The Screengrab : reese witherspoon

Christina Aguilera Goes Burlesque

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 05 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

“Christina Aguilera will make her screen debut for Screen Gems in Burlesque, a contemporary musical that Steven Antin will direct,” Variety reports. “Aguilera will play an ambitious smalltown girl with a big voice who finds love, family and success in a Los Angeles neo-burlesque club that appears to be right out of Bob Fosse's Cabaret.” It does sound like a premise tailor-made for her talents, you must admit.

Jim Carrey has become Reese Witherspoon. Used Guys, previously envisioned as a vehicle for Carrey and Ben Stiller, has been revamped as a Stiller/Witherspoon pairing. “ The comedy takes place in a future run by women, who clone and trade men like used cars. Stiller and Carrey were to play returned, outdated models who go in search of their masculinity. The current take at Fox focuses more on the relationship between Stiller's character and Witherspoon's clone owner,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Thar be whales here! Warner Bros. is bringing Everybody Loves Whales to the screen, based on “the true 1988 tale of the rescue of a trio of California gray whales found under the ice of the Arctic Circle near Barrow, Alaska. Over a two-week period, the U.S. and Soviet governments joined with oil company execs, environmental activists, Eskimos, businessmen and military officers to help free the giant mammals,” Variety reports.

DVD Digest for April 28, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week, Hollywood January-doldrums releases start finding their way to DVD, while the studios continue to flood the market with tie-ins to their upcoming summer blockbusters.

Hey, remember three months ago when Bride Wars (Fox, also Blu-Ray), Hotel for Dogs (Disney, also Blu-Ray), and The Uninvited (Paramount, also Blu-Ray) all got released in theatres? If not, they’ll all be hitting DVD today to remind you of their existence. Other recent releases hitting stores this week: Mark Ruffalo and Ethan Hawke in What Doesn’t Kill You (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Van Damme goes arthouse in JCVD (Peace Arch); Rod Lurie’s Valerie Plame-inspired drama Nothing But the Truth (Sony); and the documentary Stranded: I’ve come from a plane that crashed in the mountains (Zeitgeist), about the same plane crash that inspired the book and movie Alive.

This week’s biggest classics release is a pair of films from the great, controversial Japanese director Nagisa Oshima, In the Realm of the Senses (Criterion, also Blu-Ray) and Empire of Passion (Criterion). Both films, originally released during Oshima’s fertile mid-1970s period, will be released with plenty of extras, including documentaries, interviews, and even cut (sorry) scenes on the Realm disc. Also today, Criterion will be releasing a new edition of Stephen Frears’ British gangster drama The Hit, and Jim McBride’s semi-forgotten cult classic Glen and Randa (VCI) will hit stores as well.

New TV on DVD releases hitting stores today include: Seth McFarlane’s American Dad vol. 4 (Fox), and the animated series Marvel X-Men vol. 1 and vol. 2 (both Disney).

And just in time for their new big-screen counterparts to arrive in theatres, Star Trek: The Original Series vol. 1 (Paramount) and The Da Vinci Code (Sony) will arrive today in Blu-Ray only releases.

Finally, with this week’s Plot Synopsis of the Week, I’ve decided to spotlight something other than a Japanimation title this time. There are plenty of movies like Fox’s new direct-to-DVD feature Legally Blondes dumped into the market every week, but this one caught my attention mostly because it hits all the expected marks for a movie of this kind. It almost sounds like a parody. Don’t believe me? Check it out:

Elle Woods may have moved upward and onward through law school, but her pink and frilly spirit lives on in her young, adorable cousins Annabelle and Isabelle (Camilla and Rebecca Rosso). Fresh from England, the blond twosome assume their fashion savviness will help them make friends at their new California prep academy in no time flat. One can imagine their frizz-inducing horror, then, when they discover that their new place of learning is run by uniform-loving, junior-capitalist snobs! After the most influential students at school frame Anna and Izzy for a crime they didn’t commit, it’s up to the girls to prove not only their innocence but their capabilities. Reese Witherspoon presents this spin-off of the beloved franchise that helped make her a superstar. LEGALLY BLONDES is helmed by Savage Steve Holland, the quirky director of BETTER OFF DEAD and ONE CRAZY SUMMER.

Translation: Reese Witherspoon got sick of playing Elle Woods after installment #2, but she was still contracted for one more movie. So instead of shelling out to make her happy, we’ll have her “present” a cheapo version to polish off the trilogy, thereby allowing us to plaster her name in big letters above the title in order to fool those who don’t look too hard at the DVD boxes. No mention of siblings in the original films, but we can always do the “cousin” connection, since it worked for the American Pie spinoffs, right? The twist this time is that there are two of them- twins, even! No name twins, but what can you do? From there, the plot practically writes itself. Fish-out-of-water comedy, snobbish baddies, little dogs, and blonde jokes out the derriere! How could it miss? Oh, and why not get a comedy director from the eighties who needs the work?

See what I mean?

Morning Deal Report: Reese Witherspoon to Get Naughty in “Nice”?

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

The tween demographic was once again in control of the weekend box office, as Zac Efron in 17 Again topped the charts with $24.1 million. Apparently they’ve already had their fill of Hannah Montana, which slipped to fourth place with $12.7. Enough adults turned up at the multiplex to secure a second place finish for State of Play with $14.1 million. Monsters vs. Aliens and Fast & Furious rounded out the top five.

