The A.V. Club - Film

Film: Interview:Wes Anderson

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Now six features into his career, director Wes Anderson has established himself as the most distinctive comedy auteur of his generation, with an instantly recognizable style that’s defined by crispy composed images, idiosyncratic pop soundtracks, and a tone that balances dry wit and deep melancholy. Though his debut feature, 1996’s Bottle Rocket, only drew a small coterie of followers—mostly on video, in the wake of his MTV Movie Award for Best New Filmmaker—Anderson raised his profile enormously with his 1998 follow-up Rushmore, which revived Bill Murray’s critical reputation and influenced a wave of indie films ...

Books: Contest:Win Star Trek: The Art Of The Film book

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:30:00 -0600

"Director J.J. Abrams’ new vision of the greatest space adventure of all time, Star Trek features a young, new crew venturing boldly where no man has gone before, as it tells the story of how the brash Starfleet cadet James T. Kirk first meets a Vulcan named Spock, and earns the Captain’s chair of the Starship Enterprise. The film quickly became a critical and commercial smash hit worldwide, as audiences — confirmed Trekkers and newcomers alike — thrilled to a state-of-the-art action epic which both respected the legacy of Gene Roddenberry’s archetypal modern myth and forged ahead into an ...

Film: Hater:Inside-Out Dudes With Evil Tattoos Are The New Werewolves

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:02:00 -0600

As anyone who saw Twilight: Ballad Of The Melodramatic Papercut this weekend can attest, CGI Huskies are totally the new Abstinence Vampires, breathing near each others' faces is the new kissing, and no character development is the new character development. But what will be the new emotionally and physically abusive teen monster hotness? What will be the new CGI Huskies? Apparently it's Beasts With Really Good Balance. More specifically, it's Inside-Out Dudes With Evil Tattoos Who Can Stand On Top Of Bridges For Some Reason. Oh, and 10 seconds of vague monster transformation is the new movie trailer ...

Film: Scenic Routes:Children Of Men

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:00:00 -0600

Back in the late 1940s, Alfred Hitchcock, perhaps still addled from the war, came up with one of the all-time stupid movie ideas: shooting an entire feature that appears to be a single continuous take. At that time, of course, actually doing so was impossible—film cameras were decidedly analog, and could only shoot for about 10 minutes before the magazine had to be reloaded. Nor was digital compositing available to Hitch, which meant that he had no choice but to hide his cuts by clumsily zooming into an actor’s suit jacket for no apparent reason. Rope remains somewhat ...

Film: The A.V. Club Blog:ZMF WAS HERE

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:22:00 -0600

Like many of you, we here at The A.V. Club were never really holding our collective breath in hopes of actually meeting our most (in)famous commenter, ZODIAC MOTHERFUCKER, in person. We figured that his many comments and occasional e-mails and voicemail messages would be the only evidence of his existence. Last month, he came to Chicago and supposedly stopped by our office on a Saturday, when none of us were here. (Though he tagged a mirror at the bar on the corner as proof of his existence.) So when he e-mailed to say that he was taking a ...

Film: Newswire:Weekend Box Office: The sparkling vampire

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:48:00 -0600

With resounding force, The Twilight Saga: New Moon affirmed this weekend what Titanic, Backstreet Boys, and Shaun Cassidy did before it: Pre-teen girls are an unstoppable market force. Despite generally poor reviews—which would dissuade approximately 0% of the series’ fans anyway—New Moon enjoyed the third highest opening weekend ever with $140.7 million, second only to The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 3. That accomplishment is all the more impressive when you consider that it more than doubled its predecessor Twilight’s opening frame from a year before and it only cost $50 million to produce. (More fun facts ...

