I have been making the case for Doug Liman for years now. I’d even recently given up the claim that I completely despise Swingers (it’s mostly the neo-swing soundtrack I hate). I constantly argued that his The Bourne Identity was better than Greengrass’ The Bourne Supremacy — in the end Greengrass’ The Bourne Ultimatum turned out ultimately the best — and still continue promoting the genius of Mr. and Mrs. Smith (I watched it with a newbie just the other night, and that person was convinced). But now, I am on the fence about Jumper, which I haven’t yet seen and which arrived in theaters today. I can’t decide whether to bother seeing it.
The movie certainly looks stupid. I’ll admit it. Yet this is where my Liman defending came about in the past year, especially recently, as its release got closer. Every time the trailer or TV ad came on the screen, someone would turn to me and say it looks really stupid. Or I would overhear a similar statement coming from the mouths of strangers. Oh, it has to be better than it looks, I would say. It’s Doug Liman, a great action director who tackles seemingly stupid movies. But now the reviews are out. It has an 18% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I can’t find one trustworthy critic who offers good enough reason to see it.
…Read more
Here’s a look at the notable films opening this week that we’ve previously covered here on SpoutBlog:
I first saw Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to The Squid and the Whale, in September at Telluride. I generally disliked it, but I vowed to see it again at the New York Film Festival and, if my opinion had changed, update my original review. If anything, the second viewing solidified many of my initial, negative feelings about the movie, but I did gain deeper respect for the performances, particularly that of Nicole Kidman, who creates a magnificent villain with a vivid backstory, despite the fact that Baumbach gives her very little to work towards. I’ve updated my review to include some thoughts based on a second viewing; you’ll find the old version here, and the new version after the jump.
…Read more
My first impression of Margot at the Wedding (which, admittedly, may change after I see it a second time at the New York Film Festival) is that Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to The Squid and the Whale is an intermittently fascinating exercise that barely holds together as a film. It plays as if Baumbach cut together a footage reel of master-class actors (plus Jack Black, who, perhaps emboldened by the company, somehow gives the finest performance of his career) rehearsing without a script. The characters are half-formed and/or disposed of unceremoniously, the themes are haphazardly integrated, the emotional arc is virtually non-existent.
And yet, some of the performances show flashes of magic, so much so that for all its faults, it’s not entirely dismissable.
It did look good on paper, didn’t it? Nicole Kidman plays Margot, a successful short story writer/prolific drinker who has developed a kind of perfect celebrity-literary scam: she projects her own self-loathing outward, and then drains the frustrations of her friends and family directly onto the pages of the New Yorker. It’s not entirely clear why Margot’s husband (John Turturro), son (Zane Pais) and sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who is married to the director) keep letting her get away with this, but in the film’s best scene, her sometime-lover very publicly dresses her down for the same.
…Read more
Good news for fans of Eyes Wide Shut: a new DVD edition of Stanley Kubrick’s final film is on the way, complete with rated and unrated versions of the film, plus two documentaries, commentary from Sydney Pollack and historian Peter Loewenberg, and more. It will be available for purchase on its own, or as part of a nine-disc Kubrick collection, coming out in late October.
And if you read the above and immediately thought to yourself, “WHAT fans of Eyes Wide Shut?”, you should go read this appreciation of the film by Jeffrey M. Anderson. For several years I’ve thought (mostly in a lazy, cocktail chatter sort of way) of writing a book about Eyes Wide Shut — not so much the movie itself as the press surrounding its production, Kubrick’s death, the controversy surrounding preparing the film for MPAA approval, and its reception amongst both critics and audiences. Every time I gear myself up to actually do the writing, I inevitably lose confidence–something happens and I think, “Oh, nobody cares about that movie.”
Jeffrey’s post–and, especially, the comments it has engendered–has possibly convinced me otherwise. It’s one thing for a couple of critics to remain fascinated by a widely-reviled film ten years after its release, but those comments suggest a common relief among Eyes Wide Shut lovers: they’re all basically saying, “Finally, it’s okay for me to come out of the closet about this.”
Rare is the year that a studio moves up a release date, in order to ensure that their film is “the first Western in the marketplace.” But such is the case this fall, as Lionsgate has decided to open James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma a month ahead of schedule, in order to get a jump on the competition (ie: The Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men, and The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, starring Brad Pitt). But while Lionsgate might have dodged their genre competition, September’s an increibly crowded month for “prestige” releases; still, 3:10’s biggest competition on that particular weekend will be hardly-fearsome The Nanny Diaries.
Spike Lee held another press conference in Italy yesterday, in which he wowed the local journalists with his usual “don’t call me mainstream, I’m just here to scout locations for my $45 million film” bon mots. Amongst other revelations, Lee intimated that recent success has hardly made his life in Hollywood any easier. “My last feature film, Inside Man, was my most successful so far, and I was naive enough to think that that meant I could go from there and make any film I wanted to make. But I was very, very wrong about that.”
Apparently attempting to replicate the, um, success of Bewitched, Nicole Kidman will produce and star in a wacky romantic comedy called Monte Carlo.
I rarely get excited about new trailers; I NEVER get excited about two trailers in the same week. But today, thanks to Variety’s Anne Thompson, I’ve had a glimpse at a second film on my list of Fall 07 Must-Sees, and I can tell you that it isn’t going anywhere.
Powered by AOL Video
Margot at the Wedding (embedded via MovieFone above), written and directed by Noah Baumbach, stars Baumbach’s wife Jennifer Jason Leigh as a lady preparing to marry the schlub who got her pregnant. That description might call to mind a certain recent comic smash, but this looks like very different territory. Within the context of Baumbach’s filmography, Margot looks more like the dark family dramedy The Squid and the Whale than something like clever-but-fluffy Mr. Jealousy. Nicole Kidman–brunette, and just de-glammed enough to resemble a real person–plays Leigh’s judgmental sister. Jack Black is once again cast as in the “unlikely love interest” role, after his turn in Nancy Meyers’ embarrassing The Holiday, although I’m sure he’ll benefit from Baumbach’s ability to write characters that might actually, like, live in the world.
Interest in Margot seems to be fairly high. Shortly after the trailer appeared on Thompson’s blog, a flurry of other blogs picked it up. I even virtually eavesdropped on a Twitter conversation about the soundtrack. Hopefully we’ll get to see the thing at one of the late-Summer festivals, either Telluride or Toronto.
UPDATE: Margot will screen at the New York Film Festival.
Specialty divisions are expecting this Sunday’s stripped-down Golden Globes to deliver a serious hit in the usual visibility for their Oscar-hopeful product. But one exec quoted in this piece says some of his colleagues are “secretly thrilled” that they don’t have to take their minds off the strike and the election in order to attend one more black-tie schmoozefest. Here’s the kicker: “I had heard that stars weren’t even planning to dress up should the telecast have happened,” he said. 
Nicole Kidman’s streak of 
