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In this season of unease with torture porn, it's understandable that Captivity, which comes out July 13, is already raising hackles. But it looks like its makers have raised the bar on horror, judging from this rating box on the movie's website. Is PETA on the case?
Rick Santorum, the former U.S. senator, said last week that he's in the "very, very early stages" of a movie project with Stephen McEveety, a producer on The Passion of the Christ
and other Mel Gibson films. The planned movie "follows three Iranian
brothers who take disparate paths in their lives, including one who
becomes a terrorist." "We're not just making it for 2008 election,"
Santorum told Pittsburgh TV.
"We're making it because we think there's some information that the
public is not aware of as to who we're facing [in the war against
terror], and we think an effective way to telling a story is through
film."
Just how bad could a propaganda movie by a right-wing zealot be, especially one with such a twisted imagination? History has an answer. It could be as bad as, say, The Green Berets. Or as enjoyably idiotic as Red Dawn. Or it could be as awful as the movie Jack Abramoff made, or the one he almost made. It will be grandiose, heavy-handed, and simplistic.
I can't wait to download it.
(Posted today on The Huffington Post.)
America's taste for brains is at an all-time high, judging from the
zombie movies that have invaded multiplexes. Whereas the most graphic
of flesh-munching films used to be found only at midnight shows or in
scuzzy tenderloin grindhouses (hence the schlocky zombie tribute that
is Planet Terror, Robert Rodriguez's half of Grindhouse), they're now part of our national consciousness. (South Park
addressed the nation's feelings about indigents with customary subtlety
this season in an episode titled "Night of the Living Homeless.") But
what have we learned from these films, aside from the fail-safe
zombie-stopping tactic of the headshot?
Find out here, in my latest Huffington Post post.
In her NYT review today of Woody Allen's book Mere Anarchy, Janet Maslin quotes this line: "Whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent remains questionable,
although studies show that the odds of criminals committing another
crime drops by almost half after their execution." Then she says, "Mr. Allen’s writing has been this funny for 50 years."
My point exactly.
On The Huffington Post yesterday, someone published something dumb about the Sopranos finale. So I wrote a testy rebuttal, which you can read here. Let the flame wars begin! And let this be my last post about a TV show.
POSTSCRIPT: Here's an outstanding examination of the full arc of The Sopranos, one that doesn't bother trying to dissect the final scene (as too many people are doing these days). Oh, and here's another one.
While still reeling from the phenomenal Sopranos finale, I'm also still adjusting to last month's news that Paul Newman is done with acting. Sure, he's 82, but he was someone you could always depend on—especially in the last couple of decades—for intelligent, solid performances. As Phil Nugent says over at ScreenGrab, Newman "managed to be one
of the very few movie actors who both continued to grow as an actor
and to hang onto the untarnished aura of major stardom even as he
glided into his AARP years." Nugent offers a nice evaluation of Newman's career, toppling the dumb notion that his best work was in his earliest days:
Newman actually started showing new life in Hill's 1977 hockey comedy Slap Shot, where, now in his early fifties, he demonstrated a new sureness and snap that cut right through the programmed gnarliness of the movie he was in. (Slap Shot was one of those '70s studio pictures that tried to lure people away from their TV sets with an ad campaign that promised that if you'd come to theater, you'd get to hear the stars talking dirty.) To his new directness was added a new layer of gravity in his performances as a cop in the 1981 Fort Apache, the Bronx, as a lawyer in the 1983 film The Verdict, and, especially, as an honest working man who's made to suffer for his family connections in the 1981 Absence of Malice. His Oscar-winning exhumation of Fast Eddie Felson, from The Hustler, in the patched-together sequel The Color of Money was a welcome reminder of just how much sheer fun he could be to watch, especially when he got to tease his eager young co-star, Tom Cruise. (If it had been a boxing match, the ref would have stopped it in the first round.)
I totally agree: Newman in Absence of Malice is so damned good that you can forgive that movie's tsk-tsk earnestness. But that's not to say he wasn't amazing back when; I think of him in Hud, so dangerous, so crafty, so insanely sexy. Didn't Tony Soprano once cover up the topic of some sneaky HUD arrangement in conversation by making a jokey reference to Paul Newman? (Help me out here, Sopranos obsessives.) Anyway. So long, Tony; and thanks, Paul.
Nearly 300 vintage movie posters, including the one above, go up for grabs this week at Christie's in London. (We Yanks can bid online.) Film snobs will be clawing one another's eyes out over this one.
Jean-Claude Brialy, one of my Nouvelle Vague faves, is dead. Since the good folks at ScreenGrab have already posted clips of some of his best-known work—in Une Femme est Une Femme and Claire's Knee—I'll offer this one, from Serge Gainsbourg's wacky 1967 TV musical, Anna. In it he argues, and smokes, with Gainsbourg before getting down to some serious boogieing. Party on, monsieur.
