Alright, we’re at the end of round one with a final set of 10 films. For background on this series, click here.
By the way, “Jaws,” “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and “Toy Story” were the survivors from the last round. Have your say in the left sidebar by picking up to three films to move on and join the 17 waiting the next round!
Just a quick reminder, get your votes in for part five in our “most influential” poll series before the 2:00pm (PST) cut-off. It looks like there’s a pretty tight race for the #3 spot. We’ll have the final first round poll later this afternoon and then next week it’ll be onward with the 20 survivors.
I knew five minutes into McG’s cumbersome, misguided, lifeless “Terminator Salvation” that I would be writing a short take rather than a full review. The film sucks inspiration out of the viewer in a staggering fashion. It disavows intriguing ideas explored in the franchise to date and renders a potentially exciting re-launch of the material impotent and meaningless. It is frankly difficult to give the film a whole lot of thought.
This glossy new installment is splintered with the shrapnel of smart and at times visionary ideas, both narratively and visually. But it has no idea which way is up. It is a video game, not a piece of cinema. It is the accomplishment of a filmmaker smitten with the work of people far more talented and far more dedicated to realizing something that endures, rather than something that capitalizes on pre-existing framework. And it is a nightmare to anyone who cherished James Cameron’s now 25-year-old creation.
And that might be a key statement. Not everyone holds that creation dear. And for them, a compelling film might be in store. But I wanted more. I certainly wiped my brow with relief in the summer of 2003 when Jonathan Mostow’s largely misunderstood “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” managed to bridge two philosophies under the same umbrella, but I knew something bigger and more thematically powerful was needed to recharge the dimming light on the “Terminator” series. Something with a particular blend of creative ingenuity and allegiance was necessary. “Terminator Salvation” substitutes confused storytelling for the former and eye-rolling winks and nudges for the latter.
Before I tear into McG’s “Terminator Salvation” in T-minus 10 minutes, I thought I’d offer one last sliver of positivity for those who, like me, love this franchise. The always intrepid Nathaniel Rogers over at The Film Experience has been writing up a retrospective on the three entries in the series to date, with extended looks at the first and second films already up. He’ll be getting to “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” in due time, though I don’t know if he’ll be including “The Sarah Connor Chronicles’ or not.
Here’s his intro on 1984’s “The Terminator”:
In March of 1984 when The Terminator began filming, the director James Cameron and the producer Gale Ann Hurd were no Hollywood heavyweights. Cameron was no one’s idea of a visionary (except for perhaps his own) and had only one feature under his belt, Piranha 2: The Spawning — auspicious beginnings! Hurd had learned the production ropes on B movies for Roger Corman. Cameron and Hurd intended for the dark, fast and cheaply made robot movie to be their calling card. Seven months later in October the movie premiered with only its deceptively simple premise (killer machine hunts woman) and Conan the Barbarian (Arnold Schwarzenegger) to sell it. The Terminator was an immediate hit, though not quite a blockbuster. It earned a Conan-like $38 million gross in its initial run (which I believe is something roughly in the ballpark of $90 million in 2009 ticket sales).
As a franchise it was a slow starter but as a stand alone movie The Terminator was anything but.
And on the 1991 follow-up:
The Terminator cost 6 million to make, Terminator 2: Judgment Day would cost 100 million plus. The budget wasn’t the only thing exploding: salaries, visual effects, setpieces, ambition, and public reaction were all supersized. Yet for all of this exponential external growth, Cameron smartly kept his focus tight and intimate.
Sarah Connor’s opening narration and the imagery of post-apocalyptic LA it plays over, both review the first movie and download Cameron’s game plan for the sequel…
In other words, it’s more of the same… only bigger (we notice immediately by way of shinier effects and massive fireball explosions). This repeat template is familiar but it won’t be comfortable. We’re also going deeper. The story structure is varied only enough to reflect the passage of time. But what has that passage of time wrought?
Check out each of the in-depth pieces over at The Film Experience.
