All comparisons between Dick Cheney and Darth Vader were rendered moot recently when George Lucastold 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. …Read more
With a few more days left before the Oscar nominations are revealed, it is time to look at what the non-professionals anticipate will be among those contenders announced Thursday morning. Last Monday, we posted our own predictions for the Academy Award nominees and invited readers to weigh in with their own forecasts. A lot of comments concentrated on what shouldn’t happen, like The Dark Knight shouldn’t be nominated for Best Picture and Dustin Lance Black shouldn’t be nominated for his screenplay for Milk. And apparently The Curious Case of Benjamin Button could be this year’s Dreamgirls. However, there were some interesting trends among the many who chimed in. Check out some highlights after the jump. …Read more
We’re less than two weeks away from receiving this year’s Oscar nominations, and though none of the major categories are completely predictable just yet, each has at least three or four certain favorites. Meanwhile, the final slots for Best Picture, Best Director and the acting and screenwriting categories may be simply a random grab from small handfuls of rotating contenders. As of now, it doesn’t appear we’ll be seeing any huge surprises come the morning of January 22nd, when the Academy announces the nominees. The Dark Knight is sure to become the first comic book film up for Best Picture, and it won’t even be a shocker if animated feature Wall-E is listed alongside it in the same category.
But the ballots don’t need to be mailed out until Monday, so I’m taking one last chance to reach out to the procrastinators within the Academy membership. If you still don’t know who and what to write in, and you’re unwilling to go the safe route and nominate the expected bunch of films and talent, then consider some of these underdogs, under-appreciated and pretty much unlikely possibilities: …Read more
Netflix and Film Independent got a jump on the deluge of independent filmmaking news that will be coming soon via Sundance by announcing a new independent film contest today that will be chaired by Josh Brolin and judged by Brolin, Dan Jinks, Bruce Cohen, and Dustin Lance Black.
Ben Stiller is replacing Mark Ruffalo as the male lead in Noah Baumbach’s comedy-drama Greenburg, which has also just lost female lead Amy Adams. Between this and the news that Stiller’s directing The Trial of the Chicago 7, it appears he’s headed for a more serious course. If so, he should try and get that Zoolander sequel made before he becomes the next Tom Hanks. Joking aside, though, this could be good for those of us who prefer his performances in Permanent Midnight and Your Friends and Neighbors.
Hollywood is making yet another apocalyptic alien invasion movie, yet the latest, a comic book adaptation called Atlantis Rising, involves a threat from beneath the ocean. Obviously, it’s labeled a cross between two James Cameron films, Aliens and The Abyss.
Oliver Stone’s latest documentary about a controversial world leader will focus on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who he’s been filming for six months. There’s also rumor that he’ll follow that up with a doc on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Speaking of Stone, for those who wished Will Ferrell had played the lead in W., HBO is airing a live telecast of Ferrell’s upcoming Broadway show You’re Welcome America. A Final Night With George Bush. The date of the telecast is still unrevealed, but it’s likely to be in March.
Oscar ratings in France should be huge this year, because Jerry Lewis has been named to receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Academy Awards.
About.com’s Jurgen Fauth has put together a list of the ten films he was most disappointed by in 2008. Among them: box office champion The Dark Knight (”turgid”), preordained indie “surprise” awards darling Slumdog Millionaire (”completely falls apart by the light of day”) and the year’s token “but it’s good for grown ups too!” animated hit, Wall-E (”predictably schematic kid’s fare”). Three cheers for contrarianism!
It should be noted that many of Jurgen’s disappointments are amongst my favorite films of the year. If I made a top ten of 2008 today, spots for Burn After Reading and Synecdoche, NY would be assured, and I’m a fan of Ballast and Vicky Cristina Barcelona as well. “Many of the movies that disappointed me most in 2008 were grossly over-hyped, flagrantly overpraised — and zealously defended by people with wide-ranging vocabularies,” he writes. I’m one of those zealots!
Since the Chicago Reader’s Pat Graham extended the meme on his own blog, I thought I might as well. My own picks for the biggest disappointments of 2008 are after the jump. Chime in with yours in the comments, or write your own blog post and paste a link there.
