The Screengrab : valkyrie

DVD Digest for May 19, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week, the same old stuff you always get from DVD Digest. Also, a new Steven Seagal movie!

For some people reading this column, the news that the recent releases Valkyrie (MGM, also Blu-Ray), Paul Blart: Mall Cop (Sony, also Blu-Ray), and My Bloody Valentine 3D (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray) will be more important than anything else. But we’re looking out for the rest of you as well. And if none of these titles quicken your pulse- and I perfectly understand if they don’t- there’s always the latest from movie-star-turned-musician-turned-energy-drink-magnate (take that, Billy Bob Thornton!) Steven Seagal, Driven to Kill (Fox, also Blu-Ray). On the other side of things, the artsy and fartsy out there should be salivating over the release of John Gianvito’s excellent Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (E1 Entertainment). In other words, something for everybody!

And what would a DVD Digest be without the classics section, for those of you who aren’t all uptight about black-and-white, subtitles, Academy ratio, and long-dead movie stars. Devotees of the Criterion Collection no doubt already know about the dynamic duo of DVDs hitting streets today. First, Peter Yates' great Boston crime drama The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Criterion) makes its long-awaited DVD debut. Or if you’re in the mood for something more, uh, Eastern, check out Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes: 3 Films by Shohei Imamura (Criterion)- includes The Insect Woman, Pigs and Battleships, Intentions of Murder. Fans of old Hollywood would be advised to pick up two John Wayne favorites, El Dorado Centennial Edition (Paramount) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Centennial Edition (Paramount). And by some happy coincidence, today’s release of Fritz Lang’s Nazi-hunting thriller Man Hunt (Fox) is timed perfectly with the release of the aforementioned Valkyrie. Funny how that worked out, dontcha find?

Fans of TV on DVD should find something to enjoy among this week’s releases, which include the ever-popular 24 Season 7 (Fox, also Blu-Ray), Alan Ball’s vampire saga True Blood (HBO, also Blu-Ray), and the no-longer-surprising-in-its-awesomeness Friday Night Lights Season 3 (Universal).

Finally, if you’ve a Blu-Ray player, you’re in luck! Today’s a big one for Blu-Ray only releases, highlighted by the Batman 20th Anniversary Blu-Ray Book (Warner), which includes a Batmobile full of extras, documentaries, and other cool stuff. For the kids, A Bug’s Life (Disney) hits stores to capitalize on the upcoming Pixar release Up, while those who are looking forward to the latest Terminator blockbuster will no doubt pick up Terminator 2 Skynet Edition (Lionsgate). The political drama Lions for Lambs (Fox) is coming out for fans of political speechifying. Finally, Paramount’s got a whole slew of new Blu-Ray only releases hitting stores today, including Three Days of the Condor, Changing Lanes, Enemy at the Gates, Paycheck, and The Machinist.

Morning Deal Report: 2009! Much Like 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Marley took another bite out of the box office (Bad Marley! Bad dog!) over the weekend, running away with another $24 million for a total of $106.5. Before you start thinking sequel, a certain spoiler I heard would seem to put the kibosh on that notion. Bedtime Stories retained the second spot with $20.3 million, while Benjamin Button and Valkyrie continued to do surprisingly robust business. Really, the only stinker of the holiday season is The Spirit, which plummeted to a weekend take of $3.3 million. The Shadow and The Phantom sympathize.

Can The Night Projectionist succeed where The Spirit failed? The latest comic-to-screen adaptation “takes place on Halloween Eve in a small-town movie theater, where an all-night Draculathon draws throngs of moviegoers who suddenly find themselves locked inside the theater, which is slowly filling with vampires,” Variety reports. I’ve been to that theater, and I could have sworn they closed it down.

Forest Whitaker may be expendable. The actor is in talks to join Sylvester Stallone, Jet Li and Jason Statham as “the CIA liaison for a group of mercenaries who are clandestinely sent to South America to overthrow a dictator” in The Expendables, per The Hollywood Reporter. Stallone is also writing and directing.

