The Celebrity Connection: Kate Beckinsale

So I watched 30 Days of Night: Dark Days today. I normally wouldn't watch direct to video sequels, especially of movies I didn't like the first time around, but I covered the script to this one almost a year ago and you can just about guarantee that if I've read the script, I'll check out the finished product regardless. Watching it though I noticed something:

Could Mia Kirshner actually be Kate Beckinsale in disguise? You decide.

Not Only Does Tyler Perry Hate Black People, Now He Apperently Hates Movies Too

Here are some posters from Tyler's Perry's newest travesty Madea's Big Happy Family:

It's bad enough that Perry has profited greatly from making bargain basement soap operas that deal in ignorant black stereotypes while passing them off as serious drama (Madea's Family Reunion is about one of the most offensive mainstream movies I have ever seen), but now he's desecrating the posters of great movies as well? Is this his revenge for his first attempt at serious drama (For Colored Girls) got shafted at the Oscars after he went on record to tell everyone just how powerful and profound it was going to be?

What are your thoughts of this or just Perry in general?

In Memory of Sidney Lumet

I don't often write these posts over fallen heroes because it's a challenge to make a meaningful one when it seems like half the internet has already idolized the deceased before their last breath has even sounded but regardless, Sidney Lumet is an exception.


In this case, it's special because Lumet is not some tragic case and his death doesn't sound out any sorrow in me (he was 86 at the time of his death and was responsible for more great films than some whole careers ever house). Instead it's a way to look back and bask in the memories of one man who dedicated his life to making so many amazing movies.

What makes Lumet even more special for me is that, believe it or not, no one single person changed the way I view movies more than Sidney Lumet did. It all stems from his book simply titled Making Movies. Roger Ebert said that if you only read one book on filmmaking, make it that one and I second this.

This is a book as quotable as any great critic such as Kael, Farber, Bazin or even Ebert himself and is an intimate, loving and thoroughly technical analysis of film as seen through the eyes of the artist creating it.

Maybe most valuable is Lumet's chapter on style which is, to me, the single greatest piece ever written on the subject. Lumet dissects style (the most misused word in film as he calls it) in a way that is profound and makes sense. It made me realize that filmmakers like Burton and Gilliam are not stylists but decorators and that, most importantly, as the French also used to say, you cannot separate style from substance nor substance from style. The two create each other and together make something wonderful.

The example Lumet gives is of his debut masterpiece 12 Angry Men, taking place entirely in one room, starting by filming in close up and gradually pulling the camera back and moving it down so that you can begin to see the ceiling; feeling as though the room is closing in as the tension mounts. The final shot, outside the room, is thus placed high and filmed with a wide lense to allow the sense of relief. You don't notice it, but you feel it, because it makes sense to the story. That's film style.

That was the birth of a career that produced the big names like Serpico, Running on Empty, The Pawnbroker, Prince of the City, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, The Verdict, A Long Day's Journey into Night and most recently Before the Devil Knows Your Dead. These alongside the titles that are not considered as major but still bear the worth to warrant the accolades: Murder on the Orient Express, The Wiz, Equus, Family Business, Q&A, Night Falls on Manhattan, Critical Care and Find Me Guilty, which featured Vin Diesel's best performance.

I think what characterised Lumet's body of work was not some consistent visual style (he gave the movie what it needed like a natural technician) but that he was drawn to intelligent works about intelligent people: often men torn between doing what they believe to be right and doing what's actually best. His movies were not about action and weren’t flashy just for the sake of it; (save The Wiz, which is one of the odd one's out in his oeuvre) but are built upon the suspense of human interaction, of internal drama and of real danger.

Lumet openly admits in his book that some projects he took on just for the money. That's fine, it's not too hard to guess which films fall under that banner, but regardless Lumet always brought style and smarts to them. Lumet made bad films but he didn't often make boring ones.

Thus, I can't shed a tear for Lumet even though I'm sad to see him go. I'm too busy smiling while looking back and remembering everything he left us. America may have lost one of it's last remaining greats but the movies will live on forever.

