Positive Liberty

À la recherche du Treehouse of Horror perdu…

Constant Viewer loved Ghost Town. It’s witty, well written, ably directed and skillfully acted. How wonderful, too, to see a leading man who doesn’t look as though he splits his off-screen time between a personal trainer and a plastic surgeon. Ricky Gervais (The Office) may be the least likely romantic lead since Renée Zellweger, but he is brilliant in this role and, but for the fact that Ghost Town is a romantic comedy, would be a worthy Oscar nominee.

Gervais plays Bertram Pincus, a misanthropic dentist who, having been one himself for seven minutes, suddenly sees dead people – and where did CV see this premise before – who roam the Earth still because of unfinished business. Pincus finds himself suddenly besieged to help the dead but not yet departed. Principle among the nagging wraiths is Greg Kinnear as Frank Herlihy, whose widow Gwen (Téa Leoni) lives in Pincus’s apartment building and who Herlihy wants to stop from remarrying. Pincus of course falls for Gwen and your basic romantic comedy formula kicks in at that point, but the inevitable complications here before the happily-ever-after are decidedly better than usual and CV was surprised to find himself both laughing out loud and tearing up far more frequently than usual.

Ghost Town isn’t a blockbuster or an ‘important’ movie and it probably won’t garner much more than average attendance or critical attention. But oh what a lovely movie! See it with your mate or, failing that, with someone you might have in mind to nominate for the role. Failing that, go see it with friends or, what the hell, go see it alone. You’ll be glad you did.

Traitor is a slightly better than average suspense thriller with a significantly better than average performance by Don Cheadle in the lead role. Sadly, however, the same cannot be said of his co-star, Guy Pierce, whose American accent isn’t too awful until it is revealed through dialog along the way that he’s supposed to be a Southerner, too. Pierce is a good actor, but we might consider going back to those halcyon days when honest-to-goodness American actors, or at least Canadian ringers, were cast in such roles. Constant Viewer knows all about the wonderfully talented Hugh Laurie in House and all that, but enough is enough.

CV suspects Traitor may slip in and out of your local cineplex before you notice it was there, as it was not produced by one of the major studios and received precious little pre-release advertising. As the contemporary crop of Middle Eastern terrorists versus U.S. intelligence agency films go, Traitor is a perfectly respectable entry. If you like such movies but you waited to see it on DVD, though, you wouldn’t miss much at all.

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If you waited to see Babylon A.D. on DVD you wouldn’t miss much, either. Then again, that’s equally true if you don’t bother seeing it at all. Vin Diesel turns in an acceptable Vin Diesel performance in this hyperactive but unengaging road movie. The road in question leads from Russia over the Bering Straits, across which Diesel’s character must transport a young woman (Mélanie Thierry) and her governess (Michelle Yeoh) from Mongolia to Manhattan. There are nice performances in comparatively small parts here by Charlotte Rampling and Gérard Depardieu, but the plot is so tissue thin and the directing so uneven and distracting their efforts are largely wasted. As was CV’s time.

Constant Viewer had never seen or at least never noticed Anna Faris before today, and a quick review of her career to date makes it pretty clear why not. CV isn’t exactly part of the target audience for the Scary Movie franchise, after all, and he simply didn’t notice or remember her from Lost In Translation. Apparently, however, she has a loyal and growing fan base, so CV was a bit disappointed today when he saw her performance in The House Bunny. Okay, so the material was predictable, crudely directed and, worst of all, not all that funny for extended periods of time. CV had read, however, that Faris’s performance shines above this otherwise indifferent movie. Perhaps so, but not all that much above and, frankly, that’s damning with very faint praise at best. Comparisons to Reese Witherspoon’s Legally Blond flicks are pretty much unavoidable in any consideration of The House Bunny, and neither Ms Faris nor this new movie fare well in that comparison. Still, CV would very much like to see her in something better than this mostly failed effort, the sort of movie that might, at most, be worth a viewing from one of those supermarket $1 video rental booths.

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Kansas. And two of their founding members — Kerry Livgren and Dave Hope — became born-again Christians. YouTube has everything. Here is their interview on the 700 Club (the quality is poor). My favorite part is when bassist Dave Hope reveals that in the past year he spent $40,000 on cocaine. And that’s $40,000 in 1981 dollars. That alone, to me, well illustrates why some folks turn to religion.

Good discussion on the tension between “Dust in the Wind’s” nihilistic lyrics and the tenets of Christianity.

