Archive for the ‘Columns’ Category
Like most of us geek folk, I’ve always harbored an intense crush on the dashing archeologist-adventurer Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones, Jr., played famously on the silver screen by the dashing Harrison Ford. Through Indiana Jones’s three classic major motion pictures, I lusted after (and envied) the scruffy, rough-and-tumble hero (not so much in the lame 2008 sequel, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as he adventured to exotic locales, rescued Indian slave children, slept with hot Nazi women, and cracked his whip all over the globe. But manly and heroic as the adult Indy was, his younger self made my young pulse race in an entirely different way. And so, this week’s Movie Crush is dedicated not to the hunky Harrison Ford but to his blue-eyed teen counterpart: Sean Patrick Flanery.
“The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,” conceived by creator George Lucas as a companion series aimed at younger Indy fans, ran from 1992-1996 on ABC and the USA network as both standalone episodes and repackaged two-hour films. Prequel adventures told the back story of the future adventurer Indiana Jones, whose early 20th century exploits brought the character into contact with historical figures like T.E. Lawrence, Al Capone, Winston Churchhill, Franz Kafka, and Mata Hari. Twelve-year-old actor Corey Carrier split episodes with the then 27-year-old Flanery as the child and teen Indys, respectively, but I challenge anyone who watched the show to remember Carrier as the definitive young Indiana Jones. It was Flanery all the way.
Continue reading My Movie Crush: ‘Young Indiana Jones Chronicles” Sean Patrick Flanery
Filed under: Documentary, Scripts, Steven Spielberg, Michael Moore, Columns, Cinematical Indie
I implore any prospective or fledgling screenwriters out there to see the new documentary Tales from the Script. And afterward, if you still feel like attempting to break into that highly competitive and rarely rewarding side of the movie business, then it’s possible this is indeed the right dream and career for you. As Taxi Driver and Raging Bull scribe Paul Schrader says in the film, “if you can be happy doing anything else, do that.”
Tales from the Script is basically just a supplement to the recently published book of the same name by Peter Hanson and Paul Robert Herman (or vice versa, the book can be seen as the companion piece to the film). Hanson also directed the documentary, which features interviews with a number of celebrated screenwriters, including Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption), Shane Black (Lethal Weapon) and William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), as well as lesser-knowns like low-budget action scribe Michael January (CIA II: Target Alexa), Golden Age Oscar-winner Melville Shavelson (Houseboat) and My Favorite Year screenwriter Dennis Palumbo, who ultimately quit the field and became a psychotherapist.
Palumbo may be the only one who quit, but at times the other talking heads in the film seem to be on the verge of doing the same. Honestly, the whole point of the film appears to be a response to a statement from John Carpenter, who was one of Hanson’s first interviews. He says that “if you knew what was gonna come, you wouldn’t do it.” Well, kids, here’s what terrible things came with the careers of your favorite screenwriters: starvation on the way to success, starvation after success, lack of respect, lack of control, lack of credit, unwanted credit and disheartening interactions with anyone from Uwe Boll to Steven Spielberg.
Filed under: Awards, Oscar Watch, Columns, Girls on Film
In the words of Barbra Streisand, the time has come. After weeks of hope and pundit guesswork, Kathryn Bigelow became the first female to win the Best Director Oscar last night, just in time for International Women’s Day. In fact, The Hurt Locker did a whole lot more than just grab that one award. It grabbed six.
As anyone following the Oscar race knows — this wasn’t a clear-cut win, no matter how well the experts guessed. Everything was stacked against this film. Not only was The Hurt Locker another attempt for Bigelow to break into the boy’s club of testosterone-filled action drama, but it was also a low-budget, $11 million celebrity-free indie attempting to hold its own in the face of the “Iraq War Curse.” It was released over the summer to little fanfare from the super-successful Summit, and its box office take came nowhere close to its critical acclaim; it’s the lowest-grossing Best Picture winner of all time, in fact, and the yin to James Cameron’s wildly successful, highest-grossing yang. On top of that, it recently weathered questions of authenticity, and the fact that one of the film’s producers became the first to be banned from the ceremony.
Nevertheless, Kathryn Bigelow is the first woman to win a Best Director Oscar. It’s hard to believe that she is only the fourth woman to even earn a nomination, following in the footsteps of Lina Wertmüller for Seven Beauties in 1975, Jane Campion for The Piano in 1993, and Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation in 2003. It only took 82 years to get here.
