Anne Hathaway Catwoman

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--- Super Grouper - Of all the things in the world for me not to go nuts about and rush to watch it seems insane that the teaser for The Avengers, which is online now, would fall amongst them. Yet I haven't watched it yet. I am losing my mind! Oh well. I lose a little more every day. Have you watched it yet? or perhaps you saw it attached to Captain America? My screening didn't have it, the bastards. Anyway yadda yadda it is there to view if you're so inclined. io9 also took some screencaps, saving me the effort. Obviously I'm just a big fat ball of sloth today. But look at Hemsworth's bicep there - is he even bigger? He looks enormous, good grief.

--- Live Longer Than Prosper - It is straight up ridiculous that they haven't even finished a script for a second Star Trek movie, ain't it? There's taking your time to come up with a good idea and then there's just being lazy. LAZY! I know lazy, after all. AICN has a little word on where things are right now and it's not gonna be until at least Summer of 2013 they're guessing. Quinto needs the work, JJ!

--- Baby Mice - If you've noted the Donnie Darko banner this week with a smile - it brings me one every time I load the page - then you'll want to note this as well - there's gonna be a Richard Kelly blogathon! Hosted by Jaime at Exodus 8:2 it'll go from August 15th through the 21st! I was just thinking about Kelly the other day and wondering when we'd get more news on what he's up to - he's supposedly working on a "more straight-forward" thriller called Corpus Christi (yeah, The Box was supposed to be more straight-forward) but I haven't heard anything for awhile. Anyway there's loads to cull from his filmography for a post for this blogathon so it should be good stuff!

--- Call Him Tarry - Terry Gilliam is working on an adaptation of Paul Auster's book Mr. Vertigo. I have never read this book, but I like to hear that Terry Gilliam is working on something. Maybe he'll even get to turn his ideas into a movie for once! Imagine that.

--- Man On Milo - Via BD comes that delightfully homoerotic shot of Milo Ventimiglia hovering at the backside of another attractive looking dude in Xavier Gens' next horror flick called The Divide. Gens made his name off of Frontier(s), which rode the French horror bloodbath wave a couple years back. Anyway sweat and tank-tops and evil thoughts in close proximity, I'm there.

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Attack the Block opens with a young white woman named Sam walking to her apartment at night. She is then surrounded by a bunch of mostly black teenage boys, held at knife-point, knocked to the ground, and robbed. Two minutes later Sam's run away, and the film appears to become her muggers' film, and we're supposed to be laughing at their jokes and riding high, and I just wanted to walk out of the theater.

Sam does come back a bit later and becomes an integral part of the film. I suppose she and Moses, the 15 year old head of the gang that mugged her, could be considered co-leads of the film since it sort of becomes about their Enemy Mine-like journey to mutual understanding amid science-fictional shenanigans. But I had a fairly rough time with the first forty minutes or so of Attack the Block, trying to wrap my head around why I was supposed to want to spend a second of time with these punks. They weren't as funny as the film seemed to find them, and I spent a good amount - too long, really - wishing the aliens would gobble them up and be done with it.

Oh right, aliens. This is a movie about aliens, in case you don't know. Sort of an untethered-to-nostalgia Super 8, if you will - it's very Goonies, actually. (If The Goonies had punched Martha Plimpton in the face in the opening scene, that is.) See, Moses & Co.'s mugging of Sam is interrupted by some meteors filled with space-monsters falling out of the sky, and it becomes a question of survival on the streets of South London. Course these kids would tell you - and do - that it's always a question of survival on the streets of South London - this night it's just the they're up against a villain of extraterrestrial nature instead of other gangs or the cops.

