Question: Favorite tagline?

Hey, let's have a discussion! Here's a topic - what's your favorite recent movie poster tagline?

Me, I like 'em snappy and creative. The one that sticks out is from "The World's Fastest Indian": "Based On One Hell of a True Story."

(Very) Quick Movie Review: "Thank You for Smoking"

by Lindsey Ruehl, Associate Assistant Manager

(Lindsey is the biggest movie buff I know, and one of the smartest and funniest people on the planet. However, she also has very little time, as she is currently stage managing at a theatre in D.C., so her comments may be limited as a result - as evidenced by the following comprehensive revew:)

Thank you for smoking: Thank you for almost keeping me awake for an hour and a half.

Dat's all I got.

Movie Review: "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story"

by Jeff McGinnis, Lead Usher

*** stars (out of four)
91 minutes, Now Playing

“Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story” is like a head-on collision between a Merchant-Ivory piece and a Charlie Kaufman screenplay. It is an attempt to adapt a novel that is unadaptable, by its nature, and the movie deals with this by making the fact that it can’t be done the subject of the movie…to a degree. It is not as non-linear as Kaufman’s brilliant “Adaptation,” which was so confused the author made himself the lead character, but it’s plenty confused as it is.

I have not read the original novel “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman” upon which this film is, ahem, based, but I suspect having read the novel would not help in interpreting the film. Or maybe it would. Who knows. The book, which I only heard of when I learned of the movie, is in essence a book about distraction - the lead character attempts to tell his life story, and becomes so sidetracked with digressions and secondary bits that the book ends not long after he’s just finished recounting his birth. In short, the book is apparently a non-event - a terrifically entertaining one, I gather, but a deliberately without incident.

I’m not sure if the film began as an honest attempt to translate the material (as “Adaptation“ began), or if it’s always been planned like this, but the beautiful part about the film is, it really doesn’t matter either way. What we have is a very entertaining film on two levels - the portions that purport to be from the original novel have a manic energy to their performance, and are tremendously funny, but the real movie begins when the camera unexpectedly turns and we suddenly see a camera crew.

Well, “unexpectedly” is incorrect. We have had a pre-titles debate between Steve Coogan (who plays Shandy and himself) and Rob Brydon (who plays Toby and himself) while in the make-up chair. They discuss such topics as their relative billing (if it was alphabetical order, Brydon notes, he’d be first billed) and the color of Brydon’s teeth (not quite white). Then the movie spends about, oh, 20 minutes pretending to be an adaptation of the Victorian costume farce before the “real world” interrupts again.

The scenes from the novel (I guess) have an inspired comic tone to them - Coogan, as Shandy, notes that his father looked quite a lot like him, so it makes perfect sense that he play his own father in flashbacks. Like the book before it, the story of Tristram (so much as we see) never really gets beyond the event of Tristram’s birth - Tristram gets consistently sidetracked with other irrelevant (and consistently funny) details, then brings us back to the main gist of it. This segment seems to demonstrate just how a true movie based upon the source material might have gone - and it goes so well that I was almost disappointed when the film switched gears.

But that’s not to say that the films main passage isn’t a great time, either. We suddenly see the crew, the actors drop out of character, and we are now behind the scenes of the making of a Tristram Shandy movie. The filming is in trouble, on a few levels. Coogan is paranoid about his position as the lead, insisting that his shoes be built higher so that he will be taller than Brydon (purely for character reasons, he states). The producers don’t want to chip in more money so that an important battle scene can be improved upon. Coogan is introduced to a giant womb apparatus that he is supposed to be lowered into for a scene (bringing up inescapable comparisons to “Spinal Tap”). At one point, a crew member mentions a subplot involving “the Widow Wadman.” Coogan, who’s never read the novel, either, brings up the subplot in conversation, and within five minutes the filmmakers have cast Gillian Anderson in the role. Coogan feels as though he’s saved the day - until he realizes that the addition now gives Brydon a larger part than his own.

