The Screengrab : 21

Morning Deal Report: Michael Douglas Eyes “Wall Street” Return

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

As we noted yesterday, Americans by the millions are looking to a talking dog to take their minds off their problems for a couple of hours. But what about those of us who want to wallow in the current economic crisis? Good news! Twentieth Century Fox is moving forward with a sequel to Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. And while there’s no word that Stone himself will return, the original Gordon Gekko, Michael Douglas, appears to be on board. Allan Loeb (21) will pen the return of Gekko, “who has recently been sprung from prison and re-emerges into a much more tumultuous financial world than the one he once lorded over.” Bad news, Two and a Half Men fans: Per Variety, “The Bud Fox character, played by Charlie Sheen in the original, will not appear in the latest incarnation.”

In comic book movie news, there’s been a major casting change over at Iron Man 2. Don’t worry, you’ll still get your Downey on. But fans of Terrence Howard, who was lined up to become War Machine in the sequel, prepare to get Cheadled. Yes, The Hollywood Reporter has the word that Don Cheadle will take over the role. “Marvel had no comment, but sources close to the deal said negotiations with Howard fell through over financial differences, among other reasons.” Maybe he just didn’t like the suit.

Rat Bastard is coming to a theater near you. Charlotte’s Web director Gary Winick will helm the tale of “a conman who plots revenge when his old partner steals the loot from their latest grift and hides out by posing as a chef for a family on New York's Upper East Side,” according to Variety.

Related:
Gordon Gekko's Speechwriter Would Like to Clarify
Adams vs. Marvel: Iron Man Turns to Crime?

DVD Digest for July 22, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week, Criterion gives DVD buyers a re-pressing of an old favorite and a new version of a classic. Also, plenty of Blu-Ray for your enjoyment, provided you’re not in the market for good movies.

DVD of the Week: Years ago, Criterion released four of Carl Th. Dreyer’s greatest films in deluxe versions, but his 1932 classic Vampyr has only been available in a subpar transfer from Image. Until now, that is. This week, Vampyr finally gets the treatment it richly deserves in a new two-disc set from the folks at Criterion. Along with both German- and English-credited versions of the film, the DVD contains a commentary from film scholar Tony Rayns, a 1966 documentary about Dreyer’s work, a radio broadcast of Dreyer speaking about filmmaking, and much more. Even the insert is indispensible, containing not only essays on the film, but a book featuring the film’s original screenplay as well as the story on which it was based. Naturally, any DVD version of a Dreyer film is a must for any serious film lover, but to see one of his most significant works given the top-shelf treatment like this is magnificent news.

Also this week, Criterion is re-releasing Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low in a new version featuring several new features, plus a new high-definition transfer. So if you didn’t pick up the film last time around, now’s your chance.

In a slow week for new movies coming to DVD, today brings the release of the college-students-taking-on-Vegas thriller 21 (Sony, also Blu-Ray), Famke Janssen in Turn the River (Universal), and the John C. Reilly/Seann William Scott comedy The Promotion (Weinstein).

On the TV-on-DVD front, the big news this week is the long-awaited Region 1 release of Spaced: The Complete Series (Warner). Fans of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz will finally be able to get a taste of the series that introduced to the world the stars (Simon Pegg, Nick Frost) and director (Edgar Wright) of those films, along with the witty, pop-culture-savvy brand of humor that made those movies fanboy favorites. Also this week: Las Vegas Season 5 (Universal).

Finally, coming this week to Blu-Ray only: the Sony horror trifecta of I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, and Urban Legend; Universal’s Mummy trilogy of The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, and The Scorpion King; and The Perfect Storm (Warner). And if you’re actually waiting for good movies to come out on Blu-Ray, take heart- October is only three months away.

2008: First Quarter Wrap-Up

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

It’s not that I didn’t see this coming.

By my reckoning, 2007 was a pretty solid year for movies, so I suspected 2008 would bring a cyclical downturn in cinematic quality (accompanied by a distinctly fishy, low-tide smell wafting from our nation’s multiplexes). And, yes, I know we’re in the Horse Latitudes of the movie-going year, before the summer blockbusters and the fall Oscar contenders...but, seriously, has anyone seen anything really good yet?

By this time last year, I’d already seen four of the movies that wound up on my 2007 Top Ten list: the fine, Oscar-neglected Zodiac, a sneak preview of Knocked Up at the South-By-Southwest Film Festival, along with two outstanding documentaries, The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters and the lesser-known but equally awesome roller derby-umentary Hell On Wheels.

