The Screengrab : cloverfield

Fantastic Fest Review: “Let the Right One In"

Scott Von Doviak — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

For a movie I’d never heard of before Fantastic Fest started, Let the Right One In could not have been more overhyped by the time I got to see it. Badgeholders were giving excited testimonials in the Alamo Drafthouse lobby, bloggers were threatening to beat people about the head with broken beer bottles unless they attended the screening, and even the Fantastic Fest representative who introduced the film gushed at embarrassing length about the mind-blowing wondrousness of the movie we were about to see. It’s nice to see the geek crowd expend so much enthusiasm on a low-budget film with subtitles rather than a $200 million superhero epic, but raising expectations to an unrealistic level doesn’t do the movie any favors. At the risk of sounding like the voice of reason, Let the Right One In is a good movie, but a modest one, not the next evolutionary leap forward in cinema.

So what is it? Basically, this Swedish import plays like a Dogme-style coming-of-age movie punctuated by surprising bursts of vampiric activity. Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) is the picked-on kid at school, a quiet, shy, towheaded boy who plays out silent revenge fantasies against his tormenters by stabbing trees in the yard of his apartment complex. He’s doing just that one evening when Eli (Lina Leandersson) appears behind him, seemingly from out of nowhere. She’s the new girl in the complex – she’s pale, a little raggedy, and as Oskar is kind enough to point out, she doesn’t smell so good. He doesn’t know it yet, but that’s because she’s dead, or rather undead (or as she prefers to phrase it, “I live on human blood”).

Tentative steps toward a friendship are taken – Oskar is particularly impressed when Eli manages to solve his Rubik’s Cube – and before long, the two are inseparable. Eli knows, however, that her terrible secret will rip them apart sooner than later. After Oskar strikes back at one of his tormenters during a school outing, the bullies plot their revenge, blissfully unaware that they are picking on the wrong vampire’s friend.

Let the Right One In is a slowly unfolding, intimate drama, except for the scenes where people burst into flames or have their jugulars ripped out of their necks. It works because director Tomas Alfredson has a real gift for staging the carnage in fresh, unexpected ways that don’t rely on elaborate special effects, and because he takes such care at developing the relationship between Oskar and Eli. There are some pacing issues and a couple of dreary patches, but Let the Right One In is worth a look when it’s released on DVD next month. (Please, don’t wait for the inevitable – and just-announced – American remake, to be directed by Cloverfield’s Matt Reeves.)

Related:
Fantastic Fest Review: "Donkey Punch"
Fantastic Fest: "JCVD"

Morning Deal Report: How Tom Cruise Became Angelina Jolie

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The espionage thriller Edwin A. Salt is getting more than a name change – it’s about to undergo gender reassignment surgery. Yes, it only took a dash of that old Hollywood magic to transform Tom Cruise into Angelina Jolie. (Do Katie Holmes and Brad Pitt know about this? And will there be camera crews on hand when they find out?) Cruise was originally attached to the project, which Philip Noyce will direct for Columbia Pictures, but according to Variety, Edwin “will be redrafted by screenwriter Kurt Wimmer as a star vehicle for Angelina Jolie.” She’ll play the title character (Edwina Salt?) – “a CIA officer who's accused by a defector of being a Russian sleeper spy and must elude capture long enough to establish her innocence.” Rumor has it Cruise lost interest when they wouldn’t let him wear his fat suit.

Cloverfield honcho J.J. Abrams is the new Irwin Allen. Abrams is teaming with original Omen screenwriter David Seltzer for a “disaster flick for Universal involving an earthquake,” says the Hollywood Reporter, which is quick to note that the project will not actually be a remake of the 1974 Earthquake. No word yet on whether the Abrams version will be released in Sensurround.

The young adult novel series Maximum Ride is coming to the big screen. As Variety explains it, “protags are six children who have been genetically altered to be 98% human and 2% bird. The kids, who are bred to fly, escape a lab-rat existence and are then pursued by their scientist creators, who send a pack of part-human part-wolves called Erasers to hunt them down.” Those kids live in my neighborhood and I gotta tell ya, they made a real mess of my windshield.

Related:
Tom Cruise Parodies Someone Else for a Change
Separated at Birth: "Cloverfield" and "Miracle Mile"

In Other Blogs: 2008 Halftime Reports

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Your favorite Screengrab writers have chimed in with their favorites (or least favorites, as the case may be) from the first half of 2008, but it may not completely shock you to learn that we are not the only bloggers to do so. Over at Cinematical, Jeffrey M. Anderson explains why. “Here's one of my dirty little secrets: I love lists and I keep track of my year's ten best movies all year long. Most other critics hastily assemble their lists at the last second, which is partly why so many December movies dominate; critics can't remember what they've seen earlier in the year. My list shows that 2008 has had a pretty poor first half, but I do have some contenders for listhood. Two movies are currently competing for the top spot, though I need to see them both again to be sure. Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon (6 screens) is one; it has a lovely, laid-back, observant quality and feels less severe than some of Hou's other recent films. But I haven't yet decided if the film is a comedy or a tragedy.”

Also at Cinematical, Scott Weinberg presents a month-by-month breakdown of his year at the movies. As always, January is the cruelest month. “Not many choices, really, but I'm an enthusiastic supporter of both Cloverfield and Teeth. I also enjoyed Cassandra's Dream a bit more than most folks seem to, but it's hardly among Woody Allen's best movies. Beyond that, January was as lame as ever. (Thanks for nothing: One Missed Call, First Sunday, Mad Money, Rambo, Untraceable, and the execrable Meet the Spartans.)”

A site that’s new to us, Gone Elsewhere, weighs in with an overlooked choice. “The best new release I’ve seen thus far is Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories. The film stars Michael Shannon as the oldest of three adult brothers whose father abandoned them years ago and began a new family, with four sons. The two sets of half-brothers grew up as bitter rivals, and emotions come to a head after the father dies. Shannon may be the most creepily intense actor in movies today; see William Friedkin’s Bug if you don’t believe me. Among the more interesting insights the film has to offer is that most of the characters seem to know full well that their actions are irrational and unproductive, but their hatred is self-sustaining and out of their control.”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson writes about the ever-changing crimson shades of cinematic blood. “Before the late '70s, blood was generally (and, remember, these are generalizations -- there are certainly exceptions) bright red and opaque, like nail polish or latex paint. It was often compared to ketchup, which in many cases it was. Since then, our taste for blood runs darker, anywhere from ruby red to almost black…My favorite movie-blood story belongs to Martin Scorsese. The way he tells it, the MPAA freaked when they saw the bloodbath in Taxi Driver (1976) and was ready to slap it with an X rating for violence. They suggested he tone it down -- as in, tone down the red -- in order to get an R. So, Scorsese put the scene through some kind of chem wash or something that made the blood more brownish. In his view, it made the scene more sickening and disturbing, but he got his R rating.”

And finally, our List-o-Mania selection this week comes from Spoutblog, which brings us 5 Actors Who Shouldn’t Be Famous. I’m not entirely certain Josh Hartnett even qualifies as famous, but the most controversial choice is Jon Voight. Granted, the included clip of Karate Dog is a powerful indictment.

Related:
2008: Second Quarter Wrap-Up
Half Measures: Leonard Pierce's Favorites of the First Half of '08
Half Measures: Paul Clark's Favorites of the First Half of '08

Screengrab Review: "Garden Party"

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:45:00 GMT

Garden Party, opening in limited release next week, is being touted as the arrival of a hot new talent in the person of writer/director Jason Freeland. In fact, though, Freeland's first film was an entire decade ago, a somewhat bewildering James Ellroy adaptation called Brown's Requiem. His new film, though, with its attractive young cast and allegedly verite look at contemporary Los Angeles, is getting way more attention than Brown's Requiem ever did, and if it's not technically his debut, it's at least poised to be his breakthrough. We had a chance to screen Garden Party recently; should you believe the hype?

Boiled down to the one-sentence description that no doubt got it through the vetting process, Garden Party is the story of a group of young people, all recently relocated to the vast construct of the American psyche that is Los Angeles, who try to get by faced with all the pitfalls and perils the wicked city is home to. Peopled with a game young cast, the movie gives us a bunch of characters who aren't quite established enough as archetypes to come across as trite right off the bat; there's the vaguely sinister real estate agent/drug dealer, the allegedly brilliant young musician who drifts through life intersecting with the other characters but never making a real emotional commitment to any of them, the renegade bohemian with a porn fetish, the sexually abused teen, and half a dozen other characters who seem like they just got off the late shift at the Quaalude factory. Needless to say, their stories all intersect in sometimes surprising, sometimes predictable ways; needless to say, a few of them experience what could be called a revelation if it didn't come across as so utterly trifling; and, needless to say, there's lots of fashionable sex, drugs, and pouting to make thing palatable to the drugged-out, pouty teenage couples who are presumably the movie's target audience. With all this stuff being needless to say, you might ask: why was it even necessary to make the film? The answer? That is a good question.