Coogan’s performance is the key to the whole enterprise. As both the lead character of the imaginary adaptation and himself, he has to play widely varying notes while still maintaining a level of absurdity. Even a drop of ego into the bucket would have shattered the visage - who wants to look foolish when playing themselves? But Coogan allows his character to be portrayed as a unique combination of talent and paranoia, with plenty of flaws and neuroses thrown in for effect. A messy affair is touched upon, but a fluff magazine agrees to bury the story in exchange for an interview. His girlfriend and their son visit him on the set, but he’s more concerned about finding out how much of his role he’s just forfeited with the Widow Wadman suggestion. He has a pseudo-flirting relationship with a production assistant named Jennie (winningly played by Naomie Harris), the resolution of which essentially provides the resolution of the story, though the film understandably ends somewhat shakily (like its predecessor).

The result is an odd and entertaining film, one which I think I have to see again to truly appreciate the whole of the endeavor. There are just too many subtle touches and silly side bits (in both the main film and the film-within-a-film), I suspect, to catch them all the first time. And maybe reading the novel would help, as well. Or maybe not.

Movie Review: "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada"

by Jeff McGinnis, Lead Usher

***1/2 stars (out of four)
121 minutes, Now Showing

There’s this one song by Harry Chapin entitled “Corey’s Coming.” The song is a folk ballad (of course, being by Harry Chapin) about a pair of somewhat unlikely friends - an old man who works as a guard at a railroad station and a kid who comes by every now and then just to hang out and hear stories. The underlying story of the song is about how this old man shares tales of his past with this kid - you know, before I got stuck HERE, I had all these amazing adventures. The kid begins to share in these experiences, and they eventually become as big a part of his life as they are in the old man’s - whether they are true or not being another matter entirely.

I thought of this song as I watched “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,” the new film from Tommy Lee Jones. This movie is also, at its core, about a close friendship between two unlikely parties - a old rancher named Pete (played by Jones) and an immigrant worker named Melquiades (Julio Cedillo). A unique kinship develops between the two as they work together, and they begin to share stories about their lives, Melquiades in particular regaling Pete with tales of his former home back in Mexico, and the family he left behind. Melquiades makes Pete promise that if he should ever die while still in America, Pete needs to take him back there.

Given the title, we can deduce that Pete will, in fact, be called upon to make this journey before the film is over, and we are correct. But it will be nothing like we, or Pete, expects - indeed, the movie is nothing like we can really expect. For one thing, Melquiades’s death comes at the hands of a border patrol guard named Mike (Barry Pepper). He didn’t mean it, mind you - he was just a little distracted, heard some shots and returned fire. The fact that Melquiades was merely firing at a prairie dog that was threatening his herd did not occur to Mike at the time. We’re not sure if Mike is a genuinely evil man or merely a thoughtless one - we see him being ridiculously brutal to some illegal immigrants he captures, and his general demeanor seems to indicate that he thinks they were asking for it. He also perceives himself as a loving husband, though his wife (January Jones) practically screams her disagreement through her body language.

The first half of the film is spent establishing all these characters, and their relationships to one another (in many ways) through a series of intercut scenes from various points in the story. We begin with the discovery of Melquiades’s body, then flashback to meeting him, establishing his relationship with Pete, introducing Mike and his wife, as well as other characters such as the local waitress Rachael (Melissa Leo) who seems to be sleeping with everyone, and observes the events surrounding Melquiades’s murder with a watchful eye. The editing is disjointed but not disorienting - we never feel as though the movie is telling us the events in this order to confuse us, but merely to introduce the information in the order of its importance to the narrative.

The second half of the movie begins when Pete learns through Rachael that Mike is the killer, and that the police seem to be planning to do nothing about it. Pete’s reaction to this is not at all what we are expecting - he proceeds to kidnap Mike and force him to help bring Melquiades’s body back to his hometown in Mexico. He keeps insisting that if Mike tries to run, he’ll kill him, but we somehow know that Mike’s death is not part of Pete’s plan - and his actions when Mike DOES try to run bear this out. This portion of the movie is a much more straightforward and traditional narrative, but the story itself serves up more than its fair share of surprises.