Even the first quarter cheese I saw last year was pretty entertaining: the silly sexploitation of Black Snake Moan, the gay-panic-at-the-disco iconography of 300, and the A.D.D. chaos of Smoking Aces, a fake Guy Richie movie I enjoyed at least as much Snatch.

So far, at the quarter-mile mark of 2008, the only truly Top 10-caliber flick I've seen is Full Battle Rattle, a SXSW Special Jury award-winning documentary (reviewed here by Mr. Von Doviak on March 17) about a simulated Iraqi province in California’s Mojave desert, populated by Iraqi-American citizens and U.S. Army “insurgents” in a full-immersion training scenario where soldiers practice both their combat and diplomacy skills before heading off to the real war in Iraq.

As for the rest of the year-to-date...feh. Cloverfield had moments, but no characters. Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, Penelope and 21 were all pleasantly unobjectionable but instantly forgettable, and I Am Legend’s deserted Manhattan streets were compelling until the director filled them with boring video game ghoulies.

But, hey, maybe things are looking up for 2008...only three more shopping days ‘til Zombie Strippers!

Don’t Bet the House on Casino Movies

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:30:00 GMT

The success of 21 at the box office ($46 million and counting) probably ensures a whole new wave of casino movies on the way – not to mention a new wave of would-be geniuses who think they can beat the system crowding the tables in Vegas. James Donaghy of The Guardian takes note of Hollywood’s addiction to games of chance. “If some ball-busting genie made Hollywood choose a vice then gambling would win every time. The movies are infatuated with risk-takers: the maverick, the hopeless optimist, the plucky underdog who beats the odds. Then there's the charming conman who breaks the bank at Caesars who never has to buy another drink as long as he lives.”

Sure, it all looks easy enough in 21, with its vastly oversimplified card-counting scenario. Sadly, it’s not that easy or Las Vegas would have closed down by now. “Any casino, of course, is a fool's paradise. A mechanical moneymaking machine designed with the precision and artistry of the watchmaker to separate mugs from their money. As you watch the croupiers, dealers and pit bosses you're watching an optical illusion of fairness. Statistically, the house has an edge… There is an entire industry dedicated to catching the cheats and the city of Las Vegas is a breeding ground for the bleeding edge of high-tech surveillance technology.”

That technology includes 3-D facial recognition software, which should theoretically limit the effectiveness of the fake nose worn by Matt Damon in Ocean’s 13 or the wigs worn by the 21 gang. But Richard Marcus, “the self-declared number one expert on casino cheating,” isn’t impressed. “"Facial recognition is an absolute zero. There's not one person alive who's ever been caught by facial recognition.” That’s not to say he’s a big fan of 21 or the real-life MIT blackjack team on which the movie is based. He’s met two of the members, and “neither one would ever have had the slightest chance of joining one of my casino cheating teams.”

Donaghy concludes with “Four key movie gambling blags” (“blag” being British slang for con or scam, dontcha know), taking a gratuitously mean swipe at Sarah Jessica Parker in his take on Honeymoon in Vegas: “In a brilliant twist on an old classic, James Caan fixes a card game against Nicolas Cage so he can win something totally worthless - Sarah Jessica Parker. Much hilarity ensues (in the minds of the scriptwriters) as Cage tries to win back the thinking man's Mister Ed.” Oof. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas indeed.

The Real Deal: "21"'s Blonde Card Counter

Phil Nugent — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Mark Shanahan of the Boston Globe tracks down Jane Willis, the female member of the "MIT blackjack team", a group of collegiate math whizzes (not all of them from MIT--Willis herself was a student at Harvard Law School at the time) who stormed the casinos to use their card-counting skills to rake in the big bucks. This story--after a great deal of fictionalization, and after being filtered through the already fictionalized book Bringing Down the House bu Ben Mazrich--serves as the basis for the new movie 21, in which Willis is played, more or less, by Kate Bosworth. Willis, who hails from Mount Vernon, Illinois, is now a 38-year-old, twice-married lawyer working in a Boston firm. Once upon a time, she didn't like to talk about her involvement in the blackjack team for fear that it would hurt her career or freak out her parents (who finally found out about it six years after she'd stopped hitting the tables). But when she's asked now why more people aren't aware of how she picked up extra money in college, she just shrugs: "Sounds weird to say, but it just never came up."