Film: A.V. Talk:The Twilight Saga: New Moon

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:08:00 -0600

Much like last time around, the macho male leadership of The A.V. Club took one look at the Twilight franchise and decided to set the girls on it. Genevieve Koski and Tasha Robinson catch up with the second adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's bestselling series, and discuss how the media phenomenon has aged for them, exactly how many facial expressions New Moon star Kristen Stewart owns, and the two groups of people who will enjoy this movie. Subscribe to A.V. Talk iTunes http://feeds.theonion.com/avtalk

Film: Newswire:Will Ferrell, Ewan McGregor top Most Overpaid Stars list

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 12:08:00 -0600

Forbes Magazine just came out with its annual list of the most overpaid stars in Hollywood, which it generates via a somewhat complicated metric that looks at their last three films and compares their paychecks, the films' budgets, and the money those films brought in via theatrical, TV, and DVD release. The list isn't a snotty, opinion-laden "Why does Keanu Reeves still get paid to make movies?" dig at actors who stink up the screen; it's a cold-blooded return-on-investment comparison that calculates which stars are least profitable to the studios. Naturally, big stars getting massive paychecks for recent ...

Film: Random Roles:Tom Noonan

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

The actor: Tom Noonan leads a curious double life as a respected playwright/arthouse fixture and a sought-after character actor and villain in genre movies, particularly horror and suspense films. Noonan’s current feature, the atmospheric early-’80s-style fright flick The House Of The Devil, makes inspired use of the seeming incongruity between Noonan’s towering frame and the underlying gentleness of his manner and sonorous voice. So did Noonan’s breakout film, Michael Mann’s 1986 masterpiece Manhunter, which cast him as a killer pursued by William Petersen with help from Brian Cox’s Hannibal Lecter. Noonan won the ...

DVD: Contest:Win Anvil: The Story Of Anvil T-shirts and autographed DVDs

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:03:00 -0600

Have you seen it yet? The documentary about the most kick-ass metal band that nobody's ever heard of? You probably should. And now you've got a chance to win an autographed DVD (ARV: $24.98) and/or an Anvil T-shirt, which says "METAL ON METAL" on the back. Just send us an e-mail with your preference--T-shirt or DVD, and we'll pick some winners on or about November 30. (The T-shirts are mostly XXL, so keep that in mind.) Employees of Onion Inc. and their families are not eligible, so don't even try it, Mom. If you ...

DVD: Contest:Win Humpday on DVD

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:56:00 -0600

"It's been a decade since Ben (Mark Duplass) and Andrew (Joshua Leonard) were college bad boys. Ben is living contently with a good job and a great wife, until his old buddy Andrew shows up on his doorstep late one night. Andrew, who lives as a vagabond artist, invites Ben out to a wild party. Excessive drinking combined with the irrational need to one-up each other leads to a mutual dare that locks them into entering an amateur porn contest together." Roger Ebert called it "funny, observant, and thought-provoking." Our own Scott Tobias loved it, calling it "Old Joy ...

Film: Review:Broken Embraces

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:07:00 -0600

Blind writer Lluís Homar begins his day memorably in the opening scene of Broken Embraces. Having been helped across the street by a beautiful woman, he successfully turns her offer to read him the news into a seduction. When their encounter ends, he looks satisfied but unmoved. Warned against letting strangers into his house by his manager (Blanca Portillo), he says that everything that could happen to him has already happened. He lives life as an epilogue, remembering a time before he lost his sight, when he directed acclaimed films under his own name instead of hacking them out ...

Film: Review:The Blind Side

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:06:00 -0600

Sports movies have a long, troubled history of well-meaning white paternalism, with poor black athletes finding success through white charity. But The Blind Side, based on Michael Lewis’ non-fiction book, finds a new low. In the character of “Big Mike” (real life success story Michael Oher, played by Quinton Aaron), a poor, undereducated teenager later groomed into a top-tier offensive lineman, the film suggests a gentle, oversized puppy in need of adoption. (The family that takes him in literally picks him up from the streets during a rainstorm, like a stray. All that’s missing are the children pleading, “Mom ...

Film: Review:Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:05:00 -0600

Not since Snakes On A Plane has the line between movie and Internet meme been as confused as it is with Werner Herzog and Nicolas Cage’s remake of the Abel Ferrara shocker Bad Lieutenant. When the project was first announced at Cannes, it immediately triggered reaction along the lines of “What kind of crazy train wreck is that going to be?” And once the wondrously insane teaser trailer went viral, it turned into, “Oh, that kind of a crazy train wreck.” So what about the movie? Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans—the subtitle makes it charmingly unwieldy ...