It’s more difficult to be convincing as a real person when acting on film than on the stage. The camera can get closer and your image ends up projected many times larger than life size. So, despite giving a Tony Award-winning performance as Richard Nixon in the theater version of Frost/Nixon, Frank Langella was not initially thought of as worthy to reprise the role in Ron Howard’s movie adaptation of the play. Part of it was that he’s not a big name, but another reason was that he looks nothing like Tricky Dick.
Ultimately, Langella did get the part, and while he doesn’t resemble the former president, he apparently does a bang up job in the role. But the transition could easily have been as awkward as Ralph Bellamy’s reprisal of his Tony-winning portrayal of Franklin Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello. In the film version of that play, Bellamy’s vocal impersonation comes off more like a Scottish brogue (he sounds exactly like Sean Connery, in fact) than FDR’s signature “Locust Valley lockjaw.” Instead, Langella is on track for an Oscar nomination, and is sure to join the following actors who also gave convincing performances as world leaders.
As a handicap, SpoutBlog has limited the selections to modern era leaders whose real persona exists on film/tape and are therefore more easily comparable to actors’ representations. …Read more
It happened last year for Cate Blanchett. The actress starred in a biopic that critics ripped to shreds, a film that basically bombed at the (American) box office, and yet she managed to score a Best Actress nomination for her reprised performance as the titular monarch of Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Additionally, Blanchett earned another nomination for Best Supporting Actress the same year, for her portrayal of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. Now Josh Brolin could achieve a similar feat this year, not just by earning separate nominations for playing the titular president of W. and portraying politician-turned-assassin Dan White in Milk, but also by overcoming the difficulty of earning recognition in a lead category for a film that otherwise is not very well regarded. Are Brolin’s hurdles higher than Blanchett’s, though? With all the praise he’s received for W., he’s still far from being considered a sure thing candidate, regardless of his worthiness or the Academy’s history of oftentimes ignoring the critics and the grosses when nominating dependable, standout actors.
When it was announced that David Wain would be directing Role Models — taking over from The Girl Next Door’s Luke Greenfield — there was room for disappointment. After all, for Wain to follow up his anarchic cult favorites Wet Hot American Summerand The Tenwith a seemingly mainstream man-child comedy — one more suited to the talents of Todd Phillips or, well, Greenfield — was to crush his fans’ hopes for something more along the lines of his wacky web series, such as Wainy Days and Stella, or the old MTV sketch comedy show, The State.
But Role Models does look funny, probably because Wain ended up rewriting (with Paul Rudd and Ken Marino) Timothy Dowling’s original script. And it’s not as if Wain has suddenly gone and sold out with a bunch of really broad family films, as did his former State mates Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant, the screenwriting duo behind The Pacifier, Night at the Museumand Taxi. Still, many of us are holding out for that rumored State movie, or even better, a big screen adaptation of any of the following State sketches:
On Monday night, The Hollywood Reporter published a story questioning Focus Features’ marketing plan for Milk, Gus Van Sant’s biopic on the country’s first openly gay elected official who was famously assassinated by a colleague in the late 70s. The story suggested that by “keeping its awards contender out of fall fests and heavily restricting media screenings,” the studio is deliberately trying to avoid any kind of partisan publicity (positive or negative) that could damage the film from reaching a mainstream audience.
Focus chief James Schamus was, apparently, pretty upset by the story, particularly considering that it was timed to hit the web just under 24 hours before Milk’s premiere, a benefit screening at the Castro Theater in San Francisco. He’s written a letter to the editor of THR, which Eugene Hernandez posted on his blog last night before the Milk screening. The gist: Milk wasn’t ready in time for fall festivals, they don’t have enough prints yet to do widespread screening but they will, the entire internet has been going batshit crazy for the trailer (”probably the most inspiring piece of movie marketing about genuine (as well as out) politics ever created”) for over a month, and not only has Focus not avoided political attention but they’ve bought tons of ad space on The Huffington Post and NPR.
If the issue was whether or not Focus is actively trying to create “noise” around Milk, then Schamus’ defense seems solid enough to lead to the conclusion that THR got that part of the story wrong. But the issue might not be the quantity of noise, but the brand of noise.
