A new Zooey Deschanel movie came out last weekend. But is it the one where she plays a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” opposite Paul Dano or the one where she plays a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” opposite Joseph Gordon-Levitt? It’s the former, and it’s called Gigantic, which is also not to be confused with this coming week’s new DVD release, Yes Man, in which she plays a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” opposite Jim Carrey.
Sure, Deschanel has range and talent (see this fan-made montage of some of her more varied performances), but she also has a certain repetitive nature to her characters. And this “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” nature became all the more confusing recently when trailers for Gigantic and (500) Days of Summer (the Gordon-Levitt one, which is actually her second romantic pairing with the actor) appeared online around the same time. Maybe instead of worrying about people confusing her for Katy Perry, the actress should worry more about people confusing her characters and films for each other.
Or, maybe not. Plenty of us can’t get enough of Deschanel’s quirky, free-spirited performances. In his Yes Man review, Roger Ebert noted that two critics proposed marriage to the character at the end of the film. We wouldn’t go that far, but we have crushed on the actress since All the Real Girls and haven’t yet gotten sick of her or her similar, typecast roles. In fact, to us, the problem is not that indie films too often employ the MPDG character; it’s that they don’t cast Deschanel for every such part. So, instead of wishing she’d broaden her career to include other types of characters (it didn’t work well for her with The Happening, after all), we’ve selected ten MPDG characters that she should have additionally played. …Read more
While at the Dubai International Film Festival over the weekend, Terminator Salvation director McG “announced” that a fifth installment of the Terminator franchise is definitely in the works, although The Halcyon Co. revealed over a year ago their plans for a trilogy. That McG is back to helm the installment must mean Halcyon is happier with the way Salvation looks than some of us are.
F/X artist-turned-director Stephen Norrington is finally following up The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with the remake of The Crowthat’s been talked about in Hollywood for awhile. I wonder if Jason Statham is still interested in playing the lead.
Oh yeah, the weekend’s box office results: well, The Day the Earth Stood Still managed to just barely edge out The Happening to be the higher grossing of the year’s lame eco-sci-fi films. The animated film you never heard of, Delgo, couldn’t make a million bucks on more than 2,000 screens, while the Bollywood film you never heard of, Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, cracked a million bucks on about 100 screens. And a ton of limited specialty films, including new releases Gran Torino, Wendy and Lucy, The Reader, Doubt and Che, all had better per-screen-averages than did the #1 film, The Day the Earth Stood Still.
It’s not being received well at all on Earth, but maybe the new remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still will get better reviews in Alpha Centauri, a nearby star system to which Fox is beaming the disaster sci-fi film. Despite the negative reaction here, it’s expected to gross at least $25 million, though that would be less than the last lame global warming-based sci-fi movie, The Happening, which opened to $30.5 million back in June.
The beloved holiday classic A Christmas Story has been turned into a musical, which will have industry-only readings next week. As long as there’s a musical number titled “Fra-Gee-Lay” involving a giant dancing leg lamp, I might want to attend my first Broadway Christmas production in twenty years.
Terry Gilliam, who is being honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Dubai Internation Film Festival this week, is looking at Dubai’s new studio and for local funding to potentially shoot his revived The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in the country. I’m still crossing my fingers that this film actually works out this time.
Colombian filmmaker Andres Baiz (Santanas) will make his English-language feature debut with Babylon, a 3:10 to Yuma-like film set in Jamaica and starring Paul Giamatti as a British minister.
While watching Zack and Miri Make a Porno, it is possible to occasionally forget that you are watching a Kevin Smith movie. Mainly because he doesn’t show up in the film, a rare and appreciated move for the guy who has played “Silent Bob” in 6 out of the 8 theatrical releases he’s directed. Then there’s the cast that is involved, which makes Z&M seem like the offspring of Judd Apatow and John Waters. But there are a number of things that do make it clearly a Smith joint, such as the obligatory employment of Jason Mewes — in the role he was born to play, even moreso than “Jay” — and the potentially pitying use of Jeff Anderson, who may have been the only actor to agree to receiving that accidental Hot Carl.
And then there’s the most recognizable element: Smith’s inability let the poop jokes go in order to concentrate on his characters, and the relationships between them. It’s the filmmaker’s Achilles heel, and it’s one of five we at SpoutBlog have noticed are holding back the esteem of five would-be better directors.
M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening is as bad as we feared (or hoped?). Shyamalan, and the studios who have dared to work with him, would like to paint him as a first-bill auteur, a director of genius and vision who’s name atop the poster puts butts in seats. Alas, things do not looks good for ol’ Manoj. In this episode of FilmCouch we compare The Happening with two classics by directors whose names do sell movies, and who have influenced Shyamalan’s career: Spielberg and Hitchcock. Duel, Spielberg’s first film, is a lost gem, and a must-see for anyone hoping to populate their film with a faceless evil. And of course, we look at Hitchcock’s The Birds, the genesis of the spooky nature-turns-on-man sub-genre.