Not so very long ago a movie had to gross $100 million to be considered a bona fide summer blockbuster. Today, however, $200 million is the new $100 million and a movie that grosses a mere tenth of a billion doesn’t even hit the top 400 all-time domestic grossing movies. That’s not adjusting for inflation, by the way. Gone With The Wind grossed a mere $198 million dollars, but, hey, they were 1939 dollars and a dollar bought just a teeny bit more back then. (In round inflation adjusted numbers, GWTW grossed around $1.5 billion.)

The summer of 2008 has had its fair share of blockbusters, in any case, even at the new $200 million threshold: Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, Hancock, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Iron Man and The Dark Knight, the last three having already grossed over $300 million each and several, especially including The Dark Knight, still raking in the box office cash.

The interesting question to Constant Viewer at this point is how far The Dark Knight can go. Obviously, it’s got sprinter’s legs, having beaten Mummy III this weekend and stayed in the #1 slot in its third week out. But, let’s face it, Mummy III is probably the weakest of this summer’s big movies. Still, earning so far just $5 million shy of the $400 million mark, The Dark Knight now ranks 8th all-time in domestic gross, probably marking the first time Warner Brothers has had a film in such rarefied company since Bogart. (Okay, CV just made that up. Basically, however, aside from the Harry Potter franchise, WB hasn’t exactly been a major player for a long, long time. And CV has the handfull of Time-Warner shares to prove it, too!)

This isn’t going anywhere, in case you were wondering. CV simply finds the business of show business, the industry part of the film industry, interesting in and of itself. So when a movie like The Dark Knight comes along (and CV actually plunks down the purchase price of a ticket twice for it!) he wonders just how big it might end up being.

One thing’s for sure. The Dark Knight is not going to come anywhere close to striking range of, oh, say, Titanic. Here’s a Box Office Mojo page devoted to comparing the two, together with Shrek 2 and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace just for good measure. Notice that Titanic (a) didn’t open all that big, but (b) ended up with a domestic gross of over $600 million. That makes it the biggest PG-13 movie and roughly the fifth or sixth highest (inflation adjusted) grossing movie of any sort, period. Why was it so big?

Because it was a romance men didn’t mind going to see. Or it was an action / disaster movie women didn’t mind going to see. Take your pick. But the next huge, history making movie isn’t likely to involve superheroes or animated characters of any sort and it won’t have to be rated PG or G, either. Somewhere in Hollywood someone is studying Titanic and figuring out that romantic adventure, not romantic comedy, is where the money’s at. At least that’s Constant Viewer’s best guess. Now, if only he could figure out a cleverly tragic, romantic way for the hero to die in front of his lover in the last act of his screenplay!

The Mummy: Curse of the Dragon Emperor is not, rest assured, a French movie. In fact, it is in many respects an anti-French movie. It’s dumb and it knows it’s dumb. It may even be a little proud of how dumb it is as it revels in over-the-top action scenes and dazzling special effects. None of its characters have anything like an introspective or existential identity crisis or, for that matter, would know it if they did. There’s never a moment when the viewer has any reason to suspect that the writers or director or cast seriously thought “Oh no! We can’t do that! It would be too preposterous. The audiences will never buy it!” Nope, Mummy III knows it’s all about the cheap thrills and delivers them up by the pallet load. Continue Reading »

So there Constant Viewer was, standing in front of one of those – gulp! – Art Houses looking for an excuse to eat popcorn. But first, a brief digression.

Lewis Black does a comedy routine about candy corn. You know, the little yellow cones with the orange tips (or is it orange with yellow?) that you still see once in a while in candy dishes among the sort of people who have candy dishes in the Halloween through Thanksgiving season. The routine is, essentially, that candy corn tastes like crap, everyone knows candy corn tastes like crap and yet every year we somehow manage to fool ourselves into believing that maybe this year’s candy corn won’t taste like crap until we taste it and, lo and behold, rediscover that it tastes like crap.

Okay, so an even briefer digression would be Lucy convincing Charlie Brown once again to run and try to kick the football.

Both of which lead CV to the real topic: French movies. Continue Reading »

Constant Viewer is sometimes asked why, since he isn’t paid to do so, he occasionally goes to movies knowing well in advance that they are going to defy the laws of physics and simultaneously suck and blow. Collaterally, CV is asked if there are any such movies so far beneath his contempt that even he won’t stoop to go seeing them.

Good questions. Glad you asked.

