In all likelihood, a new documentary about Robert Pattinson titled Robsessed is a total cash grab and a waste of time. But let’s not completely toss aside the potential of this film, which UK-based distributor Revolver Entertainment has acquired and will release to DVD in the U.S. around the time that The Twilight Saga: New Moon opens in theaters.
I’m reminded of all the late night commercials I used to see for Biggie & Tupac years ago. The way the film was being sold sure made it seem at the time to be as cheap and disregardable as any of those compilation CD sets advertised in the same late hours. I never would have guessed the film was made by such an interesting filmmaker as Nick Broomfield, who I now place within my top five favorite documentarians. If only I’d been a bigger hip hop enthusiast I might have discovered Broomfield earlier than I did.
Likewise, if I’d been a greater Nirvana fan I might have been turned onto the filmmaker through his prior doc Kurt and Courtney (it wasn’t until years later when I wrote a paper on first-person documentaries that I acquainted myself with Broomfield’s films). And speaking of Kurt Cobain, I’m sure some of his young fans rented Kurt Cobain About a Son only to wind up interested in non-traditional documentary and the further work of director A.J. Schnack.
Could Robsessed really have been directed by a true talent like Broomfield and Schnack? It’s hard to imagine, especially since neither the news release nor Revolver’s website reveals the filmmaker behind this documentary. But since the film may concentrate primarily on Pattinson’s obsessed fanbase, it could at least be as interesting as docs like Trekkies and We Are Wizards, which deal with devout followers of the Star Trek and Harry Potter franchises, respectively.
I wouldn’t write Robsessed off so much as I’d say to ignore the film’s DVD-set companion, a pre-Twilight RPattz movie titled The Haunted Airmen.
Check out what other film bloggers are saying about the documentary after the jump:
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James Cameron’s Avatar is supposed to be like nothing we’ve ever seen before. So why does it look so familiar? One of the most disappointing things about the film’s promotion so far is how derivative the film looks in the trailer that (eventually) debuted online today. And much of what we’re reminded of wasn’t even that great to begin with. To help illustrate our feeling of déjà vu, we’ve captured a few screenshots from the trailer and, where available, put them next to their older visual counterparts.
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If you need to rest your eyes at any point during the 146 min. comedy epic Funny People, your best bet is to do it early during a sequence in which Adam Sandler’s character has back to back sex with a couple of female fans. The second of these scenes is mildly amusing, but there’s just no need to put the images in your head of either Sandler with a face full of breasts or the actor taking a girl from behind.
There are some actors we don’t need to see in a sex scene, humorous or otherwise, and Adam Sandler is one of them. He’s of a generation of comedic actors who starred in movies where they get the girl but where there’s no need for gratuitous sex and nudity. Unlike most of his successors, including Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, Paul Rudd and Dane Cook, he was never a pin-up in addition to being a funnyman. Even if he was better looking than some of his brethren, such as David Spade, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Rob Schneider.
Still, Adam Sandler isn’t the last male actor we’d want to see in a sex scene. He’s not even in the bottom ten, which we present in a list below:
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When it was just the Adoption Community protesting the marketing of Orphan, a hackneyed horror flick about yet another evil adoptee, it was merely another minor controversy incited by a select interest group. But now members of the U.S. House and Senate have gotten involved with a letter campaign to Warner Bros. condemning the studio’s seemingly anti-adoption advertisements for and message in the film.
Is this really necessary after so many years and so many stories containing fucked-up orphans? Sure, Hollywood has given us too few Annie types in cinema over the past few decades, but certainly ‘80s television made up for this history with the likes of Diff’rent Strokes, Webster, Small Wonder, My Two Dads, Punky Brewster, et al. And adoptions were on the rise for most of that time, only dropping slightly in recent years, possibly due to the dwindling economy.
That isn’t to say we agree with cinema’s consistent misrepresentation of orphans or adoptees, so to expose the unfair reputation of parentless kids, we take a look at ten types of screwed-up orphans, which potentially keep more people from adopting them. Check out our list of characters and films after the jump:
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I’m all for appropriate trailer positioning, but the debut last night of a teaser for something called Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief may have gone a little overboard. Actually, I change my mind: a lot overboard. The movie, based on Rick Riordan’s fantasy novels, is about a 12-year-old boy who finds out he’s part Greek god. Sounds a bit like the story of an 11-year-old boy who finds out he’s a wizard. But in case that’s not enough to be marketable to Harry Potter fans, the first trailer for Percy Jackson notes that the movie is directed by Chris Columbus, who kicked off the Potter films by helming both Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets. What else could Fox 2000 do to exploit the other franchise? Hmm, how about a logo that looks exactly like the one from Sorcerer’s Stone?
