Movie Muse

A great piece of music — and this is especially true of works for piano — conveys a mood or sometimes many moods; it is incredibly affective. While listening you might feel comfortable and at ease at one point and then suddenly chaotic and unsettled at another. This is certainly true of Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3 in D minor, the challenging piece that “Shine” main character David Helfgott aspires to master. The piece plays a pivotal role in Helfgott’s story and as such, this film based on him brilliantly reflects its beauty and turbulence. Read the rest of this entry »

I would say about 10 percent of my box office projections are based on what I overhear/word-of-mouth, but when people I never expected started talking about how they saw or were going to see The Blind Side and that it was really good, I up that number. That being the case this Thanksgiving, New Moon was almost completely blind-sided this weekend.

Most projection artists such as myself are breathing a sigh of relief at the moment. I nailed my estimate that New Moon would fall to $40 million, but to expect “Blind Side” to climb upward after last week and nearly overtake it was not in my plans. I called for $18 million, a modest drop-off considering its strong opening weekend. What I didn’t account for was that if positive word of mouth builds at the holidays where nothing new is an obvious choice, then word will become a more powerful factor at the box office. “Blind Side” has more than $100 million total now in just two weeks. By comparison, 4-week old A Christmas Carol just eclipsed the $100 M mark. Read the rest of this entry »

Somewhere between “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” and “Observe and Report,” there has to be at least a decent movie about a mall security guard. Or maybe Hollywood should just forget about this cliché-ripe “genre” altogether.

“Observe and Report” is the latest film to shove a tubby comedian (Seth Rogen) into a mock police officer’s uniform and endow him with an exaggerated sense of justice and self- importance. Ronnie Barnhardt is a gun-loving ignoramus who turns everything into a joke and believe it or not is surrounded by even less competent and pathetic co-workers. Their livelihood is threatened when a flasher begins visually assaulting people in the parking lot, namely Ronnie’s crush, Brandi (Anna Faris) the shallow cosmetics girl, and the police (fronted by Ray Liotta) are brought in to handle the mess. Read the rest of this entry »

For those wondering what happened to the old Woody Allen, here he is. “Whatever Works” is a script from the 1970s. I noticed that without even knowing Allen has been forthright about it. A few script rewrites — talk about the Taliban and not the Communists — and old Woody works in a modern context. Then again, “Whatever Works” is not a film that anyone will herald the second coming of great Woody Allen comedy, but it is one that will win over a handful of audience members. Read the rest of this entry »

The challenges awaiting Joe Penhall and John Hillcoat in adapting and directing (respectively) Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” had to be numerous. This post-apocalyptic father-and-son story about whether struggling to survive as long as possible is worth the pain is a bleak tale and one that grinds along much of the time. It doesn’t have more than a handful of eventful or visually stimulating scenes. They manage, however, to not only be faithful to McCarthy’s elegy, but also add great details to make it into a solid film. Read the rest of this entry »

Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s book “Slaughterhouse-Five” is a classic and the film version gets by on this fact alone. The rather faithful adaptation is enough to satisfy fans of the novel, but not even the great George Roy Hill can manage to turn Stephen Geller’s uninspired script into a more meaningful movie experience. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a lot of fond memories of seeing movies on Thanksgiving Break as a child. After nearly three months of school, to go to the movie theater and enjoy something during a weeknight knowing you don’t have to go to school the next day is pure bliss.

The movies I remember seeing the most? Toy Story and Toy Story 2. Talk about going to see a great movie with that precious time off of school. This was back before Disney/Pixar’s regular slot was early June, when they owned Thanksgiving week. Now, they still have a piece of it, but Old Dogs is far from Toy Story. Read the rest of this entry »

Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead” is a brilliant existential twist on a classic story (Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”) and classic storytelling. It’s sharp, witty, well-acted and thought-provoking in any number of ways, being both memorably absurd and surprisingly truthful. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a link to my Funny People review, another DVD released today

If we learned anything from the film adaptation of “The Da Vinci Code,” it’s that Dan Brown’s best-selling religion-centered mystery novels don’t translate into great films. Entertaining, sure, but great, no. The dialogue gets bogged down with historical explanation and the characters get little attention because there’s simply no time with all the symbol decoding. But box office receipts are another story: “Da Vinci” fell just sort of earning twice its budget, so great film or not, there would be “Angels & Demons.” Not surprisingly, this film suffers from the same deficiencies despite being a bit better. Read the rest of this entry »

Whoa. I knew you people liked vampires, but you really like vampires. If you haven’t heard by now, The Twilight Saga: New Moon now ranks third in all-time opening weekends with a whopping $140 million take. It also ranks No. 1 in single day ticket sales with the $72.7 million it made on Friday alone.