There are a few good reasons to see Garden Party. Freeland has a distinctive, if rather undeveloped, visual sensibility, and his pacing is very fine, keeping you involved in the story even when it spills over into the cliches he generates as a writer. And a number of the members of the largely anonymous cast are worth watching, particularly the lovely, polished Willa Holland in the lead role. However, these aspects are overwhelmed by its overall shapelessness and the fact that it seems kluged together from parts of other, usually better movies: the plot and structure capture the worst aspects of Rent but can't handle the best of Short Cuts. The teen cast and sexual panic aspects play like a lite version of Kids. The pseudo-verite is drawn from Cloverfield and the sense of communal destiny is like a mopier version of Magnolia. It draws its "depressed young white people unable to make significant emotional connections" vibe from the mumblecore movement, and its misunderstood-sensitive-genius characters from the mind of every teenager ever. Even the ad campaign makes it look like a moody remake of Swimfan. Freeland has the talent to make distinctive movies, but he seems to lack the focus to make ones that don't mostly remind us of a million things we've seen before.

DVD Digest for June 3, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:00:00 GMT

With Father’s Day coming in less than two weeks, the studios begin to unveil their snazzy new editions of what TNT used to call “movies for guys who like movies.” We’ve got all the manly movies you need to keep dad happy while mom and her friends are out seeing the Sex and the City movie (seriously, how did we not see that coming?).

Before Clint Eastwood became known as an Academy Award-winning filmmaker (or a guy who co-starred with an orangutan) he was first and foremost a grimacing badass. And while some- including yours truly- have a soft spot for his Man With No Name trilogy- the most enduring character from this period would also certainly be “Dirty” Harry Callahan. This week, Warner unveils new DVD and Blu-Ray editions of all five of Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films, featuring all of the features from previous DVD editions plus a number of new ones. Most notably, Warner Brothers’ box set (the films are also sold separately) includes a new feature-length documentary, Clint Eastwood: Out of the Shadows. In addition, the memorabilia included in the box set includes a 40-page hardcover book and a map of San Francisco detailing Harry’s hunt for Scorpio.

But if dad’s looking for wartime heroism (Blu-Ray only), MGM and Fox both have something that’ll fit the bill. MGM will unveil Blu-Ray editions of A Bridge Too Far and Battle of Britain this week, although these new discs will contain no special features. So if it’s tricked out Blu-Rays (and better movies) you want, go with Fox’s war DVDs. The studio will be releasing three of its classics- Patton, The Longest Day and The Sand Pebbles- exclusively on Blu-Ray, packed with special features and all the bells and whistles he could ever hope for.

But that’s not all, folks. If dad wants some laughs with his testosterone, buy him the new City Slickers: Collector’s Edition (MGM), which gives him some Western action, male bonding humor courtesy of Crystal, Kirby and Stern, and of course Jack Palance, who even in death can still crap bigger than you. Other, more recent dudely comedies releasing this week include Semi-Pro (New Line, also Blu-Ray), Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show (Lionsgate), and for the father whose enjoyment of movies far outweighs his taste, Meet the Spartans (Fox, also Blu-Ray). And what’s a list of guy movies with James Bond? Sony will release a new three-disc edition of Casino Royale, Bond’s best big-screen adventure since the sixties (there, I said it).

Other new releases this week include: Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic Control (Weinstein Company); the Jessica Alba remake of The Eye (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Michael Caine and Demi Moore in Flawless (Magnolia); the long-delayed The Onion Movie (Fox); and Asia Argento just the way we like her (i.e. mostly naked and toting a gun) in Olivier Assayas’ Boarding Gate (Magnolia). The week’s most notable non-guy-movie old-school release is Jean-Jacques Beineix’s seminal Cinema du look classic Diva (Lionsgate). Finally, releasing on Blu-Ray only: Cloverfield (Paramount), Signs (Buena Vista), The Recruit (Buena Vista), There Will Be Blood (Paramount).

The Joker’s Viral Marketing: Threat or Menace?

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:30:00 GMT

The Hollywood Reporter has learned that there’s something called “viral marketing,” which has something to do with putting a bunch of cyberweb sites up on the World Wide Netting and ensnaring geeks who have nothing better to do than click their mice-pads all day, collecting clues from the Joker that may somehow lead them to the jackpot prize of getting to watch a movie trailer two hours before everyone else.

In a cranky piece called “Summer viral camp: Feeling pinpricked yet?”, Andrew Wallenstein dissects the intricate yet ultimately nonsensical web campaigns for such blockbusters-in-waiting as The Dark Knight and Hancock. “Gone are the days when marketing a movie online involved simply buying a URL like DarkKnight.com and uploading a trailer. Warner Bros. has launched more than 30 Web sites during the past year in support of the latest in the Batman franchise, a trail of virtual bread crumbs intended to sate fans until the July 18 release.”

The trail doesn’t always end in cyberspace, however; in the case of The Dark Knight, it extends into a strange realm known as the real world. “One Knight site provides clues pointing to screenings that were scheduled for Monday in 12 different cities, including Hollywood & Highland. But fans expecting a handy online guide that lists dates and locations for the screening will be disappointed. Instead, you'll arrive at a spooky Web site featuring portraits of presidents whose images had been defaced by the telltale makeup of the Joker. Clicking on each portrait links to a set of coordinates that require accessing Google Maps to decipher.”

Hey, you’d think Wallenstein could at least muster some enthusiasm for anything that gets the fans out of their mother’s basements and into the sunlight, but no. “When Cloverfield played around with viral strategies, it was cool. Now that everyone else is copying -- not so cool.” Wait, Cloverfield is getting the credit for starting all this? Surely everyone remembers the elaborate AI viral campaign way back in ought-one, no?

For the record, I have nothing against the viral marketing campaigns. They’re keeping potential threats to society busy either designing them or trying to figure them out, which can only be a good thing. I’m just not convinced they actually serve their purpose as marketing. They seem to appeal only to the hardcore faithful who will be shelling out to see the product multiple times anyway. Has anyone ever been convinced to see a movie because they were impressed by the ingenuity of the online puzzles? Wallenstein reaches much the same conclusion. He’s just grumpier about it.

DVD Digest for April 22, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, a cinematic master gets the Eclipse treatment, and a viral-marketing-phenom makes its DVD debut.

DVD of the Week: In the past few years, a number of Yasujiro Ozu films have made their way to DVD, but he was so prolific that there are still many films missing, especially from his earlier work. For this reason alone, the arrival Eclipse Series 10: Silent Ozu- Three Family Comedies is cause for celebration. Comprised of three films made between 1931 and 1933, the Silent Ozu box has no extras to speak of (Eclipse doesn't really do extras), but each film features a brand-new score by silent-film composer Donald Sosin, as well as the high-quality transfers we've come to expect from the Criterion family. To date, I've only seen the box's centerpiece film, I Was Born, But..., but that film and the other Ozus I've seen have been so delightful that I have no reservations about recommending the other films- 1933's Passing Fancy and 1931's Tokyo Chorus- as well. Here's hoping that Eclipse continues to do right by Ozu in the years to come. He's certainly worth it.

Releasing today from Criterion itself is Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bardem's seminal, long-overlooked melodrama Death of a Cyclist. The class-oriented of a respected professor whose life goes into freefall when after a hit-and-run accident, the film is at times heavyhanded but always striking and beautifully shot. In addition, the film should provide a fitting introduction for many moviegoers to the charms of leading lady Lucia Bosé. An Italian stunner with screen presence to burn, Bosé was a mainstay of the early films of Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as appearing in work by Buñuel, Fellini, and Marguerite Duras. The DVD also includes a featurette on the life and work of Bardem, but the real story is the film which, like its female lead, is ripe for rediscovery.

Also of note on the classics front is the release of four comedies from Universal's Cinema Classics series. The four films are: the Mae West/Cary Grant vehicle She Done Him Wrong; Billy Wilder's early film The Major and the Minor starring Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland; and two films from director Mitchell Leisen, 1939's Midnight starring Claudette Colbert, and 1937's Easy Living with Jean Arthur. Each film is a gem, but of particular note is Easy Living, perhaps the greatest film written by Preston Sturges before he reigned over Hollywood comedy in the 1940s. And if it's sexy action you want, check out Image's new DVD of the Shaw Brothers cult classic Intimate Confessions of a chinese Courtesan, a movie I'm pretty sure I dreamed one night.