Related:
I'm a Sexy Vampire
Stallone Is Expendable

Hollywood Goose-Steps Into the New Year

Phil Nugent — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 18:45:00 GMT

Ben Crair at Slate writes that "One way to measure the approach of the new year is to count the Holocaust films at your local multiplex. The holidays arrive just as studios begin wooing academy members with serious dramas, and there's nothing more serious than genocide." This year has certainly filled theaters with a bumper crop of Nazi slash Holocaust movies, including Bryan Singer's Valkyrie, Stephen Daldry's The Reader, Edward Zwick's Defiance, Paul Schrader's Adam Resurrected, Good, which is based on C. P. Taylor's play and which opens in select cities today, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which was sent from Hell by the devil in lieu of a new STD. Crair breaks these kinds of films down into various categories, such as the ones hailing the courage of "Good Germans", such as Valkyrie (as well as earlier films such as The Desert Fox, starring James Mason as Rommel, Marlon Brando's Nazi of conscience in The Young Lions, and, of course, Schindler's List; tributes to the bravery of "Resistant Jews", such as the ones in Defiance, who have the good fortune to be led by someone played by the actor currently employed as James Bond, Daniel Craig; "Redemption Stories" about survivors trying to find their way back to normal life and human feeling, such as Adam Resurrected or the Sidney Lumet film The Pawnbroker, starring Rod Steiger, which yesterday was inducted into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. Crair also has a category called "The Fable", which may be just because he had to come up with something to call Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, and Slate he couldn't have called it what I would have called it because Slate does not carry an "Adults Only" advisory.

The peculiar place that movies with this kind of subject matter occupy in our culture was thrown into sharp relief a few weeks ago when Los Angeles Times blogger Patrick Goldstein wrote a five-star stupid piece using New York Times critic Manohla Dargis's dismissive review of The Reader to complain that "in indie Hollywood that no one wants Manohla Dargis to review their movie, fearing that the outspoken critic will tear their film limb from limb. It’s the ultimate backhanded compliment, since what they really fear is Manohla’s persuasiveness — that she’ll write a review whose combination of vitriolic snarkiness and intellectual heft will actually persuade high-brow moviegoers to drop the film from their must-see list." Dargis, he charged, displays a "“lack of empathy for the challenge of tackling difficult material.” Unless you're a third-grade art teacher instead of an actual paid writer, it's a novel thing indeed to argue, or even imply, that someone should get points for "tackling difficult material;" it may even be that having seen too many movies that were praised by gutless reviewers for the filmmakers' intentions instead of what they'd managed to get on the screen may help to drive audiences away from seeing more movies with grand ambitions. Goldstein took a righteous pasting in some quarters for having chosen to use his space on-line to slip into his cap and bells, but it's doubtful that he would have had the nerve to make such an argument at all--on behalf of a ridiculous movie based on a silly book, an expensive major release with attention-getting sex scenes and big stars and a Harvey Weinstein-approved promotional budget, directed by a man who got an undeservedly smooth ride for his previous ridiculous movie (The Hours) based on a silly novel and full of big stars and with a promotional campaign to match--if he hadn't been able, when the shock troops came around to punch some sense into him, been able to squeal, "It must be treated seriously! It's got Nazis in it!" The last word on how flimsy this line of attack is turns out not to be Life Is Beautiful or Hogan's Heroes but The Boy in Striped Pajamas, an atrocity for the whole family that will probably stand as the ultimate demonstration of how to turn historic tragedy into pap until Jerry Lewis kicks off and we all storm his house and watch The Day the Clown Cried. Until then, Lauren Wissot has a new holiday tradition in mind.

Related Stories: In Other Blogs: The Movie Killer

Morning Deal Report: No Angel at the Fence

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The box office went to the dogs over the holiday weekend as Marley and Me racked up $51.8 since its Christmas Day opening. It was an unusually robust yuletide for theatrical releases, with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button taking second place with $39 million and Valkyrie placing fourth with $30 million. Only The Spirit came up short, with a haul of $10.4 million. But I think we all saw that coming.

You can forget about the big screen adaptation of Herman Rosenblat's memoir Angel at the Fence. Turns out it's the latest fraud to fool Oprah, and publication of the book as well as the planned film have been cancelled. "Rosenblat has admitted to fabricating the story of meeting his future wife at a Nazi concentration camp," Variety reports. Actually, they met on the Titanic.

The Hollywood suits are apparently home counting their money, because there's nary a green light to be found. The only production news comes out of Japan, where veteran director "Yoji Yamada will begin shooting the family drama Otouto in mid-January with stars Tsurube Shofukutei as the "otouto" or younger brother and award winning actress Sayuri Yoshinaga as his older sister," per The Hollywood Reporter.