When I bumped into actor Ernie Hudson, an incredibly nice guy, at a Golden Globes event earlier this year at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, I had just one thing to say to him: “I hope you guys do a third ‘Ghosbusters’ film.” His response: “Hey, man, I hope we do it!” Well, it’s looking more and more like Hudson and I might get our wish.
I’ve been hoping for a third installment in the “Ghostbusters” franchise ever since the 1989 “Ghostbusters II” came and went (a film many hated, but I adored). It’s just a comedy staple that I think could use another go. The first film is, to my mind, one of the most quotable films of all time, and if you asked me to offer up a list of favorite movies (not necessarily “greatest films ever made”), “Ghosbusters” would be close to the top.
As a reborn video game nerd, I’ve also been hotly anticipating next month’s “Ghostbusters” video game, which for a time was said to be the only third production to feature the continued adventures of the paranormal policing squad we could expect. But that just wasn’t good enough. And with a number of scripts, from originator Dan Aykroyd to “Office” scripters Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, there have certainly been options floating around.
The one guy dragging his feet on a new film has been actor Bill Murray, who has never been shy about calling “Ghostbusters II” a turd. But he’s been warming up to the idea. You might remember those comments he made at Fantastic Fest in September of last year, that the “wounds” of the second film have finally “healed.”
Well it seems that Hero Complex blogger Geoff Boucher has nailed down confirmation from Aykroyd. Not only that, but it seems everyone — EVERYONE — is on board for a third installment. Check out what Aykroyd had to say after the jump.
Speaking of “Antichrist,” while some doubted that the controversial pic would see the light of day Stateside, IFC Films is ensuring that it will. The indie outfit has picked up U.S. distribution rights to Lars Von Trier’s film, and moreover, has announced that no cuts will be made to film ahead of its release. IFC president Jonathan Sehring’s states:
“Since it premiered at Cannes on Monday, we haven’t been able to stop talking or thinking about ‘Antichrist’ … It is a towering work of cinema by one its greatest directors. We are incredibly excited to bring this film to America and expect it to have a major impact on audiences not only in America but worldwide.”
Given that the film will unquestionably land an NC-17 certificate, not to mention further media ire in the States, it’s a courageous move from IFC, and I think they should be commended for it. “Antichrist” certainly stands in stark contrast to IFC’s other Cannes acquisition of the day: Ken Loach’s gentle, well-liked character comedy “Looking for Eric.”
• Peter Sciretta asks for your most hated uses of CGI in movie history. [/Film]
• Charlie Kaufman talks “Synecdoche, New York,” his “mutant horro film,” across the pond. [Daily Telegraph]
• IMAX plans to cozy up next to James Cameron’s “Avatar” for an extended run. [The Carpetbagger]
• Donna Freydkin chats up “Terminator Salvation” star Christian Bale. [USA Today]
• Matt Bradshaw remembers the movie summer of 1980. [Cinematical]
• Christopher Campbell puts together a casting call for Steven Spielberg’s recently announce Martin Luther King biopic. [Spout Blog]
• Richard Corliss picks the top 10 Cannes films ever. [Time]
Charlotte Gainsbourg seems so impossibly delicate in person that it’s hard to imagine her mutilating herself on camera. I suspect it’s even harder to watch — part of what makes her a canny choice as one of Lars Von Trier’s notoriously put-upon leading ladies.
In this excellent video interview with the Guardian’s Xan Brooks (no embed available, unfortunately), given in the wake of the incensed media reaction to “Antichrist,” Gainsbourg intelligently defends her participation in the project, as well as her director’s intentions.
She politely but firmly dismisses the accusations of misogyny levelled at Von Trier as “stupid,” and laughs off the idea that she was somehow exploited on camera. (“I was willing to do it, and I knew what I was doing.”) Most interestingly, Gainsbourg suggests that her character was intended to be reflective of the director himself:
The character was called “She,” he was called “He.” So we had no identity, and the way Lars picked me, I had the impression that he knew nothing about me. He never talked about any film that I had done, nothing like that. So I didn’t have a clue why he chose me, but it gave me a kind of mystery of being this anonymous woman.