Continue reading Girls on Film: Kathryn Bigelow, the First Female Best Director
Filed under: Oscar Watch, Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
The morning of the Oscar nominations, I got a surprise. None of the nominations themselves were very surprising, but when I was going through and counting the past number of nominations for each nominee, I was surprised to learn that Christopher Plummer, at age 80, and a full fifty years after his motion picture debut in Sidney Lumet’s Stage Struck, received his very first one. And frankly, he has thrown a monkey wrench in all my predictions and prognostications. It’s his first nomination, he’s 80 and he’s playing a real-life person — Leo Tolstoy, no less — in The Last Station (352 screens). It doesn’t even matter that the movie isn’t very good and that Helen Mirren steals the movie away from him as Tolstoy’s long-suffering wife. Plummer has become a serious contender.
Plummer has enjoyed one of those amazing careers as a supporting actor, having appeared in a broad range of interesting movies, but never stealing anyone else’s thunder. In his early days, he worked with Nicholas Ray and Anthony Mann. Both Spike Lee and Terry Gilliam have worked with him twice. He was in The Sound of Music, even if everybody remembers Julie Andrews. He was in The Man Who Would Be King as Rudyard Kipling, even if everybody remembers Michael Caine and Sean Connery. He was Hamlet, Cyrano de Bergerac, Sherlock Holmes, Santa Claus, and Mike Wallace (in The Insider). He can appear in movies as disparate as The Return of the Pink Panther, Dragnet (1987), or Oliver Stone’s Alexander, and come away unscathed, still distinguished enough for casting consideration the next year.
Continue reading 400 Screens, 400 Blows – Calling the Plummer
Filed under: Fandom, Home Entertainment, Columns
The Cinematical Movie Club is a new weekly feature where we pick a film, watch it and then discuss it. Feel free to read our introduction for more info.
What makes a classic? When I think back upon the myriad of films that get tossed into the category, there is a prevalent trend of relatability. No matter how simple or grand the story is, whether it’s detailing everyday mob violence, finding the meaning of Rosebud, or taking an epic journey through Arabia, there’s something that’s familiar. It might be a character you can relate to, a quest you find emotionally inspiring, or a masterful story that makes you feel like the fiction is real.
And then there’s The Graduate. An interesting piece of beloved cinema, it toes the line between mainstream society and tabloid iniquity, being at once both insanely engaging and charismatic, and quite troublesome and questionable. At its simplest, this is the story the poor choices a young man makes when he’s suffering from the angst-filled limbo between youth and adulthood. But it’s also one of the least desirable romantic triangles that Hollywood has given us — the young man, his hard and forlorn older lover, and her optimistic and innocent young daughter.
Filed under: New on DVD, DIY/Filmmaking, Home Entertainment, Interviews, Columns
Where the Wild Things Are was a long time coming for director Spike Jonze, who worked on the project for more than a decade before bringing it to life last year. Needless to say, part of making that process go smoothly was enlisting familiar, talented folks to help him give the film a complete and cohesive feeling. Enter Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O, whom Jonze knew for several years, and who he recruited to provide a musical backdrop for the adventures of Max and his army of Wild Things.
Jonze’s film arrives on DVD and Blu-ray this week. Cinematical caught up with Karen late last year to discuss their collaboration; in addition to talking about Jonze’s mandate for the singer-songwriter, she offered a few insights about her creative process, and clued us in on what’s happening now and what might be next for her and her band.
Continue reading The Keeping Score Interview: ‘Wild Things’ Composer Karen O
Filed under: Columns, Girls on Film
We may be relishing a surge of female power in Hollywood, from Sandra Bullock’s box office-breaking turn in The Blind Side to Kathryn Bigelow’s wide-spread success with The Hurt Locker, but for every eye looking forward, there’s always another looking back. As I wrote last week, Warner Bros. is looking to bring manner maven Emily Post back into the spotlight for a new, as-yet-untitled romcom about a “prissy Emily Post manners coach who turns a rough-around-the-edges guy into a proper gentlemen.”
Adding a slice of courtesy to modern cinema? That simple idea sounds great — we’ve all had our share of flabbergastingly rude folks who can’t see past their own nose, and maybe a little movie fun could give the jerks a kick in the right direction. Unfortunately, this isn’t about dosing the public with a little manners. It’s lavishing in that old-school mentality of the “prissy” female manners coach and the gruff and impolite man who needs to be polished to “perfection.” (Unless, of course, Warner Bros. is getting ready for a prissy man and his gentleman protege? Yeah, not very likely.) On the plus side, the project is pushing politeness rather than striving to loosen up the uptight woman so she can grab a man’s man a la The Ugly Truth. On the negative side, the coach is still “prissy,” while the film itself relishes an ancient mindset, rather than updating it with a little modern class.
For a business that’s supposed to be so very liberal and progressive, our entertainment industry thrives on the conservative and passe.
