Archive for the 'Movies' Category

Have you ever watched the reality tv show On The Lot?  It’s a hack show about the search for Hollywood’s next top director … produced by Steven Spielberg.  Gary Marshall, Carrie Fisher, and a guest judge play Simon, Randy, and Paula.  Every Monday you watch—and vote for!—a mini movie by the aspiring directors.  It’s better than watching reruns of cheesy sitcoms on competing stations, but the movies are none too inspired despite the directors’ hard efforts and use of famous actors, like the dad from Family Matters.

That basically sums up my feelings of Paris, Je T’aime. 

Some very famous and talented directors have each more or less made insipid short films around the gimmick—er, theme—of Paris as a backdrop.  Among the twenty directors are the Coen Brothers, Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven, Gérard Depardieu, and Christopher Doyle.  The cast of Natalie Portman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Elijah Wood, Nick Nolte, Juliette Binoche, Rufus Sewell, Gena Rowlands, Miranda Richardson, and Steve Buscemi, to name a few is equally impressive. 

The films, however, are surprisingly trite for their celebrated roster.  To say that one film involves a mime and another a vampire should fairly easily indicate the tacky nature of the subject matter.  For the most part, it felt like I was watching one of those esoteric foreign films that plays on PBS at three in morning that defines the general public’s perception of idiosyncratic intellectualism.    

Because they are so short, the films relied on cheap tugs of the heartstring to quickly relay their messages of loneliness, love, fear, and bliss. Occasionally, one of the short films in Paris, Je T’aime hit the mark.  A vignette would capture the innocence or the brutality of love.  The complexities of a character could be beautifully poignant.  And just as you were getting swept up into the emotion of a story, it would abruptly end and fade into the next film, leaving you no time to pause and consider its message.

Despite its title, Paris, Je T’aime does little to make you fall in love with Paris or make you understand its distinct personality.  It could have easily taken place in any other metropolitan city.

Some Directors have left such a mark on American cinema that their style seems to have become its own genre of film. So let me set the record straight:

Martin Scorcese is a director. Not a genre.

Which is the problem with, I’m sorry to say, nearly every moment of the film Brooklyn Rules that stuffs every last Italian-American, Catholic, Brooklyn, blue collar, male-bonding, mafia-tinged, good-kid-trying-to-make-his-way-out-of-the-rough-and-tumble-neighborhood cliche into a mediocre attempt at emulating Scorcese’s early masterpiece Mean Streets.

Throw in a couple of scenes stolen directly from Saturday Night Fever, down to the interrupted sex in the backseat of the bar and romantic shots of the Verrazano bridge, and you’ve got a director who clearly wishes he had made one of the afformentioned films, not just cannibalized them.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Brooklyn Rules is the story of three best friends from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. A trio of Catholic School trouble-makers who find a dead body on the beach and each walk away with a momento.

Bobby takes the dog sitting in a carrying case in the back, the almost comically vain Carmine takes a zippo lighter and our protagonist Mike takes a revolver from the glove compartment. Making sure that we remember that gun for every slow, drawn out second of the film.

The boys grow up into Jerry Ferrara (from HBO’s Entourage) as Bobby, a dumb cheapskate who wants nothing more than to marry his girl, work for the Post Office (apparently, he’s too dumb for anything else) and pray at every Virgin Mary statue he passes.

Scott Caan, one of the few competent actors in this film becomes Carmine, with bulging biceps and a pathological fixation on his hair. Carmine of course, wants to get mobbed up. (And only mob-boss Ceasar Manganaro, played by the often bored-looking Alec Baldwin) is his way in.

And sadly, Michael, (who irritatingly narrates us through every second of film) is the work-a-day Columbia University classroom hustler. Pitifully, what little the screenwriter offered the character is then mangled by the talentless Freddie Prinze Jr.

