Video of the Day 2: Superman Theme Song, Sung by Some Random Dude
5/7/2007 5:00:00 PM
For me, Superman Returns only picked up when they played the original John Williams-composed theme. (The rest of the movie bored me silly, especially as it repeated a plot point from the original film about Lex Luthor wanting to be some kind of extreme real estate property magnate — whatever happened to just taking over the world?)
Anyway, here’s an entertaining parody of the tune, with some guy who clearly just has too much time on his hands.
— Faisal Qureshi
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Questions About Spider-Man 3
5/7/2007 4:20:00 PM
Yes, it made more money than God this weekend, but Spider-Man 3 (read Nerve's review here) confuses me.
First off, why is Flint Marko (Thomas Hayden Church), who eventually becomes the Sandman, configured as the real killer of Peter Parker's Uncle Ben? This goes against one of the prime tenets of Spider-Man mythology, as enunciated in Amazing Fantasy No. 15, i.e., that, in a twist on the Batman mythos, an unnamed common crook, whom Spider-Man refused to stop in an earlier coincidental encounter, killed Uncle Ben. The first Spider-Man movie reiterated this premise. In fact, you even see this guy in the credit sequence. He also now has a sick daughter as a reason for his earlier crimes. So why do the filmmakers have to complicate matters by added extra motivation to Flint Marko's hostility?
Second, why are Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson still together? Every movie it's the exact same thing. They are together. Then they have a fight, usually over something that could easily be explained if they would just talk to each other. Then Mary Jane gets kidnapped (and by the way how did this edition's villains know that snatching MJ would bring out Spider-Man?) and is dangled from a great height, whence Spider-man must rescue her at the last second. This is such a predictable outcome of her relations with him, why doesn't she finally just dump him? Their useless boy girl fake movie fights just repeat themselves, even within the same movie. Not only that, but Peter Parker prefers to live in an impoverished dump rather than earn her love with cash earned via his Spider-Man persona. In the comics, Parker, for a nerd, scored heavily, with Betty Brant, high school blonde Liz Allen, and Gwen Stacy. There, Mary Jane was more of a vivacious, stunning Carmen Electra type, anyway. For the record, Gwen Stacy is actually Parker's first girlfriend, introduced in issue number 31.
Third, why do so many people know Spider-Man's identity? His mask comes off more often than Ron Jeremy's underpants. In the comics, the secrecy of Spider-Man's identity was crucial to the fragile network of Peter Parker's various activities. In the movie series he's always being unmasked and revealed. It must be in Tobey Maguire's contract: Face time proves that he's not using a stunt man.
Finally, given that there are at least over 500 Spider-Man comic book stories, authored by some of the best comic book writers of all time, why do the filmmakers feel compelled to tell the same story over and over? And it's not even a story from comics, it is a story from other movies based on comics that are just as bad for avoiding the source and making up a new "story" that only betrays the comics (Ghost Rider, Hulk, Daredevil, X-Men: the list goes on). One complaint about the film is that there are too many villains. It's not the villains, it's the origins. There are too many origin stories in Spider-Man 3. It's clear why FX guys like origin stories: they get to show someone in a process of "transformation," showing off their work and proving that they did something on the film. But origin stories are dull, and need to be dispensed with. And, like the first one, this sequel even ends (or nearly so) in a cemetery.
There are answers to a couple of these questions, but you have to watch the film through to the end. Flint Marko is refashioned as the real killer of Ben so that Spider-Man can "forgive" him in the end, in a renunciation of the anger he has been feeling and a re-alliance with the philosophy of Uncle Ben, as repeated by Aunt May. It's actually a rather moving scene, and quite unusual in an action film. It must also be said that it is a more interesting moment than the repetitious and pointless fight scenes. Church is excellent in the movie, at least in the two scenes in which he is actually summoned to act (if there is a movie god he will contrive to have Church play the Lee Marvin role in a remake of The Dirty Dozen). The essence of this thread of the plot is found in two totally divergent black and white flashback/memory moments. The Sandman proves to be a good villain (he's more of a blowhard in the comics), and the film turns him into a cloud of hazardous debris billowing through the city streets in an evocation of 9/11. The Sandman was introduced in The Amazing Spider-Man No. 4, then subsequently revisited in an annual and then The Amazing Spider-Man No. 18. Suffice it to say that he is a more complex villain in the film (furthermore, Venom - Eddie Brock appeared first in The Amazing Spider-Man No. 298).