Tom Cruise, at Midlife, with a Freaking Eyepatch

Phil Nugent — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Valkyrie doesn't open until the end of the week, but the movie has already been taking a pasting, much of it in the form of open mockery of its star, Tom Cruise, so scathing that the question of just what has gone wrong with the wonder boy's career, and how might it be righted, is likely to continue for quite some time. Some people may have problems remembering that, for a very long time--we're talking decades here--it was as hard to find someone in the mainstream entertainment press or the industry itself who was prepared to question Tom's magnificence as it's been, since around mid-2005, to find someone not eager to question both his appeal and his sanity. How did it come to this? Stephen Metcalf at Slate thinks he has it figured out. He has a theory that involves a close read of the movie that made Cruise a star, Risky Business (1983), and how it played its part in saddling the now 46-year-old Cruise with an image that leaves him no room to mature as an actor. Recognizing Cruise's movie-star image as "the '80s incarnate" (and accurately summing up his acting range in four words: "bark, glare, seethe, repeat"), Metcalf recalls how Risky Business's "distinctive pathos derives from its first half, from the nocturnal weirdscape emanating out of Joel's jumbled libido. As this Joel, Cruise allowed himself to be everything the publicity team has tried to convince us, for 25 years, he isn't: insecure, sexually confused, and as Brickman's camerawork takes no pains to hide, physically small. We are meant to dislike—or at least, feel queasy—in the presence of the strutting superabundant charmer of the second half of the film, as he bursts forth from, and destroys, the chrysalis of Joel Goodsen. When Joel's parents go on vacation, he teams up with Lana to bring his horny friends together with her scheming colleagues, and in Joel's transformation (into a pimp, but also into Tom Cruise), we see the emergence of the '80s as the '80s."

"The '80s," writes Metcalf, "did for money what the '60s did for sex. They told a miraculously tempting lie about the curative powers of disinhibition. It took AIDS, feminism, and sociobiology a while to catch up to our illusions about free love. It has taken cronyism, speculation, and manic overleveraging a while to catch up to our illusions about free money. Now that Ponzi capitalism is collapsing in on itself, the perverse disjunction, of saying 'what the fuck' and thereby securing your 'future,' is simply no longer tenable." What this has to do with the Tomcat and his present situation, is that "The Cruise persona, like a junk bond, was never meant to reach maturity." It is possible to agree with the broad outlines of this and still find a way to argue with many of the specifics. I think that Metcalf, perhaps infatuated with the notion that something "beautiful and authentic" was lost when Cruise found his path to public super-success, is way too inclined to give Risky Business credit for being what its writer-director, Paul Brickman, has always claimed he wanted it to be. Brickman, who at the time was best known as the writer of Jonathan Demme's Citizens Band (and who in the quarter-century since, has directed only one other movie, the 1990 dud Men Don't Leave), has made no secret of the fact that he thought he was making a movie about the power of corruption, and that the Geffen Company pressured him into changing his original, downbeat ending, in which Joel emerged less than triumphant. Working from a blueprint of one of Brickman's interviews, one can now make out what a dark, troubling piece of work it was supposed to be.

But the millions of people who loved it because they thought it was the kick-ass party movie of the '80s weren't missing anything; Brickman did agree to the changed ending, and from the evidence onscreen, whatever he felt before and after making the movie, during the all-important shooting schedule, he was less interested in realizing his cruel vision than in showing that he had the slickest, most hyped-up visual style this side of a month of MTV. No one in the summer of 1983 was wrong for thinking the movie was just what it looked and felt like: the Flashdance of suburban pimp movies. As for the sexually inexperienced, awkward, not-yet-cocky Cruise of the first half of the movie, it may be that this was not the "authentic" acting of a talented young actor playing a human being but rather the way that a cunning self-promoter knew he had to come on before he could win the audience over and make his transformation into a strutting cocksman asshole seem like a happy ending rather than a sad comment on all humanity. It's true that in every other performance Cruise would give in his golden age, he would pick up where he left off at the end of Risky Business, playing the asshole from frame one, and never looking back. It could be argued that, since the point of Top Gun and Cocktail and all the rest was to give Cruise a chance to play the asshole, it showed a kind of respect for the audience that, once he had "evolved" once and turned from sweet boy to asshole in one movie, he never really had to do it again, just as Clint Eastwood didn't pretend to be Destry and act as if his characters were reluctant to draw their guns. (For Cruise, a "prestige" acting job was something like Born on the Fourth of July, where he started out as a cocky, swaggering, pro-war asshole and then got to chance into a different kind of self-dramatizing, anti-war asshole.)

