Maybe I’m just allowing my expectations to get higher than usual, but I’m truly optimistic that this will actually be good. It’s dangerous territory for me to be getting in, and the film and its campaign are probably going to blow up in my face like that “can” of toxic material in the trailer. Oh well, what else do I have to look forward to next month? G.I. Joe? Inglourious Basterds? I gave up on my excitement for both of those long ago, and I want to be surprised by something out of nowhere. Unfortunately, modern movie distribution doesn’t allow for such complete surprises anymore, so this may be the closest thing I’ve got.

Let’s see what kind of buzz or buzzkill the blogs are inciting after the jump:

• Neil Miller at Film School Rejects is super excited that this looks better than Neill Blomkamp’s first film:
  

  As trailers go, this is one of the best I’ve seen this year. Perhaps even better than that final theatrical trailer for Star Trek, with its ability to show off just enough action to get the blood flowing and just enough story so that we know what is going on. The effects we are seeing here are leaps and bounds better than what we saw in Neill Blomkamp’s short film upon which this is based, and that’s saying something as those effects were damn good. I don’t mean to get hyperbolic here — but this could very well be the most surprising, electrifying film of the remainder of 2009. Take that, James Cameron.

• Marc Bernardin at Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch is ready to skip over this film and go right to director Neill Blomkamp’s obvious next project:
  

  Once upon a time, Peter Jackson was hired by Universal and Fox to oversee Halo, the film version of Microsoft’s killer military/sci-fi videogame…The man he wanted to direct Halo was Neill Blomkamp, who had nary a feature credit to his name but had shot a stunning short called Alive in Joburg, about aliens living a segregated life in South Africa. Halo eventually fell apart: the stated reason was that the budget had spiraled out of control, but underneath that was the fact that no one wanted to spend ungodly sums of money on a Halo movie that Jackson himself didn’t direct. No one wanted to be in the Neill Blomkamp business. Something tells me that District 9 might change some minds.

• Guy Lodge at In Contention is beginning to lose interest:
  

  Can’t say I’m as sold on the venture as others are — and the new trailer makes it look rather broader and less enigmatic than what we were originally led to expect — but I’m always up for seeing my hometown of Johannesburg show its sun-bleached colors on screen. Represent, Joeys.

• Vince Mancini at Film Drunk smells racism on the director’s breath:
  

  Anyway, the humans fear the aliens, so they marginalize them from society and control their movements, and the aliens’ frustrations eventually makes them violent, which only proves to the humans they were right to stick them in ghettoes all along. Anyone else smell a parable for Palestinians, or some other ethnic minority group?  Then again, the director’s South African, so it might just be an allegory for how much he hates black people.  They can get away with that in South Africa.  Why?  Diplomatic immunity.

• Swarez at Twitch is only critical because he’s jealous:
  

  I hate Neill Blomkamp. Hate him. Why you ask?
  Because the talented bastard is only 30 years old, four years younger than me and he’s probably gone and made the best sci-fi film this year.

• Rob Bricken at Topless Robot once again compares this film to its biggest August competitor:
  

  It would be downright asinine of me to use the word “good” to describe both the G.I. Joe trailer with the new trailer for the sci-fi flick District 9, which I think we can all agree looks definitively “good.”  It also appears to be science fiction, have aliens, action scenes but also a coherent plot that makes sense within its sci-fi world. Wacky!

• Brian Prisco at Pajiba believes it can’t be much worse than G.I. Joe, but he’s wary and critical at this juncture:
  

  I thought it’d be a lot more low tech than it is: there are glimmerings of Independence Day with the action sequences in the new trailer. I had been hoping for a little Alien Nation action — James Caan and Mandy Patinkin with super shotguns and hyperviolence. It’s rated R for bloody violence, which should give us all hope. The fat lady might sing, but that bitch is gonna be covered in a bucket of blood when she do. It seems like it’s got a pretty sinister sense of humor, but I’m not holding my breath. The aliens look like a combination of cockroaches and toasters.

• Rob Keyes at ScreenRant has no problem with an ID4 comparison:
  

  We even finally get to see what all those viral ads look like in the actual movie. I love this trailer and to me, it feels like a hyper-real documentary of what Independence Day would of looked like in a more realistic situation (minus the whole global destruction upon first contact thing).

  I’ve been looking forward to seeing this ever since the project began and now my excitement seems more justified than ever. I’ll be there opening day for sure.

• John at The Movie Blog shares an email he received from a reader that apparently proves this movie is only tracking so well because of Peter Jackson’s name. From that email:
  

  I decided to do a little experiment. I used my Vegas editing program to take the District 9 trailer and just edited out Neill Blomkamp’s and Peter Jackson’s names and inserted Michael Bay’s name. When I got to work I showed a couple of people the version with Jackson’s name and then some other people the version with Bay’s name. The results were sad.

  Every single person I showed the trailer to with Jackson and Blomkamp’s name on it (I explained who they both were) loved it and thought it was awesome. When I showed the exact same trailer with Bay’s name on it instead, people said it looked awful. The only change I made was the name on it. Nothing else.

• Ben Child at Guardian Film Blog also thinks this film is actually being marketed as something akin to Michael Bay’s latest, but hopes it might really be a throwback to pre-blockbuster sci-fi:
  

  What’s a little confusing is that the creatures appear to be organic organisms in some scenes, and metallic mechanoids in others, leading some to speculate that Blomkamp has tried to inject a man v machine element into the mix, in an apparent bid to tap into the Transformers/Terminator market…District 9 will also live or die according to how well it satirises apartheid: overdo it, and Blomkamp and co risk appearing exploitative, but hit it dead on and this could be a late-era addition to the canon of classic Soylent Green-esque sociological sci-fi, the sort of thing that became a rarity after George Lucas introduced the world to space opera with 1977’s Star Wars.

• Owen Williams at Empire points out that this is just a latecomer in a summer ‘09 trend:
  

  We knew about the documentary approach from the teaser trailer (also up at Yahoo) but the full clip gives a pretty good idea of the scale of the action too, with a lot of quick shots of firefights between ground troops and what look like giant mechanoids. Which makes for the third humanity-versus-robots rumble this summer, after Terminator: Salvation and Transformers: ROFL (sorry, ROTF).

• Daniel Dumas at Underwire sees the opposite:
  

  The film’s smart concept of alien refugees stranded in South Africa and forced to endure apartheid-like treatment seems like the perfect antidote to summertime CGI circle-jerks like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

• Mark Graham at Vulture also sees the opposite, but the placement in Cloverfield company isn’t too gracious:
  

  We’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again: District 9 is well positioned to be this year’s Cloverfield. The similarities between the two films are striking in that both feature a riveting sci-fi-leaning plot, a cast of no-name actors, and some impressive yet understated special effects (read: the exact opposite of anything you saw in Transformers: RotF).

• Wookie Johnson at Screen Junkies offers some other comparisons:
  

  It’s like they put Signs, Iron Man, and Slumdog Millionaire into a blender but instead of setting to “Blend” they went straight to “Purée Your Balls Awesome.” And now my balls are but a frothy soup. So much for having children, I guess. Is it wrong that I’m totally okay with this?

Here’s the trailer, courtesy of Yahoo!:

Just as we’d prefer for Hollywood to remake bad films rather than beloved classics, we’d also like to see more TV adaptations of obscure and failed series — as long as there’s going to be such a giant void of creativity anyway, why not go for the forgotten titles and at least make it seem like you’ve got fresh ideas?

Unfortunately, Hollywood continues to ignore our logic and is instead adapting the popular 80s cop show T.J. Hooker for the big screen. It may not be the most familiar or beloved series of all time, but it has enough name recognition to make it a success, a la the S.W.A.T. and Starsky & Hutch movies before it.

We have no interest in yet another veteran/rookie team-up, though, especially a blatantly recycled one. So we decided to mine deeper into our TV Guide issues from the 80s and pick out some lesser-known high-concept shows that would make awesome movies if only they had more of a built-in, nostalgic audience to justify a green light.

Check out our pitches after the jump, and thank us when Hollywood gets wise to the ideas.

Automan
Originally aired on ABC, 1983 – 1984

With a new TRON movie on the way, an adaptation of this TV knock-off may seem unnecessary, but it’s different enough in plot that it could work, provided the visuals are updated and changed from the glowing blue color scheme that linked it with Disney’s film. The premise involves a computer-whiz cop who creates an artificial intelligence hologram that can enter the real world (see, it’s inversely separate from TRON) and assist the policeman in his crime fighting. “Automan,” the hologram character, also comes with a sidekick in the form of a little ball of light (named “Cursor”), which can draw objects, including vehicles such as Lamborghinis and helicopters, as needed for the case at hand. We see it as The Matrix meets Knight Rider (both shows were created by Glen A. Larson) meets TRON (obviously) meets a buddy cop movie.

The Charmings
Originally aired on ABC, 1987 – 1988

Enchanted was such a box office smash that it’s surprising Sony didn’t bother to dust this show off and turn it into a similar family film. Instead of a mere princess transported to the real world, The Charmings features Snow White, Prince Charming, their two sons, the wicked stepmother and a dwarf, all of whom magically sleep for a millennium and wake up in modern-day California. There’s also a magic mirror, of course. Get Anne Hathaway and Channing Tatum to star with Meryl Streep as the evil Queen Lillian and Tracy Morgan as the mirror and you’ve got a new fantasy favorite, especially now that there’s been a few years since Enchanted and nobody will even notice the likeness.

Jennifer Slept Here
Originally aired on NBC, 1983 – 1984

Imagine your house was haunted by a famous actress. That’s pretty much the plot of Jennifer Slept Here, in which a family moves into the home of recently deceased movie star Jennifer Farrell, and she’s still residing there. Only the teenage son can see her, though, so it’s kind of like Beetlejuice meets Sunset Blvd. We think the actress’ age should be brought down a lot so she’s about the same age as the kid, and they have a bit of an impossible romantic situation going on. Cast Megan Fox as the titular ghost and turn it into a sort of teen sex comedy, and the kids will flock to it a great deal faster than they did for the last few ghost comedies, Ghost Town and Over Her Dead Body.

Manimal
Originally aired on NBC, 1983

It may have been canceled before even Jennifer Slept Here in one of NBC’s worst seasons for new shows ever, but this title has a lot more going for it. Even if people don’t remember the short-lived series, they may think they do, because the name is so catchy. It also helps that Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Talladega Nights and Foo Fighters all referenced the show, which involves a crime fighter who can shape-shift into a hawk, a snake or a black panther. Though this could be a somewhat serious cross between the Batman and X-Men movies, due to its cheesy and cultish legacy we see the movie as a comedy and for some reason picture Owen Wilson starring.

Outlaws
Originally aired on CBS, 1986 – 1987

It’s similar in plot to The Charmings, but Outlaws features cowboys rather than medieval fairy tale characters. Specifically the cowboys consist of one Old West sheriff and four members of an outlaw gang of which he used to be a member. Upon being struck by lightning, the five men travel about a century into the future, make a truce and set up a “detection” agency. The scenario may seem to require a silly tone, but just imagine it as a serious mix of Young Guns, The Cowboy Way and a Walker, Texas Ranger TV movie, with hot young stars (Robert Pattinson as one of the five, perhaps?) as the displaced detectives.

Rubik, the Amazing Cube
Originally aired on ABC, 1983 – 1984

After the recent announcement of the View-Master movie, many people wondered when there’d be a Rubik’s Cube film in the works. Well, if (when) there ends up such a project, it should be based on this Saturday morning cartoon about a magical Rubik’s Cube toy that comes to life when all its colored squares are arranged back in place. “Rubik” befriends the three Rodriguez siblings, who are masters at solving the puzzle, and aids them against an evil magician. With a primarily Hispanic cast, the movie should be especially popular in Latino markets. And Ricky Martin, whose band Menudo performed the cartoon’s theme song, should appropriately be prominent on the film’s soundtrack. Of course, Hollywood being Hollywood, the ethnicity would more likely be whitened so that the Jonas Brothers could star.

She’s the Sheriff
Originally syndicated, 1987 – 1989

The TV show was about the widow of a killed sheriff who is for some reason appointed her late husband’s position (over the eligible deputies), but we think a movie based on the series should go further. Call it She’s the President and have Anna Faris (or Elizabeth Banks or Reese Witherspoon) play a First Lady whose hubby is assassinated, and she’s somehow sworn in as Commander-in-Chief instead of the Vice President. Ludicrous, sure, but given Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House and everyone’s probable preference for Michelle Obama over Joe Biden, the comedy wouldn’t seem like too much of a stretch.

Small Wonder
Originally syndicated, 1985 – 1989

It may not be as obscure as the rest of the shows on this list, but Small Wonder was hardly popular enough, even with a cult audience, to be considered a sure thing by Hollywood producers looking for an easy exploit. Still, as the bottoms of barrels are scraped for ideas, eventually it’ll be a likely candidate for a film adaptation. Never mind that it could veer awfully close to being a creepy, pedophilic knock-off of A.I. A comedy about a family that includes a robot daughter/sister, one with super human strength and literal understanding, is timelessly hilarious, and plenty of young moviegoers unfamiliar with the original series will want to see it. Especially with Miley Cyrus in the role of “V.I.C.I.”

Starstuff
Originally aired on WCAU-TV (Philadelphia’s local NBC affiliate), 1980

Probably the most obscure title on the list, given that it was a local kids’ show, Starstuff isn’t any less ripe for a film adaptation. The main premise involves a young boy in the present who can communicate, via computer, with a young girl who lives on a space station 30 years in the future. Think Frequency meets The Lake House (and the original version, Il Mare), but for a family audience. Although we’re now living in the time that the girl was supposedly residing in, the plot should remain the same, with the boy living in the present (2010, or whenever). And maybe the end of the movie could have the boy, at age 40, finally physically meet the girl, at age 20, and they fall in love. Or would that be a bit weird and inappropriate?

Voyagers!
Originally aired on NBC, 1982 – 1983

We seem to recall this being re-aired by the Sci Fi Channel, so it might have gained a new audience recently, but even if that were not the case this short-lived cross between Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Time Bandits and TV’s Sliders and Quantum Leap (with some Night at the Museum possibly thrown in) would still make for a terrific movie. It follows a time traveler whose job is to navigate history and make sure events unfold as they’re supposed to. After his guidebook is lost, he teams up with a kid who knows his history well, and the duo set off to put right what could go wrong. The film should somewhat follow the plot of the “Trial of Phineas Bogg” episode, because it deals with the lost guidebook and also features an actual villain, the evil Voyager Drake — who should be played by the rapper Drake. As for the leads, we’re thinking a reunion of Role Models‘ Paul Rudd and Christopher Mintz-Plasse, because the kid should be that nerdy.

Honestly, I haven’t been interested in anything adapted from an SNL character since the disappointing Coneheads, so I was perfectly happy to ignore the announcement of a MacGruber movie altogether. However, it seems to be striking a nerve with the rest of the film blog community today.  So I present you with their mostly negative reactions after the jump:

• Jenni Miller at Cinematical recognizes the worthlessness of these SNL movies to a castmember’s career:
  

  While many writers and actors have gotten their start on SNL, very few of the skits themselves have translated successfully to the big screen. Will Ferrell was able to shake off the stench of A Night at the Roxbury well enough to make a slew of really funny movies and is now also writing and exec producing

• Steven Zeitchik at Risky Biz Blog recognizes the intelligence behind the greenlighting of this project:
  

  But though the skit savvily plays on nostalgia, it’s hardly a remake, nor does it rely lazily on brand association; when you watch the bits (you can find one here ) the cleverness hits you whether or not you’ve seen the original.

  That these sketches gained added currency after they went viral is a good sign. The Web component shows that movie execs finally seem to get what their television counterparts have understood for years: that it’s far smarter to try to take advantage of what people are watching on their computers instead of the alternative, crossing your arms and saying you work in a different medium.

• Chris Hewitt at Empire focuses on the stretching of the joke:
  

  Sounds formulaic, and you’d be right. But Forte, who co-writes the skits with The Lonely Island’s Jorma Taccone, who also directs, has kept the joke alive brilliantly, introducing an increasingly tortured back-story for MacGruber (he’s an alcoholic financial failure with daddy issues, a gay son… and he can shoot ping pong balls out of his butt).

  Of course, the sketch premise won’t stretch out to a full-length film, so Forte and Taccone – who’s also directing the movie – have gone for a plot that sounds like a parody of Rambo, Commando and even The Expendables.

• Nathan Rabin at A.V. Club may actually be looking forward to this:
  

  Being fans of Forte, The Lonely Island and the character we’re cautiously optimistic. Besides, if movies like Superstar and It’s Pat: The Movie have taught us anything, it’s that if an idea is funny in bite-sized chunks, it’s gut-bustingly hilarious when lovingly extended to ninety minutes.

