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20Apr

The Weekly Review: April 14 – 20

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Wanted?

“He was a complete jerk.”

“He frightened all of the children in the neighborhood.”

“When you saw him coming, you just wanted to deliver a good, swift kick to his ass.”

Those are comments you never hear about people like the Boston bombers (or serial killers). Instead, we usually hear about what nice, quiet, unassuming fellows they were.

That is why society ought to celebrate the jerks in our midst, like the sweet man pictured above. Jerks are generally harmless and always mean well. We– er, they never cause problems.

*****

Events this week did not bring out the best in Fox’s Bill O’Reilly. Within hours of the Boston bombing, O’Reilly was politicizing it, chastising President Obama for using the word “tragedy” to describe the attack.

O’Reilly loves to spring unusual words on his audience, but apparently he needs a definition of this simple, seven-letter word:

Even more distressing for O’Reilly, archenemy MSNBC showed up Fox (and CNN) by exhibiting restraint during Wednesday’s erroneous reports of the arrest of a suspect. O’Reilly refused to acknowledge this embarrassment and chose to credit CBS — but not MSNBC — with a journalistic win.

*****

The Game was on cable. It’s about the only movie I can watch, repeatedly, and laugh out loud with each viewing. Michael Douglas’s performance as a harried business honcho is a comic masterpiece.

*****

I was so bored that I actually watched golf on television. I’ve never understood why fans on the golf course are expected to watch the competition in absolute silence. Same thing with tennis. Player concentration, you say? OK, then why aren’t fans shushed when a basketball player is at the free-throw line, trying to concentrate on a game-deciding shot?

*****

Word that needs to be banished from the advertising lexicon because it no longer means anything: awesome.

*****

Quote of the Week:

“To be truly feminine means being soft, receptive, and — look out, here it comes — submissive.” — volleyball star Gabrielle Reece

No comment.

19Apr

Rectify

Posted in Books, Movies, TV & Web, TV | 1 Comment

Sundance Channel could use a better publicist. If you browse entertainment Web sites, you’ll find story after story about new series launches by Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu. There is much excitement over the brave new world of scripted programming by and for the Internet.

Meanwhile, with little fanfare and a “buzz” only your dog could detect, Sundance is also venturing into series television, and it’s offering some shows worth crowing about. On the heels of Top of the Lake, which concluded last week, Sundance on Monday premieres Rectify, a compelling, character-driven drama about an ex-con’s attempt to reassimilate into his Georgia hometown.

Aden Young stars as Daniel Holden, a man convicted of murder whose sentence is “vacated” after DNA evidence calls his original conviction into question. Holden has spent the better part of two decades on Death Row, and moving back into his mother’s house proves as difficult for him as it is for other residents of Paulie, Georgia — some of whom remain convinced of Holden’s guilt and won’t be satisfied until he’s returned to jail.

Rectify moves at a leisurely tempo, but it’s absorbing because what matters in this tale is character reaction: How will Daniel’s younger brother, a regular teen who is into girls and movies, interact with an older sibling who is familiar with prison rape but has never seen a DVD? Will the prosecutor-turned-politician who put Daniel behind bars let bygones be bygones? Why does Daniel’s own mother seem so guarded in his presence?

This kind of drama doesn’t work if the actors aren’t intriguing, but happily that’s not an issue with Rectify. Young and Abigail Spencer, as Daniel’s combative sister Amantha, are especially good at balancing the story’s heavier elements with some choice, fish-out-of-water comedy. And Rectify’s production design is more like what you find in theatrical films than on cable television. Grade: B+

Cast: Aden Young, Abigail Spencer, Michael O’Neill, Hal Holbrook, Clayne Crawford, Bruce McKinnon, J. Smith-Cameron, Adelaide Clemens, Luke Kirby Premieres: April 22, 2013

Watch Trailers and Clips (click here)

13Apr

The Weekly Review: April 7 – 13

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20-Second Gripes

1: If North Korea’s Kim Jong-un is as immature and hyper-sensitive as some experts seem to believe, maybe all of this satire by The Onion, Saturday Night Live, et al, isn’t such a great idea.

