Come to think of it, I had a difficult time understanding Batman at times, too.
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Category Archives: Movies
New Movie Time
My boys are dragging me to the The Dark Knight this weekend and, based on early reviews, I’m reasonably sure that it will be quite good. But truthfully, I’m looking forward more to the new Coen Brothers movie, Burn After Reading:
Friday Musings
So, did you know that Taxi Driver is the greatest wealth-creating movie of all-time?
Speaking of movies, actor Mickey Rourke has been down on his luck for the past several years, but he sure had a good run of movies in the 1980’s.
Finally, singer-songwriter Hayes Carll, fresh off the release of his new CD, returns home to The Woodlands for a Friday night show at Dosey-Doe. I’ll be there, so come by and say hello!
How the mighty have fallen
Some folks thought I was too hard (see also here) on the Stros and Craig Biggio for turning the Stros’ 2007 season into a death march to Bidg’s 3,000th hit.
However, my criticism of the Stros and Bidg was child’s play in comparison to this LA Times broadside on fading Hollywood leading men, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. The following will give you a taste:
Pacino has made a string of bad films lately, including the famously awful "Gigli," "The Recruit" and "Two for the Money," where he hams it up as an unscrupulous football oddsmaker. If anyone has made more movies for the money than Pacino, it would be De Niro, who has largely abandoned serious dramatic work for a spate of forgettable horror and crime thrillers (try sitting through "Hide and Seek" or "Godsend") and lowbrow comedy high jinks like "Meet the Fockers" and "Analyze That."
De Niro’s most recent film, "What Just Happened?," an inside-the-movie-biz comedy, got such an abysmal reception at Sundance that it limped out of the festival without a sale (it’s expected to close the Cannes Film Festival this year). De Niro cut his longtime ties with CAA last week, defecting to Endeavor, inspiring a venomous response purportedly from one CAA agent that was e-mailed all over town. Claiming that De Niro asks for a $1-million production fee on his pictures to help fund his Tribeca empire in New York, it minces few words, saying, "Bobby held us responsible for his own greed, his own avarice and his own megalomania. And it’s just like the studios now ask us: Why should we pay this guy — who doesn’t open a movie — the payoff to his production company, just so he can add his name as a producer?"
Also check out this Variety review and related blog post on Pacino’s latest movie "88 Minutes," which is already being included in some "worst ever" lists.
Tough place, that Hollywood.
Enjoying John Adams
My son Cody and I have been thoroughly enjoying each Sunday night episode of the HBO mini-series John Adams, which is based upon David McCullough’s brilliant biography of Adams. Given the extraordinary talents, troubling contradictions and fascinating relationships among the pivotal leaders of the American revolutionary era — Adams, Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Franklin and Burr, among others — I have always wondered why some enterprising filmmaker hadn’t made a first-rate movie about the era. John Adams producer Tom Hanks should be commended for pulling it off in a splendid manner. Rebecca Cusey’s favorable review of the mini-series is here.
My vote for the book upon which the next movie of this era should be based — Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton (Penguin Press 2004). Two other excellent recent books on this era are Jay Winik’s The Great Upheaval (Harper 2007) and Joseph Ellis’ American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic (Knopf 2007).
The Great Debaters
My younger daughter, my wife and I took in Denzel Washington’s new film the other night, The Great Debaters. Although the story was somewhat formulaic and the movie certainly not perfect, we found the movie to be hugely entertaining. The acting is superb, particularly the reliable Mr. Washington and newcomer Denzel Whitaker, a delightful young actor who literally steals the show as the youngest of the college debaters. Mr. Washington, who also directed, wisely decided to tell the story through Mr. Whitaker’s character (James Farmer, Jr.), and Mr. Whitaker is more than up to the task. What a talent!
Interestingly, the always-excellent Forest Whitaker plays James Farmer, Sr., the father of the young Mr. Whitaker’s character in the movie. However, despite their common last name, the two are not related.
At any rate, in discussing the movie on the way home afterward, my daughter observed that it sure is a good thing that the horrific racism depicted in the movie is not condoned in American society anymore. My reply was that brutal discrimination of blacks is still not as uncommon as we like to think. Scott Henson and Radley Balko comment on the unacceptable revelations of, at minimum, prosecutorial negligence in Dallas. Where is the outrage?
