Innocent Bystander

District 9 (2009)

I think District 9 is an incredibly well-made, engrossing film. But I don't think it's the blockbuster film of the summer, nor does it quite exactly live up to all the hyperbole it's generated. The sci-fi action flick (and to me at least, it was much more of an action flick than anything else) does certainly touch on race relations and wows you with its special effects bang for its buck. Peter Jackson made a wise decision producing it and lending his name to the promotion of it, because without him I feel the film would have ended up in Landmark cinemas across the country (definitely not a bad thing) and would have been lucky to eke out $15 million.

The story of a giant spaceship that stalls out over Johannesburg, South Africa twenty years ago and ends up spawning an alien ghetto, the film begins with a documentary style exploration of a private company charged with moving the aliens outside of J-burg to more of a concentration camp type of setting. The aliens--big, ugly, bug-like creatures nicknamed "Prawns," due to their similarity to shrimp--have been forced into a ghetto-like society, filled with violence, drugs, and even interspecies prostitution. Into that volatile mix comes Wikus Van De Mewre (newcomer Sharito Copley) who has to evict the prawns from their current shanty homes and convince them to sign (or scrawl) a paper that acknowledges the move. In District 9, Wikus and his paramilitary escorts find various illegal activities, including a mysterious canister that infects Wikus and starts to dramatically transform him into something entirely different.

District 9 certainly is a story about discrimination, but it quickly puts that on the back burner--along with its documentary format--and becomes an almost-routine action flick, albeit one with a good story and great special effects. It's never anything less than engrossing, but I guess I was slightly disappointed by the amount of hype that preceded my viewing of it. Copley is a marvelous actor and a definite find, going from a bit of a good-natured tool (both as part of the establishment--an evil corporation trying to strip mine alien technology--and as just a goofy guy in general) to a tragic hero. There's certainly room for a sequel, with the escaping alien ("Christian") and his son (both of whom added a really touching presence to the film) returning as promised to "save" Wikus. I'm sure District 10 isn't far off in our future...but who knows if Christian will return to save his friend or destroy the world that reduced his species to medical experiments?

An open letter to NBC's Jeff Zucker...

Dear Mr. Zucker,

I know I've disparaged you and your network in the past. I will probably continue to do so in the future. I'm sorry, but NBC was the home, once, of such great shows: Seinfeld, Frasier, Supertrain. The list is almost endless. But somewhere the bloom was scraped off the rose with a trowel. I still love 30 Rock and The Office, although your Amy Poehler series, Parks and Recreation, was exceedingly lame, and a horrible waste of both Ms. Poehler and the sublime Rashida Jones. But I digress.

I'm writing for a specific reason. No matter what you do with your fall schedule--and I guess there's no turning back from your wretched decision to put Jay Leno on 5 nights a week at 10:00pm--can you please change your promos in between shows? You know what I mean: the annoying announcer who cracks wise while the NBC tones play. He says such pithy, "witty" things like, "Hey, what's 10 rocks times 3? 30 ROCK! Coming up next!"

As I believe Harrison Ford once said to George Lucas: "You can write this shit, but you sure as hell can't say it."

Anything on network television that causes any viewer to either hit the fast forward button on their DVR or change the channel on their remote is a bad thing. I'm sure by now, with a few years in the TV "biz" under your belt, you've come to realize this is true. This announcer guy? Well, let's just say I've gone through seven TVs in the past year. All with busted picture tubes. From throwing things. Because of your announcer.

Each fall, leaves tumble from the trees, as nature begins the process of renewing itself. But on television networks, fall is the time of not only renewal, but creation. While I'm sure any number of your new shows will fall off the NBC "tree" in record time, let's start anew with a whole new look to go with those brand new shows--old favorites and new failures alike--and a whole new pun-free announcer.

Sincerely,
-Gary.

PS-I was just kidding about rerunning the Michael Jackson Memorial each night. But it made you think, didn't it?

Imagine my surprise...

Elizabeth Taylor is TWITTER-ing!

And here I thought that was what Richard Burton did to her in her trailer while filming Cleopatra.

Public Enemies (2009)

For a film that boasts two of the world's top-grossing box office stars—Johnny Depp and Christian Bale—knee-deep in a story steeped in American mythology—the great gangsters of the Depression—Public Enemies sure is kind of blah. Directed by Michael Mann, you'd think this would be like... well, gangbusters. But except for a few bravura scenes (especially the shoot-out at Little Bohemia), the movie is choppy, a little too long, and severely disjointed.