• Bryan Kremkau at ReadJunk is definitely excited about this:
  

  I knew it was only a matter of time that Will Forte’s MacGyver spoof MacGruber would be turned into a movie! It’s probably the funniest sketch on SNL these days. I seriously can’t wait for this movie because I think it’s going to be a smash hit! That is, if the script and acting is up to par. I mean, anything can be better than Ladies Man and Superstar.

• Neil Miller at Film School Rejects is also optimistic given who’s directing the thing:
  

  Fact: Taken at face value, this MacGruber movie is an awful idea — pure, unadulterated awful. It is a mediocre sketch that someone (Lorne Michaels) thinks could be fodder for a full-length feature. The last time this happened, we got Night at the Roxbury.

  But despite reason and logic, it would appear as if the SNL crew is moving forward with the adaptation, which will begin shooting in New Mexico next month. The film’s saving grace is that it has at its disposal the directorial talents of Jorma Taccone

• Alex Billington at First Showing acknowledges the redundancy of a MacGyver movie after this, but he’s on the fence about it anyway:
  

  Screw the actual MacGuyver movie, this is all we need!…I don’t watch SNL anymore, so I’m not too familiar with MacGruber, but it sounds like it could be fun. The last SNL-ish movies we were Hot Rod and Baby Mama, but neither of those did well or were that great. I expect this MacGruber movie to get a lot of buzz, but as for if it’ll actually be any good, it’s too early to tell.

• Rodney at The Movie Blog wonders if we’ll end up with two faithful MacGyver movies:
  

  So the questions that arise in my head are this. Will this simply evolve the MacGruber character (who usually ended up killing everyone in the sketch with his failed attempts to jury rig some device) or will this be more of a spoof on MacGyver?

  Somehow I think it will be both. The logic circles this presents are giving me a headache. Will this spoof MacGruber spoofing MacGyver? Will this be a double negative and cancel out the spoofing and simply offer up a straight MacGyver movie?

• Kevin Coll at Fused Film points out that in normal parody circumstances, there’d at least be a cameo from the real MacGyver:
  

  Sounds a lot like Ace Ventura meets Austin Powers by way of MacGuyver. I do not watch SNL but have seen these skits and they are funny. The skit has somewhat of a cult following with a Super Bowl Pepsi commercial using the MacGruber skit to sell their product. I wonder if Richard Dean Anderson will cameo in the film?

• Elisabeth Rappe at MTV Movies Blog is certain Anderson will show up in some capacity:
  

  Surely an appearance by Richard Dean Anderson, the one and only MacGuyver, is in the cards? After all, one MacGruber sketch revealed the elder TV action hero to be his absentee father, a plot point that is just begging to be explored further.

• Dustin Rowles at Pajiba addresses the casting of Val Kilmer and Ryan Phillippe in supporting roles:
  

  And this baby is not going to be just another dog-and-pony show with a bunch of SNL actors littering the screen. They’ve gotten actual actors to star in it. Washed up actors, but still. Ryan Phillippe and Val Kilmer are going to drive the nail through the coffin and into the back of the head of their careers by showing up in it.

• Josh Tyler at Cinema Blend notes another actor who needs to sign on:
  

  Clearly this is going to be more than just the usual shitty SNL movie. This is not Night at the Roxbury…Sounds great, the only thing missing is a variety of mid-life crises to distract MacGruber from disarming various bombs. Someone needs call up Shia LaBeouf, bring him back as MacGruber’s gay son.

• Dan Hopper at Best Week Ever goes for the obvious jab at SNL producer Lorne Michaels:
  

  Ryan Phillippe and Val Kilmer are in talks to co-star in a MacGruber feature film, based on the recurring Will Forte SNL sketches. And if there’s one thing I trust Lorne Michaels to do, it’s taking a funny five minute joke and extending it to a very necessary hour and a half.

• Mark at I Watch Stuff figures SNL producer Lorne Michaels is in need of some pocket money:
  

  Looks like Lorne Michaels still has his summer job stretching mediocre three-minute sketches into full-length films of dubious quality…With an actual MacGyver film also in the works, it looks like studios are feeling the recession and turning to an obvious, foolproof moneymaker: imitations of Richard Dean Anderson. Stargate: The TV Show: The Movie Again can’t be far behind.

• Vince Mancini at Film Drunk believes co-star Val Kilmer is in need of even less:
  

  On being asked if he’d play the part of Cunth, Kilmer said, “Lunch?”

  AGENT: “No, Cunth.”

  KILMER: “Lunch?”

  *agent slides sandwich across table*

  KILMER: “That’s what I thought.”

To be fair: Vicky Cristina Barcelona may not need my defense. Since its debut at Cannes, it has garnered some of the most positive reviews of Woody Allen’s late career. But it’s always with that caveat: it’s the best he’s done for us lately. At this point, it seems like the critical class is expected to disclaim their vitriol or praise, no matter what Allen actually puts on the screen, or which way it swings. Is it good? Well, it’s not as good as Annie Hall, but it’s not bad. Is it bad? Well, it’s not as bad as Anything Else, but it’s not good. As you might have guessed, I think Woody Allen has produced some work over the past 15 years (since the Soon-Yi “scandal”, which more or less dovetailed with the consensus opinion that his “best years” were long behind him) that is worthy of more serious consideration. But even if I didn’t think the movies deserved it, the sheer laziness that the movies seem to inspire in critics would almost give me enough incentive to passionately defend them.

To go micro before going macro: the worst thing that you can say about Vicky Cristina Barcelona is that it’s exceedingly pleasant, that it has the overall effect of a late summer, late afternoon nap. And sure, maybe, if you were inclined, it would be possible to write it all off as soft core bicurious semi-erotica (and full-on bicurious travel erotica). But I sense that Allen––if no one else––earnestly believes he’s doing more, that even in his lightest mode, he’s deeply concerned with the nagging mysteries of human relationships. Might it be creepy-old-man-ism that requires him to ask two beautiful actresses to kiss each other in an attempt to figure these mysteries out? It might be, but Woody Allen’s been a creepy old man since he was 35. To convince me that he’s totally lost it, you’re going to have to come up with better evidence than that.
The plot of Vicky Cristina –– like those of Melinda and Melinda and Match Point, the two Late Allen films it most resembles –– is barely more than a mechanism on which to hang Allen’s endless skepticism. Vicky (Rebecca Hall, a British girl doing naive but well-meaning Upper West Side academic) is going to Spain for the summer to stay with a family friend and work on a grad school thesis. It’s Vicky’s last summer before she gets married, and where another girl might be a bit more concerned with making the most of the last months of her sexual freedom, Vicky seems more preoccupied with the notion that the thesis represents her last chance at intellectual self-indulgence before her very sensible fiancee knocks her up and all vestiges of her identity as an independent woman must be put away. Vicky’s last minute escort on the trip is Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), a wild child ball of blonde hair and bad decisions, who tags along to Barcelona to escape a bad break-up with hopes of finding her calling as an old-world romantic-creative.

Thanks mainly to Cristina’s predatory eyes, the girls soon meet a painter, Juan Antonio, who they’ve heard has a torrid history with an ex-wife (Penelope Cruz). They let this smoldering artist at least 15 years their senior fly them to his hometown of Oviedo regardless of Vicky’s objections, and there the eager-to-bed Cristina comes down with food poisoning, leaving Vicky fall into Juan Antonio’s arms. But once the trio returns to Barcelona, order is restored: Juan and Cristina embark on the flagrantly cliche February-July muse-master relationship that always seemed in the cards, and Vicky dives back into her work and wedding plans. The status quo is interrupted once again when Juan Antonio’s ex-wife Maria-Elena re-enters the picture, she and Cristina first fight over and then figure out a way to happily share the lucky Spaniard, and, as she continues to be haunted by a night that seems “unreal”, Vicky starts to wonder if her entire life plan is ill-conceived.

If this sounds familiar, well, maybe we’ve hit on one of Late Allen’s easiest targets for criticism. Over and over again in this late career stretch, he’s rehearsing variations on the same preccupations: romance is fleeting, meaning and passion are both subjective and fluid; fate and luck are, in practice, basically the same thing; there are two types of fear: fear to act on our desires, and fear to do anything but. As Bardem’s character puts it at one point: “The trick is to enjoy life, and accept that it has no meaning.” This could be a direct quote from a number of recent Allen interviews, and it’s a sign of how seriously he’s invested in the essential existential question of the material: If none of it matters anyway, is it best to live impulsively and suffer disappointment, or take the safe, no thrills route, forsaking the manic highs in order to avoid the lowest lows?

Another potentially valid, but only if unexamined, points of criticism almost always directed at Late Allen: in order to explore his pet themes from a distance, he seems to want to make his characters as shallow as possible. Speaking their lines with a flatness that almost approaches a read-aloud from high school English class, crowded into going through the motions of the dictates of an all-seeing narrator, the actors’ characterizations are, almost by default, mainly surface. Cruz has to do little more than look comfortable in the markedly “ethnic,” bag lady slut chic in which she’s dressed in order to put across Maria-Elena as an icon of the Scary/Sexy Exotic; Johansson, done up like a summer Gap ad loosely based on …And God Created Woman, basically just has to show up and Allen has the Narcissist Heartbreaker he needs in order to define, by contrast, Hall’s Frustrated Realist.

(For all of the prudish questioning of the propriety of the Allen/ScarJo relationship, Vicky Cristina is evidence that Allen’s leering is at least a means to an end. Despite the limits of her character, Johansson is more present on screen here than I’ve seen her since Lost in Translation. He may love her, but up til now, Woody Allen has misused her. Here, she plays her age and, for the first time I can think of, a character whose inner and outer lives both seem organically compatible with the unconscious carnality the actress herself exudes. And someday entire grad school thesis will be written about the way Allen shoots every sex scene that she’s in, in extreme, soft focus closeup on her head, letting the camera drift to concentrate on her blonde hair spilling out of control to consume the frame.)

Rather than fault Allen for blatantly eschewing a realism that I don’t think was ever on his agenda to begin with, I think there’s something interesting about the falseness of it all–the unnecessary, didactic narration, the cliche personalities crashing into one another, and the very, very minor fissures that result. His point is taken: nothing ultimately, means anything, but in the moment, we forget that, and become convinced that inconsequential matters mean the world. Vicky Cristina Barcelona may be frivolous, but under the surface there’s a serious pondering of how the most frivolous things can temporarily cloud brains and hold otherwise reasonable people hostage, of how even a momentary giving over to impulse can slip an unignorable pea under the mattress of the best laid plans, of how sometimes functioning facades are shattered by a single slip of judgment over the course of a single night.

Above all else, Vicky Cristina reveals that Allen is developing a late career style of distant, extremely expository satire of romantic givens. The American girls, smart and experienced though they think they are and even might be, are reduced to fools by their attraction to the Spanish painter. They remain consumed with the question of what their dalliances mean, convinced they must mean something, even after he’s told them repeatedly that nothing means anything. This is insanity defined—holding onto faith that something is true when all evidence would mark it as false–and it’s this lust-bred insanity that’s the more precise Allen theme than the oft-cited neorosis. In Vicky Cristina, as the events play out in a tone pitched about ten degrees closer to comedy than tragedy, Allen mocks his girls for their illusions–harshly, at times, but not without sympathy. He’s been there.

Call it autopilot, call it barrel scraping, but I believe he’s still really baffled about various unsolvable mysteries of human nature. The benefit of age may be that he’s finally boiled his issues down from prickly, all-encompassing nuerosis, into an almost elegantly restricted package of major questions about human nature that, after nearly 73 years on the planet, he still can’t figure out. And even if these later films themselves are inconsistently moving, I’m touched by the gesture itself, the taking stock of one’s own life-long search for meaning, the mistakes made along the way, and the frustrations of coming up empty. Whether hidden under sultry sun or cold British class conflict or the pretenses of New York intelligencia, there are traces in all of Allen’s later films of unforgiving moral comedowns, as could only be conjured by someone whose own moral stumbles have gone largely unforgiven.

Allegedly, Fox had to wash Bay’s Ferrari as part of her audition for the first Transformers. And he supposedly filmed the whole thing, though there’s no proof of this (online at least, which is where it’d be if it existed). Did it really happen? I guess it doesn’t matter, because it’s already in the consciousness of boys and men everywhere to help them sleep better tonight.

True or not, check out the responses to this non-news after the jump:

• Vince Mancini at Film Drunk doesn’t buy the story:
  

  I sat through all eight mintues of Solomon’s interview with Michael Bay (also in video) to see him ask about the Megan Fox story, and it never came up (though Michael Bay does reveal “I was a magician as a child.”).  Secondly, why would she have to “audition” for a sequel?  The only grain of truth I can find in this is that it’s well known in Hollywood circles that Michael Bay does use the phrase “wash my Ferrari” as a euphemism for oral sex (which he prefers to receive in a freshly-washed Ferrari).

• Perez Hilton is grossed out by the real-life Transformer that is Michael Bay:
  

  The only transformation Michael Bay should be concerned with now is the one he took from geeky teenager to disgusting, douchey perv!

  Apparently, the Transformer’s director had Megan Fox complete a rather unorthodox audition at his house. A source reports that Bay “made her wash his Ferrari while he filmed her.”

  What?! Ewwwww!!!!

• Josh Tyler at Cinema Blend commends Bay for his honesty:
  

  It sounds more like he was filming an impromptu rap video than conducting an audition. At least Bay’s honest with himself about the way he treats women in his movies. There’s little doubt that to him they’re nothing other then sex-objects, blow-up dolls on film for his and our gratification.

• Mark Graham at Vulture wants to see the video:
  

  We’ve all heard stories of some of the skeevier things that actors and actresses have to do in order to land roles in major (and even minor) motion pictures, but this one might take the cake for sheer hilariousness…Sadly, the footage of said screen test seems to have been permanently misplaced.

• Erik Davis at SciFi Squad (thankfully not yet Syfy Squad) offers some ideas of where that video could be:
  

  Apparently this video exists somewhere, though no one knows where it is. (Um, have you checked Bay’s sock drawer?) Fox says she doesn’t know what happened to the footage, and when Page Six asked Bay, he said he didn’t know what happened to it either. Me wonders whether there was something a little more … hmmm … erotic on that tape? Maybe it’s stuck between the cushions of Bay’s casting couch? What do you think?

• Kyle Buchanan at Movieline points out that Fox got off easy:
  

  Michael Bay forced Megan Fox to wash his Ferrari as part of her original Transformers audition. At least she got off easy compared to Skids, who became a blubbering wreck when script sides forced him to reveal his robo-illiteracy.

My maternal grandmother passed away over the weekend, so I’d like to pay her tribute with a movie list. I’m not sure how big a fan of movies she was, having not grown up very close to her, physically, but Grandma Gloria can be credited with introducing me to movie hopping, at least. One of the few summers I was able to visit her was in 1992, and I mainly recall the year due to the movie we snuck into, Sister Act. And the movie we legally watched before it, Death Becomes Her. I probably would have forgotten both of these lame films in any other circumstance, but the significance of the event has kept the specific time and place of their viewing in my memory probably forever.

Grandma Gloria certainly wasn’t the most free-spirited grandmother to ever live, but a few things, such as the introduction to movie hopping, always made me think she was a bit cooler than other kids’ grandmas. Then there was the fact that she’d been married four times, which my friends found shocking. Grandmas aren’t supposed to go through husbands like that, apparently. Did it make her cool, though? My cousin would refer to her as “Grandma Get-Around,” and supposedly Grandma Gloria took the nickname as a compliment. I guess that made her a little cooler, proudly acknowledging this decidedly un-grandmotherly trait.

A list of coolest grandmothers in movies may not be the greatest way of honoring Grandma Get-Around, but in a way the fact that most of the following characters aren’t really that cool shows me just how hip my grandma really was. While grandfathers are often portrayed as fun and wise and as great storytellers, grandmothers tend to fall to one of two uncool extremes, traditionally grandmotherly or youthfully lewd. The latter category doesn’t necessarily only consist of unlovable characters, and I hope one day there’s a Who’s the Boss movie so that “Mona” can take the top spot on this list. Until then, here are the ten coolest grandmas I could think of. If you know any that are cooler, please let me know by commenting below.

10. Maureen Stapleton as “Grandmother” in The Electric Grandmother (1982)

Technically she’s not really anyone’s grandmother, because she’s an android. And it’s debatable if the ability to dispense milk from your fingertips makes you cool or not. But this cross between Mary Poppins and RoboCop (or, if you’re a Robin Williams fan, between Mrs. Doubtfire and Bicentennial Man), originally from the mind of Ray Bradbury, is at least hip in a superhero sort of way. She’s indestructible, can make kites fly (let’s at least pretend this is due to a Storm-like ability to control the wind) and she has the strange power to create muffins that have transcriptions of recorded dialogue inside them.