In the first place, Continue Reading »

Reader Chris Berez alerted me to the fact that the Watchmen trailer is up. It looks really good. Watchmen is the greatest comic book/graphic novel ever produced, certainly one day will be viewed as essential reading in the Western Canon. Comic book geeks rightly worry that the movie will ruin such a magnificent piece of literature. Based on the trailer, my hopes are up.

The best thing they could (similar to what was done in the movie adaptation of Frank Miller’s “Sin City”) is shoot right from the comic book and take as few artistic liberties as possible. Write Alan Moore’s dialog exactly into the actors’ mouths. What’s challenging is that Watchmen is a 12-part book and has too much content for even a 3 hour movie. So some artistic liberties are going to be inevitable. Hopefully the movie will be successful and then encourage more folks to read the graphic novel.

Constant Viewer caught the 12:01 showing of The Dark Knight in a theater nearly filled with some five or six hundred fellow dark knight owls, CV’s 13 year old son included. The theater almost certainly would have been filled but for a second showing some 20 minutes later. CV isn’t venturing any guesses about opening records, especially if you adjust for inflation, but The Dark Knight is a lock for this summer’s blockbuster, no mean feat when you consider the current competition.

Let’s get the accolades out of the way up front here. Christopher Nolan continues to astonish as a director, and no little part of CV’s astonishment is in realizing that The Dark Knight is only his eighth directorial credit. Christian Bale has certainly grown in the part since Batman Begins, a fine movie in which, in CV’s opinion, Bale was its weakest element. CV can’t remember when he didn’t like Michael Caine in anything since the original Alfie and can’t, for that matter, remember anything in which Maggie Gyllenhaal wasn’t an asset, either. Morgan Freeman has one of the most fun lines in the movie in a truely clever scene of attempted extortion and both Gary Oldman’s James Gordon and Aaron Eckhart’s Harvy Dent manage to impress despite all the stiff competition for attention.

And then there is Heath Ledger. Will his Joker earn the late actor a posthumous Oscar? If the voting were held by, say, Election Day, Ledger’s chances would be excellent. But The Dark Knight is still a summer movie, not a ‘serious’ movie, and the Academy has historically been chary about posthumous awards. Nonetheless, Ledger’s performance is simply breathtaking and, as entertaining as Jack Nicholson’s Joker was in the original Batman, this new Joker has to be considered the gold standard against which both earlier and subsequent super villains must be judged.

Ironically, however, the way Ledger’s presence overpowers everything else in The Dark Knight is, given Ledger’s untimely death, the movie’s greatest weakness; for CV couldn’t help but be distracted over and over again by the thought that this bravura performance could never be reprised. Imagine, for example, if Anthony Hopkins had died shortly before the release of The Silence of the Lambs.

Of course, you’re going to go see The Dark Knight no matter what CV says even if your girlfriend drags you to Mamma Mia first. Buy the large popcorn and soda, since you’re going to be there a full 152 minutes after the endless litany of trailers. Well, after all, Nolan is reaching for a movie of epic proportions here. And if he just slightly misses, the audience nonetheless was certainly not bored as the second hour came and went with another half-hour ahead of them. In fact, when the credits finally did roll they applauded. And CV, to his mild surprise, joined in.

Constant Viewer would think lines like “I’m not a baby, I’m a tumor” would be a whole lot funnier if it weren’t for the fact that countless young women have been taught to treat their unborn children exactly in that manner. Still, in the context of the Troll Market in Hellboy II: The Golden Army it’s a pretty clever line. It’s a pretty clever movie, for that matter, even if director Guillermo del Toro may have spent just a little too much time playing Rock’em Sock’em Robots as a boy.

Hellboy II is, after all, a boy’s movie based on a boy’s comic book. Okay, so as comic book characters go, Hellboy is on the other side of the comic universe from Nancy and Sluggo if for no other reason than he actually is funny occasionally. As is the movie. Ron Perlman reprises his Son of Satan turned government agency good guy (an oxymoron, CV knows) with plenty of the right sort of attitude, which is to say not too damned seriously. The rest of the principals from the first move are back, too, and CV was disappointed only in Jeffery Tambor’s character not being nearly as bureaucratically smarmy as before. As for new team member Johann Kraus, IMDb lists no fewer than three actors participating in what is essentially Robbie the Robot with a case of magical gas. CV notes for his fans, among whom CV is not to be counted, that the Kraus character voice actor is Seth MacFarlane. This explains the gas, at least.

