots political thriller to a faster, more palatable recounting of recent history.