That the film does a sideways dive into the urban blight of these kids' situation is admirable, and for the most part thankfully handled lightly (nobody goes to a movie about boys hitting monsters with baseball bats for a wordy treatise on race relations). There are more than a couple of moments where they stick the landing - when Sam admits her boyfriend is an aid worker helping out kids in Ghana, one of the kids battling aliens alongside her asks why he doesn't stay here and help the kids in London instead. But for every smart comment like that there's one that feels flat - you could see the "surprise reveal" of Moses' home-life coming from a light-year away, for one. And there were what felt like fifteen slow-motion shots of Sam seeing Moses do something noble and tough and the film poking us in the eye with "Hey, look! She's getting over the mugging thing! So should you!" that felt like trying way too hard...

But did the film really have a choice? I think they might've set themselves a somewhat insurmountable goal in that opening scene, and the only way to dig themselves out of it was to push back like gangbusters at those heavy first impressions they gave us. Imagine if The Silence of the Lambs had opened with the scene of Hannibal Lector eating that nurse's face off that we only hear about second-hand well in the film as is - after that, it would've been a slightly rougher road to anti-heroism for him in the audience's eyes, no? We want our lead characters to be flawed, of course. We want them to be complicated human beings that have to overcome inner and outer obstacles, to ride along with them for that journey, and well-made movies pretty much to a tee give that to us. I suppose the problem here is tone, especially in the wake of what we get at the start. Basically, just don't expect me to start chuckling at these kids' good-time street-thuggery five seconds after you've shown them assault a woman, dude!

But wait, aliens. This is a movie about aliens, in case you don't know. And here's the kicker that's really complicating matters for me - unlike the sub-par beastie in Super 8, these alien-monsters really kinda kick all kinds of ass. A totally unique design that's instantly memorable, very creepy, and delightfully inexplicable. Just weird, man! In a funny way that's really a joy to look at. Plus they make a shit-ton of sense thematically (talk about black versus white - they're darker than dark) and there's enough biological explanation to hang a decent plot across.

So where does this leave us? My feelings towards the film are fairly all over the place, but more than I anticipated with a movie about rubbery aliens fighting teenage gangstas and stuffed with weed jokes the movie's put my brain into overdrive. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since last night, for better or worse, and the buttons the film pushes it pushes on purpose, even if at times it's kind of feels like watching a little kid banging on a toy piano.

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So I heard it on good authority, a real "Hush! Hush!" scoop here, that Green Lantern is a pile of balls. Who'da thunk? I mean, obviously the people behind the scenes were making the right decisions right off the bat when they decided that they'd have their lead actor, well known for his perfectly sculpted everything, wear CG instead of spandex. Good choices abounded!

This whole weekend's a write-off, ain't it? The only reason I'm glad Mr. Popper's Penguins is here is if I had to sit through that trailer one more time I was gonna smelt somebody's face. That's right - SMELT! I'll do it! I've got a... a... smelter? Right here! Alright whatever this has devolved into nonsense (yeah, devolved, had a real far trip down the evolutionary ladder there).

Point being, go read some more of what I have to say about this weekend's abysmal crap-fest of movies at Celebrity Beehive. Personally I'm skipping the junk and going for the 3D Hitchcock!

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Inspired by the tepid creature at the heart of JJ Abrams Super 8 - read my unsatisfied opinion upon it here - Vulture wrote up a wonderful piece on the state of movie monsters that you oughta read. Choice bit:

It's partially why I think we need to keep clanging the bells for some HP Lovecraft film adaptations to come about - the entire point of his work is to summon up the uncanny. Oh to have gotten to see Guillermo Del Toro take on the shoggoths!

Anyway this reminds me of my list of favorite recent movie monsters that I wrote up a couple of years ago. All so simple yet unsettling still! When I was watching The Rite last night I had a similar thought process - there's this series of photographs shown in the film of people possessed by demons and they all looked like something you'd see if a class of first-year photography students were told to ape Diane Arbus. Black and white and arty all over!


Ugh. It reminded me of why I prefer Ringu's video imagery ten times over the American remake's - the remake's is too clean, too purposefully art-directed. Too sterile. There's so much more horror to be reamed from banality, from it popping up in an unexpected place where you're not quite prepared for it.

