Lorigen Engineering from JimTheFilm on Vimeo.
This film is from a first-time writer-director and I’ve no clue whether the movie will be any good and we all know that viral marketing is no way to guarantee a big opening weekend. However, the indie science-fiction tale, “Jim,” has my attention and it doesn’t need a big opening weekend.
Three horribly written, indifferently made prequels couldn’t kill it, nor widely disliked “special editions,” nor rampant over-commercialization. “Star Wars” mania appears to be stronger than ever in the hearts and minds of DIY filmmakers of all ages.
The stitched together, 15 second long efforts of people all over the country have now been combined into a feature length recreation of the George Lucas movie that, for better and for worse, changed the course of the movie business until this very day. In a funny way, at least this portion of the multi-media recreation brings back some of that seemingly long lost excitement and magic.
Star Wars Uncut “The Escape” from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.
H/t Peter Sciretta. You can watch the whole dang blasted thing here.
It’s very late as I start this and with five new wide releases this week, I’m not going to even attempt to try and describe all of them in any detail. In fact, I’m going to try and make this post as short as possible. Basically, the story is that the prognosticators like Ben Fritz and jolly Carl DiOrio seem to agree that last weekend’s megamacho winner, The Expendables, is the most likely winner of this week’s box office derby. That’s because none of the five movies is seen as being that strong.
Personally, as a geek who adores humorous, old school exploitation horror movies but who is also a gross-out negative gorephobe in no mood to have a bloody penis (!) thrown at me or throw-up thrown in my lap, I honestly don’t know whether to be happy or sad that the apparently rather effective “Piranha 3D” is not expected to do very well for the Weinstein Company. That’s despite what should be a successful formula of blood and breasts. It’s always worked before. The movie has been kept away from most critics but — bad sign — most of the ones who have seen it actually like it.
Expected to do better is the English family comedy sequel from Working Title, “Nanny McPhee Returns,” starring and written by the wondrous Emma Thompson as the anti-Poppins. The film, already a success overseas, is seen as having the best shot at kicking the arse of the ass-kicking “Expendables” septet, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Actually, I wouldn’t bet on anything because with so many movies out, it’s really just kind of a mess and anything can happen. I wouldn’t expect an upset, however, from the Warners “‘hood comedy” “Lottery Ticket” or the PG-13 Jason Bateman–Jennifer Aniston rom-com involving a “baster baby,” the aptly titled “The Switch” from possibly soon-to-be-moribund Miramax.
On the other hand, there is another movie that’s actually expected to do rather well and, oh god, I have no goddamn clue why that should be. I mean, if I was eight years old, I might find the title of Fox’s spoof film “Vampires Suck” promising. However, there is an emerging and near universal consensus that, whatever stereotypes might be out there about us Jewish guys being as inherently funny as, say, Canadians, they are more than disapproved by the past work of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. These are the guys who foisted “Disaster Movie,” “Meet the Spartans” and “Date Movie” upon an unsuspecting world. IMDb users are not loving it too much either, although there are nine women 45 and over I really wonder about. Hmm. Both guys have to have mothers, right? That’s two. Grandmothers? Aunts? Great grandmothers? Second cousins?
“Suck” is, I’m sure, the worst reviewed major movie of our not-so-young year. Indeed, the alleged comedy was on the precipice of achieving a rare 0% on Rotten Tomatoes when a lone contrary opinion saved it and got it all the way to a mighty 3%. No, it wasn’t the nefarious and attention-hogging Armond White who found something to not hate in a spoof movie seemingly dripping in the not-funny, but newcomer Michael Ordona of the L.A. Times. Or at least Rotten Tomatoes says it was him. The actual review, at least here, has no name on it. Is somebody ashamed?
The really sad part of this story is that the suck movie was actually released on Wednesday and had a surprisingly okay first day. In theory, it could win the weekend, and that would really suck.
Stay tuned — though it’s looking like my Sunday box office report will likely be delayed to Monday. Can you stand the suspense that long? I know I can.
“Piranha 3-D,” of course. Somewhere in the Academy’s heart it yearns to present an award to a film that celebrates the human spirit and its need to see naked breasts and genetically altered fish eating people, in the three dimensional way this crucial topic has always deserved.
Okay, two provisos: This is a little long, but there are funny bits kind of strewn throughout, and there is some of that NSFW language y’all know and love.
UPDATE: They apparently shortened this from nearly four minutes to about 2.5 minutes while no one was looking, Now, I find it a bit less funny. Some people are just impossible to please!
Okay, so it’s an obvious plug for the grindhouse-at-the-multiplex movie which opens on Friday. It’s reasonably funny, and I just like making simultaneous fun of the bread and circuses movie world and the middle-brow snobbery of the Academy. I mean, what if “Piranha 3-D” really is some kind of gory work of art? Would the Academy recognize it? Would I, gorephobe, feel like drinking enough to see it? The second is a lot more likely than the first.
H/t Movieline. I hope they’re just kidding about the penis, but you never know what they can get away with in an R-rated movie these days.
Here’s the new trailer for Gareth Edward’s “Monsters” which is getting a bit of hype on the geek blog circuit. I saw this one at the Los Angeles Film Festival and have an opinion, of course, but you can read that after seeing the trailer. I will say, though, that this is a very well done trailer but if you’re going in expecting to be hugely terrified or wanting to see anything like an ordinary monster film, you’re probably not going to like it. The R rating — if memory serves, is primarily for cursing and mild “sexuality,” not all of it human.
H/t /Film and here’s the official “Monsters” site.
Here’s what I wrote after the festival:
Ever wonder what would happen if an old fifties monster movie like the George Pal “War of the Worlds” decided to concentrate on characterization and its romantic subplot, and kind of let the rest of the story take care of itself? This mostly improvised film from effects guy/writer/director Gareth Edwards is actually a lot more like ur-rom-com “It Happened One Night” than the film it’s most frequently compared to, “District 9,” as it focuses on a tough-guy news photographer (Scoot McNairy) escorting the beautiful-but-engaged daughter of his media mogul boss (Whitney Able) across a Mexico plagued by giant squid monsters. It’s not nearly as funny as it sounds — it’s not really meant to be, nor is it as compelling as Newsweek critic-turned-programmer David Ansen was claiming, though there are some interesting political echoes.
It is, however, gorgeously imagined and, including the somewhat comically old-school squid monsters, something of a visual miracle considering what appears to have been a minimal budget. Nevertheless, Edwards concept of basically filming where he could and then trying to shoehorn those stolen locations into a storyline with entirely improvised dialogue, doesn’t even come close to flying dramatically. His shoehorning of effects worked better.
UPDATE: Merrick prefers the UK trailer. Whether or not it’s better as its own experience, I could go either way as both trailers are very good. Still, it’s also very nice and it is, in fact, much truer to the real spirit of the film, which for better and for worse is much more arthouse than grindhouse. See it after the jump.
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