list http://www.spout.com/ Recent community activity around Son of Rambow on Spout Copyright 2005-9 Spout, LLC Spout RSS http://www.spout.com/images/SpoutLogoRSS.jpg http://www.spout.com/ 136 30 http://www.spout.com/films/Son_of_Rambow/313998/default.aspx Title: Son of Rambow
Year: 2008
Director: Garth Jennings
Plot: As the summer sun shines down on England in the early 1980s, two boys who couldn't be more different are brought together by a mutual love of cinema, and a desire to emulate their favorite action movie icon. Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) is a well-mannered schoolboy being raised in an ultra-religious community that deplores such corruptive distractions as television, and seeks to maintain their purity by severely limiting contact with the outside world. In order to exorcise his creative inner demons, Will has taken to sketching imaginative drawings and complex illustrations. Lee Carter (Will Poulter) is the school terror, a rampaging hellion whose overaggressive behavior has made him an endless source of frustration to the faculty, and a source of fear to his fellow classmates. As fate would have it, Will is in the school hallway avoiding exposure to the classroom television when a fed-up teacher ejects Lee from the classroom. Though at first it appears as if Lee is about to torment timid Will just as he does the rest of the student body, the two form a tight bond after Will convinces Lee to view an bootleg copy of Rambo: First Blood. When Lee informs Will that he wants to shoot a homebrewed version of the violent action film for an upcoming amateur filmmaking contest, a sudden streak of rebellion prompts his sheltered classmate to readily agree. As the summer wears on the two boys set out to create the ultimate no-budget action movie, but their grand vision hits an unexpected hitch when a busload of French exchange students arrive at the school and the leader of the pack attempts to (Jules Sitrukj) hijack the production. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
Times Tagged: 20
Number of Lists: 9
Number of blog posts: 12
Number of discussion threads: 3
SpoutRating: 4
]]>Sat, 08 Aug 2009 20:20:37 GMTSon of Rambow2008Garth JenningsAs the summer sun shines down on England in the early 1980s, two boys who couldn't be more different are brought together by a mutual love of cinema, and a desire to emulate their favorite action movie icon. Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) is a well-mannered schoolboy being raised in an ultra-religious community that deplores such corruptive distractions as television, and seeks to maintain their purity by severely limiting contact with the outside world. In order to exorcise his creative inner demons, Will has taken to sketching imaginative drawings and complex illustrations. Lee Carter (Will Poulter) is the school terror, a rampaging hellion whose overaggressive behavior has made him an endless source of frustration to the faculty, and a source of fear to his fellow classmates. As fate would have it, Will is in the school hallway avoiding exposure to the classroom television when a fed-up teacher ejects Lee from the classroom. Though at first it appears as if Lee is about to torment timid Will just as he does the rest of the student body, the two form a tight bond after Will convinces Lee to view an bootleg copy of Rambo: First Blood. When Lee informs Will that he wants to shoot a homebrewed version of the violent action film for an upcoming amateur filmmaking contest, a sudden streak of rebellion prompts his sheltered classmate to readily agree. As the summer wears on the two boys set out to create the ultimate no-budget action movie, but their grand vision hits an unexpected hitch when a busload of French exchange students arrive at the school and the leader of the pack attempts to (Jules Sitrukj) hijack the production. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide20Tag Target (>10)91234http://www.spout.com/ProductImages/s313998.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/Son_of_Rambow/313998/default.aspxFilm http://www.spout.com/blogs/gerosimov/archive/2009/4/17/41630.aspx Post By: Gerosimov
Post To: Gerosimov Blog
Post Date: 4/17/2009 6:41:19 AM
Body: Son of Rambow is unique and fun. Also I could totally relate to the characters, because Rambo made a similar impact on my life as well.
]]>Fri, 17 Apr 2009 10:41:19 GMTGerosimovGerosimov Blog4/17/2009 6:41:19 AMSon of Rambow is unique and fun. Also I could totally relate to the characters, because Rambo made a similar impact on my life as well. http://www.spout.com/groups/Coming_Soon/New_Movies_2_13_Get_your_date_movie_on/216/40390/1/ShowPost.aspx Post By: spout
Post To: Coming Soon
Post Date: 2/10/2009 10:29:01 PM
Body: NEW TO THEATERS 2/13 Friday the 13th -- Watch the trailer. Did you know that hospitals are busiest on full moons? Yeah, weird but true. Do you know what buildings are busiest on Friday the 13th? Tents and cabins in the wilderness. Weird, huh? The International -- Watch the trailer. I've heard some rumors that this is suprisingly good. I'm intrigued by the premise, that a large multi-national bank would use its (our) funds to support terrorists and other criminals. And hey, two winners heading the show: Naomi Watts and Clive Owen. Confessions of a Shopaholic -- Watch the trailer. Hmm. I haven't read the book, but I have bought it several times. Anyone looking forward to this? Two Lovers (limited) -- Watch the trailer. Did you know that Joaquin Phoenix has retired from acting? It's true. And now for something that's not true: Two Lovers is the first installment in a teen-fantasy-based trilogy, completed by I Beat Up the Bully In Front of Everyone and I Win The Talent Show With My Own Power Ballad. Gomorrah (limited) -- Watch the trailer. This mafia movie set in modern-day Naples won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, and its American release is sponsored by Martin Scorsese. This movie looks like it can boast authenticity from its head to its toes...three of the actors are tied to mob activity, and the author of Gomorrah (the book this is based on) has been living under 24-hour protection since the book's release. NEW TO DVD 2/10 Blindness -- Watch the trailer. Sort of like Children of Men, but is it as good? Listen to Filmcouch. Burn After Reading -- Watch the trailer. Foot Fist Way -- Watch the trailer. I liked this one a lot. Listen to the review. Frozen River -- Watch the trailer. Won Grand Jury Prize for Best Dramatic Feature at Sundance 2008. Miracle at St. Anna -- Watch the trailer. Just a heads-up, I haven't heard one good thing about this movie. Son of Rambow -- Watch the trailer. Soul Men -- Watch the trailer. The final film performances of Isaak Hayes and Bernie Mac. W. -- Watch the trailer. Eh, it was so-so.
]]>Wed, 11 Feb 2009 03:29:01 GMTspoutComing Soon2/10/2009 10:29:01 PMNEW TO THEATERS 2/13 Friday the 13th -- Watch the trailer. Did you know that hospitals are busiest on full moons? Yeah, weird but true. Do you know what buildings are busiest on Friday the 13th? Tents and cabins in the wilderness. Weird, huh? The International -- Watch the trailer. I've heard some rumors that this is suprisingly good. I'm intrigued by the premise, that a large multi-national bank would use its (our) funds to support terrorists and other criminals. And hey, two winners heading the show: Naomi Watts and Clive Owen. Confessions of a Shopaholic -- Watch the trailer. Hmm. I haven't read the book, but I have bought it several times. Anyone looking forward to this? Two Lovers (limited) -- Watch the trailer. Did you know that Joaquin Phoenix has retired from acting? It's true. And now for something that's not true: Two Lovers is the first installment in a teen-fantasy-based trilogy, completed by I Beat Up the Bully In Front of Everyone and I Win The Talent Show With My Own Power Ballad. Gomorrah (limited) -- Watch the trailer. This mafia movie set in modern-day Naples won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, and its American release is sponsored by Martin Scorsese. This movie looks like it can boast authenticity from its head to its toes...three of the actors are tied to mob activity, and the author of Gomorrah (the book this is based on) has been living under 24-hour protection since the book's release. NEW TO DVD 2/10 Blindness -- Watch the trailer. Sort of like Children of Men, but is it as good? Listen to Filmcouch. Burn After Reading -- Watch the trailer. Foot Fist Way -- Watch the trailer. I liked this one a lot. Listen to the review. Frozen River -- Watch the trailer. Won Grand Jury Prize for Best Dramatic Feature at Sundance 2008. Miracle at St. Anna -- Watch the trailer. Just a heads-up, I haven't heard one good thing about this movie. Son of Rambow -- Watch the trailer. Soul Men -- Watch the trailer. The final film performances of Isaak Hayes and Bernie Mac. W. -- Watch the trailer. Eh, it was so-so. http://www.spout.com/blogs/dibot/archive/2009/1/29/40063.aspx Post By: dibot
Post To: dibot Blog
Post Date: 1/29/2009 12:54:01 PM
Body: I don't know how I got so behind on my reviews!Fingerprints follows a girl just out of rehab who returns home and becomes involved in a town mystery. And starts seeing ghosts. And people start dying. And everyone suspects the girl because she used do drugs. It' s so obvious that she would jump from that to killing people! Anyway, the story with the ghost kids is pretty good, but the film wasn't executed very well. Poor dialogue and acting are the main things holding it back.I actually enjoyed Yes Man. And sure, it's alot like Liar, Liar, but I liked that movie too. Jim Carrey ("Horton Hears a Who") is on his A-game. The jokes are good. The plot is nothing new and you can see where it's headed from the first scene, but the journey was very entertaining.I finally caught up with WALL-E and it was amazing just like everyone said. I didn't even notice that the first half doesn't have any dialogue. The animation is awesome. The story is so sweet between the two robots. I cried. And the state of the planet Earth is something to think about. Kids and adults both will love it. So watch it if you haven't already!I'm so in love with the little boy from Son of Rambow. I think his name is Bill Milner ("Popart"). IMDB doesn't have a picture by his name so I can't be sure. But I also adored this movie. A quiet, sheltered boy who has lost his father falls in with a trouble maker and they set out to make a Rambo movie. It's funny and heartbreaking. And I cried, again. Rent it.And then there was Highlander: The Source. I love Highlander. I'm not afraid to admit it. The movies and the TV show. But this TV movie was abysmal. Even my love of sweet, sweet Adrian Paul ("The Heavy") could not make me like the film any more. Set in the future, a group of immortals are searching for The Source, a mystical thing that will finally decide who the "only one" is. Some of the regulars from the show are here, but they are in poor form. And the dialogue made me cringe. And the editing. And everything. Maybe it really is over now.