Film: Review:Planet 51

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:04:00 -0600

Through the same mysterious alchemy that gave the moviegoing public back-to-back CGI insect adventures (A Bug’s Life and Antz), deep-sea fish adventures (Finding Nemo and Shark Tale), and films about escaped zoo animals returning to nature (Madagascar and The Wild), 2009 has produced two films about peaceful alien civilizations disrupted by human invaders. The first, May’s Battle For Terra, was a cheaply animated but heady, ponderous think-piece about the nature of humanity and the causes of war. The second, the new comic adventure Planet 51, is Terra’s opposite in every way. Its visuals are far more sophisticated ...

Film: Review:The Sun

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:03:00 -0600

Following portraits of Lenin (Taurus) and Hitler (Moloch), Russia’s Aleksandr Sokurov shifts his gaze to the land of the rising sun, where bunker-bound Emperor Hirohito (Issei Ogata) is waiting out the end of the Pacific war. Shooting in candlelit half-dark so extreme that the subtitles often cast the brightest glow—an effect that will likely prove impossible to translate to the small screen—Sokurov zooms in on Hirohito’s U.S.-mandated un-deification, the key to breaking the will of Japan’s notoriously tenacious troops. Intriguingly, Sokurov takes Hirohito’s renunciation of divine status at face value; ceaselessly twitching ...

Film: Review:Red Cliff

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:02:00 -0600

Financed for $80 million, the most money ever allotted to a Chinese production, the immense period action epic Red Cliff is John Woo’s first film in the six years since Paycheck ended—for the time being, anyway—his rocky sojourn in Hollywood. From the looks of it, the cultural exchange cut both ways: Woo’s flair for slo-mo theatrics has become a common visual stamp for Hollywood actioners, while his longtime interest in Western themes found a natural home in America, even though the blockbuster conventions of movies like Mission: Impossible II often eclipsed those themes. Bringing all his ...

Film: Review:The Missing Person

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:01:00 -0600

There’s a mass of incongruities—some clever, others shockingly ill-conceived—in Noah Buschel’s The Missing Person, a neo-noir that attempts to update the genre while providing a self-conscious throwback to its tarted-up dialogue and grimy ambiance. Bridging the gap between eras is Michael Shannon, a strange, exciting character actor whose very presence tends to put a movie on edge; whenever he popped up as a mentally unstable truth-teller in Revolutionary Road, the film’s brittle marital drama suddenly dipped into chaos. Shannon is the perfect actor to play Buschel’s hard-drinking gumshoe. He can swill gin and mumble ...

Film: Review:Mammoth

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:00:00 -0600

Rarely has a filmmaker experienced as rapid a rise and fall as Swedish director Lukas Moodysson. His intimate 1999 romance Fucking Åmål (a.k.a. Show Me Love) and his sprawling 2000 comedy Together were praised for their warmth and insight. Then he swapped optimism for pessimism with 2002’s heartbreaking (but artful) Lilya 4-Ever. After that, Moodysson tested audiences with the intentionally repellant A Hole In My Heart and the aggressively experimental Container, and in just a few short years, he went from being a favorite of critics and audiences to being a director whose name evokes winces ...

Film: Review:The Twilight Saga: New Moon

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:00:00 -0600

New Moon goes through great pains to present itself as a descendent of Romeo And Juliet, except without all that icky tragedy in the end. There are warring clans—in this case, werewolves and vampires—a rival suitor, tragic miscommunication, and at the center of it all, two self-absorbed teenage lovers. Throw in a revenge subplot and an ancient, power-hungry clan of evil Italian vampires, and it all sounds potentially thrilling. But in spite of its wealth of conflict, New Moon suffers from a dearth of accompanying tension and excitement, thanks to the increasingly tedious relationship at its center. After ...