9. Sandy Martin as “Grandma” in Napoleon Dynamite (2004)

She may not look too hip in that teddy bear t-shirt, and she’s not very Internet savvy, but compared to her grandsons this lady is Miles Davis cool. You wish your grandma had a pet llama instead of that mean little ankle-biting dog and/or that uppity old cat. Plus, Napoleon’s grannie enjoys riding ATVs, at least until she crashes into a sand dune and breaks her coccyx, which is pretty badass for an old woman.

8. Mai Zetterling as “Helga Eveshim” in The Witches (1990)

It’d be one thing if Helga only told stories of her childhood experience with evil witches. Many grandmas have tall tales and embellished anecdotes to share with their grandchildren. However, Helga was indeed an old adversary of the Grand High Witch, and when her grandson is turned into a mouse, she helps in defeating the whole coven. Fans of Harry Potter may not appreciate a grandmother who kills witches, but most kids should agree that being saved by their grandmother would earn her cool points.

7. Helen Shaw as “Grandma” in Parenthood (1989)

The matriarch of the Buckman clan (who ends up a great-great-grandma by film’s end) doesn’t immediately come off as being too with it. In fact, she appears to be completely senile. But maybe that’s just because she’s done a lot of cool things in her life, including drugs that have messed with her mind. We see that she likes inhaling helium during the birthday party scene, after all. She also plays Nintendo and is cool with porn. And later she delivers a wise speech about preferring the excitement of the roller coaster to the safe and predictable merry-go-round.

6. Shirley MacLaine as “Katherine Richelieu” in Rumor Has It… (2005)

I love Shirley MacLaine enough to think she’s cool anytime she plays a grandmother, but here she has special reason to be considered a hip old lady: she’s apparently the inspiration for the Mrs. Robinson character in The Graduate. Unfortunately, Rumor Has It… turns the story a little less agreeable by making MacLaine’s character the first of three generations of women to sleep with the same man. But it doesn’t necessarily make her any less cool so much as it makes Jennifer Aniston’s character quite lame and disturbing.

5. Shirley Jones as “Grace” in Grandma’s Boy (2006)

Grace isn’t the titular grandparent of this film. That would be “Lilly,” played by Doris Roberts, who ends up being fairly hip by playing pranks, playing video games and accidentally getting high off marijuana tea. However, Grace, one of Lilly’s Golden Girls-esque roommates, is far cooler due to her claim to giving a hand job to Charlie Chaplin and bedding both Abbott and Costello. Jones, who was born in 1934, seems a little young to be telling the truth, and it would have made more sense to have her admit to doing Harold Lloyd (who also had a film titled Grandma’s Boy), but even if the stories aren’t legit she’s cool for talking so frankly, anyway.

4. Gloria Stuart as “Old Rose” in Titanic (1997)

Say what you want about Titanic, but if Kate Winslet’s character went on to be your grandma, you’d think a lot better of the story. Just the romance element alone would make a cool tale to hear your grannie tell. The fact that she also survived the sinking of the Titanic, though, can hardly be beat as far as far as grandparents’ anecdotes go. After you brought her to show and tell, no kid could ever follow with anything better.

3. “Madame Souza” in The Triplets of Belleville (2003)

When her champion bicyclist grandson is kidnapped, the silent Souza heads out on an adventure, accompanied by their ugly dog, Bruno, to find him. She maneuvers a pedal boat all the way across the Atlantic even, to seek the help of the three titular old singers who live in a caricatured New York City. She may not be hip in the way most people think of the word, but her determination and heroism is undoubtedly cool. And even before her grandson is kidnapped, the way she cares for him and trains him to be the best — we could all have done with such an attentive guardian.

2. Maureen Stapleton as “Mary Luckett” in Cocoon (1985) and Cocoon: The Return (1988)

As a robot grandma she was plenty cool, yet Maureen Stapleton impressed me a lot more as a member of the Cocoon cast. The first movie made her and the rest hip and youthful. However it was the sequel that put them way up on the cool chart, because they’d been to another planet and lived among awesome glowing alien beings. Interestingly enough, her grandson in these movies, Barret Oliver, also previously played an android family addition.

1. Sylvia Sidney as “Grandma Florence Norris” in Mars Attacks! (1996)

She may not know what the heck is going on most of the time, but Grandma Florence is cool enough for being a fan of Slim Whitman. And not just because the country crooner’s voice is ultimately used to save the world from Martians. The Beatles may not have existed without Whitman’s influence, and Michael Jackson was a huge fan, too. So, she’s got great taste in music. Obviously the fact that she inadvertently discovers how to kill evil alien invaders gives her extra cool points, edging her past the other grannies to top this list, even the one who hung out with aliens.

I’ve been accused in the past of having knee-jerk negative reactions to crowd-pleasers, and those accusations have not always been without a kernel of truth: it’s true that I tend to be skeptical of movies which instantly entertain but never ask us to ask what they’re really up to, and of that, I’m not ashamed. But this is not a problem with the tough-to-resist Humpday, Lynn Shelton’s whip-smart, uproariously funny comedy, in which a dumb, drunken, “bros will be bros” dare serves as the in point to talk about, amongst other things, the inevitable loss of self in long term relationships and the ongoing conquest to reconcile who we really are with who we’d like to think we could be.

Youngish marrieds Ben (Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore) are comfortably, chastely slumbering in their pleasant Seattle home when they’re awoken in the middle of the night by the unexpected ding-donging of the doorbell. The uninvited guest is Andrew (Joshua Leonard), Ben’s college buddy, who has flown in without announcement from Mexico City and is looking for a place to crash. We don’t know how long it’s been since Andrew and Ben were last on the same side of the border, but we get the sense it’s been awhile — for one thing, Andrew and Anna have never met. Ben tells his wife it’s “typical Andrew” when their houseguest goes out the next day, meets a bisexual girl at a coffeeshop and ends up back at her dimly-lit playhouse, making fettuccine for his new lady friend and her old lady. But when the straight-laced husband goes to retrieve his friend and ends up staying into the wee hours of the morning smoking, drinking, and eventually goading his free-spirit bro into promising to “perform” with him on camera for an amateur porn film festival –– all the while missing a planned romantic dinner with the anxious-to-conceive Anna –– we’re to understand that this is the furthest thing imaginable from “typical Ben.”

In the harsh light of sobriety, both men have an easy out, but neither is man enough to take it. Ben “feels compelled” to follow through with the porning, apparently because he needs to prove (somewhat predictably) that his marriage is different, and not the steel cage Andrew makes it out to be; Andrew is anxious to acquire evidence that his lifelong rebellion against squaresville hasn’t been a big joke, especially after an abortive tryst points up his own sexual prudishness. Shelton lets us in from the beginning on the truth — the plan is ridiculous and doomed to fail, and both dudes are self-deluded –– which makes it all the more comedically rewarding to watch Ben and Andrew slowly puzzle it all out.

The clear-cut theme of many a Judd Apatow comedy is that bros will be bros … until women come along and offer a “better,” more civilized option. Humpday is, refreshingly, not as black and white. Anna is a fully-fleshed out complement to Ben, capable of being just as selfish and single-minded. Neither could pull off the magic act of saving the other from his/her own worse instincts. It may not be a totally fair comparison, but the women in Humpday feel much more real than the love interests often seen in Duplass Brothers films, whether it be the marriage-obsessed shrew of The Puffy Chair or the insecure temptresses of Baghead. Shelton’s film presents grown-up relationships as the complex things they are: sometimes a haven, sometimes a prison, always a thorny nest of compromises and outright lies that are nonetheless basically the best thing we’ve come up with in order to stave off fear of dying alone.

I saw a Twitter message at Sundance praising Humpday as “not too mumblecoreish.” To use that ad hoc genre as a perjorative is, in this case, missing the point of Humpday’s construction. Shot with handheld cameras, entirely improvised by the actors based on character work and extensive rehearsal, and edited with rigorous, documentary inspired formalism by Nat Sanders (who also cut Medicine for Melancholy), Humpday takes the ripped-from-real-life spirit of the films Duplass has made with his brother Jay (not to metion the work of Joe Swanberg; Shelton co-starred in his web series Young American Bodies and appeared briefly in Nights and Weekends) and applies it to that very in-vogue subgenre, the comedy of macho male fallibility. The technique wrings unexpected layers from the content, and vice versa. More grown up (and interested in the emotional pitfalls of what it means to grow up) than many recent American DIY films, and far more accessible to a non-film-savvy audience than Duplass’ last Sundance entry Baghead, Humpday may usher in the moment when some notable tropes of what we once called mumblecore can be successfully applied to more mainstream genre fare without the uninitiated turning off.

This review originally appeared in slightly different form during the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

Originality aside (it’s also being likened to Heathers and Species), Jennifer’s Body is being celebrated as low culture, criticized for being worse than low culture and otherwise dividing the bloggers up as only Cody’s feature follow-up to Juno could. Meanwhile, the truly important people (i.e. the teen boys looking at blogs) probably won’t care about what’s a good screenplay or what films this may have ripped off, because they’re probably only paying attention to all the teased Megan Fox nudity (including plenty of footage of that “topless” scene we saw “leaked” photos of last year).

By the way, my second impression of the trailer was that it’s cool they used a Runaways song so that this Bloggery can be linked to last Friday’s posting, in a way. Shows how bored I was with the plot/dialogue/visuals. Also, because you probably won’t see her acknowledged on most posts about this movie, Jennifer’s Body is directed by Karyn Kusama, of Girlfight and Æon Flux.

Now, on to the film blog reactions, after the jump:

• Mandi Bierly at Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch addresses the two sides of interest here:
  

  As a Buffy fan, I perked up when Mamma Mia!’s Amanda Seyfried says, “Jennifer’s evil….No, I mean, she’s actually evil. Not high school evil.” I’m sure others perked up every time Fox looks naked (and that time she references going “both ways”).

• Mark at I Watch Stuff acknowledges the male interests:
  

  Megan Fox and a Bowflex reference? It’s like this movie knows everything dudes love! Or at least everything dudes contemplate possessing when they’re drunk and watching TV at 2 in the morning.

• Josh Tyler at Cinema Blend gets specific with the kind of males who’ll be interested:
  

  If like the trucker-hat wearing guy sitting behind me you shouted the words “I’d hit it!” at the screen when you saw her on that motorcycle in Transformers 2, then you’d probably better get a box of tissue before you watch the first ever, red band trailer for Jennifer’s Body. It’s here, and Megan Fox wants to strip you naked and bite off your head.

• The Superficial made a special exception for the trailer:
  

  I don’t normally post trailers, but I’m willing to make an exception for one that involves a semi-nude, demon-possessed Megan Fox telling a chick “She goes both ways.” It’s almost like someone opened my heart, listened to the music inside and made a movie about it. — I should probably get that looked at.

• Todd at IDontLikeYouInThatWay.com takes that male interest acknowledgment too far:
  

  Zombies and demons should really look into hot chicks. It would definitely make it a little easier on them. Megan Fox could tear my leg off after she finished my liver and there’s a good chance I’d probably still cum at some point.

• Helen O’Hara at Empire points out that it’s not completely good for the guys:
  

  Gentlemen, prepare to be deeply, deeply confused. On one hand, Megan Fox looks fantastic in this red-band trailer for Jennifer’s Body on Shock Till You Drop and is a) dressed like a cheerleader and b) all wet. On the down side, if you watch it there’s a fair chance she’ll eviscerate you. Talk about a moral dilemna.

• Mark Graham at Vulture wonders if the male gaze will be enough for this to profit:
  

  Perhaps most interestingly, though, the film will be the first real test of Megan Fox’s box-office clout; when the Karyn Kusama–directed film opens in September, we’ll finally know whether teenage boys will turn out to ogle her when she’s not surrounded by giant robots and massive explosions.

• Anne Thompson at Thompson on Hollywood addresses the marketability and makes a comparison:
  

  The mighty combo of producer Jason Reitman, director Karyn Kusama, writer Diablo Cody and Transformers hotty Megan Fox (whether or not she can act) should add up to a very commercial Jennifer’s Body. This angry-at-men demonic horror flick reminds me for some reason of Attack of the 50-Foot Woman.

• Ben Child at the Guardian Film Blog discusses the Heathers lineage:
  

  I’ve always thought the idea of a sequel to Heathers, that relentlessly black cult classic of 80s high-school comedy, was a bit pointless…Having said that, there have been a number of spiritual successors, Lindsay Lohan vehicle Mean Girls probably being the pick of the bunch. Now, Diablo Cody, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Juno, has picked up the baton, and with some degree of relish by the looks of it.

• Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere notes a film history preceding this movie:
  

  It’s not widely disputed that the classic femme fatale character, first evident in 1940s film noir and later revived in various Halloween-styled slasher pics and high-school satires like Heathers, stems from male fear/resentment of female erotic power. It’s a sexist construction, in short. Even if you cloak it in fang-toothed female revenge and empowerment-gone-wild, it’s basically the same old Lucretia McEvil game.

• Alex Billington at First Showing is really excited by this trailer (in a movie lover way, we think):
  

  …it looks exactly like what I was expecting - sexy, awesome, and violent as all hell. Sure it looks a bit quirky and fun, but what do you expect from Diablo Cody? As always, Megan Fox looks deliciously hot, Amanda Seyfried looks great, and so does everyone else in it. I was already excited for this, but now I’m even more excited!

• Casey at BloodyGoodHorror.com’s The Mondokey Hole can’t say anything bad about this, but that might just be because he didn’t seem to notice the dialogue:
  

  For myself, the trailer seems to have plenty of 80’s horror sensibilities and does away with Cody’s trademark hipster slang dialog. While we all know that Megan Fox is fun to look it, it will be nice to see if she can act well enough to carry a flick for a change. Judging from what we see in the trailer, I’d say she does alright!

• Elisabeth Rappe at Horror Squad doesn’t want to say anything bad, but:
  

  If I have one criticism (and I don’t want to jump on the anti-Cody bandwagon by saying it, but here goes), it’s that the dialogue is a little too precious and self-aware. The Thai food line? Yeah. But it’s a minor complaint in a trailer of gory goodness … and really, what girl can’t get behind a demon who tears apart horny teenage boys? This might just act like two hours of good therapy!

• Richard Lawson at Gawker is “oddly intrigued”:
  

  Look, we’re not fans of Cody’s snappy, reference-laden “writing” any more now than we were when Juno came out or United States of Tara (a show that got better only after Cody stopped writing episodes) debuted. But couldn’t that jerky dialogue and look-Ma-no-hands kind of sardonic bravado acquit itself nicely in a silly/scary horror comedy? The Girl Gets Revenge trope worked fairly well in Teeth, and we all remember the nerdy Blockbuster clerk’s wet dream that was Scream. Smoosh those two things together and you just might get Jennifer’s Body.

• Meredith Woerner at i09 also admits to a surprising intrigue:
  

  I’m normally not a fan of Cody and after watching Megan Fox allow a tiny robot to hump her leg, I’d given up all hope for both of them. Jennifer’s Body looks like, dare I say it, a return to actually funny horror. Granted, I’m going to need to see a few more comedy scenes, but the vibe is there…

• Patrick Schumacker at Screen Junkies has a similar response, though he gets special points for using (originating?) the term “diablologue”:
  

  I’m not a huge fan of JUNO or THE UNITED STATES OF TARA, but darned if this one doesn’t look like a hell of a good time…Favorite inappropriate line from Megan Fox’s character in the trailer?  “Smells like Thai food in here.  Were you guys f**king?!”

• Guy Lodge at In Contention isn’t necessarily looking forward to this:
  

  I can’t say I’ve been looking forward to Diablo Cody’s follow-up with great anticipation. (Evidently awesome 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.

• Daniel Carlson at Pajiba takes a small shot at Kusama’s involvement after primarily bashing Megan Fox:
  

  Making matters worse for Cody, Kusama’s limited credits also include Aeon Flux. The only way this thing is getting saved is if the script is up to snuff, and from the looks of the new red-band trailer, it might be. And of course the presence of Amanda Seyfried is always welcome.

• S.T. VanAirsdale at Movieline also goes in for some Megan Fox bashing:
  

  Anybody who’s followed the aftermath of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen knows that inside Megan Fox’s lithe, photogenic frame, there’s the soul of a serious actress waiting to captivate Hollywood. And this morning, with the red-band trailer for her horror comedy Jennifer’s Body debuting online, we know that we’ll have to wait at least one more film for that takeover to occur.

• Sean at Film Junk doesn’t think Megan Fox’s acting will be an issue:
  

  Clearly the casting of Megan Fox in the lead role is going to guarantee some level of success for this film, but will her questionable acting also be the film’s downfall?

  After watching the red band trailer, I’m not even sure it matters. Her only real purpose here is to act as a sex object, which I’m sure she can handle just fine.

• Devin Faraci at CHUD.com criticizes the trailer in relation to the film’s script:
  

  It’s not great - I don’t know if the good (if Buffy-esque) script didn’t translate into a film or if Fox can’t cut a trailer to save their lives, but what I read on the page isn’t really represented here.

