Day: June 16, 2010

DVD Mini-Review: The Book of Eli

Denzel Washington in "The Book of Eli."

By Jason Apuzzo. The pitch: Samurai-style warrior Denzel Washington wanders the post-apocalyptic wasteland carrying the last Bible on Earth. His mission, given to him in a vision, is to carry the Bible west to where a last remnant of civilized humanity can preserve it for generations to come.  Standing in his way is Gary Oldman – the corrupt, tinpot dictator of a Wild West-style town who wants to use Denzel’s Bible for his own nefarious ends.  And caught in the middle, fetchingly, is young prostitute Mila Kunis, who must choose between leaving town with Denzel or remaining in the purgatorial, Dodge City hell of Gary Oldman’s harem …

What works:

• Denzel.  His star power, and the compelling mixture of ruthlessness and humanity he brings to the role, are the best things the film has going for it.  He’s very watchable, particularly in the film’s quieter moments.

• The stylized look and feel of the post-apocalyptic wasteland.  Although the wasteland in Eli isn’t the riotous spectacle that The Road Warrior‘s badlands were, it has a dark, menacing sobriety to it that works well given the film’s theme.

• The basic premise of the film is strong, and holds it together through some clunky sequences.

Denzel Washington and Mila Kunis.

What doesn’t work:

• For the umpteenth time in his career, Gary Oldman isn’t given enough to do other than sneer.  His final face-off with Denzel is anti-climactic in the extreme.

• The film can’t decide whether it’s a kick-ass action thriller, or a serious meditation on Christian faith.  As a result, it ends up being neither.

• Female lead Mila Kunis is too mousy to play sexy … yet too sexy to play mousy.  As a result, she ends up being neither.

The Book of Eli – which is newly out this week on DVD, Blu-Ray and Amazon download (see the LFM Store below) – is really a Western, pure and simple.  My sense is that the film might actually have done better if it hadn’t tried to be some sort of Christian allegory, but had instead depicted Denzel transporting something more mundane across the post-apocalyptic wasteland … like  maybe Julia Child’s Joy of Cooking.  I’m only half-kidding saying that, because the problem with this film – directed by the Hughes brothers – is that it just takes itself far too seriously.  A little humor would’ve helped matters greatly, because the film’s low budget and somewhat ham-handed action sequences are actually far below what we’ve come to expect from big Hollywood action spectacles.  If you come looking for Mad Max, you’re not going to get it in this film.  At the same time, you’re not really getting The Seventh Seal, either.  What you’re getting is something that’s passably entertaining, and modestly thoughtful, but not nearly as cathartic as it could be.

On balance, though, I wish that Hollywood made a lot more pictures of this sort – because with the apocalypse seemingly getting closer by the day, I really need to know what to wear once the bombs start dropping.  And I love Denzel’s shades.

[Special note to Christian audiences of this film: it’s Rated R and is very violent.  Viewer discretion definitely advised.]

Posted on June 16th, 2010 at 11:07pm.

Hollywood Round-up, 6/16

Decades later, Steve McQueen is back in the news.

By Jason Apuzzo. • Robert Downey, Jr. and his wife have formed a production company, and their first project will be to produce Steve McQueen’s script (yes, that Steve McQueen) for Yucatan, the Mexico-motorcycle heist film McQueen wanted to do long ago. Steve’s son Chad will be exec. producing. Although I’m not a huge fan of Downey’s, this is a genuinely great idea and somewhere up above The King of Cool is smiling in his Mustang.

• A 3D IMAX release of The Green Hornet is set for January 14th of next year. Troubling subtext: January is a frequent dumping ground of projects nobody has confidence in.  Will Green Hornet end up in the red?  In related news, the new version of The Thing will be coming out on April 29th of next year. This Thing is technically a prequel to John Carpenter’s remake … so does that mean it’s also a ‘reboot’?  I’m trying to get a handle on this.

• A sequel to Karate Kid is already in the works. Sequel + Reboot = SeeBoot. You read it here first.

Aishwarya Rai.

• A liberal group has created an on-line petition to stop Disney from putting Sarah Palin’s new Alaska/nature show on the Learning Channel.  My advice is to flood the email box of this website with enormous, 2mb photo images of Naughty Monkey pumps.

• George Clooney has been made a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. That’s not the punch-line, that’s the actual news story.  He joins Michael Douglas and Warren Beatty on the Council’s Sub-Division on Global Narcissism.

• Did Al Gore have an affair with Inconvenient Truth producer Laurie David? Or is it all just an on-line hoax?  Right now Al’s regretting inventing the internet.

• Obnoxious Brit left-winger Michael Winterbottom (The Road to Guantanamo, The Killer Inside Me) is at it again. His next project will apparently be The Promised Land, about the battle between Jewish insurgents and British occupiers in the Palestine of the 1930s. Winterbottom gets the perfect Brit-leftie 2-fer here: implying moral equivalency between Jews of the 1930s and contemporary Islamic terrorists, and comparing current American occupations to failed British occupations of the pre-World War II era. Silver lining? Nobody watches Michael Winterbottom’s films.

• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … the Hollywood reporter takes time out to interview the lovely Indian star and former Miss Universe Aishwarya Rai, about her new film Ravaan.

And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood …

Posted on June 16th, 2010 at 5:36pm.

Teacher Unions vs. Kids: The Lottery

By Joe Bendel. In New York City, parents who want their children to receive a decent education have to rely on chance.  For this sad state of affairs, they can thank the local teachers’ union, the UFT, which consistently places its own special interests above those of New York’s children at every opportunity.  Indeed, one can draw no other conclusion after screening Madeleine Sackler’s documentary The Lottery (trailer above), opening today in the city perhaps most in need of its reformist message: New York.

