300 - Trailer 2
Yummy. 300 just keeps looking better and better.
Ice Age: The Meltdown tops $100 million
‘Ice Age’ Continues Box-Office Warming Trend
The 20th Century Fox family tale “Ice Age: The Meltdown” took in $34.5 million to remain the No. 1 movie for a second straight weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday….
“Ice Age: The Meltdown,” with Ray Romano, Denis Leary, John Leguizamo and Queen Latifah providing the voices of prehistoric creatures on the run from global warming, raised its 10-day domestic total to $116.4 million.
It became the first movie released this year to cross the $100 million mark. While the first few months of the year are Hollywood’s slowest, the industry usually has produced a $100 million hit by February or March.
We saw Ice Age over the weekend. If you saw the first one, you’ll know what you’re getting with the sequel. A few clever gags, nice-looking computer animation, Denis Leary and John Leguizamo playing themselves (sarcastic wit and endearlingly annoying, respectively), some butt jokes, and a happy ending. The 20th Century Fox efforts have a way to go before they catch Dreamworks and Pixar, but they exceed Disney’s in-house efforts. Ice Age 2’s biggest downfall is the lack of a villain. Melting ice and a pair of sea creatures that prowl in silence just don’t cut it. A fun hour and a half with the kids, however.
Hollywood thinks it’s turned some sort of corner with Ice Age:
Still, Hollywood had another big showing overall, with revenues soaring for a second straight weekend. The top-12 movies took in $105.1 million, up 33 percent from the same weekend in 2005.
Box-office receipts may be up, but what they’re up with should give Hollywood pause. Putting aside the latest computer-animated box office savior, this weekend included two films not screened for critics to avoid bad word-of-mouth, the Rob Schneider-David Spade baseball comedy The Benchwarmers and the Mo’Nique vehicle Phat Girlz. Fox Searchlight, which released Phat Girlz, admits it didn’t release the film to critics fearing bad reviews:
“The core audience of Mo’Nique fans is not really going to be affected by critics, and since there was a good chance we were not going to get favorable reviews, we didn’t feel it was necessary to do that,” Fox Searchlight head of distribution Steve Gilula said.
Hollywood blames bad viewers, not bad scripts, for flops
The blogosphere is abuzz today about complaints from Hollywood that “puritanical” America has led to the demise of the erotic thriller
Paul Verhoeven, director of the first “Basic Instinct” (which scored $353 million worldwide) as well as the widely ridiculed “Showgirls” (now regarded as something of a camp classic), attributes the genre’s demise to the current American political climate.”Anything that is erotic has been banned in the United States,” said the Dutch native. “Look at the people at the top (of the government). We are living under a government that is constantly hammering out Christian values. And Christianity and sex have never been good friends.”
Scribe Nicholas Meyer, who was an uncredited writer on 1987’s seminal sex-fueled cautionary tale “Fatal Attraction,” agrees, noting that the genre’s downfall coincides with the ascent of the conservative political movement.
“We’re in a big puritanical mode,” he said. “Now, it’s like the McCarthy era, except it’s not ‘Are you a communist?’ but ‘Have you ever put sex in a movie?’”
These statements are easily ridiculed, of course. The biggest problem with basic Instinct 2 is not that it had sex in it, but that it was terrible. Good movies with lots of sex still make a lot of money. Bad movies tend not to make much money even though they have sex in them. Even Verhoeven seems to recognize this:
Still, Verhoeven said he would be game to direct a studio erotic thriller again if the right script comes along.
“If there would be a script written that had the quality of ‘Basic Instinct,’ or if Joe Eszterhas would be willing to dig himself into some new material and he would present it to me or a studio, then I would be highly interested,” said Verhoeven, who is in postproduction on “Black Book,” a World War II thriller with erotic elements that was fully financed by Europeans. “I like erotic thrillers. But in the last 10 years, I haven’t found any scripts that interested me.”
Maybe the fact there aren’t any good scripts is the real problem, not conservative attitudes toward sex.
The criticism is not entirely unfounded. Some conservative organizations have made a concerted push to eliminate all depictions of sexuality from network television, leading to the recent massive fine against CBS for an episode of Without a Trace containing teenage sex. Movie review sites like the American “Family” Association’s Plugged In contain reviews that list all sexual references to allow easily-offended audiences to keep their puritanical virtues intact. Their recent review of V for Vendetta notes that Evey “wears revealing tops” and that the viewer is exposed to “‘classic’ nude statues.” But these organizations have not yet banned depictions of sexuality, and audiences are still willing to come out in force for good erotic movies, such as Unfaithful, which made $122 million and garnered a Best Actress Oscar nomination for Diane Lane.
V for Vendetta
Remember, remember, the fifth of November,
The gunpowder treason and plot.
I know of no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny;
when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
–Thomas Jefferson
There are two ways to view Guy Fawkes. The traditional historical view is that Fawkes was England’s greatest traitor, part of the Gunpowder Plot that aimed to blow up Parliament with 5500 pounds of gunpowder placed in a cellar rented for that purpose. In this view, Guy Fawkes Day celebrates the capture, torture, confession, trial and execution of a traitor, and the victory of England over tyranny and terror.
An alternate view is that Guy Fawkes was not a traitor, but a liberator, a martyr to the cause of liberty who fought a corrupt English regime that persecuted Catholics and tortured dissidents. In this view, it is not Fawkes but England who is the source of tyranny and terror, and Guy Fawkes Day should be seen not as a celebration of victory over insurrection, but as an honor for one who stood up for freedom, using violence to try to defeat the violent. Keep in mind the part of the poem at the start of this post, repeated in the movie, that are usually left out:
- A penny loaf to feed the Pope.
