Are you tired of all the false rumors of celebrity deaths (today it was Rick Astley)? And are you tired of all the jokes that Michael Jackson is really still alive somewhere, hanging out with Tupac, JFK and Elvis? So are we, but we thought we’d take both the obnoxious death hoax trend and the idea that MJ faked it so he could live in peace and out of debt as inspiration for something more worthwhile: a discussion of favorite false deaths in movies.

The device is quite popular, especially in thrillers and horror flicks, and it can be employed as a plot starter or in a twist ending. James Bond has done it, as has Sherlock Holmes. Whether someone fakes his/her own death or is simply mistaken for dead, the actual deed or the ultimate reveal can end up terrific cinema. In fact, it was very difficult for us to narrow our favorites down to ten. It’s a shame we had to leave out memorable scenes from Heathers, Hero and many other movies. Certainly you’ll disagree with some of our exclusions, too, so feel free to name them in the comments section.

Just beware; there may be SPOILERS after the jump:
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To borrow a line from Lou Lumenick: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is this year’s Forrest Gump. This is not really arguable. In addition to sharing a screenwriter (Eric Roth), Robert Zemeckis’ 1994 Best Picture winner and David Fincher’s 2008 Best Picture front-runner (at least, as of this writing) both put groundbreaking special effects to the service of sprawling stories, spanning many decades and weaving a breadcrumb trail through modern American history, in which a man holds a torch for a woman who can’t reciprocate his love until her dreams of autonomy are spectacularly dashed. For me, the Gump comparison is a pejorative, a shorthand way to say, “This film will likely make a lot of money and win a lot of awards, and yet is so phony and cloying and gimmicky that its success will some day be seen by some as a tragedy.” But to others, the second coming of Gump would be a blessing. An Oscars-bait blockbuster? As Lumenick put it, before seeing the film, “Paramount would be thrilled, and possibly the Academy would be as well.”

Watching Benjamin Button, occasionally I actively loathed it, but mostly I just felt genuinely disappointed that it seemed so lacking in the genuine feeling that makes a bloated, over-serious, firing-on-all-cylinders Hollywood blow-out even temporarily satisfying. Ultimately, we buy into films like the film Benjamin Button wants to be because they offer our only chance at that unique catharsis: they let us cry, in public, surrounded by and united with strangers who are also crying, regardless of our individual age, class or station in life.  But Benjamin Button cannot be effective as an audience-leveling tear-inducer, because it’s not a film about people. It’s 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.

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Yesterday, Anne Thompson posted “an early review” of David Fincher’s The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, which she says was emailed by “one of [her] industry spies.” David Poland quickly huffed that “running an anonymous ‘friend’ as a ‘review’” is “just bullshit”, but for our purposes, skepticism over where the comments on the film (which are effusive regarding every aspect of the production) come from is neither here nor there.

I’m just wondering what happens now. The film has screened for some long-lead press as well as a couple of guilds, but until now everyone who has seen it (including yours truly) has kept quiet in the interest of playing nice with the de facto embargo. Should we now consider that vow of silence null and void?

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Kevin Kelly covered the Watchmen press preview in Los Angeles last week, and the same footage was shown when the preview came to Manhattan yesterday. Kevin’s piece has all the nuts and bolts of what happened in the footage, so check that out if you haven’t, but since I’m fundamentally incapable of fanboy enthusiasm, I thought I ought to weigh in with just a few additional thoughts, from my ignorant/cynical perspective.

With that said… OMGITSFUCKINGAWESOME!!!!!

Just kidding. But not completely. More after the jump.

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So much for Peter Bart’s pet dead horse about the untraversable gap between ticket buyers and film reviewers––Iron Man, so far the year’s best reviewed film, is also thus far 2008’s fastest moneymaker. The critic/audience sync continued this past weekend with Speed Racer. It takes a rare film to unite critics with as disparate a sensibility as Anthony Lane and Armond White in common vitriol; it’s almost unthinkable that the same critically-despised film would fail to appeal to the masses.