In the go-go '80s, movie heroes in Hollywood blockbusters were defined as winners. It's not just that they were different from heroes of other movie eras, who were defined by their rebelliousness or their romantic charm or their inclination to question society or whatever, but that, at their purest, they had no characteristics besides their winningness. The Reagan years at their ripest were defined by a shiny, Crest toothpaste grin that seemed to be doing its best to hold up under tremendous, unacknowledged stress, and the biggest movie stars in those years were those who seemed dumb enough or sufficiently full of themselves to sell this. Cruise was the biggest movie star of the '80s because he was the one who best typefied the image of the Winner. He wasn't alone: Stallone was the winner with the big muscles, and Eddie Murphy, the big "comedy" star of the time, had his biggest successes in what were essentially action movies in which Murphy, when he wasn't winning by shooting people, killed time by insulting and otherwise lording it over bit players who hadn't been provided by the writers with any comebacks. (To remind you that you were watching a comedy, Murphy would frequently double over with hysterical laughter at how hilarious the movie was, meeting the audience halfway by serving as his own laugh track.)

If Cruise was bigger than his competition, it was partly because he seemed to embody these pictures more than his white-bread competition, maybe because he needed his success more than any man alive, and partly because he had no special talents or peculiarities like Murphy or the steroid freaks Stallone and his usurper Schwarzenegger. For the young dudes who bought movie tickets for themselves and their dates, he was as easy to project onto as Sarah Palin was for some trailer park mom with her hair in curlers and with two kids in her arms and one in the sink. He had no special qualities to distract the half-buzzed frat rat looking to pretend that was him up there on that screen drivin' that plane. There was a memorable moment in The Color of Money where Paul Newman tells him that he's "a natural character" and then has a good chuckle at the expense of his ignorant young sensei, who, misunderstanding, thinks that he's being paid the compliment of being told that he has character. The double-edged joke of this exchange is that Cruise wasn't even an unusual enough actor to successfully play a "character." But by then, the audience, knowing what to expect from him and what not to bother hoping for, understood that he was meant to seem like more of a live wire than usual because his hair looked weirder.

The real question is how Cruise managed to stick around so long, maintaining a pretty steady top-of-the-line career for so long that both Murphy and Stallone and flamed out and had comebacks, and Schwarzenegger went into politics, in the time it took him to experience his first real signs of career turbulence. Let alone how he earned all those good reviews--at least one critic, Georgia Brown of the Village Voice, actually got indignant back in 1990 when Daniel Day-Lewis won a critics' award instead of Cruise for having sat in that wheelchair in Born on the Fourth of July. The widespread incredulity in the face of his even having taken the role in Valkyrie is probably must greater than it would have been if Cruise's pretensions to being seen as a real actor hadn't been tolerated for so long. It's as if the world had just woken up from a collective fever, one made all the more confounding for just what they found themselves in bed with when sanity returned and the beer goggles came off. On a personal note, it kind of puts me in a funny place, because I could never stand Cruise when I was one of those college guys buying the tickets but have sort of warmed up to him since he went publicly batshit. (The movie in theaters when people started jumping off Cruise's bullet train was The War of the Worlds, and his performance in that was a lot better than some of the roles he's racked up raves and award nominations for. It was perfectly in his best range: he had to express resentment, run like hell, and convince you that he'd prefer not to be incinerated by alien death rays. And he got to share the screen with Tim Robbins, always a good choice if you want to remind people that sometimes, a "real" actor can be a hundred times more annoying than a movie star.) What next for Cruise? It may be a learning game, finding out what he can and cannot get away with now. As of 2008, the stats seem to be: Fat suit and bald wig yes, Nazi uniform and eyepatch, check please!

Trailer Review: Valkyrie (Trailer #2)

Paul Clark — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Last fall, back when Bryan Singer’s latest film was slated to open in July of ’08, I scoffed at the movie’s first trailer as being too high-toned and Oscar-baity. Interestingly enough, now that Valkyrie’s release date is smack dab in the middle of awards season, the new spot looks more like a potboiler than a tradition-of-quality period piece. Frankly, I like the new approach better. The true story of Operation Valkyrie would probably feel heavyhanded as a “courage in the face of ultimate evil” narrative, but as a thriller about a band of rebellious officers trying to bring down Hitler, it sounds a lot more interesting. Sure, it runs the risk of coming off as “Nazi kitsch,” but at least that would have some flavor. Will 2008 be the year that Tom Cruise regains his movie-star mojo? Hard to say, but I’m definitely more curious about Valkyrie than I was before.

