Now Playing: Kristen Bell in Bikini, Chris Evans Fully Clothed

The Oscar films expanded last week (and in some cases -- *cough* Milk ??? -- they're already constricting again. Hope you caught them during those seven days you were allowed to see them!) so it's strictly new releases for February. Links go to trailers...

L I M I T E D
Fanboys Odd that this comedy, about a group of Star Wars fanboys (and fangirl Veronica Mars Kristen Bell, left) storming George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch would come out the day it's target audience is hitting the Comic Con. (Methinks the target audience will be too busy wearing their own Princess Leia costumes or gawking at real live ones to go see Kristen don hers!) Like many a film before it Harvey Weinstein bought this and locked it up tight never to see the light of day until, suddenly, on a whim he decided to dump it in a theater or three.

The Objective One of the directors of The Blair Witch Project tries the 'filming our demise' thing again only with military men in Afghanistan this time.

Chocolate The director of Ong Bak: Thai Warrior returns with another one of his "no wires. no stunt doubles" action films. This one is about a special needs girl who loves chocolate. She has some magical gift for muy thai fighting. I think it's kind of like that superpower on Heroes where if you see an action performed you can duplicate it. I also love chocolate and have special needs. Where's my movie? Alas, I lack that nifty fighting gift and my special needs primarily revolve around Tony Jaa. Where is he?

Chocolate and Coraline. Curious young girls are trouble!

W I D E
Coraline If you suffer from koumpounophobia you should skip this one. If you don't, you should run to the theater because the buzz for this 3D stop motion adventure makes it sound delicious and the source material is superb. If you haven't been reading Neil Gaiman's books, when are you going to start? Try American Gods.

He's Just Not That Into You Looks like the kind of movie you'll l-o-v-e if Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus strikes you as a landmark academic tome. Initially I wanted to see it (Ginnifer Goodwin plus the parade of stars) but early reports from critic friends are grim and the episode of Sex & the City about that catchphrase is unbeatable anyway. Plus, you know how they often put the best jokes from movies in trailers?

_______...those are the best jokes?

Push In which Chris Evans keeps his clothes on (just a hunch -- it's that damn new manager's fault) to play a rogue psychic leading a battle against a secret government agency. Or something. Dakota Fanning (the voice of Coraline. Dakota is a workaholic) and Djimon Hounsou also have clairvoyant powers. My own telepathic abilities tell me you're confused. "Isn't Push the movie about the obese black teenager? Didn't it win the top prize at Sundance last month?" Yes, yes, that's the one. Only it's not this one. The Sundance Push is the one that's winning Mo'Nique raves and Oscar style buzz. But this is the other Push, now playing in thousands of theaters starring Chris Evans and it's not going to get any Oscar nominations.

It would be better if Mo'Nique was in it.



Much better.

Oooh, baby, baby Baby
Yo, yo, yo, yo, Evans, Chris / Yeah, you come here, gimme a kiss /
Better make it fast or else I'm gonna get pissed

P.S. I don't know why everyone is surprised that Mo'Nique can act. Duh.

The Pink Panther 2 A non-rhetorical question for the comments: What the hell is Steve Martin doing with his career?

George Lucas and the Return of the George Lucas Hatred

Rob here, back from a little vacation of my own and noticing that while attention has moved from movie to movie from week to week this Summer (with a long layover in Gotham City), one thing has been on movie lovers' to-do lists since June:

Hate George Lucas.

And this hobby hasn't been confined to mere fanboys alone. Today Jim Emerson outlines his argument against George Lucas (which, honestly isn't that different from anyone else's). This summer it's all about how George has ruined our childhood with his less than stellar update of Indiana Jones. Personally I'm not sure why Steven Spielberg doesn't get any of the blame since his fingerprints are all over the film: the overly-happy ending, the.... well... not to ruin the surprise, but lets just say "other elements found often in Spielberg movies."

Perhaps it's because George Lucas also has the Star Wars baggage, more of which comes out this week (and don't ask about Jabba the Hutt's gay uncle... seriously). Perhaps it's because he's already talking about a possible fifth Indiana Jones movie. While I personally don't approve of this, the obsessive compulsive in me kinda does, if for no reason than to have something to support this fourth film, which now is leeched onto the rest of the trilogy, 20 years removed (it's just unsettlingly unsymmetrical).