2: Jimmy Fallon “interviewed” Rolling Stone Keith Richards and allowed Richards to actually speak for about 45 seconds. Is it too late to rehire Leno?

3: When I get up in the morning (or sometime), the first thing I do (OK, second thing, after the cigarette) is turn on cable news. This, I’ve come to believe, is a mistake. Some people get up and listen to music. That has to be a healthier, happier way to greet the new day.

4: Nightly cable news personalities, compared to the blithering idiots on morning talk shows, are a wealth of Mensa candidates. Anderson Cooper, for example, apparently takes a stupid pill at some point between hosting his evening program on CNN and taping the syndicated crap he presides over during the day.

*****

Nice try, CNN. You watched The Five on Fox, envied its ratings, studied its setup, and then devised your own camera-under-the-table-aimed-at-sexy-women’s-legs. Sadly, The Point got the shaft.

*****

Quotes of the Week (courtesy of HLN and Jodi Arias)

Eiglarsh Walsh

“She killed someone. She murdered someone. So this, to me, is a pimple on the butt of what she’s dealing with.” — attorney Mark Eiglarsh, about Arias using Twitter

“There’s something else I want to point out about this and other phone-sex conversations that I’ve heard between them [Arias and Travis Alexander]. You know, I’m a grown-up woman. I’ve had some much better phone sex in my life.” — psychotherapist Wendy Walsh

*****

Thanks to the Jodi Arias trial, the blogosphere is discussing Cameron Diaz’s panties. That’s a good enough excuse to run this picture of Cameron Diaz in panties.

*****

The Huffington Post is still in search of a few good editors. Unless, of course, the Post has unearthed evidence that O’Reilly is is, indeed indeed, a victorious homosexual.

12Apr

Four Past Midnight

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by Stephen King

I’ve been a member of Stephen King’s “constant reader” club for years, but I fear that I might be coming down with a case of King fatigue. Maybe I could call it “Castle Rock Burnout.” One symptom occurs when King characters, past and present, begin to blur together and induce a feeling of déjà vu: In Four Past Midnight (published in 1990), we once again meet the small-town sheriff, the awkward teen, the shady businessman – even King’s demons, witches, and monsters begin to feel a bit stale.

06Apr

The Weekly Review: March 31 – April 6

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Ass You Like It

“Shake your wiener!” — Welcome to Myrtle Manor’s Chelsey, above

TV Report

Winning Me Back: Welcome to Myrtle Manor. OK, I’ll admit that a lot of this stuff is probably staged (how many trailer parks conduct beauty pageants?), but the knuckleheads at Myrtle Manor are an engaging bunch, gosh darn it.

Losing Me: The Walking Dead. Major, longtime characters keep getting killed off by the show’s writers, and I’m just fine with that, which is probably not what AMC’s producers have in mind.

Game of Thrones: Downton Abbey for the dungeons and dragons crowd. It’s soap opera, but so well-produced, well-acted, and visually arresting that it’s easy to get sucked in to its fantasy world.

Orphan Black: I don’t know if it’s a good sign or a bad sign when your opening episode goes out of its way to showcase the heroine’s derriere. OK, I’m lying; it’s definitely a good sign.

Basic-cable channels seem to occupy a nudity no-man’s land. Not bold enough to flash full-frontal and too timid to bare boobs, basic channels opt instead for shapely rear ends. So do we. Keep up the good work, basic cable.

Tatiana Maslany and her two co-stars on the premiere of BBC America’s Orphan Black.

Myrtle Manor’s Chelsey doing what people usually do at trailer parks: strutting her stuff in a beauty pageant.

Game of Thrones’s Emilia Clarke demonstrates why teenage boys want their parents to get HBO.

An extra on the set of AMC’s The Walking Dead.

*****

From New York magazine:

No, no, no. Bad idea. You’ll ruin the show for teenage boys and for … other people. You want male nudity, go watch Spartacus. Below, a gratuitous penis for Matt Zoller Seitz (and, of course, for Myrtle Manor “wiener girl” Chelsey).