• Simon Dang at The Playlist concentrates on the move to push this Red-Band spot out before the presumably lackluster PG-rated spot hitting theaters this weekend:
  

  Are the trio of Kusama, Cody and Reitman possibly undermining the studio in releasing this trailer? Was the studio-made trailer so bad they had to preemptively release this to stop bad buzz? Or is it, as they claim, simply under-representative? Guess we’ll have to wait and see but the trailer at hand here certainly harks back to fun horror films of old and, at the same time, is run through with Cody-isms.

Now, here’s that Red-Band trailer, courtesy of ShockTillYouDrop:

This interview was conducted at the Atlanta Film Festival in April. Trust Us, This is All Made Up screens at the 92nd St. Y in Tribeca on Friday and Saturday.

In the West Village’s Barrow Street Theater, three empty chairs sit on an otherwise empty stage. An audience gathers, chatters, sits to stay. It’s not notable really; in fact, it’s so much less than that it could be called pedestrian. Then a second thought occurs, which is, of course, “What exactly in moments will happen on this empty stage? Who will sit on these empty chairs?” That, then, is the mystery.

Somewhere in this audience, say toward stage right, sits filmmaker Alex Karpovsky. A friend clued him into coming to this improvisational show of veteran Chicago comedians T.J. Jagodowski and David Pasquesi. Karpovsky came, he admits, with some bit of hesitation: “At least back then I wasn’t a huge fan of improv; from what I’d seen, it just wasn’t for me.”

The show, however, an entirely improvised 50-minute stretch of narrative exploration, struck Karpovsky, its characters and story arc remaining with him for many days afterward. “It was made me wonder about the underpinnings of human creativity and human imagination,” he says. “It made me very curious about (T.J. and Dave’s) relationship toward one another, and it made me very interested in their relationship toward improv in general.”

Far from a rote live performance film, Karpovsky’s resulting doc Trust Us, This Is All Made Up tiptoes gracefully around universal issues involving artistic collaboration, faithfulness felt toward and trust in some greater meaning and fearless, open-minded storytelling. It’s a film that catches you slightly off-guard and leaves you there, tottering you lightly on the boundary of some greater truth, teasing you to discover not only the stories T.J. and Dave will tell but also your own story, which in the end remains as mysterious as do the purposes of those three empty chairs.

While traveling the film festival circuit this year, Karpovsky pulled time out of this schedule to speak about the challenges of editing live performance, the magic of character development and the unknowable “It” that writes a story yet unread.

One of the interesting points for me about this particular show is that when I think of traditional improv, I think of its much faster-paced form, I think of an immediate punchline, I think of a set-up and agreement. All of these tropes I had so well known, [T.J. and Dave] felt comfortable enough to shirk off. How, in watching the two work, did you redefine for yourself the limits of what improv is, can and should do?

Speaking on their behalf—and I could be wrong, I put that out as a preface—I feel that they don’t necessarily adhere very closely to what seem to be conventions of improv, but I think one of their fundamental beliefs is to pay attention and keep it interesting, keep the story moving. If you do those fundamentals, you find that the general principles are present. There’s no reason to consciously put those principles at the forefront; those are more or less byproducts of paying attention to the other person…So, yes, there is this rule, “And…always agree with your partner,” but sometimes T.J and Dave are not interested in that, and it’s okay for them not to be. A lot of times the most interesting stories come when the other person says, “No.” Then there’s conflict created, and they have to deal with that conflict.

Shooting with an eight camera set-up [led by cinematographer Ariel Boles] must have helped this along, but it occurred to me as difficult, taking an art form that depends in large part on live communication with an audience and translating it into a much more staid medium. In order to keep the story lively, what kind of editing process did you have to go through in order to maintain that energy?

That was the central challenge and central source of enthusiasm for me personally, that, “How do we translate this inherently and fundamentally 3D live theatrical experience into a 2D, flat cinematic experience?” T.J and Dave were very wary initially about this whole idea because they’ve seen this process fail many, many times, and so there was a lot of skepticism, and it was very warranted.

One of the things I felt would help any possible translation would be to set up a context before the show began, and that’s what I try to do in the first 18 minutes of the film, is to introduce the audience to the characters and the dynamic between them, to explore their dynamic in improvisation in general and at the same time to ratchet up the suspense and interest in the show itself. It also serves to sprinkle in a few points of interaction that, during (T.J. and Dave’s) daily wanderings, will resurrect within the performance itself.

The two movies that we talked about that have structural similarities to this are two live concert performance films—although arguably only one is really a live concert performance film. In Swimming to Cambodia–which is one of my favorite films in general—the film doesn’t begin with Spalding Gray talking in front of the theater; it begins with him walking around Manhattan, and this sets up a context for the audience to get ready for the show. I don’t even think Spalding Gray says much of anything, but this does somehow introduce you to this person before you know who this person is, before you know that he’s a really well-known and well-received monologue performer with a big following, before he embraces this confidence as a theatrical performer. The other film is My Dinner With Andre, which is basically one long conversation, but it doesn’t begin with the conversation; it begins with an approach to the restaurant to start the conversation. It’s just a good fifteen minutes of voice-over where Wallace Shawn introduces the audience to this man he’s about to have dinner with, and so by the time that the dinner actually begins, I’m so intrigued and mesmerized and curious about who this guy Andre Gregory is that I can’t wait for the show to begin. To some extent we were hoping to do some of those things with [Trust Us…], to create some of that suspense and intrigue so that the audience can’t wait for the show to begin, even if they don’t know what the show is about.

Another thing that we needed for the translation to work in terms of the actual performance was to have really good sound, not to have really theatrical, boomy distance sound. So both of them have wireless lavalieres.

Then for the editing, we needed as much diversity in points of perspective as possible. One of the points that I found most challenging during the edit of the show was that on the one hand I wanted the audience of the film to experience what the audience in the Barrow Street Theater experienced. I wanted them to feel like they were there in the room with the others who were really in the theater during the show. A lot of the angles were from that perspective, with the back of people’s heads in front of you. But, I also really wanted to show the close-ups because T.J. and Dave can throw each other the smallest gesture, know exactly what to do with those meanings and run really quickly and agilely right when the gesture is laid down. So that was a give-and-take between having a lot of perspective, having a lot of cutting going on but also trying to preserve the general notion of sitting in the theater.

Earlier you talked about the underpinnings of imagination and creativity. What does this particular show’s narrative development teach you about those two things?

[T.J. and Dave] play seven or eight different characters during the course of the show. To be able to remember all the idiosyncrasies that define this character, even before that character needs or has to speak during the show, is to me really impressive; just to be able to come up with that character very quickly, then to be able to give that character context and meaning within the scene, and then to give that character an arc that spans throughout the show and in some case reaches a crisis and/or delusion, and then to multiple that small miracle by seven, create a bunch of these characters, and then to be able to basically play chess with seven opponents at the same time, to basically juggle all of those characters in their minds, building these mnemonic devices as they go to remember who those characters are, and then on top of that to have both (T.J. and Dave) play those characters, and then to make sure that the audience understands what’s going on, for the audience to understand, “Oh, this is T.J.’s character, but Dave’s now playing him, and we haven’t even seen this character in 15 minutes,” to let the audience be aware of this language, this largely symbol language that’s developing between these characters, I think all of that requires an extraordinary amount of creativity, imagination and mental, cerebral dexterity and agility.

…I’m not only talking about the characters, it’s also the larger plot. These performances are basically one-act shows with a fully realized plot, in addition to the story being really, really funny most of the time. When you combine all of those factors and role them into one, it’s pretty impressive little casserole that they are able to do this every time they come on stage. It’s a remarkable feat, an outstanding feat. It requires a deep faith and trust in the other person, I think.

Among the big questions I left this film with, and this ties a bit into the last question, is the question as to whether or not people are inherently creative. There’s doubt as to firstly whether humans are inherently creative and then secondly, if there is creativity noted, as to its sustainability over long periods of time. What are your thoughts here?

It’s not really my place to talk about the nature of human creativity. Generally, and this might sound a little silly, I think we are all equally creative; I do. It’s most applicable to this film and our discussion in that I don’t think T.J. and Dave view what they do as a process that they create. So, in that sense, if you’re looking for a close connection between the notion of creation and the concept of creativity, it’s not a concept they are trying to pursue while they are on stage. They are not creating, constructing or producing when they are on stage. All they are doing is revealing or exposing what story is already there.

When I began the project and started interviewing them, that was a total surprise to me and something that I found really interesting. They feel like the show—they call it the “It” because they don’t have a better word for it—they feel that this “It” is already waiting for them on those three chairs before they take the stage. What they have to do is find out what is already there, what is already waiting for them, and usually they can find that out within the first moment of the show. The lights go up, they look at each other for five, ten, fifteen seconds in total silence, and everything is already there. Everything is in that first moment. So for the next 50 minutes all they have to figure out is, “Why are we here? Why am I talking to you? Why am I feeling this way? Why have all of these things been happening?” In many ways it’s like peeling off the layers of an onion over the course of the show and discovering, along with the audience, what the “It” has placed there. It’s discovering “It” in real time collectively. That lends to this almost cultish following that they sometimes have, this idea that, “We’re all in this together. We’re all figuring out where this is going to go.” And, at the end of the show, they’ve all figured out, “Yes, that is the end of the show.” They didn’t know this was the end of the show; it’s just what happened over the course of the hour.

Going back to the original question, if you have this underlying association between the process of creation and the notion of creativity, (T.J. and Dave) approach it from a completely different perspective. They are not creating anything. They are just paying attention to what’s already there. So, if you think that anybody can pay attention to what’s already there, anybody could, over time and with enough courage, overcome any insecurities or ego consciousness between themselves and this “thing” that’s already happening. And so we’re all equally creative. There’s no hierarchy in this notion of creativity. We can all possess it. We can all see what’s going on.

Anyway, I’m still waiting for the re-creation of this costume to really spark talk of “kiddie porn,” and I’m still wondering if we’ll end up with a “leaked” shot of the Fanning/Stewart lesbian kiss once that scene is shot. It would rival the Vicky Cristina Barcelona kiss as far as media attention goes. Otherwise, there’s not much reason to discuss these latest images, other than to hope that it makes teenyboppers curious about Iggy Pop.

• Erik Davis at Cinematical understood that this was mainly the first look at the whole band:
  

  It must’ve been fun to be in charge of wardrobe for this film because these ladies totally lit it up with style. I’m not entirely sure which girls are featured in the image above; I know Stewart and Fanning are in the back, and I think that’s Scout Taylor-Compton in the blue and Stella Maeve up front, though I’m not positive so feel free to correct me.

• Apparently the guys at IESB.net missed the group photo:
  

  Maybe Stewart will do better this time than her turn as Bella in the Twilight films, after all, Joan Jett always had that bored look on her face.

  Can’t wait to see what Scout-Taylor Compton looks like as Lita Ford.

• James Cook at The Moving Picture mistakenly calls this a first look:
  

  A new batch of photos from The Runaways set have surfaced over at Just Jared, giving us our first look at New Moon co-stars Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning in the biopic about the hugely influential all-girl hard rock band.

• Alex Billington at First Showing also makes the mistake:
  

  This is, however, the first time we get to see the 15-year-old Dakota Fanning looking much older than she should as Runaways lead singer Cherie Currie. This little film is obviously gaining a lot of early buzz as photos like this are showing up in gossip mags all over. Check it!

• So does Simon Dang at The Playlist:
  

  Here’s your first look at Dakota Fanning made over for her role as Cherie Currie along with Kristen Stewart’s Joan Jett in the upcoming The Runaways biopic. Reports have it the two will go as far sharing a “steamy bedroom scene” in the film. Man, they have really nailed the Joan Jett look.

• Daniel Herrera at Killer Film? Ditto:
  

  Today the first photos have been released via the folks at Just Jared, and in the images we get our first look at Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie, and Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett for their upcoming biopic of the all girl punk band The Runaways.

• Kevin Coll at Fused Film also had his first look at Fanning with these shots:
  

  The casting decision I was worried about was Dakota Fanning being cast as Stewart’s co-star and bandmate Cherie Currie, the young 15 year-old lead singer of the group. Fanning also 15 had the age in common but could she pull off the look? That was my questions and with out a doubt we see she can.

• Josh Tyler at Cinema Blend at least only thinks this is his first look:
  

  Here’s the weird thing. I think this is the first time Dakota Fanning has ever looked like, well, an adult. She’s almost unrecognizable beneath her makeup, blonde wig, and rock-chick clothes. Maybe she’s really going to pull this whole child actor to adult film actor thing off.

• Ace Showbiz can’t even get the decade correct:
  

  Both of the starlets were dressed in the full ’80s gear. Black-haired Stewart was seen sporting leather pants and her co-star Fanning was captured wearing platform boots. This is the first time Fanning was spotted as Currie.

• Devin Faraci at CHUD.com admits it could have been possible to overlook earlier Fanning images:
  

  So last week I stumbled upon Kristen Stewart in her Joan Jett outfit when The Runaways was filming on my block. But did I also stumble upon Dakota Fanning? If so, I would never have recognized her - as it is I can still barely believe that the young lady in the pictures at Just Jared are actually the Little Miss F.

• John at The Movie Blog also didn’t quite recognize her at first:
  

  Good freaking grief. I had to do a serious double take when I first saw this picture. It’s a shot of Kristen Stewart & Dakota Fanning in their new upcoming movie The Runaways.

• James White at Total Film allows for knowledge of previous shots, but notes the significance of Fanning here:
  

  While we’ve seen Stewart in her Joan Jett getup before, there hasn’t been much coverage of Fanning, playing leader singer Cherie Currie.

  And it’s Fanning who makes the biggest impact here - she’s almost unrecognisable these days from the little girl who appeared in the likes of War Of The Worlds. Sniff… she’s growing up fast.

• Omar Aviles at JoBlo.com focuses on Fanning’s maturity:
  

  Well, would you look at that. Little Dakota Fanning, whose preternatural acting talent was at times scary but mostly cute as a button, went ahead and grew up on us.

• Meanwhile, for an idea of where the comments on these sites are going, here’s the best example from Latino Review (which references the girls’ “bodies” in its headline):
  

  julianne  · 6 hours ago
  Isn’t there some sort of child porn law in Hollywood? Having a 15 year old do a lesbo scene in a movie is every bit child porn. Run, Dakota, run! Hollywood needs to check its moral compass.

  chris · 2 hours ago
  15 years old is not a child by any stretch of the imagination. She is a young adult for god’s sakes. When did the US become so prudish and puritanical? Oh wait, it’s always been that way. At least since the 50s. Grow up America!

  chris · 2 hours ago
  So two same-sex teens kissing is child porn julianne? Since when? Get a grip and stop sexualizing gay and bisexual teens. Would you say that if it were a boy and girl around the same age? That’s ridiculous and homophobic.

When I heard that the New York in the Movies Blogathon and the Self-Involvement Blogathon were happening around the same time, I got it into my head that there was one film I could write about that could legitimately fit on the nexus of both. Sure, there are “better” New York films––Manhattan, obvs, or even Metropolitan; there are films that would allow me to more deeply discuss my personal life, as the Culture Snob puts it, as it’s “filtered through movies.” But there’s no movie in any category or canon that allows me to talk about how my relationship to the city I live in has been filtered through movies since long before I lived here, quite like Ghostbusters. A close reading of the film, the way it depicts New York, and what that has to do with me, follows after the jump. The entire film is now available for streaming, but not embedding, on Hulu.

I should note from the outset that I’m too close to Ghostbusters to know whether or not it’s an empirically “good film.” But I do know it’s empirically fun to watch, and there are definitely aspects of its construction that are, at the very least, novel for its genre. It’s essentially a horror comedy made like a musical, the kind that was, in 1984, at least twenty years out of date.

“Listen!” says Ray early in the film. “Do you smell something?” This is classic screwball dialogue, delivered in a style that’s more sing-song than realistically conversational. A couple of scenes later, Venkmam actually seems to be singing along to the orchestral score when he grabs his fifth of whiskey, puts an arm around Ray and consoles him: “Call it fate/call it luck/call it kar-maaaaa/I believe/That everything happens/For a reason!” And as Ray grabs the bottle and starts rationalizing about their “ectocontainment system,” Venkman dances in place. Later, when he catches his first glimpse of Sigourney Weaver’s Dana Barrett, he’ll do a leap over a short fence; I swear Ivan Reitman stole it from Gene Kelly.

We first meet the Ghostbusters at the psych building of an unnamed university (it looks less like NYU than Columbia). The door to the parapsychology office is emblazoned with blood red graffiti: “Venkman, Burn in Hell”––giving lie to his later insistence, “But the kids love us!” And why *would* they love him? This is a guy who falsifies his experiments in order to give nerdy boys––prototypes for himself and his friends, really––electric shocks, whilst convincing superhot girls that they have psychic powers in hopes that it’ll spread their legs. He’s a gleeful, obvious sadist. And yet there’s something charming about his complete disregard for morality––he got into an an obscure corner of academia for the chicks!