]]>Thu, 29 Jan 2009 17:54:01 GMTdibotdibot Blog1/29/2009 12:54:01 PMI don't know how I got so behind on my reviews!Fingerprints follows a girl just out of rehab who returns home and becomes involved in a town mystery. And starts seeing ghosts. And people start dying. And everyone suspects the girl because she used do drugs. It' s so obvious that she would jump from that to killing people! Anyway, the story with the ghost kids is pretty good, but the film wasn't executed very well. Poor dialogue and acting are the main things holding it back.I actually enjoyed Yes Man. And sure, it's alot like Liar, Liar, but I liked that movie too. Jim Carrey ("Horton Hears a Who") is on his A-game. The jokes are good. The plot is nothing new and you can see where it's headed from the first scene, but the journey was very entertaining.I finally caught up with WALL-E and it was amazing just like everyone said. I didn't even notice that the first half doesn't have any dialogue. The animation is awesome. The story is so sweet between the two robots. I cried. And the state of the planet Earth is something to think about. Kids and adults both will love it. So watch it if you haven't already!I'm so in love with the little boy from Son of Rambow. I think his name is Bill Milner ("Popart"). IMDB doesn't have a picture by his name so I can't be sure. But I also adored this movie. A quiet, sheltered boy who has lost his father falls in with a trouble maker and they set out to make a Rambo movie. It's funny and heartbreaking. And I cried, again. Rent it.And then there was Highlander: The Source. I love Highlander. I'm not afraid to admit it. The movies and the TV show. But this TV movie was abysmal. Even my love of sweet, sweet Adrian Paul ("The Heavy") could not make me like the film any more. Set in the future, a group of immortals are searching for The Source, a mystical thing that will finally decide who the "only one" is. Some of the regulars from the show are here, but they are in poor form. And the dialogue made me cringe. And the editing. And everything. Maybe it really is over now. http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/12/19/38614.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 12/19/2008 2:00:53 PM
Body: Because there’s nothing like waiting until the last minute to do some holiday shopping, we’ve compiled this handy-dandy shopping guide to the best DVDs of 2008 that you can use now, or wait until the dust settles and clean up with any cash that Santa or Hanukkah Harry happened to leave you. It’s broken down by the person you’ll be shopping for to make things easier, even if that person happens to be yourself. When noted, we’ve picked the Blu-ray version over the standard definition, because we try to be all about 1080p and other technical terms whenever possible. But, the regular versions are just fine as well. Still, it’s true what they say: once you go HD you’ll never go back. The Superhero Fan Iron Man: In my opinion, this was a much better movie than The Dark Knight. Why? Because it nailed the whole comic book formula so well. This literally made me feel like I was back on my grandma’s summer porch reading a huge stack of comic books. Hancock: It was darker than the commercials let on, and Will Smith didn’t make his “concerned face” nearly as much as he does in Seven Pounds. That’s a plus that’s definitely not listed on the back of the DVD box. The Blu-ray version includes both the unrated and normal cuts of the flick, and also has producer Michael Mann popping up from time to time in the commentary. The Dark Knight: Even though I didn’t go bananas for it, this recently became the first Blu-ray DVD to sell a million copies. The best thing about the movie is Heath Ledger’s lip-smacking performance, and although the DVD lacks commentary from Christopher Nolan, it’s packed with enough extras to make you forget that. The Dreamer The Fall: This goes down as the most under-appreciated movie of the year. It’s part Princess Bride and part The Wizard of Oz, and is just incredibly gorgeous. Catinca Untaru, the little girl in the film, will charm your socks off, and the cinematography is stunning. It even features underwater shots of swimming elephants. Son of Rambow: This appeals to the filmmaker inside of all of us. It’s about a boy who has never seen movies before trying to make his own home video version of First Blood. It’s also a good way to jumpstart your own under-utilized imagination. Wall-E: Disney/Pixar’s robot-in-love story won’t just please any kids who happen to be within viewing range, adults will love it too. Plus you’ll be humming “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” from Hello, Dolly the rest of the day. The Drama Queen (or King) Juno: While I wouldn’t have thought that a movie about teenage pregnancy would end up being one of my favorite dramatic films from 2008, here it is. It retains all its charm on DVD, and adds a ton of special features like blog posts, screen tests, and the “Diablo Cody is Totally Boss” featurette. There Will Be Blood: I just watched this again last night, and I’m still amazed by what Paul Thomas Anderson can do with so little. There are scant few extra features on the DVD unfortunately, but there’s a great extended scene in the restaurant with Daniel and H.W. where Daniel Day Lewis cracks up at the end. That’s pure gold. How The West Was Won: Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, Debbie Reynolds, James Stewart and John Wayne star in this sweeping Western epic. The first disc contains the movie formatted for regular television screens, but the second disc features the full three-camera Cinerama process, and they’ve digitally erased the lines between each image. While this really needs to be seen on a giant screen to be appreciated, it will look pretty darn good in your living room too. The Space and Fantasy Crowd CJ7: Stephen Chow’s slapstick comedy version of E.T. didn’t really connect with audiences over here, but it’s a really fun movie that deserves a second chance. Spielberg meets Wile E. Coyote is about the best way to describe this, with the touching story of a little boy (who is played by a girl) and her down on his luck father. Southland Tales: Yes, this movie is still a trainwreck, but what I can’t figure out is why it’s such a watchable trainwreck. With the new edition of the DVD out, writer/director Richard Kelly actually offers up a commentary track that leaves you even more perplexed. But for some reason, it’s impossible to turn this off and walk away. MirrorMask: Full disclosure: I actually did notes on the early drafts of scripts for this when I worked at Henson. It’s truly spectacular that Dave McKean was able to pull this off on a shoestring budget, and it’s a fantasy written by Neil Gaiman. Pure escapism and gorgeous visuals. The Election Buff JFK: New to Blu-ray this year was a special edition of Oliver Stone’s JFK in Warner’s “digibook” format that features the disc along with a slim book in one package. This director’s cut added 17 minutes of unused footage, a lot of special features, and it’s the perfect movie to herald the dawn of new hope with our new President-elect. While the film focuses on the assassination of Kennedy, it also shows the impact his presidency meant to people, and what drove one man to pursue justice to the brink. Nixon: Also new to Blu-ray in the hopes of capitalizing on an election year was Oliver Stone’s Nixon. Even the case for it shouts Election Year Edition on the front cover. But it adds more than a half hour of footage to the movie and includes great extras, like the documentary made by Stone’s son Sean called Beyond Nixon. I missed this in the theaters, and saw it this year for the first time and it did not disappoint. Recount: It’s hard to watch this HBO Films movie and not get angry while doing so. Yes, it’s been eight years since the election, but seeing this is like tearing the band-aid off a wound that’s almost closed. Kevin Spacey is really great in this, but it’s Laura Dern, as former Secretary of State for Florida Katherine Harris, who you’ll find yourself loving to hate . The Documentary Addict The Unforseen: This documentary screened at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, and it’s an extremely impressive (and scary) look at the effects of land development on the watershed in an area of Austin, Texas. It’s both tragic and hopeful, and it’s coming out on DVD during the start of the U.S. recession, which can be blamed on poor real estate planning and development. Eerily timely. John Adams: This HBO miniseries is based on the David McCullough book of the same name and produced by HBO Films. While it might take a few liberties with creating historical dialogue, it’s a great way to learn about our nation’s history. Paul Giamatti really hits all the notes as Adams, and Tom Wilkinson is surprisingly perfect as Benjamin Franklin. Also includes a nice documentary about the author called Painting With Words. This American Life: This Showtime series based on the long-running radio show falls between entertainment and documentary. All of the stories are real, and they’re some of the most hilarious and moving things you’ll ever see. Episode four’s animated Chris Ware piece is worth the cost of the whole set alone. The Gamer WarGames: Yes, it’s an oldie. But the 25th (god, I’m old!) anniversary edition of this came out this year, and it’s bargain priced. It’s also been beautifully restore, and has never looked better. Toss in the fact that both Ally Sheedy and Matthew Broderick came back to do new interviews for this version, and it’s a perfect stocking stuffer. Tilt: The Battle To Save Pinball: I’ve written about this movie previously, but I can’t say enough good things about it. If you or someone you know loves pinball machines, you really can’t go wrong with this one. Just don’t complain when they ask for a full-sized machine of their very own next year. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters: Despite the controversy that swirls around it, this movie is so entertaining that I’ll usually end up watching the whole thing when I flip past it on cable, even though it’s sitting on a shelf a few feet away. It also cements Steve Wiebe in place as probably the nicest guy in the entire known universe. The Boxed Set Obsessetarian Casablanca: The Ultimate Collector’s Edition: Casablanca is probably one of my favorite films, and this edition is the ultimate for any movie geek. Not because the transfer is excellent and the sound pristine: it’s because it comes with a replica of the Letters of Transit! Now you too can pretend to be Peter Lorre and wheeze “Hide me, Reek!” to people. Okay, the movie is also gorgeous, too, and it’s been given the Blu-ray treatment. There’s also a great documentary here called Jack Warner: The Last Mogul. This is some good stuff. The Godfather Trilogy: The Coppola Restoration: The Godfather films have been released before on DVD, but this new set runs rings around it. Coppola called up Steven Spielberg when Viacom acquired Dreamworks, and asked him to let them release money for a Godfather restoration project. This is the end result, and it has been digitally restored and packed with amazing extras. A real gem. Mystery Science Theater 3000: 20th Anniversary Edition: This boxed set features four of the best MST3K episodes, along with a 3-part documentary about the history of the show, as well as video coverage of the MST3K reunion panel from this year’s Comic-Con. Plus if you can find the limited edition version of this set in a collectible tin, it comes with a little Crow figurine. Rad. The Non-Tivo Owning TV Watcher Mad Men: If you think it’s impossible to like this show, then you need to head out and pick up the first season on DVD. It will definitely change your mind. You’ll either want to be Don Draper, or have sex with him. Just stay away from my Joan Holloway. The first season DVD includes commentary on all 13 episodes, and a nifty “Advertising and the American Dream” documentary. Dexter: Michael C. Hall made the near-impossible jump from one highly successful series to another, only now he’s playing a lovable serial killer instead of a gay undertaker. This is one of those shows I hate to miss, and the new Blu-ray of the first season looks great and is packed with nifty features, including the first two episodes of the Steven Spielberg / Diablo Cody tv show The United States of Tara. I Dream of Jeannie: The Complete Series: Earlier this year Sony released a boxed set of I Dream of Jeannie, and it comes in a big purple bottle carrying case. That’s almost reason alone to pick this up. It’s the complete series, and features commentary from Barbara Eden, Larry Hagman, and Bill Daily. This is one of my true guilty pleasures, and this is the first time I’m publically admitting it. