That “Lifetime” is allowed to still go around billing itself as “Television For Women” when it’s output is almost-exclusively Hallmark treacle, reality TV flotsam and tabloid sleaze is something that someone should really organize a march against. Until then, let’s all “enjoy” this trailer for their next big celebrity biopic, “The Anna Nicole Story;”with Agnes Bruckner in the title role and a torch-song version of “Fame” lilting over the soundtrack.
Wow. Do you have any idea how bad a movie has to be to look like it’s not going to do “justice” to the life-story of Anna Nicole Smith?
I think my favorite part is her kid standing there crestfallen when he accidentally sees Anna dry-humping a ladyfriend in an elevator. Yeah, I’m sure that was the most horrifying thing that went down in his upbringing. Depressingly, the director on this was Mary Harron; the once-promising helmer of “American Psycho.”
The clock keeps ticking down to the release of “Man of Steel.” I’m not slated to see it until the week it comes out (at least so far,) but it’s been shown to the NY/LA junket press and there are supposedly sneaks happening around starting this week. So far, nobody I know or trust has given me a solid reaction one way or another, so… the waiting game continues.
While we wait, Warners has released this 13 minute “making of” piece to the web. Nothing in the way of new footage or plot details, but always interesting all the same. It doesn’t do much to change the overall impression I’ve held since this ball got rolling: Looks really good, will almost-definitely do the job of making Superman “cool” in the eyes of the popular-culture again… but there’s this omnipresent “moodiness” hanging over everything they’ve shown that can’t help but make me worried that they somehow still. Managed. To. Not. GET. It.
If nothing else, I’m encouraged by the fact that Christopher Nolan has basically no presence in the piece. Sure, that’s probably more of a scheduling thing, but I’ve maintained all along that he’s completely wrong for a Superman project and if his role here really was just laying his “Director of The Dark Knight” blessing on the film and hanging back as a figurehead… fine by me. On the less-encouraging side, everything out of David Goyer’s mouth in this makes me physically cringe, and it’s his “reimagining” pitch that apparently made Nolan throw his weight behind this in the first place.
Just a pair of observations:
1. Pretty-much every single “new” version of Lois Lane get’s talked up as “more proactive” than the previous; which is endlessly amusing if you have even cursory knowledge of the real history of these characters. Lois is the most well-known superhero love-interest, so people tend to imagine her as being the “useless shrieking damsel-in-distress” believed typical of the type – ignoring the idea that “unusually proactive, assertive and independent” has been the default for Lois since the beginning of the comics. Yes, she got captured by bad guys a lot… usually because she was going into dangerous places alone of her own volition rather than waiting for anyone else to nut up and do it. 2. I’m not going to say that working stuff like this out as part of establishing a cohesive design aesthetic is a “bad” approach, BUT… if you really are enough of a miserable party-pooper that the question of why an alien’s costume has an “S” on it’s chest will be the thing that would negate your enjoyment of a movie, you were never going to enjoy a Superman movie.
When the Wall Street Journal – one of America’s worst non-mimeographed and/or locally Church-published newspapers – isn’t running obnoxious, stiflingly-ignorant clickbait pieces “taking down” film criticism (oh, I’ll get to that one, be patient;) it’s apparently giving platforms to the shambling, somehow still-animated Old Money ghouls of New York Past. Because someone has to.
One of these frightening yet pathetic creatures, Dorothy Rabinowitz, has taken some time from what one must assume is a strict regimen of draining life-sustaining essence via eye-contact with unlucky errant Central Park dogs to offer a hilariously tone-deaf (in the “do these people HEAR themselves!?”) screed against NYC’s new Bike Sharing installations.Whatever she was hoping to accomplish here, it’s effect on me is sudden desperate hope for a sequel to “Premium Rush” with somebody fun (is Mary Woronov still working?) as an extra-villainous version of this lady.
Snapped and tweeted by LaMovieBuff at a convention in Puerto Rico is a photo that, if I were the head of marketing for Warner Bros, would be purchased and readied to be slapped on every “Man of Steel” puff-piece set to hit Time-Warner’s various magazine and news outlets over the next two weeks.
This. This image right here. This is the real, pure, true, good thing underneath all the obscene corporate/commercial bloat surrounding a movie like this (or “Avengers,” or “Pacific Rim,” or whatever.) And it’s also the literalization of my central question regarding “Man of Steel” and WB’s still shakily-uncertain DC Universe plans in general: Will they be worthy of the awe this kid is investing in just the poster? And if not, then why are they bothering to make these at all?
I hope I like this movie, but I really hope this kid likes this movie.
Courtesy excite (note: site is in Japanese), here’s your first publicity-still from the live-action version of “Kiki’s Delivery Service;” which evidently is a thing that is happening.
The key to the original “Machete”– for me, at least – was that it was the first instance in a long while of a Robert Rodriguez movie actually being about something beyond the surface-level faux-grindhouse jokefest. I have no idea what Rodriguez politics are and thus no idea how strongly he “really” feels about the U.S. immigration debate; but whether authentic or just part of the winking 70s-exploitation pastiche it was the ferocity with which “Machete” engaged the subject that made it stand out: The wildly-applauding, predominantly Latino audiences at my screening(s) certainly didn’t think it was a joke.
So I wonder if “Machete Kills,” which Rodriguez may or may not have put together partially by having the castmembers of “Sin City 2” put on different costumes for pickups during their greenscreen shoots, is going to keep that going or let Part 1 be “the political one” and just focus on the spectacle of improbable action-lead Danny Trejo hacking up a succession of stunt-cast cameos and Latin-cinema mainstays.
The first full trailer for the film (it’s a Yahoo, sorry) doesn’t let much out in the way of story beyond what we already know: Machete is called in for a mission by the U.S. President (Charlie Sheen, here using his real name “Carlos Estevez” for the first time in a film) involving a supervillain played by Mel Gibson; whose scheme may or may not involve a “Moonraker”-style outer space component. Rodriguez has “joked” in the past that the third film “Machete Kills Again” will be a Space Opera, possibly incorporating leftovers from his scuttled John Carter project.
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