Certainly such a teaser should be positioned in front of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince right? Well, actually, I think it could hurt the upcoming potential franchise starter, which doesn’t hit theaters til next February. Potter fans aren’t dumb and they’re sure to see that their beloved character is being completely ripped off and exploited. And with a record-breaking midnight box office for Half-Blood Prince last night, this teaser probably struck a bad chord with millions of moviegoers. As observed by Alex Billington of First Showing during one screening, the New Moon trailer obviously garnered huge cheers while Percy Jackson was met with “confused silence.” Meanwhile, the movie doesn’t seem to be getting a whole lot of attention online save for negative postings by film bloggers who agree that it’s a blatant Potter wannabe.
Check out some of those negative reactions after the jump:
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We’re so amazed by the stellar reviews of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (if not for Manohla Dargis, Rex Reed and Wesley Morris the top critic score on Rotten Tomatoes would be 100%), that we wondered if it’s the best-received sixth installment of a series ever. And from what we can tell, until some late-come party crashers show up to ruin things, it appears to be nearly true.
Of course, it’s not like there was much competition from past franchises. By the sixth movie most film series are cheap, tired and nearly void of remaining followers. However, there have been a few worthwhile Part 6s, enough to show us that it’s sometimes acceptable for Hollywood to keep going with a film property (even without the excuse and benefit of a popular long-running book series).
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All comparisons between Dick Cheney and Darth Vader were rendered moot recently when George Lucas told Maureen Dowd, of The New York Times, “George Bush is Darth Vader. Cheney is the emperor.” In response to that clarification, David Edelstein wrote a piece in this week’s New York magazine in which he attempts to find another movie villain who Cheney resembles even more than any character in Star Wars. Ultimately, though, he settles on the former vice president being something of a villainous mutt: “Cheney is Palpatine with a soupçon of Sauron, a pinch of Voldemort, a dash of Mabuse, a jigger of Fu, with some Elmer Fudd and Richard Nixon folded in.”
That’s an interesting conclusion, but do we really need to soil our memories of these cinematic evildoers by likening Cheney to them, and worse, vice versa? It’s bad enough the guy has shown up in a lot of contemporary movies, both officially (W.) and unofficially. In Jim Jarmusch’s new film, The Limits of Control, which opens this week, a certain character is an obvious, albeit somewhat veiled, stand-in for Cheney. And at least seven other recent films similarly feature a character who is a dead-ringer for the old VP. We count them down, in order of most intentionally Cheney-like, below.
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It’s been a long time since I paid attention to any promotional materials related to a Harry Potter movie. After awhile, it had seemed the movies all look the same, at least in trailers, posters and other marketing tools. And since I stopped caring about both the books and the movies after Goblet of Fire (though Order of the Phoenix has admittedly been floating around the bottom of my Netflix queue since it was released to DVD), there really was no reason for me to bother with ads for whatever installment Warner Bros. is currently attempting to ram down my movie-blogging throat.
However, due to my job of keeping abreast of all that’s super-hot in the world of film (according to film blogs, at least), I was obligated to watch the latest trailer for this summer’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. And I have to admit that it makes the new movie look incredibly epic. I feel like even if I had never seen a Harry Potter movie before, I’d still go see this, whether I went back and acquainted myself with the predecessors or not. Even more than exciting me with its percussion-heavy music and its promise of kissing scenes (aka “mild sensuality”), the trailer really impressed me with its turn-face on the usual trailer-pause technique, in which the cliche “It has begun” is replaced with “It’s over.”
After the jump, read what other bloggers are saying about this new spot:
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Though the third Fast and the Furious installment, Tokyo Drift, wasn’t a huge box office disappointment with its $63 million domestic gross, it was significantly less successful than its predecessors, The Fast and the Furious ($145 million) and 2 Fast 2 Furious ($127 million). A fourth film would normally see an even bigger drop in box office receipts, but next week’s Fast & Furious has a good chance of actually being the highest-grossing film in the series yet, due to the return of original cast members Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordanna Brewster and, most importantly, Vin Diesel.
With the expectation that Fast & Furious will be enough of a hit to save the franchise, we take a look at ten other films that similarly kept their respective series going, either because of an increase in profits or a surprising increase in quality, following one or many disappointing installments.
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Last Friday, Hollywood Reporter broke the news that Fox will bring the comic strip Marmaduke to the big screen. One the one hand, this is baffling. The comic, a series of crudely rendered half-jokes, makes very little sense, and has no story whatsoever. The fact that Marmaduke is a mischievous great dane barely even qualifies as a premise. On the other hand, studios have sunk massive amounts of money into comic strip movies like Garfield and Dennis the Menace, and money-making dog movies like Marley & Me, which has earned $166 million worldwide since its Christmas ‘08 release.
So Marmaduke might make economic sense, but it makes little sense otherwise. The green-lighting of this project is a peek into the bizarre minds of studio executives. If movies like Wall-E and the Harry Potter series bring home the bacon and earn critical acclaim, why empty the coffers for family tent-pole movies based on the crappiest of source material available? I have a theory. Just as Zack Snyder was goaded on by the allegedly “unfilmable” quality of the Watchmen graphic novel, the executives at Fox must see the production of a Marmaduke film as an act of artistic defiance. Let’s turn and unreadable comic into an unwatchable movie, they say, and laugh all the way to the bank when it destroys the competition at the box office!
