redblog

Pirate Radio

In Pirate Radio, writer-director Richard Curtis (Love Actually, Bridget Jones's Diary) is clearly telling a story that he's passionate about, based on the real-life fact that in 1966, at the height of the British rock revolution, the officially-licensed radio stations of England only played an hour of rock a day -- leaving a void that offshore pirate broadcasters on their own boats were more than willing to fill. It's clear that Curtis is passionate about all of this -- the radical rule-breaking, the rebellion of rock, the struggle to remake Britain in the '60s from a steady nation of uptight upright citizens into 'Cool Brittania.' Watching Pirate Radio, though -- as it meanders through its plotlines and jumps from montage to montage and leeches the energy of rock and roll in order to occasionally give its lifeless form a jolt-of much-needed energy -- you realize that Curtis might not have too much more than passion in his arsenal.

And at first that sugar rush is enough to lull you into thinking that Pirate Radio is going to be, at the very least, fun: It has an amazing cast, from Bill Nighy (Love, Actually) to Nick Frost (Hot Fuzz), Phillip Seymour Hoffman (Almost Famous) to Rhys Darby (Flight of the Conchords), Rhys Ifans (Notting Hill) to Kenneth Branagh (Valkyrie). But Curtis confuses having a great cast with having something for a great cast to do, and Pirate Radio soon turns into a collection of bits and bites and soundbites strung together along the flimsiest pretext of a plot, as the band of radio DJs under Nighy's loose command have a new friend in his godson Tom Sturridge and a new enemy in Kenneth Branagh's slicked-back tight-wound bureaucrat, who's taking on his new task of destroying pirate radio stations as a personal crusade.

Spread

I wasn't expecting much from Spread -- after an indifferently-received debut at Sundance, it played a handful of theaters for a period of time so short you'd need high-end physics equipment to measure it --  starring Ashton Kutcher (who also produced) as a young, charming L.A. man who keeps a roof over his head and the finer things in his life by deliberately seducing older, well-to-do women. He's not quite a prostitute. But if you look at his life hard enough, you can kinda sorta see it. What most interested me about Spread, when I finally caught up with it on DVD, is that the movie's in fact about Kutcher's character, Nikki, looking at his life hard until he kinda sorta gets a real look at what he is and what he's doing. ...

Much like another 2009 Sundance film, Shrink, Spread exists in part to give an actor a stretch of a role (Kevin Spacey in Shrink, Kutcher in Spread) and also showcases a very different kind of L.A.; Nikki may end up in palatial mansions in the Hollywood Hills if he plays his cards right, but if worse comes to worst he's exiled to his friends' shabby places in Silverlake or Los Feliz. And while it's possibly unkind to say that having Kutcher play a good-looking youth who gets by on charm may be the easiest casting task ever accomplished, it's also worth noting that Kutcher digs in here, and plays something hard and ugly under Nikki's soft words and pretty face. Kutcher's voice-over gives a nice second level to the film -- Kutcher on-screen is gentle endearments and sassy talk; his narration is blunt, bleak and brutal.

School of Rock

All it takes to become a star is one simple thing: The right movie. For Tom Cruise, it was Risky Business; for Eddie Murphy, it was 48 Hours. And for Jack Black -- launching him from bit-part supporting player to multi-media mega-comedian -- it was School of Rock. Written by Mike White (Orange County,Year of the Dog) and directed by Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise), School of Rock has a paper-thin premise, as slacker-rocker Dewey Finn (Black), desperate to make the rent, masquerades as his substitute-teacher roommate Ned Schneebly (White) and takes up a position teaching a music class, turning the kids into a backing band to try and win at a battle of the bands his old, ex-bandmates (who kicked him out for terminal uncoolness) are also competing in.

But one of the brilliant things in School of Rock -- and it is a movie full of small, brilliant moments --is that it knows this premise is paper-thin, and never tries to stretch it or sell it to us as iron-strong. Dewey knows he's embarking on an idiotically ill-thought-out plan; the kids gather almost instantly that Dewey is not a conventional teacher; Dewey does well by doing good, and along the way gives up what he thinks he wants and discovers what he needs. Linklater may be known as a master of sprawling youth-epics, full of big funny moments you remember, but he also has a hand on the simpler, gentler moments that make the funny stuff actually matter, and School of Rock relies on that balance and understanding.

The Accidental Husband

I was watching The Accidental Husband with a friend, and he shrugged halfway through it, saying "I've liked worse films than this." And in a way, his dismissal pretty much sums it up; you've liked worse movies than The Accidental Husband, and you've passed over better films than The Accidental Husband because they lacked the star-power and familiar faces it offers as the film-renting version of comfort food. In fact, The Accidental Husband is simultaneously supported and doomed by the fact that everyone in it is so charming -- which makes you willing to watch its contrivances and familiarities, even ask you ask why these very charming actors can't be in a slightly better film with a slightly better script that doesn't have such familiar contrivances.