My Cinematic Alphabet

So I've seen this mem going around the blogging world for at least a week now. Maybe I'm a little late as always (I'm moving in May which will ensure that I once again become more active in the blogging community, I promise) but regardless, here's my version:

One Minute Review - Eat Pray Love (2 out of 5)

Eat Pray Love is about as simple and unassuming as it's title suggest. Of course it is. It's another example of putting stars into big movies and sending them out into the world to find no real dranger or drama. It happened with Brad Pitt in Seven Years in Tibet, Patrick Swayze in City of Joy and now it happens to Julia Roberts here. So what we are left with is a half hearted story in which a white woman travels to three places around the world to do exactly what's in the title after having a mid-life crisis of sorts. Conviently for her she always manages to bump into another American along the way or, when she runs across a foerigner, luckily enough, it is Javier Bardem.

Eat Pray Love was adapted from a best seller by Elizabeth Gilbert who is either the most boring of travelers or the victim of a poor, predictable adaptation. If, along the way, Gilbert achieved something profound in her personal journey, the remnants of it are not to be found here.

Maybe it's the fault of writer/director Ryan Murphy (of Glee fame) who overshoots and understuffs. Murphy has a way of confusing movement with artistry and bigness for something profound. Along with his cinamatographer, Murphy has the camera swoop and swirl and push in and push out and spin around from above, trying to make a lack of material seem big enough to inhabit its own running time. Take a scene in which Roberts, having come from a meeting with her laywer and husband over their divorce, comes upon her husband in the elevator. Instead of allowing a quite moment to pass between them Muphy lets the camera rapidly push in on her and the cuts immediatly to it doing the same thing on him. A small moment is forced to become a big moment and the impact is lost by being underlined. Stretch that to 2 and a half hours and you have about the effect of Eat Pray Love.  

Desert Island CD

Because last year's Desert Island DVD list was such a big smash Castor from Anomalous Material has devised a new list in which we pick 12 songs that we would take with us on a desert island and they all need to be from movie soundtracks. So, in no particular order:

1. Nine Inc Nails - Dead Souls (The Crow)



I think the Crow is a great movie from Alex Proyas and Nine Inch Nails are one of my favourite bands. The band's cover of the Joy Division song is what every cover should be: a faithful interpretation of the original while an update by the new band. Long before The Social Network Trent Reznor was already becoming a VIP soundtrack artist.

2. Elvis Costello - She (Notting Hill)



Costello is one of my favourite vocalists and although I love everything from his snotty early punk days to his transformation into country and pop and everything else under the musical rainbow I don't think he's ever let his silky smooth vocals soar over a song quite like they do on this one.

3. Trisha Yearwood - HowDo I Live(Con Air)



Funny, Con Air was on my Desert Island DVD list as well and maybe this song has something to do with that. Usually not a fan of pop country, there's something about this song that sets the tone for the whole movie, making it more human and grounded than usual big budget action vehicles. When Nic Cage meets his daughter for the first time at the end and hands her the dirty pink bunny while this song plays my heart skips a beat every time.

4. R. Kelly - I Believe I Can Fly (Space Jam)



There was a time, circa grade 6 or 7 where, when I wasn't playing basketball with friends I was wathing Space Jam and when I wasn't watching Space Jam I was listening to the Space Jam soundtrack and it was this song that always struck me the most. I love how it builds to the huge emotional payoff at the end.

5. Another Day (Rent)



I love musicals and Rent is my favourite and this song just embodies everything I love about it.

6. Michael Bolton - Go The Distance (Hercules)



There are two Disney songs I love and this is one of them. Just such a lovely song.

7. Part of Your Wold (The Little Mermaid)



Here's the other one

8. Come What May (Moulin Rouge)



Just another one of those wonderful songs that makes a good musical into a great one.

9. Whitney Houston - I Will Always Love You (The Bodyguard)



The ultimate diva sings the ultimate ballad

10. Bruce Springsteen - Streets of Philidelphia (Philidelphia)



Few movies have as great an opening credit montage as Philidelpia and that is in part due to Springsteen's heart wrenching ballad. His song from The Wrestler could just as easily have been included but I went for the more ionic one. I just wouldn't want to live the rest of my life without The Boss

11. Josh Groban - Belive (The Polar Express)



Another soaring ballad but another one of my favourite songs from one of my favourite movies. Would come in handy come Christmas time as well.

12. Train - Ordinary (Spider-Man 2)



I guess I need one rock song to offset all the schmaltz

The Adjustment Bureau ( 4 out of 5)

Rumor has it that when the original Young Turks of the Cashiers du Cinema gathered years after the fact for a round table discussion one of the topics was with regards to how they had argued so hard towards the director as the artist of his own work that when he was finally given artistic freedom, he didn’t know what to do with it.