I actually have an example of this to share from just this morning - I was jogging down the street and noticed a man walking towards me on the opposite side of the street. There wasn't anything noticeable about him at first, it was just early and we were the only two people on the street is why I noticed him. So I didn't pay him much mind until I was passing him and he caught my eye again as we crossed - I think it was just the fact that I was half-awake but he did have some kind of limp and somehow out of the corner of my eye this translated into the herky-jerky movement of someone who's been shot on film moving backwards and then the film's run forwards to give it that unreal quality (does that have a name?), and so I turned to look at him to make sure I was just being seeing things and he had this giant crazy person grin on his face. Now that is unsettling. That you remember. It's the things that don't fit in no matter how hard you try, they were never meant to fit in, they were never meant period, that'll getcha.

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Taking my time to post some thoughts has bitten me in the ass once again - amongst other places, if you go read what Nathaniel wrote on Super 8 at The Film Experience you're gonna have approximately 98.75% of my opinion summed up for you there. Or familiarize yourself with this paragraph from Roger Ebert's review:

It should be noted that somehow even after expressing all that Ebert gave the film 3.5 stars, which seems a bit off. I had way too many problems with the final 45 minutes of the film to feel that good about the experience once the lights came up. The beats of the adventure swallowed whole the entirely lovely character beats that'd been set up - if somebody can explain to me precisely what big lesson Kyle Chandler's character learned and at what point that drove him to reevaluate his relationship towards his son I'd be much obliged. He hardly has reason to know the sort of danger his son's been in at any point. Their conciliatory hug at the end was as forced as the reappearance of the son at the end of Spielberg's War of the Worlds, if you ask me. And what of the fractured friendship between Joe and his directing friend Charles, that was so much of the film's story before Hell breaks loose? I can't even remember if they see each other again once they split up. The adventure should spin out from the complications in these relationships, and should somehow feel intertwined. Instead the monster just eats it all up. 

And as for that monster, I did not like that monster. It's an inexplicable tangle of limbs punching out of the blackness for far too long - at some point you need to lay your cards on the table, JJ, or we come to believe your holding a blank deck. Even if Spielberg kept the shark hidden from us for most of Jaws, we still knew it was a shark. We knew it'd have a couple of fins and a big ass mouth. Even once Super 8 was finished I still didn't have a good understanding of what this alien-insect-monster was supposed to be. There were too many legs and perhaps it was made out of bark? And it had a face of some sort? I don't know, and it never did anything nifty enough to make me care to figure it out. A lousy, unmemorable cap to too long a campaign of mystery. Even though I find the 2006 Korean monster movie The Host to be entirely overrated, one thing it got right was how it flung it's monster right into the daylight right at the start. JJ had how much more money to spend? And there was nothing even one tenth as thrilling as that creature's first attack.

But the kids were all terrific - Joel Courtney is a great find, and I'm nursing my Somewhere crush on Elle Fanning even worse after this. I just wish the film had seen fit to care about them in the end as much as it had made me care about them at the beginning.

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JJ Abrams ode-to-Spielbergia Super 8 is here, hoorah! I've avoided reviews but the general mood seems positive...? Well we'll know soon, I suppose. For now, read up what little more I have to say on that and the other couple of movies coming out this weekend over at Celebrity Beehive. I get to namedrop "pinochle" and "lanai" in the same sentence, yo. I'm ecstatically geriatric.

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... this weekend, but the main thought I have every damn time after I see the trailer isn't, "Ooh what's inside the box?" but rather, "Oh my god, Elle Fanning is so lovely to look at." Is that weird? The boyfriend and I have expressed the same thought several times so at least I know I'm not alone in having it as the most prominent reaction. Anyway my point is, Dakota who?

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And a happy 39th birthday to the sexy Kiwi this fine day. To those of you who braved Priest: how was Karl in it? I don't remember hearing anything coming out of that movie except screams of, "My eyes, my eyes! Oh god it burns, my eyes!" Poor dear. JJ Abrams best get to work on the Star Trek sequel and rescue him stat.