Vanishing Act: Christopher McQuarrie

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:30:00 GMT

It’s rare that the screenwriter for a splashy indie film will get as much or more attention than the director, but that was the case when The Usual Suspects hit it big in 1995. Boyhood friends Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie first collaborated on 1993’s Public Access, which went nowhere despite winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Their second effort become a modern crime classic, and there was no ignoring the fact that McQuarrie’s twisty narrative and twisted characters contributed greatly to the success of Suspects. In fact, when the Academy Awards were held the following year, it was McQuarrie who walked away with the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

It was Singer, however, who used Suspects as a launching pad to a blockbuster career. After the Stephen King misfire Apt Pupil, Singer bounced back with the first two X-Men movies and the semi-successful Superman Returns. McQuarrie went his own way, hoping to realize his dream project: bringing Alexander the Great to the screen. This turned into a long, frustrating odyssey that ended when Oliver Stone made his own much-mocked version with Colin Farrell. McQuarrie’s sole effort as a writer-director, The Way of the Gun, was released in 2000, but it was something of a disappointment, getting lost in the post-Tarantino crime wave. Since then, McQuarrie has worked as a script doctor (doing uncredited rewrites on the first X-Men, among others) and has been involved in a number of aborted projects, including a Bryan Singer remake of Logan’s Run, but he has a grand total of zero screen credits since 2000.

That’s finally about to change. Today McQuarrie’s name popped up in this AP story about yet another controversy surrounding the upcoming Tom Cruise film Valkyrie. It seems Slate has had to retract a claim that the film’s producers altered photographs of German officer Claus von Stauffenberg in order to make them more closely resemble Cruise. This claim turned out to be false, and commenting on the situation was one of Valkyrie’s producers – Christopher McQuarrie. Per the AP: “‘The picture United Artists used of Colonel Stauffenberg can be found all over the Internet,’ said Valkyrie co-writer and producer Chris McQuarrie in a written statement released by a United Artists spokeswoman Tuesday. McQuarrie, who won a screenplay Oscar in 1995 for The Usual Suspects, added that it would have been easier to ‘alter Tom Cruise’ than to doctor ‘every available picture of Claus von Stauffenberg.’”

Valkyrie is the first full-fledged reunion of Singer and McQuarrie since The Usual Suspects. The duo was also set to re-team for the Harvey Milk biopic The Mayor of Castro Street, but that was before Gus Van Sant went forward with Milk. McQuarrie’s next announced project as a writer-director is The Stanford Prison Experiment, based on the actual psychological study gone awry in 1971. Rumored cast members include Ryan Phillippe and Paul Dano, but given the bumps in the road McQuarrie has already hit, it’s best to take such information with a grain of salt.

Related:
Tom Cruise Career Downward Spiral Update
A Brief History of Milk

Stamping Out Goodness

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:45:00 GMT

Over the years, Terence Stamp has transformed from Angry Young Man of British Cinema to Living Symbol of Swinging Sixties London to Occasional Blockbuster Filler Material Paycheck-Casher to Grand Old Man of the Silver Screen. But one thing has remained constant: he's a hell of a fun interview.

The Collider managed to track him down at the premiere of the Get Smart big-screen adaptation, and, in discussing everything from working with Tom Cruise to working on Yes Man with Jim Carrey to his classic role as General Zod in Superman II, he's as engaging as ever. In discussing the problem-plagued Valkyrie, Cruise's WWII epic, Stamp plays it pretty close to the vest, just before launching into a rather odd story about being invited to a Tom Cruise rave.

Our favorite anecdote, though, is the one where Stamp more or less takes direct responsibility for the moral decline of Western civilization since 1980: "I hadn't worked in about 10 years when I got the Superman offer, and I was very nervous because it was apparent that they just wanted, like, an ugly. And I had the feeling that they were going to just like me ugly, and dress me ugly, and give me ugly stuff to say. And I had a friend at the time -- he was a baron, a Dutch baron, he was called Frederick von Pallandt and he was a very wise guy. He was a bit older than me. And I said, 'I'm having doubts about this.' And he said, 'You shouldn't really have doubts about it, because for loads of kids, Superman movies will be the first movie they ever go to see. And by the time they grow up, there'll be more people who want to be more people who want to be Zod than Superman. So you really shouldn't worry about it. You should just be as ugly and as horrible as you can be.' And it kind of came to pass, you know."

