Summer Movie Roundup

I did a summer movie roundup...I think it was last summer...anyway, it was lots of fun, so I thought I would do it again!

Note: The embedded videos don't import well, so if you're reading this somewhere other than this blog, I hyperlinked the titles to the trailers on youtube so you won't be left out.

First up - Knight and Day.

I know it opened yesterday, but it's not expected to do great box office, and that's a shame. This is the perfect summer date movie - plenty of chase sequences, explosions, cloaks, daggers, and a touch of romance. Actually, I don't remember any cloaks, but the daggers are there. It's a spy caper much in the same vein as The Losers, which I loved much. Diaz is perfectly cast and so is Cruise, and that's the first time in a while that I've been able to say such a thing about them. Thirty years ago, it would have been Robert Redford in the Cruise role, definitely. Maybe Jane Fonda in the Diaz role (think Electric Cowboy).

Oh, and the writing is amusing, possibly the first time the word "sublime" has been uttered by the good guy in a spy caper (for some reason, it's the bad guys who tend to have the large vocabulary.) Really. Go see it. You'll have a good time.

Next up - Eclipse.



Each installment arrives with better and better writing and production value. Howard Shore of LOTR fame is doing the score. This one's supposed to be the guy-friendly edition, with lots of vampire violence. Whatever. At the end of the day, either you like the Twilight books/films or you don't. There's not a ton of middle ground. We'll be going, and we'll likely have a good time.

Now for a Danny film - The Last Airbender.



Originally titled Avatar: The Last Airbender after the TV show (can't imagine why they changed it...), the film seems to come already steeped in its own lore. The plot, as far as I can tell, is superfluous. The big piece up for conversation is the fact that it's an M. Night Shyamalan film. It looks great effects-wise, and I've read that it's been retooled to release in 3-D but should look better than the post-production 3-D-ing of Clash of the Titans (from what I've heard, that's not saying much). Best case scenario - it's M. Night Shyamalan's comeback film and the first of a trilogy. Worst case scenario - it skews too young and makes no logical sense. Either way, pending reviews we'll likely see it opening weekend.

Inception



If Christopher Nolan pulls this off - really, truly, pulls this off - then he's essentially the new James Cameron. It's anyone's guess until then. The cast is solid - Leonardo DiCaprio stars with supporting turns by Ellen Page, Ken Watanabe, Marion Cotillard, Michael Caine, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Cillian Murphy. If Leonardo DiCaprio doesn't annoy you, than it's kind of an actor's actor dream team. It looks terrific, boasts a score by Hans Zimmer (the hardest working musician in Hollywood) - my only concern is that it might be too high-concept to have an engaging story and will wind up collapsing in its genius. Nolan's at a stage in his career when people might not have the chutzpah to tell him when a script needs another turn through.

Or it could be mind-staggeringly brilliant. We'll find out in July.

A change of pace - Ramona and Beezus.

I blogged about Ramona a while ago. Just watched the trailer - I was skeptical for 60 seconds, until I saw more of Ramona and, let's face it, John Corbett. And Sandra Oh. I have high hopes this will be the nostalgia-fest I want it to be.

Mao's Last Dancer

This played at Toronto Film Festival last year to great reviews, but like many films, had to be patient to find a distributor. How good is it? It placed second against Precious for the Audience Award. It is being given a limited release, but I'm confident it should play at Eugene's Bijou. Oh - and the blond should look familiar if you saw Center Stage.

Eat Pray Love

Girl movie! With Glee's Ryan Murphy directing, hopefully this won't be inspiration, served straight up. I like Julia Roberts, so here's hoping.

I need to get going on my day - we're going rock climbing with friends this afternoon. BUT, a few notes - no, I didn't write about Salt. I don't have much to say about Salt, other than the fact that I feel Tommy Lee Jones is around there somewhere saying that Jolie pulled a Peter Pan. It's got potential, but I need someone to tell me that Jolie's not off looking for the Russian with the missing arm.

Also, I just found in the June lineup a limited release film called Ondine that looks cool - I may post about that later. Colin Farrell's in it. Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky may open at some point in the US other than LA/NY, and once I saw Mads Mikkelsen (After the Wedding, Clash of the Titans) was in it, I was even more interested in seeing it.

