The Next Picture Show

The first review I read of Valkyrie was Joe Neumaier’s in the New York Daily News. Neumaier hated the movie, giving it one star and calling it tedious. He was also unkind to Tom Cruise, describing the actor’s performance as too showy.

So imagine my surprise when I checked out RottenTomatoes.com a few days later and saw that more than 50 percent of film critics the Web site polls liked the movie (it didn’t, however, get enough positive notices to merit a “fresh” rating on the site’s Tomatometer). Among those who praised it were such notables as Richard Schickel of Time magazine, Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times and Tom Maurstad of the Dallas Morning News.

 

It would be a boring world for sure if all reviewers agreed on everything, but the disparate opinions aimed at Valkyrie got me thinking about why film criticism exists and what its role is. In this era where the critic’s demise is constantly being written about (usually in articles that are much longer than the typical review), that question seems more relevant than ever.

(Before I continue, let me point out that TIMEOFF, the entertainment supplement for Packet Publications, has an outstanding movie critic in Elise Nakhnikian. She writes well, her observations and insights are intriguing and thoughtful, and she’s given the space to write longish reviews. If you don’t read her, start now.)

Getting back to my point, I’ve never read or watched reviews looking for someone with the exact same opinion as mine. Sure there are times when critical praise gets me really excited to see a movie (think No Country For Old Men, Slumdog Millionaire), but what I really want are opinions and thoughts from someone who loves and cares about the movies. Whether or not a critic likes or dislikes a particular film doesn’t matter, it’s how he or she backs up their opinions.

Those opinions have little to no effect on how I react to the movie. Few pictures got better reviews this year than The Dark Knight, which I think is good but overrated. Similarly, poor notices didn’t keep me from thinking Mamma Mia! was a whole lot of fun. And while I expect Kevin James’ upcoming, Paul Blart: Mall Cop to get skewered by reviewers, I think I’ll laugh at sight gags like James struggling to “slide” across a polished floor.

Ben Lyons, who established a career in softball entertainment reportage, has been getting hammered ever since he took over one of the seats on At The Movies (formerly hosted by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, then by Ebert and Richard Roeper after Siskel died, then by Roeper and various guest critics when Ebert became ill). A Los Angeles Times article quoted film critics and bloggers who called out Lyons for saying I Am Legend is one of the best movies ever made and naming Goldeneye his favorite James Bond movie.

Yet when Entertainment Weekly’s terrific Owen Gleiberman named Casino Royale the best movie of 2006, no one wrote essays about what a disgrace it was for a major critic to say a Bond picture was better than Letters From Iwo Jima, The Departed or The Queen.

But read what Gleiberman had to say about Casino Royale and I think you’d respect his opinion. He wrote of the movie redefining the franchise. Of Daniel Craig’s reinterpretation of Bond he said, “He speaks to an age of desperation, when the cosmetic barely holds sway over the cutthroat.”

Gleiberman addressed the film’s craft and placed it in context. More recently, he praised Marley & Me, which hasn’t gotten a whole lot of good reviews. But it’s hard to dismiss his admiration for the movie when he writes, “Marley & Me celebrates two ordinary people as they try to fit love, work, children, and one volcanically misbehaved pooch into a single space. Marley may be the dog from hell, but we’re meant to see that the Grogans, in their hearts, wouldn’t have it any other way.” I’m still not dying to see it, but Gleiberman found a humanity in the story that he couldn’t deny.

What did Lyons say about I Am Legend? That it’s what an event movie should be and that his head was “blown to bits” when he saw how New York City was depicted in the movie. Then he claimed that “The film… engages your mind with questions of your own survival skills.” I go to the movies for many reasons, ruminating on my own survival skills isn’t one of them. And why is Goldeneye Lyons’ favorite Bond movie? Because as a youngster, he played the videogame the movie inspired.

Lyons may think I Am Legend is one of the greatest movies ever made, but it wasn’t even his favorite of 2007. That honor went to Into the Wild, a noble choice but I’m baffled by Lyons’s reasoning: “Truly a beautiful film that captures the essence of what life is all about: to follow your heart, no matter where it takes you.”

From where I sit, Into the Wild is about Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch), who grew up in a family where wealth took the place of love. He shuns his parents’ materialistic ways to live in the wilderness of Alaska. He touches the lives of several people (most memorably Hal Holbrook, who begs him to become his surrogate son) then does indeed live in the wilderness until the spring thaw, when a river rises too high for him to cross. That traps him without a food supply and, starving, he eats poisonous berries and dies a painful death. (If only he had seen I Am Legend and engaged his mind with questions of his own survival skills.)