From a very young age, I subconsciously understood that Ghostbusters is not really about the supernatural threat against Manhattan––it’s about this guy conquering the supernatural threat against Manhattan. It’s a Reagan-era Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which the guy most able to think for himself is impervious to the threat. Except, that as scripted by Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis, and played by Bill Murray, this anti-hero would look like a villain if not for his fluid, inexplicable charisma. (Note that the unlovable loser as savior archetype will be recycled in future sci fi action comedies ad infinitum; Affleck and Willis aside, Armageddon is about a whole crew of Venkmans saving the world. Scary stuff.)

A good first third of the film is an extended walk-and-talk, shot on real locations in NYC. There’s something almost Godardian (or, at least, Breathless-ian) about this; you can feel the “real” city’s energy on the margins of Reitman’s deeply nostalgic mish-mash of incongruous old Hollywood genres, even though, as the most expensive comedy ever made up to that point, the production was surely crowd controlled within an inch of its life. Still, this is a film with a deep love for a New York on a never-again brink: the anarcholibertarian spirit of the rough days of the 1970s lingered, but by 1984, everyone had money. What’s more libertarian than a redneck reticence to be ruled, backed up with a full bank account?

That reading gives Murray’s first great line in the film extra meaning. Giving the ghost-stunned librarian a basic psychlogical quiz, he asks the menopause-aged woman if she’s currently menstruating. The Eric Blore clone who apparently runs the joint scrunches his face in horror over the very idea of a functional female anatomy. “What has that got to do with it?” he groans. Murray tilts his head up to the man just slightly, as he’s going to whisper. He doesn’t. “Back off man,” he says. “I’m a scientist.” It’s a threat. It’s a Dirty Harry moment––a “Do you feel lucky, punk?” for science nerds who happen to also aspire to badassness. Ghostbusters is a movie about the scum of the earth re-setting nature’s rules, and in order to do anything like set it back, the traditional power brokers have to rely on these nerds, these scientists who are too punk rock for the academy––partially because they speak the scum of the earth’s language, but partially because they’ve got nothing left to lose.

Which isn’t to say that our boys in grey (as Casey Kasem refers to them during the “rise to fame” montage) aren’t fighting for the New Manhattan. Venkman even shape-shifts into the power-tied 80s capitalist ideal just long enough to goad Ray into financing their venture (”You’re not gonna lose the house–EVERYONE has three mortgages nowadays!”) They move into an abandoned firehouse in Tribeca, a building which Egon insists “should be condemned.” “The neighborhood is like a demilitarized zone,” he warns. Cut to Dana Barrett’s luxe apartment overlooking Central Park West, which we soon learn is ground zero for the city’s supernatural invasion.

The city’s real estate heirarchy is thus upended: still-scary downtown is a safe haven from the horrors of the high-rent district. In 1984, the city was in the first throes of the gentrification that, two decades later, has rendered the Lower East Side and the Upper East Side virtually indistinguishable. Paranormal blight is a Dorian Grey thing, the manifestation of repressed wrongs. Above all else, the Ghostbusters are laying the ground work for the city to self-homogenize, one borough at a time.

The narrative’s only joke about this is a minor one: that when the dead rise from the grave, they’ll inhabit the shells of wannabe old-money co-opers, who will then become indistinguishable from the homeless insane which their penthouses were supposed to protect them from. (I never realized until this viewing that Rick Moranis becomes possessed by the giant dog in the garden outside Tavern on the Green. No wonder I’ve always felt so fucking uncomfortable at those NYFF opening night parties.)

Ghostbusters makes it clear that evil is baked in to the city’s foundations, and like all gentrifiers, the Ghostbusters’ sanitation involves the erasure of history. The boys aren’t sure how to proceed with Dana, their first client, but the first thing that comes to Ray’s mind is to go to the hall of records and see if the building itself “has a history of psychic turbulence.” It, uh, does, and ultimately it’s demolished and rebuilt. Ghostbusters plays on an entire city’s anxieties that, as renters, our spaces don’t belong to us, that there’s a history to our homes that we’ll never know, and probably shouldn’t know. And anyone who’s ever had a roach problem won’t see Dana’s reaction when she finds an unwelcome visitor in her kitchen to be anything unfamiliar.

And like the unwelcome roommates crowding under fridges from the Battery to the Bronx, the threat in Ghostbusters is only scary because it’s so mundane. When the boys move down to scene of the library crime, they find a stack of books on the floor, extending upwards a couple of feet above their heads. The grand majority of mischiefs caused by ghosts in this film are completely everyday, and that’s why it works within the film’s shot-on-location realism––the easiest way to get a cynical audience to accept the fantastic is to make it unspectacular. The ghosts in Ghostbusters don’t kill––they don’t even make an attempt at violence until very close to the end of the film––they are very literally nothing but spectres, and the only threat they pose is a mostly psychological hindrance to everyday order.

Every time I watch it as an adult, I try to tap into what appealed to me about the film as a kid. What did I get, at 5 years old, out of a montage of the boys appearing on the covers of Omni and Atlantic Monthly? Most of the dialogue surely went over my head until I was in my teens. I’m not even talking about the subtle economic/social/moral/religious/and racial subtexts––what did I think was going on when Ray clearly gets a blow job from a poltergeist? How about when Dana, possessed by Zoul, lies under Peter and says, ” I want you inside me?” Was that double entendre unwound/negated completely by the next line––”Sounds like you got at least two people in there already”––or did I always know, subconsciously, that it wasn’t that simple? To watch this film is to necessarily grapple with how it warped my young mind, which is the height of self-involvement.

July 4th weekend is typically reserved for huge blockbuster releases, particularly those starring Will Smith and/or showcasing America as a force not to be messed with (against aliens or the British). Very, very rarely does an independent release even bother trying to go up against the studios during the big holiday. For example, the only option for an American indie we have this weekend is IFC’s wrong-holidayed I Hate Valentine’s Day, which is uneventfully the second Nia Vardalos movie in a month. And this year we don’t even have the usual sort of event movie debuting on July 4th weekend. There’s just Public Enemies and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. Boring.

Isn’t it ironic that independent films can’t open on Independence Day? It would make sense for there to be a number of good U.S.-produced indies opening this week, going up against the big guys with their American spirit (including their disregard for broad, worldwide marketability) and evidence of the American Dream come true. Wondering if there have ever been great independents released at this time of year, we took at look at the last 30 years of cinema and found only a few significant titles.

See what little (American) films bucked the 4th of July weekend release system after the jump:

The Decline of Western Civilization

Distributor: Nu Image Films
Release date: July 1, 1981
Studio offerings: Stripes; For Your Eyes Only; The Great Muppet Caper; Dragonslayer; S.O.B.

Leave it to the punks to infiltrate America’s birthday tradition. This first installment in Penelope Spheeris’ music documentary trilogy focuses on the L.A. punk scene and features live performances by X, Fear, The Germs, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, The Bags and Catholic Discipline. It actually didn’t have much simultaneous studio competition, as Blade Edwards’ Hollywood satire S.O.B. appears to have been the only other new film debuting for the holiday weekend. This is likely because a lot of blockbusters opened the weekend before. Interestingly enough those releases include a subversive comedy lampooning the U.S. military (Stripes) and two films that are a bit too catered to Anglophiles (the 007 installment For Your Eyes Only and the London-set Great Muppet Caper) considering what we celebrate this time of year. No wonder the great American hero Superman held onto the box office crown (with Superman II) for his third weekend in a row that Independence Day.

Surf Nazis Must Die

Distributor: Troma Entertainment
Release date: July 3, 1987
Studio offerings: Innerspace; Adventures in Babysitting

It was somewhat appropriate for Troma to open this low-budget genre flick over the holiday weekend because it features a hero named Washington who battles a bunch of Neo-Nazis led by a guy named Adolph. And obviously the surfing stuff makes it ripe for summertime. The problem is, we’re not 100% positive that Surf Nazis Must Die actually hit theaters on this date (as the IMDb lists it), because Janet Maslin’s New York Times review points out that it opened in NYC in October of that year. And Box Office Mojo has no record of the film. Troma didn’t reply to our email request, either, so we’re just going to believe that it debuted so perfectly this weekend 12 years ago. If you were one of the few moviegoers not keeping Dragnet and Spaceballs in their lead spots over that holiday weekend and remember the truth, please do let us know.

Slacker

Distributor: Orion Classics
Release date: July 5, 1991
Studio offerings: Terminator 2: Judgment Day; Problem Child 2

This seminal indie opened a day after the holiday, but its time of release was certainly intentional. Richard Linklater’s debut is a piece of Americana and displays a side of this country that Hollywood never could. Filled with bohemian characters, many talking about anarchy, conspiracy theories and other subversive topics, the plotless film fits in with the initial theme of Independence Day: revolution. And in a way it also started a revolution for independence in the film industry due to how influential it was on American filmmaking over the next decade. Slacker may not have reached the amount of people T2 did, but it reached the right people at the right time. Linklater must have remembered how successful he was at releasing an indie for Independence Day, because 13 years later his Before Sunset debuted in theaters on July 2 up against Spider-Man 2.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

Distributor: Sony Classics
Release date: June 28, 2006
Studio offerings: Superman Returns; The Devil Wears Prada

Another film subversively focused strictly on an American issue, the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? takes on the U.S. auto industry (specifically General Motors) and the U.S. government as its sort-of enemies while depicting the short history of GM’s EV1 electric car and mourning the vehicle’s demise. The film is primarily a protest of Washington and Detroit’s lack of concern for global warming and energy efficiency and seeks a revolution in both the Capitol and American car manufacturing. Again Superman won the 4th of July weekend box office, even though this time he didn’t specifically represent the American way.

The Wackness

Distributor: Sony Classics
Release date: July 3, 2008
Studio offerings: Hancock

Last year, Sony’s specialty division went for another 4th of July opening with an indie alternative to bloated blockbuster superhero fare. This time it wasn’t a documentary, though. It was, however, another interesting look at a specific part of America (and Americana) at another interesting time. Set in NYC in the summer of 1994, The Wackness is not a protest but a celebration of a certain freedom we still don’t actually have in the U.S.: the freedom to smoke marijuana. And being pro-pot, the movie has a connection with the annual Smoke-In that occurs in Washington, D.C., every 4th of July. Also released the same weekend was the documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, about the very American, very subversive, very revolutionary writer.

Other Independence Day indies include Day of the Dead (1985), The Clearing, Twist of Faith (2005), Strangers With Candy (2006), Joshua (2007), Diminished Capacity (2008) and the already mentioned Before Sunset (2004) and Gonzo (2008).

I have to concentrate on when this thing will be, because focusing on what this thing will be is futile. And that’s the primary reaction to the news today: what the hell will an Asteroids movie be about that will fill up a feature-length running time? And why did four studios fight over such a simple property? Check out some of these reactions from the film blogs after the jump:

• Erik Davis at Sci-Fi Squad reminds us of why this was such a hot property:
  

  the object of the game was to navigate this space ship through an asteroid field and shoot down whatever crazy flying object got in the way. That was it — no storyline, no insane graphics — just a bunch of glowing dots on a screen. Obviously the cinematic possibilities are endless (ahem, sarcasm)

• Marc Bernardin at Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch references the Armageddon connection:
  

  Couldn’t Universal — who won that four-way bidding scrum — just make a movie about noble men and women tasked with blowing up rocks from space without needing a game to base it on?

• S.T. VanAirsdale at Movieline compares the project to another hot property of yore:
  

  Atari’s thrilling story of a triangle and its mission to clear the cosmos of flying rocks. Long considered by Hollywood’s development community as the unadaptable Benjamin Button of classic video games…

• Dan Hopper at Best Week Ever notes that people won’t have the attention span for it:
  

  The movie will be remembered fondly by children from the 80s, but they’ll get bored and switch over to the Q-Bert movie after one quarter.

• Mark at I Watch Stuff thinks the studios picked the wrong video game:
  

  I can’t help but think this is a mistake. Not the idea of making a movie based on a game of flying around shooting asteroids, but making a movie based on a game of flying around shooting asteroids that isn’t Sinistar . At least then you’ve got an extremely antagonistic villain: [embedded YouTube clip]

• Mike Sampson at JoBlo.com also wishes the studio would adapt a different game:
  

  I won’t get into how moronic this idea is (why get into a bidding war when you’re essentially creating the plot from scratch?), but if you were going to adapt an early-80s-era video game into a movie, why not GALAGA? That at least has something to it. Or just take the money that you spent to get “Asteroids” and put it back into BIOSHOCK a movie based on a game that actually has an intriguing storyline…

• Alex Billington at First Showing is sure most of the other early arcade games will hit theaters in no time:
  

  For the longest time, it was always a joke that one day someone would adapt Asteroids. Now it’s really happening. I’m sure this means movies based on Tetris and Frogger and Pac Man won’t be too far behind either, right? God damn you Hollywood! Is there any hope for this movie?

• John at The Movie Blog is flabbergasted at the idea:
  

  ARE… YOU… FUCKING… KIDDING ME!?!?!?!

  You had to pay MONEY for the rights to a story about… well… NOTHING??? It’s a triangle shitting out little dots hitting rock like objects. You’re going to build a MOVIE around that? Seriously?

• Vince Mancini at FilmDrunk is also annoyed and amazed:
  

  A F*CKING BIDDING WAR.  For a movie based on three dots that shoot one dot at other small clusters of dots.  If you can think of anything stupider than this… someone in Hollywood will pay you a lot of money.  GREAT NEWS, EVERYONE, TOM CRUISE JUST SIGNED ON TO PLAY BLINKING LIGHT NUMBER FOUR!  SOMEONE FINGER MY ASSHOLE SO I KNOW I’M NOT DREAMING!

• Dustin Rowles at Pajiba is almost as shocked:
  

  This move makes absolutely no sense to me. If you just call your movie Asteroids (as five other movies have already done), no one is going to know it’s not based on the game unless you tell them it’s not. Is brain damage contagious? And does everyone in Hollywood have it? This is completely shitballsian.

• Sean at Film Junk believes the plotlessness of Asteroids makes this even more ridiculous than most game adaptation ideas:
  

  I mean, we all know that big screen adaptations of video games are usually doomed from the start, but when you’re dealing with a game as simplistic as Asteroids, well, I really don’t know what to say.

• Steven Zeitchik at Risky Biz Blog believes the plotlessness of the game is a good thing:
  

  “Asteroids” has about as much plot and backstory as a Cinemax special feature. Which means that, without the conventions of modern videogame storytelling to slow it down, it may actually work.

• Ross Miller at ScreenRant sees this adaptation as one of the least offensive of late:
  

  Still, of all the board game, toy and video game adaptations in the works, I think Asteroids is probably one of the most harmless. Since there’s no real story to the game, there’s no real story to ruin either. But nonetheless, it’s still irritating to see this Hollywood trend continuing at full speed.

• Annalee Newitz at i09 wonders what the game’s plot was originally and suggests a great idea for a mash-up:
  

  Why were you shooting the asteroids? Were they controlled by aliens? Were you trying to break them up so you could mine them for nickel in their cores? It was all an 8-bit mystery…Couldn’t they just combine Battleship with Asteroids so we could have a plotless tale of shooting that spanned skies and sea? Doesn’t that sound awesome?

• Andrew Mack at Twitch made up the perfect (and likely) plot synopsis:
  

  Aliens have redirected asteroids from the belt in orbit around the Sun, that one between Mars and Jupiter, and they are launching them at Earth, hoping to wipe out the human race from a distance. It’s up to the Asteroid Defense Human Defenders [ADHD - get it?], a collection of young, hot, thrill seeking space pilots to intercept these Asteroids before they become Meteorites and plunge into the soft recesses of our fragile Earth. They’ll be doing some plunging into some soft recesses of their own because they are so young and hot and thrill seeking. Either an Asteroid will get through their defenses, kill millions, and one of the pilots will have this big emotional moment where they torture themselves in grief only get their vindication when Earth can finally launch an assault on this Alien race and these pilots will be asked to lead the charge once they arrive at the belt. Or, one of their pilots will die, planting themselves on the front side of a massive Asteroid, and everyone will have a joined emotional moment then everyone can get their vindication when Earth can finally launch an assault on this Alien race and these pilots will be asked to lead the charge once they arrive at the belt. There will be lots of special effects and lots of explosions [which you must have even though there is no sound in the vacuum of space] and I wouldn’t be surprised if it is done in Real 3D. After all, it’s Asteroids damnit!