That is, in one way or another, the logic behind the Adjustment Bureau as explained by Terrence Stamp’s Thompson in one of those film stealing monologue scenes. It’s that free will is just an illusion. Sure we can chose what tie to wear and what tooth paste to use, but give a person real power over themselves and we get the Dark Ages or World Wars. Thus there is a Chairman who has a plan devised for everyone and when we step off course, he sends his men to give us all a nudge back into fulfilling the destiny that was set out for us.


That’s the story told anyway in the new film of the same name which places Matt Damon and Emily Blunt into, what is essentially an old fashioned melodrama with the ideas surrounding them loosely based on a Phillip K. Dick short story that, just possibly, Alex Proyas also had in mind when he dreamed up his masterpiece Dark City. It’s the foregrounding of this romance that essentially holds the movie together, giving it human momentum within a story that hasn’t been given half as much though by its writer/director George Nolfi as say was given to the aforementioned Dark City or even Inception for that matter, but then again, the old adage still stands: love conquers all.

Damon plays David Norris, a former bad boy turned senate hopeful in New York who looks poised to win until a picture of some former college hijinks is put into print and Norris loses. In the bathroom, before his speech on election night he meets Elise (Blunt) and immediately establishes a connection until she is chased away, no name or number having been given, by a pair of guards looking for her for crashing a wedding upstairs.

Norris, smitten and frustrated, manages a speech that night that is honest and compelling and looks like it will set him on course for a win come next term. Meanwhile, on a bus to his new job, he meets up with Elise and they manage to exchange numbers. However, this wasn’t the plan for Norris who, upon arrival to the office, finds men in suits erasing memories from his co-workers. They give chase but are inescapable. Their hats, we are later told, allow them the power to go through doors and be teleported around the city like magic. It’s a neat trick that doesn’t get much more logical an explanation than this.

Norris is told of this mysterious Chairman and this divine plan that has been written for everyone and is mapped out in convenient animated books which, despite their power, look less impressive and versatile than Ipads. Apparently God hasn’t caught up with the times. But now, reeling myself back in, I’ve gone and made an important assumption that the film wisely doesn’t. These men don’t stand in for angels nor the Chairman for God, although the parallels are there: we know this Chairman, we are told, by many different names and have met him but never know as he appears in a different form to everyone.

The thing is, Norris was never meant to meet Elise and her presence, if a relationship is allowed to develop, will throw both of their destinies off course and will ultimately, if Thompson is to be believed, ruin both of them. Therefore, the agents follow Norris, “nudging” him every once in a while in order to keep him on the fast track to greatness and away from Elise. The logic here though is a bit murky: if the agents need to keep nudging Norris back on track, aren’t they changing also, by doing so, the destinies of those around them, in a Butterfly Effect-like manner, or are there other agents who need to come in and nudge everyone else back on course after an initial nudge? That must require a lot of man power. Maybe in the sequel we can go backstage at the Bureau and see the Chairman going through the recruitment process.

The film is wise in that it doesn’t explicitly draw a religious parallel, which would ultimately ground it in some sort of reality and make it into something it isn’t, although it does suggest a certain spiritual subtext by which Nolfi, on several occasions, films Damon in long shot amidst beautiful, sprawling backgrounds which were, depending on how you look at it, either the design of human artistry or part of an overall destiny in which one small man is passing through.

And then the story ultimately becomes a romantic thriller in which Norris, with the help of one optimistic agent played by Anthony Mackie, tries to avert the agents, who aren’t, in one of the films many little nice touches, so much bad guys as simply men doing their job, and get back to Elise, even if it means changing the course of his entire life. It’s a nice premise for which Damon and Blunt can cast a likable couple that we generally hope find each other and features a world in which chases are handled by foot and not computers and are filmed in long takes and edited with logic not a blender.

And that’s what you get for your money. Here’s a film that is well acted and made and spreads a little bit of logic in with a little bit of illogic. It doesn’t have the sweep of say Inception, but unlike that film is does have an emotional drive towards some sort of foreseeable end point, which makes it not nearly as compelling but engaging for its own simple, earnest reasons. It won’t provide any food for thought that will justifiably leave anyone discussing it several weeks from now but then again, neither did Inception.