Tom Cruise Career Downward Spiral Update

Phil Nugent — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Valkyrie, the Bryan Singer movie starring an eye-patched Tom Cruise as a German general involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler has had its release date pushed back from this October to February 13, 2009. This is the second time that the troubled production, which first generated headlines by upsetting Germans who wanted Cruise to git off their land, has had its release date rescheduled; once upon a time, it was a much-anticipated summer release, and the center of Cruise and producer Paula Wagner's plans to rejuvenate United Artists. (The previous center of that particular campaign, Lions for Lambs, crash landed into theaters last fall.) The reason for the original push-back was that Singer needed additional time to finish the film--and, rather astonishingly, he still does. According to Kim Masters, "Singer will film a scaled-back version of what was originally conceived as a Saving Private Ryan-type opening. According to [Masters's] source, the sequence was abandoned at one time as a cost-saving measure—and this movie is racking up the bucks—but when it became clear that the film was too talky, the battle was reinstated. The sequence explains why hero Claus von Stauffenberg wears that eye patch. A studio source contends that the battle scene was always in. Apparently, it was going to be filmed in Dubai, which tried to lure the production with hopes of a publicity windfall derived from the presence of Tom, Katie, and Suri. Film your next movie in Dubai! That deal fell apart, and no location has been selected."

At this point, Cruise himself may be the least of Valkyrie's problems. The star has reportedly been very well-behaved on the set, and Masters believes that "Cruise has begun to appreciate the magnitude of career damage that he has inflicted upon himself, though he may not completely grasp the cause." He is not alone; as an example of just how unsettling the prospect of the Tomcat in decline is for some of the fans who've grown up thinking he hung the moon over the Hollywood hills, James Wolcott highlighted a deranged rant that somebody stuck in the comments section of David Poland's movie news site, The Hot Blog. The fact that his professional setbacks can inspire such panic attacks in the devoted may not mean that Cruise's career has yet reached the point of no return, but when somebody launches their Internet career by appearing on YouTube shrieking, "Leave Top Gun alone!!", we'll know that it's probably time for lights out.

Trailer Roundup: Valkyrie, Atonement, Meet the Spartans

Peter Smith — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Valkyrie

Despite the movie's late June release date, a high-toned thriller set in Nazi Germany would not appear to be summer movie fodder. But based on the trailer, Valkyrie looks typical of Hollywood’s approach to the Third Reich, boiling it down to the Ultimate Evil in charge and the morally-just "traitors" who have history on their side. Why else would they mount a big-budget telling of the story of the man who tried to kill Adolf Hitler, starring Tom Cruise, who, with a handful of exceptions, has made his reputation playing morally uncomplicated heroes? Perhaps director Bryan Singer and his collaborators could have taken a cue from Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book, whose breakout star Carice Van Houten is cast here as Cruise’s arm candy — in the shadow of the Nazi regime, things were rarely so simple as black and white.

Atonement

Normally, when I write my blurbs for Trailer Roundup, all I have to go on are the trailers themselves and the advance buzz for the movies. So it’s a little different to take on Atonement, which I had the chance to see at this year’s Toronto Film Festival. As far as trailers for prestige pictures go, this one’s pretty good, especially for the way it uses Dario Marianelli's score, a kind of concerto for typewriter and orchestra. But while the trailer for Atonement does a good job summarizing the plot and showing some of the film’s more visually impressive moments, I’m not sure I would have found this trailer particularly inspiring had I not already seen the movie itself. I also think it was a mistake to show Vanessa Redgrave, who doesn’t turn up until the very end of the film, for reasons that will become clear if and when you see the movie. All the same, Atonement should be catnip for awards-season voters, as its trailer makes abundantly clear.

Meet the Spartans

You know, I like many different kinds of movies, and even when I don’t like something I can usually see why others might. But occasionally a phenomenon will arise that makes me feel like Pauline Kael did when she claimed she didn’t know anybody who voted for Nixon. So it is with the recent wave of chintzy spoofs: who actually LIKES these things? Someone must enjoy these if they keep making them, right? Well, not necessarily. All it takes is for enough people to visit Blockbuster on a slow night and say, "Epic Movie might be okay," and boom, the studio greenlights Meet the Spartans. Now, I know I’m one to talk here, but don’t you think there are better ways to pass two hours than to watch a movie that will be, at best, "okay?" Read a book. Talk a leisurely walk. Try out a new sexual position or two. Or if you absolutely must rent a movie, try venturing inland from the outside walls of the local video emporium. Once you get over the old-timey movie stars and the black and white images and maybe even subtitles, you just might see something better, or at least more interesting, than the time-waster you passed over on the new release wall. Of course, it would be hard to be WORSE than Date Movie. . .

— Paul Clark