The scenes are repetitive to the point where by the seventh time the boys are sitting around in classic Brooklyn locales drinking Budweiser, you must presume that the Milwauke based company was one of the film’s primary investors. When the esoteric scene that begins the film comes full circle at the end, it leaves the audience thinking. . . what. . . So that’s it?

Brooklyn Rules was directed by Michael Corrente whose unimpressive resume indicates that he’s not in line for an Oscar nod anytime soon. However, it was written by Soprano’s verteran Terrence Winter. It seems like he’s trying for his Scorcese moment, and clearly fails in his first attempt.

Rounding out the lifeless performances of the film is Mena Suvari as Ellen, Michael’s classroom love interest (from Connecticut of course, and has her birthday party at a bar in TriBeCa! Ooohhh, fancy!) She goes through her lines with absolutely zero chemistry with her goofball screen partner, in the back of her eyes, you can almost hear her saying (I went from American Beauty to this?)

The highlights of the film come from the clever barbs and one liners the boys from Bay Ridge lay on each other, the classic 1980’s nostalgia, and the English-mangling father of our boy Bobby, for whom each line is a hillarious hodge-podge of misused words.

Cliches can be fun sometimes. But stuff a movie full of them, and it leaves you wondering what, if anything, from this film was worth taking from it on its own merits.

And so the PANELGEEK has finally picked up an off-the-internet bootleg of Spider-man 3 to watch in the comfort and scrutiny of his own secret headquarters and, much to his own surprise

It WASN’T BAD!!

Now its important to mention that expectations were already very low. I was somewhat unimpressed with the first two, thinking that there were mistakes in casting (Maguire is NOT PETER PARKER) and some visual and directorial choices (The super-lame Green Goblin mask, when Willem Dafoe’s face is clearly what a psychotic super-villain should look like!) Combine that with a lousy script most of the time and Sam Raimi’s undeniably campy approach somewhat soured the franchise for me.

But by the third film, the characters were established enough for some of the actors to really sink into them. Kirsten Dunst seemed, for the first time to have really grown into the womanly glamour that is Mary-Jane Watson

(in the first two, she just seemed like a pretty little girl.)

James Franco’s reprise as Harry Osborn, trying to live up to his father’s might as the Green Goblin was impressive, especially because the script team had the courage to change te course that Harry took in the comics, and in this film, turned him into the reluctant hero that I found myself (by the final battle scene) wanting him to be.

I was very skeptical about adding The Sandman to the film franchise, finding him to be a cheesy, two-bit stock villain complete with campy striped shirt. But when the Oscar-nominated actor Thomas Hayden Church, with his deadly serious expression picked up that familiar shirt in the early scenes, something struck home about the character, and the director: It is possible to portray a campy, pulpy comic book story and still take it seriously. Something Raimi has had trouble conveying in the past.

Church: perfect casting as Flint Marko (The Sandman.)

Then there’s The Symbiote Black Suit, which just falls out of the sky without explination and we find out increases the wearer’s strengths but also increases their aggressive tendencies

And there’s Eddie Brock, played with complete lack of depth or nuance by That 70’s show’s Topher Grace. Brock is The Daily Bugle’s skeevy photographer counterpart to the morally irreproachable Parker.

When the two become one, the fusion is Venom: The closest thing Spider-man has ever had to an evil mirror-image.

Oh, and there’s also Gwen Stacy, Spider-man’s other romantic interest.

And Flint Marko was also apparently Uncle Ben’s real killer.

And isn’t Peter’s frail Aunt May supposed to fit in here somewhere?

Oh, and the alien suit is vulnerable to sound waves, too!

Herein lies the problem: Too many characters and too many plot threads equals NOT ENOUGH PLOT DEVELOPMENT! Each of the scenes seem like they’re just trying to string us along on an over-worked plot (or multiple plots) while not giving any one plot the right amount of exposition it needs.

The special effects for Sandman and Venom were brilliant, and the scene in which Spider-man defeats Venom was AWESOME, but I can’t help but feel that if Raimi left the showdown with Venom for the next film, he would have had a little more leeway with other development but sometimes its hard to suppress a vision (or multiple visions) with so much money, expectation, and MERCHANDISING behind it (does everyone have their Venom figurines yet?)