Adapted from the excellent history book of the same name by author Bryan Burrough, Mann and company pare down the cast of characters to the Melvin Purvis (Bale) vs. John Dillinger (Depp) storyline. (Burrough's book was a fairly-comprehensive history of the life and times of numerous Depression era bad guys, including Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Alvin Karpis, and Ma Barker and her brood.) Both Bale and Depp are excellent, as is Marion Cotillard as Billie Frenchette, Dillinger's soulmate. Billy Crudup makes for an appropriately conceited and fussy J. Edgar Hoover, and everyone else pretty much looks like they stepped out of a Walker Evans photo, as does the entire film, albeit in color. But while Mann does a great job of recreating the physical era, he fails at recreating the hero worship and excitement that surrounded the bad guys in a time when everyone was broke and looking for a Robin Hood. Even with an actor as charismatic and watchable as Depp, it's hard to get excited about anything in this movie.

Dillinger and company were hardened criminals, not worthy of any kind of worship, but they sure are a lot more fun than the Bernie Madoffs and AIG bigwigs of the world. Too bad Public Enemies doesn't make better use of that fun.

1939 on Turner Classic Movies...

I just watched the new TCM/Warner Home Video documentary, 1939, a look at the watershed year of Hollywood studio film production. Before the war, before the government carved up the studio theaters, before television, 1939 represented the zenith of the movie industry.

If you look at it only from the standpoint of just two classic films that have stood the test of time, growing ever more popular over the last 70 years, 1939 is an incredible year. Those two films are The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind. But when you add in just some of the other amazing movies to debut that year, the list is astonishing: Gunga Din, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stagecoach, Dark Victory, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Young Mr. Lincoln, Of Mice and Men, Son of Frankenstein, The Women, Ninotchka, Only Angels Have Wings, just to name a dozen more. It was the year the studio system triumphed with an incredible output of films.

The documentary is a wonderful look back at that blessed year, narrated by Kenneth Branagh. It explores the output of each studio, taking us around a map of Hollywood, starting with MGM and ending with United Artists. Each look at the individual studios' films that year includes a brief history of the studio itself. Included is commentary by a whole bunch of film critics, authors, and scholars, including my favorite, Thomas Schatz, who wrote what I consider THE book on the Hollywood studio system, The Genius of the System (sadly out of print at this point). The occasional archival talk with a director (Frank Capra and Howard Hawks, to name two) or star (Maureen O'Hara, looking not very much different from her starring role in Hunchback, 70 years ago!) is also included. This is another in an excellent series of documentaries from TCM and WHV, and one that I hope will show up in a boxed set of 1939 films at some point, even if they are all only Warner Bros. films.

In fact, TCM seems to have the rights to the excellent series of documentaries that critic and author Richard Schickel made back in the 1970s, and which first aired on PBS, The Men Who Made the Movies. They popped up last month when TCM was showcasing great directors each day. I wish they'd release a DVD set of them, and while they're at it, can someone find the exquisite Kenneth Brownlow documentary series, Hollywood, about the silent film era, and get that out on DVD, too, please? Pretty please?

1939 shows again on TCM on July 10 at 8:45am (5:45 PDT) and July 31 at 10:45 am (7:45 am PDT). It's part of the cable network's month-long salute to 1939, with "39 from 1939" running each Thursday evening. I know I'll be DVR-ing a lot of these (already set to record to Ninotchka tonight!), and enjoying every minute of them.

My confession...

I never saw Borat.

You'd have to pay me a lot of money to see Bruno.

The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)

I was prepared to hate the new version of The Taking of Pelham 123. The original is one of my favorite films of the 1970s, one that has a sly little trick ending, and a director and/or writer with the sense of fading to black at the perfect moment. But that film is an exact reproduction of an era, a time when New York City was full of crime, when taking the subway was a risky move, especially late at night. It was the era of America's giant F-You to New York when it ran out of money. New York was Gotham City, full of crazies, liberals, and an island many people wished would just float away.

Cut to 2009 and Tony Scott has remade the thriller, based on a novel by John Godey, with a script by Brian Helgeland, who co-wrote one of my all-time favorite movies, L.A. Confidential. The basic story remains the same: a small group of criminals take over a subway train on a typically busy New York day,and hold the passengers for ransom. In the 70s, the plot revolved around "how are they gonna do it"--how do you escape from a subway train underground with the then princely ransom of one million dollars? But in the new millennium, the story has a lot more layers. A flawed hero (Denzel Washington), who is under investigation at the MTA for taking a bribe. A crazy-like-a-fox mastermind (John Travolta), who's bluster is part prison-made, part something else entirely. The cat-and-mouse game is amplified, the trick ending is gone, but--I'm very happy to say--this new version is its own animal, something engrossing and very, very satisfying.