Is Reese Witherspoon finally sick of the rom-com carousel? Witherspoon may get back to her black comedy roots with Nice, about “a magazine writer who accidentally kills her boyfriend. She finds a way to get rid of the body and discovers that killing boyfriends is easier than breaking up with them,” Variety reports. Witherspoon is not yet signed, but those of us who miss the spitfire of Freeway and Election are hoping it happens.

Felicity Jones has been cast as the female lead in The Men at the Pru, the “1970s insurance-world dramedy” from Ricky Gervais. “Jones will play Julie, who is led to believe by the men around her that a woman should focus on raising a family but who wants to break out and pursue a career in photography,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Related:
Giamatti and Witherspoon Are Downsizing
Truth or Date with Ricky Gervais

DreamWorks CEO Brags About New 3D Technology, Talks Shit About Your Daddy

Phil Nugent — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:45:00 GMT

"There were two major developments in cinema during the 20th century. The first came in the Twenties when silent movies became talkies. The second came in the following decade, when we went from black-and-white to color. Now, 70 years on, we're in the third great revolution: the new generation of 3D." That's Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation, explaining why the release tomorrow of the company's Monsters vs. Aliens is such an historic occasion that you must bow down before him. ""I honestly believe that," says Katzenberg. "I really don't think this is an exaggeration." (If he'd just said that he didn't think he was exaggerating and left out the "really", there'd still be room for us to doubt.) But those of us with long memories--memories that stretch back as far as, say, last month, when Coraline was released, or even those senile few old enough to remember Beowulf, practically a whole year and a half ago--have been down this road of hype before. Why is this 3D revolution different from all previous 3D revolutions, going back to the bygone days of 1953's House of Wax? Let's wind Jeffrey up again and see what comes out:

"Until now almost all of the 3D movies that audiences have seen were filmed in 2D and then post-produced into 3D. With Monsters vs. Aliens, this is our first film totally authored in the 3D format – and not just any 3D format. We use something called InTru3D, which combines DreamWorks Animation's authoring tools with the latest Intel technology, allowing artists to tell a more compelling story and give film-goers a more exciting, immersive 3D movie experience. It's a huge development and so very important. This is something that people have to see and experience and write and talk about and let the audience know that it's coming. Hopefully, that will make people aware that this not our fathers' 3D." That shit that your father put up with sometimes had notorious side effects, and that was on top of the most obvious cost of watching a 3D movie, which was that more often than not, the movie you were watching was something along the lines of Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn. "People used to get headaches and some even got nauseous," says Katzenberg. "And who ever heard of a successful business that makes its customers throw up? Well, apart from the alcohol business!" Let it be noted that even when on the verge of making history, Jeff still had it in him to make a funny.

Monsters vs. Aliens inaugurates a new slate of DreamWorks animated films that will be made in the new 3D process, but in a knowing move that may be lost on a significant portion of its young target audience, the story, involving a strike force of mutants, including a not-quite-fifty-foot woman (voice by Reese Witherspoon), who are called into action to combat a threat to the Earth posed by Rainn Wilson--playing an alien visitor, though I think it would be just as plausible if he were just Rainn Wilson in a bad mood, is a parodic throwback to the kind of '50s sci-fi spectacle that was routinely served up in your father's 3D. This perfect fusion of form and content was not planned. As The New York Times has reported, Katzenberg informed the project's directors, Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon, that they were making it in 3D when " work on the movie was well under way". “We were totally taken aback,” says Vernon. “I didn’t sign up to do something garish.” Well, yeah, dude. Nobody would think you were planning to make a garish movie called Monsters vs. Aliens. (I see Sven Nykvist as chief D.P. and Anthony Hopkins as the Jello-O monster.) According to the Times, "The DreamWorks team associated 3-D with Captain EO, the 1980s-era Disneyland attraction, long since closed, that starred Michael Jackson as a space explorer. Stuffed with 3-D gimmicks that extended from the screen into the audience — lasers, smoke, flying fuzzy aliens — that film, directed by Francis Ford Coppola with George Lucas as executive producer, defined cinematic cheese for a generation of Hollywood creative types." But Katzenberg made the "not-your-father's-3D" speech at them, and even assured them, “I’m pretty sure that no business can succeed in which it makes the customer hurl.” (You'll note that this is a version of the same joke he tells the British newspapers, but when he's telling it to people who work for him, the gloves come off.)

There are also clear business advantages to making 3D movies, which may conceivably have appealed to the capitalist pirate who dwells deep inside Katzenberg's gentle-Buddhist-monk soul: "Tickets for 3-D screenings can be sold for a premium. It would also be harder to pirate DreamWorks movies: sneaking a camcorder into a theater — which is the way most bootleg DVDs are born — wouldn’t work at a 3-D screening. And 3-D was a way of standing out in a marketplace increasingly cluttered with computer-animated movies, as Coraline recently demonstrated with surprisingly strong box-office returns." The downside is that DreamWorks did have to scale back its plans to open the movie on 5000 screens across the U.S., because there aren't that many 3D-friendly screens in the U.S. (Instead, it'll be rolled out on about 2000 screens.) After a period of adjustment and a "tutorial" from John Bruno, who worked on the theme park attraction T2 3-D: Battle Across Time,, the group assembled for Monsters vs. Aliens felt they were ready to make the leap. "Although Mr. Katzenberg had promised that 3-D would not be used as a gimmick," says the Times, "DreamWorks ultimately couldn’t help itself. When the film was nearly finished, Mr. Katzenberg asked the creative team to add some more 3-D 'pow,' according to Mr. Vernon. Most of that pow was tooled back — B.O.B.’s lone eyeball no longer rolls out into the audience, and debris from explosions doesn’t land in the front row — but they kept one at the beginning of the movie: a paddleball sequence. 'That was basically us telling the audience, "Look what we could do to you, but we’re going to control ourselves" ' Ms. Stewart said." Will history be conclusively made on Friday. Having seen Coraline, I can tell you this much: it's definitely true that the glasses you have to wear are now a lot cooler.

