Thank God scientists finally found the missing link (aka Darwinius masillae, aka “Ida”). Now we can at last prove Charles Darwin right and be done with films like Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, as well as all the seemingly pro-science movies that inadvertently ruined the theory of evolution. We now look forward to the “Ida” biopic, or at least a movie detailing the 26 years (give or take 47 million) it took for the discovery of her fossil to become a mainstream media sensation. Never mind that this is hardly the missing link between apes and humans. With almost 50 years passed since the release of Inherit the Wind, film-loving Darwinists need some kind of missing link story to grab onto.

It is true that cinema has not been so kind to Darwinism, giving us such mockeries as Evolution, Howard the Duck and Creature from the Black Lagoon. But filmmakers have consistently shown a special love for the concept of the missing link, at least. Although many movies depict the idea with little seriousness, and some feature negative portrayals of primitive monsters, there are a number of truly lovable creatures that represent the concept of the missing link on film. Check them out after the jump.
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I don’t smoke weed, but if I did, I’d spend today getting high and watching a marathon of movies that are (supposedly) better when you’re stoned. Why? Because it’s 4/20, the high holy day for marijuana fans. You’ve probably seen a billion of these lists, which recommend the same bunch of psychedelic classics beloved by stoners everywhere. So, instead of including such obvious choices as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, and other familiar titles, I’ve picked some alternatives to the usual 4/20 favorites, because after awhile, the same old visuals just don’t do it for me — I mean, those sick, degenerate reefer addicts — anymore.
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Thanks to David Hudson of IFC.com’s The Daily and just about everybody else for so clearly letting me know what “everyone’s talking about” today: the new trailer for the sci-fi Sundance sensation Moon. I find the excitement interesting for two reasons. First, I think it’s odd when people who’ve already seen a movie go ga-ga for its trailer. Such subjective write-ups also tend to hint that spoilers abound, which can be quite obnoxious. Second, I think it’s strange that we still go completely insane for films like this, even as we immediately address their influences in Kubrick and Tarkovsky. I’m not complaining, of course; I love all derivatives of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solyaris, Alien, Metropolis, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, etc. There’s just something about sci-fi that overcomes the usual complaints against lack of originality.

Anyway, because I haven’t yet seen Moon (Karina has, though, read her review from Sundance here), I’m going to attempt to ignore the commentary from people who already love the film (sorry Billington, Goss, etc.). Objective reactions only, after the jump:
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It’s only a couple of short weeks before the 2008 Oscar nominees are announced, and the internet is abuzz with prognostications. One hotly debated topic is whether or not Wall-E can pull off a Best Picture nomination, or even a win. It would be the second animated film to be nominated in the category, after Beauty and the Beast, which got the honor before the Animated Feature prize existed. Will the stodgy old Academy seat Wall-E at the kid’s table, giving it an easy win in the animation category, or will it be allowed to play with the big boys?

A best pic nomination for Wall-E would be a rare honor for animation in general, but it would also be a long over due rarity for another reason: Wall-E would only be the second best pic nominated film in the history of the Oscars to be set in the future. The only one to date is A Clockwork Orange. When you consider how many nominees are period pieces (I didn’t care to count), this represents a massive bias on the part of the Academy. It’s clear that they love the past, but they hate the future.

What would the history of the Academy Awards look like if the Hollywood elite wasn’t terrified of speculative fiction? Below, seven movies about the future that should have been nominated for Best Picture:

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On Friday, singer Levi Stubbs passed away at the age of 72 following a long battle with cancer. Best known as the lead singer of The Four Tops, Stubbs also provided the voice for “Audrey II” in both the stage musical and the film musical versions of Little Shop of Horrors. Though his only film role as a voice actor (he could also be heard in the Saturday morning cartoon Captain N: The Game Master), it was plenty. His performance as the carnivorous plant put him in the ranks with Douglas Rain (”HAL-9000″), Anthony Daniels (”C-3PO”) and James Earl Jones (”Darth Vader”) as far as iconic vocal parts in live action movies go. Unfortunately, due to a lack of lasting enthusiasm for Horrors, Stubbs is not quite as celebrated as the others. But could you possibly imagine or accept any other voice begging for Seymour to “feeeeeeed” him? Just thinking of the idea reminds me of the clip of Darth Vader actor David Prowse speaking the lines before Jones’ voice was overdubbed.

As a kid, much of my delight with Little Shop of Horrors was with Stubbs’ voice, which I loved to try and imitate. In particular, it was this Oscar-nominated song, “Mean Green Mother from Outer Space,” written for the film and not originally in the stage musical, which was the most fun to sing along to, because of the racy (to a nine year old) lyric, “I’m gonna bust your balls!” And, of course, I always enjoyed the lead-in line, which I would often attempt in my best prepubescent baritone, “noooooo shit, Sherlock!” Stubbs performed the song live at the 59th Academy Awards, but I don’t recall how censored the lyrics were, and unfortunately only the performance of the winning song (”Take My Breath Away” from Top Gun) appears to be available online.