As for the story line, Hellboy and his Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense teammates are called to the rescue when the prince of an ancient magical kingdom attempts to break a truce with humanity by reassembling a crown that will give him control of “70 times 70” supposedly unstoppable Rock’em Sock’em Robots Mechanical Warriors. The prince isn’t such a bad fellow, really; he just feels that human beings have taken over too much of the planet. His father and twin sister oppose breaking the truce and a family squabble of mythical proportions ensues. Oh, and there are a couple of love stories kinda, sorta going on in the background, too.

Del Toro obviously has a flare for fantasy yet keeps his tongue firmly planted in his cheek here even as he puts the characters through their more or less predictable paces. Hardly a great film, Hellboy II manages to keep from taking itself too seriously well over ninety percent of the time and settles sensibly for being a fun ride in Summer Movieland.

Mongol probably isn’t coming to a theater near you or, if it is or already has, it probably isn’t the sort of movie you’re likely to go see unless you’re already the sort of art house film buff who eschews Hollywood flicks and regularly uses words like “eschew.”

But Constant Viewer saw it yesterday and, as Mongolian language movies go, CV would give it a thumbs up (if CV had opposable thumbs like those art house snobs, that is) for beautiful cinematography, excellently choreographed and executed battle scenes complete, indeed, replete with splattered blood galore and the sort of epic sweep we don’t see all that much ever since David Lean died.

Mongol tells the story of the early years and rise to power of Genghis Khan and, lest there be any doubt, it is not a remake of The Conqueror, clearly the most grotesquely funny miscasting of John Wayne ever. Besides, Mongol is all about the gentle side of Genghis Khan; Khan the family man, law giver and all around good guy. It’s not The Wrath of Khan; it’s Yes, I Khan! (Now, if only CV could figure out some way to work The 39 Steppes into this review.) Better still, since Mongols are not what you’d call chatty people, this is the rare foreign language movie where there is absolutely zero chance the rare dialog and therefore rare subtitles will distract you.

Mongol is in many respects an old-fashioned movie. There are no surprising twists or turns and no flashy CGI special effects. It is, on the other hand, an entirely craftsman-like film and, as all movies should, it takes you somewhere you’ve almost certainly never been. By contrast, an increasing number of this summer’s movies take you where you’ve already been far, far too often.

I have a guilty confession. I love the Death Wish movies. I hear that Sly Stallone wants to remake the franchise. While I think the idea of a remake to be good, I don’t support having Stallone play the lead character. Stallone was also slated to play the lead character in Beverly Hills Cop, and imagine how bad that would have been.

Now that’s a gun.

Rather, Harvey Keitel would be the perfect guy, with the perfect build at the perfect age to play the Paul Kersey character.

The first thing that must be said about Hancock is that, its misleading trailer aside, this is not a comedy but a serious summer superhero action movie. Okay, so the phrase “summer superhero action movie” probably shouldn’t ever be qualified by “serious.” Still, Constant Viewer thought he’d be seeing something of a send-up of the genre; the superhero equivalent of Last Action Hero (a much maligned and actually very good movie, by the way).

But no, Hancock has its comic moments but most of them are, in fact, on that disingenuous trailer. What you see when the lights go down is the story of a man whose past has been lost and whose present and future, as a result, are in danger of being lost as well. CV isn’t surprised his fellow reviewers have been all over the map about this movie, he really isn’t sure about it, himself.

This much in favor of Hancock can clearly be said. All three principal players, Will Smith, Charlize Theron and Jason Bateman, turn in strong performances in well written, three dimensional roles. (Okay, okay, 3-D by action movies standards, but hey, you know.) Theron’s part is substantially larger than CV expected, a fact which leads to a plot twist that caught CV entirely by surprise. The special effects are fun and it’s actually refreshing to see the ripple effect, if you will, of the typical superhero’s good deed doing.

On the other hand, CV came away thinking that Hancock is a brilliant concept that has been almost indifferently executed. Surely a malcontented alcoholic superhero is a character worthy of more exposition and exploration than he is given here and CV felt almost rushed through Hancock’s rehabilitation so that the movie’s far more conventional story could get going.

Will Smith is an enormous talent with enormous personal appeal. Among his contemporaries, probably only Tom Hanks is as hot and as personable a star. Smith’s string of hits since before Independence Day is a simply amazing streak (never mind that CV thought Wild, Wild West sucked), and he’ll probably carry Hancock securely into financial success just on good will alone. Frankly, however, Hancock didn’t come close to the major movie it could or should have been, and that’s a damned shame.