Movies worth $10

We should enjoy what we’ve just gotten out of Hollywood, because the next couple of weeks look real painful.

Summer Palace (release January 18, 2008; click here for preview) – Yu Hong (Lei Hao) begins her studies at Beijing University where she beings an intense affair with another student, Zhou Wei (Xiaodong Guo). Their tumultuous relationship is the at the forefront of a movie where the background shows the dramatic student demonstrations and protests that have seized the minds of Chinese youth. When the protests fail, the two are separated and Zhou goes to Europe and Yu returns to the country. When another powerful event at the end of the Cold War jars Zhou, he returns to China to try to find the woman he could never forget. The movie seems mildly compelling even at the clichéd story level, yet the historical backdrop complete with radical real footage of protests that got the movie banned by the CCP make this movie very interesting. Alas, it’s release will likely be so limited that no one will get to see it.

10,000 B.C. (release March 7, 2008; click here for preview) – Near the dawn of time, a hunter D’Leh (Steven Strait) travels through mysterious lands experiencing numerous adventures from mammoths to saber tooth tigers to blood thirsty warlords. Of course the movie features an unknown hottie (Camilla Belle) as Evolet, D’Leh’s love. Don’t expect detailed plotlines but instead broad story archs with sweeping CGI and ridiculous action. I know I’m totally psyched because I think the movie looks like Independence Day meets Apocalypto.

Stop Loss (release March 28, 2008; click here for preview) – If you went to a movie over the holidy you probably saw the trailer for this movie about the topical story of a soldier who got “stop-lossed.” Starring Ryan Phillipe, who finally got to take off his Reese Witherspoon-imposed apron and make some movies, the movie looks dangerously close to just being another “one of those movies.” What does that mean? I’m not sure, although the interesting story and the intriguing castings (Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as comrades in arms and a buried Timothy Olyphant who got zero trailer time), could just slip into mediocrity. That danger is unfortunately showcased by an over-long trailer that gives away a few plot-points. At the same time, this could be the movie about the war that goes beyond the sensationalized stuff of Rendition and reaches the heart of why support for the war is eroding.

Movies NOT worth $10

Step Up 2 the Streets (release February 14, 2008; click here for preview) – this is one of those “sequels” that aren’t really sequels, in the sense that it has “2” but is not related to the first one at all. The one similarity it does have is the Maryland School of the Arts where two dance geniuses come together at just the right time to lead the school to a dance championship. I would go into more plot details but it’s pretty much exactly the same as the first one except supposedly this time the “street badass” character is a woman instead of Channing Tatum, and the innocent ballet pro is a guy. I will say that I did get dragged to the first Step Up movie, and the dancing in the preview is pretty ridiculous. Don’t confuse the movie with it’s competition How She Move (not to be confused with the dangerously similar 2001 dance movie The Way She Moves with the tagline of “one dance can change everything”). They come out at about the same time and while Step Up 2 fields a predominantly white cast, How She Move fields an almost all black cast.

TV Buzz

The Golden Globes were canceled this week. The strike has gone from crying baby annoying to constant mosquito annoying (the next on the scale is pesky-mother annoying) with the cancellation of the award show that usually leads into the longer, grander award show, the Oscars. With the strike being unlikely to be resolved before the Oscar date, that show is in serious danger of becoming a news-show disaster like NBC’s Globes.

A touch of nostalgia

Just saw the movie Good Bye, Lenin. It was pretty good. It’s about a woman who collapses and goes into a coma before the Berlin Wall comes down and wakes up afterward and her kids are worried that her condition is too fragile to tell her the truth. It got me thinking, what events of the last fifteen years are that dynamic that changed an entire world system?

What the papers say

I was in a strangely comic mood so I stayed away from hottie slide shows and senseless stuff like that in favor of a bunch of stuff that made me laugh this past week.

The Editing Room is a website that utilizes sarcasm and wit when they re-release the scripts of big time movie disappointments like there’s no tomorrow. It’s an exhaustive exercise for them probably, but a very rewarding experience for those who get to read it. Their latest work is a send-up of I Am Legend, with their usual humor and sarcastic observations about movie holes.