Related: Screengrab Review: Monsters vs. Aliens

Precursors: Mars Attacks!

Screengrab Review: Monsters vs. Aliens

Andrew Osborne — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

At the 3-D screening of Monsters vs. Aliens I attended, there was a collective gasp from the children in the audience when the first image seemingly launched off the screen at us, and a cynical, “It took five people to write that?” from an adult behind me when the end credits finally rolled. My own opinion fell somewhere between those two reactions.

While generally more broad and less well-written than a typical Pixar film, the gang at DreamWorks Animation (under the direction of Conrad Vernon and Rob Letterman) gives good visual in their latest, with everything from spaceships to red rubber paddle balls zooming towards (and, in correctly equipped theaters, beyond) the screen, as well as a series of cleverly conceived and executed action sequences: one, involving an epic battle on and around the Golden Gate Bridge, is especially breath-taking.

The story and characters, meanwhile, don’t go a lot deeper than the high-concept title: Reese Witherspoon voices a young bride-to-be named Susan, who transforms into a 50-ish foot woman called Ginormica after getting hit by a mysterious meteorite on her wedding day.

“Ginormica,” in fact, is the name assigned to Susan after she’s captured by a secret government agency tasked with containing the world’s creepiest creatures, including a brainless blob (Seth Rogen), a fish-ape (or possibly ape-fish) “missing link” (Will Arnett), a Brundlefly-esque amalgam of mad scientist and cockroach (Hugh Laurie) and Insectosaurus (Jimmy Kimmel), a giant Mothra-style insect several times larger than even Ginormica (and whose incoherent yowlings somehow required yet another celebrity voice). When evil extraterrestrial Gallaxar (a relatively restrained Rainn Wilson) invades, the U.S. President (a disappointing Stephen Colbert, badly in need of restraint) is convinced by General Monger (Kiefer Sutherland, channeling Larry the Cable Guy) to arrange a battle royale involving...say it with me now...monsters vs. aliens.

Along the way, there are plenty of (mostly) clever gags -- my favorite involving a thumb-less wedding guest -- and nice (if simplistic) messages about acceptance and girl power. Meanwhile, even those currently experiencing Rogen fatigue may get a kick out of the actor’s familiar stoner giggle issuing from a family-friendly blob...a character the husky Canadian was pretty much born to play.

And besides, griping that DreamWorks’ new offering doesn’t measure up to, say, WALL-E or The Incredibles isn’t entirely fair. Since at least the Jeffrey Katzenberg era at Disney, American mainstream animated features (from Who Framed Roger Rabbit to Coraline) have been consistently smarter, better crafted and more humane than most Hollywood product over the same period. If Monsters vs. Aliens is just an average kiddie film, then here’s hoping all the kiddies raised on such films will come to demand at least as much quality from the studios as their generation moves forward into adulthood.

Related Stories:
Trailer Review: Monsters vs. Aliens
The Top 50 Movies of 2009

Morning Deal Report: Giamatti and Witherspoon Are Downsizing

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:30:00 GMT

Alexander Payne has finished his latest script, a “social satire” (aren’t they all?) called Downsizing. Paul Giamatti, Reese Witherspoon and Sacha Baron Cohen are all attached, and it’s clear from the plot description that Payne is taking the title quite literally. Giamatti plays “a man low on money who decides he can have a much nicer life if he undergoes a process to shrink himself,” Variety reports.

Atom Egoyan is remaking the French thriller Nathalie…, and naturally he’s calling it Chloe. The story “centers on a married woman (Julianne Moore) who hires a prostitute (Amanda Seyfried) to find out whether her husband (Liam Neeson) is cheating on her. The prostitute, however, cons her about the nature of her husband's fidelity, a move that puts the family in jeopardy,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Sam Raimi and Jonathan Demme have been added to the upcoming SXSW roster. Raimi’s work-in-progress Drag Me to Hell will screen in the midnight slot at the Paramount Theater on March 15, while Demme will premiere his latest documentary, Neil Young Trunk Show. Yes, Jonathan Demme has made another Neil Young performance film. I can’t stop him.

Related:
No Venom for Sam Raimi
Scorsese Passes the Baton to Demme on Bob Marley Documentary

Morning Deal Report: Ang Lee’s Slice of “Pi”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Ang Lee is in talks to direct an adaptation of Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi. That should be interesting, since the story “revolves around a youth who is the lone survivor of a sunken freighter and winds up sharing a lifeboat with a hyena, an injured zebra, an orangutan and a hungry Bengal tiger,” per Variety.

James L. Brooks returns to the director’s chair with a romantic comedy tentatively titled How Do You Know? Owen Wilson and Paul Rudd are two potential points in a love triangle that also includes Reese Witherspoon. “Rudd would play a white-collar executive vying for Witherspoon's affections, while Wilson would portray a professional baseball pitcher who is also a love interest.”

Robert Rodriguez is going back to the future with Nerverackers. “Set in 2085, the story centers on a character named Joe Tezca who is part of an elite unit dispatched to quell a crime wave in a theoretically perfect future society.”

Related:
Ang Lee Takes Woodstock
Rose McGowan in Chains!