Reason number #379 to kick myself for not seeingSpeed Racer in a theater: Daniel Kasman’s latest entry at The Auteurs. It begins like this: “Upon return from Cannes, I saw two movies in rapid succession. The films probably should not be combined into any sort of synthetic criticism, but it is too tempting to at least collide their names in the same piece: Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 film with the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil (1968), and Andy and Larry Wachowski’s Speed Racer (2008) adaptation. The arena we are dealing with is dimensionality.”
“The Happening is not just bad. It is more than awful.” At Hammer to Nail, Michael Tully finds the dark side of Avante Retarde. “The painful truth is that I had a blast while watching the film–again, not in the intended manner–but when it ended, and especially when I woke up the next morning, my delight at the preposterousness of it all was gone and all that remained was frustration and anger.”
Blatant self-promotion: Your Blogger and Glenn Kenny joined the House Next Door boys for an epic, booze-soaked podcast. This is just the first part; stay tuned for parts two and three, where I accidentally slap my wife while she’s winning an Oscar and then walk into the sea in order to allow her career to continue its ascent without the anchor of my humiliations.
The Happening had a much better opening weekend than expected (or is it feared?), coming in at third place with $32.1 million domestically, and actually beating The Incredible Hulk overall overseas. Meanwhile, Universal and Marvel insist that their superhero movie is a hit, even though it mad six million dollars less in its opening weekend than Ang Lee’s supposedly disastrous Hulk five years ago.
Werner Herzog’s “don’t call it a remake” remake of Bad Lieutenant has found a female lead in Eva Mendes, who previously starred opposite new Bad star Nicolas Cage in Ghost Rider. So, to recap: Werner Herzog is restaging an Abel Ferrara movie in New Orleans, with the cast of a comic book movie about a guy on a motorcycle with a fireball for a face. Sounds about right.
Everything is Fine, one of my favorite films from Cannes, won the grand jury prize in the New Directors sidebar at the Seattle Film Festival this weekend.
Walden Media is planning a huge blitz to promote their fall Bill Murray starrer City of Ember at ComicCon. The current plan is to “re-create the mythical city depicted in the film on a private two-car train that will transport 25 members of the media on a 2½-hour journey to the convention’s San Diego locale,” accompanied by the film’s director, screenwriter and producer.
Expect to be inundated with “Hulk Smash!” headlines on come Monday morning. Variety kindly suggests that The Happening “will likely play like a traditional horror film rather than a broad summer title”––read: $20 million opening––leaving the by all accounts imperfect but not that bad Hulk to reel in mid-five figures.
Sony Pictures Classics, the only studio other tha IFC to seriously stock their shelves last month at Cannes, has announced another acquisition: Palme D’or winner The Class.
After showcasing the well-timed TV spot for The Incredible Hulk, which reveals the film’s Tony Stark/Iron Man cameo, I was hoping to find something for M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening that could similarly turn my (and likely your) low expectations upside down. And I found it: a trailer that reveals the film’s cameos from Raj, Rerun, Dwayne and Shirley, all from TV’s What’s Happening!!. OK, so unfortunately it isn’t real, and it’s not even put together all that well (what’s with the strobe effect?), but it’s still probably more enjoyable than the actual movie (especially if that twist spoiler is legit).
With the popularity of trailer mash-ups, the ease of YouTube distribution and the internet’s ability to expose the synchronous one-mind of a pop-culture-reared generation, it’s not surprising to find that the above video was not the only combination of The Happening and What’s Happening!!. There’s also this one, which only features the What’s Happening!! theme music and no footage from the show (also it boldly makes light of the more graphic footage from the film’s red-band trailer), and there’s this one, which does the opposite by including the audio from the Happening trailer over footage from the TV show. I’ll let you decide which of the three is the best/worst.
Hopefully YouTubers will do better when mashing up What’s Happening!! with Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened?(obvious title: What’s Just Happening!!).
Why doesn’t anyone care about M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening? iO9’s Graeme McMillan has a theory: “The trailer gives you absolutely no idea what the movie is about, apart from people dying and Mark Wahlberg looking confused. People probably thought that it’s some kind of big-budget sequel to A&E’s turgid Andromeda Strain remake.”
Paul Scheer’s first paid job as an actor was in The Onion: The Movie. “I shot it about 6 years ago, I’ve never seen it, nor did I ever see a script for the entire film (just my scene) but after reading this quote from the Washington Post, I’m intrigued…” We assume he was as “intrigued” as us by the part about the film co-starring “Kevin Federline, who — oh irony of ironies! — appears as a dancer in a music video that satirizes soon-to-be-wife Spears.”