The film has an easy, relaxed confidence in its story and tells it in a matter-of-fact tone, which makes grisly details (like the exhumation and transportation of a rotting corpse over the U.S.-Mexico border) not only bearable, but entertaining. Pepper’s border guard keeps a steady level of gall and disgust at the task at hand, but Jones as Pete still relates to Melquiades as his friend, who he loves and wants to protect - he just happens to be dead now, thank you very much. His state of mind reflects a combination of righteousness and delusion, as evidenced by his reaction when he and Mike finally arrive at their destination.

Jones emerges as an interesting filmmaker, this being his first feature (a made-for-TV movie back in 1995 is his only previous directing credit). He does not overpower the material or over think the story - he tells it in a relatively realistic tone and lets it speak for itself. The frequent use of flashbacks without some kind of obvious visual cue as to when they are taking place may seem to some like an amateurish choice, but if one reflects on the technique, one realizes that it’s really a tribute to the respect the film has for the audience - the filmmakers presume that the viewers are intelligent enough to catch on to the storytelling technique, and determine when something happened, simply by virtue of the relationships and characters. It makes us invest ourselves more quickly in the events.

If the film has a flaw, it comes in its conclusion, which is of course the one part of the movie that I absolutely cannot drop even the slightest hints about. I will merely note that the film ends somewhat abruptly, and a longer denouement would have been welcome. But in a film as rich in characters and events as this, the point lies not in the destination, but in the journey. My guess is, by the end of the film, Pete is thinking much the same thing.

Movie Review: "V for Vendetta"

by Beth Wander, Head Popcorn Taster

(Editor's Note: Welcome our first contribution from our first staff writer, Beth Wander! Yay!)

Hey, I like popcorn....

First of all, you probably shouldn't read this if you're anal retentive about knowing anything about movies before you see them. I'm not gonna ruin any special endings, at least I don't think so, but there will be plot points and such.

So, V for Vendetta. For starters, I really enjoy Natalie Portman. I'm disgusted by how good she looks with a shaved head, but I can't blame her for that. For a follow up, I REALLY enjoy Hugo Weaving's voice. I have since I first heard it. The accent has something to do with it, but its not all of it, because I don't love all Australian accents that much. So this movie has a few things going for it when I walk in the theater. Then I meet Finch, the cop; and I immediately greet Fergus from The Crying Game, who gives as masterful a performance in this as he did then! So another big bonus. And then the characters start talking... and I give myself up to it.

I don't think anyone will be surprised to hear that I like words. A LOT. I read obsessively, and anyone who can use words wisely and well makes my heart go all pitter-patter. And damn, can those Wachowski boys write. I know the film is based on a graphic novel, and I don't know how much of the script came from who, but damn is it pretty. All I must refer you to is "the V speech" (and if you've seen it you know), the Shakespeare quotes, the flow, the everything. I say, with vim and vigor and absolutely no vitriol, damn.

The story- fascinating. I'm all bleeding heart liberal and stuff, so I was kinda gonna like this movie no matter what I think, but it really was incredibly interesting. I enjoy watching characters change and learn, and movies that take time to cover larger spans of time should have more to offer in that respect, and this one certainly does. The only characters that are static are the ones you KNOW aren't going to change- anyone with a chance to move in any direction takes that oppotunity, or is forced to, and that totally counts. The story was comprehensive, it didn't skip anything, it took time to lead you places, but also gave you time to figure things out. Exposition is a good thing, when well paced with neat stuff- this was a fantastic mix. I dunno what else to say about simply the story, because it only seems right that the pretty story is absolutely tied up and connected to the pretty pretty pictures on the screen. There are at least two scenes that took my breath away, literally. Actually, no there are four. Maybe 6 or 7. And those are just the ones that stuck out from a gorgeous movie. Okay, maybe 8 or 9 or 12 or 40.