Spider-Man 3 is the Batman Returns of the series, the film in which Sam Raimi and the other credited writers (Ivan Raimi and Alvin Sargent) attempt to "deepen" the psychology of the characters. If Batman Returns was obsessed with bad parents, than Spider-Man 3 is obsessed with father killers. The film is also fixated on pairings and doublings. Both Mary Jane and PP at one point lose their jobs. Spider-Man repeats the famous rain kiss from the first film, here as a publicity stunt. And Peter Parker is "duplicated" in the form of Eddie Brock (Topher Grace, who, by the way, would have made a better PP-Spider-Man than Maguire; I can imagine him much more successful in the film's "Staying Alive" sequence; and he even has a Ditko style long square-shaped head). The result of all this is that Spider-Man 3 is a chunky, clunky movie that gets sort of better as it goes along.
— DK Holm
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Festivals for the Rest of Us
5/7/2007 3:45:00 PM
As summer approaches, silly season begins in the world of film festivals. With most of the big ones either out of the way or still to come, second- and third-tier promoters look to take advantage of the summer heat and bring moviegoers into air-conditioned comfort for a glance at unusual fare they won’t be getting from the big-studio blockbusters. The Screengrab will feature much more film festival coverage throughout the summer season, but for now, we’ll take a brief look at some of the more unusual fests coming your way.
New York, L.A., Chicago, Paris, and Berlin constantly have something going on festival-wise, but the summer months also bring independent filmgoing to locations not normally associated with the scene: Iowa City steps on the scene with the first installment of their cleverly named “Landlocked Film Festival”; the least populous state in the union gets its due at Wyoming’s Jackson Hole Film Festival; St. Louis struts its local stuff at the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase; Dokufest, the documentary and short film festival, comes to Kosovo, a city no stranger to documentaries; and Expresion en Corto, one of the most interesting festivals in the Spanish-speaking world, is held in Guanajuato, Mexico this year.
A great way to pack in enthusiastic crowds is niche marketing, and there are an increasing number of festivals that cater to very specific tastes. For example, the Wild Talk Africa Festival features nature filmmakers, documentarians, cultural preservationists and environmentalists sharing ideas in Durban, South Africa; Fantasy Film Fest, featuring classics and up-and-comers of science fiction and swords & sorcery, plays all throughout Germany this summer; the Golden Trailer Festival tries to prove that you don’t have to watch an actual movie to appreciate the movie business; the Action on Film Festival in Long Beach caters to fans of martial arts, explosions and on-screen mayhem; and in studio-saturated Century City, the Cell Phone Fest — featuring movies meant to be played on mobile phones, or made using mobile phones — is now, shockingly, in its fourth year.
Finally, every year sees more and more festivals devoted to the works of particular nationalities, ethnic groups or cultures, and this year is no exception. Summer will see festivals devoted to Turkish film (the prestigious and long-running Altin Koza festival in Adana), Arab and Asian film (the Osian’s Cinefan Festival in New Delhi), films of northern Europe and the Lowlands (the Benelux Film Festival), Latino films (the Hispano-American Film Festival, which for some reason takes place in Canada instead of America), and Greek film (the Hellenic film festival, held in that classic hotbed of antiquity, Cleveland Heights).
— Leonard Pierce
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When Oliver Stone Met Fidel Castro
5/7/2007 3:00:00 PM
As a regular visitor to Cuba, I've been following stories of Fidel Castro’s impending demise with more than the usual interest. From the CIA hilariously claiming that the old man had Parkinson’s Disease to even more serious ailments. When news of his illness first leaked out, it was widely rumoured he had a few weeks left to live. The speculation carried on for quite some time, with each new press article promising the death of the Cuban leader as he withdrew from public office and let his brother, Raul Castro take over whilst he underwent medical treatment.
Well, like Mark Twain, news of Castro's death have been exaggerated with the man, at age 80, seeming to make a steady recovery from an intestinal ailment. It was rumoured that he would make his first public appearance in months at last week’s annual May Day celebrations. In the end though, all that emerged was a statement from the man to the celebrating crowds in Revolution Plaza wishing them well. (Which of course fueled even more speculation.)
