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  • “Do or die, Bed-Stuy”

    Do the Right ThingLike others, we’ve been paying mind on these pages to the 20th anniversary of Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” a film that now finds itself in the odd position of being both a period piece and a still-resonant state-of-the-nation address. Certainly nothing in the two decades since its release has surpassed it as a study of the intricacies of race relations in modern America. (Even supporters of “Crash” would have to admit that.)

    Anyway, my attention was brought to this beautiful tribute to the film’s legacy in black-interest magazine The Root, in which Kai Wright reflects on what changed — and remained — in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood that the film immortalized:

    Much has changed since 1989, my older neighbors say, but much hasn’t. We’ve got a few coffee shops for hipster art students—black and white alike—but Spike’s Sweet Dick Willie, Coconut and M.L. still set up their own corner cafes. They lounge on paint buckets and tumble out of parked gypsy cabs, interrupting their endless debates only to ogle women young enough to be their daughters.

    It’s hard to imagine a race riot anywhere in New York City these days, let alone Bed-Stuy. Frustrations are more likely to erupt inward—into domestic violence, drug abuse and depression, small beefs that spiral up into shootings. Maybe Spike can make another film about it, and this time Bed-Stuy’s people will actually do the right thing—and take their riot over to Wall Street.

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  • Jennifer Hudson sings for Michael Jackson

    I’m sure many of you have been watching the Michael Jackson memorials proceedings just as I have, so there’s no need to remind you of what went down. A largely tasteful, moving affair, I’m pleased to say.

    In the interests of keeping things movie-related (I mean, how many other Oscar winners can claim to have performed for the King of Pop?), I thought I’d put up this clip of Jennifer Hudson belting “Will You Be There” with immense spirit. Not the man’s greatest song, but it hardly matters. Say what you like about Hudson as a thespian, but by God, that voice can move mountains.

  • Small victories

    As “Transformers” hangs on by a hair to the the top spot for another week Stateside, there’s at least some minor consolation for the film’s detractors (and Michael Mann champions) in the weekend figures for the UK box office, where it wasn’t even a contest for the win:

    Title Weekend Takings Total to Date
    1. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs £7 639 884 £7 639 884
    2. Public Enemies £2 228 291 £2 228 291
    3. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen £2 214 505 £20 785 050

    .

  • THE LISTS: Top 10 first-half releases that deserved better

    Ben Affleck and Jennifer Aniston in He's Just Not That Into YouAround this time last year, we did a mid-year stocktake of sorts, wherein the site’s various contributors named the best (and worst) of what the cinematic year had presented thus far. You may have noticed that we haven’t offered up a similar piece for 2009. Time constraints may have had something to do with it, but given the slow start we had to the year, I suspect regular readers won’t have found it particularly hard to pick our favorites from the crop.

    As we’ve made clear on these pages, Kris and I are united in our admiration for such 2009 releases as “Public Enemies” on the large end of the scale, and “Sugar” on the much, much smaller end and, of course, “The Hurt Locker” somewhere in between. On our own individual tangents, Kris loudly declared his love for “Star Trek,” while back in May I went to bat for Olivier Assayas’s gorgeous “Summer Hours” – with the caveat that it wasn’t a 2009 release for me at all.

    (Release dates play havoc with such lists – using the U.S. release calendar as my guide, I could just as well hand year-best status to something like “Hunger,” if I hadn’t already done so in 2008. Even in the list below, I’ve technically cheated three times by including films that saw the light of day in my neck of the woods last year.)

    In any case, all of these are films that, wonderful as they are, either have already built devoted critical and/or public followings, or (as in the case of “Enemies”) hardly need further exposure. (Do you really need one more critic this summer to remind you about the wonders of Pixar?)

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  • Really, Hollywood? Really?

    Charlie Sheen in Major LeagueWe’re all accustomed by now to Hollywood’s insatiable appetite for rehashes, but nonetheless, two reports yesterday of imminent sequels still gave me pause. While one is as depressing as it is predictable, the other is just, well, weird.

    To deal with the former project first, by now you’ve probably all heard the confirmation that Mssrs. Spielberg, Ford and LaBeouf are set to dethaw Indiana Jones’s frozen corpse one more time. Of course, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crystal Skull” all but promised a sequel itself last year, but there was always the hope that time might stop, gravity might reverse itself, and the fifth film might not come to pass.