It’s debatable whether it’s one of the film’s major strengths or its fatal flaw, but there’s no denying that Oliver Stone’s W. is loaded with actual quotes and dramatizations of documented events. But as if they were anticipating an argument over the film’s factual basis anyway, Lionsgate has set up a companion web site called the W. Film Guide, which essentially breaks the movie down into 83 footnotes.
Fox was the bread in a Chihuahua sandwich this weekend, as estimates place the studio’s two new releases at #1 and #3 on the box office chart. 20th Century Fox’s Max Payne made $18 million while Fox Searchlight’s The Secret Life of Bees earned just over $11 million, which was very, very close to Beverly Hills Chihuahua’s second-placing $11.2 million. Coming in fourth place, which in terms of the sandwich metaphor makes it a pickle, was Oliver Stone’s W. with a close $10.6 million. The discarded turkey, meanwhile, was Sex Drive, which placed ninth with only $3.6 million.
Not enough of a turkey, however, that the Sex Drive writing-directing team of John Morris and Sean Anders couldn’t make a deal for their next project, a college comedy about an accidental father.
Citing creative differences, Hugh Grant has exited the movie biz-set romantic comedy Lost for Words, which would have seen him play opposite Ziyi Zhang as an actor who falls for his director despite a language barrier. Now hopes of a life-imitates-art romance between Grant and Danish director Susanne Bier have been shattered.
Killer Films is producing a movie involving the 1944 meeting of Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Jack Keroac. Too bad David Cross, who hilariously portrayed Ginsberg in Killer’s I’m Not There is probably too old to reprise the role.
I’m still waiting for the day a remake of Troop Beverly Hills is announced, but for now the similar-sounding Tough Cookieswill just have to suffice. The family film will be about a deadbeat dad who leads an unconventional group of girl scouts, who compete against snobbish rivals at the National Scout Rally.
At various turns, Abraham Lincoln(1930), D.W. Griffith’s first and most notorious sound film, comes off as the legendary director’s W.– the story of a simple, silly good ole boy’s rise to the U.S. Presidency. Walter Huston portrays young Abe as a tough but bumbling doof, romantic daydreamer and idle underachiever. Even his bride-to-be, Mary Todd, curses him as a “country baboon” at one point. But the rest of the film illustrates every last Honest Abe tall tale. Well, in that sense, it’s a lot like W., too: When in presidential mode, Huston’s Lincoln is as uncanny a reproduction of a national myth as Josh Brolin’s George W. Bush is of a national disgrace.
Brad Pitt will produce and may star in an outer space version of The Odyssey for Warner Bros., and the studio is looking to sign George Miller as director. It is indeed an interesting project for Pitt since he also starred in Troy, which was kind of an adaptation of Homer’s The Iliad. But even more interesting is the fact that this isn’t the first Odyssey in space movie announced this week. On Monday, Ridley Scott described his next project as “The Odyssey by way of Blade Runner.”
Pitt may also play Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane (labeled one of the “New Einsteins” in the latest Mental_Floss) in an adaptation of the nonfiction book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game from screenwriter Steve Zaillian (American Gangster) and director David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada).
Star Wars geek Kevin Smith is at last making his own sci-fi movie, a father-son comedy set in outer space that “will reference other sci-fi movies.” Hopefully it will be as good as Spaceballs and Galaxy Quest, but looking at both the history of sci-fi comedies and the Bluntman and Chronic stuff at the end of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back leaves me thinking it will be more 2001: A Space Travesty.
It’s that time of the year when studios decide if their Oscar hopefuls are ready or not. Dimension is currently weighing the possibility of The Road being pushed to 2009, and now Paramount has announced that expected contender The Soloist won’t be released until March while Defiance will barely make the calendar cut with a limited drop on December 31.
Oliver Stone’s W. opens tonight. For a little perspective, we decided to watch a different movie made in an era of political transition and economic collapse. Gabriel Over the White House (1933) tells the tale of a slacker president who undergoes a religious conversion, after which he consolidates executive power and sponsors an enormous financial bailout. Sound familiar? It should, FDR personally approved the script, then went on to enact half of the film during his presidency, but the parallels echo through many administrations.
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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About.com’s 
On Monday night, 
