The Screengrab : jerry bruckheimer

Trailer Review: G-Force

Paul Clark — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:00:00 GMT

As a longtime guinea pig owner and enthusiast, I strenuously object to this trailer. Now, don’t get me wrong- I’m happy to finally see them taking the lead in a movie. But oh please, not this one. Guinea pigs are cute and fun on their own, and don’t need sassy voices from the likes of Nicolas Cage and Tracy Jordan Morgan to lend them any extra personality. What’s more, the trailer sells this is a dumbass kiddie take on a mindless Hollywood spy yarn. In other words, producer Jerry Bruckheimer has somehow managed to go slumming here, no mean feat considering that this is the dude who was responsible for King Arthur and Bad Company. Oh, and what’s up with that last exchange? Couldn’t they at least think of some retort from the insulted animal?

Morning Deal Report: Tarzan Swings Again

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Few characters in motion picture history have been reimagined as many times as Tarzan. From the Johnny Weissmuller adventures of the 30s and 40s to the cheesecake of Bo Derek in Tarzan, The Ape Man to the literary pretentions of Greystoke to his most recent turn as a Disney cartoon, the lord of the apes has proved remarkably resilient. Now let’s see if he can survive the director of Van Helsing, GI Joe and two Mummy movies. Stephen Sommers will direct the latest version from Warner Bros., per The Hollywood Reporter. Sommers and screenwriter Stu Beattie “do not plan to work from the original 1914 Burroughs tome or any previous film. An entirely new approach is in the works, though more details beyond that are being kept under wraps tighter than Tarzan's loincloth.”

In a vaguely related development, Russian bodybuilder-turned-actor Alexander Nevsky will produce and star in Hercules: The Beginning. “The move comes at a time when Universal Pictures and Nu Image/Millennium productions are also planning projects based on the Greek hero,” Variety warns.

In non-loincloth movie news, Variety also reports that Jerry Bruckheimer and Disney have acquired the rights to Steven Pressfield’s novel Killing Rommel. The book “focuses on the British Long Range Desert Group and its attempt to stop Rommel, the legendary Desert Fox who routed the British in the North African desert in 1942 and threatened to overrun the Middle East thanks to his battlefield strategies and Panzer tanks.” Clearly this is a story crying out for that subtle Bruckheimer touch.

Related:
How Bad Will "G.I. Joe" Be?
Hercules on Elm Street

New Grindhouse Classics: "Mulberry Street"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The holy grail of a certain kind of movie geek is the low-budget genre picture--crime, sci-fi, or maybe, especially, horror--made by no-name filmmakers who, forced to compensate for their lack of resources with whatever they can come up with in terms of ingenuity and febrile, crackpot ideas, achieves what Manny Farber called "termite art," a strange and living vision that charges down alleys that Jerry Bruckheimer wouldn't venture into if there were strippers in there. Mulberry Street, which played theaters for an instant last year tucked in alongside seven other scare pictures as part of the 2007 "After Dark Horrorfest" and which recently came out on DVD, is a rare example of a movie that gets close enough to achieving grail status for viewers to catch scent of the wine. It's an apocalyptic horror movie that suggestively touches on post-9/11 anxieties without resorting to the kind of explicit speechifying that one encounters in the films of such specialists in ambitious schlock as Larry Cohen. It's also a movie that solves the problem of how to capture the edgy, grungy vibe of the classic New York movies from the seventies and make it seem relevant to the city we know today.

Mulberry Street is set among the people who can barely afford a ticket to the theaters in the more photogenic parts of New York now, who are being crowded out of a place that increasingly seems to have no place for anyone who has to keep up on the price of groceries. The main setting is an apartment building whose tenants are on the brink of being evicted by a development company looking to upgrade the area; the company's billboards are plastered with the message, "The neighborhood is changing" and a picture of the Trump-like company head, gazing down over his latest acquisition like a Yuppie Big Brother. The construction process has apparently set off reverberations that are reaching down beneath the subway lines and bringing to the surface an especially nasty breed of rats, who, biting anyone they come across, turn their human victims into rabid, murderous were-rats. Silly as this sounds, in the movie it plays with a metaphoric logic that's hard to shake off. It's as if gentrification has finally driven what's left of the city's natural essence insane and forced it to fight back. Of course, in fighting back, it mainly strikes the people who are already its fellow sufferers--the people who, as in Katrina, can't afford to get out of nature's way. When all hell is broken loose and Manhattan has been quarantined, a TV news announcers informs us that the mayor will soon be making a speech, "from the Bahamas."