Compared to this week's selection of classics, the new titles can't help but look a little paltry. The big-ticket DVD this week is of course Cloverfield (Paramount), the Matthew Reeves/JJ Abrams rampaging-monster movie. For me, the film was never so much fun as when I first saw the trailer before Transformers, but the DVD should give people a chance to approach the film separated from all the hype. This week also brings a Philip Seymour Hoffman double feature, with Hoffman hitting DVD shelves with Tamara Jenkins' The Savages (Fox)- in which he appears opposite Laura Linney- and his caustic, Oscar-nominated performance in Mike Nichols' Charlie Wilson's War (Universal), which also features mediocre turns by Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, and a pretty hot scene in which Emily Blunt slinks down the stairs wearing only a man's dress shirt.

In addition, there's a trifecta of indie releases hitting the market today: Andrew Wagner's Starting Out in the Evening (Lionsgate), which garnered awards buzz for the ever-dependable Frank Langella; Paul Schrader's The Walker (ThinkFilm), featuring Woody Harrelson as a too-helpful escort for society women; and Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs (Genius Productions), starring "mumblecore" darling Greta Gerwig. Also worth mentioning are the second season of Friday Night Lights (Universal), J.A. Bayona's supernatural chiller The Orphanage (New Line, also Blu-Ray), and the mostly-ignored Hollywood remake of One Missed Call (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Mind you, the latter is only worth mentioning for the sake of completism, but there you go.

Finally, David Huddleston would like the announce that there are no HD-DVDs hitting the market today. Frankly, he couldn't be happier.

2008: First Quarter Wrap-Up

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

It’s not that I didn’t see this coming.

By my reckoning, 2007 was a pretty solid year for movies, so I suspected 2008 would bring a cyclical downturn in cinematic quality (accompanied by a distinctly fishy, low-tide smell wafting from our nation’s multiplexes). And, yes, I know we’re in the Horse Latitudes of the movie-going year, before the summer blockbusters and the fall Oscar contenders...but, seriously, has anyone seen anything really good yet?

By this time last year, I’d already seen four of the movies that wound up on my 2007 Top Ten list: the fine, Oscar-neglected Zodiac, a sneak preview of Knocked Up at the South-By-Southwest Film Festival, along with two outstanding documentaries, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters and the lesser-known but equally awesome roller derby-umentary Hell On Wheels.

Even the first quarter cheese I saw last year was pretty entertaining: the silly sexploitation of Black Snake Moan, the gay-panic-at-the-disco iconography of 300, and the A.D.D. chaos of Smoking Aces, a fake Guy Richie movie I enjoyed at least as much Snatch.

So far, at the quarter-mile mark of 2008, the only truly Top 10-caliber flick I've seen is Full Battle Rattle, a SXSW Special Jury award-winning documentary (reviewed here by Mr. Von Doviak on March 17) about a simulated Iraqi province in California’s Mojave desert, populated by Iraqi-American citizens and U.S. Army “insurgents” in a full-immersion training scenario where soldiers practice both their combat and diplomacy skills before heading off to the real war in Iraq.

As for the rest of the year-to-date...feh. Cloverfield had moments, but no characters. Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, Penelope and 21 were all pleasantly unobjectionable but instantly forgettable, and I Am Legend’s deserted Manhattan streets were compelling until the director filled them with boring video game ghoulies.

But, hey, maybe things are looking up for 2008...only three more shopping days ‘til Zombie Strippers!

George Romero Runs the Voodoo Down

Phil Nugent — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:15:00 GMT

Every kid with a taste for horror movies knows that vampires hate garlic, sleep in, and can be dispatched with a wooden stake through the heart. Also that werewolves are allergic to full moons and silver bullets. But these basic ground rules were cobbled together from a mix of fictional sources and ancient folklore, whereas George Romero, starting with Night of the Living Dead and then with its sequel Dawn of the Dead, actually created a new, long-lasting set of basics for a breed of movie monster. There had been zombies in movies before, but they tended to be dullish, pop-eyed stranglers whose strings were being manipulated by the local voodoo master. Now, thanks to Romero, everybody knows that zombies are carniverous and can only be taken out with a brain-pulverizing blow to the head. Now Romero is getting proprietorial about it. In his new Diary of the Dead, a student crew filming a mummy movie argues over whether a mummy could run; the director is clearly on the side of the guy who says that "dead things" can't move fast because "their ankles would snap." Speaking to the BBC as his movie arrives in Britian, Romero acknowledges that there is a trend build to update his concept by flooding theaters with fast zombies, and he ain't having it.

The "fast zombie" prototype can be found in 28 Days Later, even though the frothing speed freaks in that movie are not, strictly speaking, "zombies." They're living people suffering from a kind of hyper-rabies, and in the end of the movie they basically starve to death, but there's enough of a family resemblance to Romero's creatures that it's easy to understand why so many have, adopting a kind of genre shorthand, referred to it as "a zombie movie." What really hurt was when Zach Snyder's 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead came out and betrayed a clear 28 Days Later influence. Romero, who didn't have a hand in that movie, was horrified to see zombies sprinting around in a movie nominally connected to his own body of work. "Zombies don't run. They can't! Their ankles would snap. What did they do — wake from the dead and immediately join a health club?" Perhaps to avoid asking Romero just how much actual research he had done in this area, the BBC also asked him the seeming prevalence of the "found-footage" gag that his new movie, like Cloverfield and Redacted, is built around. "We thought we were going to be the first ones out there," says Romero. "But now we have to settle for being part of a trend. I guess there must be some sort of a collective subconscious."

Indie Box-Office Roundup: Weekend of February 15-17, 2008

Paul Clark — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:17:00 GMT

Continuing its strong appeal to arthouse audiences, Eran Kolirin's The Band's Visit has moved up to #1 atop this week's Indie Box-Office Roundup. The Israeli comedy, released in the US by Sony Pictures Classics, managed an impressive per-screen average of $11,267, up from $9,642 last week. At a time when the big Hollywood releases are opening big and falling fast, it's good to see a movie that really catches on with audiences like this. A movie like The Band's Visit may never pull in Cloverfield grosses, but in its limited release it should have more staying power than most would-be blockbusters.

Also maintaining a strong showing over President's Day Weekend was last week's chart-topper, Focus Features' In Bruges, now at #2 with a $10,420 per-screen average in its second week of release. Martin McDonough's film is still expanding its release, so expect the averages to dip somewhat in the following weeks.

The weekend's top premiere was George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, the inaugural release from Weinstein Company offshoot Third Rail Releasing. Romero's film, his fifth Dead movie to date, garnered a solid $6,549 per screen, and will expand to 10 more markets for the weekend of February 29.

Rounding out the top 5 were Cao Hamburger's The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (City Lights) and the self-distributed David and Layla. Also of note was Magnolia's program of 2007 Oscar-nominated Short Films, which finished #9 on the list. However, I find their figures more than a bit dubious, considering I had to pay separate admissions for the Animated and Live-Action programs.

Finally, Juno-watch! The movie that Roger Ebert called "his true love" finished just outside the top 10 this week, raking in $2,993 per screen, finishing ahead of last week's top wide-ish release, There Will Be Blood. Next week could see a bump in a number of current limited releases, depending on how the Oscars pan out. So hopefully we'll get a nice surge for PT Anderson, not so much for Diablo Cody and Ivan Reitman's kid.

Top 10, Weekend of February 15-17:
1. The Band's Visit [Sony Pictures Classics] ($11,267 per screen)
2. In Bruges [Focus Features] ($10,420 per screen)
3. George A. Romero's Diary Of The Dead [Third Rail Releasing] ($6,549 per screen)
4. The Year My Parents Went On Vacation [City Lights Pictures Releasing] ($5,430 per screen)
5. David & Layla [David & Layla, LLC] ($5,007 per screen)
6. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days [IFC First Take] ($4,808 per screen)
7. How To Cook Your Life [Roadside Attractions] ($3,704 per screen)
8. The Business of Being Born [International Film Circuit] ($3,608 per screen)
9. 2007 Academy Award Nominated Short Films [Magnolia Pictures] ($3,605 per screen)
10. Caramel [Roadside Attractions] ($3,360 per screen)

Source: IndieWire.

Review: Diary of the Dead

Peter Smith — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 18:07:00 GMT

Diary of the Dead is the latest in George Romero's now forty-year-old "[Noun] of the Dead" franchise. It's back-to-basics in tone and production, after 2005's massive Land of the Dead. It would be easy to accuse Romero of trend-hopping, based on the film's "found footage" presentation and release in proximity to Cloverfield and Brian De Palma's Redacted. But the film parts from the recent surge of Blair Witch-ian diegesis by opening with narration: a character explaining that she's edited and produced the film you're about to watch with the intent not just to record but to frighten. Instead of coming off as pretentiously meta, this contextualizing helps you suspend your disbelief. Romero makes the most of that suspension, and the result is a strange movie that succeeds far more often than it fails.

