The Screengrab : grace is gone

Trailer Review: Igor

Paul Clark — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

You know that family-friendly computer-animation is a box-office winner when every studio has its own animation wing. Here, it’s MGM getting in on the act with the animated adventures of everybody’s favorite hunchbacked science partner, Igor (that’s EE-gor, not EYE-gor). A little odd to hear John Cusack voicing the title character, although after flops like The Martian Child and Grace Is Gone I’m guessing he figured an easy paycheck job in a likely hit would make it easier for him to churn out more Ice Harvests, so more power to him. That says, this looks like it might be a fairly painless kids’ movie, with plenty of “don’t judge a book by its cover” sentiments in the Shrek tradition- although hopefully, not as much bodily-function humor.

Cusack Heads for the Middle

Peter Smith — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Grace is Gone is a bad movie with a halfway decent premise that could have succeeded if it weren’t so damn cowardly. John Cusack plays a conservative father of two, a patriot with a shameful military past who receives word at the beginning of the film that his soldier wife has died in Iraq. The rest of the ninety-minute runtime follows his struggle to find a way to tell his daughters, aged twelve and eight, that their mother is dead. There’s an opportunity here to say something about the half-decade war we remain embroiled in, and director/writer James Strouse studiously avoids saying it. The Iraq War could be subbed out for any conflict from the past fifty years and the same limp story could be told. What’s even more frustrating is that Grace is Gone's line-toeing is intentional — it's a film, on a political subject, so desperate not to offend that it avoids politics completely.

It is short though. That was nice.

When I arrived at a roundtable Q&A with Cusack, all I was armed with was a fresh blank tape and a burning desire to know why this man hated Better Off Dead. But once Cusack walked in, looking and moving exactly like John Cusack, the Egon-Spengler-esque critics hogging the front of the table set in, and for forty-five minutes it was impossible to get in a question. The one I finally got in was this: "You have a large, rabid cultish fan base that is predominantly young people who don’t yet have families, and also have very strong opinions about the war. What do you want your younger fans to take away from this? How do you think they’ll relate to this?"

"I don't really know what they'll take away. Hopefully, as more of being conscious. Consciousness. Compassionate," said John Cusack.

Softballed! And that's appropriate for a promo of Grace is Gone — a thirty-mile-per-hour softball, right down the middle.

— John Constantine

Today in the Nerve Film Lounge: Juno, Atonement, The Golden Compass, Grace is Gone, Billy the Kid, The Walker, Drunken Angel

Peter Smith — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Juno: "Less than the sum of its parts, but those parts are so entertaining that you don't mind too much."

Atonement: "Refreshingly old school."

The Golden Compass: "Fails to convincingly establish its world or the people that inhabit it."

Grace is Gone: "Too calculated to surprise."

Billy the Kid: "A higher grade of filmmaking than an episode of MTV's True Life. It explores Billy's relationship with his mother and others with real insight."

The Walker: "What might have been a first-rate character study instead devolves into a routine morass of Beltway intrigue."

Drunken Angel: "The film could have been a pat tale of redemption, but Kurosawa leaves its allegorical dimensions wide open and keeps his sentimental streak at bay."

Box-Office Quagmire

Peter Smith — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Remember fifteen minutes ago, when people were complaining that nobody was making movies about Iraq? Well, while you were blinking, the octoplexes got overstuffed with movies about Iraq. The only problem is that, as A. O. Scott points out, nobody's going to see them. The films that've opened this past year — In the Valley of Elah, Rendition, The Kingdom, The Situation — have been greeted with "soft box office returns." Similar commercial fates may await the string of films currently lined up on the runway, which include Brian De Palma's Redacted and Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs, as well as Grace Is Gone, an indie tearjerker starring John Cusack as a father of two who is widowed by the war, and the adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best-seller The Kite Runner, set in Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban. (As Kim Masters recently wrote in Slate, Lions for Lambs also has its own special problems: it stands to be the next exploding boxcar in the continuing train wreck of Tom Cruise's career.) For all the automatic clucking about how American audiences don't really want to see movies about real problems, some of the recent Iraq movies make it clear that there's a built-in problem in trying to make drama out of an ongoing national trauma. As Scott puts it: "What is missing in nearly every case is a sense of catharsis or illumination. This is hardly the fault of the filmmakers. Disorientation, ambivalence, a lack of clarity — these are surely part of the collective experience they are trying to examine. How can you bring an individual story to a satisfying conclusion when nobody has any idea what the end of the larger story will look like?" — Phil Nugent