Filed under: Drama, Fandom, Home Entertainment, Oscar Watch, Columns, Stars in Rewind
This weekend at the 82nd annual Academy Awards, British thesp Colin Firth will compete for Best Actor for his performance in Tom Ford’s A Single Man, in which he stars as a grieving gay professor in 1962 Los Angeles. But just fifteen years ago, Firth vied for (and won) my heart by reaching a bit farther back in the annals of time to play a wealthy 19th century bachelor with a thing for spunky heroines, a haughty but handsome gentleman whose name I will always associate with Colin Firth: Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy.
Many women have a deeply personal relationship with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a novel that’s induced countless swoons over the years in its various pop cultural iterations. And while we can all argue over which is the very best filmic adaptation of Miss Austen’s romantic-comedy of manners (Cinematical’s Elisabeth Rappe prefers 2005’s Oscar-nominated Keira Knightley-Matthew McFadyen film, for example), I hold tight to my beloved BBC miniseries version, which starred Firth as the quintessential Darcy and Jennifer Ehle as his foil, the strong-willed Elizabeth Bennet.
I’d read and loved Austen’s novel in the years before Pride and Prejudice hit the airwaves in the U.S. (January 14, 1996), a few months after it debuted in its six-episode installments in the U.K., so I was perhaps perfectly prepared to see the deliciously drawn-out romantic longing on screen. For many young literature nerds of the female persuasion, I imagine Pride and Prejudice was a gateway drug of sorts to all kinds of historical romance; deep down, aren’t we all ripe young heroines bristling against social conventions who delight in flirting with cocky, handsome bachelors who declare their undying love for us just so we can shut them down?
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Continue reading My Movie Crush: Colin Firth in ‘Pride and Prejudice’
Filed under: Fandom, Cinematical Seven, Lists, Columns, Stars in Rewind
Watching the dramatic exploits of Dawson Leery and his pals back in the day, it seemed a no-brainer that Dawson himself – or, as he’s known in the real world, James Van Der Beek – was destined to rise the highest in Hollywood. After all, he was the star of the show! It was named after him! (That said, I was always on Team Pacey.) But sometime during his post-”Dawson’s Creek” career, after he snagged his first big role in the 1999 football flick Varsity Blues, Van Der Beek’s career drifted off, little by little, into indie movie oblivion. Yes, he scored a prime role in the epic-on-paper Texas Rangers, but that became one of the biggest bombs of 2001. And then he played the lead in Roger Avary’s racy Bret Easton Ellis adaptation The Rules of Attraction, a divisive film that earned its own solid cult following. But where, oh where, was Dawson Leery during the better part of the ’00s? Answer: languishing in TV movies, direct-to-DVD pics, and – shudder – an Andy Dick film (Danny Roane: First Time Director).
In light of all that, this March marks a triumphant resurgence of sorts for James Van Der Beek, who stars in not one, but two theatrically released films in the span of a month. In Formosa Betrayed (released February 28 in select cities), he plays an FBI agent investigating a conspiracy of politics and murder in 1981 Taiwan; next week, he stars in the mystery thriller Stolen alongside Jon Hamm and Josh Lucas. (Stolen is available on VOD from IFC Films starting March 3.)
But enough about Dawson. The show was about more than just his drama — it was about everyone’s drama, too! Where have the other Capesiders gone in the years since The Creek? And whose star has risen the highest?
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Continue reading Cinematical Seven: ‘Dawson’s Creek’ Alumni on the Big Screen
Filed under: Fandom, Home Entertainment, Columns
The Cinematical Movie Club is a new weekly feature where we pick a film, watch it and then discuss it. Feel free to read our introduction for more info.
Heathers is near and dear to my heart. It marked the first step towards my adult preferences, as I broke out of the kiddie fare and slowly journeyed into the world of more discerning taste. (My pre-teen self thought Grease 2 was a superior film to the original in all ways, people!) I rented the VHS because of my Christian Slater fandom born out of The Legend of Billie Jean and Gleaming the Cube. The Metropolitan trailer tugged me into the world of Whit Stillman and conversational features while the film itself allowed me to discover my deep love of black comedy and well-written banter.
To be fair, the first time I watched it, my friend and I were professing our love for Jason Dean, hoping to keep him from going further down that dark path. But when she went home, I rewound the tape and watched it again. And again. It stuck with me like no other film had. When I was 17 and driving around in my own car, I recorded the entire audio track and would listen to it daily, quickly learning every. single. line. It wasn’t, however, mere teen adoration. I was simply enamored by the flow of the words, which may be passed off as merely weird, but rang in my ears like modern, satirical Shakespeare.