Oh, and Toy Story 3 - we'll see it soon. I'll let you know.

What films are you looking forward to this summer?

Twilight and the Evils of Voice-Over

I know this review has been a long time coming; all I can say is that I got sick after Thanksgiving weekend, and when I began to improve, Danny caught it.

Now I'm healthy (with just the tiniest cough), I'm 90% done with the Christmas shopping (although in denial about the need to wrap), I finished a chapter two days ago, and life is back on track.

So. Twilight.

The initial hype and fervor has passed, but impressive while it lasted. Before the film opened, all of the conversation fluttered around whether or not the movie would gross enough to warrant the sequels. I had a hunch it would - after all, this was a movie for the same demographic who made Titanic successful (weepy, squealy teen and preteen girls).

When we went, the theater was full of, yea verily, many weepy, squealy girls. How squealy? The scene: high school in Forks, Washington. Bella, sitting, minding her own business when who should enter (in slow motion, so you get all that good hair bounce) but the Cullens? There's Rosalie, Emmett, Jasper, Alice (perhaps not in that order, but there isn't a poem for them like the reindeer) and...wait for it...wait for it...



It was like sitting in a theater full of happy shrieking eels. A bit overdramatic if you consider this particular vampire borrowed his hair from Elvis.

Back to the movie, except, if I'm going to talk about the movie, I need to talk about the book.

Twilight and its successors, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn, are prime examples of how good storytelling sells. Stephenie Meyer was extremely successful is writing books with a compelling enough story to launch the reader through a 2" thick book in 48 hours. The forbidden love story is classic in its archetypal roots and for that reason strikes a chord. The books are really less about Vampires than they are about a Romeo and Juliet story in which Romeo has impressive incisors and the ability to climb a pine with his bare hands.

The supporting characters are strong, particularly Edward's "siblings," and there's enough romantic confusion and romance to keep things entertaining. This is not to say that the writing didn't need a few more passes through the editing department. But we believe Bella as a serious, thoughtful teen who has completely fallen in love with a man who wants to eat her.

I know some people became frustrated with Bella as the series progressed; I thought it was unfair. She's 17 and dealing with International vampire culture. That she doesn't collapse into a paroxysm of trepidation is really to her credit.

The movie is so wrapped up in the thing which Twilight has become that it has difficulty really exploring its space, settling in, and becoming its own entity rather than a book adaptation. No one looks comfortable in their movie skin, with the exception of Elizabeth Reaser's Esme Cullen. For the Twilight fan, the film is a chance to see the book come to life. For the outsider, a lot of the plot developments and character motives would remain a little too mysterious.

The first half takes too much time trying to develop, but speeds up well during the second half. Funny, because the book did the same thing. Difference is that the book managed to entertain when nothing much was going on but Bella's reflections on Edward's physical perfection.

I would see it again, and enjoy it (unlike Bond, which I did see a second time and zoned out through the last half), and I'm genuinely looking forward to New Moon.

I was looking forward to it even before the directorship was handed off to Chris Weitz. As the director of Golden Compass and About a Boy (one of my favorite movies), I think he'll help bring the production values up a notch. Or ten. Because there's nothing wrong with making the movie not look like it was made for the Sci-Fi channel. I think the hand-held camera is great and looked terrific for the Bourne movies, but for films with a fantastical element I think the camera needs to be grounded more often, to aid with the suspension of disbelief.

Haven't heard anything yet about the script, IMDB still lists it with Melissa Rosenberg, but if they hand that one off, I think that's great. The film opens with a lot of voice-over which should have been cut IN THE FIRST DRAFT PEOPLE, DID WE LEARN NOTHING FROM FILM SCHOOL????? If you're going to use first-person narration, you had better be writing the great American film, and there had better not be vampires involved. Or werewolves. I'm sure this was all covered in class. In a perfect world, I would have the producers court Steve Kloves (of Harry Potter fame) or Jan Sardi (The Notebook), with a co-writing credit for Delia Ephron (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants), a writer who has no issues getting into the heads of teen girls (She used voice-over in the form of letters, yes, but it worked).

This is really less of a review than a discussion. I'm okay with that. If you want to know what the movie's about, read the book. It'll take about 48 hours.