2008 in Review: Scott Von Doviak's Top 10 Unwatchables of the Year

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

As your resident movie janitor, I could hardly wrap up the year without a rundown of 2008's greatest crimes against cinema. As always, I see them so you don't have to.

10. STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS

I have little to add to my earlier rant. The sad thing is, there are still a few George Lucas zombies willing to defend this star dreck.

9. STEP UP 2 THE STREETS

A movie that raises many questions, not least of which is: “There was a Step Up 1?” A teenage street dancer (Briana Evigan, the next Demi Moore, if we needed one) is forced to enroll in an upscale school for the performing arts, leaving her old crew to accuse her of NOT KEEPING IT REELZ. This can only be settled with a dance-off! A thoroughly unconvincing dance-off that looks like an outtake from Night of the Living Dead: The Musical.

8. MAX PAYNE

Here we have a ludicrous new film genre (coincidentally featuring Ludacris): the videogame noir. Based on a first-person shooter game that was influenced by Hong Kong action movies and the "bullet time" effects of The Matrix, Max Payne is at least three steps removed from any semblance of originality. It boasts a stylish surface, but there's nothing new beneath it.

7. THE RUINS

Reviewed here at the time of its release. At least, it was in theaters when I started writing the review; I think it had been pulled by the time I posted it. A gripping, intense read becomes a dead teenager movie with laughable CG effects.

6.TYLER PERRY'S THE FAMILY THAT PREYS

Within the first five minutes of The Family That Preys, four different characters utter some variation on the line, "I need a drink." By the end of this latest Tyler Perry opus, I could definitely relate. Family is a mean-spirited endurance test populated by some of the most unpleasant movie characters in recent history. Perry prides himself on leaving out the sex and violence and making movies the whole family can enjoy. It's hard to imagine families enjoying this one, though; they're more likely to be traumatized when they aren't bored out of their minds.

5. FIRST SUNDAY

So bad that I’ve already covered it here as part of the Unwatchable series. Nuff said.

4. FOUR CHRISTMASES

Here's a movie that spends an hour showing how unpleasant family can be and how grotesque small children are before doing a complete U-turn into sickening sentimentality and hypocritical moralizing. Director Seth Gordon, who made last year's terrific documentary The King of Kong, turns out to be just another sitcom hack. Witherspoon is so chirpy and strident, it's not clear that anyone told her this was supposed to be a comedy. To say that Vaughn is phoning it in these days would be an insult to telecommuters everywhere. Four Christmases with this bunch is four too many.

3. PRIDE AND GLORY

There's nothing wrong with a gritty cop drama, so long as it has something to offer besides grit. Pride and Glory provides murky images, shaky camerawork, a muddy soundtrack, blood by the buckets and profanity by the bushel. It's easy to see why director Gavin O'Connor buried his movie under all this sludge; scrape it away and there's nothing but the most generic "bad cop" movie possible underneath.

2. TRAITOR

Don Cheadle is the world's most boring Muslim - but at least he's not evil like all the other ones! There's very little suspense in this dull, talky thriller, but there is a laughable twist ending for the ages.

1. THE LOVE GURU

Everything you’ve heard is true. This isn’t a case of mass hypnosis or the critical brotherhood sticking together – it really is that bad. Mike Myers described this comedy about a self-help guru’s attempts to help a hockey player win a championship as “a delivery system for some wonderful ideas.” Actually, it’s a delivery system for dick jokes, each one dumber than the last.

Trailer Review: Monsters vs. Aliens

Paul Clark — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:00:00 GMT

After Monday’s Trailer Review of the teaser for Pixar’s Up, most trailers would be a letdown, and this one is no exception. Yet taken on its own terms, Monsters vs. Aliens looks pretty fun. For years, Dreamworks has been Pixar’s most ubiquitous rivals in the CG animation market, but while films like the Shrek franchise and Shark Tale relied far too heavily on easy pop culture references for their humor, they’ve been getting better in recent years, re-positioning themselves as the Warner Bros. to Pixar’s Disney. I like that the cast here is somewhat less star-studded than most previous Dreamworks Animation releases- Reese Witherspoon is top-lining of course, but the most of the other cast members they went for comedic talent rather than box-office clout. That said, the combination of Seth Rogen, Stephen Colbert, Rainn Wilson, Will Arnett, Paul Rudd, and even Hugh Laurie (such a perfect Jeeves) is pretty irresistible. It remains to be seen whether this is any good, but what can I say, I laughed, especially at the “Susan” gag.

Screengrab’s Back-To-School Round-Up: The Top 18+ High School Films (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:30:00 GMT

SIXTEEN CANDLES (1984) & THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1985)