I didn’t intend this post to add to the hate being piled on Lyons, but his being placed in such a powerful post underscores the risk good film criticism faces. Lyons has at least one fan in Cenk Uygur. Uygur (who admits he’s a friend of Ben Mankiewicz, Lyons’ At the Movies partner) wrote on The Huffington Post that he likes Lyons because he’s good on TV. Of Siskel and Ebert he claimed, “the cinematography and shadowy lighting is enormously important (to them). God bless them for it, but I mostly don’t care. And I suspect I’m in the vast majority.”

Uygur makes Siskel and Ebert sound like elitists. They weren’t. Ebert liked Cop and a Half and Siskel sang his way through perhaps the lone positive review given to Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Siskel and Ebert were interesting, not because of their haughty views of film but because they talked like people, not made-for-TV puppets. Tim Russert wasn’t a natural TV star either, but someone was smart enough to have him host Meet the Press. Tony Kornheiser and Mike Wilbon host one of the best shows on television, ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption. But they were newspapermen long before they became TV stars.

Uygur also writes that he doesn’t want to hear comparisons to Frank Capra, he just wants “to know whether I should see Benjamin Button this weekend.” He can get that from all kinds of places - Entertainment Tonight, Extra, and the E! Network. At the Movies was a place for thoughtful, spirited film discussions. It’s where you might become intrigued to seek out Away From Her, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and The Savages.

I’m not asking that A.O. Scott take over for Mario Lopez, I just want back that one half-hour each week where two critics intelligently discuss the merits of new movies. Uygur suggests that critics who knock Lyons are jealous of him. Could be. I’d love to be magically tapped to host At the Movies, or a similar show. I’ll tell you what I don’t want to do - interview Brad Pitt about the twins or what a jokester George Clooney was while filming Burn After Reading.

Let Lyons do that. Let him live a long, healthy life and host At The Movies for decades to come. Just don’t let real movie criticism go away. We need it.

Teenagers who dream of becoming the next Christopher Nolan should look into The Princeton Public Library’s video production workshops for teens. Two four-session workshops will begin Jan. 13 and Feb. 10.

The workshops seem like a terrific opportunity to learn about filmmaking, and will be taught by Allison Paz, a library Tech Aide with a bachelor’s in film production. She’ll be teaching aspiring moviemakers the basics of video production, including composition, lighting, scriptwriting, and editing. Students even get to make a short film as a final project.

Students in grades 8 through 12 are invited to register. Participants can bring their own camera or use one provided by library. Call (609) 924-9529, ext. 240 to register.

Here’s a request that the library consider a similar program for adults, I’d love to participate in one. If anyone at the library reads this, please plan an adult program time other than late Tuesday afternoon, there’s no way I can leave work early on a Tuesday.

Fans of classic television remember Paul Benedict for his role as Bentley, the British goofball of a neighbor on The Jeffersons. I took particular notice of his death last week because I interviewed him two years ago as he was preparing to play Scrooge in McCarter Theatre’s production of A Christmas Carol.

We mainly talked about the show and the role of Scrooge, since that’s what the story was about, but we also talked about his film work. His movie roles included a terrific part in Neil Simon’s The Goodbye Girl as a director who forced Richard Dreyfuss’ character to play Richard III as a flamboyant gay man. Benedict also had parts in two of Christopher Guest’s comedies (he played the guy the cast thought was the all-powerful Guffman in Waiting For Guffman).

But what I most wanted to ask him about was working with Marlon Brando in 1990’s The Freshman - how often are you two degrees of separation from, perhaps, the greatest movie actor ever? Benedict played an obnoxious NYU film school professor in The Freshman and Brando played a mobster who looked remarkably like Vito Corleone.

I asked Benedict if he had a Brando story for me, and he didn’t disappoint. He approached Brando at the wrap party and told him it was a pleasure working with him. Brando mentioned a scene that he thought Benedict was particularly good in.

“I wasn’t in that scene,” Benedict told Brando, “you and Matthew (Broderick) were.”

Brando, he told me, quickly replied: “Oh, it was a good scene, though.”