• Craig Kennedy at Living in Cinema may have gotten ahold of the script already — even if he’s joking, this is probably it:
  

  Apparently they’ve already written the screenplay and one of our Universal insiders sent over a few pages. Here’s an excerpt:

  Player 1: Blip… blop… blip … blop … blip … blop… pew pew pew pew pew boom… blip… blop.. blip.. blop.. blip.. pew pew pew pew pew pew pew.. blip.. blop.. blip.. whoop whoop whoop pew pew pew whoop whoop pew pew pew pew whoop whoop whoop pew pew pew pew pew boom… blip blop blip blop… boom.

  Player 2: Blip… blop… blip… blop…

• Amos Barshad at Vulture offers his plotmaking services to the project:
  

  As you’ll recall if you enjoy fun, the game consists of a triangle shooting at asteroids moving vertically down the screen — and that’s it. So, guys, if you need a hand with that screenplay or anything …

• Kyle Buchanan at Movieline jokingly suggests some casting ideas for the adaptation. Here is one of the proposed stars:
  

  Natalie Portman as High Score
  Like the High Score itself, Natalie Portman carries a whiff of unattainable prestige, and if Universal added her to the film’s cast, it would be a Twin Galaxies-worthy coup. It may seem like a lot of work for the actress — after all, she’d have to be on-screen at all times — but isn’t Portman due for some outer-space atonement after the Star Wars prequels?

his review was originally published in February. Two Lovers is out on DVD this week.

Rarely has movie love been handled with both the dreamy indulgence and the cynicism that James Grey pulls off in Two Lovers. It’s a pity that the film, which premiered nine months ago at Cannes and is now rolling out on VOD and in theaters via Magnolia, has been pegged in time as the allegedly final film of star Joaquin Phoenix. In this meditation on class passing and infinite adolescence, set mainly in Brighton Beach with a few giddy sojourns to Manhattan, Grey creates a mood pocket, as it were, that’s distinctly out of time. Working off a series of contrasts that’s very true to its New York setting, Two Lovers is implicitly concerned with the way romantic relationships give us an opportunity to slide back and forth across class lines; if that motion temporarily offers the potential for an erasal of personal history, our ultimate stations in life can’t be escaped.

Gwyneth Paltrow and Phoenix both play adults who allow older men to pay their rent. For Paltrow, it’s a stock slimeball married guy who keeps her Michelle, an aging if well-bred bad girl, stashed in an apartment in The Old Neighborhood –– part easy alibi (his mama lives nearby), part obvious fetishistic class regression/emotional slumming (his mama lives near by). In Phoenix’s case, the older man is his father, an Israeli-born dry cleaner who wants to ensure his own comfortable retirement by making sure his wannabe photographer son Leonard hooks up with Sandra Cohen (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of a business partner. Too bad Leonard is constantly running off to answer text messages from Michelle, whose bought-and-paid-for pad is visible from his childhood window. He can gaze lovingly, creepily at his shiksa goddess’ blonde head floating behind a barred window across a courtyard while his too-close mom (Isabella Rossellini) spies on her son from just outside his bedroom door.

Leonard begins relationships with both women simultaneously, and much of the film is devoted to the ways in which he immerses himself in the pleasures offered by one to ameliorate the disappointments of the other. The dry cleaner’s daughter says she wants to “take care” of Phoenix, but she probably shouldn’t––at worst unstable and immature and at best just something of a bore, he’s a 30 year-old boy who has moved back in with the ‘rents after a failed engagement and multiple suicide attempts. In turn, Paltrow (more impressive than she has been in years cast against type as a cannily manipulative roiling ball of need) exploits Leonard’s proximity (emotional, physical) as a salve for the constant pain wrought by her married boyfriend’s distance and seeming indifference.

A film about emotional extremes, Two Lovers plays out in visual extremes. Grey very consciously color codes his spaces to correspond to his narrative’s alternating moods. All grey and green and drained of light during the narrative’s darkest points, Two Lovers shifts into chromatic overdrive when its bi-polar protagonist is closest to manic oblivion. A crucial clutch scene that might under other circumstances seem like a romantic high is marked as anything but by Grey’s choice of palette: there’s almost no color on the screen beyond the white-gold wisps of Paltrow’s windblown hair dusting the frame. Since this scene comes after a pair of less-ambiguous low moments (a suicide attempt, a miscarriage), all rendered in the same lightless matte, we know to read what the characters see as a moment of unexpected ecstasy, as in all actuality a third flirtation with death. It’s horribly bleak. It’s also beautiful.

The film’s tone can be somewhat contradictory, and it’s hard to say whether Grey is saying that his obviously troubled protagonist’s ability to seduce two gorgeous women (and, most problematically, that he stuns both ladies into a state of something like love via swift administration of his dick) makes for comedy or tragedy. Maybe both: Phoenix himself, starting at the moment of seduction and carrying through to the end of each such scene, seems like he’s playing a completely different person. It’s a dramatization of the transformative nature of sexual attraction.

In the film’s second to last shot, Phoenix locks a single, tortured eye on the camera from behind the embrace of the woman who he’s just, by default, given a diamond ring. It’s a single shot that undercuts any possibility that this apparent traditional romantic happy ending is in fact what it seems. It would be difficult to look at that image and still believe that anyone in this movie has actually been in “real” love since they stepped on screen, to not feel a cynical, momentary jolt that romantic love itself is never really more than a collision of circumstance and impulse, a way of taking care of a need via the most readily available means. It’s a testament to the childish madness of infatuation, and maybe even true love’s impossibility. Happy Valentines!

This review is a rethink of some thoughts I posted after seeing Two Lovers for the first time at Cannes; a second viewing this week outside of the pressure and exhaustion of the film festival cleared up some of my questions about the film. Sometimes that happens!

Before seeing Johnny Depp as John Dillinger in Michael Mann’s new crime film Public Enemies, we decided to check out an earlier portrayal of the infamous bank robber, Lawrence Tierney in Dillinger. The 1945 picture is a bit disappointing in terms of bank jobs, which are mostly shown in quick succession during a montage. There is one interesting robbery, but technically it’s an armored truck heist (also, having been shot by Fritz Lang for an earlier film, the scene doesn’t quite fit the rest of the movie). From what we hear, the robberies in Public Enemies aren’t that much more memorable, even if they do resemble an MGM musical, which is a shame considering how clever the real Dillinger was.

We definitely prefer a clever criminal and a clever plan when it comes to bank robber movies. Otherwise it’s just yet another taut thriller or slapstick comedy involving a tunnel dig from the bakery/bathhouse/chicken restaurant/luggage store/etc. next door. So we’ve come up with ten favorite bank jobs that involve originality and a successful getaway (a plan isn’t that clever if it doesn’t work). There have been hundreds of bank robberies throughout film history so if we’ve forgotten something really clever, inform/remind us of the movie in the comments. We’ve purposefully excluded armed vehicle, stagecoach and train robberies, though, so stick specifically to internal bank jobs.

10. Clive Owen Hides in the Wall, in Inside Man (2006)

In Spike Lee’s complex heist drama, Clive Owen plays one of the smartest, most precise bank robbers ever seen at the movies, and though his scheme is figured out in the end, it’s already too late for him to get caught. To begin, he and his team enter a New York City bank disguised as painters and refer to each other only as variations of the name “Steve.” Simple enough, but then as time goes on there are some mysterious activities going on with the moving of hostages and some sort of carpentry occurring inside a stockroom. Ultimately, the employment of fake kills and fake walls is ingenious, though the overall idea of camouflaging robbers as hostages had been done before (see #1).

9. The Money is Floating Out of the Bank, in The Invisible Man (1933)

Is an idea clever if it’s not technically possible? Well, there are apparently scientists working on achieving invisibility, with relative success, so in the future H.G Wells’ concept of an invisible man may not be so unfeasible for real life criminals. Of course, by then it won’t be such an original idea to rob a bank using the power of invisibility. It’s the second most likely thing for a man of such ability to do (the first is to go into the women’s’ locker room). For Claude Rains’ character in James Whale’s adaptation of the Wells novel, the concept was still pretty original and obviously quite brilliant. And his idea to have the money just float outside and into the streets, for the townspeople to take, is very generous.

8. Modern Robin Hoods Don’t Actually Steal Anything, in Wisdom (1987)

If Emilio Estevez and Demi Moore were merely modern day Robin Hoods in this film (which Estevez also wrote and directed — with help from Robert Wise), they wouldn’t have qualified for the list, but because they didn’t actually steal any money from the banks they robbed, their holdups are quite interesting. During the 1980s, when American farming was in crisis, it was more beneficial to decrease farmers’ debt than increase their cash in hand. Does burning mortgage records still count as stealing? Yes, in a way that’s cleverer than simply looting money.

7. Small Army, Big Take, in Kelly’s Heroes (1970)

In this larger-scale precursor to Three Kings, a group of American soldiers led by Clint Eastwood venture into enemy territory during WWII to steal a huge cache of gold bars located in a bank vault. It’s certainly unlike most heist films in that it’s also a war movie, and both the robbers and the bank guards are armed with tanks.

6. Army-Trained Crew, in The League of Gentlemen (1960)

Of course, Kelly’s Heroes wasn’t the first film to feature a group of soldiers-turned-bank robbers, but it’s still quite different from The League of Gentlemen, which isn’t set during wartime. Instead the film involves former army personnel who are deemed corrupt in some way or another who are brought together to lend their specific military expertise towards a foolproof bank heist plot. We consider the plan foolproof despite the group’s ultimate downfall, and still count the job as a relative success (compared to most foiled heists in other movies) due to the very rare and circumstantial reason that they were caught.

5. Elliott Gould Takes Advantage of His Situation, in The Silent Partner (1978)

Pulling a job from the inside isn’t always a good idea, but Elliott Gould shows us that it can work if the inside man isn’t connected to the outside men in any way. He plays a teller who learns that his bank will be robbed, so he puts aside a whole bunch of money for himself knowing that it will just be lumped in with the real robber’s take, as far as the bank and the police are concerned. Unfortunately, the real robber (Christopher Plummer) catches on to Gould’s sneaky cut-in and threatens his life. The Silent Partner is apparently a remake of a 1969 Danish film with the English title Think of a Number, so that film should get some credit for this clever plot.

4. Lola Keeps it in the Family, in Run Lola Run (1998)

When she is desperate to get her hands on 100,000 Deutche Mark to pay a ransom, Lola’s (Franka Potente) options are depicted in three different scenarios. In the second of these segments, she decides to rob the bank where her father works. It’s a bold plan, but in a way it’s pretty clever because nobody would expect a banker’s daughter to be a bank robber. Of course, in the long run (no pun intended) such a crime wouldn’t really work, because she’s so easily identifiable, but in the short run it’s perfect, and hilarious, how the cops outside the bank don’t believe a young woman with bright red hair is the one robbing the bank.

3. Thomas Jane Investigates His Own Crime, in Stander (2003)

This film gets special props for being a true story, because it’s not often enough that real-life criminals are more clever than movie criminals. Thomas Jane plays a South African police Captain (named Stander), who starts robbing banks when he grows tired of his normal life. In the movie he often looks ridiculous, wearing disguises that seem straight out of the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” video. But his heists work out due to how unbelievable they are. Because he’s a cop, nobody suspects Stander for a long time, even when he’s recognized by a teller while leading an investigation of a robbery that he himself committed (this same irony occurred in the search for the informant “Deep Throat,” too).

2. The Joker Kills His Crew, in The Dark Knight (2008)

The opening sequence of The Dark Knight works so well on its own that it functioned almost as a pre-feature short when released as a promotional tool attached to prints of I Am Legend. Really it’s one of the greatest bank heist scenes of all time, partly because it’s so clever. The concept of a gang leader killing off his team one by one in order to acquire 100% of the haul may not be the freshest, yet it’s written and executed (no pun intended) so perfectly that the plan seems original. The cleverest thing about this heist, though, has to be the Joker’s use of a school bus as a getaway vehicle so that he may blend in with a convoy of buses leaving a school.

1. Jean-Paul Belmondo Clowns Around, in Hold-Up (1985)

We’ve actually never seen this French Canadian comedy, but it was remade as one of our favorite Bill Murray films, Quick Change (both films are based on a novel), which we always thought had the most clever bank robbery in cinema before discovering this earlier film. So we’ll go by what we would have written for the American version and apply it to the source:

The employ of costumes in bank robberies was nothing new when Jean-Paul Belmondo and Guy Marchand wore disguises in this underrated comedy (which also stars Kim Cattrall, apparently in the Geena Davis spot), but the way the duo pulled off their costume changes was more clever than any other heist we’ve seen on the big screen, before or since. Belmondo enters a Montreal bank as a clown and seeming solo robber. Then, after letting his accomplice Marchand go free as a “hostage,” he changes into normal clothes and pretends to be a hostage, as well. In Quick Change, the way the re-disguised bank robbers get lost in the frenzy outside the bank is a little unlikely, but otherwise the plan seems smart and easy enough that once we’re sure nobody remembers either Hold-Up or its more well-known remake, we may actually try to pull it off ourselves.

Other memorable film appearances include roles in Gypsy, Patton, How the West Was Won, Birdman of Alcatraz, I Confess, Pollyanna and One-Eyed Jacks, directed by his occasional costar Marlon Brando. He also starred on TV’s The Streets of San Francisco. My favorite of his movies is Baby Doll because his character was one of the first I’d encountered where I wasn’t sure if I should like him or hate him. Ultimately I sympathized with him over his rival in the film, played by Eli Wallach, simply because I grew up loving Malden and his big bulbous nose. Plus, between Waterfront and Pollyanna, as a kid I always associated Malden with good, religious roles. Even though he hadn’t worked in years, his passing today marks quite a significant loss for both cinema and television.

Check out other film blogs’ tributes to the great actor after the jump:

• Anne Thompson at Thompson on Hollywood recognizes his dominant likability:
  

  While he played his share of villains, he was known for his decency, finally. He represented something good in all of us…We should all wish to generate such respect and affection, and live so long.

• Bob Westal at Premium Hollywood recognizes his status and quality as an actor:
  

  Karl Malden never got quite the same level of attention as costars like Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, Steve McQueen, Anthony Perkins, Montgomery Clift, Michael Caine, and George C. Scott…That was largely because Malden was the kind of performer who understood that acting is a team sport. His best scenes were like great duets with near perfect communication between him and his scene partners. The exception were American Express travelers’ checks; those, he wiped off the screen.

• Beaks at Aint It Cool News celebrates his longevity:
  

  You can’t do ninety-seven years much better than Karl Malden…I think we can safely say Karl Malden made the best of his time on this planet.

• John Farr at The Huffington Post considers the timeliness of Malden’s death:
  

  It’s sad and scary both to say goodbye to you, because you represented the last man standing from a period in film-making whose like we won’t see again.

  As we celebrate the Fourth, we should think of you, since you represented all the best possibilities of being American : a young immigrant, full of promise, who found identity and success in the new world.

• Dennis McLellan at the LA Times addresses Malden’s distinct schnoz:
  

  With his unglamorous mug — he broke his bulbous nose twice playing sports as a teenager — the former Indiana steel-mill worker realized early on the course his acting career would take.

  “I was so incredibly lucky,” Malden once told The Times. “I knew I wasn’t a leading man. Take a look at this face.” But, he vowed as a young man, he wasn’t going to let his looks hamper his ambition to succeed as an actor.

• Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere recalls some favorite Malden moments:
  

  [In Waterfront] I love Malden’s frustrating third-act moment with Brando in the Hoboken bar when he yells at the bartender, “Gimme a beer!” And his line to Eva Marie Saint in the beginning: “You think I’m just a gravy-train rider with a turned-around collar…don’t you? Don’t you? (Pause) I see the sisters taught you not to lie.”

  In Streetcar Malden says to Vivien Leigh, “I was fool enough to believe you were straight.” And she answers “Straight? What’s ’straight’? A line can be straight, or a street. But the heart of a human being?”

  I love the One-Eyed Jacks moment when the hog-tied Brando spits in Malden’s face just before being bull-whipped on Main Street; ditto Brando’s faking Malden out in the final shoot out, running and diving into the dust and shooting Malden in the back three times.

• Kristopher Tapley at In Contention could go on and on, but holds back:
  

  Too many films to recount, too many great pieces of acting to list.  “On the Waterfront,” “Baby Doll,” “Cheyenne Autumn,” an impressive TV streak in “Streets of San Francisco.”  I’ll always remember “Streetcar.”  He was 97.  Now that’s a life.

• Craig Kennedy at Living in Cinema primarily remembers Malden from television:
  

  I knew Karl Malden first as the guy from the American Express commercials in the 1970s, but he’ll probably always be best known as Lt. Mike Stone on TV’s The Streets of San Francisco which ran from 1972 – 1977.

• Andrew O’Hehir at Beyond the Multiplex also remembers the TV stuff first:
  

  For someone of my generation, Malden will always be identified with Lt. Mike Stone of the long-running 1970s TV series “The Streets of San Francisco” (whose sidekick was played by Michael Douglas). For younger viewers, I guess he’ll always be the “Don’t leave home without it” guy from more than 20 years of American Express commercials…Go in peace, Sekulovich. I don’t think they take American Express cards where you’re going. Just this once, it was OK to leave home without it.

