News Commentary - By Grabthar's Hammer, Dean Parisot to helm Red 2!

One of the great mysteries over the last decade or so is deducing why Dean Parisot hasn't made a half-dozen more movies since 1999.  The guy's second film, Galaxy Quest, is not only one of the best comedies of the last twenty-years but remains the best Star Trek movie ever made, bar none (ironically, there were actually a few elements from said parody that were cribbed with a straight face in the 2009 J.J. Abrams reboot).  The film didn't become an out-and-out smash hit, partially due to a boycott of Dreamworks movies from Regal Cinemas at the time.  But his second film, the underrated and ahead-of-its-time Fun With Dick and Jane (yes, it's a remake, but its middle class family struggles with economic obsolescence was about three years two early) was the last live-action Jim Carrey film to crack $100 million in the US back in 2005.  And up until yesterday, Parisot has been relatively MIA.  Variety is reporting that Parisot has been hired to helm Red 2, the sequel to Summit Entertainment's surprisingly successful 'retired spies get back in the game' action comedy from late 2010.   

In a 'trash your last movie' era, why I'm glad that Pixar is defending Cars 2...

As a result of director Andrew Stanton and the various producers of John Carter are making the junket rounds this week, there has been opportunity to discuss what many pundits and critics feel was a rare Pixar whiff in Cars 2.  Producer Lindsey Collins, while speaking to Movieline's Jen Yamato, discussed both the film's critical reception and the fact that it was the first Pixar film not to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature since the inception of that category in 2001.  Without simply laying out the quotes (hence the link), she correctly states that there were a number of really solid animated films this year, that she believes that Cars 2 suffered from a kind of anti-Pixar backlash, and that director John Lasseter still loves the film.  I don't know if the film suffered from an anti-Pixar backlash (although expectations were that the film would be mediocre prior to press screenings), and I am personally not a fan of Cars 2.  But I personally am darn-happy to see the Pixar gang defending it against the critical onslaught.

Remember when the GOP tried to convince us that Barack Obama was The Joker? A chilling new report shows that they may have been right...

Remember this picture?  It popped up in the summer of 2008 as a piece of political propaganda, usually with a caption along the lines of 'Socialism!' or 'Audacity!'.  Alas, it turns out that the juxposition may be more accurate than anyone would have guessed four years ago.  There is a lengthy and seemingly well-researched article over at the London-based Bureau Of Investigative Journalism that states that, along with the widespread use of unmanned drones as a weapon to unilaterally target would-be terrorist targets, the Pentagon, under Obama's orders, has apparently been targeting not just the primary targets but those who first arrived on the scene, be they first responders or mourners.  The paragraph in question -

"But research by the Bureau has found that since Obama took office three years ago, between 282 and 535 civilians have been credibly reported as killed including more than 60 children.  A three month investigation including eye witness reports has found evidence that at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims. More than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. The tactics have been condemned by leading legal experts."

So, why isn't The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo a hit yet? Oh right...

This was posted as a comment elsewhere, but it touches on something I wanted to talk about, so I'm sharing it here too...
So as of last week, David Fincher's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo crossed $100 million in the US and $100 million overseas, giving the film a current worldwide cume of $211 million.  Yet, what should be a terrific result for what is currently an endangered species, an R-rated, hyper-violent/sexual adult thriller, is in fact something of a disappointment.  Why is that?  Simple, it cost too much.  It shouldn't have cost $90 million, end of story. I don't care how good or bad it is, I don't care how polished it looks or how splashy the 007 title sequence is, it was a film with a limited theatrical audience and should have been budgeted as such. The lesson over the last few years is that adult genre fare, even R-rated fare, can thrive as long as they don't cost anymore than $45 million. Contraband cost $25 million. The Town cost $40 million. The Lincoln Lawyer cost $40 million. Limitless cost $27 million. The Grey cost $25 million. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a 2.5hr R-rated thriller that basically advertised that it wasn't appropriate for general moviegoers and had a limited international audience due to the fact they'd have to read subtitles just like the original, cost $90 million. Despite all of its negatives, it still grossed $100 million domestic off a $12 million Fri-Sun opening, showing genuine legs in a front-loaded marketplace even as a hyper-competitive January caused unexpected screen-bleeding.. But, because it cost $90 million, it will struggle to break even.  Sometimes, expectations be-damned, it's just about the math.

Scott Mendelson

The Bourne Desperation gets a teaser trailer...

The most striking thing about this teaser (which premiered late last week) is that it's in fact a variation on an old joke my wife and I used to do back when The Bourne Ultimatum came out five years ago.  It's no secret that I kinda hate The Bourne Ultimatum, finding it to be a dumbed-down, streamlined, crowd-pleasing remake of The Bourne Supremacy.  But the goofiest part of the picture is the revelation that Jason Bourne wasn't just a patient in the Treadstone program, no, he was also involved in an even more secret and devious organization: Blackbriar (which, to be fair, was I believe referenced offhand at the finale of The Bourne Identity)!  So if the fourth film ever came to fruition, we'd inevitably see the reveal of yet another uber-secret government-sanctioned wet-ops program.  "If you were horrified by Treadstone... if you were mortified by Blackbriar... then you will shit your pants when you learn about Bald Eagle!!"  Bourne: "Oh my god... you turned us into half-human/half-robot killing machines!"  Reanimated Clive Owen: "Look... what... they (loading-loading)... make (Error!  Error!) you give!"  Sadly that absurdest bit seems perilously close to fruition with this new teaser for The Bourne Redundancy.  

Dear genre filmmakers - If you want your surprise reveals to be surprising, don't make the opening credits the ultimate spoiler.