I’m no sociologist, but I’ll nevertheless hazard the following thesis: no matter how good any particular teen film may be, there’s nothing that compares with the high school movies you saw while you were actually IN high school. And so, no matter how good, say, American Graffiti or The Last Picture Show or Rushmore or American Pie may be (and yes, Commenters, we know we left all these ultra-worthy contenders off this week’s list, and apologize profusely!), they’ll never hold the same hallowed place in my heart as Sixteen Candles or The Breakfast Club, which I saw during my junior and (best of all) senior years at good ol’ M.H.S., home of the Middleboro Marching 100 and the Speech & Theater Workshop...GO SACHEMS!!!! WOO-HOO!!!! CLASS OF ’85 RULES!!!! Writer/director John Hughes also ruled way back then, before he tumbled into the bottomless vat of Cheez Whiz better known as his post-‘80s directing career. But, just like your goofy yearbook photo, his two best films are eternal: Molly Ringwald as wised-up, self-conscious everygirl Sam and Anthony Michael Hall’s noble Geek are Clearasil icons for the ages in the endlessly quotable '84 classic that established many if not most of the future clichés of the modern teen movie: the ironic, pop culture post-modernism, the clueless but caring parent/guardian and, of course, the climactic cast-of-thousands suburban blow-out. But as good as Sixteen Candles is, The Breakfast Club seemed even better at the time, if only because it gave my senior class “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” as our official swan song. Even when I was squarely in Hughes’ demographic, of course, I recognized the occasional pretentious, simplistic and overwrought moments of the '85 dramedy, and Ally Sheedy’s conversion from cool Goth to Emilio Estevez’s boring prep girlfriend still rankles...but looking back now, I can’t help feeling nostalgic for an era when teens could be still be captivated by a talky character study that played like a one-set, seven-character off-Broadway show with no gratuitous violence or nudity (except for the second big screen close-up of Molly Ringwald’s panties in as many years). Hey...hey...hey...hey!

HIGH SCHOOL (1969)

The cinema-verite documentarian Frederick Wiseman has spent the bulk of his career boiling down one American institution after another -- often in movies with generic-label titles such as Hospital, Juvenile Court, Basic Training, and Domestic Violence -- to reveal the lives being helplessly fed into the bureaucratic grinder. It stands to figure that high school would have been one of the earliest subjects on his list. This film, which was shot at Philadelphia's Northeast High School, conveys the experience of being trapped there for a typical day, and in the process pins to the wall the regimented drills, the impatience with nonconformity, imagination, or anything else that might take things off their carefully scheduled course, the seething resentment of the authority figures trying to hammer the kids into well-behaved, smiling cannon fodder. It was selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry in the third year of that list's existence, but it might be a greater tribute to it that it was banned in Philadelphia for years because it made the educational process look dehumanizing and depressing.

LORD LOVE A DUCK (1966)

Probably many will automatically nominate Molly Ringwald or Winona Ryder for the title of high school movies' definitive prom queen, but for some of us, Tuesday Weld blows them all out of the water. The Drew Barrymore of her time -- besides having the weird name to have to explain to people, she was a veteran actress-model, supporting her family while coping with a drinking problem and a nervous breakdown, all before she was thirteen -- she was also a white-hot talent, an inventive actress who was both sexy and affecting even in the cheesy, early rock and roll exploitation pictures that served as her entry point into the movie business. She was twenty-three but still looked like a teen queen when she starred in this bizarre satire, directed by George Axelrod. She plays Barbara Ann Greene, a child of divorce (back when that was still supposed to be shameful) who wants to be loved by everyone but can't even crash the important girls' club she needs to join to take her first steps towards school-wide popularity, because she can't afford the twelve angora sweaters that are a non-negotiable requirement of establishing any girl's true worth. Luckily, she attracts the admiring attentions of Alan (Roddy MacDowell), who begins greasing the wheels for her steady ascent, by whatever means necessary: he's something between a wish-fulfilling genie and a psycho on the make. Before graduating forever from high-school age roles, Weld would follow Duck up with another cult classic, 1968's Pretty Poison, in which the roles were reversed: in that one, her frustrated young miss hooks up with a lonely young man (Anthony Perkins) with a history of emotional disturbance, who realizes too late that she's ensnared him in a murder plot. Once again, Weld demonstrates her ability to do the near-impossible by making her character believable and seductive while managing to make Tony Perkins look like the sane one.

ELECTION (1999)

Alexander Payne's movie, closely adapted from Tom Perrotta's slim, sharp novel, may be the best of all attempts to use high school life as a metaphorical testing ground for everything that comes after it. Matthew Broderick explodes his Ferris Bueller persona as the upstanding, much-admired high school teacher who preaches the virtues of democracy until it becomes clear that, unless checked, democracy is going to make a terrible mistake and reward Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), the superachiever student who is the personification of everything that he hates and thinks is wrong with the world (i.e., everything that makes other people more successful than him). Broderick hasn't had a role half as good since, and neither Witherspoon nor Chris Klein (as the sweet golden boy dope of a jock who's Tracy's natural enemy in spite of himself) has ever been better, but a special Screengrab Missing in Action shout-out goes to Jessica Campbell, the young actress (sixteen at the time) who gives a wonderful performance as Klein's lonely, frustrated lesbian sister, whose acting out turns her into the anarchist heroine of the student body elections, and who, except for a couple of low-profile TV and movie roles, hasn't been seen since.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Anna Faris, Honorary Bunny

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Anna Faris may be my favorite actress whose movies I never see. OK, that’s probably overstating the case a bit – I should say “screen presence” rather than “actress,” since I’m basing my statement on a small sample size that suggests her range consists of “cute and funny.” Still, on the rare occasions I do stumble upon her work – Lost in Translation, My Super Ex-Girlfriend, whichever Scary Movie installment I reviewed for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram – I thinks to myself, I thinks, “I like that there Anna Faris. Why isn’t she a bigger star?”

Well, her moment may have finally arrived with tomorrow’s release of The House Bunny. Sure, the movie sounds like a stupid retread of Legally Blonde – but then again, Legally Blonde didn’t exactly hurt Reese Witherspoon’s career. And although I’m sure she’d be delighted to learn I’m in her fan club, an even bigger honor was bestowed upon her this week as Hugh Hefner named Faris an honorary Playboy Bunny and put her on the cover (clothed, alas). We know what you’re thinking, but Faris denies it. “"I would like to say that I slept with Hef, but I'll dispel that rumour right now," Faris told Canada.com.