Foregoing the established continuity of the previous Dead films, Diary begins on day one of the zombie apocalypse. A group of film students are shooting a horror movie in the woods when they hear on the radio that the dead are rising from the grave. It's a simple set-up, colored by Romero's trademark winking humor, but it works thanks to the reactions of the cast. There's no panic, just a dumbstruck acceptance. Protagonist Jason continues to film as the group begins their journey to his girlfriend's home. Where Cloverfield and Blair Witch used a camera-wielding character to emphasize how technology acts as a buffer between humanity and disaster, Jason's compulsion to keep documenting the end of the world is actually the core conflict in Diary of the Dead. The camera, the character it's tied to, and its angry, incredulous subjects emphasize conflicting human impulses during disaster: do I document or do I help. As one puts it, "I want to help them, but I can't, cause I'm fucking plugged in," and to Romero, that about says it all. — John Constantine

Trailer Review: George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead

Paul Clark — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

I actually saw this in Toronto at the world-premiere Midnight Madness screening, and while I was lukewarm on it the first time around, I'm curious to catch it again. For one thing, having recently seen Cloverfield, which uses a similar first-person shooting style, I'd like to be able to watch this again for comparison's sake — to contrast the stylistic gambit in the hands of a genre master with the director of the David Schwimmer vehicle The Pallbearer. Diary of the Dead may prove to be the most love-it-or-hate-it of any Romero zombie movie yet — it's got both the gore and the sociopolitical messages one has grown to expect from a Romero zombie movie, although how well he does by the latter is up for debate. But regardless of how you feel about it, a new Romero zombie is still something of an event.

Take Five: Cryptozoology

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Hollywood loves a good monster movie. The recent success of the risky Cloverfield is proof of the fact that audiences, too, will flock to a good creature feature even if the monster's main purpose is to ruin the first-date memories of outer-borough hipsters. Strangely enough, though, movie studios and filmgoers alike are a tad more diffident when it comes to monsters that have a slight possiblilty of being real. Vampires, zombies, wolfmen, and whatever the hell Gamera was supposed to be? Sure, we'll take whatever you got. But when was the last time you saw a bunch of lithe, promiscuous teenagers menaced by a bunyip? What was the last movie that featured a small town in the middle of nowhere being attacked by a rampaging Cornish Owl-Man? Paramount is hoping, with the Friday release of Fred Wolf's shaggy Sasquatch story Strange Wilderness, that audiences will evince an interest in Bigfoot unseen since the glory days of the Six Million Dollar Man. But as we'll see, the history of movies based on so-called "cryptids" — creatures or animals widely thought to be legends, but believed by some researchers to be real — is dismal enough that the studio has as much chance of actually uncovering the Loch Ness Monster than turning a profit off of this dud-in-the-offing.

NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1980)

An almost-forgotten, and rightfully so, horror cheapie from the dawn of the slasher era, Night of the Demon does for Bigfoot what Jason Voorhees did for big-screen murderers, or at least tries to. Big-screen Bigfeet are usually portrayed as either gentle giants or, at worst, misunderstood animals, but in this null-budget exploitation number, he's more like a bloodthirsty devil on a rampage, Freddy Kreuger without the stylish hat and sweater combo. The movie's Sasquatch romps all over the Pacific Northwest, terrorizing anthropology students, yanking the junk off of an unfortunate hillbilly, and having his wicked way with local farmer's daughters. The high, or low, point of the flick comes in a flashback sequence: the innocent young lady who found herself at the receiving end of unwelcome advances from Bigfoot decides, for some reason, to bear its offspring (birthing the child of a monstrous rape apparently being less shameful than an abortion), until her overbearing dad decides to force her to kill the Bigfoot baby! A hallucinatorily bad movie sure to be the final word in, as the poster copy put it, "cross-breedin' Bigfoot".

TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE (1983)

Despite the fact that multiple reports of gremlins, wing-monsters and foo fighters by American flyers in WWII were all almost certainly the result of ordinary mechanical failure, combat fatigue, or smuggling a bottle of Old Crow into the cockpit, the Army took them seriously enough to launch a legitimate investigation, and by the 1960s, the beasties were entrenched enough in popular culture to inspire a memorable episode of The Twilight Zone. When a movie adaptation rolled around some twenty years later, a remake of this episode was arguably its high point, thanks largely to a wildly over-the-top, and yet somehow perfectly suitable, lead performance by John Lithgow. (Amusingly enough, almost twenty years after that, William Shatner — who'd played the gremlin's victim in the original TV version — was paired up with Lithgow on his own show, 3rd Rock from the Sun, and the two baked hams overacted like there was no tomorrow in a sly inside gag about their shared past.) Nowadays, the movie is remembered largely for the disastrous accident that took the lives of several crew members, and given John Landis' rather contemptible behavior at a subsequent trial for negligence, it's surprising he didn't try to blame the helicopter crash on an invisible monster only he could see.

SPLASH (1984)

Yes, folks, there are those in the cryptozoological community — and apparently there is one — who believe that mermaids are really real, and not just the product of a dugong and a very lonely, very drunk sailor coming into contact with one another. It is to them and to you that we recommend a fresh viewing of this charming '80s comedy. It's long been an almost invisible part of the cultural landscape; few people even think about it these days. But Splash is in fact a very fine comedy of its day, not boisterous or insulting like the majority of Eighties comedies that reached its level of success. And it also functions quite well as a time capsule: it brings us a pre-iconic Tom Hanks, a pre-crazy-recluse Darryl Hannah, a pre-self-important Ron Howard, and a pre-death John Candy in one of his most appealing roles — all wrapped up in a genuinely funny, if slight, Bruce Jay Friedman screenplay. There's only five dugongs in captivity, but DVDs of Splash can be found anywhere.

ANACONDA (1997)

Despite an incredibly dismal record of investigations into various Nessies, Jersey Devils and Bigfeet, the cryptozoologists have been right exactly once: the giant squid. Long considered a myth, a dead Architeuthis washed up in New Zealand in the 1870s, and in 2004, scientists finally captured living speciments on film. Many believe that if the fringe biology crowd is going to score another stopped-clock victory, it will be with the discovery of gigantic specimens of the already huge constrictor snakes known as anaconda, and when that day comes, perhaps this movie will be viewed as eerily prophetic instead of an embarrassingly hokey, campy creature feature with a mind-blowingly unrealistic rubber snake as its villain. Anaconda isn't entirely unsalvageable; Jon Voight hams it up deliciously as a great white hunter, Ice Cube is entertaining in full-on Private Hudson mode as a doomed photographer, and there are many fine shots of Jennifer Lopez' structurally pleasing hiney. However, the script is an utter dud, the special effects look like they were done by a dull fifteen-year-old, and the plot makes The Mothman Prophecies look brilliant by comparison.

THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES (2002)

When the history of Richard Gere's movie career is written, it's unlikely that this will be one of its most glorious moments. It's hard to imagine a worse title than The Mothman Prophecies, and if the movie isn't quite as terrible as the title promises, it sure as hell ain't great, either. Supposedly based on true events, the flick is about as good as you might expect from a movie prefaced by such a claim; back in the 1970s, they used to make thousands of flicks like this loopy would-be chiller about a West Virginia town haunted by mysterious visions of the future and visitations by a rubbery, bug-winged extraterrestrial something-or-other, and they were all pretty bad, albeit in a different way. The Mothman Prophecies is plenty expensive as opposed to a cheap filmed-in-a-weekend exploitation flick, and it tries for a post-modern moody ambience instead of pure shock, but it's still pretty dire. There's a big, garish steel statue of the Mothman in the actual West Virginia town where the events of the movie allegedly took place; it's a safe bet that Gere's performance — alternately bored and confused — will ever be similarly immortalized.

Consumer Report on "Meet the Spartans"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Josh Levin puts a stopwatch on Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer's Meet the Spartans: "Various news sources have declared that Meet the Spartans has a running time of 84 minutes. Some online reviews peg the actual running time at 68 minutes. I went to a 5:30 p.m. screening. After previews, the movie began some time between 5:44 and 5:47. The closing credits started at 6:47. After a cast-performed rendition of "I Will Survive" (note: this was a reprise of an earlier performance) staged on the American Idol set (note: not the real American Idol set), the credits ran over a black screen. Perhaps two minutes later, the credits gave way to scenes that weren't strong enough to make the first 60 minutes, including Spider-Man removing Donald Trump's toupee. After about five minutes of these deleted scenes, the credits started again. They moved at about 10 lines per minute. And, considering the movie is about an hour long and probably took about six hours to make, they included a surprising amount of names; I'm guessing 8,000. By the time the credits had been slow-rolling for several minutes, the other 15 people in the theater had gone home. As the credits continued, I put on my headphones and listened to some music. At 7:09, more than 20 minutes after the credits began, I was rewarded by" a cinematic vision of "a Stallone impersonator gyrating in the outfit Britney Spears wore to the MTV awards."