Back in the 1980s, I went to a movie theater on Long Island to see House of Wax, an old Vincent Price horror picture from the ’50s. It wasn’t the movie itself that I was dying to see; rather, I wanted to watch a movie in 3-D, which I had known about for years but never experienced.

I’ve never seen House of Wax again and my recollection is that it’s pretty good, but even in my early teens I thought 3-D distracted from the movie experience rather than enhancing it. If I recall correctly (and I’m writing from memories that are about 25 years old here), when I peeked at the screen sans my cardboard glasses, I saw the image of the movie being screened three times. Wearing the glasses, I suppose, merged them all together for a 3-D effect.

The image was kind of blurry and hard to follow. One of the few 3-D effects I remember is when a character (I think the one played by Charles Bronson) runs from the forefront of the screen and it kind of looked like he had jumped out of the audience into the movie. I also remember someone hurling an object that appeared to leap off the screen.

Except for some attractions at Disney World, like the breathtaking Mickey’s PhilharMagic, I didn’t don 3-D glasses in a movie theater again until this past weekend when my daughter and I took in a showing of Bolt. If I had had the inclination to see Bolt without my daughter, I would have opted for 2-D with the stubborn conviction that 3-D isn’t a genuine part of the movie-going process.

I’m real glad I have a kid.

The new digital 3-D is spectacular. There are few “tricks” in Bolt (one that stands out is pepper spray being shot at the audience) but the depth of the image is what struck me most. When a road, or the ground, is in the forefront of the screen, it doesn’t merely jut out at you; rather it appears to be inviting the viewer to step into the image like Mia Farrow in The Purple Rose of Cairo. 3-D also made me feel closer to the characters’ experiences, facial expressions seemed more genuine and body movements (especially the pigeons’) inhabited their space.

I wouldn’t want every movie to be made in 3-D, it adds a level of spectacle that doesn’t fit serious films like No Country for Old Men. Nor am I excited about upcoming 3-D re-releases of Toy Story and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast - those movies created their own wonderful experiences and should remain as they are.

But looking forward, it appears 3-D is here to stay, unlike past experiments. Coming attractions prior to Bolt include Monsters vs. Aliens, a new Ice Age adventure and, best of all, Pixar’s Up. As I watched the character in Bolt walk amongst motionless blades of grass, I couldn’t help but think that the Pixar people would have had them blowing in the wind. Up’s trailer includes a thrilling image of countless balloons taking an old man, his house and an unwanted stowaway on a journey. I can’t wait to hop on board - and nothing less than 3-D will do.

I had an epiphany of sorts while watching, of all things, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa with my wife and daughter this past rainy Saturday. I didn’t find any deep meaning in the adventures Alex the Lion and his friends but I had trouble putting aside an image of the World Trade Center towers shown early in the movie.

 

They’re shown rather matter of factly to establish the time period when young Alex is given a home in New York’s Central Park Zoo but I’ll bet my Milk Duds that a lot of thought and debate went into the decision to show the towers in a movie, particularly one made for the kiddie set. It might, in fact, be the first instance of filmmakers making an effort to show the Twin Towers in a post-9/11 movie that isn’t about the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

 

Ben Still voices Alex in Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa and it was about seven years ago, shortly after the terrorist attacks, when another Stiller movie, Zoolander, made headlines when its studio digitally removed the towers from a scene. It was too distracting or distressing, the thinking was, for people to see those buildings on the big screen so shortly after that tragic day, especially in a wacky comedy.

 

I was in Manhattan on 9/11, nowhere near the site of the attacks but I saw, and felt, the fear around me. I remember riding the elevator at the building I worked in near Grand Central Terminal and listening to a woman as she fought through tears to tell me, a total stranger, that she was walking to the Brooklyn Bridge. It was the quickest way off Manhattan she could think of. A few hours later, when I caught up with a friend of mine who did work near the towers, I was shocked at the site of a layer of dust that covered his clothes.

 

Even with these experiences, I thought some of the reaction to 9/11 was silly. To this day, I can’t understand why radio stations decided “Bridge Over Troubled Water” shouldn’t have been played in the days following the tragedy. And why an episode of The Simpsons was shelved because of a hysterical scene in which Homer guzzles cans of crab juice while visiting the Big Apple. Desperate to pee, he’s told the bathroom is on the top floor of the towers, when he finally gets there, he’s informs it’s on the top floor of the other tower.