Eva Moskowitz was one of the few relatively moderate Democrats in the New York City Council (and my local council person).  After earning union enmity for holding hearings on the teachers’ contract, she was defeated by a vastly less talented candidate for the Manhattan Borough Presidency.  Supporting her opponent might have been the union’s biggest mistake.  After the election, she moved back up-town, where she opened the Harlem Success Academies, a series of public charter schools that dramatically out-perform the local zip-code schools.  Much to the embarrassment of the union and local administrators, over five thousand parents attended the legally mandated lottery to enroll their children in Harlem Success.  The Lottery tells their story.

There are many differences between the parents featured in Lottery.  Some are single parents, some are immigrants, and some are union members themselves.  However, they have two things in common: they all want their children to have greater opportunities in life than they did, but they do not think that is possible if their children attend their failing zip code-zoned public school.  In order for their children to be successful, they will have to be lucky in the Harlem Success lottery.

As a charter school, Harlem Success cannot choose its students.  There is no skimming cream off the top.  By law, if total demand exceeds their total registration, they must hold a lottery for all new incoming students.  Of course, that demand is enormous, overflowing the cavernous Harlem Armory Center.

None of this pleases the union, though they declined to explain why on-camera.  The only interview participant willing to shill for the UFT is former New York City Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, but she does not make a good spokesman for their interests.  Appropriately, we also see the “community organizers” formerly known as ACORN show up to intimidate Harlem Success parents and staff at public hearings.  (Karma seems to have caught up with them.) Continue reading Teacher Unions vs. Kids: The Lottery

What is Christopher Nolan Doing with Superman?

By Jason Apuzzo.  Speculation is currently very heated about the exact nature of the plotline to writer-director Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film, Inception.

Why the speculation is so heated is actually something of a puzzle to me, in so far as the film’s trailer would seem to make Inception‘s storyline fairly clear: the film appears to be a kind of sci-fi, Hitchcockian thriller based on the concept of what used to be termed mind-control and/or brainwashing.

According to Warner Brothers, the film’s distributor:

“Acclaimed filmmaker Christopher Nolan directs an international cast in an original sci-fi actioner that travels around the globe and into the intimate and infinite world of dreams. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a skilled thief, the absolute best in the dangerous art of extraction, stealing valuable secrets from deep within the subconscious during the dream state, when the mind is at its most vulnerable. Cobb’s rare ability has made him a coveted player in this treacherous new world of corporate espionage, but it has also made him an international fugitive and cost him everything he has ever loved. Now Cobb is being offered a chance at redemption. One last job could give him his life back but only if he can accomplish the impossible—inception. Instead of the perfect heist, Cobb and his team of specialists have to pull off the reverse: their task is not to steal an idea but to plant one. If they succeed, it could be the perfect crime. But no amount of careful planning or expertise can prepare the team for the dangerous enemy that seems to predict their every move. An enemy that only Cobb could have seen coming. This summer, your mind is the scene of the crime.”

Personally Nolan’s much-hyped film is of little interest to me, due to its seemingly derivative quality; the film appears to be a kind of pastiche of familiar elements from The Matrix, Memento, The Thirteenth Floor, Dark City and myriad other recent films that have plumbed the theme of mind control.  Inception already appears to lack the punchy, campy vitality of the original Matrix; nor does Nolan appear to have developed a sense of humor – we’re apparently still going to be waiting for that in one of his films.  [And I’ve been waiting for it ever since his Following, from 1998.]  But Nolan certainly made Warner Brothers enough money from The Dark Knight that he’s earned the right to do what he wants to do with Inception – it’s his film.

Your mind is the scene of the crime: from Christopher Nolan’s “Inception.”

Superman is a somewhat different matter.  As has been widely reported, Nolan has been given by Warner Brothers what amounts to supervisory control over the forthcoming ‘reboot’ of the Superman franchise.  He’s been given this control due to the wild financial success of The Dark Knight. But Superman is an altogether different kind of ‘property.’  The Superman character is an important figure of American iconography – a product, actually, of America’s epochal battle against fascism in World War II.  Going ‘edgy’ or ‘dark’ with the Superman character – which is ostensibly why Nolan was brought in – is therefore quite a tricky matter.

Miles Millar’s comic series Superman: Red Son (an image of which is seen at the top of this post) – the much-discussed series in which Superman is re-envisioned as a Soviet superhero of the working people – offers a vivid example of how even something as seemingly stable as the Superman image can be tampered with in drastic ways.  With the full-throated support of the fanboy community, Millar was pitching Superman movies as recently as two years ago, although in fairness I don’t believe the Red Son plotline was part of his pitch.  The point is, though, that Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns actually went so far as to drop the ‘American way’ from the famous Superman ‘credo’ of standing for “Truth, Justice and the American Way.”  So does anyone really trust these people to retain the essence of the Superman character as a patriotic icon?

There are already rumors about what the next Superman film might be like from the plot standpoint.  The rumors don’t really tell us much – or at least, they don’t tell us the really important things to know.  But I’m long-past trusting the studios to handle this material anymore.  And now Christopher Nolan – the guy making the brainwashing film, who brought a sinister allure to the Batman series – is entrusted with Superman.  And I’m actually a little concerned about it.

For now Nolan has been keeping his cards close to the vest about his plans for Superman.  I understand the showmanship aspect of keeping things secret, but at this point I’d actually like to know a little more about where he intends to take the Superman franchise.  Hopefully during the rollout of Inception we’ll hear a lot more from him about this.

Posted on June 16th, 2010 at 12:57am.