Michael Cera and Kat Dennings in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist
Happy Monday everyone and welcome to LiC’s weekly look at how you the beloved reader spent your movie weekend. Consider it an open thread with a movie-centric focus. Talk about what you’ve seen lately or anything else that’s on your mind. You can even talk about Beverly Hills Chihuahua raking in nearly $30 million over the weekend if you want.
For my part, I tackled a few of the wide releases this weekend with mixed results. I didn’t have much hope for the first film How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. My interest began and ended with the cast including Simon Pegg, Jeff Bridges, Danny Huston and Gillian Anderson, yet my limited expectations still resulted in disappointment. What more can you really say about a comedy where you checked your watch more often than you laughed? Pegg evoked a few smiles, but Bridges, Huston and Anderson were completely squandered. Kirsten Dunst barely registered and pretty Megan Fox’s looks were no compensation for her utter lack of charm. It wasn’t offensive or even irritating, it simply wasn’t very funny.
This week’s Movies You May Have Missed features a solid line-up of three films that get 3 1/2 stars from LiC. Since these are all scheduled for DVD release on Tuesday, now is the time to readjust your Netflix queue.
Paranoid Park (2008) *** 1/2
Though I haven’t seen it again since I first reviewed it, I think I might like Paranoid Park even better than I did six months ago. With his story of a troubled teen teetering on the edge of oblivion, Gus Van Sant has put some of the formal experimentation of his most recent small-scale pictures to its most satisfying use. It’s still arty and some will find it pretentious, but if you give it a chance you might find it sticks with you.
With apologies to the international contingent of the LiC family, I’m pimping Hulu this week because they recently started streaming this underrated Robert Altman/Paul Newman gem. It’s not my favorite Altman or my favorite Newman, but it’s good and sadly they’re both gone.
Sunshine Cleaning, the story of a woman who gets involved in the crime scene cleaning and biohazard removal business to make a better life for herself and her son, made a bit of a splash at Sundance. The bad news is it looks like another in a long line of overly quirky indie comedies in the Little Miss Sunshine mold. The good news is that it stars Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, Alan Arkin and Steve Zahn.
Watch the trailer and decide for yourself.
Sunshine Cleaning is slated for some time in 2009.
AFI announced yesterday that two highly anticipated films, Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler and Steven Soderbergh’s Che will be making their West Coast premieres at the 2008 AFI Fest.
Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival, The Wrestler starring Mickey Rourke will screen November 1 at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. Che starring Benicio Del Toro will unspool in two parts with a 30-minute intermission on November 6 at the same location.
Forget about Twilight, here’s a trailer for a Swedish film about adolescent vampires called Let the Right One In that has been lighting up the Internet as it makes it way along the festival circuit. Word on this one has been very positive.
I missed it when it played at LAFF, but I’ll be seeing it in the next couple of days. Here’s hoping it lives up to the hype.
Let the Right One In opens on October 24, just in time for Halloween.
Check out the international trailer after the jump.
Martin Scorsese is set to direct Robert De Niro in an adaptation of the book I Heard You Paint Houses about Frank Sheeran, the mob assassin who claimed to have murdered Jimmy Hoffa.
“Painting Houses” is slang for a mob hit referring to the blood and goo splattered on walls.
No word yet on where this fits in to the eight or nine projects in development that have Scorsese’s name attached to them, but Steve Zaillian (Schindler’s List) has just been hired to write the screenplay.
Scorsese’s Shutter Island starring Leonardo DiCaprio hits theaters next October while De Niro will be seen next in Everybody’s Fine starring Sam Rockwell, Kate Beckinsale and Drew Barrymore.
The wide releases are a mixed bag this week so let’s cut through the crap and lead off with a couple of movies that are only playing in limited release but have received the coveted LiC stamp of approval.
Ballast Stark, minimalist and naturalistic, Ballast may not be the feel-good movie of the fall, but it’s a must-see for anyone who appreciates and supports truly independent American cinema. First time writer director Lance Hammer recruited local Mississippi non-actors to play three people who form a kind of reluctant family unit in the face of a tragedy that befalls them all. Ballast opened at New York’s Film Forum on Wednesday and it will open in select theaters on October 17. Stay tuned for a full LiC review and hopefully an interview with Mr. Hammer.
I’m hoping to catch this documentary about same sex marriage in the coming days so I can give it a full review before it opens next week. I hesitate to open a political crap storm on a movie blog and being a single straight guy I don’t exactly have a dog in this fight, but the fundamental equality of all people is something a strongly believe in and I don’t think society will truly be healthy until we get there.