But acknowledging all of its flaws, Spider-man 3 was still a great super-hero action film with just enough camp, and all the special-effects magic we could ask for in a summer block-buster.

One last gripe: Tobey Maguire, pathetically trying to be Peter Parker, pathetically trying to be “baddass” montage, with a black outfit and smiling and winking at every supermodel he passes was appalling.

His white-as-white-can-get disco homage to John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever made me physically nauseous. That entire scene knocked one star off my review. The scene in the Jazz Club was, as well, utterly stupid.

Damn you Sam Raimi for your idiotic mockery of a character I’ve loved for years.

If I never, ever saw Tobey “wide-eyes-and-pouty-lips-is-NOT-an-acceptable-substitute-for-actual-talent” Maguire mangle the insight and moral complexity of Peter Parker, it’ll be too soon.

After mentally checking my outfit for red carpet worthiness (fail) I shrugged and headed to the Tribeca film fest to mingle with the stars and, as it turns out, cringe at everything but the sight of a very naked Lucy Liu for a couple hours.  Upon arriving to film fest central I was directed to the wrong theater.  Two cabs, 20 bucks, and a stick of bbq’d street meat later, I finally made it to the eerily remote Battery Park Regal Cinemas Theater.  A single cardboard sign directed me to the “festival.”  No red carpet, no stars, just a lot of dorky white dudes coming out to stare at (did I mention?) a very naked Lucy Liu.

 Check out the preview…it’ll save some time.

Anyways…  Wow.  So bad.  SO SO SO bad.  And did I mention that Lucy Liu, and at least half a dozen other really hot women are all sorts of naked?  And yet, still, bad.  To be fair, it was stylishly bad for the first hour or so, but for the entire last hour of the film you could actually see the actors reading their lines off the page. 

BISHOP:  No, stop.

SADIE: (Naked back flip, lots of odd camera angles, shoots vampire in throat) I’ll stop when I’m dead.

BISHOP:  Oh!  The irony!  A vampire!  Dead!  Oh man, the audience will NEVER pick up on that one!

Yeah.  Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t see it.  Just don’t pay any money to see it.  Marilyn Manson has a cameo as a bartender sans makeup, which is almost worth paying for, and the copious nudity is really pretty amazing.  The action is even pretty good.  It’s just the writing…whoa.  It’s that bad. 

Every Thursday, Chelsea Clearview Cinema shows classic films. At $6.50, it sounded like a great way to broaden my knowledge of film so off I went to see the
exclusive 7 PM showing of Harriet Craig. As I began to search for a seat in the maroon theatre, something felt different….
Finding an aisle seat in the left row, I look around. Two things quickly become clear:

1. The theatre is a lot more crowded than I expected for a film that I’ve never even heard of.

2. Men make up the vast majority of the audience. The woman behind me in the ticket line also ordered a ticket for Harriet Craig, but I don’t see her or any other women in the audience.

I know there’s some sort of pre-show for the Chelsea Classics that came with a warning: “Pre Show for Mature Audiences Only.” What on earth have I gotten myself into? Am I mature enough for whatever is going to happen when Hedda Lettuce begins the pre-show?