Uma Thurman is Dr. Emma Lloyd, a top-rated talk radio advice and relationship expert in New York who advises her listeners to forgo romantic love in favor of responsible love -- to hope that you get your head in the process more than you hope to lose your head. One of the women she dispenses this advice to, Sophia, takes Dr. Lloyd at her word -- and calls off her wedding; her fiancée, NYFD's Patrick Sullivan (Jeffery Dean Morgan) is understandably hurt and sees Dr. Lloyd as the cause; a plucky neighbor kid, Ajay (Jeffery Tedmori) hacks into the city's database and enters a marriage certificate for Dr. Lloyd and Patrick ... which complicates her upcoming nuptials to Richard (Colin Firth), the head of the publishing house that's about to release her sure-to-be-a-best-seller. ...

Disney's A Christmas Carol

With the release of Robert Zemeckis'  A Christmas Carol -- his latest movie crafted through capturing the motions of real actors and then draping them in computer-generated forms and putting those figures in animated backgrounds -- we have what you could interpret as the meeting of a classic tale and cutting-edge technology. Charles Dickens' timeless story of Ebenezer Scrooge's Christmas Eve visions and redemption has been brought to the screen over and over again -- but this time, it would be with 21-st century movie making magic. Jim Carrey would not only play Scrooge, but all the Ghosts of Christmas! Victorian London would be recreated in a magnificent way! Computer-generated images would be used to bring the story to life like never before! Watching A Christmas Carol, though -- in IMAX 3D -- I was curious about who, exactly, watched previous versions of A Christmas Carol and thought the problem with them was that the camera's point of view did not fly through the center of a wreath, or that there was no scene where a shrunken-down Scrooge slipped down a drain pipe like it was a waterslide before slamming his face and groin into a number of icicles.

In recent years it seems like technology has given moviemakers everything (or, rather, what seems like everything, but more about that later), but it's a double-edged sword: Advances in digital technology have given moviemakers opportunities from light-weight cameras that can capture an image almost as well as film at a fraction of the cost to the ability to create ancient cities, futuristic robots and other visions that as little as a decade ago would have been technically impossible or prohibitively expensive. Technology, however, cannot provide a reason for a film, a compelling reason to make it, and this seems to be the number one problem with Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol from the jump: There doesn't feel like any push behind it other than the fact that Zemeckis would like yet another chance to refine, re-invent and re-use the motion-capture technology that he previously used for The Polar Express and Beowulf. Pixels aren't passion; three-dimensional images are no substitute for three-dimensional storytelling.

The Fourth Kind

There's a couple of interesting things going on in The Fourth Kind -- it's trying to mess with our heads, suggesting that it's a fictional version of real-life events that offer evidence of alien abductions around Nome, Alaska a few years ago, combining dramatizations (featuring actress Milla Jovovich and actor Will Patton) with "documentary footage" of the videotapes and audio recordings that depict the startling, supernatural secrets of these (entirely phony) events. There's an intriguing idea here -- the split-screen contrast between the "real" interviews and the re-enactment, the contrast between real life and the Hollywood version, the straight-faced suggestion that Nome was plagued by creepy space aliens going in and out of people's houses as easily as Santa Claus and a lot more often -- but The Fourth Kind is so clumsy and clunky and stiff it's like watching someone attempt an intricate card trick while wearing oven mitts.

After a brief introduction where star Jovovich looks into the camera to introduce herself and explain the film's device and warn s that "some of what you're about to see ... is extremely disturbing," director Olatunde Osunsanmi interviews the "real" Dr. Abigail Tyler, who looks pale and shaken. We then see how Tyler, a psychiatrist, was trying to complete a sleep study she was doing alongside her recently-murdered husband; Abigail's husband was stabbed while they lay in bed, and the killer's yet to be found .. and all the participants in the sleep study, haunted by restless nights, tell of an owl who they've seen outside their window, or in their bedrooms, staring at them with implacable eyes ... that isn't an owl.

The Marc Pease Experience

There is a chance that some clever marketer will take advantage of currents in the culture and, noticing the audience's avid love for Glee, market The Marc Pease Experience as another plucky tale of high-school outcasts united and healed by the magical power of music and performance. This person would, in fact, be clever, but they would also, in fact, be evil with a capital 'E,' because The Marc Pease Experience is -- from horrible title to smug closing moment -- one of the least funny comedies in a long time, and a head-scratching exercise in how you can take three funny, talented people and wind up with them not being especially funny in any way. Fortunately, nobody seems hell-bent on marketing The Marc Pease Experience -- it was dumped unceremoniously into only 10 theaters nationwide, all in second-tier markets last August, and now comes ot a featureless, vanilla DVD in the hopes it might generate some cash on the strength of the names of its stars.