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Fri, 19 Dec 2008 19:00:53 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com12/19/2008 2:00:53 PMBecause there’s nothing like waiting until the last minute to do some holiday shopping, we’ve compiled this handy-dandy shopping guide to the best DVDs of 2008 that you can use now, or wait until the dust settles and clean up with any cash that Santa or Hanukkah Harry happened to leave you. It’s broken down by the person you’ll be shopping for to make things easier, even if that person happens to be yourself. When noted, we’ve picked the Blu-ray version over the standard definition, because we try to be all about 1080p and other technical terms whenever possible. But, the regular versions are just fine as well. Still, it’s true what they say: once you go HD you’ll never go back. The Superhero Fan Iron Man: In my opinion, this was a much better movie than The Dark Knight. Why? Because it nailed the whole comic book formula so well. This literally made me feel like I was back on my grandma’s summer porch reading a huge stack of comic books. Hancock: It was darker than the commercials let on, and Will Smith didn’t make his “concerned face” nearly as much as he does in Seven Pounds. That’s a plus that’s definitely not listed on the back of the DVD box. The Blu-ray version includes both the unrated and normal cuts of the flick, and also has producer Michael Mann popping up from time to time in the commentary. The Dark Knight: Even though I didn’t go bananas for it, this recently became the first Blu-ray DVD to sell a million copies. The best thing about the movie is Heath Ledger’s lip-smacking performance, and although the DVD lacks commentary from Christopher Nolan, it’s packed with enough extras to make you forget that. The Dreamer The Fall: This goes down as the most under-appreciated movie of the year. It’s part Princess Bride and part The Wizard of Oz, and is just incredibly gorgeous. Catinca Untaru, the little girl in the film, will charm your socks off, and the cinematography is stunning. It even features underwater shots of swimming elephants. Son of Rambow: This appeals to the filmmaker inside of all of us. It’s about a boy who has never seen movies before trying to make his own home video version of First Blood. It’s also a good way to jumpstart your own under-utilized imagination. Wall-E: Disney/Pixar’s robot-in-love story won’t just please any kids who happen to be within viewing range, adults will love it too. Plus you’ll be humming “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” from Hello, Dolly the rest of the day. The Drama Queen (or King) Juno: While I wouldn’t have thought that a movie about teenage pregnancy would end up being one of my favorite dramatic films from 2008, here it is. It retains all its charm on DVD, and adds a ton of special features like blog posts, screen tests, and the “Diablo Cody is Totally Boss” featurette. There Will Be Blood: I just watched this again last night, and I’m still amazed by what Paul Thomas Anderson can do with so little. There are scant few extra features on the DVD unfortunately, but there’s a great extended scene in the restaurant with Daniel and H.W. where Daniel Day Lewis cracks up at the end. That’s pure gold. How The West Was Won: Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, Debbie Reynolds, James Stewart and John Wayne star in this sweeping Western epic. The first disc contains the movie formatted for regular television screens, but the second disc features the full three-camera Cinerama process, and they’ve digitally erased the lines between each image. While this really needs to be seen on a giant screen to be appreciated, it will look pretty darn good in your living room too. The Space and Fantasy Crowd CJ7: Stephen Chow’s slapstick comedy version of E.T. didn’t really connect with audiences over here, but it’s a really fun movie that deserves a second chance. Spielberg meets Wile E. Coyote is about the best way to describe this, with the touching story of a little boy (who is played by a girl) and her down on his luck father. Southland Tales: Yes, this movie is still a trainwreck, but what I can’t figure out is why it’s such a watchable trainwreck. With the new edition of the DVD out, writer/director Richard Kelly actually offers up a commentary track that leaves you even more perplexed. But for some reason, it’s impossible to turn this off and walk away. MirrorMask: Full disclosure: I actually did notes on the early drafts of scripts for this when I worked at Henson. It’s truly spectacular that Dave McKean was able to pull this off on a shoestring budget, and it’s a fantasy written by Neil Gaiman. Pure escapism and gorgeous visuals. The Election Buff JFK: New to Blu-ray this year was a special edition of Oliver Stone’s JFK in Warner’s “digibook” format that features the disc along with a slim book in one package. This director’s cut added 17 minutes of unused footage, a lot of special features, and it’s the perfect movie to herald the dawn of new hope with our new President-elect. While the film focuses on the assassination of Kennedy, it also shows the impact his presidency meant to people, and what drove one man to pursue justice to the brink. Nixon: Also new to Blu-ray in the hopes of capitalizing on an election year was Oliver Stone’s Nixon. Even the case for it shouts Election Year Edition on the front cover. But it adds more than a half hour of footage to the movie and includes great extras, like the documentary made by Stone’s son Sean called Beyond Nixon. I missed this in the theaters, and saw it this year for the first time and it did not disappoint. Recount: It’s hard to watch this HBO Films movie and not get angry while doing so. Yes, it’s been eight years since the election, but seeing this is like tearing the band-aid off a wound that’s almost closed. Kevin Spacey is really great in this, but it’s Laura Dern, as former Secretary of State for Florida Katherine Harris, who you’ll find yourself loving to hate . The Documentary Addict The Unforseen: This documentary screened at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, and it’s an extremely impressive (and scary) look at the effects of land development on the watershed in an area of Austin, Texas. It’s both tragic and hopeful, and it’s coming out on DVD during the start of the U.S. recession, which can be blamed on poor real estate planning and development. Eerily timely. John Adams: This HBO miniseries is based on the David McCullough book of the same name and produced by HBO Films. While it might take a few liberties with creating historical dialogue, it’s a great way to learn about our nation’s history. Paul Giamatti really hits all the notes as Adams, and Tom Wilkinson is surprisingly perfect as Benjamin Franklin. Also includes a nice documentary about the author called Painting With Words. This American Life: This Showtime series based on the long-running radio show falls between entertainment and documentary. All of the stories are real, and they’re some of the most hilarious and moving things you’ll ever see. Episode four’s animated Chris Ware piece is worth the cost of the whole set alone. The Gamer WarGames: Yes, it’s an oldie. But the 25th (god, I’m old!) anniversary edition of this came out this year, and it’s bargain priced. It’s also been beautifully restore, and has never looked better. Toss in the fact that both Ally Sheedy and Matthew Broderick came back to do new interviews for this version, and it’s a perfect stocking stuffer. Tilt: The Battle To Save Pinball: I’ve written about this movie previously, but I can’t say enough good things about it. If you or someone you know loves pinball machines, you really can’t go wrong with this one. Just don’t complain when they ask for a full-sized machine of their very own next year. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters: Despite the controversy that swirls around it, this movie is so entertaining that I’ll usually end up watching the whole thing when I flip past it on cable, even though it’s sitting on a shelf a few feet away. It also cements Steve Wiebe in place as probably the nicest guy in the entire known universe. The Boxed Set Obsessetarian Casablanca: The Ultimate Collector’s Edition: Casablanca is probably one of my favorite films, and this edition is the ultimate for any movie geek. Not because the transfer is excellent and the sound pristine: it’s because it comes with a replica of the Letters of Transit! Now you too can pretend to be Peter Lorre and wheeze “Hide me, Reek!” to people. Okay, the movie is also gorgeous, too, and it’s been given the Blu-ray treatment. There’s also a great documentary here called Jack Warner: The Last Mogul. This is some good stuff. The Godfather Trilogy: The Coppola Restoration: The Godfather films have been released before on DVD, but this new set runs rings around it. Coppola called up Steven Spielberg when Viacom acquired Dreamworks, and asked him to let them release money for a Godfather restoration project. This is the end result, and it has been digitally restored and packed with amazing extras. A real gem. Mystery Science Theater 3000: 20th Anniversary Edition: This boxed set features four of the best MST3K episodes, along with a 3-part documentary about the history of the show, as well as video coverage of the MST3K reunion panel from this year’s Comic-Con. Plus if you can find the limited edition version of this set in a collectible tin, it comes with a little Crow figurine. Rad. The Non-Tivo Owning TV Watcher Mad Men: If you think it’s impossible to like this show, then you need to head out and pick up the first season on DVD. It will definitely change your mind. You’ll either want to be Don Draper, or have sex with him. Just stay away from my Joan Holloway. The first season DVD includes commentary on all 13 episodes, and a nifty “Advertising and the American Dream” documentary. Dexter: Michael C. Hall made the near-impossible jump from one highly successful series to another, only now he’s playing a lovable serial killer instead of a gay undertaker. This is one of those shows I hate to miss, and the new Blu-ray of the first season looks great and is packed with nifty features, including the first two episodes of the Steven Spielberg / Diablo Cody tv show The United States of Tara. I Dream of Jeannie: The Complete Series: Earlier this year Sony released a boxed set of I Dream of Jeannie, and it comes in a big purple bottle carrying case. That’s almost reason alone to pick this up. It’s the complete series, and features commentary from Barbara Eden, Larry Hagman, and Bill Daily. This is one of my true guilty pleasures, and this is the first time I’m publically admitting it. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/dj4our/archive/2008/12/1/37828.aspx Post By: dj4our
Post To: dj4our Blog
Post Date: 12/1/2008 9:00:18 PM
Body: rated PG-13 for violence and reckless behavior. 1 hr. 35 min. written & directed by: Garth Jennings produced by: Nick Goldsmith Watching writer/director Garth Jennings new film, I couldn't help but recall the wonder and excitement I felt the first time I devoured the movies that shaped my childhood. Leaving the movie theater as a wee lad, I remember feeling as if there was no end to the movie I had just seen. It continued on in my mind, living inside me as the characters embodied my actions. I believed wholeheartedly that I could pilot a "piece of junk" through outer space with a wookie as my copilot or that I could crack a whip in search of the lost Ark. If that sounds familiar to you then this lovable film will bring you back to that time with a smile on your face and maybe even a tear in your eye. The film takes place just outside of England in 1982, right around the time Stallone's socially-challenged Vietnam vet was introduced to cinemas. It is indeed the movie "First Blood" that brings two young boys together in an unlikely friendship. Unlikely because they are worlds apart despite living in the same town. Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) is an introverted loner who takes refuge in drawing up an entire book of colorful stories. He lives with his mother, younger sister and grandmother who are all part of the Plymouth Brethren, a religious sect that shuns worldliness, secular music, TV and movies. Then there's freckled Lee Carter (Will Poulter), the thieving, charismatic troublemaker at Will's school. His teachers call him "the devil child" and yes he is a hellion but right away we see that he is just as endearing as Will. He lives with his much-older brother, Lawrence (Ed Westwick), unchecked and on their own while his mother lives in Spain with their stepdad. A situation ripe with mischief. Lee runs a video piracy business at home for his brother and has secretly decided to make a home movie himself. His goal: to make it the best ever and enter it into the local young filmmaker's contest. Lee finds an awe-struck ally in the imaginative Will, who is soon recruited by Lee to be his stunt double for an action movie he is making. Once Will sees his first ever movie over at Lee's place, a pirated copy of "First Blood" well, it's all over! He becomes obsessed with all things Rambo! He imagines himself as the "Son of Rambow" (stay till the end of the credits for a funny audio clip about the title) and enthusiastically immerses himself in the character...literally. We see Will jump from heights, fall from a tree and swing into a lake all for the sake of the art. Both boys develop an indelible bond as they become amateur cinematic collaborators. But this wouldn't be the hilarious, touching and joyous film that it is if all went well for our boys. When a busload of French exchange students are dropped off at their school, pretty boy, Didier (Jules Sitruk) enters the scene. He captivates the uniformed girls and boys with his black leather, red boots and his new wave music but provides a driving wedge between the boys when he practically takes over production. Another challenge is fellow Brethren brother Joshua (Neil Dudgeon) outing his Will's forbidden celluloid adventures while horning his way into his family, putting Will and his family in danger of expulsion. But the most heart-wrenching of challenges is of the hurt caused by the growing egos and stubborn pride of both boys. You really want them to be the best of friends and it breaks your heart when anything opposing that occurs. Director Jennings ("The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy") and his producing partner Nick Goldsmith really hit the jackpot finding these two non-actors as their leads. They really are perfectly cast and just flawless. I would imagine that Jennings has reels of edited film of these boys that didn't make the released cut. The supporting cast is excellent as well, particularly Jessica Hynes as Will's devoted mother who patiently tries to relate to his burgeoning backsliding. Little does she know that as much as her son wants to be a good son, he also wants to be the "Son of Rambow". Not only do the laugh-out-loud scenes make the film but the quieter, character moments add a sweet sincerity. When I found out that the film is partly based on Jennings' own childhood experiences of filmmaking, it made me love the film all the more. No wonder the film has so much heart. It can be seen in the writing and visual storytelling which seem straight out of a fond reminiscing dream. His use of scribbly graphic animation is used wisely, not overdone but rather caters to Will's vivid imagination. The film is a wonderfully unpretentious reminder of the unlimited possibilities of make believe. The only possible way to not like this film is if you hated being a child and you hate children. It's been a long time since I sat in the theater and felt the same exuberance as the main characters but this film did just that for me.