“Welcome to the Clearview, where dreams come true!” trills Hedda Lettuce, as if she were standing at the entrance to Disneyland and not some run-of-the-mill city theatre. The spotlight on her, Hedda Lettuce is mesmerizing in a beaded green dress and green highlights in her hair to match her name. “Hello, ladies and gentlemen and everything in between.” Ah, yes, Hedda is a drag queen: “I don’t mind being called anything with the word ‘queen’ in it.”
Turns out the pre-show is nothing raunchier than catty, improvisational banter to get the audience riled up for an old movie. The crowd loves Hedda. I love Hedda. Hedda loves Hedda. It’s clear that in his six years of opening at the Clearview Cinema, Hedda Lettuce has gained quite a loyal following. He seems to know many of the audience members by name. It’s evident that the Chelsea Classics has quite a few regulars (mainly gay men) each Thursday night. Whether they come for Hedda or the movie is unclear.
“How many people who are gay have not seen this film?” Hedda asks the audience, and then polls people’s favorite scenes. Russell has seen Harriet Craig seven or eight times. His favorite scene is when Harriet is having a “fussy” conversation, and in his best Joan Crawford act recites the lines when she scolds her servants for going up and down the stairs. When Steven begins to speak, Hedda interrups, “Oh, what a lisp. You’re so gay!” Then poses the same question, “how many times have you seen this movie?” to which he responds, “Today?” His favorite scene is “when the maid tells her off.”
Then “Bucket Boy” comes out to give away the prizes. Several people win movie tickets. There’s a big shocker.
Harriet Craig is “Martha Stuart on crack,” according to Hedda. As the black-and-white film begins to play, Hedda’s quip seems an understatement. Harriet Craig doesn’t clean or cook — she has servants and a cousin who does that for her. They must keep her house positively spotless. Of course, Harriet’s insistence on having a house that is perfect is a metaphor for wanting to control her home life.
More specifically, Harriet Craig controls her husband. The film is rich with sexual power plays and clever remarks about gender, such as when Harriet says, “No man’s born ready for marriage; he has to be trained.”
Harriet Craig, directed by Vincent Sherman and written by Anne Froelich and James Gunn, is brilliant. A pure cinematic gem. And the audience is delightful. They cheer and clap for Joan Crawford, who plays the domineering housewife. Their robust, over-the-top laughter shows how much they love the film. Seeing Harriet Craig with a bunch of gay men in Chelsea ranks as one of my all-time favorite movie-going experiences.

It’s exciting to see a young actor grow from childhood sitcoms to serious films, and I’m proud of the strong choices that Joseph Gordon Levitt is making.

From his hillarious romps with his fellow covert aliens in 3rd Rock from the Sun to his intensely powerful turn in the High School Noir film Brick, which I consider the sleeper of 2006.

And now he continues on that trend with the small-town, lonely winter bank heist film The Lookout

The film begins with beautiful tragedy. Gorgeous teens on prom night, driving down farm roads in search of a specific type of beauty that can only be found in small farm towns. Then tragedy strikes.

Chris Pratt, played by Levitt is now, four years later, still re-learning basic sequential functions like remembering to grind the coffee before making it, and where to find, (and how to use, and what the hell is a. . .) can opener. He’s helped along with his clever, blind roommate Lewis, played by the always wry and brilliant Jeff Daniels.

Chris also works as the night custodian of the local bank. Which is just a coincidental convenience for the local seductively charming bad-boy. Gary

The bank-heist formula is familiar: patsy gets sucked in by Gary’s charisma. As well as the chance to somehow get out of this “trap” that the accident put him in, (because money solves everything. . .) and of course, the chance to be “cool” again.

The tender folds of a former stripper named Luvlee Lemons (named WHAT? hahaha) of course helped as well.

The bank heist unfolds as movie bank heists often do, and the writer/director Scott Frank doesn’t score any major points in that department. He really shines in his artistry in revealling how this flawed man, struggling just to keep up with the world and weighted down by his guilt can rise to the call of heroism.

The Lookout is a beautifully crafted and magnificently acted, if predictable film. In the deluge of celluloid shit that comes out in theaters from January through March, The Lookout might just be the first good film of 2007.

Although. . . if you’ve seen Momento, as I’m guessing Mr. Frank has many, many times. . . well, I’m just saying you might also experience a strong sense of Deja Vu. . .

“Breaking In” is a new sitcom that will be playing on the internet this Spring and Summer. Last night, at the beautiful Off-Broadway Theatre, New World Stages, there was a screening of the pilot episode of this hilarious new show.