Jeff Wells takes a look at a piece by Gregg Goldstein on Charlie Kaufmann’s Synecdoche, New York. “The title of Goldstein’s piece is ‘Synecdoche could improve with edit’; the subhead is ‘Hypnotic film may undergo further cuts.’ The Hollywood Elsewhere response: ‘No shit?’”
I hate twist endings, especially those in the films of M. Night Shyamalan. Maybe it’s because I was told the twist of The Sixth Senseprior to seeing it and haven’t been able to appreciate the filmmaker ever since. It’s not so much that I believe films shouldn’t have twist endings, it’s that I believe films that have twist endings should be enjoyable even when you know the secret (Psychois still great after a thousand viewings, for example). The only one of Shyamalan’s movies to hold up even with the spoilers revealed is Unbreakable.
So, I had no problem reading about the big secret of Shyamalan’s latest, The Happening. An early review of a rough cut of the thriller has shown up on Collider, and in addition to claiming the thing is “a terrible, terrible movie,” and that, “Mark Wahlberg might very well give the worst performance I’ve ever seen in anything,” the critic includes a complete plot synopsis, including the big revelation of what is causing people to suddenly kill themselves (surely you’ve seen the trailer).
I won’t write out the spoiler here (but here’s a hint: the film has something in common with both The Wizard of Ozand Harry Potter), but you’re welcome to head over to Collider (or Vulture blog) to ruin it for yourself.
Here is the new teaser trailer for Blindness, the latest film from Fernando Meirelles (City of God; The Constant Gardener). Normally I wouldn’t be so excited about something that reminds me of Val Kilmer’s post-eye-surgery point-of-view shots from At First Sight, especially when such visuals are accompanied by generic outbreak plots, but I’m so excited about Meirelles’ work that I’d have seen Alvin and the Chipmunks– poop-eating included — if he’d been behind the camera. All this despite the fact that I was extremely disappointed with The Constant Gardener the first time I watched it on account I had such high expectations. Maybe I should calm down my anticipation before Blindness hits theaters this September.
Anyway, I know there are some other outbreak films coming out soon, including M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening and the enticingly titled Zombie Strippers, but neither of them come from a Nobel Prize-winning novel, like Blindness does. Of course, the greatest novels are often those which cannot be adequately adapted into films, so maybe Zombie Strippers (which is merely based on, loosely, the non-Nobel-winning play Rhinoceros, by Eugene Ionesco) will actually be better. Which should make Meirelles, the producer, realize: the Rio favelas would sure be a good setting for a zombie movie. May I suggest the obvious title City of Zombies? It fittingly fills out an unintended trilogy.
I’ve already written about trailers for each of these films, and I didn’t really want to revisit either one. Even if they did have second trailers released — as most movies do — it’s typically hard for me to find the new versions in a format that I can embed here (I guess I got lucky with The Happeningvideo above). But both of these movies have special marketing circumstances regarding their new, second trailers, that I figured they were worth noting.
The new trailer for The Happening, unlike the one I wrote about previously, seems more interested in exploiting the 9/11 and terrorist-threat angle. As if we hadn’t already guessed that Shyamalan was dealing with that kind of subject matter. Of course, the first trailer was just fine at selling the movie as a sci-fi/horror thriller, which I imagine is much more appealing to a wide audience than anything relating to 9/11. Still, I kind of understand why they decided to go this route, as well. The first trailer just made the movie look like a clone of The Mistand the upcoming horror flick The Signal. Perhaps the studio wanted to distinguish itself more as a deliberately relevant and topical genre picture. …Read more
Maybe I read too much Curbed, but it seems we’ve been having a lot of construction accidents in New York City lately (actually, the Daily News has also taken notice). So, while watching the new teaser trailer for M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, I couldn’t help but think about last Wednesday’s tragedy in Brooklyn involving a man falling 13 stories to his death. The trailer, which features construction workers throwing themselves off a site due to some strange “happening” that causes people to suddenly commit suicide, may hit too close to home for other people, too. A few blogs and forums have noted the similarity to the images of airborne jumpers/fallers from the World Trade Center on 9/11 (this wouldn’t be the first time Shyamalan made a 9/11 metaphor).
Now, I’m not the kind of guy to normally get sensitive about trailers unintentionally evoking tragedy (I thought it was unnecessary for trailers for The Coreto be pulled following the Columbia disaster, but I guess I’m heartless). But this one hit me differently. Maybe it’s because these accidents are more of an ongoing/continuing problem, and certainly I’m also letting my bias against most NYC real estate developers get me heated up. However, I don’t think the trailer should be pulled — no, I’d rather it be seen by enough locals who might also relate the imagery to the tragedies.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Reason number #379 to kick myself for not seeing 
The Happening
Walden Media is planning a huge blitz