    Cinematical yesterday expressed faint hope that the series can be salvaged (if only because it could hardly get worse), but suffice to say the majority of the blogging world isn’t with them. Of course, I’d say this is the sequel that nobody asked for, but since last year’s atrocity still raked in the dollars, I can’t.

    No, yesterday’s title of “sequel that really nobody asked for” had to go to “Major League 4.” That’s right, “Major League 4.” (If you’re too young to know what I’m talking about, look it up. And then please kill me.)

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  • 7/7 Web Round-up

    Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard in Humpday• Good piece from David Poland about the age-old disconnect between audiences and critics. [The Hot Blog]

    • Marshall Fine implores you to see “Humpday” instead of “Bruno.” Why not see both, I say. [Hollywood & Fine]

    • While we’re on that subject, “Transformers” won the weekend box-office battle after all. Ew. [New York Times]

    • At the mid-year point, Peter Knegt reflects on the indie box-office winners and losers. [indieWIRE]

    • Cute feature, this — a rundown of the greatest credit sequences. Today: “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” [Cinematical]

    • On the web’s smartest new blog, a panel of critics re-evaluate Michael Mann’s “Miami Vice.” [The Auteurs’ Notebook]

    • Pamela McClintock contemplates the implication of the PG rating — after the franchise’s dip into PG-13 waters — for the latest “Harry Potter” effort. [Variety]

    • Speaking of which … my, how they’ve grown. [The Guardian]

  • Baldwin, Ford, Affleck … Clooney?

    George ClooneyIsn’t it funny how there are some high-profile films that you anticipate, see, thoroughly like at the time … and then promptly forget about until they crop up on late-night TV, in conversation or in some news archive, and you think, “Hey, that wasn’t half bad?”

    Such is the sort of flashback I had while reading on Anne Thompson’s blog about the possible resurrection of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan franchise.  My first thought was that the films are collectively something of a 1990s time-capsule item, and perhaps best left in that era — but then, my first thought was that we’d left the franchise in Harrison Ford’s hands 15 long years ago.

    For whatever reason, it entirely slipped my mind that the Ryan saga had already been rebooted and de-aged for the 21st century, in the shape of Phil Alden Robinson’s disposable but thoroughly enjoyable 2002 “The Sum of All Fears,” with a pre-backlash Ben Affleck doing the honors. Whether or not the film, with its terrorist-heavy plot, came too soon after 9/11, it did respectable business, but the overhaul didn’t seem to stick in the wider public imagination.

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  • Celebration of amorality?

    Johnny Depp in Public EnemiesAmid the mixed critical reaction to “Public Enemies,” I’ve been surprised at how few critics have responded to the film’s contemporary resonances: the dialogue (intentional or otherwise) between the film’s portrait of the Great Depression and the bleak economic landscape of the present day.

    One reader recently (and rather astutely) noted the film’s general lack of interest in the “people’s champion” side of Dillinger’s persona, which might indeed have brought the film’s social agenda more to the fore. But David Cox at the Guardian believes the film already celebrates Dillinger quite amply, and draws parallels between the film’s events and the present-day corruption of the banking system. The only difference, he argues, is that the Dillingers of today lie within the system:

    As he did in Heat, Mann toys with the much-favoured Hollywood theme of moral equivalence between wrongdoers and their state-ordained antagonists … It’s this air of pervasive amorality that most clearly links Mann’s tale with its present-day analogue. We may be seeing less bloodshed now, but we’re not short of our own kind of depravity. In some ways it’s even worse than the version that Mann portrays.

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  • Cheap thrills

    I was tickled by — and completely related to — this piece by Cinematical’s Elisabeth Rappe in which she expounds the joys of embarrassing bargain-bin DVDs.

    You know, the movies you know you shouldn’t own (and in some cases, don’t even like that much) but can’t resist picking up when you’re in the store and spy a mark-down sale sticker slapped on the cover. The ones you bury at the back of your bookshelf lest your cineaste friends see that you actually spent money on “13 Going on 30.” (Yeah, I did … and a well-spent pound it was too. Anyway, “Legally Blonde” needed company.)

    Here’s Rappe on her latest red-faced purchase:

    This week’s guilty grab was Australia, a film I was very disappointed in, and planned never to see again unless I stumbled on it while flipping through cable channels. But there it was on half.com, “watched once, brand new” for $5.00 … It’s really the perfect movie for knitting to, because I can just concentrate on turning my sock heel, and look at the pretty cinematography.