“Breaking In” is a theatre geek/ struggling artist’s dream sitcom. The show parodies all that is demeaning, depressing and silly about the off-off-off-off Broadway theatre scene, from the actors’ and producers’ perspectives. A “Waiting fo Guffman” set with twenty somethings in Manhattan, the pilot was about the opening night of a brand new Native American-themed muscial. A lead actor’s nose gets broken when he is making out backstage with one of the producers, the audience yawns and text messages during the show, a young actress gets hit on by her sleazy co-star moments before her entrance.

The writer, Joe Drymala, has a dry, hip, distinctly Manhattan sense of humor. His characters are quirky and the relationships are dead-on. The show is simply fun to watch– all the actors have excellent comedic timing and fanatastic character work. Director Ryan Davis has captured something special in thie brief, 20 minute pilot, and I, for one, will be tuning in for episode 2.

Episodes airing online, so keep checking in to see the newest “Breaking In”.

Don’t you just love to see a man have a dream and work really hard to accomplish it? Okay, so maybe not all dreams are as epic as others, but isn’t the fact that he’s trying his damnest good enough? Even if it’s perhaps a wonky dream, it’s a dream nonetheless… which brings me to our everyday unsung hero…

Determined, he creeps into the snow covered clearing donning his fringed buckskin jacket with knives strapped to his body. He tells his story of the “old man” with the white beard- the grizzly who almost took his life. He is Troy Hurtubise, survivor of a ferocious grizzly bear attack. His dream is to create the perfect bear proof suit of armor. After many futile attempts, he wears his heart on his sleeve as he lives his story. Oh, it is sad, it is ridiculous, but most of all it is sweet and less than ordinary in the most endearing way.

He so badly wants to be somebody (haven’t we all been there?). His nature is defined by his quirky actions- shaving his face with his bowie knife, lighting his cigarette with a blow torch. His mega suit goes through many models and tests to become grizzly bear proof, such as walking through fire, numerous ramming of heavy logs at high speeds, being shot at with bows and arrows as well as 9 millimeter slugs and even running smack dab into the damn thing with a truck 18 times. I swear the poor man could literally barely walk in the suit since it weighed 147 pounds and he even had to get into it like the Duke Boys got into the General Lee.

Director Peter Lynch is a filmmaker who gets it. He combines storytelling with documentary cinematography to piece together the most lovable and outrageous true story that I have ever seen or heard. Lynch injects Troy’s story right into the veins of North America. After the screening at New Center Cinema, on March 9th, his Q&A session was well received by audience members. Everyone wanted to learn more about Troy and hear about Peter’s vision for the film.

Thank you Peter and thank you Troy for a romping good time and a sincere moment of simple pleasures.

Overall: Two opposable thumbs up- go see it! I seriously don’t care how you get there, find a way. You will laugh, you will giggle, but most of all you will feel your heart well up inside you as you remember the time that you yourself had a dream and you will smile and hope (just like I did) that someday our everyday unsung hero will get his due.

I like free things. I’m on a mailing list for Time Out New York that offers free advanced movie screenings. All you have to do is be one of the first people to respond and you get free general admission tickets They overbook so you have to be there early because there’s no guarantee you’ll get a seat.

I was a little late for the free screening of Starter For 10, meaning I arrived at the theater 10 minutes before the movie started, so my friend and I had to sit in the front row. Oh well, being really uncomfortable will just give me more of an impetus to get up and leave if the movie sucks. The movie, produced by Tom Hanks, centers around a small town working class Brit named Brian Jackson (James McAvoy). He’s going off to university because he wants to know everything. He loves to learn. When he was a child, he used to watch quiz shows with his dad, who has since passed away. He meets Alice Harbinson (Alice Eve) while trying out for the university quiz team. He helps her cheat on the entrance quiz and because of this, ends up as only an alternate while she gets a spot on the team. He doesn’t mind though because it’s not long till the rest of the team recognizes his quiz team chops. As a bonus, Alice, the pretty preppy blonde type, agrees to go out with him. Days earlier, however, he met Rebecca, a protest-y punk rock type who also likes him, but at this point he is too smitten with Alice to look twice at her. Thus begins the love triangle. This is where the story lost me. First, I did not believe that either of these girls would actually like him. Second, I didn’t buy that he wouldn’t automatically choose Rebecca. She was just so much cooler and prettier than the other girl. Regardless, I feel like I don’t have to tell you anymore about the plot because if you’ve ever seen a movie, you know exactly what’s going to happen here.