To address the political issue. Is this movie making valid political points? Absolutely. Does it make you think? Yes. But really, who's going to agree that the totalitarian government is the good guys? You know whose side you're going to be on when you go to the movie- you just have to let them take you there, and they do it very, very well...

In closing (apologies if this isn't as cohesive as one might hope), when Marsh and Sarah and I left the theater, I realized that it had been a long time since a movie surprised me this much, especially pleasantly. Since they were involved with both, this movie heralded The Matrix. I, along with the rest of the planet, was blown away by the new ideas and the groundbreaking way they were expressed in that movie ("woah" not withstanding- hands down "Vendetta" is better written). That was the feeling I had when I left the theater- seeing and hearing and experiencing that movie had changed me. Not in any groundbreaking way, but in the way of I now have a new standard to appreciate movie beauty. I have some new memories that will never be replaced, some new favorite movie scenes.

Valuable, virtuous, valid, visionary... and I'm out. Man that's sad. I'll give that up and use one of my favorite words. This movie is fancy. So sayeth Beth.

Movie Review: "Aeon Flux"

by Jeff McGinnis, Lead Usher

And just for fun, here's a reposting of one of my favorite reviews from a couple of months ago. Truth be told, writing this one was what started the ball rolling on this little experiment...


(WARNING: The following review is basically nothing but one, big spoiler. Ignore this post if you intend to see this movie. Not that, you know, you should.)

“New Rule: In her next movie, Charlize Theron has to be sexy again. We get it. You're a serious actress. Now how about playing a lesbian superhero named Nympho? Or that hot teacher in Florida who bangs her students?” - Bill Maher, “Real Time with Bill Maher,” 10/14/2005

I would officially like to ask Mr. Maher to please stick to commenting on politics and social issues and shut the hell up about the movies. Charlize Theron’s daring belief in lesser projects, what you so off-handedly dismiss as the temptation to be considered a “serious actress,” has brought us films like “Monster” and “North Country”. The desire to objectify her and persuade her to cash in on her looks has now brought us “Aeon Flux.” The phrase, I believe, is “case closed.”

Indeed, “Aeon Flux” gives us few options but to regard Theron for her beauty. She either wears skin-tight outfits or next-to-nothing for virtually the entire running time, and the role she’s in gives her no opportunity (or motivation) to demonstrate her considerable acting skills. Like Halle Berry in the much-maligned “Catwoman,” here is one of the top actresses of her generation, completely reduced to the most superficial of her gifts. The lack of an intelligent story surrounding her merely exacerbates the issue.

The plot, as outlined by a pre-opening series of subtitles, is that in 2011, a massive plague strikes the globe, killing 99% of the human race. Then, “scientists find a cure.” Well, better late than never, I guess. The remaining five million survivors are herded together into a one, big, walled-in mega-city, so that if another plague strikes them, it won’t have to work quite as hard to kill everyone off, I suppose. They are lead by the guy who oh-so-efficiently found the cure in the first place, Dr. Goodchild, who becomes the chairman of this new civilization. And it stays like that for 400 years.

Okay, stop and consider what you’ve just read for a second. 5 million survivors, walled into a single city. Considering the relative amount of population growth on the real Earth in a comparable amount of time, logic states that the number of remaining people should have outgrown that little city in about, say, 50 years, tops. Ah ha, but there is a reason they haven’t we will eventually discover, though why this little factoid has not occurred to ANYONE in the city in all this time, well, that’s anyone’s guess.

Okay, so back to the exposition, which switches to narration rather than subtitles, we meet Aeon Flux (Theron), whose incredible fighting skills are demonstrated as she catches a fly in her eyelid while lying in bed. She informs us that this “perfect society,” which largely consists of people riding around glassy-eyed on bicycles and wearing pseudo-hippy throwbacks, is not as perfect as it appears. Well, duh. It’s actually an oppressive police state, people live in fear, cannot go outside the walls, yadda yadda. Exchange “futuristic” for “primitive,” and basically it’s “The Village” all over again. And no one needs that.