Granted, any filmmaking team that makes a habit of releasing its movies in January might as well have the words "Don't expect much for you money" branded on their foreheads. But just because Meet the Spartans--like another big January release, Cloverfield--is very, very short, especially in contrast to the kind of Oscar fodder that it's begun replacing in theaters, doesn't mean that anyone wants more of it than there is. Levin is moved not just to call the film itself an act of "consumer fraud" but to question the job definitions of those responsible for it. "Friedberg and Seltzer do not practice the same craft as P.T. Anderson, David Cronenberg, Michael Bay, Kevin Costner, the Zucker Brothers, the Wayans Brothers, Uwe Boll, any dad who takes shaky home movies on a camping trip, or a bear who turns on a video camera by accident while trying to eat it." Of course, a bear might have trouble making sure that its pop-culture references were so timely and up-to-date. Levin mentions that Meet the Spartans builds to the crowd-pleasing sight of President Bush getting kicked in the balls. "Judging by the respective approval ratings of Bush (31 percent) and the Friedberg-Seltzer comedy team (between 2 percent and 3 percent, according to Rotten Tomatoes), audiences would have preferred to see Bush, or perhaps even Stalin, kick Friedberg and Seltzer in the balls."

Salting the Earth: Cloverfield II

John Constantine — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:56:00 GMT

When you make $80 million on a $30 million investment in less than two weeks, it’s understandable that you want to go back for seconds. As the ‘Grab pointed out earlier today, Paramount is already talking about making Cloverfield II: Field of Dreams with Matt Reeves.

Here’s why this is an exceptionally bad idea. Reeves already mentioned that a sequel might could focus on different perspectives of the same attack on New York. There’s logic there. There are undoubtedly other people filming the event on cell-phones and digital cameras. The problem is that the audience already knows what the monster does in New York. They know where it goes up until the climactic bombing. New York is, literally and metaphorically, done. The movie does tease that the monster survives but a sequential sequel doesn’t seem smart either. Watching the monster head upstate and start scarfing bed and breakfasts along the Hudson doesn’t sound too thrilling (maybe a little). Paramount and Reeves should sit down, savour their success, and consider how to intelligently explore what has the potential to be a lasting franchise.

Our two cents? Cloverfield is excellent genre deconstruction so there’s only one place you go next with the genre: GIANT MONSTER FIGHT! Have it fight some enormous yeti that comes out of a melting polar glacier. Or have the Statue of Liberty come to life Ghostbusters 2 style and seek out revenge. Both good ideas.

Freddy and the Furious Go to Cloverfield

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Are we really sure we want the writers' strike to end? For now, it's the only thing standing between us and an unending parade of sequels and reboots. Here's the latest from the Hollywood recycle bin:

Despite its second weekend plummet at the box office, Cloverfield is still a massive hit considering its $25 million dollar budget, so it's no surprise that Variety reports a follow-up in the works. Director Matt Reeves may have to delay his "Hitchcock-style thriller" The Invisible Woman, but no doubt Paramount will make it worth his while.

Vin Diesel tells MTV, "I'm a little bit slower than the average actor that just jumps into the sequel, but I think the time has come to revisit Dom Toretto." If that character name rings no bells for you, perhaps its been a while since you've seen the first installment of The Fast and the Furious. After two largely Diesel-free sequels (the chrome-domed lunk did make a cameo appearance in Tokyo Drift), the original star is aboard for the fourth installment, as is his partner in crime. "Gotta have Paul Walker," says Diesel, who is the first person on earth to ever utter that sentence.

And then there's our main man Freddy Krueger, who already survived the seemingly fatal Freddy's Dead and either won or lost the battle of Freddy vs. Jason. (We can never remember.) Now there are reports that none other than Michael Bay is set to revive A Nightmare on Elm Street. (We'd like to suggest the title A Recurring Nightmare.) According to Zap2It, "No writers can be attached to Nightmare on Elm Street until after the strike ends, which is fine. Bay and his Platinum cohorts already have remakes of Near Dark and The Birds in various stages of preproduction for Rogue and Universal respectively."

Strike on, brothers. Strike on.

Akira Kurosawa Drops the Bomb

Phil Nugent — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Everyone knows that Godzilla was, in its original context, a metaphor for the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, and by now a number of commentators have made the leap of seeing Cloverfield, whose advance publicity cited the veteran thunder lizard as some kind of role model, as either addressing or exploiting the memory of 9/11. Actually, American filmmakers have been trying, in one way or another, to deal with 9/11 in movies ranging from Oliver Stone's World Trade Center to Spielberg's The War of the Worlds to such indies as The Great New Wonderful. And Japanese filmmakers, including some of the greatest, took their best shot at dealing with the bomb and its aftermath, often in movies without rubber monster suits. Writing in Slate, Fred Kaplan argues that "If someone should feel compelled to make a film about 9/11 — specifically, about the social and psychic toll that the attacks have and haven't taken — a good model would be Akira Kurosawa's I Live in Fear, a relatively little-known film by perhaps the most revered of all Japanese filmmakers that's just been issued on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection's Eclipse series. The movie stars Toshiro Mifune as an industrialist who becomes obsessed with protecting himself from the bomb and from radioactive fallout. His solution is to sell his company and move himself and his entire family to Brazil — a plan that inspires his three sons to try to get him declared nuts so that they won't lose their share of the family business. (Kurosawa often openly ransacked Shakespeare for his movies, and this thread of the plot suggests King Lear turned inside out for the nuclear age.)

The punchline is that Mifune's character really does go mad and winds up being institutionalized — in response to the shattering realization that even exile to Brazil wouldn't be enough to ensure his safety in the event of a nuclear war. The punchline to the punchline is that, in Kurosawa's vision of "a world in which the most dreadful dangers are shrugged off as routine", the man locked up as crazy is the only one who seems to have trouble simply adjusting to the ever-present danger of being wiped out at the touch of a button. ("Sirens wail in the background all through this film; it's not clear what kinds of sirens [police, ambulance, air-raid drills?], and nobody pays attention anyway." This is, as Kaplan points out, "a rather unsubtle message, but Kurosawa compensates with an understated visual style. According to his autobiography, he started using three cameras around this time, letting them all roll while the actors played the whole scene as if in a stage play, then choosing the best angles in the editing room. It gives the film a documentary feel — many scenes are shot from behind the characters — as if we're peeking in on a slice of life." It also captures something that Kurosawa himself must have felt to the marrow — though he may never have addressed the subject again so explicitly, he was playing with images of nuclear devastation as late as thirty-five years later, in the 1990 Dreams. As it happened, the idea of a man set apart from his society because of his inability to deal with the thought of its destruction turned out to be a pretty good metaphor for the movie itself. Made in 1955, it not only bombed in Japan but didn't play in the American until it was shown at the 1963 New York Film Festival; it received limited U.S. theatrical release in 1967. It was issued on VHS back in 2001, but at no point has it ever — you'll excuse the expression — set the world on fire.

Afternoon Deal Report: A Fitting Tribute to Hasbro's Tradition of Quality

Peter Smith — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:20:00 GMT

Dennis Quaid and Channing Tatum have joined the cast of G.I. Joe. This seems apt, given Tatum's startlingly realistic face.

Julianne Moore will star in the supernatural thriller Shelter.

After (ahem) a monstrous opening, Cloverfield has dropped 68% at the box office. Course, when you're up against an aesthetic triumph like Meet the Spartans, which made $18 million last weekend. . .

Crash is becoming a series on Starz. That's the ensemble drama Crash, not the Cronenberg flick about car-fucking, unfortunately.

Luc Besson's next project will be a three-film adaptation of Aventures, a beloved French comic about a novelist in World War I-era Paris.

Separated at Birth: "Cloverfield" and "Miracle Mile"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The apocalyptic monster movie Cloverfield, with its Camcorder-eye view of Manhattan being flattened by an aggrieved, bellowing beastie from the sea, was already well defined in the public mind as "Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project" long before it opened. It used to be that this kind of mixed-marriage pitch was a staple of Hollywood satire, an easy laugh at the industry's blatant embrace of unoriginality. By now, after a few decades of Entertainment Tonight and Entertainment Weekly teaching lay people to think of movies in terms of grosses and big weekend openings, even ticket buyers are conditioned to think of a movie's resemblance to other movies as some kind of come-on. J. J. Abrams, whose Bad Robot company produced Cloverfield (and who is probably the creator most strongly associated with it, even though he neither wrote nor directed it), has also taken credit, in a roundabout way, for the most striking image featured in its trailer, that of the head of the Statue of Liberty being used as a bowling ball, by saying that he'd always felt gypped that there was no such image in John Carpenter's Escape from New York, even though that movie's poster showed the Statue's head lying discarded in the street. But there's another movie that in its structure bears a striking resemblance to Cloverfield: Miracle Mile, written and directed by Steve De Jarnatt and released to nothing better than mildly cultish appreciation back in 1989. The fact that a moviemaking team that takes so much pride in its influences has not — to my knowledge, anyway — done much to advertise their debt to De Jarnatt's film may indicate that the similarities are coincidental, or it may just prove that nobody wants to brag about building their hit on the bones of an underappreciated, semi-forgotten (and better) picture.