Willis and the boyfriend who eventually became her first husband--both of the confirmed "math geeks", she says--got roped in because they both knew one of the big players in the group, Jeff Ma. "Jeff would occasionally have an expensive bottle of wine or champagne, and it didn't make a whole lot of sense. Then he told us about Vegas. I think it dawned on him that we could play blackjack and also give the team, which was mostly Asian and male, a little diversity." (Attention, Rush Limbaugh!) She soon discovered that her gender gave her an edge, since the security people keeping an eye out for counters tended to not suspect women. 21 fabricates a romance between the Bosworth character and the Ma stand-in, and it exaggerates the riches that came her way. As a "spotter", it was her job to keep an eye on a game and count cards until the time was ripe to signal Ma to appear, join the game, and start vacuuming up the casino's money. She and the other spotters were paid a percentage of Ma's winnings; Willis, who Ma says only worked with him about once a month, would clear about three thousand bucks over the course of a rich weekend. (Ma says that he figures he made more than a million dollars from the tables while the team was in operation.) Though the work didn't entail the James Bond dress-up techniques that are in the movie--and Willis stresses that counting cards isn't illegal, however much it may burn the casino bosses' asses--and Willis describes it as a "grind," she recalls getting a charge out of the excitement and the rush of winning. It's an interesting story, even if the moviemakers thought they had to "improve" on it.

SXSW Review: 21

Scott Von Doviak — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

It’s not unusual for South by Southwest to select a high-profile studio release as the opening night attraction, but it’s hard to understand how a movie as slick and empty as 21 could have been chosen for the honor. It’s an anti-SXSW film if ever there was one.

Directed by Robert Luketic (Monster-in-Law), 21 is based on Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, although there’s no evidence on the screen to suggest that anyone involved with the production read any further than the title on the book’s cover. Mezrich’s book is nonfiction; Luketic’s movie is nonsense.

Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe) is Ben Campbell, an M.I.T. student with plans to attend grad school at Harvard. The tuition is a little out of his reach: in the neighborhood of $300,000. His nonlinear equations professor Mickey Rosa (Kevin Spacey) takes an interest in Ben and invites him to join an extracurricular student group he’s mentoring. These math geniuses have used their skills to develop a sophisticated blackjack card–counting system – or at least, we’re forced to assume it’s sophisticated. Screenwriters Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loeb have boiled the mechanics of 21, one of the most engrossing sections of the book, down to a handful of gestures and code words.

Rosa and his students take the act on the road to Vegas, where they work the tables as a team. The big flaw in their plan is that they apparently only hit the casinos where Laurence Fishburne is in charge of security. Soon the entire operation is at risk, along with Ben’s future.

Spacey isn’t believable for a second; Larry the Cable Guy would make a more convincing math professor. As the team’s two Asian-American members, Liza Lapira and Aaron Yoo radiate ten times as much charisma as Sturgess and co-star Kate Bosworth in a fraction of the screen time. (The actual M.I.T. blackjack team was predominantly Asian-American, but heaven forbid we be deprived of bland, attractive white people in the leading roles.) Between the Scorsese-lite stylistics and the dumbed-down plot (including a stupid vengeance twist and an obligatory romance), it’s tempting to think the SXSW powers-that-be chose to show 21 first only to make the rest of the festival selections look even better.

The Five Most Intriguing SXSW Trailers: Narrative Films

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Yesterday we took a look at the most notable documentaries playing at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, which kicks off a week from today in Austin, TX. Today let’s check out the narrative films. Unfortunately, some of the movies we’re most excited about don’t have trailers available online, but here’s the best of the rest.

21

Truthfully, we’re torn about this one. It’s based on the terrific nonfiction thriller Bringing Down the House, about a team of MIT students who become blackjack experts in Las Vegas, and it may actually contain the first bearable Kevin Spacey performance in years. But the casting of bland Jim Sturgess and Kate Bosworth has us wincing, particularly since the real MIT Blackjack Team was made up primarily of Asian-Americans.

Mister Lonely

A Michael Jackson impersonator falls for a Marilyn Monroe lookalike. "Meanwhile, a miracle is happening somewhere in a Latin American jungle." It could be unbearably precious, but it is Harmony Korine's first movie since Julien Donkey-Boy, so we can’t help but be curious.