That’s not the only honor Faris has been awarded lately. High Times named her Stonette of the Year based on her work in Smiley Face and Entourage. “I’ve got my bong award on my fireplace,” Faris told Time Out New York. “It’s the only award I’ve ever won. I’m so, so proud. My parents are as well.” Clearly a star is born.

Related:
Anna Faris: The Meryl Streep of Bong Hits
Trailer Review: The House Bunny

Trailer Review: Beverly Hills Chihuahua

Paul Clark — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT

I was lucky enough to attend an advance screening of WALL *E, so I wasn’t subjected to this trailer. But not being smart enough to leave well enough alone, I decided to watch it despite warnings from friends about its potential toxicity. So I just want to say that I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you guys- I’ll try not to let it happen again. Initially, I was expecting something akin to a movie told from the point of view of Reese Witherspoon’s dog in Legally Blonde, but this actually turned out to be much, much worse. It doesn’t really get noxious until the dogs actually start singing a song that’s both unspeakable and really catchy, so much so that I had to listen to Penderecki for half an hour to expel it from my head. But while this is awful to watch, I’m sort of glad I did, if only because now I’ll never be even the slightest bit curious to watch the movie itself.

Girl DisemPowering: Nine Films That Didn't Do Feminism Any Favors (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:45:00 GMT

SHOWGIRLS (1995)

“Do you know what they call that useless piece of skin around a twat? A woman!” And that hilarious quip from strip club “comedienne” Henrietta “Mama” Bazoom pretty much sums up the philosophy towards women in this abortion of a cult classic by screenwriter Joe Eszterhas and director Paul Verhoeven. Sure, I get it...this campy, overwrought drag show bitch-fest about amoral sex worker Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) is so bad it’s good! And we can all just laugh through the parts where Gina Ravera’s Molly (the only vaguely redeemable or recognizably human character in the movie, and a black woman to boot) gets brutally raped by a loathsome white rock star. (I love it when they act out that part in the drag queen version of the show at my favorite hipster bar!) Garish, ridiculous and aggressively stupid, Showgirls is hard for me to enjoy ironically, since it so clearly embraces and truly believes in its own fetid realpolitik Hollywood philosophy that love is a lie, “art” is whatever makes money, winning is everything, men are scumbags, women are worthless (especially if they’re not hot, naked and young), the world is a shithole, if you’re not clawing your way to the top every single minute (and/or don’t know how to properly pronounce the most expensive status symbol brand names) you’re a fool and a loser and deserve what you get. Yeccch. Showgirls ain't just misogynistic: it pretty much hates everyone. And the feeling is mutual.

INDECENT PROPOSAL (1993)

If Demi Moore is, or was, a star, it's not because she's talented (she can't act a lick) or because people like her (a lot of them don't) but because she manages, just through her very presence, to convey the impression that denying her the attention she craves might have consequences that are just too dire to contemplate. Like Madonna at her least interesting and most hard to take, she seems to be all about ambition for its own sake, but possessed of a steely, confrontational gaze that says: You will take me seriously. Although others will prefer to honor her for her services to American literature in The Scarlet Letter, Indecent Proposal may be the definitive Demi Moore movie statement. Here, she takes up where the Material Girl left off in the '80s; Madonna demonstrated that pure commercialism was hip, and this movie gives Moore the chance to show that a woman can assert herself and take control of her life by whoring herself out. When we first meet her, she's totally in thrall to her boyfriend, Woody Harrelson -- his dreams (of making a haul gambling in Vegas to fuel his doomed business venture) are all that matter. But after Harrelson craps out, she agrees to gazillionaire geezer Robert Redford's offer that she sleep with him for a million dollars. Harrelson, who wants the money but also wants some credit for feeling bad about it, ends up basically serving as her pimp, but when she's had it with his whining she makes it clear to him that this was her decision -- she's her pimp. And she's right -- although Harrelson has been her one true love and her ennobling reason for accepting the offer, once he goes into his snit, she has reason to dump him, which she does, thus conveniently giving Daddy Warbucks his opening to step up and sweep her off her feet. Then, because Redford, apparently a big Cheers fan, can't stand to see Woody Harrelson feeling suicidal -- and also, maybe, because the young poor guys whose girlfriends dragged them to this movie would tear out the theater seats if Moore stayed with the old, rich guy -- Redford ennobles himself by gracefully doing a far, far better thing than he has ever done before and giving her back to Harrelson. Moore agrees, somehow failing to notice that she's not just continuing to define herself by which guy she's with, but letting the guys dictate which one of them that will be. Not that I'd want to have to choose myself if I were her; Harrelson has never come across as goofier, and the awestruck, glamour-lighting treatment that Redford is given here just tends to emphasize how much his sun-kissed visage was starting to look like the bottom of a potato chip bag.