Meanwhile, on Survivor, Brenda (below) strives for success.

*****

I haven’t been watching much Rachel Maddow lately. She spends too much time on issues of great importance to a relatively small number of people, including gay rights. But when Maddow turns to matters like government corruption or military misadventures, there’s no one better in cable news. On Tuesday, she and Eliot Spitzer skewered former SEC chief Mary Schapiro, and it was terrific journalism.

*****

Two weeks ago, I introduced a “please let them be struck by lightning” list by spotlighting a pompous, irritating spokeswoman for AARP. Money-grubbing, shameless Fred Thompson, shilling for AAG in the picture above, makes the list this week.

*****

The thumbs are all buried now, and that’s a bummer.

I thought Roger Ebert was a superb writer but a critic with … uh, peculiar taste. But if you love movies, Ebert was a big part of your past, and it’s sad to see him go.

02Apr

Reviews in Short: April 2013

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The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Despite an appealing cast, this high-school drama strikes an immediate pity-party tone and never strays from it. Charlie (Logan Lerman), abused as a child, is timid in school, misunderstood by girls, suicidal and, to an irritating degree, Oh. So. Sensitive. He is befriended by two seniors — a girl “with a past” (Emma Watson) and a gay boy (Ezra Miller) who dates the school’s quarterback — and they all become best buds. In this movie, most (not all) of the heterosexuals are brutish, insensitive clods, and our heroes are all tragic victims. If you love snow angels, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, then this is a movie for you. But gag me with a spoon. Release: 2012 Grade: C-

*****

The Grey

A plane goes down in the Alaska wild, where Liam Neeson and a small group of oil workers face hostile elements and inhospitable wolves. The Grey wants to be both thrilling adventure and a profound meditation on the meaning of life — and falls short. The wolf attacks are fairly entertaining, but the “deep meaning” scenes sputter because Grey’s characters are thinly drawn, with a vocabulary that seems limited to the word “fuck.” Release: 2012 Grade: B-

*****

Hitchcock

It plays fast and loose with the facts, but Hitchcock is a surprisingly sweet biopic. If you can overlook the screenplay’s fabrications about the famous filmmaker’s alleged monetary problems and supposedly shaky marriage, and focus instead on the interplay between stars Anthony Hopkins (Hitchcock) and Helen Mirren (wife Alma), the reward is a droll depiction of an enduring creative partnership and, as a bonus for film buffs, an amusing look at the making of Psycho. Release: 2012 Grade: B+

*****

Suspiria

Jessica Harper plays a young American who enrolls at a German dance academy that turns out to be something else, entirely. Horror director Dario Argento’s primary-colored movie is an expressionistic treat, with a score by the Italian band Goblin that could make your skin crawl (in a good way). Unfortunately, the stilted dialogue, dated special effects, and wooden acting could have the same effect (in a bad way). All in all, though, this is one eerie, sensory experience. Release: 1977 Grade: B

*****

Ted

Mark Wahlberg stars as a 35-year-old slacker who must choose between his walking, talking teddy bear and Mila Kunis. If you would choose the teddy bear, then this is a movie for you. There are a few amusing pop-culture references and the animation is good, but writer-director Seth MacFarlane’s big-screen debut is mean-spirited, childish and, well, pretty much unbearable. Release: 2012 Grade: D

*****

The Impossible

The special effects are impressive — most of them were created the old-fashioned way, using miniatures and water tanks — and there are some fine performances, but this fact-based drama about one family’s struggle to survive a tsunami that pummeled Thailand in 2004 is often a drag. Knowing the fate of the family deprives the story of suspense, and we are instead left with more than an hour of unrelenting misery. It’s realistic, sure, but aren’t disaster movies also supposed to entertain? Release: 2012 Grade: B

30Mar

The Weekly Review: March 24 – 30

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These endless smoking bans and tax hikes are making me bitter. A Norwegian professor named Bharat P. Bhatta says that fat people should pay more for airline tickets because they create more jet-fuel consumption. Ten years ago, I would have said that was mean-spirited. Not anymore.