]]>Tue, 02 Dec 2008 02:00:18 GMTdj4ourdj4our Blog12/1/2008 9:00:18 PMrated PG-13 for violence and reckless behavior. 1 hr. 35 min. written & directed by: Garth Jennings produced by: Nick Goldsmith Watching writer/director Garth Jennings new film, I couldn't help but recall the wonder and excitement I felt the first time I devoured the movies that shaped my childhood. Leaving the movie theater as a wee lad, I remember feeling as if there was no end to the movie I had just seen. It continued on in my mind, living inside me as the characters embodied my actions. I believed wholeheartedly that I could pilot a "piece of junk" through outer space with a wookie as my copilot or that I could crack a whip in search of the lost Ark. If that sounds familiar to you then this lovable film will bring you back to that time with a smile on your face and maybe even a tear in your eye. The film takes place just outside of England in 1982, right around the time Stallone's socially-challenged Vietnam vet was introduced to cinemas. It is indeed the movie "First Blood" that brings two young boys together in an unlikely friendship. Unlikely because they are worlds apart despite living in the same town. Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) is an introverted loner who takes refuge in drawing up an entire book of colorful stories. He lives with his mother, younger sister and grandmother who are all part of the Plymouth Brethren, a religious sect that shuns worldliness, secular music, TV and movies. Then there's freckled Lee Carter (Will Poulter), the thieving, charismatic troublemaker at Will's school. His teachers call him "the devil child" and yes he is a hellion but right away we see that he is just as endearing as Will. He lives with his much-older brother, Lawrence (Ed Westwick), unchecked and on their own while his mother lives in Spain with their stepdad. A situation ripe with mischief. Lee runs a video piracy business at home for his brother and has secretly decided to make a home movie himself. His goal: to make it the best ever and enter it into the local young filmmaker's contest. Lee finds an awe-struck ally in the imaginative Will, who is soon recruited by Lee to be his stunt double for an action movie he is making. Once Will sees his first ever movie over at Lee's place, a pirated copy of "First Blood" well, it's all over! He becomes obsessed with all things Rambo! He imagines himself as the "Son of Rambow" (stay till the end of the credits for a funny audio clip about the title) and enthusiastically immerses himself in the character...literally. We see Will jump from heights, fall from a tree and swing into a lake all for the sake of the art. Both boys develop an indelible bond as they become amateur cinematic collaborators. But this wouldn't be the hilarious, touching and joyous film that it is if all went well for our boys. When a busload of French exchange students are dropped off at their school, pretty boy, Didier (Jules Sitruk) enters the scene. He captivates the uniformed girls and boys with his black leather, red boots and his new wave music but provides a driving wedge between the boys when he practically takes over production. Another challenge is fellow Brethren brother Joshua (Neil Dudgeon) outing his Will's forbidden celluloid adventures while horning his way into his family, putting Will and his family in danger of expulsion. But the most heart-wrenching of challenges is of the hurt caused by the growing egos and stubborn pride of both boys. You really want them to be the best of friends and it breaks your heart when anything opposing that occurs. Director Jennings ("The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy") and his producing partner Nick Goldsmith really hit the jackpot finding these two non-actors as their leads. They really are perfectly cast and just flawless. I would imagine that Jennings has reels of edited film of these boys that didn't make the released cut. The supporting cast is excellent as well, particularly Jessica Hynes as Will's devoted mother who patiently tries to relate to his burgeoning backsliding. Little does she know that as much as her son wants to be a good son, he also wants to be the "Son of Rambow". Not only do the laugh-out-loud scenes make the film but the quieter, character moments add a sweet sincerity. When I found out that the film is partly based on Jennings' own childhood experiences of filmmaking, it made me love the film all the more. No wonder the film has so much heart. It can be seen in the writing and visual storytelling which seem straight out of a fond reminiscing dream. His use of scribbly graphic animation is used wisely, not overdone but rather caters to Will's vivid imagination. The film is a wonderfully unpretentious reminder of the unlimited possibilities of make believe. The only possible way to not like this film is if you hated being a child and you hate children. It's been a long time since I sat in the theater and felt the same exuberance as the main characters but this film did just that for me. http://www.spout.com/groups/Weekly_Theme/Re_Weekly_Theme_for_November_3_The_Movies_in_the/625/37013/1/ShowPost.aspx Post By: Ravie13
Post To: Weekly Theme
Post Date: 11/6/2008 1:39:59 AM
Body: OH I thought this discussion was going to be about FICTIONAL movies within movies ... like the one they're making within In Bruges, etc. Meta reference it is then... how about when Joanna Barnes who played "Vicky" in Disney's THE PARENT TRAP (the money--grubbing fiancee that the twins are trying to knock out of the picture) showed up as "Vicki," the mother of Meredith (the money-grubbing fiancee that the twins are trying to knock out of the picture) in the 1998 remake of The PARENT TRAP? (I hated that part of Oceans 12 ... I just thought that was so dumb. Julia Roberts pretending to be Julia Roberts... all so they could explain her pregnant belly?? Dumb.) Here's one - THE FRESHMAN. It's sort of a spoof of mobster movies and Marlon Brando plays the Godfather-esqe character ... though he's not really mafia. SON OF RAMBOW? That's the point of the whole movie. Doris Day played "Jan Morrow" in PILLOW TALK which was a referenct to Jeanne Moreau, the french actress. They were making a reference to Jeanne playing sexy roles while "Jan Morrow" was a straight-laced woman (with maybe a little something sexy hiding underneath.) Then we go to the Ewan McGregor/Renee Zelwegger flick - DOWN WITH LOVE. Which was an homage to Doris Day/Rock Hudson movies. (Some of the split scene comedy seemed to be funny to only me in the theater.) In QUEEN of the DAMNED some of Lestat's music videos are based on old horror movies like THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI. And I can't be positive on this one but I think the name Gillian in PRACTICAL MAGIC was a reference to Kim Novak's Gillian in BELL, BOOK and CANDLE.
]]>Thu, 06 Nov 2008 06:39:59 GMTRavie13Weekly Theme11/6/2008 1:39:59 AMOH I thought this discussion was going to be about FICTIONAL movies within movies ... like the one they're making within In Bruges, etc. Meta reference it is then... how about when Joanna Barnes who played "Vicky" in Disney's THE PARENT TRAP (the money--grubbing fiancee that the twins are trying to knock out of the picture) showed up as "Vicki," the mother of Meredith (the money-grubbing fiancee that the twins are trying to knock out of the picture) in the 1998 remake of The PARENT TRAP? (I hated that part of Oceans 12 ... I just thought that was so dumb. Julia Roberts pretending to be Julia Roberts... all so they could explain her pregnant belly?? Dumb.) Here's one - THE FRESHMAN. It's sort of a spoof of mobster movies and Marlon Brando plays the Godfather-esqe character ... though he's not really mafia. SON OF RAMBOW? That's the point of the whole movie. Doris Day played "Jan Morrow" in PILLOW TALK which was a referenct to Jeanne Moreau, the french actress. They were making a reference to Jeanne playing sexy roles while "Jan Morrow" was a straight-laced woman (with maybe a little something sexy hiding underneath.) Then we go to the Ewan McGregor/Renee Zelwegger flick - DOWN WITH LOVE. Which was an homage to Doris Day/Rock Hudson movies. (Some of the split scene comedy seemed to be funny to only me in the theater.) In QUEEN of the DAMNED some of Lestat's music videos are based on old horror movies like THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI. And I can't be positive on this one but I think the name Gillian in PRACTICAL MAGIC was a reference to Kim Novak's Gillian in BELL, BOOK and CANDLE. http://www.spout.com/blogs/kowalski76/archive/2008/10/17/36452.aspx Post By: Kowalski76
Post To: Rebellious Celluloid
Post Date: 10/17/2008 1:36:55 PM
Body: A film about cinema lovers for lovers of cinema. Son of Rambow captures the heart and soul of the eighties almost perfectly. Although there's things that feel foreign to the decade, Brethren for one. I can't say I ever met such people in my time on this small island. I'd forgotten how magical it was to imagine as a child, to create imaginary worlds. Thanks to Carter and Will I got to relive my youth a little. If you're looking for escape, for a light-hearted fun-packed film Son of Rambow may just be that film.