But anyway. Aeon fights for a band of rebels called the Monicans, who communicate through taking pills which stimulate the cortex of their brain and put them in contact with their leader, the Handler, who is played by Francis McDormand and who borrows Napoleon Dynamite’s hairdo. She sends Aeon on her first assignment, to blow up a pool of some kind or something, but really what she’s doing is distracting Aeon from a dinner with her kid sister, Una, so the plot can have her killed off by the Evil Police State.

Now Aeon’s really mad and so forth, so of course, NOW the Handler sends Aeon on a mission to kill Chairman Goodchild (Martin Csokas), who is not the original Chairman Goodchild but is, in fact, the descendant of that Chairman Goodchild, but just happens to look just like the original Chairman Goodchild. As did all his descendants, apparently. With subtle hints like this, when the big surprise is finally revealed, considering all the generations of people who came before them and had access to all the exact same clues, and yet didn’t figure out squat, I was praying that Francis McDormand would look at her hapless charges and say, “I’m not sure I agree with you 100 percent on your police work there, folks.”

So, anyway, Aeon heads off on her mission to kill the Chairman, accompanied by her friend Sithandra (Sophie Okenedo), who has hands for feet and hands for, uh, hands. Aeon breaks in while Sithandra stands guard outside, gets the drop on Goodchild, but when he calls her “Catherine,” she does nothing and gets conked on the head from behind. Yes, the bad-ass female soldier who we’ve seen take out dozens of thugs with barely a thought is subdued by getting called the wrong name. Having been on the wrong end of that type of exchange before myself, though, I can sympathize.

So, anyway, she’s locked up but not killed, escapes without too much fuss, accosts the chairman in his room, and promptly sleeps with him. This would seem to be contradictory to the mission at hand, but anyway. After she wakes up next to him, she chokes him out (and who hasn’t been there?), finds some clues about some unsettling testing that’s going on, and leaves to meet up with Sithandra (who’s shown the patience of Job times 10, waiting outside while all of this was going on). Rather than take the time to explain to Sithandra what happened in there and why she’s so confused, she proceeds to beat Sithandra up, tie her up, and leave her helpless at the bottom of a fountain, with only a small reed to breathe through. But it’s okay, Sithandra mind-melds with the hive of the Monicans, who are dispatched to free her, and only take, oh, 30 minutes or so of screen time to do so.

Anyway, in the meantime, Chairman Goodchild is overthrown by his wussy little brother Oren, and won’t THAT look embarrassing in the authorized history of these events. Goodchild and Aeon hook up (not that way) and go through a few chase scenes before the true nature of the world is revealed: the virus also rendered everyone on the planet sterile, and ergo, the past 400 years worth of generations have been clones, so when someone dies, they are immediately cloned and someone in the city is impregnated with them. This is demonstrated to Aeon through her finding her little sister, who has just been born to a new couple. Okay, wait. Her sister was just killed, like, 2 days ago. So either: a.) they fertilized the woman nine months prior to them even knowing they’d kill Una, and it was just a lucky guess, or b.) that woman went through the FASTEST pregnancy period on record.

Meanwhile, it’s revealed that Goodchild has discovered the cure to the sterility (again showing the crackerjack pace of his scientific revelations, just like how lightning-fast he found that plague cure), but his brother wants things to keep on going as they are, so he can “live forever,” even though it’s just copies of him that live forever and not actually him, but we’re really just picking nits now, aren’t we? Oh, and the backup Monicans FINALLY get to Sithandra, and they inform her of the coup which overthrew Goodchild, so of course Sithandra and company decide to continue with the mission and kill Goodchild anyway, despite the fact that Goodchild has no power anymore and at one point, the guy who IS in charge now is standing right next to him and not a one of them thinks to train their guns on him instead. These aren’t Monicans, they’re Monican’ts.

Oh, and I didn’t even get to the big, golden balloon that flies over the city piloted by Pete Postlethwaite that looks like a cross between the Goodyear Blimp and a Snork.

But enough. The movie is competent enough on a technical level, I suppose, and the action is well done for being as ludicrous as it is, but it’s all in the service of nothing. Karyn Kusama is a talented director, having made the excellent “Girlfight” back in 2000, so we’ll chalk this up as a misstep into the big leagues and hope she moves on.