 

It was pop culture arrogance, programmers and movie executives deciding what “regular folk” could handle. And it extended to a few movie critics. I remember watching one on Fox News praise United 93 but warning that audiences probably weren’t ready for it. The guy didn’t look particularly bright, and I wanted to scream at the TV, “Hey buddy, if you’re ready for it, then most of us will be too. And those of us who aren’t ready will know to stay away from it without your help.”

 

I don’t want to say the Towers’ appearance in a movie means Americans have become comfortable with 9/11 - it continues to affect us and I don’t think we’ve come close to defining what post-9/11 America is - but I suppose Dreamworks thinks we’re now able to handle being reminded of those buildings and, in effect, that day. I disagree. I think we always could have handled it. The people behind Zoolander were in a tough situation, the movie was released in the weeks after 9/11. But those buildings are already in lots of movies that were made long before their destruction, The Godfather Part III and Godspell come to mind. Those towers are a part of our history and I’m somehow encouraged that they’re showing up in movies again.

 

And I hope that episode of The Simpsons is being shown in reruns. I’m ready to laugh at Homer and the crab juice again.

�

 

A few random observations from the world of movie-going…

Has anyone noticed the complete Apatow-zation of movie comedies? Not only is Apatow himself producing three movies slated for release in 2009, it seems like studios are trying to convince us he’s involved in a slew of others.

The trailer for Role Models showcases Paul Rudd, an Apatow regular, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse (McLovin from Superbad). It also features Jane Lynch who’s made brief but notable appearances in movies like The 40 Year-Old Virgin (she was the electronics store employee who merrily exchanged phrases for getting high with Seth Rogen).

Rudd is teaming up with Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s Jason Segal in I Love, You Man, whose bro-mantic premise - about a friendless engaged guy seeking a best man - sounds like it came out of Apatow 101.

 Lynch will also show up in The Post Grad Survival Guide with Craig Robinson, who has shown up in Apatow projects Knocked Up, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and Pineapple Express. Robinson also has a role in Playboys, about a virginal teenager who wakes up from a long coma to discover his girlfriend is now a centerfold, another Apatow-ish plot.

 The last filmmaker to spawn so many imitators was Quentin Tarantino, based on the films that followed Pulp Fiction, the laughs at all these movies may be few and far between.

***

 About six weeks ago I went to a matinee at the AMC Hamilton 24 and noticed a showing of Mamma Mia! where audiences were encouraged to sing along with the movie. I had a few minutes before my movie started so I popped into the Mamma Mia! auditorium thinking it would be fun to spy on people happily singing along to “SOS.” I walked in to a completely empty theater. And to answer the movie equivalent of the light bulb-in-the-refrigerator question, apparently movies are screened even if no one shows up to see them.

 ***

Speaking of the Hamilton AMC, in my review of that multiplex, I wrote about their $5 bargain matinees. The price has gone up to $6. That’s still good but $5 sounds a lot better than $6 (all of a sudden I’m sounding like Andy Rooney).

 ***

I was angry at a co-worker when he told me he and his friends sat through a blurry showing of W. without complaining. As I admonished him and asked why he didn’t say anything, he replied, “Because when you complain, nothing changes.” He’s right and I’m guilty of the same exact thinking (I’ve even written about it on this blog). So movie-goers, let’s unite. If you see a blurry image or hear poor sound, complain to the manager. We pay good money and spend our precious spare time at the movies, theaters should hold up their end of the bargain.

 ***

Entourage is a TV show, not a movie, but it’s about a movie star so let me go on a mini-rant here. This season has been a disappointment, though I’m nowhere near close to jumping ship. With only four episodes left, it feels like the season’s plotline is only getting started as Vince finally starts filming Smoke Jumpers. But the real problem is that E. is still stuck in this mode where he’s the smartest guy in the room but no one pays attention to him. E. needs to become his own man, a successful manager in his own right who guides Vince’s career for real. This might diminish Ari’s role but Jeremy Piven’s character was more interesting as a supporting player anyway.

Â

Heard any good jokes lately? If you have, I bet you haven’t heard them at the movies.

Because it seems jokes - at least good ones - are fading from the silver screen. Oh sure, there are plenty of comedies out there but they’re from the school of creating laughter from behavior, rather than sight gags and one-liners.