Directed by Jim Mickle from a script he co-wrote with Nick Damici, who plays the hero, an ex-boxer named Clutch, it's a monster movie whose fast-cut editing (by the director) and blurry, often weirdly lovely cinematography (by Ryan Samul) are so effective that it's hard to mind much that they probably developed as a way to conceal the limitations of the special effects/make-up budget. The first rat people we see are bum-like creatures with loose, matted hair that strategically conceals their features, though once things are going good, there's a quick glimpse of a bald, pointy-haired sucker who looks rather like the title character of F. W. Muneau's Nosferatu. (The ending, which features guys running around in protective suits, plays as a double homage to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and his lesser-known 1973 film The Crazies.) Most of the characters are hard-scrabble members of the working poor and self-styled tough New Yorkers; when a young family hustles to get the hell out of the building before the plague engulf them, one urban warrior yells after them contemptuously, "Go back to Connecticut!" (There's also a memorable scene of a heavyset bar owner matter-of-factly chasing a monster out of his place by repeatedly whacking it upside the head with a skillet while hollaring, "And stay out!")

The biggest flaw in the movie is that the casualness-in-the-face-of-chaos tone can get underdone. There are a couple of moments where characters seem bizarrely unmoved by the loss of people they had reason to feel close to, and Clutch, who's expecting his grown daughter's return home after a stint in Iraq and a spell in a military hospital, never betrays the concern you might expect a loving father to expect upon his realization that his kid is out there somewhere in a zombie minefield; he never even comments on it. (The daughter is played by Kim Blair, whose beauty is somehow made only more affecting by her character's facial scars. The standout member of the cast is Ron Brice, who plays Clutch's gay roommate; he knows how to communicate fear and confusion while retaining his character's dignity.) But even when it seems to have a couple of circuits misfiring, Mulberry Street has a look and feel that set it apart from the run of blood-squib operas cluttering up the direct-to-video shelves. Hardcore horror geeks and people nostalgic for the old Times Square should give it a look. Some sane people might want to give it a look, too.

Fine and Zandi

Phil Nugent — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

You may not have heard of David Zandi. If so, from the sound of it, you don't know what you're missing. The twenty-nine-year-old, Iranian-born Zandi, says that he's one of the last surviving male members of the Persian royal family. His IMDB page, which lists two acting credits--Marci C, in which he played "Musician", and Men in Black II, in which he stretched for the role of "Alien"--is full of other intriguing personal information, including the news that he's "a champion equestrian", "loves going skiing in the winter", "Turned down the offer to be a model for Gucci and Calvin Klein to stay in acting school", and that he "Coached his girlfriend with her acting and speech in 2001 so she could work on his project." (Is that what the kids are calling it these days?) This stuff goes over pretty well with the people who hang out at IMDB message boards: one post there is headed, "MARRY ME!" The page also features quotes from Zandi, including this beaut: "Even as Talent, I see it as my sole duty to do that which is in the best interest of the Studio, regardless of my own personal desires." Right now, Zandi is trying to serve the best interests of Disney by offering himself to star in the forthcoming movie version of the video game Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Zandi isn't exactly lobbying for the role: he just wants the studio to recognize that logic is on his side. "I'm very logical for this part," he explains, "because of the way that I was raised as a child, his personality, his mannerisms. It's something I could easily pull off. It would be like playing myself. It would be an opportunity to play myself because of my ancestry."

But though he's above begging, he "will accept the role from Jerry Bruckheimer when he decides to meet the demands of the fans. I just want to give the fans what they want." Zandi knows what the fans want because of "an official-looking poll obtained by movie news service IESB.net" that shows him leading the field s voters' top choice for the role, ahead of such notables as Orlando Bloom, Zac Efron, and James McAvoy. IESB says only that they received news of the poll from an anonymous source who asked that his identity be kept confidential, a Disney spokesperson said only the official spokesperson equivalent of, "Pull the other one," and Zandi disclaims any connection to the poll but does say that he thinks it would be an awful thing for his family and everyone involved if his ancestor wound up being played by Orlando Bloom. (We hear him on that one.) Will Jerry Bruckheimer come to his sense and hire Zandi? Right now, things don't look that good, but maybe if things don't work out, maybe Zandi can maintain his poise by repeating this mantra, from his IMDB quotes section:"In this world, there are many forms of deception, but perhaps the greatest of them all, is self-deception."

Morning Deal Report: Bollocks.

Peter Smith — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Oh, the good ol', progressive ol' MPAA: they've rejected the poster (visible at right) for Alex Gibney's documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, about the U.S. military's torture of foreign detainees. No blood, no gore, what's the problem? Well, it might upset children. And remember, all American political discourse must be pitched (gently, underhand) to the comfort level of an eight-year-old.

After the Fight-Club-reunion hype around State of Play, with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton sharing a screen once more, Pitt fled the coop. Now Norton has done the same, and Ben Affleck will replace him.

Jerry Bruckheimer gets into video games. This probably won't be a very difficult transition.