    My DVD shelf is chock full of such films. Kate and Leopold, The Long Kiss Goodnight (worth far more than whatever I paid), my entire Mel Gibson collection, Marie Antoinette, The Wedding Singer, and so on. The list is long and not very illustrious (Vanishing Point remake, anyone?), but at least I can say I didn’t go out of my way for most of them.

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  • Warm reviews for latest ‘Potter’

    Daniel Radcliffe in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood PrinceI must admit upfront that I don’t really get the Harry Potter franchise. I don’t dislike it — not having exposed myself enough to its components to justify such a response — but I’ve never felt remotely compelled to deepen my acquaintance with the material. I’ve tackled one of my J.K. Rowling’s novels, but the lumpen functionality of her prose didn’t tempt me further.

    As for the films, I’ve sat through two of them — and yes, one of them was Alfonso Cuaron’s expertly crafted but still personality-deficient effort — and found them both painless yet unengaging watches. I understand that they please millions of viewers, and I commend them for that. But for fear of breeding actual resentment, I think it’s better that I no longer watch them. The Potter films and I have reached an entente cordiale, if you will, and it works for both of us.

    All of which is to say that the more enthusiastic reviews emerging for the sixth (!) installment, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” (am I the only one who always has to look the full titles up?), don’t really move me one way or the other. It would appear that director David Yates and writer Steve Kloves (are we ever getting another “Wonder Boys” from him?) have maintained their general success in streamlining the unwieldy novels with equal attention paid to character and craftsmanship, which is a significant achievement this far into a franchise. But I remain thoroughly untempted to get in line.

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  • Chief basterd

    These new “Inglourious Basterds” character posters have been knocking around for a few days now, but I only really paused to look at them this afternoon. I must say, whatever my suspicions of the film itself, the marketers deserve a bouquet: I wholeheartedly love the cinema-steeped wit and intelligence of the artwork we’ve seen thus far, and this is no exception.

    Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds

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  • 7/6 Web Round-up

    Daniel Radcliffe in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince• Ahead of the latest Harry Potter instalment, a profile of no-longer-boy wonder Daniel Radcliffe. [The Guardian]

    • Ever a must-read, Nick Davis continues reviewing the decade, taking on “American Psycho.” [Nick’s Flick Picks]

    • Dredging up the Marion Cotillard 9/11 “controversy” … again? Jeez. [Times of London]

    • Nathaniel Rogers tweaks his Oscar predictions, elevating “The Lovely Bones” to pole position. [The Film Experience]

    • A Brit offers his perspective on the ten-wide Best Picture field … and remains on the fence. [ScreenDaily]

    • List of the day: the top 10 “apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic” movies. [Rope of Silicon]

    • Jim Fusilli chats with “Public Enemies” composer Elliot Goldenthal. [Wall Street Journal]

    • Andrew O’Hehir catches up with the wonderful oddity “Tony Manero,” which is gradually making its way across the the U.S. [Salon]

  • ‘Jennifer’s Body’ red-band trailer

    As someone who believes “Juno” largely succeeded despite its multi-garlanded screenplay, rather than because of it, I can’t say I’ve been looking forward to Diablo Cody’s follow-up with great anticipation. (Evidently hot soundtrack notwithstanding.) Still, while this cheerfully tacky trailer for “Jennifer’s Body” does little to change my mind in that regard, I do credit Cody for playfully running as far from Oscarland as she could with this effort — a canny way to keep the industry pressure at bay.

    To any Karyn Kusama fans waiting for another “Girlfight” … keep waiting. To any Megan Fox fans waiting for cleavage shots … voilà.

  • SUNDAY CENTS: Photo finish on ‘Ice’

    Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs*Historical figures quoted are adjusted to today’s dollars.

    It was another close race at the box office this weekend with estimates calling it an exact tie between “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” and “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” but Monday actuals might tell a different story.

    The third entry in the animated series (only the second major animated franchise to reach three films) earned $42.5 million for the three-day weekend and $67.5 million since opening on Wednesday.  Independence Day falling on a Saturday was always going to hurt but given the fact that the first two “Ice Age” films opened with $57.2 million and $74.6 million respectively, this is a bit on the low side.

    There really wasn’t enough material with these characters for one movie, let alone three, so it’s not surprising that the shine is wearing off.  But Fox will still cross $400 million worldwide with this sucker so it’s no big deal to them.