]]>Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:36:55 GMTKowalski76Rebellious Celluloid10/17/2008 1:36:55 PMA film about cinema lovers for lovers of cinema. Son of Rambow captures the heart and soul of the eighties almost perfectly. Although there's things that feel foreign to the decade, Brethren for one. I can't say I ever met such people in my time on this small island. I'd forgotten how magical it was to imagine as a child, to create imaginary worlds. Thanks to Carter and Will I got to relive my youth a little. If you're looking for escape, for a light-hearted fun-packed film Son of Rambow may just be that film. http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/10/2/35824.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 10/2/2008 12:00:44 PM
Body: With Halloween less than a month away, it’s time to start thinking about what to go as. That is, if you haven’t already. A good costume-loving cinephile typically knows well in advance what he or she will dress up as for Halloween (and Comic-Con, too). But if you’re one to wait until the last minute, and also one who likes to be a lot more contemporary than, say, dressing up as a Ghostbuster or Edward Scissorhands, I’ve got some suggestions for you for costumes based on recent films. Check them out after the jump. “Nuke the Fridge”  - from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull For this costume, you need to prepare a basic Indiana Jones costume and then build a ’50s-style fridge costume out of cardboard to go around your whole body. It could look something like this, except instead of just exposing your head, you show your whole body, dressed in Indy clothes. When people ask what you are, explain the terrible scene from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, as well as how it has spawned this new term for when a movie franchise goes sour. Also, if you like to be demonstrative, feel free to throw yourself into the air as if being propelled by a nuclear blast. “Chad Feldheimer”  - from Burn After Reading This should be a pretty easy homemade costume. Just get a dark red polo, patch on a handwritten “Hardbodies Fitness Center” logo to the chest, spray a little temporary blond into your hair and strap an ipod to your arm. Maybe even add “Chad” name tag, despite Brad Pitt’s lack of one in the film. For lack of a better quirky indie character this year (like Napoleon Dynamite), it’s a good enough idea to get you by without need for too much explanation. “Didier Revol”  - from Son of Rambow If you want to be a little quirkier and a lot more obscure, though, you could seek out appropriate ’80s Euro clothing in your local thrift shop and go as this popular French exchange student. For this, you’ll still need some kind of temporary hair coloring for that skunk stripe, and you definitely need some red shoes. The jacket doesn’t need to be perfect, and anyway you can also just find a triangle-print midriff-exposing t-shirt and be fine. For your few cool friends who’ve seen the movie, it shouldn’t be too hard to get the idea across. “Pepper Pots”  - from Iron Man Another thing lacking this year was strong female roles in comic book and action movies, from which you can usually get hot costumes like Lara Croft and Selene from Underworld. But as boring as it will be to go as Pepper Pots (or Rachel Dawes, or Betty Ross), putting on a women’s pantsuit and dying your hair light orange will also serve as a protest against the 2008 tough woman drought. Sure, you could try to pass something off as Fox from Wanted, but nobody will get it. If you really need to do something with skimpy outfits and machine guns, there’s always the Sarah Palin costume. However, that’s obviously not movie related enough, unless you somehow make it clearly reference Miss Congeniality. “The House Bunny”  - from The House Bunny For the girl who likes to keep things simple, there’s fortunately the old Playboy Bunny staple. And now it’s more movie-themed thanks to the comedy The House Bunny. Just get some hot pink duds and some basic bunny ears and you’re all set. Just don’t let people assume you’re just a sexy bunny, or, worse, either Bridget Jones or Elle Woods. Another old standard that has recently become movie-themed: zombie stripper. “Eve”  - from Wall-E The girl who doesn’t like to keep things simple may want to attempt a homemade Eve costume. It’s possible that it could serve as a sexy costume, as it can consist of a white body stocking, posterboard-cut flap arms and a white garbage pail top for the head. But as hot as that tight-fitting stocking will be, the real shape of Eve’s body is far sexier. So get out those plastic-welding tools and come up with something more streamlined and rounded. Otherwise people might just think you’re an iPod or some other Mac product. “There Will Be Blood group”  - from There Will Be Blood If you’re looking for a good group-costume idea, and you don’t want to be Scooby and gang, then the characters and iconic props from There Will Blood are sure to be a hit. While three friends dress up as Daniel Plainview, H.W. Plainview and Eli Sunday, three other friends must dress as a bowling pin, a milkshake and maybe an oil rig (copy this Eiffel Tower costume). “The Dude Playin’ a Dude Disguised as Another Dude” (aka “Robet Downey Jr. Blackface”  - from Tropic Thunder Even Halloween is now a questionable time for a white person to put on blackface, but you might be okay with the dark face paint if you go as Robert Downey Jr.’s character, Kirk Lazarus, as his African-American Army sergeant character. It’ll be fun doing the voice, but it’ll be even more fun telling people why your race-altering costume is not un-PC, because it’s ironic and satirical. You can also invite your friends to dress up as the other actors and make it a Tropic Thunder group costume. Just don’t have anyone be Simple Jack, because that’s definitely not PC. “Joker-Faced Meg Ryan”  - from The Women Sometimes a good Halloween costume can come about by turning an another costume into something new. Like how John Carpenter turned a William Shatner mask into a Michael Myers make for Halloween. Now, for anyone wishing to go as the plastic-surgery disaster that is modern Meg Ryan (or her character, Mary Haines, in The Women), all you have to do is take a Dark Knight-style (and Heath Ledger-style) Joker mask, change the hair color or add on a curly blonde wig, and maybe flesh-out the color of the face. “The Dark McCain”  - from The Dark Knight Inspired by the cartoon of McCain as Batman printed in Entertainment Weekly, this may be the easiest and most timely movie-themed Halloween costume of all. Because this is going to be a heavy year for both political costumes and movie-related costumes, but this one fits both categories (as do a Bristol Palin Juno costume, a Bristol Palin Baby Mama costume, a Sarah Palin Miss Congeniality costume, a Barack Obama Hancock costume, etc.). Because there were readings of The Dark Knight in which people said the Caped Crusader is Bush or Cheney, those alternates will also work. Just be sure to get your McCain mask (or Bush or Cheney) and your Batman costume before both sell out. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:00:44 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com10/2/2008 12:00:44 PMWith Halloween less than a month away, it’s time to start thinking about what to go as. That is, if you haven’t already. A good costume-loving cinephile typically knows well in advance what he or she will dress up as for Halloween (and Comic-Con, too). But if you’re one to wait until the last minute, and also one who likes to be a lot more contemporary than, say, dressing up as a Ghostbuster or Edward Scissorhands, I’ve got some suggestions for you for costumes based on recent films. Check them out after the jump. “Nuke the Fridge”  - from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull For this costume, you need to prepare a basic Indiana Jones costume and then build a ’50s-style fridge costume out of cardboard to go around your whole body. It could look something like this, except instead of just exposing your head, you show your whole body, dressed in Indy clothes. When people ask what you are, explain the terrible scene from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, as well as how it has spawned this new term for when a movie franchise goes sour. Also, if you like to be demonstrative, feel free to throw yourself into the air as if being propelled by a nuclear blast. “Chad Feldheimer”  - from Burn After Reading This should be a pretty easy homemade costume. Just get a dark red polo, patch on a handwritten “Hardbodies Fitness Center” logo to the chest, spray a little temporary blond into your hair and strap an ipod to your arm. Maybe even add “Chad” name tag, despite Brad Pitt’s lack of one in the film. For lack of a better quirky indie character this year (like Napoleon Dynamite), it’s a good enough idea to get you by without need for too much explanation. “Didier Revol”  - from Son of Rambow If you want to be a little quirkier and a lot more obscure, though, you could seek out appropriate ’80s Euro clothing in your local thrift shop and go as this popular French exchange student. For this, you’ll still need some kind of temporary hair coloring for that skunk stripe, and you definitely need some red shoes. The jacket doesn’t need to be perfect, and anyway you can also just find a triangle-print midriff-exposing t-shirt and be fine. For your few cool friends who’ve seen the movie, it shouldn’t be too hard to get the idea across. “Pepper Pots”  - from Iron Man Another thing lacking this year was strong female roles in comic book and action movies, from which you can usually get hot costumes like Lara Croft and Selene from Underworld. But as boring as it will be to go as Pepper Pots (or Rachel Dawes, or Betty Ross), putting on a women’s pantsuit and dying your hair light orange will also serve as a protest against the 2008 tough woman drought. Sure, you could try to pass something off as Fox from Wanted, but nobody will get it. If you really need to do something with skimpy outfits and machine guns, there’s always the Sarah Palin costume. However, that’s obviously not movie related enough, unless you somehow make it clearly reference Miss Congeniality. “The House Bunny”  - from The House Bunny For the girl who likes to keep things simple, there’s fortunately the old Playboy Bunny staple. And now it’s more movie-themed thanks to the comedy The House Bunny. Just get some hot pink duds and some basic bunny ears and you’re all set. Just don’t let people assume you’re just a sexy bunny, or, worse, either Bridget Jones or Elle Woods. Another old standard that has recently become movie-themed: zombie stripper. “Eve”  - from Wall-E The girl who doesn’t like to keep things simple may want to attempt a homemade Eve costume. It’s possible that it could serve as a sexy costume, as it can consist of a white body stocking, posterboard-cut flap arms and a white garbage pail top for the head. But as hot as that tight-fitting stocking will be, the real shape of Eve’s body is far sexier. So get out those plastic-welding tools and come up with something more streamlined and rounded. Otherwise people might just think you’re an iPod or some other Mac product. “There Will Be Blood group”  - from There Will Be Blood If you’re looking for a good group-costume idea, and you don’t want to be Scooby and gang, then the characters and iconic props from There Will Blood are sure to be a hit. While three friends dress up as Daniel Plainview, H.W. Plainview and Eli Sunday, three other friends must dress as a bowling pin, a milkshake and maybe an oil rig (copy this Eiffel Tower