KISSES FOR MY PRESIDENT (1964)

In this election year, let us spare a moment's reflection for the sacrifices made by those who came before us, like whoever had to sit through Kisses for My President, a Great Society-era comedy in which a woman -- Polly Bergen -- becomes president of this great land, an idea that at the time must have seemed considerably more far-fetched than anything in the Warren Commission Report. Bergen's Leslie McCloud wasn't the first pretend woman president in American movies -- that honor may fall to the nameless character played by Ernestine Barrier in the 1953 Project Moonbase, which was set in 1970 -- and she may not even be the most pathetic. (Tip your hat to Loretta Swit's President Adams in Whoops Apocalypse.) But she may have been the most retrograde, a sad example of a would-be world leader overtaken by events on the home front. Although Bergen is actually a decisive, effective commander in a dangerous, confused and (this being a 1964 Hollywood comedy) kooky world, she has to fight to stay focused on her job because her husband, Fred MacMurray, is having a twenty-four-seven hissy fit about how unmanning it is to be the First Gentleman. Fred finally solves his problem by getting Bergen pregnant, forcing her to step down so that Dick Cheney can become president. Special prosecutors have been appointed over less.

LEGALLY BLONDE (2001)

Call it last-wave feminism: it has a target market, not a constituency, and they’re the kind of women who don’t even like to use that particular f-word. It’s the feminism of sorority girls with trust funds and breast implants, the feminism of drunk girls making out with each other in main-drag bars. It’s the feminism of marrying up, of buying at full price, of a career as a means not to equality, but to superiority: and Legally Blonde is its favorite movie. The 2001 fish-in-the-wrong-brand-of-bottled-water comedy made a fortune, and turned Reese Witherspoon into a major star; but beyond that, it inspired a legion of imitators that all followed a now-familiar formula. Nice was the new smart, fashionable was the new educated, and rich was the new liberated. It’s easy enough to brush off Witherspoon’s Elle Woods as simply another iteration of the classical comedic underdog, but that only works until you consider the fact that her underdog is rich, well-dressed, trendy and drop-dead gorgeous. She enrolls in Harvard Law School (and is accepted with insulting ease) more or less to spite her equally wealthy, handsome ex-boyfriend, and the movie’s idea of conflict is simply pitting her against a variety of snobbery slightly different than the one she’s used to. The girl power championed by Legally Blonde is the power to wear a push-up bra with pride, and to blend the power of crass nouveau wealth with that of elite establishment power. Sound like any president you know?

Click here for Part One of Girl DisemPowerment.

Or click here for Part One and Part Two of Chick Hits: The Girl Power Top Ten

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

The Jailbait Sweet 16 (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999)

This modern day take on Lolita, reviled by some, adored and Academy-Awarded by others, tells the story of Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a miserable hen-pecked middle-aged loser reinvigorated by a surge of life-altering lust for the sexually aggressive friend (Mena Suvari) of his mopey teenage daughter (Thora Birch). To attract Suvari’s character, Angela, Burnham starts working out, pumping up his body while channeling happy memories of his irresponsible, pot-smoking youth. Eventually, Burnham gets his wish to have sex with Angela...but, upon learning that the allegedly promiscuous girl is actually a virgin, he pulls back from the brink at the last moment, suddenly remembering that he is, in fact, an adult. And then he gets shot in the head...a nice, throwback moment to the old Hays Code days when moral transgression always led to a grisly end, cautioning the rest of us against stepping over the line. Yet transgression is part of the film’s DNA, and while I can appreciate the reasons why certain people hate this movie (the artifice, the middle-aged lust thing, the Spacey Smarm Quotient), I nevertheless enjoy the message of the smart Alan Ball script that we are not defined by our age, our possessions, or the way we’re perceived, and lying to ourselves about who we’d rather be instead of accepting who we really are leads to heartache, rage, bad relationships and, occasionally, bullets in the head. Like many dirty old men before him, Lester Burnham thinks he wants sex with a much younger woman, but what he really wants is to simply be much younger, with all of life’s possibilities ahead rather than fading away in the rearview mirror.

AMERICAN PIE (1999)

And speaking of fin de siècle movies with “American” in the title co-starring Mena Suvari...this raunchy-sweet comedy was a throwback to 1980s teen sex comedies like Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Risky Business, Porky’s, Screwballs, Losin’ It, The Last American Virgin, Zapped! and etc., etc. etc. Yet somehow, despite scenes of adolescent pie-fucking, discussions of inappropriate relations with a flute at teenage band camp, tons of high school sex and the deflowering of a pubescent boy by a predatory Mary Kay Letourneau-esque older woman, American Pie barely raised a flicker of controversy upon its release, possibly because it was simply too funny and ridiculous to get all het up about...but also perhaps because of the genuine affection writer/directors Chris and Paul Weitz had for their characters, male and female, as opposed to presenting them as figures of scorn and/or inflatable sex dolls (or just so much bloody meat, like the unfortunate young victims in any number of slasher flicks from Halloween to Hostel, where sex literally equals death). As the esteemed Mr. Pierce’s notes in an earlier post on Lolita, Nabokov’s book, for all the controversy surrounding it, was actually funny...and American Pie, a kind of classic in its own right, proves once again that sometimes the best way to deal with the scary issue of sex is simply to laugh.