It’s a new milestone for bad movies trying to kill at the box office. “New Moon” is now the most successful movie based on a book ever. Depending on how the total gross shakes out, “New Moon” could eclipse (unfortunate pun) every Harry Potter film, all of which were better than this movie, probably. Thanks to your unfailing support of this book series and craving to see those stories come to life on the big screen no matter the cost or quality, producers everywhere are going to try and give us more stuff like the “Twilight” series. Read the rest of this entry »

“Amores Perros” is a three-vignette film that’s not so much concerned about creating a harmonic epiphany among its three plot lines, but rather it aims for compelling stories with a brutally honest portrayal of life, love, sin and redemption. Getting a unified message out of the film is about as difficult as translating its title.

Literally translated the title doesn’t make much sense, but “amores” translates to loved ones or while “perros” literally means dogs but is also an obvious pejorative for lowly people such as criminals. The title can also be broken into “Amor es Perros” which means “Love’s a Bitch.” All of these are fitting for the film and their multitude is appropriate considering the open- ended nature of the truths the film preaches. Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Kenner’s documentary “Food, Inc.” sounds like something you’ve heard of before. When Eric Schlosser’s book “Fast Food Nation” first woke America up to the horrific way that fast food meat is processed and Morgan Spurlock’s documentary “Super Size Me” exposed the deadly health concerns of too much fast food, most Americans began to associate fast food with unhealthy food. The organic food movement began to take off and most well- educated Americans began to take what’s in their food more seriously. But it hasn’t been enough — “Food, Inc.” breaks down why in this highly educational investigative film. Read the rest of this entry »

This is one of those weekends where you avoid movie times after 5 and before 9 pm. Unless you are an adolescent girl or you like being around crowds of them (if the latter applies to you, I hope to God you’re an adolescent boy), pick your showtimes wisely.

The first blockbuster of the season, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, hit theaters at midnight. The film adaptation of the second book in Stephenie Meyer’s series of vampire romance novels had record-breaking pre-sales and is surely poised to outdo its predecessor, a film that made about $70 million in its opening weekend.

So I reiterate: vampire romance. That’s all you need to hear to know what the crowds will be like in theaters all over the country. Read the rest of this entry »

I come from the group that has never read the Stephenie Meyer books and knew little about them other than the general idea of love and vampires and such. I had put off watching “Twilight” based on reviews, what I heard and my gender, but finally — nearly a year later — gave in to my curiosity over what the craze is all about.

Now, I understand it. I don’t like it, but I understand it. “Twilight” and the book it’s based on is romance — melodramatic dialogue-filled romance about dangerous/forbidden love, something that’s been a major literary force for centuries. Combine that with human infatuation with vampires and there’s perfect reason for “Twilight” to be a success. Read the rest of this entry »

A little more than a month ago I posted a musing on how zombies have managed to become their own genre in film. Now it’s time to focus on the monster genre that has reigned supreme for centuries: vampires.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon comes out tomorrow or in most people’s case, at midnight tonight. But Stephenie Meyer’s books and their cinematic counterparts are merely the crowning achievement of the vampire in today’s day and age.

The fact that vampires have been around since before recorded history is impressive. In fact, it’s probably proof that vampires really exist, but that’s a topic for another day. Vampire lore and mythos, however, have undeniably remained immortal in that time, reaching a new zenith in our time with Twilight and HBO drama True Blood.

The appeal of the vampire to the human race and our culture is perhaps stronger than any other single thing of myth-based origin. Nothing has withstood the test of time in like the vampire – its appeal both cross-cultural and cross-generational.

There is a reason for this. In fact, I’ve come up with ten good reasons why we love vampires (and why we’ve loved them for so long.) No particular order, but they do tend to be more important later down the list Read the rest of this entry »