Last Labor Day weekend, the incoherent children's movie The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure had the worst-ever debut opening for a movie in over 2,000 theaters. As educational and ugly as a Barney costume filled with sawdust, the movie cost $20 million and was directed by Matthew Diamond, the marketing mastermind behind Thomas the Train. With Oogieloves, his luck ran out.
Neil Drumming is a veteran journalist who's written and edited for the Washington City Paper, Entertainment Weekly, and elsewhere. Last year, he decided to turn his screenplay into a movie, and—unlike many other would-be filmmakers—actually made it happen. His film Big Words is making its NYC premiere at BAM next Friday.
Today, in movie news, we learn that Johnny Depp will be playing the role of notorious Boston gangster Whitey Bulger in an upcoming film based on Bulger's life. This should not be confused with the other Whitey Bulger Boston gangster movie that Ben Affleck will be making after he makes a movie based on a Dennis Lehane novel that is also about Boston gangsters.
I have seen Woodstock and I have seen The Last Waltz. I have seen Don't Look Back, Eat the Document, and No Direction Home. I have seen the Maysles Brothers' documentary about the Rolling Stones, as well as Jean-Luc Godard's semi-documentary about the Rolling Stones and Robert Frank's notoriously unreleased documentary about the Rolling Stones, which legend has it you're only legally allowed to watch in the presence of both Jagger and Richards. (It was only okay.) I have seen The Great Rock and Roll Swindle as well as The Filth and the Fury, Julien Temple's two different documentaries about the Sex Pistols. I have seen that double-DVD Tom Petty documentary. I have seen the special features. I have seen the movie where Chris Holmes from W.A.S.P. slowly drinks himself nearly to death in a darkened swimming pool enclosure and Ozzy pours the orange juice all over the counter. I have seen David Bowie's cocaine skeleton doing Burroughsian cut-ups on the floor of a luxury hotel in the difficult-to-find TV special Cracked Actor. To varying degrees, I enjoyed all these films, but if you asked me to tell you my very-favorite-ever cinematic document of a rock and roll band, I would have to break down and admit that it's a 10-dollar import DVD of Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show doing a live-for-German-TV performance sometime in 1974.
This week sees the release of three new horror movies: Warm Bodies, Girls Against Boys (both in theaters) and The ABCs of Death (on demand). But it is not enough anymore merely to be a horror movie — now horror movies, in conversation with what came before them in their respective subgenres, must add something new to the conversation, or at least purport to for the sake of "angle." All three of these attempt to do so, with various yet decided degrees of success. Let's explore.
If the upcoming Lindsay Lohan/James Deen vehicle The Canyons is half as entertaining as Stephen Rodrick's New York Times Magazine piece about it, it's going to be fantastic. The 8,000-word article reads like an exhaustive documentary on the Paul Schrader-directed, Bret Easton Ellis-written film (that has since been rejected by Sundance). It is what those on Twitter would refer to as a "great read."
The Washington Post bills Ann Hornaday's essay on movies today ("I don't know where this national discussion will wind up," is her unproductive conclusion) on the front page of its website like so: "Have audiences had enough of guns, violence and blood at the movies? After the Newtown tragedy, will screen violence still be considered entertainment?"
Beware some SPOILERS in this piece.
The new movie version of Les Misérables is a nonsensical, emotional vampire of a movie. It sucks and sucks and never stops sucking. I knew I was supposed to feel something in this ever-welling sea of emotion, but I didn't know exactly what and I most certainly did not feel a thing. Well, that's not entirely true — I did feel isolated, like I was from a different planet than the people who were moved to repeatedly applaud for actors that couldn't hear them (at a screening full of critics, no less!), and audibly weep at turns so evidently constructed to make them do so that a giant lit up "CRY NOW" sign in the theater would have been redundant.
Judd Apatow's miserable new comedy, This Is 40, is a cautionary tale that warns against two things: getting older and being married. I don't know what messages you are to extract from this thing if not: kill yourself and get divorced now.
A junky argues with her landlord while the Red Hot Chili Peppers' heroin ballad "Under the Bridge" plays in the background. Then, when she shoots up, we hear a cover of the Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane." An alcoholic druggie purges his stash and looks longingly at wedding pictures for a marriage that eventually failed to the strains of Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine." A drug dealer is brought in to deliver some hangover-busting cocaine and the refreshed drunk rides the elevator down from his hotel room to a muzak version of "With a Little Help from My Friends."
"We always had to make a conscious decision to make the same movie over again, only each one would be slightly different," says Steve Miner, the director of the second and third Friday the 13th installments (and associate producer of the first), in the franchise's oral history, Crystal Lake Memories. Indeed, by 1982's Friday the 13th Part III, the series was already repeating itself: once again, we watched a formerly bullied giant mama's boy stalking dumb kids in a rural setting, killing some in ways he had killed their predecessors (through-the-bed stabbing from below got a reprise). The climax virtually repeated that of the first film's except it was Jason who was doing the slaying and his now-decomposing mother who did the final-scare popping out of the water. They just traded roles, of course — shifting bodies around was business as usual.
The walls rot like flesh. A man in an engraved triangular iron helmet is the protagonist's guardian-slash-executioner. He manually operates a carousel where people suspended by chains through their pierced bodies are the horses. A princess party in a mall led by a creepy clown disintegrates to snarling children with faces painted like cats feasting on raw, probably human meat. A spider configuration of heads and arms that look like they came out of the manufacturing plant in Björk's "All is Full of Love" video swiftly attacks.