- A farthing o’ cheese to choke him.
- A pint of beer to rinse it down.
- A faggot of sticks to burn him.
- Burn him in a tub of tar.
- Burn him like a blazing star.
- Burn his body from his head.
- Then we’ll say ol’ Pope is dead.
- Hip hip hoorah!
- Hip hip hoorah!
It is a moral dilemma that confronts viewers in V for Vendetta, the Wachowski brothers’ excellent adaptation of Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s graphic novel. Is the titular V (Hugo Weaving) terrorist or defender of liberty? Is Evey (Natalie Portman) villain, victor or victim?
Moore’s V for Vendetta was a product of early Thatcherite England, a 1980s where the more paranoid could envision the police state and totalitarianism arising from surveillance, security measures and crackdowns on crime. It’s the same mindset that produced A Clockwork Orange. Thatcher also, of course, contributed in no small measure to the current free Europe and the fall of the totalitarian Soviet bloc, but the British left did not see it that way.
Moore and Lloyd produced a dystopian epic, in which the Chancellor both gained power and retained it through fear. The Voice of Fate manipulated truth through propoganda, and the vicious Fingermen put down any sign of dissent. Against this tyranny stood only V, who channeled Fawkes both literally and figuratively, wreaking vengeance both for his personal suffering and for the suffereing of the formerly free Britain. V for Vendetta, along with Moore’s own Watchmen and the lesser-known Miracleman, redefined the graphic novel, and ranks in its own way with Huxley and Orwell as a dystopian vision.
The Wachowskis and producer Joel Silver have done an admirable job updating the original to 2006 reality. They took some liberties with the original work, and Alan Moore famously demanded that his name be removed from the credits. But make no mistake, this is no League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Despite the changes, V for Vendetta stands on its own as a film.
Hugo Weaving makes an excellent V, although he did at times seem to be relying too heavily on his character from the Matrix trilogy. The celluloid V seems half psychotic survivor of a fascist government and half avenging angel. Is he terrorist or freedom fighter? Neither, really. V is an expression of an idea. Given what the tyrannical government has done to him personally, his expression of the idea is too violent, too judgmental by half. Evey, whose own history should make her open to V’s ideals, is turned off by the violence, by how personal it is to V. Weaving does a good, but not great, job of portraying this dichotomy.
Natalie Portman, on the other hand, is nearly perfect as Evey. Even at 24, the waiflike Portman seems childlike. Watching her Evey descend from innocent citizen through trial, torture and abuse to V’s willing assistant is a triumph of acting. Weaving’s V wears a literal and figurative mask; Portman’s Evey is open in all senses of the word. This is clearly Portman’s best role and best performance to date.
The rest of the performances are good, but not superlative. Stephen Rea plays Inspector Finch with the same hangdog, just-trying-to-do-his-job-even- though-his-bosses-are-evil look he’s brought to other roles. It’s reminiscent in many ways of Lt. Viktor Burakov, the homicide investigator Rea played in HBO’s Citizen X. Like Burakov, Finch is an honest cop trying to do his job in a corrupt system, angling to avoid being swept up in party politics. The movie creates a relationship of sorts between V and Finch that is not present in the graphic novel, using Finch to, like Evey, show how the human side of V and the idea of V turn outsiders to his cause despite the violence.
John Hurt drips evil as Adam Sutler in an over-the-top performance that is more or less what the character calls for. Just as V is an idea, a masked character representing freedom, Sutler is a caricature representing evil and tyranny. He wears a mask, too.
Most of the flaws of the movie are in the source material. Even in Moore’s work, the backstory of V, Larkhill and the government are not adequately tied to the campaign against Sutler, the Fingermen and the Voice of Fate. Neither the 1980s version or the film do an adequate job of explaining how a free government fell into totalitarianism, or why the people do not resist before V comes along. Despite these flaws, however, the movie is at bottom a success.
Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities
has the power to make you commit injustices.
– Voltaire
Ultimately, V for Vendetta is all about masks. The masked vigilante pulling the mask from a tyrannical government to get the people to rise and demand freedom. The oppressed masses donning the vigilante’s mask to express solidarity with the cause. V for Vendetta answers one question — there are times when violence by the people is necessary to counter violence by the State — but leaves others unanswered. Is V a terrorist? That’s for you to decide.
Annie Proulx’s Sour Grapes Rant
E. Annie Proulx is a gifted, if at times long-winded and tedious, writer. The Shipping News was a finely-crafted (but somewhat overrated) novel. Accordion Crimes was even better, and underrated to boot. But now she’s lost it, fully crossed the line from entertaining writer to tedious artiste. Witness her sour grapes rant in The Guardian:
We should have known conservative heffalump academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture. Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash - excuse me - Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline. Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the debate over free silver.
So the “conservative heffalump” Academy gave the award to the movie making Important Points about racism instead of the movie making Important Points about homosexuality. Whatever. The digs at Philip Seymour Hoffman are completely unnecessary, and go contrary to Proulx’s alleged point (why would the homophobic Academy give the Oscar to that actor playing that role?).
Full disclosure: I saw neither Crash nor Brokebake Mountain. In fact, this year, I saw more Razzie nominees (1) than Best Picture nominees (0).