“Speed Racer kills cinema,” went White’s fuming, unusable pullquote. But does it? It would be wishful thinking to assume that the average ticket buyer actually cares about “cinema”, never mind the death thereof, but it seems clear to me that the audience’s failure to care about this particular movie could have lasting repercussions for those of us who do take cinema seriously. After jump, you’ll find five reasons why, love the movie or hate it, this bombing could potentially be Bad For Movies on the whole––and one reason why it might be kind of good. As usual, feel free to tell me why I’m a moron in the comments.

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When I saw the title of Olly Richardson’s rant on The Empire Blog asking if CG has killed our imaginations, I presumed he meant filmmakers’ imaginations and how special effects are less creative when done with the ease of computer graphics. But no, he’s really talking about our imaginations, meaning me and you and everyone we know. I’d never given it too much thought, but maybe modern audiences are really losing their ability to believe at the movies:

We never used to be so picky. If somebody watches the original King Kong or any of the works of Ray Harryhausen, you will never hear them complain about how the skeletons were a bit jerky or that the big ape’s fur didn’t blow realistically when he was climbing the Empire State Building (if they do complain, however, you should feel free to shoot them on the grounds of wrongness and philistinism). You just watch the film, acknowledge that what you are seeing couldn’t possibly exist, admire the artistry it took to create it and choose to believe it anyway. That’s what suspension of disbelief is: ignoring the protests of your eyes and more logical parts of your brain in order to enjoy a good story.

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I honestly don’t mean to keep devoting time and blog space to Uwe Boll, but when the guy manages to say something hilarious or interesting every other day, what else am I to do? Write about serious issues like the future of film criticism? Karina’s got that covered quite sufficiently and efficiently, so I might as well stick to the fluff.

Of course, I can still relate the fluff to film theory, as in the case of Boll’s latest peer slamming, located at MTV Movies Blog. After criticizing the uneven work of Tom Tykwer (sorry, Uwe, but Perfume is a far better film than Run Lola Run), Gus Van Sant and Michael Haneke, he goes off again on his favorite nemesis, Michael Bay:

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BoingBoing is all excited about this trailer for KINO’s new Houdini: The Movie Star DVD set, because it features “THE FIRST EVER ROBOT IN A MOTION PICTURE.” And the robot is, admittedly, exciting, but I’m pretty much a sucker for silent era special effects of any kind. More on the DVDs here.

• “As a student and fan of special effects and new media,” writes Bob Rehak at Graphic Engine, “I’m struck by the completeness with which the top 10 [grossing films of 2007] encapsulate an evolving mode of high-tech production in serial media.” Those films, of course, include titles like 300, Ratatouille and the latest Harry Potter flick, all of which enjoyed “enormous profitability … in striking contrast to their devalued cultural status.”
• Earlier this morning, I came up with a few reasons why New Line might have bumped Be Kind Rewind by a month. Chris Thilk offers another: it could be because Cloverfield is expected to “march through the box-office like a monster rising from the depths of the sea.”
• At LIBERTAS, Dirty Harry predicts that in calling Knocked Up sexist, Katherine Heigl has irreparably damaged her appeal. “Heigl might’ve thought the quote would help her with the feminist crowd which obviously means so much to her, but the American male who made her a star will only see arrogance, and that’s a turn-off.”
• “Dear Studios,” writes Hacking Netflix. “Stop treating your paying customers like thieves.”

Could any film ever hope to overcome a festival drubbing like the one that greeted Southland Tales at Cannes 2006? Screened in competition, in an early incarnation clocking in at 2 hours 40 minutes (director Richard Kelly later claimed it had been a rough cut all along, but that’s apparently not how it was billed to the press at the time), Kelly’s follow-up to the slow-burning cult hit Donnie Darko was roundly, emphatically, infamously booed. Sometime after the first shockwave of bad buzz hit the States, a handful of critics rose to defend Kelly’s vision. The rest of us sat back and waited a year and a half to get a look for ourselves.

Southland Tales may never be able to live down that first, fateful, fatal screening, but you can’t say Richard Kelly didn’t try to reverse the damage; in fact, he spent a good portion of the 18 months following the film’s ill-fated premiere streamlining his disasterpiece. The 2 hour 24 minute cut premiering in theaters tomorrow boasts a newly-fashioned prologue (wherein a July 4th barbecue is interrupted by a mushroom cloud, touching off World War III), a re-recording of Justin Timberlake’s narration (stoney and oblique, but purposefully so), and the exorcism of one or two subplots (Janeane Garofalo used to be in this film; now she is not).