Gambon on acting
Sir Michael Gambon is one of the finest character actors of our day. In the brief video below (h/t to my son, Cody), he brilliantly explains his theory on acting. Enjoy.
Good training for taxi drivers
The Lives of Others is a masterful Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck film about the Stasi, the East German secret police force, during the final days of the Communist government. I highly recommend that you see it if you have the chance.
This Roger Boyes/Times article about the movie passes along Alex Latotzky’s clever observation, which you will understand perfectly once you see the movie:
“Some ex-Stasi became taxi drivers, and very good ones, too; you just had to give your name and they knew the address.”
On the vagaries of a movie’s success
One of the many benefits of having a couple of college-age sons who are movie buffs is that they take me only to good movies. That happened this weekend, as one of my sons took me to the new David Fincher movie, Zodiac, the movie about the taunting serial killer in the Bay Area during the 1970’s who was never caught. The movie is excellent and has opened to very good reviews.
On the other hand, Wild Hogs, one of those movies that is so ghastly that it makes you cringe while merely watching the preview, also opened this weekend to appropriately awful reviews. Joel Morgentstern, who writes good movie reviews for the Wall Street Journal, sized up Wild Hogs this way ($):
Wild horses couldn’t drag me to see “Wild Hogs” a second time, but seeing it once can be a liberating experience. Not in the same sense that its four middle-class, middle-aging buddies from suburban Cincinnati liberate themselves from work and family to recapture their youth during a road trip to California on their Harleys. The movie frees you of the belief that making it in Hollywood requires finely honed skills. If the writer and director of this coarsely honed sitcom could get hired, then the studio doors must be wide open.
So, how did these two films do at the box office in their opening weekend? Wild Hogs raked in a robust $38 million, the third-highest grossing March opening on record and the biggest start ever for a road trip comedy. On the other hand, Zodiac generated only an estimated $13.1 million, which was smallest start for one of Fincher’s films in terms of admissions.
Inasmuch as Zodiac is quite good and Wild Hogs is perfectly dreadful, how could this be?
Art DeVany explains.
Is Tony Blair’s Princess Di premonition coming true?
During a scene of Stephen Frears’ clever film, The Queen, British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s staff is relishing the public disdain for the Royal Family’s restrained response to Princess Diana’s death because it makes Blair — who made a passionate public response — look good in comparison. Blair — played brilliantly by Michael Sheen — grows frustrated with his staff’s gloating because he knows that the same public venom that is being directed toward the Royal Family could just as easily be directed toward him.
Based on this Daily Telegraph article, Blair may be receiving precisely what he feared:
We have become like any other nation. No more can we tell ourselves that British corruption scandals are qualitatively different from those of hot countries, or that the peccadilloes that shake our polity would barely make the newspapers in Italy. In 1994, in his first major speech as Labour leader, Tony Blair promised that, under his leadership, Britain would never again be out of step with Europe. Now, in a grisly kind of way, his ambition has been fulfilled.
With so many sleaze stories in our news pages, it is easy to become confused. A prominent Labour donor has been profiting from the recommendations of his own task-force. Gordon Brown’s supporters accuse Mr Blair of seeking to drag their man into the mire with him. Meanwhile, the Government has ordered an abrupt halt to the inquiry into allegations of hidden arms commissions, just as others begin to suspect corruption.
The sheer blizzard of allegations can leave us snow-blind. Perhaps, we tell ourselves, this is what all governments do. Perhaps Labour is no different from its predecessors. After all, wasn’t John Major brought down after a series of sexual and financial scandals?
Yes, he was. But what is happening now is of a different order. The central accusation against this ministry ñ that it has sold favours, possibly even places in the legislature, to secret donors ñ is one that has not been seriously levelled at a British government since the introduction of the universal franchise. [. . .]
Tony Blair’s belief in the superiority of his motives leads him to reason that, when the New Labour project is at stake, the ends justify the means.
We saw this within weeks of his accession when he sought to explain the Ecclestone affair ñ the first of many cash-for-favours scandals ñ on the basis that he was a pretty straight kinda guy. That, essentially, remains his attitude: he regards complaints about probity as petty next to what he is doing for Britain.
A decade later, parliament is cheapened, and the police have been called into Downing Street. That, more than the transformation of his party, more than Scottish devolution, more even than Iraq, will be his legacy.