In 2002, Oliver Stone went over to Cuba to shoot a documentary on Castro for HBO and the result was Comandante, a bizarre little epic with Stone and Castro discussing the history of the country as well as other issues of importance (Castro, it turns out, really digs Scarface). HBO planned to screen the film in May 2003, but it received criticism from some quarters as the Cuban Government had executed three hijackers who tried to take over a passenger ferry to get them to the States.
HBO asked Stone to go back to Cuba and shoot another documentary, Waiting for Fidel, which did get broadcast though it still received a hostile reception. It was a surprise for me to learn that Comandante has never since received a broadcast or DVD release in the US, and that it will probably remain this way for some time. As the case with Peter Watkins’s Privilege, I wouldn't usually advise anyone to watch a feature on YouTube, but given that it’s currently unavailable in the US, it might be worth having a look at this "missing" Oliver Stone documentary. Disagree with both men if you want too, but Oliver Stone is no stranger to provoking a response, and this film certainly does that.
Part 1 of 12 is below. Go here for the rest.
— Faisal Qureshi
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"A Flavor Burst of Confused Adolescent Horniness": Screengrab Interviews Guy Maddin
5/7/2007 2:00:00 PM
The Winnipeg-born writer-director Guy Maddin has been happily mixing styles and forms for more than twenty years now. He's a dedicated experimentalist and a true movie lover who enjoys adapting antique film styles and "outdated" modes of presentation to his own, often surreal, narratives. 2004's silent, sixty-four-minute Cowards Bend the Knee, featuring a hero named Guy Maddin who's caught up with his father in ice hockey-related intrigue, inaugurated a new "autobiographical" phase of his career, though Maddin's idea of autobiography is less about direct reminiscence than using his memories of his early life as a basis for his own wild, movie-spawned fantasies. Originally commissioned as a gallery installation, Cowards was first presented in a peepshow format that permitted viewers to watch it in six-minute installments. In his new silent feature, Brand Upon the Brain!, in which young Guy Maddin is caught up in mysterious goings-on at his family lighthouse that involve his pubescent sister and a female teen detective in male disguise, he's gone in the opposite direction: the film will be presented at selected theaters accompanied by a live orchestra, a five-member Foley sound effects team, and a selection of celebrity narrators. (The film will then go into wider distribution with a regular soundtrack — "for posterity", as Maddin puts it — narrated by Isabella Rossellini, who worked with Maddin on his feature The Saddest Music in the World and the sublime short tribute to her father Roberto, My Dad Is 100 Years Old.)
You actually got out of Winnipeg for this one.
Yeah, I did. My first foreign film. It felt great! You know, I started making movies just by myself. And then it slowly built — a three-man crew, and then finally a full crew, just like a Hollywood movie. And it was too much for me. Finally, on Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, I was given a full, gigantic crew, and they were all going about their business, doing their jobs. The previous films, with the smaller crews, there was a certain dedication to the work. On that picture, it was more a case of them just looking to cover their own asses. So if I asked the guy for an intentionally jiggly dolly move, he'd go, no way, not with my name on this picture. But before the picture, I'd show them an intentionally jiggly dolly move from a Busby Berkeley picture and say, “I love the organic quality of this.” It makes you think of how the movie's made, and about how comfortable the women seem, and it makes the women more accessible, and more desperate. The experience is horny for me because of the dolly jiggle. And they're all like, yeah, and you're nuts, but whatever you say, and when it comes time to ask for the jiggle dolly move, they go, no way.
So the price of stepping up to the big time was having mutinous crews.
Yes, and it's very unpleasant. So that's why I went back to shooting on Super-8, no dollies at all, no tripods anymore, just keeping things primitive and moving quickly, and it was so liberating not having to communicate to anyone about how you wanted the shot to look. Instead of fourteen shots a day, the way you work with a big crew, you can get two hundred shots a day. Man, does that feel good, to just burn through the pages.
 | | Brand Upon the Brain! Photo by Adam L. Weintraub |
How do you come to mate these specific projects with the different kinds of presentation? What's the genesis of the idea of doing this one with the live music and sound effects, after using the peephole concept with Cowards Bend the Knee?