SPOILER warning - this post contains third-act spoilers for a handful of recent and not-so recent thrillers, including Safe House, which just opened on Friday.

I'm not going to go into too many details about Safe House, but I will say that it's such a painfully conventional thriller that it could have been written in a Mad Libs book.  If I crack that it would have possibly been a riveting thriller in 1988, that's not entirely an insult.  In 1988, the film would have seemed a little less boiler-plate and its now-standard political cynicism wouldn't have been quite as formulaic.  Moreover, the picture likely would not have been shot with a puke-filter over the camera and wouldn't have been edited within an inch of its life, rendering its shoot-outs and fight scenes incomprehensible.  It's not especially more violent or action-packed than something like Andrew Davis's The Package (another genre entry that also somewhat deals with getting a dangerous prisoner from point A to point B), but the moments of action and violence were cleanly shot and coherently edited.  But its most frustrating element is something that has been a problem for decades.  Like so many thrillers over the last 20-30 years, a large chunk of the tension in Safe House depends on trying to uncover which of the alleged good guys may actually be a bad guy.  And like so many genre entries of late, the would-be mystery is anything but mysterious due to some inexplicably obvious casting.

Weekend Box Office (02/12/12): Everybody wins as The Vow breaks records, Safe House opens huge, Journey 2 best Journey 1, and Phantom Menace 3D feels the Force.

Wow.  Just wow.  Four major releases debuted this weekend and every single one of them opened with superb numbers.  On one hand, that means that every respective demographic was ably served this weekend.  On the other hand, one can only wonder how much cash was sacrificed by opening these four movies on the same weekend.  Anyway, the top film of the weekend was the Rachel McAdams/Channing Tatum romantic drama The Vow.  The $30 million Screen Gems drama, which by the way is NOT based on a Nicholas Sparks novel (it's a true story), debuted with an eye-popping $41 million, a record for the studio.  That's well-over $10 million more than the $30.4 million debut of Dear John, which was the previous record-holder for an opening weekend for a pure romantic drama.  The film played 55% under-25 years old and 72% female.  Obviously everything clicked on the marketing for this one, and Channing Tatum is now the official king of the romantic drama, having headlined the first one to open with more than $30 million and now the first one to open with over $40 million, while Rachel McAdams is the queen, now holding the first and fourth-biggest opening weekend for an unfiltered romantic drama ($18 million for The Time Traveler's Wife).  Where it goes from here is an open question, as Dear John did not have the strongest legs, topping out at $80 million (or just below the $81 million gross of Rachel McAdam's The Notebook).  On the plus side, The Vow doesn't have the same-demo blockbuster Valentine's Day nipping on its heals like Dear John did.  Plus, even if The Vow has the same quick-kill performance (2.6x weekend-to-final multiplier), it will become the first pure romantic drama (no explosions, no action scenes, no mass-disaster in the third act) to cross $100 million since Jerry McGuire in 1996.

In defense of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace...

Like so many who read and write about movies, I saw Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace on Wednesday, May 19th, at 12:01am.  Like many who read and write about movies, I did not think it was the greatest film of all time.  But like the majority of the movie-going public, I also did not think it was the worst film of all time, nor did I find it to be some kind of glorious affront to cinema as an art form.  And 13 years later, it is what it always was: a Star Wars movie through-and-through.  It has problems unique to itself, unique to the prequel trilogy, and even some problems that have existed in the series right at the start.  Taking away the fact that one film was a cinematic breakthrough an launched the fandom of a hundred-million would-be movie lovers and the other was released under the crushing expectations of two generations of film fans, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace is really no better or worse than Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.  

The Amazing Spider-Man gets a stylish, but still familiar trailer.

Taken on its own merits, this is a pretty solid trailer.  The visual effects look decent, there seems to be plenty and varied web-slinging action, and Marc Webb's reboot does possess a different, more real-world look compared to Raimi's cotton-candy New York City.  But the idea that this film is 'darker' because it's visually darker and rains a bit more, for the moment, silly.  For all the bright colors and gee-whiz action, Sam Raimi's initial Spider-Man was an awfully morose and depressing affair, with pretty much every major character (Peter, Mary Jane, Harry, Norman, etc) in a state of mental duress for 90% of the picture.  How gloomy is the picture?  It ends at a funeral... for the villain!  And the idea that this film differs by creating a student/mentor relationship between Peter Parker and Dr. Conners completely ignores the father/son relationship between Peter and Norman Osbourne in Spider-Man and the student/mentor relationship (truncated as it was) between Peter and Dr. Octavius in Spider-Man 2.  

Politicizing apolitical Americana... Will the GOP/Right Wing surrender their biggest advantage by protesting the Clint Eastwood Chrysler Super Bowl commercial?

I've written from time-to-time about how Democrats and Liberals seem so willing to cede what should be basic apolitical American values to the Right/Republican wing of America.  Pundits, even liberal ones, brand movies as Conservative because they espouse family values, morality, private charity, personal responsibility, monogamy, the right of self-defense, entrepreneurship, patriotism, etc.  Never-mind that such American values are technically apolitical and are shared and practiced by people of all political stripes, the 'Right Wing sound machine' did a bang-up job in the 1980s and 1990s basically branding much of Americana as 'conservative', and we stupid liberals went on and allowed them to do it.  The Democratic wing has long struggled with rebutting an opposition that successfully branded itself as 'explicitly American' and has defined the debate by defining the vocabulary.  So to those criticizing last night's Chrysler commercial, which aired during the Super Bowl and was narrated by Clint Eastwood (longtime Libertarian/Republican) as some kind of pro-Obama propaganda, knock yourself out.