Most auspiciously, Kelly brokered a deal with Sony that required him to shave a sizable chunk off the running time in exchange for their bankrolling of 90 new effects shots. It would seem that this money was put to good use: I’m not someone who usually takes much pleasure from good CGI, but if there’s one thing we should all be able to agree on when it comes to Southland Tales, it’s that the effects are truly special. Particularly in the film’s spectacular final twenty minutes, Southland Tales contains some of the most purely beautiful digital effects that I’ve ever seen on a big screen.

And the rest of it? It really comes down to what you’re willing to let Kelly get away with.

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At Slackerwood, Jette Kernion has a fully illustrated report from opening day of Fantastic Fest, which runs through next Friday in Austin. Of the Gore Cannon, pictured above, Jette writes: “I don’t know exactly how it worked, but it shot bloody gore through the air in a spectacular way.” Good enough for us. Jette also says she’s heard rumblings of an unannounced Fantastic screening of Spike Jonze’s long-awaited Where the Wild Things Are.

• Sony’s making a sequel to The Pink Panther. Yeah, the Steve Martin one. The one that was delayed for a year and only barely made back its production costs at the domestic box office. Judging by the cast they’ve put together (which includes Aishwarya Rai, Jean Reno and John Cleese), the studio seems to be banking on international appeal to put the franchise in the black.
• Brian Lowry reviews NY77, a documentary about the emergence of punk, hip-hop and “a sexually-permissive club scene” in New York in the late 70s. The film, which was produced by Nanette Burstein and premieres on VH1 this weekend, “methodically recreates the period’s vibe — with Geraldo Rivera recalling how at Studio 54, it was ‘absolutely appropriate’ to have sex in the bathroom stalls. (Today, sadly, he can only approximate that experience via his appearances on Fox News.)”
• Motion capture effects house Mova demonstrated a new 3-D technology at SIGGRAPH this week, aimed at creating life-like models of actors’ faces. According to Mova founder Steve Perlman, the future of 3-D won’t involve plastic glasses, but will be “more like theater in the round, where you can either walk around the scene or move into the scene itself.”
• Tom Hanks and Nia Vardalos are among the complaintants in a lawsuit filed against financing company Gold Circle Films. Hanks and crew claim Gold Circle “cheated” them out of profits on My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Variety’s Janet Shprintz notes that while Wedding is “one of the most successful indie films of all time”, it’s also “spawned an extraordinary amount of litigation” — this is the third lawsuit involving Vardalos alone.

• Is Reese Witherspoon the great untapped comedic talent that David Denby thinks Vince Vaughn has been waiting for? The two stars will face off in a comedy called Four Christmases, which New Line is trying to hustle into production so as to be able to release it in tie for the 2008 holiday season.
• Anchor Bay has acquired some kind of distribution rights (home video? theatrical? The Variety story is vague) to Sex and Death 101. The film marks the long-awaited re-teaming of Heathers director Daniel Waters with the star of that 1989 film, Winona Ryder.
• With footage from Beowulf blowing Comic-con crowds away, the effects firm behind that film’s motion-capture technology has landed deals to develop effects for three additional projects, including an animated film about cavemen to be developed by Jon Favreau.

According to Scott Kirsner, today is the 25th anniversary of the release of Tron, the groundbreaking Disney film that served, as Kirsner puts it “as the “shot heard ’round the world” for computer-generated visual effects.” Kirsner recently interviewed Tron director Steven Lisberger, who notes that in spite of the innovation Tron represented, at the time Disney compared his film unfavorably to another 1982 release:

Tron was nominated for two Academy Awards, in sound and costume design. But it wasn’t nominated for Best Visual Effects.

“We found out that the statement that was made was that we had cheated when we used computers,” [Lisberger] said.

[...] Lisberger said that when ET came out a few weeks before Tron, Disney executives told him they wished ‘Tron’ had turned out more warm and fuzzy… like ET. (ET won the Best Visual Effects Oscar for 1982.)

In honor of Tron, feast your eyes on this infamous deleted scene from the film, in which Yori takes Tron back to her “very illegal” private quarters, where they can “talk.”