[Please Note: Spoilers to Follow. You have been warned]

CLOVERFIELD: The movie opens with the information that Beth (played by a very pretty young woman) and Rob (played by an even prettier young man) have fallen in love, but due to some miscommunication for which they both may be to blame, they quarrel and split acrimoniously on the evening of Rob's big going-away party. At that ill-timed moment, the apocalypse shows up, in the form of a giant, rampaging monster, and Rob tears through the increasingly chaotic metropolis that is Manhattan in a state of nocturnal panic, to be with the woman he loves. Thanks to his gallant heroism, which is depicted in something close to real time, they manage to reconnect, but an attempt to flee by government helicopter fails. The movie concludes with Beth and Rob dying in the rubble of Central Park, but their end is at least a small triumph of the heart: they have the chance to die together with the words "I love you" on their lips. Immortalized in the home-video footage collected and preserved by the government, they will live on in memory as a testament to the tender emotions of those lost in the monster's attack.

MIRACLE MILE: The movie opens with the information that Harry (played by Anthony Edwards in engaging, likable-geek mode) and Julie (played by Mare Winningham as a lovable geekette) have fallen in love, but Harry is reluctant to tell Julie that he loves her because he has commitment problems. He resolves to take the plunge when he and Julie are set to meet one night, but due to some miscommunication for which a power outage and malfunctioning alarm clock are to blame, he fails to show up. Wandering the nocturnal city alone, Harry learns that the apocalypse is coming in on the next train, in the form of a nuclear attack. Harry tears through the increasingly chaotic metropolis that is Los Angeles in a state of panic, to be with the woman he loves. Thanks to his gallant heroism, which is depicted in something close to real time, they manage to reconnect, but an attempt to flee by government helicopter fails. The movie concludes with Harry and Julie dying in the mire of the La Brea Tar Pits, but their end is at least a small triumph of the heart: they have the chance to die together with the words "I love you" on their lips. Like the dinosaurs, they will join the fossil record, living on in memory as a testament to man's folly.

It goes without saying that the feel and texture of the two movies could hardly be more different, though there are traces in Cloverfield of a yearning to express something close to the romantic sweetness of Miracle Mile; it's outside the movie's range, partly because it would get in the way of the spectacle, partly because the characters lack the individual spark of the people in Miracle Mile. (On the other hand, they also lack the unpolished averageness of the people in The Blair Witch Project, a quality that made it easier to believe that movie might really be a record of something that had happened. If you think that the people onscreen count for more than your taste in gimmickry, Cloverfield is actually more like Godzilla meets Make Me a Supermodel.) It might be nice if some of the attention being paid to Cloverfield could be siphoned off in Miracle Mile's direction, assuming that the clock hasn't already completely run out on Cloverfield's fifteen minutes. Miracle Mile was in some ways its writer-director's real feature debut; the script was named one of the ten best unproduced screenplays by American Film magazine in 1983, the same year that De Jarnatt got his first screen credit for his work on the screenplay of Strange Brew, starring Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as Bob and Doug Mackenzie. De Jarnatt had sold it to a studio that had no interest in letting him direct it; he was later able to buy it back, after working as a writer and director on the mid-1980s revival of the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and writing and directing the straight-to-cable sci-fi romance Cherry 2000. Since then, he's done a lot of TV, and he had a hand in launching the offbeat horror series American Gothic and Kindred: The Embraced. But in the almost twenty years since Miracle Mile was completed, he hasn't made another movie.

Sundance Roundup: Day 7

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Not surprisingly, the news of Heath Ledger’s death has put something of a damper on the Sundance fun over the past twenty-four hours. Ledger’s former paramour Naomi Watts cancelled all press appearances today in advance of the midnight screening of Funny Games, Michael Haneke’s American remake of his own 1997 film. Meanwhile, some knucklehead decided a post-screening Q&A would be the appropriate time to ask Josh Hartnett for his thoughts on the tragedy. Goodness knows we were all waiting on the word from Hartnett; now we have closure.

In other Funny Games news, the Salt Lake Tribune notes an unusual guerrilla marketing campaign on the streets of Park City. Is it really a good idea to supply potential audience members with eggs before a screening? Why not pass out rotten tomatoes while you’re at it?

Audiences are on a Sugar buzz, says the L.A. Times, crowding into screenings of the latest effort from Half Nelson filmmakers Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden. It’s the story of a Dominican baseball player “recruited to play for a Kansas City farm team, but his overwhelming excitement is soon muted when he finds himself far from home in all-white Bridgetown, Iowa, with no English skills and a naivete about U.S. culture.”

Over at Slamdance, the hot ticket is Paranormal Activity, which is either the next Blair Witch Project, the next Cloverfield, or the next Slamdance movie you’ll never hear about again. According to New York magazine, the audience “screamed at all the right places, then chain-smoked cigarettes outside Slamdance’s ramshackle Main Street HQ in order to decompress.” With any luck, no one interrupted them to ask about Heath Ledger.

Star Trek Teaser Follow-Up: The Real Deal

John Constantine — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:45:00 GMT

We, like many others on the internet, got fished in by the fake JJ Abrams Star Trek teaser a couple of weeks back. Here, for your viewing pleasure, is the genuine article. It's surprisingly similar to the fake teaser as far as content goes, right down to Leonard Nimoy getting all gravelly voiced to talk about what is still the final frontier.

I caught this trailer last Friday when I went to see Cloverfield. Actually yawned in the theater. I was kind of tired, but still. It's just not a very good sign when the coolest part of your trailer is usage of the transporter sound effect.

The Most Unnecessary Movies of 2007

Phil Nugent — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Here at the Screengrab, we've pitched in our two cents on the best films of 2007, and my esteemed colleague John Constantine has weighed in on the year's worst. But to paraphrase the late Roman Hruska, don't mediocre movies deserve a little recognition too? They make up the bulk of each year's crop of movies that get released (and probably also the bulk of those that will barely see the light of day), and every so often you see one whose unexceptionalism really stands out. So now, as the new film year begins to heat up with the arrival of the Sundance Film Festival and the first big commercial releases of 2008, let's take one last minute to salute 2007, by remembering the movies that everyone has already gotten a head start on forgetting.

BROOKLYN RULES: This '80s-set tough-neighborhood movie attracted a little attention upon its release because it was written by Terence Winter, who won acclaim for his work on The Sopranos. Winter must have been worried about being accused of repeating himself if his movie too closely resembled The Sopranos, so he wrote something that, like 98% of the tough-neighborhood movies of the last thirty-odd years, rather resembles Mean Streets, except there's no crazy young Robert De Niro figure, and he is greatly missed. Instead, we have our audience surrogate, the clean-cut young dude who's going to grow up to be a writer and tell this story, played by Freddie Prinze, Jr.; his buddy who ever since he was a kid always wanted to be a gangster, played by Scott Caan; and their harmless goofball pal who was born with a target on his back, played by that asshole who plays the unendurable Turtle on HBO's Entourage. The cast also includes Alec Baldwin as the local hot-tempered mob boss, who demonstrates that his transformation into a comedian hasn't been so complete that seeing him carve someone's ear off at a deli counter isn't exactly on a par with seeing a post-Airplane! Leslie Nielson playing a hooker's mean trick in the 1987 Nuts. The best way to tell this movie apart from a thousand other Mean Streets/GoodFellas knock-offs is that it's the one that goes the farthest to pull its punches; it keeps hinting that terrible things are on the verge of happening to the principle characters, and then nothing really terrible ever does, unless for some reason you think there's something regrettable about finally seeing Turtle get his.

I'M REED FISH: Better you than me, as they say. This strained exercise in indie quirkiness was written by Reed Fish and stars Jay Baruchel (the goofy aspiring boxer in Million Dollar Baby) as Reed Fish, who everyone in his small town loves and counts on to help them make sense of this crazy old world. But Reed has relationship troubles: he's engaged to Kate, played by Alexis Bledel (of Gilmore Girls), but what is he supposed to do about these tender feelings developing between him and Jill, played by Schuyler Fisk (the fetching and talented daughter of Sissy Spacek and There Will Be Blood production designer Jack Fisk)? These are the kind of problems you'd sell your soul to the devil to have. The movie has been failing to involve the audience for quite a long time before it pulls a whammy and reveals that what we're watching is a movie within a movie, and that the actual Reed, Kate, and Jill are in the audience, and experiencing mixed emotions about seeing their intricate love lives captured on film. The "real" Reed, Kate, and Jill are played by actors named, respectively, John Penner, Valerine Azlynn, and Shiri Appleby. It's all very meta. There apparently really is a Reed Fish who wrote the thing; at least, he has his own IMDB and MySpace pages and blog, which is about as real as you can get these days. On the blog, he celebrated the mixed reviews and middling box office of his labor of love by writing, "We didn't do crazy big business or anything, but hey, most movies like ours don't ever even get the chance to get into theaters, so no sweat." Low aspirations can seem an appealing thing compared to full-blown show business megalomania, but you don't really want them to show up quite so nakedly on the screen.