costume). “The Dude Playin’ a Dude Disguised as Another Dude” (aka “Robet Downey Jr. Blackface”  - from Tropic Thunder Even Halloween is now a questionable time for a white person to put on blackface, but you might be okay with the dark face paint if you go as Robert Downey Jr.’s character, Kirk Lazarus, as his African-American Army sergeant character. It’ll be fun doing the voice, but it’ll be even more fun telling people why your race-altering costume is not un-PC, because it’s ironic and satirical. You can also invite your friends to dress up as the other actors and make it a Tropic Thunder group costume. Just don’t have anyone be Simple Jack, because that’s definitely not PC. “Joker-Faced Meg Ryan”  - from The Women Sometimes a good Halloween costume can come about by turning an another costume into something new. Like how John Carpenter turned a William Shatner mask into a Michael Myers make for Halloween. Now, for anyone wishing to go as the plastic-surgery disaster that is modern Meg Ryan (or her character, Mary Haines, in The Women), all you have to do is take a Dark Knight-style (and Heath Ledger-style) Joker mask, change the hair color or add on a curly blonde wig, and maybe flesh-out the color of the face. “The Dark McCain”  - from The Dark Knight Inspired by the cartoon of McCain as Batman printed in Entertainment Weekly, this may be the easiest and most timely movie-themed Halloween costume of all. Because this is going to be a heavy year for both political costumes and movie-related costumes, but this one fits both categories (as do a Bristol Palin Juno costume, a Bristol Palin Baby Mama costume, a Sarah Palin Miss Congeniality costume, a Barack Obama Hancock costume, etc.). Because there were readings of The Dark Knight in which people said the Caped Crusader is Bush or Cheney, those alternates will also work. Just be sure to get your McCain mask (or Bush or Cheney) and your Batman costume before both sell out. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/joem18b/archive/2008/9/25/35552.aspx Post By: joem18b
Post To: joem18b Blog
Post Date: 9/25/2008 7:04:22 PM
Body: O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias (2006)***** SPOILERS *****The Year My Parents Went On Vaction tells the story of a pre-teen boy in São Paulo, Brazil, separated from his parents during a military coup in 1970. As the army takes over, the country is distracted in part by Brazil's successes in the World Cup of that year (sort of like following the pennant race or NFL football in the U.S. as the country's financial system implodes). The movie is pleasant, never dull, well shot, with a delicate score that adds to the feelings of sadness and loss inherent in the plot (the director threw out the first score written for the movie; Beto Villares then did it over and got it right).TYMPWOV begins with a mother and father taking their son to grandfather's house in São Paulo. The three are riding in a VW bug, '65 or earlier. A Brazilian friend suggests that for verisimilitude, they should have been in a Renault or Citroen, because the bug was the inexpensive car of youth and the lower middle-class; her family always drove French cars. Be that as it may, the movie's streets are rife with vintage bugs and VW buses, though I did spot a Renault or two. I mention this because the first car that I bought and paid for with my own money was a new '67 bug from Belmont Motors in Massachusetts, powder blue. It has been sitting since 1981 or so in a succession of company parking lots, progressively degenerating until, paint gone, wheels seized, flowering weeds growing from dirt caught in the chassis crevicles, it looks so bad that I was ordered to have it towed off the property because it had become an eyesore, at least to one sorehead in the company who remained anonymous - the bug's engine refusing to start, a hole in the floor threatening to release the battery under the back seat like a bomb dropped from its bay at the first speed bump, the windows opaque as my glasses in the Turkish bath down the street. Fortunately, my son stepped up and volunteered to restore the car as a hobby. He abstracted it on a flatbed towtruck via Raul's Towing Service to his driveway, where it sat, partially disassembled, for a week or two before the city, at the behest of neighbors or a cruising patrol car, ordered him to remove it. He rolled the poor thing into his garage, wheels now at least freed, out of sight behind closed doors, and since then he has ordered replacement parts from an unending list. He tells me that there are two sources from which to obtain these parts: (a) a quality manufacturer somewhere or other, or (b)Brazil. You want quality, you go to the quality manufacturer; you want cheap, you go to Brazil. I don't know if that's true or not but when I replaced a bumper a long time ago, it had a "Made in Brazil" sticker on the inside surface. One tap by another vehicle and the bumper folded up like an origami noodle. Also, curiously, '67 door handles are unavailable. But the point is, if you're a bug lover you might want to give TYMPWOV a little love for that reason if for no other.Director/writer Cao Hamburger and his co-writer, Claudio Galperin, were both born in São Paulo in 1962 and were eight years old when General Emilio Medici engineered his coup. Hamburger's parents "went on vacation" at that time, but only for a few weeks. In this movie, Hamburger and Galperin share some of their childhood experiences growing up in the cultural melting-pot of São Paulo. Hamburger's father came from a German/Jewish family that emigrated to Brazil before World War II. His mother was of Italian/Catholic stock, though both parents were non-religious scientists as he grew up. He says that he began thinking about São Paulo's mix of cultures and his roots while living and feeling like an outsider in London, another city where races and nationalities mingle. According to Hamburger (and my Brazilian friends), Brazil is deeply divided over socio-economic class issues (the rich, a small middle-class, and the poor) but is accepting of emigrants; he refers to Brazilian culture as Samba culture - "Samba" here meaning, roughly, "let's all dance together." In fact, Hamburger started out with all sorts of ideas for the movie, but while making it settled on the idea of enjoying the brief periods of sunshine in life on a cloudy day. The movie was made on a medium budget by Brazilian standards. Since the success of films like Central Station and City of God, Hamburger says, funding opportunities for cinema have gotten a lot better. He used professionals as well as non-actors from the community, which in the film is a conservative Jewish neighborhood. Today, Hamburger says, this neighborhood is Korean, but since he is exploring his own roots, for the purposes of the film it remains Jewish. Hamburger spent four months finding an empty apartment building to use for the shoot; the movie was filmed completely on location.So often in making a movie, the director starts out with an idea and massages it until a theme for the film is produced. This process can extend over years with input from editors, writers, friends, family, and assorted other sources while the director chases funding, as I describe in my review of Manda Bala. Hamburger's initial inspiration was to examine the mixture of cultures in Brazil, and from that grew the idea of examining a year in the life of a boy growing up in the same time and place that Hamburger and Galperin did. During the making of the movie, the military coup and contemperaneous world-cup excitement in the film emerged, according to the director, as metaphors for life. It seems to me that some of these metaphors crop up post-production but perhaps I'm just metaphor-blind or metaphor-averse. Does a movie metaphor count if it's discovered after the movie is finished? Does it count if a reviewer invokes it, rather than the director? I do like the way that Claudia Llosa, for example, disavows metaphors in her Maven-reviewed Madeinusa, a movie which could easily be weighed down with them. I'm guessing that Hamburger's military coup and World Cup would remain in the movie whether Hamburger deemed them metaphors or not. As it is, he has one more thing to talk about during interviews. Anyway, the coup represents a dark day and the World-Cup victory represents a shaft of sunlight breaking through the gloom of that day. The dark day is life under the military regime and the sunlight represents those moments in life that you must embrace in order to get through the bad patches - did I just nest a metaphor within a metaphor there? The life of goalies in general is also a metaphor in the movie, but if the victory is a bright shaft of sunlight, what is the goalie? A meteorite the size of Oshgosh? Who knows? The gray day/sunlight metaphor, applied to my own personal life, would be like at my work, where my boss would be dictator General Emilio Medici, and out of the grinding gray of morning I would emerge at lunchtime to sit down across from Izzy Vulvano and beat his pants off playing Magic and using my special red and black deck. Also the movie is about dealing with our loneliness and our connections to others, how we make them and break them and move on. Is the movie itself a metaphor for that, or just a movie about that? Also, the director does not agree that soccer is the opiate of the masses, exploited by the junta in this case to maintain calm. Hamburger is going for gray day/sunshine here, not gray day/opium. And having mentioned Manda Bala above, note that this whole movie unfurled without a kidnapping or fried frog in sight, but only because the whole country is under siege from an autocratic military dictatorship rather than a scourge of corrupt politicians and kidnapping-for-profit criminal thugs.Strangely, Hamburger's soccer metaphor gets turned on its head at the end of the movie. Irony? Another layer? Or just part of the movie that doesn't conform to a simple, stumbled-upon talking point? I thought about calling Hamburger and asking him, but nobody likes a wiseass.When the metaphorical army arrives in Michel's neighborhood and starts dragging young men out of their union offices in São Paulo, clubbing them and hurling them into vans while the boy's parents are in hiding, it occurred to me to wonder whether such scenes are automatically more powerful when filmed in the country where they are supposed to have happened, in the language in which they happened, by victims or the relatives of victims of the evils portrayed. Or, for a subtitle-hating country like America, could such a scene be made more visceral and moving if shot in Hollywood for U.S. consumption? For example, would Der Untergang or The Lives of Others have retained their energy or even gained some, if they had been made, shot for shot, in the U.S. with U.S. actors instead of Germans? Ennio De Concini tried it with xxAlec Guiness playing Hitler but I think we can agree that that didn't work as well as Bruno Ganz doing it. Being a cinema snob, I would say without cavil that it is intuitively obvious that the Brazilian version of the coup or the German version of Hitler's last days cannot fail to have an innate power, if well enough done, that a U.S. version could never match. But hold on. Summer Palace provides a dramatic take on Tiananmen Square and the events there in 1989, yet I've heard plenty of squawking (from round eyes) about its failure to do justice to that historic conflict. Would a movie about Tiananmen, made along the lines of The Last Emperor, fare better in the U.S? Could Gettysburg withstand a transfer to Japan; if Kurosawa made it, might it even improve in the eyes of the Japanese? Or in the