*****

Evidently, there are only two issues that warrant media attention these days: gun control and gay marriage. I don’t own a gun and I’m not gay, so I do not, as they say, have a dog in these hunts — at least, not directly. But all of this babble about “fairness” and “equality” is a joke to single Americans — gay and straight. Here’s why.

(The article addresses single women, but most of the points apply to single men, as well.)

*****

It’s not often that I agree with the talking heads on Fox News and on MSNBC. Dr. Keith Ablow (above), a talking bald head, was singing my tune when he said government should get out of the marriage business: “That means: No preferential treatment at tax time, no preferential treatment for married folks by insurance companies. Everyone should be treated as an individual.” Meanwhile, over at MSNBC, Bob Franken was proposing pretty much the same thing: time to dump unfair benefits for married people.

*****

Tilda Swinton sleeping in a glass box at a museum. Performance art, or mental illness?

*****

Bill Carter of the New York Times has praise for Barbara Walters, who is said to be retiring next year: “She was doing interviews with every big figure in the news at that point in her time. She was part of that whole shuttle diplomacy era, flying back and forth in the Mideast between Begin and Sadat and all the other big figures, like Castro and Gaddafi and all these very famous figures in history.”

Depressing, because now we have Dennis Rodman doing that job.

*****

Here are pictures of Jeffrey Toobin getting clobbered outside of the Supreme Court. I don’t know about you, but I enjoy seeing Jeffrey Toobin getting clobbered.

30Mar

Room 237

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I love Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining — even though the man who wrote the original story, Stephen King, does not. I have never understood King’s disdain for the 1980 film adaptation of his novel. King’s stories, after all, have been bastardized on screen many times (sometimes by King himself), from Sleepwalkers to Thinner to Maximum Overdrive. And yet, this is the movie that rankles him?

But much as I like Kubrick’s movie, my admiration is nothing compared to that of some fans, five of whom describe their Shining obsession in Room 237, a documentary about hidden messages in the film. Or so these people believe.

According to these conspiracy theorists, who have laboriously studied the movie (often frame-by-frame), Kubrick, a meticulous filmmaker, planted subliminal messages throughout his movie. The Shining, they say, is an allegory about the Holocaust (look how often the number 42 appears!). Or, The Shining is a commentary on the “white man’s burden” — a burden our ancestors relieved by committing genocide against the American Indian (see those cans of Calumet in the background of the pantry?). But wait: Kubrick is the man who helped the United States government falsify footage of the 1969 moon landing, and the evidence of that hoax is scattered, confession style, throughout The Shining.

A problem with Room 237 is that there are so many conspiracy theories proposed that they tend to cancel each other out. Assuming Kubrick did insert subliminal comments about the Holocaust, did he also plant messages about manifest destiny, and about Apollo 11? Not likely.

Personally, I was intrigued by the patterns in the carpeting of Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel and their alleged symbolism. Then again, if you are going to spot Minotaurs in pictures of snow skiers on the wall, you might as well analyze every other picture on the walls of the hotel — or every cloud in the sky, for that matter. Wait, someone does analyze the clouds … and spots Kubrick’s “face.”

When I was in college, I took a film class where we studied Hitchcock’s Psycho. I noticed something in a scene in which Norman Bates disposes of evidence by pushing a car into a swamp. As the vehicle sinks, Hitchcock shows a close-up of the license plate, and we can clearly see the letters “NFB.” In my class paper, I speculated that the letters might be a wink from the director to his audience: NFB = Never Find Body. My professor loved this theory and gave my essay an A.

But who knows? Maybe the letters NFB were completely arbitrary. Maybe The Shining is simply a great horror film littered with continuity errors and an art director’s whimsy. Sometimes a monkey tossing a bone into the air is just a monkey tossing a bone into the air. Grade: B

Director: Rodney Ascher Featuring: Bill Blakemore, Geoffrey Cocks, Juli Kearns, John Fell Ryan, Jay Weidner, Buffy Visick Release: 2013

Can you see the electrical cord for the TV? Of course not, because there isn’t one.