Take the films of Judd Apatow, undoubtedly the most influential comedy presence in film today. Since 2005, he’s directed, written or produced the following comedies: The 40 Year-Old Virgin, Talladega Nights, Knocked Up, Superbad, Walk Hard, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Drillbit Taylor, Step Brothers and Pineapple Express.

Most of these are pretty darn funny, but their laughs are born from characters being placed in uncomfortable situations - either social or physical - or by acting outrageously. Think of Seth Rogen dancing in Knocked Up, Michael Cera and Jonah Hill expressing their bro-mance love in Superbad or Kristen Bell dumping a naked Jason Segal in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. It’s a school of comedy perfected on television (or at least HBO) on The Larry Sanders Show (which Apatow worked on) and more recently Curb Your Enthusiasm.

If you read these scripts, I’m not sure you’d laugh. It’s a different kind of comedy than something like Young Frankenstein, which is being shown at the ACME Screening Room in Lambertville, Oct. 25. It’s part of a Halloween double feature (along with Alien) but the movie’s fascinating to watch today because of its approach to comedy.

Jokes fly off Young Frankenstein’s script (written by its star Gene Wilder and its director Mel Brooks). Seconds after the credits end, we see someone struggling to remove a box from a decayed corpse. Before we know it, Wilder’s Frederick Frankenstein is insisting his name is pronounced “Frohnkenstein” and he stabs himself in the leg with a scalpel while emphatically trying to make a point. Then there’s a stretch of less than two minutes when Igor meets Dr. Frankenstein off a train. During a recent viewing, I counted eight jokes (like “Froderick,” “What hump?” and the shameless “Walk this way” bit) in that span.

In my opinion, the funniest movie ever is the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, made nearly 40 years before Young Frankenstein. Counting the gags in that movie might break your calculator.

The joke movie may not be totally dead but it’s on life support. One recent example is Disaster Movie, which is undistinguishable from lame predecessors like Epic Movie or Meet the Spartans. Their gags involve taking a popular movie’s premise and sticking everyone from Paris Hilton or Indiana Jones in the middle of things. If Brooks and Wilder did this, Young Frankenstein’s jokes would include having Don Corleone and Spiro Agnew show up in Transylvania for no apparent reason.

Another recent comedy, An American Carol, was directed by David Zucker, of Airplane! and Naked Gun fame, but made news only because of its conservative leanings, not for its yucks.

All of this has me wondering. Can a joke-filled movie make it today? If Young Frankenstein were made today, would we still laugh? Some of its jokes are just too easy, like when Frankenstein and Igor are digging a coffin out a grave and Igor says it could be worse. “How?” Frankenstein asks. Seconds after Igor replies, “Could be raining,” they’re stuck in a downpour. I wonder if a generation raised on Jackass, Punk’d and YouTube videos would sit still for Brooks’ shenanigans. It helps that Young Frankenstein is an exceptionally well made picture (the best directing job Brooks ever did).

Not even comedic masters like Brooks and Zucker can make funny movies today. Brooks’ only recent relevance has come from recycling his movies for Broadway and Zucker hasn’t made anything remotely funny since the last Naked Gun movie in 1994. I shutter at the thought of Sci-Fi Movie, which his IMDB page has him producing for a release next year.

For one night in Lambertville, there’s Young Frankenstein. Then you can fill your Netflix queue with Blazing Saddles, Silent Movie, Duck Soup, Horse Feathers, A Night at the Opera, Sleeper, Airplane!, the Naked Gun trilogy and the first two Austin Powers movies.

 

Young Frankenstein will be screened at the ACME Screening Room, 25 S. Union St., Lambertville, Oct. 25, 9:15 p.m. Part of a double feature starting with Alien at 7 p.m. $5 suggested donation; www.njstatelib.org/lfpl/friends/NN/

It seems people my age can’t let go of our movie past. For more than 25 years we’ve been arguing over which Star Wars movie is the best and spent a part of our summer whining when George Lucas released the mediocre Clone Wars cartoon. We lined up to see Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull nearly 20 years after Indy’s previous adventure and helped Sylvester Stallone become fairly relevant again a couple of years ago by making minor hits out of the latest Rocky and Rambo installments.

Set for release over the next nine months: New starts for the Star Trek and Friday the 13^th franchises, even a new Witch Mountain movie (continuing, after more than 30 years, a series of average live-action flicks for kids released by Disney in the 1970s). TV shows from our youth like The A-Team and Land of the Lost are also getting the big screen treatment next summer.
Continue Reading »