NEXT: Ever since Blade Runner made science-fiction guru Philip K. Dick a recognizable name in the movie industry, Hollywood has practically developed a whole subgenre in big, noisy, cluttered action pictures that are ostensibly "inspired" by Dick's work. In 2006, with his rotoscope-animated A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater actually found a way to film one of Dick's late novels so that the black-comic eeriness would slowly, quietly envelop the viewer and the ideas would have room to breathe. Hollywood gets back on track with this big-budget slice of sound and fury, directed by Lee Tamahori, once the respected director of the emotionally searing Once Were Warriors, now a man who tells the actors where to stand so they'll be properly positioned in relation to the exploding fireballs that the CGI guys will fill in later. Nicolas Cage plays the hero, a man who can see what's going to happen a couple of minutes into the future. This is a talent that comes in handy when he hits the casinos, or tries to evade an FBI capture team led by Julianne Moore, who recites her lines as if she were only using as much of her brain as she can spare while silently counting her money and memorizing her lines for the next Todd Haynes picture. (As for Cage, for all the abuse he takes these days, he remains a talented guy who does generally try to stagger his roles so that he does one picture of at least nominal artistic credibility for each sewer-dwelling money gig. As it happens, this movie came out between Ghost Rider and the National Treasure sequel, suggesting that he may have gotten his calendar dates screwed up.) The whole thing ends with a shockeroo twist ending that effectively cancels out everything that's come before it, which is fine by me, and that also could be seen as a threat to launch a sequel, which is not.

EVER SINCE THE WORLD ENDED and BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF VERNON LESLIE: These aren't as grating as some movies I saw this year, and Angela Goethals does give a very winning performance as the heroine of Vernon Leslie. But between the two of them, they do a lot to sum up why the fake documentary, usually presented in the guise of sci-fi fantasy or satirical comedy, has fast become the most half-assed, tedious subgenre popular among low-budget indie filmmakers. You can see the reasons for its appeal: it enables filmmakers to patch a movie together largely from simple shots of actors talking directly to the camera or "interviewing" one another, and it allows them to pass off things like shitty lighting and cruddy visuals as a mark of "authenticity." But when you set out to use this form to do something like depict life in a world that's been nearly depopulated by a killer virus (as in Ever Since the World Ended), you'd better have a script that's cleverly worked out to the nth degree instead of one that makes it seem that you're just aimlessly kicking the idea around the parking lot. Vernon Leslie is more professional — the supporting cast includes Scott Wilson, Zelda Rubinstein, and genre-movie stalwart Robert Englund — but that just makes its disposable feel that much more irritating. (It's also more derivative; it's about a film crew that's making a tag-along documentary about a serial killer, an idea that, fifteen years earlier, served the makers of the Belgian black comedy Man Bites Dog. The big difference between the two films is that Man Bites Dog was supposed to be about a "real" murderer, whereas Vernon Leslie is set in the B-movie universe inhabited by Michael Myers and Freddy Kruger. It's built on a familiarity with the rules of the slasher-movie genre that makes you want to get the filmmakers a library card.) There's been a bit of an explosion in fake documentaries these last few years, and most of them seem to have been made by people who have no grasp of how much care and planning goes into making something like Zelig seem like a real movie. With any luck, Cloverfield will help to blow the wheels off this particular bandwagon.

Vanishing Act: Daniel Myrick & Eduardo Sanchez

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Filmmakers disappear for all sorts of reasons. Eccentric geniuses like Kubrick and Malick are known for taking many years between projects and working in complete secrecy. Actors (Charles Laughton, Marlon Brando) and writers (Dalton Trumbo, Stephen King) may dabble with one-and-done efforts and never return to the director’s chair. An Ed Burns may make a big splash with his debut, churn out a series of increasingly lame follow-ups, and eventually find himself releasing his films directly to iTunes.

For this inaugural edition of Vanishing Act, we set the wayback machine for the summer of 1999, when Blair Witch mania swept the nation. Unknown filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez hit upon an ingenious plan for making the most of their microscopic budget, using the mockumentary format to not only justify their jittery digital images but to amp up the "you are there" horror of three amateur filmmakers encountering evil in the woods. The Blair Witch Project was also a pioneer in the realm of viral marketing, using the web to generate underground buzz over whether or not the film was "real." Its influence can be seen in two movies releasing this week: Teeth explicitly mentions Blair Witch in its TV ads, while Cloverfield appropriates both the shakycam immediacy and the viral approach.

When Blair Witch grossed an astonishing $140 million at the box office, it seemed that Myrick and Sanchez were sitting pretty. They had the good sense to steer clear of the stinkeroo sequel Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, except as nominal executive producers. Their next announced collaboration, Heart of Love, was to be a complete change of pace, a screwball comedy described by Myrick in several interviews as "the most politically incorrect movie imaginable." Several web sites (now long defunct) were launched in hopes of recapturing the viral magic of their first collaboration, but the movie’s production was delayed over and over while the directors squabbled with distributor Artisan over Blair Witch profits and the project died quietly.

Despite their tiff with Artisan and mutual antipathy toward the failed Book of Shadows, Myrick and Sanchez toyed with making a Blair Witch prequel before finally going their separate ways. So what have they been up to lately?

This 2005 profile of Sanchez from the Baltimore City Paper finds him in pre-production on Probed, an “alien sci-fi horror monster movie” that was released straight to DVD as Altered in 2006. In a three-skull review (I think that’s a good thing), Fangoria.com notes that the effects-based set pieces are “a far cry from the psychological terrors of Blair Witch,” but that “Sanchez’s work on Altered shares with that previous film a keen sense of downward-spiral pacing.”

Myrick directed The Strand, which originally appeared as a series of webisodes about oddball characters on Venice Beach, CA, and Believers, a straight-to-video thriller about a dangerous cult. In this recent interview, Myrick discusses his new project The Objective, as well as the possibility of working with Sanchez again and maybe even reviving that Blair Witch prequel.

Alias "The Burly Man"

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

One of the most anticipated releases of 2008 is, of course, Rory’s First Kiss. Many fans are wondering if it can possibly live up to the precedent set by the smash hit Intimidation Game. Others are anxiously awaiting that high-profile new sequel from the maker of such blockbusters as Moon Song and Party in Fresno, while some continue to wonder when the director of the all-time box office smash Planet Ice will ever return to big screen glory.

No, you haven’t slipped into a parallel universe through a wormhole in space. All of the above are indeed well-known movies released in recent years – or, more precisely, the fake working titles for those films. As you probably know, in addition to old reliables like Untitled Rob Zombie Project, the studios often use code names for high-profile shoots in order to throw snooping fans off the scent. The most famous example is Blue Harvest, Lucasfilm’s fake working title for Return of the Jedi, which is now so well-known it was used as the title of Family Guy’s newly released Star Wars parody. Then there’s Cloverfield, which began as a fake working title and just sort of stuck. (Somehow the alternate working title, Slusho, never caught on.)

Take your best shot at identifying these 10 movies from the fake working titles (without consulting IMDb, natch). There’s no prize except our undying admiration. I’ll post the answers in the comments after a bit.

Intimidation Game
Rory’s First Kiss
Incident on 57th Street
Moon Song
Planet Ice
Paradox
Three
The Burly Man
Party in Fresno
Colorado Nights

Grey Takes Paramount From Red To Black

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Brad Grey is a TV guy. (You know him, if for no other reason, because he is one of the men behind The Sopranos.) TV guys are not supposed to know anything about movies.

And yet, Brad Grey is running one of the oldest and most respected movie studios in America -- Paramount Pictures, an outfit which, according to one of Grey's collegues, is "on our way to making money", quite an accomplishment in today's Hollywood -- and this weekend will see the release of Cloverfield, a huge gamble that Grey greenlighted at significant personal risk (and which is the product of J.J. Abrams, another TV guy).

In an interesting interview with the New York Times, Grey discusses his trial by fire as the head of Paramount, the management shuffles that accompanied his rise to the top, and his conception of Abrams as the Spielberg to his Lew Wasserman. It's fascinating not only because of what Grey has to say -- a typical producer's mix of cautiousness and braggadocio, but without the guarded defensiveness that usually comes with habitiual ass-covering -- but because of the insight it has into the business of running a studio at a time when business is shakier than ever and very little gets produced at the top end without a guarantee of making money. It's in light of situations like this that whether or not Cloverfield succeeds will mean a lot more than the failure of a single movie.