We meet Marc (Jason Schwartzman) just as he's getting ready to make his big entrance in his high school's production of The Wiz, as the Tin Man, egged and coaxed onstage by his drama teacher and the show's director Mr. Gribble (Ben Stiller) -- but Marc's stagefright gets the better of him, and the result is a disaster. Jumping forward 8 years, Marc's a limo-driver loser, dating a high school girl, Meg (Anna Kendricks) from his old school, and Meg also has an uncomfortable attraction to Mr. Gribble, who Marc resents and hates for ruining his life. So from the outset, we have a love triangle where two sides are creepily, disturbingly inappropriate for the other; who exactly are we supposed to root for?

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Paramount's feature-film live-action adaptation of the '80s comic-book and animation and toy franchise, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, is one of the most fascinatingly flawed big-budget movies imaginable. I stumbled out of it overcome with special-effects-induced sensory overload when it played in the theaters, wondering just how narrowly Hollywood is marketing its films these days-- is it, say, down to the year? The month? I'm moved to ask this because G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra feels like the perfect film for a fifteen-and-a-half-year-old-boy -- not one day more, not one day less.

You can't imagine someone much older enjoying G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra because, frankly, it is silly -- cartoony and crude, full of phony high-tech pseudoscience and heroes and villains with goofy codenames like "Snake Eyes" and "Ripcord," plus hidden bases that look like something from a Roger Moore Bond film on steroids. And I can't recommend someone much younger watching G. I Joe: The Rise of Cobra because while it is silly and nonsensical, it is also incredibly violent. And I'm not talking about the red-laser/blue-laser violence of the cartoon that inspired the film, either, where no blood was spilled and bad things happened far away; in the first reel of G.I. Joe, we see someone get a red-hot iron mask latched to their face while they're screaming, then a few people getting stabbed in the eye with knives and crossbow bolts; it is fun for the whole family, but only if your family likes watching people burned alive and stabbed in the brain. And I know plenty of fans of the '80s comics and TV show and toys who liked the nostalgia trip G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra offered, but, much like Transformers, I don't have that spoonful of sweet, toxic nostalgia it takes to make those big, stupid pills go down.

James' Latest Radio Spot

Wanna hear James give his take on last week's DVD releases, including Ice Age 3, Orphan and The Maiden Heist, as well as films currently in theaters, including Michael Jackson's This Is It and Paranormal Activity?  Then click here to listen to his spot on KPAM's Bob Miller Show this past Friday.   

You'll also learn what scary movies James likes to watch on Halloween.  Nope, I'm not going to spoil the surprise -- you have to tune in yourself!

The Rocchi Files -- Winter Comedy Preview!

Winter may be larded and filled with Oscar contenders, to be sure, but Hollywood -- knowing that a little desert makes the broccoli go down -- has made sure to fill the winter Oscar-qualifying and Oscar-waiting season with a few comedies to break up the drama and depression. There's plenty of funny stuff if you know where to look -- with, of course, the warning that you may not find the same things funny as Hollywood. ...

The Men Who Stare at Goats (Nov. 6)

Packed with an all-star cast - including George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey --this comedy would be absolutely unbelievable, if it weren't all true. Based on journalist John Ronson's book, The Men Who Stare at Goats tells the true tale of the U.S. Military's Cold-War era experiments in creating psychic soldiers who could spy and kill with the power of their minds alone. McGregor's a journalist who tracks down Clooney's ex-psychic, while Bridges and Spacey butt heads over how the psychic soldier program should continue -- or if it should at all. The Men Who Stare at Goats has been getting some play on the festival circuit -- I saw it in Toronto -- and while it's a bit uneven, there's a few solid laughs in it, especially when Clooney plays the silly psychic stuff .... perfectly ... straight.

Did You Hear About the Morgans? (Dec. 18)

Directed by Marc Lawrence -- who's previously struck gold with Hugh Grant in Two Week's Notice and Music and Lyrics -- Did You Hear About the Morgans? has a plot as old as the hills, the fish-out-of-water-but-in-trouble. The unhappily married Morgans (Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker) of New York are witnesses to a mob murder, and have to be put into witness relocation. Together. In Wyoming. Sure, it all sounds a little too much -- the odds that the Morgans will reunite seem approximately the same as that of the sunrise tomorrow -- but Grant and Parker are always reliable. More interestingly, the supporting cast is amazing -- Sam Elliott, Mary Steenburgen and Elizabeth Moss of Mad Men, for starters -- and as theaters get crowded with Oscar contenders, Did You Hear about the Morgans? might be the down-home vacation from deep, dark movies that audiences want.