Washington and Travolta are both great, as is James Gandolfini as a mayor more tuned into his constituency than the previous version's clown. The ante is upped to a cool 10 million this time, and a lot of the set pieces are there: the snipers in the tunnel, the mad chase with the money to make the deadline. Travolta's criminal is the polar opposite of Robert Shaw's quiet, cool boss. But I have to stop comparing this film to the other one...because--I almost hate to say it--it's a better movie.

Tony Scott's direction almost turned me off from the opening credits, all jangly and quick-cutted. But Scott wisely saves all that frenetic motion for the on-the-street scenes, with the action in the tunnels controlled and almost claustophobic. There's some new twists, too: the emergence of a new kind of New York villain in who Travolta REALLY is; the acknowledgment of the Internet as a major player in everything we do these days (witness Iran; the revolution will not be televised, it'll be streamed live). Helgeland's script brings Washington's character of Garber more into the action and ends with a bang.

This is too cool and smart an action movie for the summer months, when everything is X-Men and giant robots and twenty-somethings posing as teens in mythical fantasy schools. Pelham 123 is a great movie, one of the best I've seen in a long time...I just wish everyone else would go see it, too.

Star Trek (2009)

It took J.J. Abrams--33 years after the fact--to make me a fan of Star Trek.

Like any comics-loving 11-year old, I was excited when the original series debuted on Friday night on NBC way back when in '67 (well, 1966, but I went for the Steely Dan lyric instead, thus dating not only my TV-viewing taste but my musical one, as well). But the bloom quickly faded. I was never a fan of Kirk, Spock, Bones, et al. It was another one of those TV shows where special effects were limited to a couple of ship--Federation, Klingon, Romulan--flybys per episode and the inevitable "rock the boat" explosions, where the back and forth camera did all the heavy lifting for the effects.

Sure, I appreciated the characters. I loved the color (color TV was still a bit of a novelty in '66, even though just about everything was in color by then). But their "5-year mission to boldy go where no man has gone before" (which seemed to apply to Captain Kirk even more so than the rest of the crew, especially when it came to the alien ladies) was cut short at 3, due to lack of interest, and not just mine. And here's my true confession: as a rabid comics fan, science fiction leaves me cold and unexcited. I've never been bitten by the "Star" bug. I enjoy both Star Trek and Star Wars, but I wouldn't go out of my way to see either, and I've never read any of the associated books, comics, etc.

But then there's Abrams' new movie, which gives an origin story to virtually every one of the familiar characters from that TV series way back when: Kick, Spock, McCoy, Sulu, Chekov, Uhura, even the ill-fated Captain Pike (which was just NBC getting it's pilot episode investment back). Like Batman Begins and Casino Royale before it, Star Trek starts over, crafting new storylines for all the characters, some based in TV show canon, some not. Abrams covers his ass by having original Spock Leonard Nimoy along for the warp-drive ride, who explains that there's an alternate reality at work here. When Romulan bad guy Nero (Eric Bana) comes back in time to destroy the USS Kelvin--the ship that has the unborn James Tiberius Kirk (Chris Pine) and family onboard, including the soon to be Captain/soon to be dead George Kirk (played by soon to be Thor, Chris Hemsworth)--he creates the paradox, spinning the entire crew off into an alternate reality. So there you go, Trekkies--er, Trekkers--your Shatner/Nimoy universe (and all that followed) is safe and sound and still living on your DVDs. The Nimoy thing is nice, but unnecessary, a nod to all those vocal fanboys who take umbrage at any minor course correction in a reboot like this, ignoring the fact that it is a REBOOT.

Abrams' movie is everything that the original series--and subsequent movies--aren't: fast, furious, and funny (at times). It pays homage to the original characters through not only brilliant casting but careful scripting. Pine is incredibly reminiscent of Shatner. Zachary Quinto nails Spock and seems to be a young Nimoy (although stick that make-up and haircut on anyone and they're eerily reminiscent of both actor and character). And Karl Urban--who I'm most familiar with as the Russian bad assassin from the second Bourne movie--seems to be directly channeling DeForest Kelly. The voice, the look, it's all there. Zoe Saldana is an adequate Uhura, whose character is given much more to do and be in her limited time on screen than Nichelle Nichols was ever given in all the episodes and movies combined. John Cho as Sulu and Simon Pegg as Scotty (the latter is the last to appear and complete the original cast of characters) are both excellent. My only quibblle--actor-wise--is with the over-the-top performance of Anton Yelchin as Chekov. I sometimes wished for subtitles when he spoked.