Even if Abrams doesn't prove to be the next Steven Spielberg, Grey has the real thing to fall back on: Paramount has just acquired DreamWorks, and will be working with Spielberg on the development of many properties the company purchased over the years, including ones slated for production or direction by Spielberg himself. Grey calls the acquisition his best movie in the business to date; "Oh, God, I've made many mistakes," he says of his relatively brief career (he just turned 50), but buying into the Spielberg machine is not one of them.

Selling the "Cloverfield" Monster

Phil Nugent — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

In anticipation of the arrival on Friday of Cloverfield, S. James Snyder reviews the marketing of the movie, which started last summer with a trailer strategically attached to the release of Transformers. (If you're going to try to coax people out to see a new movie in the misbegotten month of January, you can't start too early.) "By the end of the weekend, that cryptic preview — which purported to show the home video of a New York house party at the moment it erupts into chaos, as something gigantic, but never seen, attacks the city with huge explosives — had spawned its own universe of online traffic. Initially, people simply tried to find the title of the film, but as word spread that this was, in fact, the new unlabeled disaster film by producer J.J. Abrams, fans of Mr. Abrams's secret-filled TV serial "Lost" quickly scoured the trailer for clues. It didn't take long for Mr. Abrams himself to add fuel to the fire, identifying www.1-18-08.com as one of the film's Web sites, but ensuring fans there were others out there, waiting to be found."

The simulated-home-movie technique of the Cloverfield footage immediately calls up memories of The Blair Witch Project, as does the whole idea of selling a movie through hints and teases located on-line. But part of the brilliance of the Blair Witch campaign was the way the website and other paraphernalia attached the movie, such as a fake "documentary" that aired on the Sci-Fi Channel, created an instant urban myth; some viewers enjoyed being able to pretend that the movie was "real", while some other, less canny viewers actually thought that it was based on something real and felt outraged about being hoaxed when they saw the stars on TV next to Jay Leno. That option isn't really open here; there can't be too many people who've seen the TV commercials showing a mysterious, bellowing something decapitating the Statue of Liberty and generally wreaking havoc on Manhattan who thought that it was really happening, though if there are any such people, they're probably planning to vote for Mitt Romney. Another point of comparison is Snakes on a Plane, the viral-marketed B-movie whose title and catch phrase were all but decreed by Internet feedback. That movie whipped up a firestorm of on-line interest that didn't carry over to the box office; the lesson that the makers of Cloverfield may have taken from it is that if you give the geeks too much control of the pre-release party, then everyone may have started fishing for their car keys by the time the picture opens. (Incidentally, "Cloverfield" was originally supposed to be a temporary code name for the movie, taken from a street address of the Bad Robot company offices, but it's become so identified with the project that now they're stuck with it.)

The Cloverfield marketing team has risen to the challenge of this brave new marketing world with an intricate set of interlocking come-ons, including one surprising tie-in: "In a recent episode of the NBC series Heroes, fans took note of the name and logo of a soft drink that also appeared on the T-shirt of a character in the trailer for Cloverfield — 'Slusho' — which led them to the Web site (www.slusho.jp) and a bizarre online commercial (viewable at YouTube.com) that seemed to have nothing to do with the New York disaster in the Cloverfield trailer. But that was until a new series of fake news reports was released online, all detailing the destruction of a drilling platform out in the middle of the ocean, supposedly owned by Tagruato, the fictional Japanese company that owns the fictional Slusho." In an effort to mix up all this Internet activity with a little real-world buzz, Paramount has also invited a couple hundred of the movie's close, personal "MySpace friends" to " 'Rob's surprise party' — the fictional party interrupted by rumbling explosions in the trailers — on January 17, the night before the film opens." Ultimately, though, an online marketer named Adam Paul insists that, "The key is that the movie has to actually live up to what you've promised in the hype," which sounds very old-school. We don't know any more about what's actually going to be on those screens come January 18 than you do, but we do know this: if audiences get their first clear look at the Cloverfield monster, whatever it is, and respond with laughter or snores, this surprise party is going to wrap itself up very quickly.

God Damn Us All to Hell, Every One!

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 16:30:00 GMT

In I Am Legend, Will Smith zips around a depopulated Manhattan in a sports car, with his trusty German shepherd in the seat next to him; if he takes a curve too fast and the pooch soils the upholstery, he can always pick up another one. Smith also high in the tall grass that, intended, has sprouted up in Times Square and hunts deer with the Virgin Megastore in the background. He doesn't have any scenes with the Statue of Liberty, but as Sewell Chan points out in The New York Times, apocalyptic fantasies centered in New York City often go straight for the lady in the harbor. Charlton Heston had a hissy-fit when he encountered her remains at the end of Planet of the Apes; her torch sticking out of the waterline was the last visible trace of a submerged New York in Steven Spielberg's A.I.; and the promotional artwork for the forthcoming Cloverfield uses a smoking, ravaged statue to indicate what horrors may await audiences when that viral-marketed behemoth finally lumbers into theaters.

New York is hardly the only place on the American landscape that has been obliterated onscreen to audience-pleasing effect. The whole point of the 1974 disaster hit Earthquake was, in the words of Pauline Kael, about "seeing L.A. get it." And though Chan includes the 1996 Independence Day in his roll call, noting that it's a film in which "Giant alien spaceships hover over, and then destroy, New York and other major world cities", the fact is that the one thing everybody probably remembers from that picture is the image of the White House exploding. (Even people who didn't see that movie may well still remember it from its once ever-present trailer.) But you know New Yorkers. Chan quotes the architectural historian Max Page as writing, “The best thing for New York might be the sight of King Kong tramping through the streets of Manhattan on his way to a fateful appointment at the top of the Empire State Building. For if there is one thing that symbolizes New York’s pre-eminence, it is that so many still want to imagine the city’s end.” But Chan isn't just convinced that this is all about the city; he also thinks it's "tasteless" to indulge in this sort of thing after 9-11. An alternate hypothesis might be that it's actually a sign of health that moviemakers and audiences may be ready to indulge in this kind of scary fantasy again; that they've moved on. Luckily, he was able to reel Ed Koch in for a sound bite. “'They want to see our skyscrapers destroyed because they are envious of them,' Mr. Koch said in a phone interview. Asked whom he was referring to, he said, '"They" is the rest of the country.'” Maybe the monsters and aliens keep attacking New York because they're trying to make friends with us by taking out Ed Koch.

Trailer Roundup: Cloverfield, Definitely Maybe, The Other Boleyn Girl

Peter Smith — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Cloverfield

While the 1.18.08 teaser that played before Transformers this past summer appeared to simply be a brilliant piece of viral marketing, it now appears that the project, now titled Cloverfield, will actually be shot largely by characters wielding personal camcorders and camera phones, instead of in a conventional style. Frankly, I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, I think it's a good idea in theory to make a kind of Godzilla for the YouTube generation. But a movie like this is tricky to pull off. The Blair Witch Project worked because you always got a sense that there were really three people lost in the forest and beset by forces they couldn't explain, but it'll be much harder to get that same vibe with a project this large-scale and effects-intensive. I'm not sure the director of the 1996 David Schwimmer vehicle The Pallbearer is the man for the job. Regardless, I'm curious to find out.

Definitely, Maybe

About the best thing I can say about this trailer is that Ryan Reynolds doesn't look to be as insufferable as he usually is. Plus his three romantic partners — Elizabeth Banks, Rachel Weisz, and Isla Fisher — are all pretty smokin'. But otherwise, gag me. Much of the blame can be placed on little Abigail Breslin, who has taken over the mantle of Hollywood's go-to moppet from Dakota Fanning. Or maybe it's just that the character feels less like a precocious kid than a screenwriter's conception of same, a little girl who gives voice to all the clever, self-aware ideas on the scribe's oh-so-clever mind. How else to explain lines like "what's the male word for slut?" This is the kind of crappy Valentine's Day release that makes me glad to be single. And who signed off on that title?

The Other Boleyn Girl

Okay, who cast this thing? When your least problematic lead is Aussie Eric Bana (Henry the Eighth he ain't, he ain't), you know there's trouble. I'm not sure who's more ill-fitting in this story, emo pixie Natalie Portman as the defiant Anne Boleyn, or princess of pout Scarlett Johansson as her sister Mary. Based on her ignominious work in previous period films, I'm inclined to lean toward Johansson here, but it's a tough call. Either way, couldn't they find two English actresses who (a) suited their roles, and (b) were more convincing as sisters? With Elizabeth: The Golden Age and now this, Hollywood might want to consider laying off the British history for a while, lest our friends across the pond think we've got it in for them.

— Paul Clark