New Orleans Mon Amour

Director Michael Almereyda made the little-seen but weirdly compelling Happy Here and Now (which played SXSW in 2003) in pre-Katrina New Orleans. After the flood, Almereyda returns to the Crescent City tell the story of a surgeon trying to get his life back together as the city tries to do the same.

Goliath

Austin’s own Zellner Brothers may not be following the Coens to the Oscar podium anytime soon, but they do have their own special brand of comedic deadpan. Their latest feature Goliath, about a man searching for his lost cat, got a mixed reaction when it premiered at Sundance, but the hometown crowd is sure to be on their side.

Baghead

Greta Gerwig is the undisputed queen of mumblecore, starring in no less than three such films at this year’s SXSW festival. One of them is the Duplass Brothers’ Baghead, the mumblecore horror-comedy about four friends spending a weekend at a woodsy cabin, where they are menaced by a man with a paper bag over his head. Even if you can’t stand these sort of inarticulate twentysomething characters, you can at least hold out hope that Baghead will do something terrible to them.

As a bonus, here’s a short film that will be playing this year’s festival. It’s called "I Slammed My Dick in the Drawer." We think it’s self-explanatory.

SXSW Preview

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

The full roster won’t be released until sometime after Super Bowl Sunday, but the preliminary highlights of the 15th annual South by Southwest Film Festival have been announced.

As you read here yesterday, kicking off the 2008 fest on March 7th will be 21, based on the self-explanatory Ben Mezrich book Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. It’s probably long past time to keep hoping for Kevin Spacey to return to form, but his role as the professor who masterminds the ring of blackjack geniuses would seem to be his most promising in years. Kate Bosworth co-stars as the world’s sexiest math student.

Other intriguing entries include Dreams With Sharp Teeth, a documentary retrospective on the always prickly and entertaining sci-fi author Harlan Ellison, and Wild Blue Yonder, in which Celia Maysles turns the tables on her famous documentarian father and uncle, Albert and David Maysles.

On the back burner, there’s Michael Radford’s Flawless, in which Demi Moore and Michael Caine team up for a diamond heist, and Run, Fatboy, Run, in which Hot Fuzz star Simon Pegg attempts to win a marathon and the respect of his family. It’s directed by David Schwimmer, if you want to start curbing your enthusiasm now.

SXSW runs from March 7th through the 15th, all over Austin, TX.

Morning Deal Report: No Dogs or Chinese Allowed

Peter Smith — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 17:45:00 GMT

21, the adaptation of the non-fiction bestseller Bringing Down the House, will open SXSW this year. Allow me to editorialize for a minute on this subject. Bringing Down the House is the story of a group of MIT students — mostly Asian-American MIT students — who counted cards in blackjack to win big in Las Vegas. 21 is the story of a group of white, Caucasian, Rockwellian, turnipy-colored, white-ass white people. (And their one Asian friend, Aaron Yoo, as "Choi.") I guess there weren't enough Asian-American actors who needed interesting roles. Clearly, more Asians = less money for Columbia Pictures; it's not like they'd put money on the line for what I'm sure they consider a small detail. But it's outrageously disrespectful to the actual students, and to Asian-Americans in general, to hand over most of the roles to "audience-relatable" white actors, and relegate the one Asian-American actor to a supporting spot. Still, I suppose it could be worse; his part could always be played by Rob Schneider in yellow-face.

Mathieu Amalric, of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, will play the villain in the next Bond movie.

Less than a week after her assassination, Benazir Bhutto gets a biopic. The catch: the producers don't want to "create any controversy." (!)

Trailer Roundup: 21

Paul Clark — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

If Hollywood is to be believed, smart people are only interesting when they're using their intelligence for selfish, greedy ends. So it is here, in a movie inspired by an actual case in which a group of college students took a Las Vegas casino by counting cards in blackjack. Of course, blackjack and math aren't particularly fun to watch by Hollywood's standards- blackjack doesn't have the built-in drama of poker, after all- so the trailer includes plenty of tricked-up filmmaking like sped-up play and funky camera angles. In addition, he's still trying to force Kate Bosworth on us, despite her being largely rejected by paying audiences (seriously, what was she doing as Lois Lane?). Still, I'll see this, since a friend of mine worked as an extra in some the MIT scenes, and I'd like to support him. It helps that this looks somewhat better than his last extra gig, last year's The Game Plan.