• David Poland at The Hot Blog recalls a recent tribute from Malden’s TV costar:
  

  …it was Michael Douglas’ tribute and love for Karl Malden that most strongly resonated. He spoke of feeling like Malden’s son and wishing that he could, indeed, be adopted by his second father. At an age at which he was trying to break away from his parent/legend, he was shown the showbiz ropes by Malden.

• Seth Abramovitch at Movieline spotlights Malden’s rare marital achievement:
  

  Malden is survived by his wife Mona Greenberg — the two celebrated their 70th anniversary last year, which tied Bob and Dolores Hope’s record as Hollywood’s longest-married couple…

Now for some clips:

• Todd at IDon’tLikeYouInThatWay.com shares this scene from Streetcar:

• The Moviezzz Blog presents a clip from Gypsy:

• Noel Murray at A.V. Club highlights a montage of his AmEx spots:

Director Zach Godshall and co-writer/producer/star Barlow Jacobs incorporate documentary footage into a fictional tale of insurance adjusters in the devastated city. Jacobs plays Turner Stull, a blank-eyed young white guy who moves down to NOLA to evaluate storm damage under the tutelage of his carpetbagging uncle. Forced to traverse an unfamiliar city in which simple signposts and landmarks have been erased, making a living by delivering bad news to a seemingly endless stream of justifiably angry folks, Turner strikes up an uneasy friendship with an enigmatic black man named Nixon. This unlikely pair spends the bulk of the film driving around, attending to Turner’s insurance appointments and searching for Nixon’s lost dog. Their convergent quests may be a little too convenient, yet the set-up works. The actors, particularly Robert Longstreet as Turner’s uncle, are continuously engrossing, and the survivor interviews never fail to astound. Though less interested in mounting an investigation or assigning blame, Low and Behold is just as affecting as Spike Lee’s Where The Levees Broke–sometimes more so.

Low and Behold is the second feature on a bill that starts at 6pm. More info here.

Karina kind of foresaw the Chipette-debuting sequel “appealing to a young male audience’s latent lust for a trio of tarted-up little girl chipmunks” a year ago, and now this teaser is proof that the Alvin and the Chipmunks franchise has gone from being influenced by Pink Flamingos to being influenced by Porky’s (or some other horny teen comedy). But while we actually had to see shit-eating in the first film’s trailer, at least we didn’t have to see any chipmunk erections in this spot. Meanwhile, some concerned people are fearing that this movie will encourage more lookalike couples. Really? Are lookalike couples that bad? Or is the real concern that the movie somehow will inspire kids to dress in drag? Is the tagline “Munk Yourself” some kind of reference to a transsexual narcissism fetish?

Check out the film blogs’ reactions to the trailer after the jump:

• Vince Mancini at Film Drunk admits those computer-animated Chipettes turned him on:
  

  It isn’t quite as strange as the infamous poop-eating teaser from the first movie, but it is a little creepy to see rodents making eyes at each other accompanied by slow jams, and it’d definitely go in the spank bank if I was a furry.   Ha, just kidding, I’ve pleasured myself to it three times already.

• Mike Sampson at JoBlo.com feels a little guilty after watching this:
  

  When I was a child, I had a somewhat inappropriate crush on Brittany, the lead Chippette. The new trailer for ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS 2 makes that crush a whole lot more inappropriate.

• Mark at I Watch Stuff is surprised yet thankful there are no erect penises in the trailer:
  

  When Alvin and his cronies unexpectedly run across their female counterparts–mirror images of themselves wearing ineffective skirts–the boys naturally get pretty turned on…Gross, but relatively restrained in comparison to the feces-eating in the original film’s trailer. I was fully expecting to be shown a trio of erect chipmunk penises.

• Katey Reich at Cinema Blend wishes the Chipettes were more than just objects for the male chipmunk gaze:
  

  First of all, the chipmunks still look creepy. Second of all, there’s still no reason for them to be voiced by name actors (Justin Long, Jesse McCartney and Matthew Gray Gubler). And third, the Chipettes don’t get a single line? Really?

And here’s the teaser, courtesy of MTV Movies Blog:

Are you tired of all the false rumors of celebrity deaths (today it was Rick Astley)? And are you tired of all the jokes that Michael Jackson is really still alive somewhere, hanging out with Tupac, JFK and Elvis? So are we, but we thought we’d take both the obnoxious death hoax trend and the idea that MJ faked it so he could live in peace and out of debt as inspiration for something more worthwhile: a discussion of favorite false deaths in movies.

The device is quite popular, especially in thrillers and horror flicks, and it can be employed as a plot starter or in a twist ending. James Bond has done it, as has Sherlock Holmes. Whether someone fakes his/her own death or is simply mistaken for dead, the actual deed or the ultimate reveal can end up terrific cinema. In fact, it was very difficult for us to narrow our favorites down to ten. It’s a shame we had to leave out memorable scenes from Heathers, Hero and many other movies. Certainly you’ll disagree with some of our exclusions, too, so feel free to name them in the comments section.

Just beware; there may be SPOILERS after the jump:

10. Irene Dunne Survived the Shipwreck in My Favorite Wife (1940)

Nick’s wife, Ellen, has been missing for seven years after a shipwreck and is presumed dead. Of course, just when he finally declares her deceased and tries to move on by marrying someone else, Ellen returns, having been only stranded on a desert island all those years. Madcap screwball comedy ensues. The hilarious reveal comes early on, though, when Ellen (played by Irene Dunne) shows up at the new couple’s honeymoon hotel and causes Nick (Cary Grant) to do a stunned and tilting extended take while an elevator door slowly eliminates his view of his supposed-to-be dead first (and favorite) wife (Dunne). The situation was slightly combined with Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train for the plot of Throw Momma from the Train, except that the (ex-) wife who ends up actually alive in that film was not nearly so beloved.

9. The Body on the Floor is Not a Corpse in Saw (2004)

We aren’t exactly fans of the franchise (we’ve only seen this first installment), but the reveal at the end of the original Saw is amazing. Throughout the horror film, which is set primarily in a dirty bathroom occupied by two chained-up men forced into a morality game, there is a seemingly dead corpse lying in the middle of the floor. But ultimately the body gets up off the ground and turns out to be the mastermind, the “Jigsaw Killer.” Do we buy that anyone could remain that still for so long? Not exactly, but it’s a neat trick and plot twist nevertheless.

8. Rock Hudson is a Human Reboot in Seconds (1966)

Sometimes we wish that Hollywood would come along and reboot our lives the way they reboot film franchises. Seconds is kind of like that, as it involves a company that gives people second chances by faking their deaths and transforming their appearance. The film’s protagonist goes through the process of becoming a “reborn” and receives the face of Rock Hudson, which is a pretty good deal no matter how much the service cost. But in a kind of It’s a Wonderful Life way, the character decides that he wants his old life back. Unfortunately, unlike George Bailey, he’s technically already gone through with the “suicide,” and it’s not so easy for a change of heart.

7. Jack Nicholson Swapped Identities in The Passenger (1975)

Somewhat akin to the concept of Seconds, only less sci-fi, a TV journalist (Nicholson) assumes the identity of a dead man who has been staying at the same small African hotel, and he reports his own death instead. A word of advice learned from this Michelangelo Antonioni film, though: when picking a new life, choose one that isn’t so criminal and hated as a gunrunner. Also, don’t be surprised if your wife comes looking for the person you’re pretending to be in order to find out what happened to “you.”

6. The Dead Woman Wasn’t Laura in Laura (1944)

It’s a common narrative idea to have a detective become obsessed (even fall for) the dead woman whose murder he’s investigating. It’s not as common, though, for that woman to suddenly show up alive, the way Laura (Gene Tierney) does in Otto Preminger’s classic film noir. Where has she been all this time? Oh, up in the country where there are no newspapers or any other means of her hearing that she’s apparently been killed. And the body that was found dead in Laura’s apartment? Oh, that was another woman Laura’s fiancée was seeing on the side. The revelation scene here is great because both the detective (Dana Andrews) and the non-dead character are in shock — he because she’s alive and she because she’s “dead.”

5. Jerry Orbach’s Assassination is Staged in F/X (1986)

Mobster’s deaths are often faked in the movies, but in this film the feds get smart and hire a special effects artist from Hollywood to make the assassination look realistic. The twist here is that for a while the artist (Bryan Brown) thinks the supposed-to-be fake shooting was real after all, and he has been framed as the killer. But then it turns out the mobster (Orbach) is indeed still alive. But then he’s killed for real. But then the effects artist takes on the guy’s identity, so it seems he’s still alive. The movie isn’t really as confusing as it sounds.

4. The Floating Body is a Special Effect in April Fool’s Day (1986)

1986 was a good year for movies involving deaths faked by fictional special effects artists. In this prank of a slasher film, based somewhat off Agatha Christie’s novel And Then There Were None, nobody really dies. We find out in the end that everyone’s murder has been faked with great detail by a hostess and her hired effects team. Technically that means that April Fool’s Day counts for more than one false death, so we picked the inaugural death as the single false death, because it is the one that sets the fear and mystery in motion (well, really, the guy crushed by the boat does this, but he doesn’t “die,” so we can’t use him). The movie was remade last year for a direct-to-video release, but apparently there are a few actual deaths in that one.

3. Kim Novak Only Plays One Person in Vertigo (1958)

We never fully bought this Hitchcock classic when we were young, and even though we grew to love it and appreciate it, the premise is still a little ridiculous. Obviously Judy Barton is the same person as Madeleine Elster, who seemingly jumped/fell to her death from a bell tower earlier. She’s played by Kim Novak, too, and looks so much like the other person, even if her hair and clothes aren’t the same. But people in movies (even James Stewart) don’t always recognize disguised persons so easily, especially if they think they saw the person die. Of course, that minor issue can be set aside for the sake of the story and its themes, but just barely.

2. Arnold Schwarzenegger is Digitally Killed Off in The Running Man (1987)

One year after F/X and April Fool’s Day, Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared in this sci-fi action flick about a violent game show that kills off convicted criminals for the entertainment of civilians. And like those two movies, it employs the idea of special effects for false deaths. When it appears that one particular contestant (Schwarzenegger) can’t lose, the show’s host (Richard Dawson) stages the guy’s gruesome death using CGI. Of course, the unstoppable running man can do more than not lose, he can win, and that consists of killing the game show host and proving that he’s alive and innocent to the viewers at home (or wherever). Never mind that there’s a second person (María Conchita Alonso) whose death is faked in that CGI sequence; if she hadn’t been with Schwarzenegger she would have died for real anyway.

1. Harry Lime is Hiding in the Shadows in The Third Man (1949)

Probably the most famous reveal ever that a character is living, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who supposedly died of a broken neck after being hit by a truck, stands in a shadowed doorway but is identified when a spot of light briefly illuminates his face. This one couldn’t possibly be a spoiler for anyone due to how iconic it is.

Kamp Katrina is shot cinema verite style on prosumer digital video. The roughness inherent to the format produces unexpectedly exciting effects. As co-directors Ashley Sabin and David Redmon buzz like flies around the action in the tent city, their handheld cameras are set to low shutter speeds to compensate for a lack of natural light.The resulting image is slightly slowed, tinted neon pink, and at times, it almost seems to float off the screen. The hallucinogenic spin brought by the video amplifies the feeling that post-Katrina New Orleans might as well be on another planet, in as much as it resembles the “normal” American city.

The DVD package includes two essays: one on the movie itself by Stuart Klawans of The Nation, and another byJeff Ferrell on the notions of “cultural criminology” and the “carnivalesque.” The latter doesn’t directly reference the movie in the case, but instead provides theoretical backup for Redmon and Sabin’s wider project.

You can buy Kamp Katrina at Amazon or via the Carnivalesque web site.

Virtually since the production of Michael Mann’s Public Enemies was announced, various parties have expressed concern that the video fetishism of Collateral and Miami Vice would make a less than appropriate presentation format for a glammy gangster piece set in the 1930s. If *only* Public Enemies looked more like Miami Vice — if only Mann had brought back cinematographer Dion Beebe for a third consecutive collaboration/experiment in pushing the limits of what high quality digital video can do. Lensed by The Insider cinematographer Dante Spinotti, Public Enemies is a drab looking film, its shaky-cam aesthetic coming off as less considered — and far less explicable — than that of any number of indie dramas employing similar run-and-gun techniques on a millionth of this film’s budget. Add in a wildly uneven performance style, an unnecessarily attenuated running time and a sound mix that’s problematically muddy even after evidently excessive after-the-fact dubbing, and the result is a severely miscalculated marriage of style to subject. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Public Enemies is essentially a really expensive mumblecore film with ADR and guns — and the M-word comparison is not merited solely by its conspicuous form. It’s also a film in which the world of work and general era-appropriate social consciousness is conquered by an emphasis on love. And that, in the end, may be the only thing Public Enemies does right.

Johnny Depp plays John Dillinger, the Robin Hood of Depression America, on the lam from a fledgling FBI led from a desk by J. Edgar Hoover (an unrecognizable Billy Crudup) and on the ground by Agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale, on growling Batman autopilot). Dillinger meets a girl named Billie (Marion Cotillard) in a Chicago nightclub and decides, on the spot, that she’s going to be his girl; she resists a bit but he’s kind of a bully, and she kind of likes it, so soon they’re having epic, virtually abstract sex. Then there’s a bunch of shooting and running around — half the time, I couldn’t figure out what was going on, partially because I could barely see it, partially because I could scarcely understand the dialogue, much of it mumbled and/or drowned in score — but eventually Billie ends up in jail. She won’t snitch on “my man Johnny.”  Spoiler alert: Batman finds him anyway.

Depp interprets Dillinger as a nattily-dressed gentleman murderer/celebrity thief with a fraction of the winking zeal he brought to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. If those films stand as examples of how rote genre exercises are sometimes the best vehicles for balls-to-the-wall star power, Public Enemies has the inverse problem: the style and structure of the film mutes its megastar, reducing him to an image mostly devoid of personality. This is not necessarily an unexpected direction for Mann: Miami Vice, though arguably more inspired by the music video-as-emotional-placeholder ethos of the original TV series, featured two lead performances that worked on a purely visual level … in large part because Colin Farrell and Gong Li were both tasked with linguistic challenges that they could not meet. Casting women who cannot speak English intelligibly seems to be a growing trademark of Michael Mann films: in Enemies, Cotillard tries out a handful of accents, none of them convincing for an American coat check girl circa 1933. Increasingly, Mann seems to be making movies that might be better off silent.
As far as I could tell, Public Enemies tells us that there’s a Depression going on in two ways: with very occasional visual reminders, such as an image of a hobo slumped in front of a palatial bank that Dillinger is about to rob, and with a title on the screen. Otherwise, this is pure 1930s movie escapism, which would be fine if Spinotti’s camera was up to the task of capturing the contrast between the glitzy dance halls where Dillinger plays and the scrappy climes in which he hides. Instead, both poles are flattened out, and whatever tension could conceivably be milked from a story with a long-proscribed ending collapses in kind.
But there is one area in which Public Enemies nods to the gangster movies of old that does succeed. The gangster myth, especially as manifested in the 1930s flicks that reinforced the fame of someone like Dillinger in his own time, only works if the gangster and his lifestyle are linked to love and desire. Being sexy is not something that Johnny Depp has to work at; this is something that just requires Johnny Depp to show up. Though Cotillard is not convincing as a US Citizen, she would have to work much harder than she does to be unconvincing as a woman in love with Johnny Depp. The romance between Dillinger and Billie does what gangster romances are supposed to do: it humanizes the criminal and demonizes the cops and the feds who are trying to keep the lovers apart. The best moments in Public Enemies — a brutally violent interrogation scene in which Billie is humiliated in virtually every way short of rape, a scene where Dillinger takes a casual walk through the office of the men who are trying to jail him — have a kind of surreal quality, in which the boy and girl, embolded by a passion that’s making them crazy, are driven to test what they can get away with. It’s because of these moments that Public Enemies can’t be called a complete failure, or even a must-avoid. It’s not a bad film, it’s just badly made.

Of course, a success like Transformers 2’s doesn’t exactly prove critics are worthless, only those who function simply as a thumbs up/thumbs down sort of recommendatory guide. Plenty of critics should continue to be worth reading if they’re otherwise good reads and create or allow for discussion without merely saying a film is good or bad. One of my favorite kinds of critic, for instance, is the kind that may turn me onto a film despite him/her having disliked it, as some scathing reviews of Transformers 2 have almost done.

A reader commented on my previous post about Transformers 2 with the claim that all our negative reviews helped the movie be so successful. If that’s the truth, maybe we should start using negative psychology and trash the great little films we really love. Or, we can just stop worrying about the majority audience liking different things as us and enjoy all the death threats we get from mainstream moviegoers when we disagree with them. Isn’t it often better for our sites’ traffic to stir up contention anyway?