I really trusted him, and that’s also a thing that I find unjust when people say that he hates women. Because I really had the impression that I was portraying him. That he was the woman. That he was going through that misery of physical condition and panic attacks and I related to him completely, and I had the impression that he related to me, in that he was understanding my feelings.
It’s a measured, thoughtful interview in that Gainsbourg still seems to be coming to terms with the film herself. The video also offers some footage from the film that I hadn’t seen before — check it out here.
UPDATE: Variety’s Todd McCarthy bucks the trend with a decidedly enthusiastic review. He cites some problems, including first-half tonal inconsistencies, but otherwise finds himself swept up in Tarantino’s self-reflexive games:
By turns surprising, nutty, windy, audacious and a bit caught up in its own cleverness, the picture is a completely distinctive piece of American pop art with a strong Euro flavor that’s new for the director.
The best characters are non-Yanks, all of whom speak their own languages and one or two others to boot. But this commendable gesture toward linguistic accuracy is virtually the only realistic aspect of the picture, which otherwise soars on its flights of fancy and deliberate anachronisms — the use of David Bowie’s “Putting Out the Fire” at a crucial point is particularly inispired — and flattens out only when Tarantino gets too carried away with over-elaborated dialogue scenes, a problem that could easily be addressed with some slight trimming between now and the skedded August opening … (It’s) never less than enjoyable and more than that in the second half.
EARLIER: Blogger reactions to “Inglourious Basterds” may be scattered, but the first two trade reviews (we’re still waiting for Variety to chip in) read fairly similarly, and not very positively at that.
The critics agree that there are tasty morsels in the stew — rapid consensus seems to be emerging that Austrian star Christoph Waltz spectacularly outshines the rest of the ensemble — but accusations of overlength, indulgence and narrative inconsistency are to be found.
Are we talking another “Death Proof,” a specialized item that will have its critical and public champions but doesn’t return its maker to the world-beating crossover status of this earlier work? It’s early days in terms of gauging critical response, but with the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw crucifying the film (a “colossal armour-plated turkey from hell”), and the Telegraph indifferent (“not so much inglorious as undistinguished”), it seems the detractors will be plentiful.
UPDATE: Jeff Wells’s unenthusiastic take lines up with what I had personally feared from reading the script:
It’s not great. It’s a Quentin chit-chat personality film in World War II dress-up. It’s arch and very confidently rendered from QT’s end, but it’s basically talk, talk, talk. Tension appears in a couple of scenes (especially the first — an interrogation of a French farmer by a German officer looking for hidden Jews) but overall story tension is fairly low. A couple of shootings occur but there’s no real action in the Michael Mann sense of the term except for the finale. No characters are subjected to tests of characters by having to make hard choices and stand up for what they believe — they all just talk their heads off, is what it comes down to.
EARLIER: Total Film’s two men on the spot are split on the film. Sam Ashurst finds his expectations happily exceeded, and seconds the good word for Christoph Watz:
This is Quentin’s best film since Jackie Brown. It might even be his best film since Pulp Fiction … QT’s magpie eye has never been sharper, swooping down on Italian cinema and plucking the very best shots, framing and music to create a deserving homage to the spaghetti westerns of my youth.
Make no mistake, this is Landa’s (Watz’s) film. He is the Blonde Jules of the movie; the stand-out character that will be on everyone’s lips when they’re walking out of the screen.
Jane Shilling has a piece at the Telegraph about the gender politics of “Chéri” — specifically, the social disruption engendered by a romantic relationship between a middle-aged woman and a young man.
Describing “Chéri” author Colette, and by extrapolation the character of Léa (played by Michelle Pfeiffer in the film), as “the original cougar,” Shilling suggests that the story of her love for a man half her age is more provocative to a contemporary audience than the first readers of the 1920 source novel:
A couple of weeks ago in Grazia magazine an article appeared about a fascinating modern phenomenon. “Until recently,” wrote the author, Rita Sangha, “a woman dating a much younger man was likely to be ridiculed. But things have changed. Thanks to stars like Madonna, a ‘cougar’ – an older woman dating a younger man – isn’t seen as desperate: she’s glamorous and in charge of her own destiny.”
