It’s Saturday, so who feels like working? Certainly not the Dude, for whom every day is Saturday. Still, meeting up with the far more industrious Morpheus could change a guy’s point of view. Or not.
“The Matrix”/”The Big Lebowski” mash-up via HuffPo
Category: Movie Comedies (Page 42 of 195)
It’s oh so tempting to slack off with more trailers and videos, but a few items too interesting to ignore…
* Regular readers, both of you, may remember a number of interview pieces here and elsewhere by me dealing with a film called “Middle Men.” Well, my interview with the film’s producer and presumed model for the lead character, Christopher Mallick, has become a lot more interesting over the last few days. It has drawn some unusually strong comments from netizens, and not for no reason. The Wrap’s Johnnie L. Roberts sums up how funds deposited by Mallick’s current company, ePassporte, have been effectively frozen — leaving some people truly in the lurch — and also that this isn’t the first arguably suspicious crisis that Mallick has weathered.
I will say that if you have over $240,000 pre-loaded on a card which I gather is mainly for use on porn sites these days (not online poker as I once assumed) — I’m no one to judge on this matter, but I think you’ve got a bit of a problem.
* A much more positive story, especially for hardcore movie fans, is Roger Ebert’s announcement that he is returning the format he and Gene Siskel perfected back to its original PBS home, with a few interesting new twists including the presence of the one of the universe’s more photogenic of cinephile bloggers, Kim Morgan of Sunset Gun, alongside headliners Christy Lemire and Elvis Mitchell, Omar Moore and Ebert himself. Nikki Finke, via TV Deadliner Nellie Andreeva, provides the turd in the punchbowl. (Please, Mr. Mitchell — don’t give Ms. Finke the pleasure of a “Toldja!” here.)
* Speaking of the amazing Mr. Ebert, be sure to check out his TIFF swag.
* William Monahan, who did such a great job turning the engaging-but-slender Hong Kong thriller, “Infernal Affairs,” into a full-bodied near masterpiece for Martin Scorsese in “The Departed” will be working with “Tron: Legacy” director Joseph Kosinski on something called “Oblivion” for Disney.
* Alamo Drafthouse will be getting into the film distribution game with a bang in more senses than one with their release of the ingenious, ultra-dark British comedy, “Four Lions,” which really does do for terrorism what “In the Loop” did for needless wars. A parking snafu created by the organizers of the Los Angeles Film Festival caused me to be 20 minutes later for the screening but, even so, I can’t imagine that the film will be anything less than one of the year’s best, even if its premise scares many away.
In the short annals of sports-oriented musicals there’s “Damn Yankees” and…well, there must be one I’m forgetting. Anyhow, now, at last there’s another and its about hockey and it’s from Canada and of course it’ll be featured at the Toronto International Film Festival which opened last night.
Here’s the trailer.
I’m not saying that the rather literally titled “Score: A Hockey Musical” looks particularly good — it doesn’t to my eye — but sometimes something is just so bold in conception that attention must be paid.
You’d think Jewish New Year and Labor Day coming so close together would slow down the pace of movie news a little, but leisure is for suckers and Yahweh is just another bit player in this hard luck town.
* The talk of the geek-o-sphere for some time is going to be the announcement of a massive and potentially trendsetting film/television cross-over adaptation of Stephen King’s multi-volume “The Dark Tower” mega-epic. Universal, which has had some very tough times lately, is taking what I’m guessing could be a make-it-or-break-it gamble on the project, the news of which was broken by Mike Fleming earlier. I’m not a King reader, but I am intrigued by the fact that it’s a western-science fiction-horror cross-breed. In any case apparently the plan is to start with a movie, go to a 22 episode not-so-mini-series, and then onto another movie, another series, then wrapping it all up with movie. The idea being to provide fans with both the grandeur of theatrical films and the detail and time of a television series.
It’s intriguing but laden with potential pitfalls. One is that it demands an awful lot of time and people who aren’t following the series may feel shut out of the latter two movies. The other is that, quite frankly, I feel the “A Dangerous Mind” creative team of director Ron Howard and writer Akiva Goldsman — who I gather will be writing and directing the first two films and the entire first series at least, which could be some kind of record if that’s what’s really going to happen — simply haven’t indicated they’re up to this kind of material. I hate to say it but winning Oscars can be negative indicator sometimes.
It’s not that I doubt their ability to crank it all out. Howard is obviously a very competent director who knows how to make highly professional material and I have tremendous respect for him as an individual and one of the more positive forces in Big Moviedom. However, he’s always shown a tendency to play it safe and often a bit dull when the chips are really down creatively as a director and none of Goldsman’s movies have been all that inspiring to me either. All I’m saying is that I had a good feeling about Peter Jackson taking on “The Lord of the Rings” and I have a bad feeling about it, though I’d seriously love to be wrong. Something tells me this project needs a real lunatic and Ron Howard is one of the sanest guys in show business. Huge King fan Quint at AICN has similar misgivings. He has a more riding on this than I.
* Simon Abrams is right re: “Kick-Ass” doing a lot better than people assumed. Even though I cover the weekend grosses here, we all make way too much of those openings and fail to look at the overall picture. Calling a movie a bomb that makes nearly half its budget in its opening weekend is just idiotic anyhow. The actual success of the film may have figured in the ongoing financial struggles between Lionsgate and Carl Icahn.
When the ads for Robert Luketic’s “Killers” started appearing in theaters, a lot of people were quick to notice the similarities to another husband-wife action comedy, “Mr. & Mrs. Smith.” But while it certainly sounds like a clone of the Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie film on the surface, “Killers” should be so lucky to be considered in the same company. Katherine Heigl stars as Jen Kornfeldt, a recently single woman on vacation in France with her parents when she meets the seemingly ordinary Spencer Aimes (Ashton Kutcher) and the pair get hitched. What Spencer fails to tell her is that he used to be an assassin for the CIA, and although he’s since walked away from the job in order to lead a normal life, a bounty has been put on his head that sends a sleeper unit of contract killers posing as their neighbors and co-workers to take him out.
Unfortunately, Heigl and Kutcher just don’t have the chemistry needed to make a movie like this work, and I would have loved to have seen what other actors (like maybe real-life couple Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson) could have done in the roles. Of course, that wouldn’t change the fact that the film’s biggest flaw is the explanation as to why the bounty has been put on Spencer’s head in the first place – a twist ending so absurd that it makes the rest of the movie seem even dumber than it is. “Killers” still has a few good moments (including a cameo by a certain bestselling R&B musician that’s so out of left field it’s actually pretty funny), but they’re not enough to save it from the film’s own half-baked plot.
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