Anyways here are some suggestions for a title for George Lucas's fifth Indy film:

Indiana Jones and the Bad Case of Osteoporosis
Indiana Jones and the Attack of the Clones
Indiana Jones and the CGI Critters
Indiana Jones and the Small Personal Movies I'm Going to Start Making
Indiana Jones and the Attack of the CGI Critter Clones
Indy and Chewie Celebrate Life Day: A Family Adventure for the Whole Family
Midi-Chlorians and Nuclear 'Fridge Rides: The Story of George Lucas' Genius

(that last one would be a documentary)

Wall•E is a Beau-ty

The highlight of the second day of the New York Comic Con was a special preview of Pixar's Wall•E. I've included the earliest teaser poster to your left cuz it's so cute and all but forgotten with the release of more and more trailers and imagery. It's like Wall•E himself, abandoned 700 years back when everyone left Earth...and forgot to turn off the last robot.

Day two of the con was actually quite a bummer for this casual non-committed geek. He grew tired of all the constant shilling of new product in place of actual conversation or sneak peeks. Lucasfilms was particularly evil about this. They got a whole hour of prime space and location and then abused the eager fans. They sent a corporate guy to repeat himself frequently, congratulate George Lucas on his genius (*cough*), threaten us "delight us" with stories of George's "control" over every new Star Wars project (Didn't The Empire Strikes Back prove definitively 28 years ago that George is more effective when he's not holding all reigns?). Then they showed only trailers, despite other studios offering actual advance scenes. As an added "bonus" they also showed footage of the same guy at other conventions interviewing people about the new product (a new video game and an animated series) in which they repeated everything you'd already heard in his scripted banter. Yes, thanks. Lucasfilms went to the Dark Side long ago.

But not Pixar. Pixar is not only of consistent quality, but also of warm fuzzies. They're so generous and thus quite contemporary, after all a lot of new models for entertainment do involve giving the product away: tv, music, blogs, podcasts, web comics all do this. The expectation being that if you're any good and people love the work, they'll buy compilations, go to your shows, donate to keep you writing and snatch up print versions of your online work, respectively.

Pixar's man showed three lengthy scenes from Wall•E, all of which were highly amusing and emotionally direct and thus tender (cuz it's Pixar, not...Haneke). The first was Wall•E doing his garbage dump thing when he discovers a red light, which he begins to chase into the desert. The chase will be even funnier for people who have cats: they can't resist chasing laser pointers, even though there's nothing to catch. It's an eternal fruitless struggle for pea-brained felines. The light turns into multiple lights and eventually a huge space ship is landing, completely disrupting our little robot's existence and bringing his new girl into full view. She's "Eva", a sleek modern robotic beauty. MaryAnn (The Flick Filosopher) whispered to me that she was like 'the iPod of robots.' It's so true. How Pixar's crack animation team is able to make a rusty box-like protagonist and his elongated egg-like love so expressive is a delightful mystery. I find still photos of Wall•E to be rather unfulfilling but the animation, very photo-realistic this time, is stunning. To see the characters move and emote is a wonder. It was also interesting to hear that the filmmakers had consulted with world great cinematographer Roger Deakins (two Oscar nominations last year for No Country For Old Men as The Assassination of Jesse James) on the film. Wall•E may look like he belongs in the junkyard but Wall•E looks like a hundred and twenty million bucks.

The second scene had our Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth Class showing Eva a beta-max copy of Hello Dolly that he obsesses over. I'm not making this up! The final scene was even more hilarious and featured a crowd pleasing cleaning robot who is horrified by the earth muck that Wall•E has contaminated his ship with. All three scenes were dialogue free, which means Thomas Newman's score as well as the sound mixing and effects were front and center. Peter Gabriel, pictured left, is doing the end credits song! I'm quite relieved to have predicted the film in all four of those categories for next year's Academy Awards. This should be a fairly easy sell in most of those.

The big question mark regarding the film's quality is whether Wall•E's mix of sci-fi whimsy and silent movie pathos can be sustained at full feature length without getting too gooey/cutesy but the footage screened was very impressive.

Here's the newest trailer.



related articles
Oscar Predictions for 2008 -the first round
We Can't Wait -Wall•E was TFE's #12 entry
Pixar Eight -Ranking the studio's feature filmography. Where will this new film land when all is said and done?

More Comic Con Posts:
Super Women or Cheap Whores -genre land isn't kind to the ladies
Puny Fanboys. Hulk Smash -corporate nerves and collateral damage
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20:07 (Tatooine)

"That malfunctioning little twerp... this is all his fault"

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For my contribution to the 3oth Anniversary Star Wars Blog-a-Thon, I had intended to write about Carrie Fisher/Princess Leia. That won't surprise regular readers since I have read all of the woman's novels and am a card carrying actressexual to boot. But as is often the case in the past two months, I find I'm haunted by this random screengrab I pulled for my 20:07 series *

[Edited to add: Unfortunately, as it turns out my DVD player or the DVD itself, a rented remastered copy of the 1977 film, has some sort of glitch. I can't get an accurate read of the time (it jumps from 3:32 at the end of the text crawl to 10:29 and the first glimpse of the spaceship, thus rendering the clock unreliable from then on -apologies, editor]

But anyway... If you're an irregular reader and just here for the 'thon, I'll fill you in: as an experiment in visual blogging, I've been stopping movies at a random point, the 20th minute and 7th second and posting the screenshot with dialogue. Sometimes this leads to revealing giggles and other times to fascinating meta-criticism. Occasionally the random image pulled makes me ponder the movie in a whole new way. And, though I couldn't get an accurate read on this Star Wars disc, this image I grabbed from my skipping disc is haunting me anyway. The more I tried to pull myself away to talk Princess/novelist, the more I found myself lost in this image of the desert vista on Tatooine.