Perhaps, she would have been amused – though not surprised – to discover that the seductive alchemy of a love affair between a middle-aged woman and a boy young enough to be her son would seem even more scandalous in 2009 than it did when she sat down to write it, 90 years ago.
Shilling’s rather sketchy argument fails to bridge these two contradictory points — how is the so-called “cougar” phenomenon both laudable and scandalous? — though that perhaps accidentally echoes Colette’s own ambiguity on the matter. As I discussed in my Page to Screen article on the novel, Colette both defends Léa and Chéri’s generation-crossing relationship, but condemns a similar dalliance by of one of Léa’s peers as grotesque; the principal difference, it seems, lying in the two women’s levels of physical attractiveness.
Even the Batman thing is a collaboration with an artist, Christopher Nolan (as Cage tried to support The Pangs and LaBute – amongst others – and make commercial cinema with edge, like Burton’s non-starting Superman). Do we need to beat up a guy who did two Batman movies and a Terminator while also doing I’m Not There, 3:10 to Yuma, The Prestige, Rescue Dawn, New World, Harsh Times, Howl’s Moving Castle, The Machinist, Equilibrium, Reign of Fire, Laurel Canyon, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Shaft, and American Psycho?
Look at the list. High-artistic-ambition directors Haynes, Mangold, Nolan, Herzog, Malick, Miyzaki (sic), Brad Anderson, Cholodenko, Mary Harron, plus artistically ambitious commercial directors like Singleton and John Madden in his Shakespeare In Love follow-up.
David Poland’s defense of Christian Bale against a mean-spirited, thoughtless attack on the actor by The Wrap’s Deson Thomson.
One of the stories we linked to in this morning’s round-up was a Noah Forrest riff bemoaning the complacency of Tom Hanks in his recent work. While that might be a valid point, I still have a soft spot for things like this because Hanks is a natural. It also helps that the “Jeopardy” sketch has always been one of my favorites and made for a nice 90s blast from the past on Saturday night’s Will Ferrell-hosted season finale.
• Anthony Breznicaan reports on the big “Christmas Carol” to do at Cannes. [USA Today]
• John Hiscock talks to Ron Howard about getting around the Vatican’s disapproval of “Angels & Demons” while filming on location. [Daily Telegraph]
• David Cox, meanwhile, believes the film will indeed hurt the Catholic Church with its depiction of an organization out of touch with modernity. [The Guardian]
• And Noah Forrest just wants to know what happened to the Tom Hanks he knew and loved. [Movie City News]
• Richard Woodward reports on the Jacques Tati retrospective going down at the Cinemathèque Française in Paris [Wall Street Journal]
• A bit out of the blue, a list of the 10 best suspense films of all time. [The Independent]
• Erica Abeel talks to Steven Soderbergh about his latest, “The Girlfriend Experience.” [indieWIRE]
• Nikki Finke reports that yet another actor you could care less about has been cast in Marvel’s “Thor.” [Deadline Hollywood Daily]
• Well that’s thinking outside the media coverage box for you: a look at…ahem…the “slash” fan fiction of the “Star Trek” dedicated. [Newsweek]
• Sam Raimi wants to go back in time and do everything on the “Spider-Man” franchise differently. You and me both, Sam. [Hero Complex]
This strikes me as quite a coup for Overture Films, the young indie outfit that recently made their presence felt with a hard-won Oscar nod for “The Visitor.” In the biggest Cannes acquisition so far, Overture has nabbed the U.S. rights to Grant Heslov’s “Men Who Stare at Goats.”
The film, a political satire from Heslov and George Clooney’s production company Smokehouse, stars Clooney as a military forces agent who possesses the secret to paranormal war tactics. Ewan McGregor co-stars as a journalist who becomes inveigled into the discovery, while Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges round out the powerhouse cast. It’s certainly a lofty-sounding title for the little studio. Good for them.