But even though I'm not a fan of the original, I do admit to getting a little misty-eyed when each of those old tropes came up. Scotty yelling he's givin' her all he's got; Spock telling Kirk to "live long and prosper"; Bone saying he's a doctor, dammit, not a physicist. They're all there, the little catchphrases and bits of lore that have become part and parcel of pop culture.

And my only real tribble--er, quibble with the entire film is the sometimes over-the-top musical score. Otherwise I loved this new version of the venerable old classic (to some people, if not me), and rank it up there with the great Batman and Bond reboots. Beam me up, J.J....I want more.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the de facto fourth film in Twentieth-Century Fox and Marvel's X-Men franchise, immediately descends into silliness with its opening scene. Baby Wolverine, way back in 1845 or so, pops his claws for the first time and kills his daddy. In what almost seems like a parody of every action film--especially those featuring super-heroes--made in the last decade or two, the kid's anguished scream when he realizes what he's done is filmed with a high-angle camera, looking down. Get used to it. Because in addition to this shot, we also get "treated" to a lot of arms extended/claws popped/growling at the camera throughout Wolverine.

But you know what? The rest of the film is okay, not great, but certainly enjoyable, mainly because of Hugh Jackman, but also because it looks like Fox--the studio famous for reducing Galactus to a giant cloud--actually spent some money for once.

After the opening scene, we follow Wolvie and bro Victor (who is really Sabretooth, but I don't recall anyone calling him that in this film, maybe because he was played by some lame-ass wrestler in the first X-Men movie) through history, as they fight in the Civil War, World Wars I and II and Viet Nam. They're indestructible, see, and they join up with Colonel William Stryker (Danny Huston, who is either aping Brian Cox who played the character as an older guy in X2, or he's channeling his father, director/actor John Huston) and a band of mutants who take on secret missions. Those mutants include Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, only they don't call him that until the end, when the character is referred to as Weapon XI and played by actor Scott Adkins. Reynolds is wasted in the few minutes he's actually in the film, but he has spin-off buzz.

Anyway, it seems that Wolvie has a conscious, so he quits the dirty government squad and becomes a lumberjack. Seriously. Along the way he picks up a cute school teacher, Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins), who soothes the savage beast in him. The film does a good job of actually fashioning a coherent (well...semi-coherent) origin for the character, something that was badly mauled in comic book form by various writers, including Paul Jenkins, who gave Wolverine the MOST. BORING. ORIGIN. STORY. EVER. (Marvel publisher at the time, Bill Jemas, also got credit on that epic piece of crap, proving that he was a far worse writer than he was a publisher. 'Nuff said, True Believers!)

Along the way, Stryker and company pick up their own little mutant zoo, including a young boy who shoots red power beams out of his eyeballs. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought one of the previews I saw also showed a very young African American girl with prematurely white hair, but I don't recall seeing her in the actual movie. There is, however, a nice cameo of another familiar X-character.) Wolvie goes back to Stryker when he thinks Victor (Liev Schreiber, by the way, kind of slumming in an action flick) kills his girlfriend and gets the whole deluxe Adamantium detail package and emerges as the Logan we all know and love. In his quest to find Stryker's mutant island, he meets up with Remy Lebeau, the mutant known as Gambit, who's played by Taylor Kitsch, who I thought was maybe an American Idol star or someone, but I guess he's been in other movies. Then they all--Wolvie, Victor, Gambit, and Deadpool--have this climactic battle. Oh, and there's a scene after the credits end, too (although it's hardly worth waiting for).

The end.

Jackman's screen prescence is basically the engine that makes Wolverine run and he can play the character until they adapt the current comic storyline, "Old Man Logan," as far as I'm concerned. Schreiber looks silly at times, especially with those muttonchop whiskers and his running like an animal, but he does bring a level of class to the proceedings, something you don't often find in a super-hero movie, especially one from Fox (Elektra or Daredevil, anyone?). I find the whole Wade Wilson/Deadpool thing confusing, though Deadpool is not a character I ever had any interest in in the comics, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of room for a spin-off with the final...disposition of the character in this film.

Wolverine is the first big summer movie out of the gate, coming at the beginning of a crowded month of May that saw Star Trek debut this weekend, Angels and Demons next, followed by Terminator Salvation on May 21 and Night at the Museum 2 on May 22 doing battle for the box-office crown on Memorial Day Weekend, the traditional start-up of summer movie season. Jackman's cigar-chomping, claw-popping, whisker-wearing hero has only diminishing returns to look forward to as the summer's big guns start to go off from now through the early dog days of August. But I don't think that'll stop Jackman from donning the claws again in the years to come.

Four reasons why no one should EVER consider Matthew McConaughey for CAPTAIN AMERICA...

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I rest my case with these 4 images and these 4 words: pretty boy rom-com star.