Film Fatale Archive for May, 2007
STAR WARS Blogathon: Princess Leia's Bikini Kill Kult
Celebrate 30 years of STAR WARS with Edward Copeland’s blogathon — essays, polls, rants on a huge variety of subjects, including the notorious holiday special. (There’s even an essay in defense of the Ewoks: I do love a contrarian.)
I wrote about the enduring power of Princess Leia’s metal bikini from RETURN OF THE JEDI.
PIRATES! How Long Does It Take to Get to World's End?
Midway through American Idol, there’s a punchy ad for PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD’S END
“In 23 hours, 9 minutes, all will be revealed”
And I have to wonder: Is that a countdown to opening day…or the threatened running time of the movie?
Bruce Campbell: Hungry Like the Wolf
I have no use for this particular product and cannot even tell you what it smells like. But I heartily endorse its endorser, Bruce Campbell, and this witty advertisement. Nice choice of music, too.
When Film Critics Get Erased, Part 2
“Fewer movie critics means fewer voices shouting against the noise of Hollywood’s hype machine, fewer champions for the small, interesting films struggling to break out amid the blockbusters,” says Sean Means of the Salt Lake Tribune [via Romenesko]
Distressing news from the Atlanta Journal Constitution, where longtime film critic Eleanor Ringel Gillespie will be replaced by “the wires” next month. “The wires” – thanks, we can read that stuff anywhere. Atlanta is no small city: The wires won’t tell you what’s going on in your hometown. Read what the Alliance of Women Film Journalists has to say about her departure here.
GIGI Overture Causes Boston Pops Balcony Brawl
Will Mass. lawmakers call for an all-out ban on classical music performances after last night’s balcony brawl during the Boston Pops opening night performance at Symphony Hall? (Light classical fans: they’re a rough crowd.)
According to eyewitnesses, conductor Keith Lockhart had to silence the orchestra — and guest performer Ben Folds of Ben Folds Five — during the overture to “Gigi” as two men came to blows in the balcony. (MSNBC has video of the fight, which is particularly alarming because the balcony rail is so low in front.) No arrests or injuries were reported.
The Onion on Film Franchises That Flopped
Is there a sorrier sight than than marked-down action figures headed for the island of unwanted toys?
After the heavily hyped GODZILLA remake, I recall seeing broken, abandoned ‘Zilla toys and knockoffs on 14th street — you couldn’t give that stuff away.
The Onion’s A/V club remembers thirteen failed franchises, movies that looked like Part One of a sure thing, from comic book heroes (DICK TRACY) to spinoffs (DAREDEVIL) to literary adaptations (MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD). One even had summertime box office king Will Smith (WILD WILD WEST)
What went wrong?
Surveillance Nation: From REAR WINDOW To DISTURBIA
Think you’re being watched?
From DISTURBIA, the teen-noir remake of Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW, to RED ROAD, Andrea Arnold’s international festival hit about a CCTV-obsessed Scotswoman, to this weekend’s paranoid thriller CIVIC DUTY, with Peter Krause as an Arab-bashing Yank, movie characters are peering through their Venetian blinds into the lives of others. And seeing enemies everywhere.
Peter Keough of the Boston Phoenix notices that these post 9/11 surveillance films, unlike the McCarthy-era REAR WINDOW, arrive at a time when “we’ve grown used to the idea that not only should we suspect everyone of evildoing, but that we should also welcome the intrusion of government surveillance into our private lives.”
Though Keough mentions only these three films now in theaters, he might have added one of the week’s top rental DVD’s: the action thrillers like DEJA VU, which had hero Denzel Washington — and the government — seeing everywhere, even into the past.
Jesse James: Revisionist Western Undergoes Revision
When will we get to see Brad Pitt as JESSE JAMES?
And when we do, will the adaptation of novelist Ron Hansen’s “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” be as long as the book that spawned it? In today’s Los Angeles Times, writer John Horn reports that the current version — which clocks in at more than three hours — has “tested poorly” with preview audiences. (Please Warner Bros, let the running time be shorter by the planned Sept. 21 release.)
I’m not surprised that JESSE JAMES tests poorly. Many good-to-great and ultimately popular films flop with test audiences. One of the most common questions in test screenings is about audience expectations — and once an audience realizes that the subject is American outlaw/bank robber Jesse James, they think they know his story.
After all, it’s been told before, in ballad, book, film (THE NORTHFIELD MINNESOTA RAID, with Robert Duvall as Jesse, and THE LONG RIDERS, with James Keach and AMERICAN OUTLAWS, with Colin Farrell in the lead. A very good TV movie, FRANK & JESSE, with Rob Lowe and Bill Paxton as the outlaw brothers, suggested that the elder, Frank, was the brains of the gang (Indeed he may have been: he made a deal to retire from crime, saving his life.)