There’s a movie I’m betting you haven’t seen called “Dark City.” It is also about a group of humans caught in an isolated situation for reasons they do not comprehend, and the struggle to regain free will from their oppressors. But that film is visionary, revolutionary, groundbreaking, intelligent, exciting, moving - in other words, everything “Aeon Flux” isn’t. So, save yourself the two hours and having to go all the way to the theatre, and just rent “Dark City” instead. Or, just come over to my place and I’ll show it to you. I’ll even spring for the popcorn.

Trailer Review: "Superman Returns"

by Jeff McGinnis, Lead Usher

A little taste of what is gonna be going on around here. The Trailer Reviews will have a much more structured formula than my movie reviews, you will note.

The Title: “Superman Returns”

The Formula: The Superman Movies - III & IV + Bryan Singer

The Stars: Brandon Routh (don’t worry, no one else has heard of him, either), Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth

The Director: Bryan Singer

The Rating: None yet listed on the trailer. MPAA has rated it PG-13, according to IMDB.

The Trailer Type: Teaser, which is all we’ve had for the past five months.

The Plot: The trailer reveals tantalizingly little about the storyline, just iconic shots of the Man of Steel and various trademark visuals of Supes’ universe.

The Line: “For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you…my only son.” -Jor-El (Marlon Brando), in recycled dialogue from the original film.

The Moments: A breathtaking shot of Superman soaring in front of the sun, as well as Supes hovering over the Earth.

The Sights: The visuals seem to be leaning toward a slightly darker color palate than the original films, but then most films being made nowadays do. Most all the effects look great at this early stage. But those trunks on Supes still look too darn small.

The Sounds: Borrowing the musical score and narration from the original films was a hotly debated idea, but it works marvelously in this trailer. Williams’s music and Brando’s dialogue give the visuals a built-in weight and history, giving the filmmakers an automatic advantage in establishing their universe, as opposed to having to start from scratch (as “Batman Begins”’s filmmakers did, and marvelously).

The Good Stuff: The trailer evokes a powerful emotional reaction in those familiar with the Superman mythos - that only covers, what, 99.9% of the population? By not revealing too much of what is to come, it also makes more information hotly anticipated.

The Problems: The lack of info also leaves viewers uncertain as to what exactly the story here is supposed to be, but hey, it’s just the teaser.

The Tagline: Shot of the “S” Logo, followed by “RETURNS SUMMER 2006.” No credits.

The Release Date: None listed in the trailer, it will be arriving June 30, 2006.

The Verdict: The one that puts the “tease” in teaser, we get no sign of Kevin Spacey and barely any sign of Kate Bosworth, but what is there is there - and HOW. It’s impossible for someone with even the slightest affinity for the character to finish watching the trailer without a big ol’ grin on your face, even if you’re left with little idea what any of it means or what direction they are going. All you know is, they seem to know the notes. All that’s left is, do they know the music?

The Score: **** (out of four)

Welcome!

by Jeff McGinnis, Lead Usher

We're giving this thing a shot, at long last. So, hello. My name is Jeff McGinnis, and I am a movie buff. Or film geek, whichever term you prefer. I have spent an inordinate amount of my life in a darkened room with strangers all around, staring at a flickering screen. I love movies, love seeing them, love writing about them, just plain love everything about 'em.

Ergo, this blog. I already have a personal blog, which I have filled quite a few times in the past with my intermittent ramblings about the film business. But now, those thoughts have their own home. So, look for movie reviews and columns in the weeks to come, as well as a new feature I've been experimenting with: trailer reviews, as at my current job (at a theatre) I see way more than the national average, I'd say.

But wait, there's more. In the days to come, I will hopefully be adding more writers here - my dear friends who are just as opinionated about the movies and much more entertaining than I am. So, you won't be stuck reading just me, I promise.

Meantime, thanks for stopping by, expect more in the days to come, and let us know what you think!