What I Learned from the Movies is a show described as “imagining, in a comedic way, lessons that can be derived from the movies. Each episode will cover a different topic such as sex, marriage, or work. Using real movie clips combined with animated graphics, our commentators will share with our audience the cultural wisdom that movies impart.” They had this clip about superheroes, based on Spiderman as their most recent episode.

The sequel to The Graduate? No, I’m not talking about Rumor Has It! I’m talking about an ACTUAL sequel written by Charles Webb that follows the lives of The Graduate characters many years later. This LA Times article is pretty interesting more so than just mentioning the story, but more about how the story came to be. If I had to guess, Webb had to be hurting for money, or publicity, or both.

Fincher to direct Fight Club the Musical on Broadway? The interview is pretty long and Fincher covers a bunch of crazy stuff, briefly touching on the idea of a Fight Club musical. While Fincher seemed to be dead serious, as did the interviewer, the idea seems kind of ridiculous. But who knows. People loved the dark musical of Sweeney Todd enough to turn it into Hollywood, maybe they can turn a dark Hollywood feature into a musical.

Um…really???

Sean Penn’s divorce was jumpstarted by the star being caught in bed with two young girls! I mean, sure, you were used to sleeping with the likes of Madonna before your marriage, but you did marry Robin Wright! We’re talking Buttercup and Jenny here! Couldn’t you at least have been more discrete? I mean, you got two rooms for you and your wife and sent her to one while you used the other one with two girls? Didn’t you think there was a big risk you would get caught?

Who am I?

I turned down roles in Costner's Hood, Kilmer's Bat Cave, Ford's Mansion, and Cruise's Firm.
Send your reply to saltystixtrivia@gmail.com.
Last week’s answer was Kate Bosworth.

 

Could “Avatar” Win Best Picture?

By Brett Hogan

 

Last week, the trailer for James Cameron’s sci-fi experiment “Avatar” debuted. While initially unimpressed with the teaser, I began to wonder: Could this film win best picture? 

 

Buzz has been generating for this movie for years. Years. The technology to make this movie didn’t exist when Cameron conceived it, so he invented it. When is the last time you heard of a director spearheading the invention of anything? The casting started in 2005. Most movies these days, even epics, are done in half that time. I could go on. 

 

The most important thing to take away from all of this is that people are saying this will be the future of movies. Now, I don’t agree with the idea that CGI will become more prevalent than it already is. But I do believe that this will set the bar miles higher for sci-fi. I mean, that is what Titanic did. And that won some awards if memory serves.

 

I’ll bet you’re asking yourself, how can you even suggest that a film like this will win Best Picture when the initial trailer was nothing better than visual stimulation? Well, there are a couple of reasons. First, the Academy has expanded Best Picture to ten films. This doesn’t guarantee anything other than improved chances for most films on the cusp.

 

Second, after last year’s Oscars debacle, which saw the best film of the year, “The Dark Knight,” not only get shafted in awards but nominations as well, the Academy is pulling out all the stops to appease those with the loudest voices in the film industry, the fanboys. Now, the Academy probably didn’t lose anything because of that other than some viewers of the award show. Perhaps if people are again outraged with the winners or nominees, the heads of the Academy would lose their jobs. So this is all about the Academy protecting itself, which is not so outrageous.  

 

 

Third, there is an economic motive here. I’ve heard this film will cost $190 million, not counting the R&D costs associated with Cameron’s inventions or the cost of getting 3-D cameras into every theater in the country. The Academy will do everything in its power to get people into the seats and make this the next “Titanic” or “The Dark Knight.” But the Academy doesn’t have much power, besides nominating and awarding, so they will slap the “Nominated for Best Picture” moniker onto every commercial and print ad to get the people who didn’t believe the critics to relent and see this movie.

 

Of course, all of this is pure conjecture, and no revolutionary film (Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, etc.) has ever won the Best Picture category because it changed the game. Except maybe Titanic. But still, could this movie actually win? My answer is no but a nomination is certain and who knows what could happen from there. We’ll know more come February 2010.