In that vein, I challenge the major studios to make the following comic strips into movies, just to see if people will pay to see the resulting crap. If they should choose to accept this challenge, may God help us all.
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Both are broadly classifiable as science fiction, but Alien is basically a horror flick and Aliens has all the conventions of a war film. That’s a pretty slick transition from one type of movie to another, especially since the switch was so immediate within the series. Most movie franchises don’t play with genre in such a way until they’ve gone through a number of sequels, and even then the series usually just simply takes its characters into outer space, a la Moonraker, Jason X and Leprechaun 4.
Genre jumping isn’t that easy, though, unless a franchise inhabits a whole universe in which to expand through. Like Star Wars, for example. Originally a film series, the Star Wars franchise spread out into novels, which has allowed for dips into the romance genre and now horror. That’s right, an upcoming novel by horror author Joe Schreiber, titled Deathtroopers, takes the Star Wars universe into frightening territory described by Schreiber as “in the vein of The Shining and Alien, with a little dose of William Gibson mixed in.”
So, if Star Wars can venture into the horror genre, what other movie franchises should attempt a genre jump? To toy with the idea, we’ve selected five film series in need of a change and suggested a possible redirection of genre for each.
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As we crack open fresh calendars for a new year, we’re treated to a predictable rash of blog posts: 2009 technology predictions. I’ve read a number of these, and prognostications about Microsoft buying Yahoo make me want to light my laptop on fire just to cure the boredom. As an anecdote to lame, ‘what’s the next Twitter?’-style tech prediction lists, I’ve decided to make a list 2009 tech predictions entirely inspired by movies.
2008 was the year in which widely available real-world gadgets were just as good as what James Bond had. Sure, Daniel Craig kicked some ass in Quantum of Solace, but his only real piece of tech was a phone with a camera and GPS! (Hope you got a good texting plan with that, James.) I predict this trend will continue in 2009. We’ll see even more real-world gadgets that used to be the sole domain of Hollywood special effects gurus. Sure, some of these technologies will require minor miracles to become a reality in the coming year, but others are closer than you think.
Strength-Enhancing Exoskeleton Armor
In Iron Man, Tony Stark creates a crude, internally-powered suit of armor to escape his terrorist captors. Once he’s safely at home in his billion-dollar laboratory, he hones the suit into a golden ass-kicking machine, and becomes Iron Man. This story isn’t that far from the truth. Rather than a single billionaire playboy, teams of research scientists are developing robotic suits that significantly increase the wearer’s strength. And the end goal is goal is the same: beating the hell out of terrorists. Almost five years ago, UC Berkley researchers announced a DARPA-funded project called BLEEX, the Berkley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton (pictured at left). If you’re thinking that giant backpack is full of the machinery that runs the thing, you’re wrong. That’s the 70 lbs. pack the wearer can hardly feel, thanks to his robot legs. Assuming secret military technology is always ahead of publicized military technology, and considering that the BLEEX is five years old, I think it’s safe to say that in 2009 President Obama will personally don an Iron Man suit and kill Osama bin Laden.
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Should special effects only be used to service a film’s story, or is it perfectly fine for movies to feature extraneous spectacle? That’s a debate that comes up often among cineastes, but ultimately there’s room for both functions. Sometimes, in cases like Jurassic Park and The Matrix, both categories of effects may even faultlessly coexist in the same film. Yet there is one kind of effects employment that’s intolerable to all film-loving parties: the gratuitous exploitation for the sole purpose of brazen gimmickry. It’s this kind of effects work that goes beyond spectacle. It’s not so much a show as a show off.
For one example of this cinematic sin check out Karina’s review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in which she references a scene featuring an inessential and irrelevant rocket launch in the background of an otherwise intimate moment between two lovers on a sailboat. Actually, that’s apparently only a minor citation in a “a film about the feat of its own whiz-bang, Frankensteinian digital imagery, drunk on its own accomplishment to an extent that feels quasi-ethical.” Hardly the first movie to commit such a crime, sure, but Benjamin Button seems to be the most thoroughly guilty exploiter since Forrest Gump (both films, incidentally, were scripted by Eric Roth).
So, in (dis)honor of Roth’s repeat offense, let’s take a short look at the worst exploitations of special effects in the last 15 years:
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Opening today, Soul Men features the final performance from Bernie Mac, who died unexpectedly on August 9. The movie also includes a cameo from Isaac Hayes, who died one day later. Both men join a long list of people whose last films were released after their deaths, a list that includes Brad Renfro, whose final performance, in The Informers, can be seen in theaters come next May.
Unlike some names on that list, Bernie Mac, whose voice can also be heard in the new animated sequel Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, isn’t likely to receive a posthumous Oscar nomination as a tribute to his final work. But as one of the most underrated comic actors of the past few years, Mac likely gives a great performance as soul singer “Floyd Henderson,” enough to fall in with the crop of posthumously released roles we’ve showcased below:
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