BLOGS
March 2010 Archives
Matt Damon is back, and he's mad! In Green Zone, he plays a warrant officer tasked with finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which mostly means he runs around pointing guns at people, scowling, getting captured, escaping, and openly threatening senior intelligence officials. So naturally, he -- wait a minute. We've seen this guy before. This is one of the stock characters from the Matt Damon playbook! Granted, it's not a very large playbook, but every character Matt Damon has ever played can be divided into one of five types. Here's a guide to the five, so you can recognize them in their natural habitats.
If you were still awake after the Oscars ended last night, you may have caught Robert Downey Jr. on Jimmy Kimmel Live, where he debuted a brand-new Iron Man 2 trailer. Whether you're a comic book fan or a Robert Downey Jr. fan, this trailer is must-see material, since it showcases a lot more fun lines from the movie, as well as some major plot points and details. Here are our six favorites.
Take a classic, family-friendly film property and add a fan-favorite director, an iconic movie star and 3-D glasses, and you've apparently got a smash hit on your hands. Alice in Wonderland, the latest funhouse-mirror remake by director Tim Burton, opened to $116 million at the box office, the sixth biggest opening of all time, helping make it the biggest March opening ever in the U.S. That beats Burton's previous biggest opening, for Planet of the Apes ($68.5 million), and considering how much better this movie is than Apes, we hope it will outgross it in the long run, as well. Another $94 million from overseas placed it at number 14 on the list of biggest worldwide openings, so things are looking good there, too.
Who earned golden trophies? Did you win your Oscar pool? Find out below.
Okay, okay, we get the joke -- Tim Burton's remakes are overwrought, CGI-heavy and even more grim than the source material. But here's the thing: in his new film Alice in Wonderland, it actually works. The absurdities of Wonderland have been made less whimsical and more elaborately frightening and purposeful. CGI animals and disproportionate humans are appropriately nightmarish, and no creepier than Sammy Davis Jr. dressed as a caterpillar. And while accuracy to the source material is already of questionable importance when dealing with a psychedelic head-trip like Alice, Burton has seamlessly interwoven the events of both Alice books and created what is essentially a sequel, in the vein of Hook or Return to Oz.
I'm always fascinated by directors like Antoine Fuqua, who manage to direct something truly great early on in their career (in his case, Training Day), and then quickly devolve into making worse and worse parodies of that one critically acclaimed film until something as bad as Brooklyn's Finest happens. The good news is this is rock bottom; his next project might be great. Nowhere to go but up from here.
Cementing his love of the offbeat, Tim Burton -- along with his 9 partner Timur Bekmambetov -- has announced that he will produce a film adaptation of the just-released book Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. The screenplay will be written by the book's author, Seth Grahame-Smith, who also wrote Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is also being made into a movie (albeit one directed by Natalie Portman). While former presidents have been used as great comedic devices in past films, (Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Dick), rarely do their biopics stray too far from the recorded histories. We'd love to see more movies like this, ones that take our favorite historical figures and have them do more exciting stuff than attend state dinners. Here are a few suggestions for former presidents.
While they may not be nominated for any Academy Awards (rightfully or not), this week's movie releases are all certainly a lot of fun, and visually spectacular in a variety of ways. Watch them with the sound off, and they'll still be pretty damn entertaining. In a couple of cases they might even improve! (2012, I'm looking in your direction.)
The latest slightly-misogynistic-but-not-enough-to-be-unfunny buddy comedy, She's Out of My League, is miraculously not directed by Judd Apatow, but does star one of his discoveries, Jay Baruchel (Undeclared, Knocked Up, etc.). He plays Kirk Kettner, a frumpy-yet-happy airport security agent who catches the eye of a flawless girl and spends the duration of the film struggling to understand why such a perfect creature would be interested in him. In League's most memorable scene, Kirk's friends convince him to "manscape" his crotch, and (spoiler alert!) while we don't get any full frontal action (a la Jason Segel in Forgetting Sarah Mashall), we do see a shot of Kirk's entire backside. There's also a pretty gnarly scene in which, through a sequence of only-in-a-rom-com events, an enormous dog licks Kirk's (clothed) crotch to no avail. At a press junket this weekend, we spoke with Baruchel about acting in these humiliating scenes, as well as his experience co-starring in the upcoming Nicolas Cage film, The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
For the second weekend in a row, Martin Scorsese's psychological horror-mystery Shutter Island is at the top of the box-office chart. It seems positive word of mouth has kept it alive, although a 45% drop-off to $22 million has placed it just above Kevin Smith's latest, the buddy comedy Cop Out. While $18.5 mill is nothing to sneeze at for a Kevin Smith opening (it's almost double what Zack & Miri and Clerks II opened at), you'd think an action comedy with cop-movie legend Bruce Willis and hot comedy star Tracy Morgan would be #1 at the box office, right?