In the new movie Eagle Eye, three characters participate in a re-creation of the famous crop duster sequence from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Only the plane from NbN has been replaced with an electrical tower and power lines, and it takes Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan and Anthony Azizi to perform Cary Gran’t part (Azizi also substitutes for the pilot and the farmer, I guess).

Such an homage is not surprising coming from director D.J. Caruso, whose last picture, Disturbia, is currently involved in a lawsuit for being an uncredited remake of Hitch’s Rear Window. This time, fortunately, Caruso borrows enough from other films, including Hitch’s second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, 2001: A Space Odyssey and I, Robot, to keep from being sued by any single party. Eagle Eye will likely also remind audiences of The Dark Knight, if not for the similar cell phone surveillance tactics then for Caruso’s even less capable talent for directing car chases.

While Caruso does a good job at allowing his audience to compare him to better filmmakers (yes, even I, Robot’s Alex Proyas), he doesn’t give us the world’s worst redo of the crop duster bit (that is probably this). But he also doesn’t come anywhere close to giving us the best. And for such a famous scene that is so widely studied and imitated, giving us merely another so-so re-creation is very disappointing. After the jump, you’ll find some of my favorite tributes to North by Northwest, mostly paying homage to that one beloved sequence.

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Everyone is familiar with the major controversy of the 1969 Oscars, but the real problem may not be that Oliver! was named Best Picture over Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which wasn’t even nominated in that top category. No, the bigger issue may be with Planet of the Apes receiving a special award for make-up — consider someone associated with that production may have stolen from or attempted to sabotage the ape wardrobe of Kubrick’s film. In a Vulture blog interview with 2001 ape performer and choreographer Dan Richter, the former mime implies something to that affect:

We had stuff stolen. I can’t say it was Planet of the Apes, but they were the only other movie shooting at the same time and same place we were. Stanley and I even had someone steal a mask and some ape hands right out from under our noses on the backlot, where someone had hid in a drainage ditch. We were in lockdown all the time.

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One of the hardest things about being a young film critic is that it’s impossible to catch up to the older guys in terms of how many films I’ve seen. To think Roger Ebert was already reviewing films at the Sun-Times for ten years before I was born. And gee whiz, Andrew Sarris has been doing this forever. I mean, it’s hard enough seeing every significant film released in a year, let alone every significant film released in the 8 decades before my lifetime. But while it’s certainly in my best interest to see all those Ingmar Berman films I’ve avoided, and see everything else on all those “all time best” lists, and maybe watch Turner Classic Movies 24-7 for the rest of my life, there’s just no way I’ll ever be complete in the eyes of some of my peers or, more importantly, of my readers.

Last Sunday, SF Chronicle critic Mick LaSalle confessed to having never previously seen some “classics”, including 2001: A Space Odyssey. But he had finally just watched them and proceeded to review them. Some bloggers have responded, including Kevin Lee, who is disappointed in LaSalle’s low-level insight, and Jeff Wells, who admitted to his own unseen, none of which seemed too embarrassing. But then LaSalle ponied up a response to the responses:

“Of course, since I’ve written that article I’ve heard from people telling me that I’m an illiterate for not seeing the movies they’ve seen (although I’ve seen them NOW). Needless to say, I could name hundreds of worthy and significant films that probably none of them have seen. But hey, people need something to make them feel good about themselves, and they’ll find any excuse.

But that’s neither important nor interesting. However, the larger point this brings up, though, does interest me. Movies have been around now for about a century. Fifty years ago, we might have reasonably assumed (it wouldn’t have been true, but it would have been a reasonable assumption) that every film critic of significance had seen all the major movies.

But after a hundred years, do we really want our film critics to be generalists, all familiar with the same batch of pre-digested movies that everyone agrees are good? By now, you really can’t see everything, so do we want critics all to have seen the same narrow basic repertory?”

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In the new issue of Entertainment Weekly, Mark Harris declares that sci-fi movies are in trouble, that they’re not giving us any new ideas and are in fact too nostalgic and derivative. Harris himself is saying nothing new — Blade Runner director Ridley Scott expertly stated this last summer at the Venice Film Festival — but I applaud his solution and his call for someone to rise to the occasion and save the genre from itself:

Perhaps science fiction needs to be saved from the very people who love it the most. Nostalgia for a form can be annihilating to creativity, so while its devotees are swamped in their own canon, trying to mine now-sacred texts for any new material, I wish a great writer or director with no particular affection for the genre would let his imagination loose and see what it yields. It happened 40 years ago, when Stanley Kubrick, following his own ice-cold muse and his fascination with science itself, decided he wanted to create something that ”extended the range of science fiction,” a genre that didn’t particularly impress him. What nerve! The result was 2001: A Space Odyssey, which changed the game so completely that in movies, the sci-fi genre immediately vanished for a few years while everyone surveyed an irrevocably altered landscape.

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