In each case, it's been a slightly different evolution. [With Cowards,] I was invited to make an installation at an art gallery. I'm really uncomfortable with the idea of making installations because I have too much respect for the institution of the art gallery. I'm not an artist, I'm a filmmaker. That's an artist in a way, but I'm not a gallery artist; with installations, I'm not sure that I understand them well enough to know when I'm not wanking. With film, I have my own bullshit meters that go off. My movies may seem bizarre, but they're always grounded in something real to me. But I wasn't so sure that, with the installation, I wouldn't be 100% bullshit. But it was very tempting to have something at this prestigious gallery. And so we finally agreed that if I made a movie, and installed that somehow, then I could feel on comfortable terms with myself. And we found a comfortable way of presenting it, and that's the peep show. Because I spent a lot of time, as all adolescent boys do, spying on people through holes, literally, and catching a few glimpses of sex education wherever I could, and through devious means sometimes. And so I thought I would return the favor to the general public by allowing them to spy on me in my most exposed and lurid moments. So that was sort of my way of rationalizing that.
Here, there was a different kind of rationalization involved. First of all, the live music presentation is something that I'd often daydreamed about doing. I'd just noticed, watching silent films — I'm not always in the mood for silent films myself, but I'm more inclined to go out to one if there's live music. And then, I'd worked with Foley artists in the secrecy of their dark studio basements for years, and have always been beguiled and delighted by, you know, the way a middle-aged man will put on a pair of women's shoes and walk on some linoleum in perfect synchronization, or a guy can make a car chase with his thumb on his wrist and a microphone. The odd things that stand in for other things were just so delightful to me. I thought, I can't just have live music, I've got to add the Foley artists too. I asked them, and I really thought that the cost would be too high, and that they'd say, "Oh, we'd love to do it, but we earn $10,000 a day doing this Foley work, and you can't pay us that, so no." But what I didn't realize was that they're showmen, and they're proud of their craft, and they're having the time of their lives performing in public.
When I saw the movie with the recorded soundtrack, there were moments when I thought to myself, this is gonna be so cool with the live Foley guys. Like the scene in the laboratory, with the guy's head...
That's the Foley money shot! Originally, they had a sound that really sounded good but wasn't visual. For the first time in their lives, they're thinking visually. They had a noise that was produced by putting dry pasta in a wet shammy and twisting it, but viewed from the cheap seats, you can't even tell what that is. So they switched over to celery, which under a little spotlight, reads as celery from the bleachers. And so when you're seeing this one image on the screen, and look over and see a man in a lab coat sucking some celery and chewing and twisting it at the same time...
 | | Brand Upon the Brain! Photo by Adam L. Weintraub |
In what way do you see this movie as autobiographical?
Maybe this number seems arbitrary, but I've described this movie as 96% true. I didn't grow up in a lighthouse, and my parents didn't run an orphanage, but the house was always full of kids, and my mother was an all-seeing person. Everything is built up around an episode where my older sister and my mom had this titanic battle, because my mother really disagreed with the number of pubic hairs that my sister was growing. She wanted none. My sister wanted all. And the battle spilled over and there was a lot of collateral damage. A lot! My mother fought dirty. And my sister fought dirty. And then, when my sister got a young sweetie, there was a bizarre episode where she was literally taken in by a very charming young woman whose gender my sister was not aware of. But that person was not a teen detective.
How disappointing.
I've kind of always liked Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys...
Those teen detective books have a real...sort of subtext of...
So horny. [laughs]
Yeah. A kind of erotic...
Oh, don't be so tasteful. They're horny.
And the movie really taps into that.
Well, I really wanted to get at a kind of psychologically honest flavor burst of confused adolescent horniness. If there's a chewing gum named after this movie, it would taste like that. With a liquid center that bursts in your mouth!
Here's hoping that dream becomes a reality. Not to change the subject, but how do you go about casting a silent movie these days?
By e-mail. The head shots were sent to me by someone who works in casting in Seattle. It's not a beauty contest, but certain people get your hopes up. And then they held auditions. Since there's no lines of dialogue, I had them act out things, I gave them a list of things to emote. I gave instructions to them not to be shy about turning the melodrama level up to eleven, so I could see their range, see how they photographed. Then those were sent to me by Quick Time files. For someone as obsessed with primitive filmmaking as I am, I felt quite modern, auditioning people on the Internet. Then I just made my casting decisions, which weren't very difficult. I was very happy with the cast I had.
And now it all culminates in this big live presentation.