Oh well, here’s another crop of critical whinery after the jump:

• Steven Zeitchik at Risky Biz Blog responds to TF2’s success with something he calls the “Fool-ometer”:
  

  We knew the reviews would be fetid. And we knew the box-office would be smashing. But we didn’t know the box-office would be this good and the reviews this bad…[so] we came up with a little measuring tool to gauge just how much audiences disregard critics on a given pic. We call it the Fool-ometer, and it quantifies the gap between audience and critical approval.

  It’s a simple formula. To come up with a Fool-ometer score, we took a film’s opening weekend and compared it to its reviewer approval (we used Rotten Tomatoes). So a blockbuster that was well-reviewed, like “Iron Man,” scores in the range of a 1 — in that case, the $98 million it earned opening weekend is just about one time the the 93% of critics who approved. That’s the sort of number you want. “Dark Knight” is slightly higher, but that’s mainly because it earned so damn much.

• Peter Travers at The Travers Take also compares the disappointing success of TF2 with other blockbusters, including Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith:
  

  …the runner-up position in my book goes to Revenge of the Sith, the final and most futile attempt from clumsy director and tin-eared writer George Lucas to create a prequel trilogy to match the myth-making spirit of the original Star Wars saga he unleashed in 1977. I’d still watch Sith five times than endure another five minutes of Trans 2. But that’s just me.

• Dustin Rowles at Pajiba seems disappointed with the world’s moviegoers:
  

  It’s just a goddamn shame that “It doesn’t look good, but I’ll see it anyway,” is worth so much more in box-office dollars than: “That looks amazing, and I’ve heard great things. Maybe I’ll see it on DVD.” What the hell is wrong with this country’s mindset? There are a couple million folks who only venture out of their house once a year to see a movie, and they’ve decided that Revenge of the Fallen was the one movie worth seeing.

• John Cairns at Film School Rejects is mad at some specifically located American moviegoers:
  

  I’m mad that folks in middle America are giving a free pass to all this outrageousness when they didn’t give a free pass to Indiana Jones 4 or these other movies. There were people bitching and complaining about that fridge-nuking, and about  Watchmen and Terminator Salvation and other movies for all kinds of things, and to various degrees these movies took a hit at the box office as a result – not so much in the case of last year’s Indiana Jones movie, but definitely with these other two.

• JoBlo.com uses a lot of quotation marks and exclamation points sarcastically in its box office report:
  

  I think TRANSFORMERS 2’s record-shattering opening over the past 5 days has, at the very least, proven one thing: when it comes to summer “blockbuster” movies, film critic reviews don’t matter for shit!!…it seems as though “regular audience” members (you know, those who actually matter!!) could care less, and just wanted to check out a film offering some uber-escapism.

• Eugene Novikov at Cinematical foresees things getting worse in the wake of such success:
  

  Well, don’t we all feel a little silly. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the movie that received the most hysterically negative reviews of 2009 opened to by far the year’s biggest numbers…I hope everyone is looking forward to Transformers 3, where Autobots will discover fart jokes.

• Robert Humanick at The House Next Door anticipated the divide in his review of TF2:
  

  I’m sick of this notion that movie critics don’t like to have fun. Like any broad accusation, it’s pure cop-out, especially when founded on the basis of but a handful of films, as is usually the case. Though a minority opinion in my circles, I liked the first Transformers…Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is to its predecessor like a medieval torture chamber is to a playground, but that won’t keep many from swallowing it hook, line and sinker, quickly and indiscriminately…I mourn the volume of human life being wasted on this thing. If the film makes $100 million this weekend and tickets cost $10 a pop, that’s ten million viewers and a total of twenty-five million hours, not including previews, travel and the time spent earning the wasted money. If the average person lives to be 75, that’s 38 lives. This seems to me a crime…

• Rob Bricken at Topless Robot is kinda glad at least that TF2 didn’t better TDK in its opening:
  

  I have to admit that if Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen had out-grossed The Dark Knight, I would have found it very depressing. Hell, it still kind of bums me out that a movie with almost zero coherence — but plenty of action — got so damn close. Surely no one out there thinks that TF2 was better than Dark Knight, right?

• Dan Hopper at Best Week Ever notes that the TF2 gross isn’t too bad in perspective with the week:
  

  Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen grossed $112 million this weekend, which isn’t the saddest or most surprising pop culture story of the past week, but still…

• S.T. VanAirsdale at Movieline responds to Paramount’s data measuring audience approval, which notes moviegoers favor TF2 over even Star Trek:
  

  Right. Like you have to guess who sent the press such “notable facts” from inside Paramount — the same studio, of course, which Bay infamously scolded via e-mail for neglecting Fallen while Star Trek took top marketing priority. Naturally the same LAT excerpt wound up posted this morning on Bay’s own Web site, its last sentence bolded for emphasis like a middle finger to critics, Paramount and anyone else with the slightest lack of faith in him or his masterpiece.

• Robert Fure at Film School Rejects lashes back at the pretentious and whiny film critics:
  

  …critics, with their delicate sensibilities and fragile egos, choose to insult the audience.  Choose to insult their own readers.  They insist this movie is so bad that anyone who goes and watches it is an idiot.  An idiot.  Well, my friends and colleagues, at least 70% of the people who walk out of Transformers walk out of it with a big smile plastered on their faces…In the end, the joke is on you.  You think you’re big and bad and important, but the box office shows the truth – you’re just an asshole with a microphone.  So shut the fuck up and let me watch these robots fight each other or I’m going to transform past my boiling point.

• The Playlist doesn’t think anyone should be surprised:
  

  Critics are obviously scratching their heads, but Bay is laughing all the way back to the bank and Paramount shareholders are probably pleased as punch. It’s a bit sad that a spectacle this dumb is rewarded so well, but it’s not like any of us weren’t expecting it.

• Brad Brevet at Rope of Silicon wrote up a lengthy response to an AP story about the movie’s “critic-audience divide” and seems in agreement with the comment I received:
  

  Here’s the deal, audiences were going to see this no matter what. Reviews only helped raise the awareness. Good or bad, it didn’t matter…They are merely a tool for awareness and conversation starters. Critics see a movie, audiences see a movie and the film is discussed and its place in history is decided down the line.

Apparently three-time Oscar nominee Michelle Pfeiffer has been relegated to playing only “cougars.” The slang term has been used heavily to describe the actress’ latest character, a Parisian courtesan who has an affair with a pretty boy half her age (Rupert Friend). But just prior to appearing in Chéri, which reunites her with the Dangerous Liaisons writer-director team-up of Christopher Hampton and Stephen Frears, Pfeiffer starred in two direct-to-video releases in which she similarly ends up with a much younger guy. In Amy Heckerling’s I Could Never Be Your Woman she falls for Paul Rudd, while in Personal Effects she has an affair with Ashton Kutcher (ironic since Heckerling’s film takes shots at Kutcher’s marriage to real-life “cougar” Demi Moore).

The term “cougar” has some negative connotations, which is a shame given all the movies we see in which an older man romances a younger woman and think nothing of it. But it’s good to see Pfeiffer still getting work at her age (51), especially in roles celebrating the idea that older women can still be desirable. And in our opinion she’s every bit as desirable as she was at age 25, when she broke through with her sexy appearance in Scarface.

Below we spotlight ten other actresses/characters who’ve shown us that aging women can still be very attractive to young men.

10. Margaret Whitton as “Vera Prescott” in The Secret of My Succe$s (1987)

At 37, Whitton is a little young for this list, but she seems much older in the traditional role of the sexy boss’ wife who falls for an employee (Michael J. Fox) at her husband’s company. Things are a little more complicated than normal because she’s also the young man’s Aunt, though she doesn’t see the harm since they’re only related by marriage, not blood. Personally, aunt or not, we’d have gone for the kinky Whitton over the boring Helen Slater. At least she’s not his mother.

9. Jennifer Coolidge as “Stifler’s Mom” in American Pie series (1999 - 2003)

Having your own mother come on to you is totally wrong (even if you’re French), but your friend’s mom is another story. Coolidge was the original MILF, or at least the woman who popularized the term. Despite being under 40, the character (whose first name is revealed to be “Janine” in the second installment) is still classifiable as a “cougar,” even if it was Finch (Eddie Kaye Thomas) who technically seduced her. She certainly fits the term in the sequels, at least, when she’s over 40 and coming back for more.

8. Isabelle Huppert as “Erika Kohut” in The Piano Teacher (2001)

We may not be able to count her incestuous mother character in Ma mère as a “cougar,” but Huppert definitely fits the bill in this Michael Haneke film, in which she plays a piano teacher who becomes obsessed with her 17-year-old pupil. Teacher-student relationships are one of the more common for “cougar” movies (see also Jacqueline Bisset in Class and Cate Blanchett in Notes on a Scandal for more such educational “cougars”), but music tutors tend to be the hottest, due to the kind of close contact involved. In this film her character is quite awkward (she still lives with her domineering mother) and the whole masochism thing can be very discomforting, but Huppert has a way of being sexy even in the most abnormal of ways (that mud scene in I Heart Huckabees shouldn’t turn us on as much as it does). Just as long as she’s not hooking up with her son.

7. Lauren Hutton as “Countess” in Once Bitten (1985)

As a seductive female vampire, Hutton’s character is an obvious play on the term “vamp.” But now that we have the term “cougar,” she is retroactively classified as that too, since she specifically seeks out virginal young men like Jim Carrey. As a vampire, she’s also the closest thing to a real cougar, since she takes a bite out of her victims partners.

6. Cloris Leachman as “Ruth Popper” in The Last Picture Show (1971)

We’ve mentioned older women who were the boss’ wife and older women who were teachers, but Leachman’s Oscar-winning role in The Last Picture Show crosses the two by being the teacher’s wife (well, her husband is the high school basketball coach). She may be depressed, but she’s also quite sexy and doesn’t deserve to be treated as bad as she is by her teenage lover (Timothy Bottoms). Of course, part of our consideration of Leachman’s hotness has to do with her real-life persona — foul mouth, semi-nude magazine covers and all.

5. Bebe Neuwirth as “Diane Lodder” in Tadpole (2002)

We may have been weird for having a thing for “Lilith” growing up watching Cheers, but there’s something very attractive about a domineering older woman when you’re a teenage boy. And yet in Tadpole Neuwirth is only a second choice for 15-year-old “Oscar” (Aaron Stanford), who is actually in love with his stepmother (Sigourney Weaver). Supposedly Oscar only has sex with Diane, his stepmother’s best friend, because he was drunk and she was wearing the stepmother’s scarf (and therefore smelled like her). But we can’t believe any sober kid would pass up Neuwirth’s advances, especially not after she gives him a massage.

4. Karen Young as “Brenda” in Heading South (2005)

To be fair, Young shares this slot with Charlotte Rampling and Louise Portal, her costars in Laurent Cantet’s film about three middle-age women who go to Haiti to have sex with young locals. But Young is the hottest (not necessarily because she’s the youngest) of the trio, probably because she’s the more reserved one and therefore has the most room to open up and get wild with the concept of sex tourism.

3. Jane Seymour as “Kathleen ‘Kitty Kat’ Cleary” in Wedding Crashers (2005)

We’re not sure when or where the term “cougar” originated, but we likely first heard it when used to describe Seymour’s character in this movie. Her nickname, “Kitty Kat” has to be a reference to the term, too. In any event, she’s a hot older woman (also a MILF) who just “had her tits done” and won’t let her younger prey (Owen Wilson) out of the room until he’s felt them. This could be the extent of her interest but it has to qualify, as it is a form of seduction. Also, Seymour is super hot for being in her 50s, even if her character is a bit creepy.

2. Kim Basinger as “Marion Cole” in The Door in the Floor (2004)

Talk about a hot woman in her 50s, Basinger is like Pfeiffer in that she still looks as good now as she did in the ‘80s. As “Marion Cole,” she’s somewhat an amalgam of other “cougar” roles, including the unlisted (but referenced) maternally incestuous ones. She’s also kind of the boss’ wife. Her young lover is her (temporarily separated) husband’s assistant, who has been hired because of his resemblance to their dead son. But complicated and disturbing motivations aside, no kid could say no if ever seduced by a “cougar” as hot as Basinger.

1. Anne Bancroft as “Mrs. Robinson” in The Graduate (1967)

Obviously the top spot on the list goes to the original “cougar,” “Mrs. Robinson.” When we think of young men being with older women we immediately recall the famous seduction scene from The Graduate. Indeed the seduction of “Stifler’s Mom” in American Pie occurs while the song “Mrs. Robinson” plays on a stereo. Of course, at a mere 36-years-old, she’s a tad young to be considered a “cougar,” but there’s no debating that she not only belongs on this list but belongs in the top spot — and not just because its so iconic and pioneering a role. Bancroft was extremely hot. Just watch that seduction scene one more time. Or look at that single iconic leg of hers her character’s (portrayed promotionally by Linda Gray, apparently).

In Coppola’s house on Broadway. Outside the wind is howling, whipping the laurel bushes. The sailboats in the bay are lying almost flat, the waves sharp-contoured and restless. The Alcatraz Light is flashing signals, in broad daylight. None of my friends is here. It is hard to buckle down to work, to shoulder this heavy burden of dreams. Only books provide some measure of comfort.

The NYTimes.com has published an excerpt of Werner Herzog’s Conquest of the Useless, his diary of the making of Fitzcarraldo.

Maybe it’s not fair for me to begin the review of a festival film with a lengthy digression on nostalgia and the death of Michael Jackson, but somehow all of these things seem to point in the same direction (and not geographically speaking, despite the connection to Westwood). So please, bear with me:

The Associated Press published an editorial this morning by Ted Anthony, titled “2 lost icons: For Generation X, a really bad day.” In it, he assesses the impact of the near-simultaneous deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson on the segment of the population who were at their most demographically desirably in the late 80s-early 90s. He attributes the following portentous quote to a 38-year-old HBO employee:

“This,” he said, “is the moment when Generation X realizes they’re grown up.”

Thanks to this article and others, “Generation X” has been bopping around Google’s Top 100 search terms all day. Which is funny, because I can’t remember the last time I even thought about the concept of Generation X … before earlier this week, when I watched Passenger Side, Matt Bissonnette’s third feature and an entry in the Los Angeles Film Festival’s Narrative Competition. Starring the director’s brother Joel Bissonnette and Adam Scott as two brothers (one a struggling novelist with an aversion to modern technology, the other a personable recovering junkie) who spend a day driving around Southern California looking for the ex-girlfriend who one of them wants to marry, Passenger Side also seems to have that age group’s reconciliation of age and nostalgia for a simpler time on its mind.

With its wall-to-wall soundtrack of early 90s college radio hits (Silver Jews, Superchunk, Guided by Voices) and plot that only makes sense thanks to a complete absence of cell phones and internet, Passenger Side plays like a lost classic of the post-Slacker era. Not announced as a period piece, barring the appearance of an aged Greg Dulli Passenger Side nonetheless feels like the product of another time. Whether this works for you or not may depend in no small part on your attachment to that time, but from the style of conversational banter between the brothers (in the spaces around the not-always-successful roadtrip comic setpieces, the screenplay works as a study of how, if a conversation lasts long enough, deadpan sarcasm eventually gives way to introspection and confession) to the odd but gorgeously warm-toned rear projection effect on the driving scenes, the film’s aesthetics are extremely appealing.

Nostalgia, and the cynicism that tends to sandwich it, is cyclical. It took the death of American popular culture’s biggest and most problematic icon to get MTV to revert to playing music videos; surely, I’m not the only one who found herself up way past her bedtime last night, not wanting to turn the channel off for fear that the transformation would be over by morning. It wasn’t — the channel announced plans to keep the marathon going until at least 8pm EST, thus creating a 24 hour respite from the game shows and slick unscripted dramas that have become their programming staples — but by afternoon, after the aesthetic highs of “Beat It” and “Scream” had given way to schmaltz and self-deification of the later Jackson videos, exemplified by the Free Willy tie-in “Will You Be There” and the Garden of Eden allusions of “You Are Not Alone.” It could be that sincere nostalgia is only possible as a knee jerk reaction; if we push it hard enough and/or long enough, chances are our warm, halcyonic memories will spoil and sour.

And this is something like the experience of watching Passenger Side: the nostalgia it evokes — for music, for the experience of having to physically look for something rather than virtually search for it, for the concept of conversation unmitigated by technological distraction — is palpable and powerful. But there’s nowhere to go from this high other than down, and in one of its last scenes, Passenger Side sinks its slice-of-life-looseness in a “gotcha!” plot twist. Like the nostalgia tour pop culture seems to have taken over the past 24 hours, I wish Passenger Side had ended while still ahead, but I appreciate having taken the ride.