eyes of American viewers as well? How to assign metrics to questions like these? It's easy to just say that the better the filmmaker, the better the film, for all informed viewers of taste. Do the French still love Jerry Lewis? Are Hollywood blockbusters still the biggest grossers all around the world? And children in movies - does the fact that the child is native to a country foreign to the viewer and speaks a foreign language have any effect one way or the other on that viewer? Rather than approaching these questions from first principles, maybe the thing to do is to evaluate a hundred movies or so, make a call on each, and examine the results for trends.And speaking of children, how do they learn to act so well? Or isn't learning involved? Teens act in high-school drama classes and plays - they're learning something there, I guess. They act in community theater, especially in locations where drama in the schools is being cut. Adults go to drama school, but often act badly in films anyway. And yet I see movie after movie in which children act just fine (Mother of Mine, Wondrous Oblivion, Birth, Kabluey (where the kids are caricatures, but good caricatures.) On the other hand, that kid in The Dick Van Dyke Show... ouch.). Is aging an antidote to natural inborn talent? As we grow up, do we lose our ability to act? Or are these children, who seem to be acting so well, actually not doing much at all? In TYMPWOV, is the boy mostly just running around, looking upset, and playing with his tabletop soccer set, or is he interacting with others and... well, acting. I called the Stella Adler School in Manhattan to ask these questions, but the woman I spoke to told me that the youngest students they enroll are 14-year-olds (eight Saturday classes from 10 to 6, $800. No waiting list.) I asked the woman if the under-14s I see in the movies have been trained, or if whatever they show is just natural ability. She could only surmise. I asked if the Stella Adler Saturday classes have produced some success stories; she said yes, but didn't name anybody I've heard of. She didn't have much else to say about younger children and their appearances in movies, so I called a school out in the Valley (Sherman Oaks) which takes kids as young as 8. Sherman Oaks is up the 405 from Santa Monica, just over the hills from Hollywood. The fellow I spoke to told me flatly that every young person onscreen today has taken classes. He listed graduates from his school now appearing in Desperate Housewives, Everyone Hates Chris, etc., etc. (Classes from 10 to noon on Saturdays.) Agents and casting directors visit frequently, nominally as "class assistants," but actually trolling for talent; or maybe just trying to make a living. For example:****For Young actors:Howard MeltzerHannah Montana Casting DirectorTV Intensive - Saturday, October 4thIn each class session, the children work on a scene. In addition, there is instruction in preparation, auditioning, so forth. Camps and career-placement services are available. I asked the fellow whether children start out with talent and then lose it, or whether talent is distributed among children in the same proportion as among adults, and if so, what the classes might add to that. According to him, we're all natural-born actors. As children, we play-act all the time, but as we age, we forget how much fun that acting can be. Acting classes, like organized sports, are just a modern way of letting children continue to have fun. And just as you won't be playing in the NFL or NBA unless you associate yourself with an organized program, just so you won't break into Hollywood without connections. Plus, I'm now getting casting calls for some reason.Hamburger claims to have auditioned more than a thousand children looking for his stars in TYMPWOV. When he found the boy and girl that he wanted for the leads, Michel Joelsas and Daniela Piepszyk, he changed the script to fit them. Joelsas had never acted in a movie before (like Magaly Solier in Madeinusa, who had never even been in a movie theater when Claudia Llosa made her the lead in her movie). Hamburger says that Joelsas had talent and other characteristics of his personality that helped him to compose the character, such as "his shyness, his introspection, his curiosity about life, and his strength." And his "intelligence and a sense of observation. And he had strong charisma. He's also got a certain shyness and an inner strength." Hamburger introduced all the children in his movie slowly to the characters that they were to play, perhaps Mike Leigh-like. There was improvisation. None of the kids saw a script during the shooting of the movie. So no acting class there, unless you count Hamburger's direction; TYMPWOV argues for inborn talent, but only in one in a thousand or so. “The way I work with them is the most important element. I treat them as intelligent people. They are not children. They are spiritual, intelligent human beings. What I look for in casting children is charisma and talent, but, more than that, I want smart people. There is a very natural sense - especially the kids with their reactions...We worked a lot to have this very natural feel, but there is a lot of work behind it.” So roll the film of Michel's audition. What the heck did this kid have to do when he came through the door, number 1013, with Hamburger languishing there in his director's chair, in order to get picked boss boy? Bark like a dog? I coulda been a contender? Put on blackface, fall to his knees, and sing Mammy? We'll never know. Now my niece - those auditions are brutal. She crawls on her belly like a reptile. They badger her about her tattoos. Surely there were tattoos in Shakespeare's time, weren't there, even if they weren't coupling ferrets over You Suck! in red and green on her shoulder blades?When I say that the kids were fine in the movie, I just mean that I watched the movie and never found myself thinking, "This kid is acting." What they were actually doing onscreen, I wasn't exactly paying attention to. Sometimes in a movie I do think about what the child is up to: when Cameron Bright gets into the bath with a naked Nicole Kidman in Birth, I found myself speculating about how that was accomplished without breaking any laws. When Dylan Baker has a talk with his son in Happiness, about Baker's pedophilia and his abuse of the boy's sleepover friend the night before, I knew in advance that Baker was actually talking to the air and his son's reaction shots were filmed later. But in general, I don't sit watching for signs that actors are acting, child or otherwise. Mary Badham and Phillip Alford in To Kill a Mockingbird? How much were they given to do? Can't remember. Scout narrates the movie, but as an adult. Are kids mostly asked to just look worried, or angry, or confused? How often does a kid have to laugh in a movie? What's the story on kid monologs? 726,000 Google hits for "kid monologs," including the following from Henry V:BOY: As young as I am, I have observed these three swashers. I am boy to all three; but all three, though they would serve me, could not be man to me; for indeed three such antics do not amount to a man. For Bardolph, he is white-livered and red-faced; by the means whereof 'a faces it out, but fights not. For Pistol, he hath a killing tongue and a quiet sword; by the means whereof 'a breaks word and keeps whole weapons. For Nym, he hath heard that men of few words are the best men, and therefore he scorns to say his prayers, lest 'a should be thought a coward; but his few bad words are matched with as few good deeds, for 'a never broke any man's head but his own, and that was against a post when he was drunk. They will steal anything, and call it purchase. Bardolph stole a lute-case, bore it twelve leagues, and sold it for three halfpence. Nym and Bardolph are sworn brothers in filching, and in Calais they stole a fire-shovel. I knew by that piece of service the men would carry coals. They would have me as familiar with men's pockets as their gloves or handkerchers; which makes much against my manhood, if I should take from another's pocket to put into mine; for it is plain pocketing up of wrongs. I must leave them and seek some better service. Their villainy goes against my weak stomach, and therefore I must cast it up.Wow. Maybe Michel laid that one on Hamburger.When I think of "bad acting," am I just reacting to bad line readings? In Son of Rambow, the boys have a lot to say and every once in a while I'd raise an eyebrow. In TYMPWOV, Joelsas and Peipszyk and the other kids are required to show their chops as follows:First twenty-five minutes: Michel (Joelsas) is the only child in the first quarter of the movie, except for a brief interaction with Hanna (Piepszyk). He plays by himself, asks his parents questions, looks out the car window at the big city and, by the way, narrates the film creditably. Sustains hugs from his parents. (As a child, I was hugged by a woman in a play once and I had to stand there and take it with a smile.) This is a good-looking young man. The camera loves him. So he walks, runs, waits, frowns at strange food, pisses in a flowerpot. It all looks real to me. I guess that's acting.Second twenty-five minutes: Michel gets slapped, runs away, cooks in the kitchen, kills time around the house. Now some face time with Hanna - mild dialog - but since I don't speak Portuguese, how can I evaluate their line readings? Rats. (And by the way, watching the movie, I mostly couldn't distinguish Portuguese from Yiddish; be nice if the subtitles would indicate which was being spoken - and ditto for Swedish and Finnish in Mother of Mine). At 39 minutes (out of 100), Michel meets Hanna's friends, three boys. They refer to Michel as the goy. Ten minutes of ensemble child acting; all five seem a little stiff, but they're just meeting each other for the first time, so maybe in real life they would be stiff. Will the stiffness persist? Now Michel settles in with his neighbor, the elderly Shlomo next door, and makes friends throughout the neighborhood. He's not asked to say much by Hamburger, but he does a lot of worrying about his parents, running around the neighborhood, so on. At the halfway point in the film, the World Cup begins. Third twenty-five minutes: First World-Cup match with everyone watching; Michel spending time alone again in the apartment; then with a whole crowd of kids - minimal dialog; back home at the one-hour mark. Second match. Polish Jew, Italian Jew, Greek, African, German Jew, Hamburger really pushing the melting-pot theme. Local soccer game. Narration by boy. He wants to be a goalie. Another World-Cup match (sees first with Shlomo, second at the union, third with the old women. Local kids game with Michel as goalie. Piepszyk gives him a gift in a one-on-one scene with dialog. Michel goes to synagogue.Final twenty-five minutes: The kids do an excellent acting job at a bar mitzvah celebration. And then some acting by Joelsas, as he helps a young union member hide from the army and secret police. Emoting, face to face with an adult! Some intense moments. Then more alone time for the boy, now coping with his worries in a more mature way than at the beginning. And the final soccer match, and more perfect-pitch behavior from Joelsas. And drama to wrap up. The boy has charisma, for sure. I believed him, from start to finish, and the other kids too.And lest I forget, every time a goal was scored, everybody whooped and waved their arms in the air and I wondered if all the women in Brazil were shaving under their arms in 1970. According to a Brazilian I asked, the answer is yes. Looks come first in Brazil, she told me, and that includes proper underarm maintenance.