FREEWAY (1996)

And then there’s the less funny side of sex: molestation, prostitution and violence against women, all of which is faced and overcome by a modern day So-Cal Red Riding Hood in this astonishing exploitation film by jailbait auteur Matthew Bright, whose fetish for pigtails and ponytails drove him to personally style the hair of his actresses...which must make him a creep, right? And yet, despite Bright's seemingly shady fascination with underage sexuality, this is one of the most empowering, ass-kicking girl power movies I’ve ever seen. Reese Witherspoon leaves this one off her resume, and yet her portrayal of the indomitable white trash warrior Vanessa Lutz is, hands-down, the single best performance of her career, promising a future of nitro-fueled intensity that (Tracy Flick aside) pretty much fizzled into perky romantic comedy fluff. Remember how cool Emilio Estevez was in Repo Man before he became...y’know, Emilio Estevez? Yeah, it’s kinda like that. The story pits Witherspoon’s illiterate, underage Lutz against a crack whore mother (Amanda Plummer), an abusive stepfather, the L.A.P.D. and, most notably, Kiefer Sutherland as the story’s Big Bad Wolf, Bob Wolverton (get it?), a leering bogeyman of a sexual predator. The escalating verbal and physical warfare between Lutz and Wolverton taps into something downright primal and possibly Freudian, as if Bright is investing all his forbidden love for the raw sexuality and electric vitality of youth into Lutz and all the self-loathing shame surrounding his secret, twisted obsessions into Wolverton, then letting the two duke it out in a steel-cage match. The result is the greatest B-movie John Waters never made, a loud, raucous, thriller with jaw-dropping stretches of pitch-black comedy and a truly startling cameo by the queen of Jailbait Cinema, the one and only Brooke Shields, who shows up (along with Mr. Bright’s even more peculiar sequel to Freeway) in part three of this list.

KIDS (1995)

In Kids, the first feature directed by the legendary photographer Larry Clark, a bunch of teenagers spend a day and a night wandering around New York City in the summer. They have sex, shoplift, beat the crap out of somebody, take drugs, and have an orgiastic party. There's no plot to speak of, but there is a suspense hook: Jennie (Chloe Sevigny) has just learned that she's contracted AIDS from the mushmouthed, seventeen-year-old lothario Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), a serial deflowerer of girls who imagines that his sexual partners will always remember him if he's their first but who loses any interest in them after that, and she sets out to try to find him before he can rack up his next intended victim, Ruby (Rosario Dawson). (She is unsuccessful in this.) The whole movie is sunk so deep inside its obsessions with selfish teenage kicks that it gives the feeling that the screen could use a bath. When it first appeared, Kids was THE controversial indie film of its season, and it was defended by some moralists who argued that Clark and his twenty-two-year-old screenwriting partner Harmony Korine were obviously showing us these youngsters acting like animals--which is the closest thing they have to an interesting quality--as a "wake-up call" to parents. Please. Clark's subsequent films (Bully, Wassup Rockers), and for that matter the photo collections with which he'd made his name (Tulsa, Teenage Lust) have only served to confirm that Clark likes to film teenagers babbling incoherently, acting out nastily and fucking because he likes to watch teenagers babbling incoherently, acting out nastily and fucking; pointing a camera at it gives him an excuse to indulge in his hobby, which he is of course entitled to share with others who have similar interests. Those of us who used to get bored with such things after about three minutes even when we were teenagers need to look elsewhere.

HARD CANDY (2005)

At 21, Ellen Page sure is a hard-working gal. Juno may have made her a star when it opened late last year, but in recent months we've seen the arrival of three other movies in which she stars or has prominent roles (Smart People, The Tracey Fragments, and An American Crime, which played at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival but recently premiered on Showtime cable). In fact, the success of Juno was the explosion coming at the end of a long fuse set by the cult home video success of Hard Candy, a two-character drama that uses the then-teenaged actress's mixture of seductiveness and spikiness for all it's worth. She plays a 14-year-old who has struck up an Internet correspondence with an adult photographer (Patrick Wilson); when she meets him for the first time, she invites herself back to his place with the promise of hearing a Goldfrapp mp3 he boasts of having. Once they get back to his place, it turns out that she's springing a trap; taking him prisoner, she informs him that she knows that he's a pedophile who's involved in the murder of a girl, and she proceeds to torture him, threaten him with exposure and castration, and cajole him to do the right thing and commit suicide. It's to Page's considerable credit that, by turns enticing, alarming, and outright scary, she remains fascinating throughout, even though she can't make her character believable; she has a degree of infallible self-assurance that would be hard to buy in a SWAT team leader, let alone a 14-year-old girl playing cat and mouse with a psycho on his home turf. Her choicest moment of degradation for her prey may be when, having gotten him where she wants him, she casually reveals that she actually thinks Goldfrapp is pretty lame. Other movies (such as The Professional) know that the viewer's inner pedophile will be flattered by seeing a young girl insist that she wants the older man even if he has the nobility (and the box-office savvy) to not follow through; Hard Candy knows that, while castration threats are pretty bad, the best way to make the older man shrivel up is to let him know that, when he thought he was being cool and up to date, he was actually sounding like an old fart.

For more jailbait: Part One, Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Morning Deal Report: Alan Parker Does It His Way

Peter Smith — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Apparently Sid Vicious biographer Alan Parker has some beef with Alex Cox's 1986 Sid and Nancy. He's making his own Vicious biopic, which I guess will make clear to us all that Sid Vicious was actually a genius and totally nice guy.

The inevitable Night at the Museum sequel may feature Reese Witherspoon as Amelia Earhart.

Looks like that long-rumored miniseries adaptation of A People's History of the United States is on its way.

— Peter Smith

Morning Deal Report: Two Great Tastes

Peter Smith — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 16:00:00 GMT

As the world now knows, nothing goes together like Vince Vaughn and Christmas. Good news, then, that he's working on the comedy Four Christmases with Reese Witherspoon and (newly announced) Robert Duvall.

And like Vince Vaughn and Christmas, like chocolate and peanut butter, there's remakes and Neil LaBute. The director has just signed on to remake Francois Truffaut's La Femme d'a cote (The Woman Next Door).

Your dreams have come true: a live-action Dragonball is on the way.

— Peter Smith