Meanwhile, the Clooney updates are coming thick and fast. The actor, who it seems can put nary a foot wrong these days, has just signed on to headline Focus Features’ “A Very Private Gentleman,” an adaptation of Martin Booth’s well-regarded novel about an assassin whose plans for a simple final assignment in a rural Italian village are complicated by a series of personal engagements.
Which is all well and good, but what’s really interesting about the project is that it is being helmed by Anton Corbijn, the music-video master whose debut feature, “Control,” was one of 2007’s finest. This is a very different proposition for the filmmaker, and I’m looking forward to seeing how he applies his trademark atmospherics to thriller territory.
As I mentioned earlier, Jacques Audiard’s “A Prophet” is the clear critical favorite of the Cannes competition to date, with some calling it the one to beat for the Palme d’Or. If you’re wondering what all the fuss is about, this brief teaser offers a tiny but compelling taste. I can’t say I was expecting something quite so visceral from Audiard.
Pedro Almodovar’s “Broken Embraces” has just had its Cannes debut, and the notices emerging so far largely supplement the good-but-not-ecstatic slate of reviews the film garnered upon its Spanish release back in March.
Kirk Honeycutt, in one of THR’s slightly pointless video reviews, labels it “Almodovar lite” and discusses the film’s allusions to “Peeping Tom” (not “an old 50s movie,” by the way). Wendy Ide at the Times coolly calls it a “mixed bag of smart ideas … rather than a coherent, distinct work of art,” while the Telegraph’s David Gritten loves Penelope Cruz’s performance, saying it excels her recent Oscar-winning work, but thinks the film “treads water rather than breaks new ground.”
The case for the defence comes from Jeffrey Wells, who deems it by far the festival’s standout film at this stage:
A romantic noir about writing, directing, damage and healing, it’s easily the most fully realized, thematically satisfying, self-assured and purely entertaining film of the festival so far. Not as fully emotional as Almodovar’s best films, but on a very high station in the second tier. Way in front of anything I’ve seen so far. The only thing that could knock it off is the Tarantino.
Not sure why or how he’s dismissing the other titles he hasn’t seen yet, but anyway. I have a feeling this is one film whose critical consensus could see-saw between now and its eventual U.S. release in November.
With 12 the 20 Cannes Competition titles out of the way (that’s counting the already critically-examined “Broken Embraces”), a clear favorite seems to have emerged — and I’m both pleased and a little surprised that it’s Jacques Audiard’s “A Prophet.”
Pleased, because Audiard is a brilliant filmmaker who is owed more recognition. Surprised, because on paper, I didn’t expect an all-male, 2.5 hour prison drama to generate this much excitement. In the event, however, the film has inspired repeated comparisons to “GoodFellas,” and ScreenDaily’s critical panel rates it the best of the fest so far (closely followed by “Bright Star”), an endorsement echoed by a range of critics from Manohla Dargis to the Guardian’s Xan Brooks.
Of the rest already screened, only “Bright Star” and British film “Fish Tank” really sound like viable Palme d’Or alternatives. Meanwhile, those two films’ respective leading ladies, Abbie Cornish and Katie Jarvis, look to be heading a heated Best Actress contest. (“Vincere’s” Giovanna Mezzogiorno and even “Antichrist’s” Charlotte Gainsbourg are also in the mix.) By contrast, the only actor attracting major buzz at this stage appears to be Tahar Rahim, the young Arab discovery of “A Prophet.”
Of course, nobody has any idea what the jury is thinking, while jurors are apparently discouraged from reading the press about Competition titles. So when awards are dealt out, surprises are the norm. I’ve thought from the beginning that “A Prophet,” and indeed any other French titles in the lineup, were at a disadvantage; following last year’s winner, jury prez Isabelle Huppert might want to avoid showing too much homeland favor. Meanwhile, can Audiard’s entire male cast win over a mostly female jury? And with critical reactions so scattered, who knows what they make of “Antichrist?”
So many questions. And with several formidable titles still to bow (including the latest from Michael Haneke and Elia Suleiman, my personal, out-of-thin-air bet for the Palme), plenty more to come.