March 2010 Archives

Green Zone: Page One in the Matt Damon Pamphlet of Character Types

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.

New Iron Man 2 Trailer: Double Your Recommended Dosage of Iron

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.

Alice's Spectacular Debut Headlines a Box-Office Wonderland

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.

Academy Awards 2010: The Winners

by Angel Cohn March 7, 2010 8:40 PM
Academy Awards 2010: The Winners Who earned golden trophies? Did you win your Oscar pool? Find out below.
Alice in Wonderland: As Good and Weird as the Disney Original

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.

Brooklyn's Finest: An Exhaustive Encyclopedia of Clichés 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.

If Abraham Lincoln Can Fight Vampires, then Teddy Roosevelt Better Fight Aliens

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.

I Want My DVD: Tuesday, March 2, 2010

by Zach Oat March 2, 2010 6:00 AM
I Want My DVD: Tuesday, March 2, 2010

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.)

Something to Declare: Jay Baruchel Talks Crotch Shots, Nic Cage and She's Out of My League

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.

Shutter Island Scores Another Shutout; Cop Out Tops Out at #2

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?

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