Blog Categories
A Festival for the Rest...ival
20 Entries
Accidents Do Happen
46 Entries
Adventures in Fakery
77 Entries
Alien Nations
3 Entries
Animation Desensitization
79 Entries
Awards Schmawards
17 Entries
Box Office Tally
79 Entries
Burning Questions
4 Entries
Coming Soonish
9 Entries
Cool Nerds Guide
6 Entries
Cop Rick
4 Entries
Crazy In Love
2 Entries
Director? I Hardly Knew Her!
154 Entries
Disease of the Week
1 Entries
Doc Watch
1 Entries
DVDs Unwrapped
24 Entries
Footage Lost (And Found)
2 Entries
For Your Amusement (Park)
10 Entries
Foreign Relations
49 Entries
Future Tense
1 Entries
Galleries (and Other Picture Postcards)
23 Entries
Gangster's Paradise
4 Entries
Getting Dramatic
3 Entries
Girls on Film
75 Entries
Happy Anniversary
9 Entries
Hi, High School
1 Entries
Hollywood To TWoP: Hello There!
36 Entries
I Voted for GORE!
101 Entries
I Want My DVD
221 Entries
I Want My VOD
20 Entries
I've Got Two Tickets to Merchandise
33 Entries
IMDb Fun Times
6 Entries
Indie Snapshot
41 Entries
Indie, Indie, Come Back Home
38 Entries
It Came From New York
6 Entries
It Came From San Diego
14 Entries
It's a Major Award!
75 Entries
Legal Eaglese
21 Entries
Let's Blame the Media!
49 Entries
Let's Go To The Video!
29 Entries
Letterbox of Recommendations
22 Entries
Lights, Camera... Action Jackson!
177 Entries
Little TV Shows That Done Hit the Big Time
71 Entries
Martial Artistry
11 Entries
Momentous Occasions
25 Entries
More On Movies
37 Entries
Movie Merchandise
4 Entries
Musicalifornication
47 Entries
Name That Tune
2 Entries
Obituaries Without Pity
23 Entries
On the Frontlines
1 Entries
Oscars and Grouchery
11 Entries
Politicking
3 Entries
Pros and Controversy
26 Entries
Read All About It
4 Entries
Real People, Fake Movies
21 Entries
Remakes R Us
7 Entries
Reviews of Movies We Haven't Seen Yet
42 Entries
Reviews of Movies We've Actually Seen
485 Entries
Scary Monsters & Super Creeps
103 Entries
Sci-Fidelity
147 Entries
Script From the Headlines!
56 Entries
Separate but Sequel
246 Entries
Sequelitis
19 Entries
Shameless Self-Promotion
27 Entries
Sing Out, Louise
3 Entries
Sports in Our Shorts
6 Entries
Strike Watch
14 Entries
Stupid Cinematic Celebrity Sayings
34 Entries
Sundance Sundance Revolution
13 Entries
Swords and Sorcerers
2 Entries
Taste the Reading Rainbow
93 Entries
Tears in Heaven
1 Entries
The Art of the Cannes
6 Entries
The Biz
122 Entries
The Casting Conch
192 Entries
The History, Booooyyyyy!
79 Entries
The Kongs of Comedy
199 Entries
Theatre With an "R" and an "E"
11 Entries
Things to Know
1 Entries
Things We Learned
1 Entries
Time Tripping
1 Entries
Top of the
1 Entries
Top of the MWoP
5 Entries
Trailer Trashing
72 Entries
Trailers Without Pity
37 Entries
Video Games Killed the Movie Star
23 Entries
Watching Movies With Kids
4 Entries
We Call Do-Over
177 Entries
We Watches the Watchmen
33 Entries
What's Up, Documentary?
17 Entries
When Animal Movies Attack
13 Entries
YA Wasteland
3 Entries
You Got Comic Book in My Movie
249 Entries
You Know, For Kids!
132 Entries