The beauty of the image is this: there's next to nothing there. Its simplicity is vast. We've just witnessed one of the most exciting opening scenes in film history: a text crawl has informed us that we've arrived in the middle of a story! We've seen an outer space attack, a princess, an evil cloaked villain, and two droids narrowly escaping armed soldiers. And here we are marooned on a desert. George Lucas couldn't have chosen a smarter locale to toss a curious audience into. There is so much that's unknowable, even alien about a desert... and yet its a familiar and static image. There is no distraction. Your mind is then free to wander, to wonder, to fill in the possible details. There's nothing to look at and you want to see everything. What kind of creatures live on this planet? Is there only desert? How will these machines (C-3PO pictured and R2-D2 dissed) make their way in this world? What will become of the Princess's message, already embedded in the malfunctioning little twerp?

The simplicity here got me thinking about visual schemes in the entire Star Wars series. It isn't just the desert that's low key. The color palette is largely black (costumes, Vader, space) and white (costumes, Storm Troopers) with abundant beiges (costumes, endless sand) and grays (spaceships). The Empire Strikes Back is similarly muted in its color schemes. Instead of the desert we begin on an ice planet (also familiar yet alien and wondrous to the eye). Return of the Jedi adds a forest moon and with it more greens and browns. These fantastical worlds are really quite generously familiar and plain. It's our imagination, fully engaged, filling in the details of this galaxy far far away. We're intimately engaged in the mythology because we're helping to create it as we watch.

This desert image from the 20th minute of the first film solidifies for me this partially inchoate notion I've had about what went wrong between the first set of films (1977 to 1983) and the later ones (1999 to 2005). When we first return to Tatooine in The Phantom Menace it's still a desert but there's more detail. Technological advances fill every frame with ... stuff. The new worlds created are bizarre (who lives under water or on lava?) and the costumes are explosively colorful and odd. The second trilogy (Chapters 1 through 3) is so visually detailed as to be entirely cluttered and muddy. The audience's imagination has no work left to do. There's so much to look at that there's, metaphorically speaking, nothing to see. It's certainly alien but the humanity has gone right out of it.
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* I use a VLC DVD Player on an iMac for my screenshots. All 20:07 images in the series are from this system (unless other wise noted from guest images) Not all DVD players match in their internal clocks.

Ridley Scott To Become George Lucas

Director Ridley Scott and I have had our differences in the past (his filmography is more than a little uneven) but he has directed a few truly extraordinary films. My three favorites from his filmography are Alien (1979), Blade Runner (1982) and Thelma & Louise (1991).

Recently I read news of reshoots to Blade Runner (1982) and my whole body went shivery. Not in the good way. The reshoots in question involve changes to a fairly early scene wherein the title character (Harrison Ford) kills a runaway replicant named Zhora (Joanna Cassidy). But if there's one scene being reshot whose to say there aren't more? Apparently these reshoots are for another "director's cut" DVD release of the classic. If you're scratching your head thinking you've stumbled on a post written before The Film Experience even existed, that's understandable. Blade Runner has already received directors cut treatment. That version was much preferrable to the original primarily because it strengthened the ending and removed narration that the studio had forced on the picture in 1982 when they were worried that audiences would find it hard to follow (Yeah, this problem is a classic: it never goes away). Those revisions netted the influential sci-fi film an awesome theatrical rerelease in the 90s. But there is no reason to reshoot and change the film at this point in time. It is now twenty-five years old and it's still more exciting to watch and more impressive looking than many sci-fi blockbusters that are just hitting their opening weekends.

We've already been through this 'can't-let-go' fever once recently with George Lucas. Obsessive tinkering tends to deflate original intent. Han Solo shot first and all that... I'm thrilled for 61 year-old Joanna Cassidy that she can still fit into her amazing and barely existent Zhora costumes but save that admirable triumph of fitness for sci-fi convention appearances, please. Classics are classics. Why can't filmmakers leave their work alone? You don't see painters adding strokes to a masterpiece a quarter of a century after the painting hit the galleries.