Watch Trailers (click here)

27Mar

Come Out and Play

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Going in to an “evil kid” movie, you know it’s just a matter of time before all hell breaks loose. In Come Out and Play, a low-budget remake of a 1976 Spanish cult film, the evil kids eventually do come out and play — but the wait is a bit of a drag.

Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Vinessa Shaw play young Americans who are also in a holding pattern. Beth, seven months pregnant, and husband Francis decide to enjoy some pre-baby free time by vacationing at a picturesque Mexican island. When they arrive at Punta Hueca, there are children playing and fishing off the dock. Upon further exploration of the village, Beth and Francis make an unsettling discovery: There are, seemingly, only children on the island. Where are all of the adults?

(The director of this film is a strange character called “Makinov” who seems to have one or two bones to pick with the world. In a YouTube video, Makinov shields his face beneath a hood, a la pick-your-favorite-serial-killer, and rants against modern society. During the end credits of Play, Makinov dedicates his movie to “the martyrs of Stalingrad.”)

Think what you will of Makinov the politician, the man knows how to stage a creepy scene. When children perch atop a fence lining a village street, silently watching as Beth and Francis pass by, they resemble nothing so much as the ominous crows in The Birds, at rest on a schoolyard jungle gym between attacks. Makinov, like Hitchcock, takes something that’s everyday normal — children, birds — and turns it into an object of fear. When you do something like that, you run the risk of generating unintentional laughter; to his credit, Makinov generates suspense.

But this movie is not The Birds. Despite an eerily effective soundtrack, arresting visuals, and a pair of surprising plot turns, Come Out and Play simply takes too long to get to the fun stuff. Grade: B-

Director: Makinov Cast: Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Vinessa Shaw, Daniel Gimenez Cacho Release: 2013

Watch the Trailer (click here)

27Mar

Top of the Lake

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I’m not sure why everything isn’t filmed in New Zealand. Sure, Southern California has nice beaches and nearby mountains and a big city, but … New Zealand — have you looked at pictures of New Zealand?

Sundance Channel is airing a seven-part miniseries from director Jane Campion called Top of the Lake, a crime drama filmed in New Zealand. Elisabeth Moss plays a young police detective who, while home visiting her cancer-stricken mother, gets drawn into the case of a missing 12-year-old girl who also happens to be five-months pregnant.

The plot is a bit familiar (at least through the first three episodes): Robin Griffin (Moss) is basically Clarice Starling, a conscientious cop trying to conduct serious business while battling male-chauvinist colleagues and her own personal demons. When you’re telling an oft-told tale like this one, it helps if your supporting characters add luster. And boy, do the supporting characters add luster to Top of the Lake.

Peter Mullan is rough, gruff, tough and — surprisingly — quite funny as the apparent villain, a drug lord named Matt Mitcham, father of the missing girl and several adult sons with biblical names, if not leanings. Holly Hunter is also in the cast as the spiritual guru of a tribe of middle-aged women living in “Paradise,” a makeshift commune that is, unluckily, located on land that Mitcham considers family territory.

(I’d like to add that David Wenham, as Griffin’s sort-of boss and potential romantic interest, also lends wonderful support to the drama. I’d like to say that, but I have to be honest: With his mumbling delivery and heavy New Zealand accent, I couldn’t understand a word that Wenham said.)

Campion, sharing directing duties with Garth Davis, lets the actors and story proceed at a leisurely pace, but don’t equate “leisurely” with tedious; this mystery takes unexpected turns and has a chilly, pervasive sense of doom. But the real star of the production is New Zealand — the spectacular mountains, hills, and lakes. These stunning vistas put Hollywood, California, to shame. Grade: A-

Directors: Jane Campion, Garth Davis Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Peter Mullan, Thomas M. Wright, Holly Hunter, David Wenham, Jacqueline Joe, Gavin Rutherford, Jay Ryan, Genevieve Lemon, Robyn Malcolm Release: 2013

Watch the Trailer and Clips (click here)