    Hot on its heels was “Transformers.”  A 62% dip to $42.5 million gives Michael Bay’s magnum opus $293.5 million after 12 days.  Uptight movie nerds need not worry though because at 12 days “The Dark Knight” had already amassed $333.9 million, so there’s no chance of Shia rubbing elbows with the bat’s total gross.  It does have a great chance of becoming the 12th film from this decade to cross $400 million though, and that’s a damn shame.

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  • Warrior

    I don’t normally delve into sporting matters on these pages, but I can’t not mention the history that has just been made this afternoon, only a couple of miles away from my own house. Today’s Wimbledon men’s final was a mammoth but weirdly cagey affair — certainly not as explosive as last year’s classic — between two fighters stubbornly defending their turf at all costs, before a tense crowd that included the disparate likes of Henry Kissinger, Russell Crowe and Woody Allen. (See, we’re still about the movies here.)

    But when — in the 30th game of the fifth set, a record statistic in itself — Andy Roddick finally handed Roger Federer his sixth Wimbledon title with a wayward, exhausted shot, the dramatics of the match were immediately swamped by its larger significance. One man. 15 Grand Slam singles titles. That’s not a record that’s getting broken for a good long while. (Longer still, if the man to do so isn’t named Rafael Nadal.)

    It’s not often one can bear witness to a fully-formed legend in the present tense — much less one who has yet to turn 30. Humbling. Hats off.

    Roger Federer

  • ‘Up’ becomes Pixar’s second-highest grosser ever

    UpI expect Chad may get into some of this later in today’s Sunday Cents column (unless his silly inflation observation gets in the way), but Pixar’s “Up” grossed another $6.5 million today, bringing the domestic total to $264.8 million, surpassing the $261.4 million “The Incredibles” racked up in the fall of 2004 to become the studio’s second-highest domestic grosser ever behind 2003’s “Finding Nemo.”

    I would assume the answer here is lack of demographic comeptition to an extent.  “Monsters vs. Aliens” was the only animated film within earshot of “Up”‘s May 29 release date until “Ice Age” came along this weekend.  And there hasn’t been much else for the kids beyond “Night at the Museum: Battle for the Smithsonian.”  That’s a solid month of focused box office play for the film.

    Obviously “Nemo”‘s $339.7 million is safe and will likely remain safe for a long time to come (and it’s worth noting that “Up” opened in the same frame), but Pixar’s latest has nevertheless become a personal record-breaking success for the studio?  And yet it’s not even in the top 25 for the decade, which tells you the leaps and bounds box office has made in the last 10 years.

    So, congrats to all involved.  Well-deserved.  Check out my interview with “Up” director Pete Docter here if you missed it.

  • Love your ‘Enemies’

    Marion Cotillard in Public EnemiesI’ve had a busy week, so I’m a bit late to the table on “Public Enemies” — but in a way, it seemed fitting to wait until the 4th of July to watch such a muscular, intrinsically American piece of cinema.

    Much has already been said on these pages about the film, so there’s no need for me to discuss it at great length, but I do want to say how befuddled I am by the numerous lukewarm-to-cool critical reactions out there. I went into the theater with guarded expectations — not being an ardent devotee of Michael Mann’s oeuvre in the first place — only to be greeted by something rare and rather special: a broad, red-blooded blockbuster that is nonetheless tailored specifically for adults.

    Calling it Mann’s finest film since “The Insider” may sound like faint (albeit merited) praise. Perhaps more meaningful is to declare the film — with its elegant synthesis of crisp, confidently linear storytelling and rich, unfussy visual construction — the most completely realized major American studio picture of the last two or three years.

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  • On the Academy’s tune tribulations

    Eminem in 8 MileFor the most part, I feel like this Eric Felten op-ed (in a new weekly Wall Street Journal arts column called “De Gustibus”) has its heart in the right place.  But in chastising the Academy for all but doing away with the Best Original Song category with a recent rule change, he takes some rather cheap shots at the group for awarding, in fact, some of the most worthy movie tunes of the alst few years.

    Forgive me but I happen to think Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” and Three 6 Mafia’s “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” to be, however on the nose, powerful additions to their respective films, and the Academy uncharacteriztically brave for singling them out.

    That having been said, it is true that members of the Academy rarely seem to recognize song work that stands the test of time.

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