The movie is set in the 1980s, but it also was filmed in a 1980s style, which I thought was an odd and distracting choice. I kept thinking ‘who would choose this crappy instrumental synthesized garbage as background music’ on purpose? They only did it in the 80s cause they didn’t know any better. The movie has a couple of funny moments but all in all, it’s pretty predictable and a little too corny and the characters didn’t feel very flushed out. I enjoyed Rebecca Hall and all The Cure songs and it wasn’t so bad that I walked out. It would have been a long walk to the back of the theater and it didn’t deserve that grand of a gesture, though if I were you, I wouldn’t waste my money seeing this in the theater.

Okay, so experiencing free street art can be quite serendipitous and downright trendy, unless it’s fucking cold outside at a windchill of 16 degrees. Along with a handful of other teeth-chattering city-goers, I stood at the exterior of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) to experience Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers, an outdoor exhibit consisting of 8 huge moving images appearing on the architecture of the museum itself depicting the lives of 5 seperate people through 5 seperate stories. Each story, quite simple in nature, lasts only 13 minutes. Upon completion, each story then appears on a different screen, creating an ever-changing and individual experience for each viewer (pretty creative really).

The only soundtrack…the true sounds of the city: sirens and traffic and people talking and wind, etc. Ryan Donowho, Seu Jorge, Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power), Donald Sutherland and Tilda Swinton portray the 5 characters in the stories representing people from a full range of bluecollar to white collar careers. We get to witness them going about their mundane everyday lives (Think ‘The Office’ without the comedy). Each story unfolds slowly with routine activities such as waking up, putting on shoes, drinking ones beverage of choice out of one’s personal drinkware (a paper cup, a colorful mug, a recycled jelly jar), standing in front of one’s mirror. Then, we see the monotanous commute to work (be it bike, subway or fancier mode of transportation) , the mindnumbing activities faced daily at the job, endless photocopies, lonely hallways/tunnels, the characters achingly drag through the non-adventures of the day.

Oh, such comments on the sometimes sad and lonely nature of our very existence and the state of peoples lives in America at the moment. The characters live realistically on screen, having absolutely no reactions or interests until they each experience an intense moment of passion/joy/release- but this is only an adventure in their minds, while their bodies continuously stay consumed with the blah blah path of everyday activities. This adventure thankfully takes them away from an unforeseen, yet possibly lifechanging event. Could this be a wakeup call, cityfolk??!!??; warning us not to sleep through our lives in disheartened melancholy? Could this be reminding us to live with the intensity of the creativity burning within us all? Hmmm… have to think on that one.

And hey, by the way, all you crazy cats with cellphones can dial into #408-794-0886 for some interesting & helpful introductory commentary on the artwork, brief comments about the artist’s vision & useful location information. Although, if you don’t know this before you go, then no technical advances for you sucka, as this is not well advertised at the exhibit and, therefore, not understood by most passers-by and/or event visitors.

Image screens are visible from 53rd and 54th Streets, from the concrete throughway in between and from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. The exhibit lasts through February 12th and is viewable each evening from 5-10 PM. Oh, but don’t go grab a coffee or bring your own thermos of hot cocoa to try to warm up, because MOMA won’t let you use the facilities to tinkle!

Overall, a very unusual and interesting concept- very cool and artsy idea. But, hey MOMA, next time let’s do this in the spring or summer- you’ll get a much better turnout & we’ll be much less worried about getting frostbite!