I feel like a showman! For the first time in my life. Before I was always described, by myself and others, as a "filmmaker.' For some reason, an urgent need to engage an audience isn't inherent in that word, “filmmaker.” I feel like half the time, you're making the films for yourself. But on this film, once you've gone to the trouble of rehearsing the orchestra, writing the score, finding the narrators and things like that, you'd be pretty disappointed if the audience isn't entertained.
Well, earlier you insisted on this distinction between yourself and gallery artists. Do you see yourself as an entertainer?
All of a sudden, yeah, I do. And I like the feeling.
— Phil Nugent
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Video of the Day 1: The Best (and Worst) of the Late, Great Oliver Reed
5/7/2007 1:00:00 PM
Last Wednesday was the 8th anniversary of the death of Oliver Reed whilst on a break from shooting on Ridley Scott's Gladiator. Though once a great heartthrob and actor, Reed had fallen onto hard times and was known to younger audiences for his drunken behaviour, as this clip shows when he appeared on a British TV chat show.
Though at one time tipped to replace Sean Connery for the role of James Bond, Reed's fortunes had fallen mainly due to his public drunkenness. When he appeared on chat shows, he was usually bought on to do some kind of drunken act and was probably encouraged to do this by producers. This was confirmed on an infamous episode of the defunct Channel 4 show, The Word, where he was secretly filmed getting plastered with drinks happily supplied by the production company. (One wonders if the same producers would also provide Pete Doherty with a suitcase full of heroin in the Green Room, secretly filming him before he goes on to provide a performance that would be euphemistically referred to as "under the influence").
Another infamous episode was on another Channel 4 show, After Dark, considered the pinnacle of his public display of drunkenness. It culminated with an attempt by Reed to kiss feminist writer Kate Millet. Here’s Part 1 of that:
When cast right though, Reed could be a fine performer, and this needed the hand of a skilled director. His most well known collaborations were with Richard Lester on the Three Musketeers movie, where he played the brooding Athos:
For me though, his finest role was Urbain Grandier in Ken Russell’s adaptation of The Devils, based on the true story of a case of alleged possession and the Catholic Church's persecution of an innocent priest they accused of being an emissary of the Devil. Reed is exemplary playing a man whose dedication to the church is in conflict with his human needs.
During his career, Reed worked with filmmakers such as Sir Carol Reed (his uncle, who got him a role in Oliver!), David Cronenberg (The Brood), Michael Winner (Hannibal Brooks), Nic Roeg (Castaway) and Terry Gilliam (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen). In between these were a host of forgettable films, like an adaptation of the John Norman Gor novels or taking over Robert Shaw's role in the sequel of The Sting.
In 2005, Channel 5 broadcast the one-hour biography The Real Oliver Reed, which gave a good overview of his life and career, with entertaining anecdotes that made Klaus Kinski look like a pussycat.
— Faisal Qureshi
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Tribeca Review: Normal Adolescent Behavior
5/7/2007 12:15:00 PM
Beth Schacter’s directorial debut and semi-autobiographical screenplay focuses on six high school friends who form a tight knit group that share secrets and Saturday nights while fluidly exploring their sexuality together within the shelter of the group’s self-imposed boundaries. This somewhat bizarre set-up is cast in direct opposition to the teenage norm of random party hook-ups, presented here as a much colder and even more dangerous alternative. The material is purposely provocative and built to show the widespread promiscuity among today’s teens without excluding the age-old need to make sense of it all.
The talented ensemble of young actors, led by Amber Tamblyn as Wendy, are given enough space to create believable, well rounded characters in a script kept sharp with interesting situations and original dialogue. The group construct is initially portrayed as almost innocent, even enlightened. A former member answers questions about the group with a flip aside: “Smart kids who have sex. Who knew?” But it is through the emergence of Sean (Ashton Holmes), new kid in school and Wendy’s next-door neighbor, that the group is challenged. Sean develops an unshakable crush on Wendy and pushes her to explore a more traditional boyfriend/girlfriend relationship with him. She initially laughs the idea off as “a fairytale” but is soon entertaining the possibility of a break from the group. Kelli Garner as Billie, is the group’s relentless protector and brings a refreshingly layered performance to the hottest-girl-in-school role. It’s not long before the group stops resembling a loving family and begins to look more like a somewhat perverted safety net against loneliness.