Politics aside, I hope to judge the film on its merits as a documentary. We’ll see how it goes.
Meanwhile, the trailer just turned up on Trailer Addict:
Some people are so blind, they can’t see a metaphor even when it’s right in front of them.
I thought the protests over Tropic Thunder were the silliest ever, but now blind activists are planning on picketing the release of Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness, a film about society crumbling when it’s hit by an epidemic of sightlessness.
Marc Maurer, president of the National Federation of the Blind fears the depiction of suddenly blinded people as monsters will make it harder for the real blind to integrate into society.
Eileen Walsh in Eden, a Liberation Entertainment Release
Photo credit: Bernard Walsh
It’s not set to be officially released until November, but Declan Recks’ Irish marriage drama Eden kicks off the Los Angeles Irish Film Festival on Thursday, and it’s playing the annual Woodstock Film Festival on Thursday and Saturday. Besides that, it’s a terrific film and I wanted to plant the seed a little early.
The story of a marriage teetering on the brink of disaster is one that has been told many times, but Eden has an uncommon equanimity. This isn’t a story of good wives and bad husbands. It’s a human story of flawed people who are losing their way and it’s tinged with the hope that they will be able to find it again.
It’s heavy material, but the performances and the honest emotions are invigorating rather than depressing.
Stay tuned in the coming weeks for a full review of Eden and an LiC interview with the director and with star Eileen Walsh (The Magdalene Sisters). In the mean time, you can catch the trailer here.
Jennybee brought this trailer for the French I’ve Loved You So Long to my attention last night. The film starring Kristin Scott Thomas as a woman who comes to live with her younger sister after being in prison for 15 years premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in February and has been getting good notices ever since.
Jeff Wells has been especially high on it. Trying to outdo even Peter Travers, he says of Scott’s performance: “Kristin Scott Thomas gives an immensely sad but highly sensitive and attuned performance that you just know, minutes into it, will be with you the rest of your life.”
Apple has higher quality versions of the trailer, but (the suddenly spoiler sensitive) Wells warns that the Apple synopsis gives away too much of the film’s mystery and should be avoided. You’ve been warned.
This morning, MSN put up what they’re calling an “exclusive video” for Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, though many sources are calling it a trailer. I suppose it’s a pointless semantic argument, but to me a trailer plays in a theater before a movie. Anything else is a commercial or a promotional video. Whatever this is, it’s a more extended look at the film than we’ve yet seen.
I know there is a strong, vocal group of people who can’t stand Nicole Kidman, but I’m not one of them. I even liked her in Margot at the Wedding, a film I otherwise mostly hated. I’m still not sure how to feel about this one though. What do you think?
I guess you have to hand it to Spike Lee. He had a problem with the fact that Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers overlooked the role played by African-American soldiers in World War II and, after complaining about it, he put his money where his mouth with his own World War II film. The result is Miracle at St. Anna based on the novel by James McBride. The film tells the story of a group of African-American GIs known as Buffalo Soldiers who find themselves trapped in a small Tuscan village behind enemy lines. Because the Buffalo Soldiers’ story is one so infrequently told, it’s all the more frustrating that this one is such a mess.
Hollywood watchers were abuzz last week amid reports of a disagreement between Harvey Weinstein and Scott Rudin over when to release Stephen Daldry’s World War II romance The Reader. Always looking for a little Oscar juice, Weinstein wanted to release the film starring Kate Winslet in December after a test screening went well. Rudin, who has another Kate Winslet Oscar contender in Revolutionary Road, preferred to give the director time to properly finish the film by releasing it in early 2009.
After making some concessions (including moving post-production to New York where director Daldry is busy at work on the Billy Elliot Broadway musical), Weinstein got his way and The Reader will hit theaters on December 12. Could Kate Winslet be competing with herself for an Oscar? Will she favor Revolutionary Road directed by her husband Sam Mendes?
LiC says: Oscar Shmoscar. We’re just glad there’s definitely one more interesting film hitting theaters this season.
Monday: 9/29/08 The Watercooler
Talk about the weekend's movie watching, or anything else that's on your mind. Thursday: 10/2/08 Weekend Forecast
A look at the upcoming weekend's theatrical releases. Sunday: 10/5/08 Movies You May Have Missed DVD releases of interesting films that may have slipped under your radar.
