What do you think? Personally, I was already jazzed, but now I officially cannot wait for May 8, 2009. The following admission will no doubt result in several of my friends declaring me to be dead to them, but if I’m to be truthful, I’m more excited about this film than I was to see “The Phantom Menace.”
True story.
Anyone who’s been watching “Entourage” for a while knows that the show portrays Hollywood as a sort of suspended reality, but there’s no way that any director in the movie business is even half the crybaby that Verner is. For the last two weeks, it’s been unknown whether Verner simply didn’t like Vince or actually had a viable argument about his ability as an actor, but after the two disagree over Vince’s performance during the filming of a pivotal scene this week, I’d lean more towards latter. In fact, Verner doesn’t even seem to hate Vince so much as the idea that the actor was forced upon him, but if he knew that Vince was attached to the project before he signed on, why did he even agree to do the movie?
I wish that Vince would have called him out on that, but instead, he just points out that Verner is acting more like a dictator than a director. Maybe it has something to do with the language barrier. Regardless, Verner takes the comment one step further by firing Vince from the film. Of course, he doesn’t really have the power to make such a decision, and before you can Super Jew, Ari is on the scene to settle the dispute. When asked what he could possibly do to help Vince’s situation, Ari coolly replies: “Because the Jew has arrived and he doesn’t like Germans.” Plus, Dana Gordon owes him big after he hooked her up with that sweet gig at Warner Brothers. I just wonder how long Ari will be able to milk that connect before Dana gets tired of returning all the favors.
It’s her first big movie as head of production and she’s not about to let anyone ruin it for her, so she calls a meeting with Verner and allows Ari, Vince and Eric to tag along. What she doesn’t expect, however, is for Verner to turn into the world’s biggest crybaby right in the middle of the office. When Ari tries to trick Verner into thinking he’s just been replaced by Peter Berg, however, the German goes ape shit and starts running through the building looking for John Ellis to plead his case. The fact that this was all happening with Rammstein’s “Du Hast” playing in the background only made the scene even funnier. Verner would have been better off not opening his big mouth in the first place, though, because instead of getting his way, Ellis just shuts down the whole movie. The consolation is that it appears it wasn’t Vince’s fault at all – in fact, Ellis thought Vince was great in the few scenes he had filmed – but with no money and no prospect for another job, Vince decides to head back to Queens.
The rest of the guys jump on the plane with him, and poor Turtle is forced to say goodbye to Jamie-Lynn, who he’s just spent the weekend with after she called him up looking for a booty call. Turtle thinks he’s just being used at first, and he’s totally okay with it, but as the day goes by, he finds out that Jamie-Lynn is actually interested him. Go figure. Here’s hoping the “Sopranos” star sticks around for a little while longer, because she really brings out a side of his character that we rarely see. Plus, we finally learned why he goes by the name Turtle – because his real name (Sal) is more embarrassing. Unfortunately, that relationship might have hit a dead-end now that the gang is back in New York, but even though Vince can’t get a job, Eric and Drama still have careers waiting for them in LA. How long will they stick by Vince’s side while he tries to put his life back together, and now that Turtle’s finally been given some well-deserved character development, how long will we have to wait for more?
Director Takashi Miike is one strange dude, and that inherent weirdness is on full display in “Sukiyaki Western Django,” an unofficial remake of “A Fistful of Dollars” using a mostly Japanese cast speaking broken English. Set a few hundred years after the Genpei War, the movie takes place in a city called Utah-Nevada where two rival gangs – the Reds and the Whites – battle for control over a legendary treasure hidden somewhere in town. When a lone gunman arrives one day, the leaders of both clans try to woo him over to their side, only to discover that the nameless sharpshooter has plans of his own. Unfortunately, Miike’s homage to the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns feels more like parody, and the choice to have his Japanese actors speak English (even though most of them are just sounding out the words phonetically) is just the start of the problems. The story jumps around so much that it’s difficult to keep the paper-thin story straight, the dialogue is incredibly lame, and there’s a surprising lack of action for a movie whose trailer was loaded with it. Additionally, most of the comedy injected into the story doesn’t work very well (namely a schizophrenic sheriff who comes off looking like Gollum from “Lord of the Rings”), and Quentin Tarantino delivers his worst onscreen performance since “Little Nicky.” “Sukiyaki Western Django” isn’t even half the film it could have been, and while many will expect something along the lines of a fun midnight movie, all you’ll find is a great idea gone to waste.
Flaming Lips is one of those bands where the idea of them is easier to love than the band itself, and their foray into moviemaking, “Christmas on Mars,” will serve as the definitive litmus test between Lips fans and Lips admirers. Shot mainly in black and white, the movie takes place on a futuristic Mars space station, where several members of the crew are losing either their minds or their faith. There is also a woman and a baby in a protective bubble, aliens with heads shaped like female genitalia, Lips singer Wayne Coyne as a non-speaking green alien who saves Christmas for Major Syrtis (Lips member Steven Drozd), and more ‘F’ bombs than John Malkovich’s character in “Burn After Reading.” It’s all very avant garde – or as Moe Szyslak would define it, weird for the sake of being weird – and if you can make heads or tails of any of it, you’re smarter than we are. It’s a given that the movie would be odd, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be entertaining at the same time. Fans of the band will surely declare this to be their new favorite Christmas movie. Everyone else should probably steer clear.
A confession: I know only too personally the joy of early onset male pattern baldness. In my case, it crept up just slowly enough for Minoxidil to preserve a few token sprouts. Still, my “early onset” was late twenties, how much more traumatic would it have been if I’d been in my early teens? That’s the predicament facing the title character of this mostly irritating comedy from SNL gagster turned writer-director T. Sean Shannon.
Shannon doesn’t seem to know whether he wants to make a wholesome and small-scale yet over-the-top teen-comedy a la “Napoleon Dynamite” or a more realistic coming of age tale. He might have done slightly better with the latter because, despite his background, the ratio of good to bad jokes is about 1 to 15, Moreover, as Harold, young Spencer Breslin (Abigail’s big brother) is asked to almost single-handedly carry the movie. The stocky Breslin at times seems to be channeling a young Paul Giamatti in the scenes where he’s supposed to be way-prematurely crochety (apparently, he’s internalized his baldness to some degree), but then lapses into Michael Cera-style deadpan once all the old-guy “Murder She Wrote”/”Matlock” jokes we’ve been hearing for months in regards to John McCain have been exhausted. Unfortunately, neither really works — but it’s clearly not his fault. More experienced costars Ally Sheedy as Harold’s mom and Cuba Gooding, Jr. as his school’s wacky-but-helpful janitor, are equally at sea. Even cameos by such comedy sure things as Fred Willard and Chris Parnell aren’t able to do a whole lot with this unsure, and sometimes downright agonizing, material. While not completely wretched — I laughed several times and things do pick-up slightly in the last reel – in the ranks of coming of age comedies, “Harold” doesn’t really rank at all.
© 2026 Premium Hollywood
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