A big part of the film’s strength is its ability to capture the constant uncertainty of that age where emotions are so raw they’re electric and everything hurts. The universal experience of being a teenager seems to have helped jump the generation gap between director and actors as the film is able to paint an authentic portrait of youth with the knowing wisdom of an adult. In that sense, you can’t help but think of the films of John Hughes, particularly Pretty in Pink, where you see on screen all the things that kids really go through with added depth and a consideration that puts it well outside the usual mindless representations of teens usually coming from Hollywood. Hopefully, Normal Adolescent Behavior will be able to find an audience among the teenagers it depicts as it gives them attractive, relatable characters and something to think about. A rare mix these days…
— Bryan Whitefield
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Lounge Wizards
5/7/2007 11:30:00 AM
Don’t forget to check out the new content at the Film Lounge, folks. Some stuff went up Friday, some went up today. It’s all worth reading, of course, and I’m not just saying that because I wrote like half of them.
- An interview with Diego Luna about his directorial debut, Chavez.
- An interview with Wes Craven about his episode in the omnibus film Paris Je t’aime.
- An interview with Sarah Polley about her directorial debut, Away from Her (and you can read a review of it here.)
- A feature article about rediscovering the work of 30s Mexican auteur Fernando de Fuentes. (Seriously, this dude was a master.)
- And, of course, reviews.
— Bilge Ebiri
Permalink : http://www.nerve.com/nerveblog/screengrabblog.aspx?id=107e11210#11210 |
Navel Gazers, Hold Your Fire!
5/7/2007 10:45:00 AM
 | | Actual photo of Manohla Dargis trying to review Spider-Man 3. |
Spider-Man 3, despite mixed-to-lousy reviews, is obliterating box-office records left and right, having already taken Europe by storm and now, taking in enough money over the weekend to mount a credible campaign for President. No doubt, this will launch another wave of conflicted articles by critics about whether what they do matters, in the face of public difference (much like this one last year). And surely such doubts will be further encouraged by industry types and the likes of Peter Bart.
I am, of course, powerless to stop all this. But it really does bear noting that Spider-Man 3 isn’t getting public raves either. Yahoo! Movies users give it an average score of B, lower than what they gave Grindhouse, Disturbia, or Shooter. Its Rotten Tomatoes user rating is 67%, not much higher than its critics’ rating of 61% (though both are sure to change soon). And its 7.1 IMDb rating isn’t exactly the stuff that empires are built on.
I’m not picking on Spider-Man 3 because I think it’s a bad movie. (Actually, I don’t think it’s a bad movie. Here’s proof.) No, I point to these ratings and such because I’m tired of box office success being presented as a sign of enthusiastic and unabashed public approval, or some kind of heroic viewer riposte to crotchety critics. In the Age of Marketing, a big opening for an event movie does not mean that the public fell in love with your movie; it merely means that the public felt compelled to see it. Which means the studio did its job. End of story. Reading any more into it will only waste our precious time — time that could be better spent trying to come up with new pirate clichés to use in our inevitable war over Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.
— Bilge Ebiri
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Morning Deal Report: Porn in Unlikely Places, Manohla Hearts Big Flicks, Horror on the Internets
5/7/2007 10:00:00 AM
- Really, any movie could be turned into a grindhouse feature. Go here for more proof.
- How come it’s always kids’ shows and movies that get inadvertently interrupted by hardcore porn? Couldn’t this stuff happen at least once during an episode of Desperate Housewives or something?
- Manohla Dargis defends the Hollywood blockbuster. (Money quote: “Just because a movie blows stuff up doesn’t mean it automatically stinks.”)
- The company that gave us the Saw films is developing a new horror film “that will have its U.S. debut exclusively online. Tentatively titled The Internet Killer, it will be posted in daily segments approximately three minutes long,” on the video sharing site Break.com. Currently, they have no script, or director, although they do “hope the pic will be ready by the end of the summer.”
- After years of rewrites, Disney’s Gemini Man finally gets…another rewrite. This time it’ll be the estimable David Benioff taking a crack at it, for producer Jerry Bruckheimer. All this for a movie about “an over-the-hill hitman forced to do battle with a younger clone of himself”? Somebody tell these guys the hitman genre is over.
- A recent survey in Britain names Star Wars the most-watched film among males, and Dirty Dancing the most-watched among females.
— Bilge Ebiri
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