]]>Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:04:22 GMTjoem18bjoem18b Blog9/25/2008 7:04:22 PMO Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias (2006)***** SPOILERS *****The Year My Parents Went On Vaction tells the story of a pre-teen boy in São Paulo, Brazil, separated from his parents during a military coup in 1970. As the army takes over, the country is distracted in part by Brazil's successes in the World Cup of that year (sort of like following the pennant race or NFL football in the U.S. as the country's financial system implodes). The movie is pleasant, never dull, well shot, with a delicate score that adds to the feelings of sadness and loss inherent in the plot (the director threw out the first score written for the movie; Beto Villares then did it over and got it right).TYMPWOV begins with a mother and father taking their son to grandfather's house in São Paulo. The three are riding in a VW bug, '65 or earlier. A Brazilian friend suggests that for verisimilitude, they should have been in a Renault or Citroen, because the bug was the inexpensive car of youth and the lower middle-class; her family always drove French cars. Be that as it may, the movie's streets are rife with vintage bugs and VW buses, though I did spot a Renault or two. I mention this because the first car that I bought and paid for with my own money was a new '67 bug from Belmont Motors in Massachusetts, powder blue. It has been sitting since 1981 or so in a succession of company parking lots, progressively degenerating until, paint gone, wheels seized, flowering weeds growing from dirt caught in the chassis crevicles, it looks so bad that I was ordered to have it towed off the property because it had become an eyesore, at least to one sorehead in the company who remained anonymous - the bug's engine refusing to start, a hole in the floor threatening to release the battery under the back seat like a bomb dropped from its bay at the first speed bump, the windows opaque as my glasses in the Turkish bath down the street. Fortunately, my son stepped up and volunteered to restore the car as a hobby. He abstracted it on a flatbed towtruck via Raul's Towing Service to his driveway, where it sat, partially disassembled, for a week or two before the city, at the behest of neighbors or a cruising patrol car, ordered him to remove it. He rolled the poor thing into his garage, wheels now at least freed, out of sight behind closed doors, and since then he has ordered replacement parts from an unending list. He tells me that there are two sources from which to obtain these parts: (a) a quality manufacturer somewhere or other, or (b)Brazil. You want quality, you go to the quality manufacturer; you want cheap, you go to Brazil. I don't know if that's true or not but when I replaced a bumper a long time ago, it had a "Made in Brazil" sticker on the inside surface. One tap by another vehicle and the bumper folded up like an origami noodle. Also, curiously, '67 door handles are unavailable. But the point is, if you're a bug lover you might want to give TYMPWOV a little love for that reason if for no other.Director/writer Cao Hamburger and his co-writer, Claudio Galperin, were both born in São Paulo in 1962 and were eight years old when General Emilio Medici engineered his coup. Hamburger's parents "went on vacation" at that time, but only for a few weeks. In this movie, Hamburger and Galperin share some of their childhood experiences growing up in the cultural melting-pot of São Paulo. Hamburger's father came from a German/Jewish family that emigrated to Brazil before World War II. His mother was of Italian/Catholic stock, though both parents were non-religious scientists as he grew up. He says that he began thinking about São Paulo's mix of cultures and his roots while living and feeling like an outsider in London, another city where races and nationalities mingle. According to Hamburger (and my Brazilian friends), Brazil is deeply divided over socio-economic class issues (the rich, a small middle-class, and the poor) but is accepting of emigrants; he refers to Brazilian culture as Samba culture - "Samba" here meaning, roughly, "let's all dance together." In fact, Hamburger started out with all sorts of ideas for the movie, but while making it settled on the idea of enjoying the brief periods of sunshine in life on a cloudy day. The movie was made on a medium budget by Brazilian standards. Since the success of films like Central Station and City of God, Hamburger says, funding opportunities for cinema have gotten a lot better. He used professionals as well as non-actors from the community, which in the film is a conservative Jewish neighborhood. Today, Hamburger says, this neighborhood is Korean, but since he is exploring his own roots, for the purposes of the film it remains Jewish. Hamburger spent four months finding an empty apartment building to use for the shoot; the movie was filmed completely on location.So often in making a movie, the director starts out with an idea and massages it until a theme for the film is produced. This process can extend over years with input from editors, writers, friends, family, and assorted other sources while the director chases funding, as I describe in my review of Manda Bala. Hamburger's initial inspiration was to examine the mixture of cultures in Brazil, and from that grew the idea of examining a year in the life of a boy growing up in the same time and place that Hamburger and Galperin did. During the making of the movie, the military coup and contemperaneous world-cup excitement in the film emerged, according to the director, as metaphors for life. It seems to me that some of these metaphors crop up post-production but perhaps I'm just metaphor-blind or metaphor-averse. Does a movie metaphor count if it's discovered after the movie is finished? Does it count if a reviewer invokes it, rather than the director? I do like the way that Claudia Llosa, for example, disavows metaphors in her Maven-reviewed Madeinusa, a movie which could easily be weighed down with them. I'm guessing that Hamburger's military coup and World Cup would remain in the movie whether Hamburger deemed them metaphors or not. As it is, he has one more thing to talk about during interviews. Anyway, the coup represents a dark day and the World-Cup victory represents a shaft of sunlight breaking through the gloom of that day. The dark day is life under the military regime and the sunlight represents those moments in life that you must embrace in order to get through the bad patches - did I just nest a metaphor within a metaphor there? The life of goalies in general is also a metaphor in the movie, but if the victory is a bright shaft of sunlight, what is the goalie? A meteorite the size of Oshgosh? Who knows? The gray day/sunlight metaphor, applied to my own personal life, would be like at my work, where my boss would be dictator General Emilio Medici, and out of the grinding gray of morning I would emerge at lunchtime to sit down across from Izzy Vulvano and beat his pants off playing Magic and using my special red and black deck. Also the movie is about dealing with our loneliness and our connections to others, how we make them and break them and move on. Is the movie itself a metaphor for that, or just a movie about that? Also, the director does not agree that soccer is the opiate of the masses, exploited by the junta in this case to maintain calm. Hamburger is going for gray day/sunshine here, not gray day/opium. And having mentioned Manda Bala above, note that this whole movie unfurled without a kidnapping or fried frog in sight, but only because the whole country is under siege from an autocratic military dictatorship rather than a scourge of corrupt politicians and kidnapping-for-profit criminal thugs.Strangely, Hamburger's soccer metaphor gets turned on its head at the end of the movie. Irony? Another layer? Or just part of the movie that doesn't conform to a simple, stumbled-upon talking point? I thought about calling Hamburger and asking him, but nobody likes a wiseass.When the metaphorical army arrives in Michel's neighborhood and starts dragging young men out of their union offices in São Paulo, clubbing them and hurling them into vans while the boy's parents are in hiding, it occurred to me to wonder whether such scenes are automatically more powerful when filmed in the country where they are supposed to have happened, in the language in which they happened, by victims or the relatives of victims of the evils portrayed. Or, for a subtitle-hating country like America, could such a scene be made more visceral and moving if shot in Hollywood for U.S. consumption? For example, would Der Untergang or The Lives of Others have retained their energy or even gained some, if they had been made, shot for shot, in the U.S. with U.S. actors instead of Germans? Ennio De Concini tried it with xxAlec Guiness playing Hitler but I think we can agree that that didn't work as well as Bruno Ganz doing it. Being a cinema snob, I would say without cavil that it is intuitively obvious that the Brazilian version of the coup or the German version of Hitler's last days cannot fail to have an innate power, if well enough done, that a U.S. version could never match. But hold on. Summer Palace provides a dramatic take on Tiananmen Square and the events there in 1989, yet I've heard plenty of squawking (from round eyes) about its failure to do justice to that historic conflict. Would a movie about Tiananmen, made along the lines of The Last Emperor, fare better in the U.S? Could Gettysburg withstand a transfer to Japan; if Kurosawa made it, might it even improve in the eyes of the Japanese? Or in the eyes of American viewers as well? How to assign metrics to questions like these? It's easy to just say that the better the filmmaker, the better the film, for all informed viewers of taste. Do the French still love Jerry Lewis? Are Hollywood blockbusters still the biggest grossers all around the world? And children in movies - does the fact that the child is native to a country foreign to the viewer and speaks a foreign language have any effect one way or the other on that viewer? Rather than approaching these questions from first principles, maybe the thing to do is to evaluate a hundred movies or so, make a call on each, and examine the results for trends.And speaking of children, how do they learn to act so well? Or isn't learning involved? Teens act in high-school drama classes and plays - they're learning something there, I guess. They act in community theater, especially in locations where drama in the schools is being cut. Adults go to drama school, but often act badly in films anyway. And yet I see movie after movie in which children act just fine (Mother of Mine, Wondrous Oblivion, Birth, Kabluey (where the kids are caricatures, but good caricatures.) On the other hand, that kid in The Dick Van Dyke Show... ouch.). Is aging an antidote to natural inborn talent? As we grow up, do we lose our ability to act? Or are these children, who seem to be acting so well, actually not doing much at all? In TYMPWOV, is the boy mostly just running around, looking upset, and playing with his tabletop soccer set, or is he interacting with others and... well, acting. I called the Stella Adler School in Manhattan to ask these questions, but the woman I spoke to told me that the youngest students they enroll are 14-year-olds (eight Saturday classes from 10 to 6, $800. No waiting list.) I asked the woman if the under-14s I see in the movies have been trained, or if whatever they show is just natural ability. She could only surmise. I asked if the Stella Adler Saturday classes have produced some success stories; she said yes, but didn't name anybody I've heard of. She didn't have much else to say about younger children and their appearances in movies, so I called a school out in the Valley (Sherman Oaks) which takes kids as young as 8. Sherman Oaks is up the 405 from Santa Monica, just over the hills from Hollywood. The fellow I spoke to told me flatly that every young person onscreen today has taken classes. He listed graduates from his school now appearing in Desperate Housewives, Everyone Hates Chris, etc., etc. (Classes from 10 to noon on Saturdays.) Agents and casting directors visit frequently, nominally as "class assistants," but actually trolling for talent; or maybe just trying to make a living. For example:****For Young actors:Howard MeltzerHannah Montana Casting DirectorTV Intensive - Saturday, October 4thIn each class session, the children work on a scene. In addition, there is instruction in preparation, auditioning, so forth. Camps and career-placement services are available. I asked the fellow whether children start out with talent and then lose it, or whether talent is distributed among children in the same proportion as among adults, and if so, what the classes might add to that. According to him, we're all natural-born actors. As children, we play-act all the time, but as we age, we forget how much fun that acting can be. Acting classes, like organized sports, are just a modern way of letting children continue to have fun. And just as you won't be playing in the NFL or NBA unless you associate yourself with an organized program, just so you won't break into Hollywood without connections. Plus, I'm now getting casting calls for some reason.Hamburger claims to have auditioned more than a thousand children looking for his stars in TYMPWOV. When he found the boy and girl that he wanted for the leads, Michel Joelsas and Daniela Piepszyk, he changed the script to fit them. Joelsas had never acted in a movie before (like Magaly Solier in Madeinusa, who had never even been in a movie theater when Claudia Llosa made her the lead in her movie). Hamburger says that Joelsas had talent and other characteristics of his personality that helped him to compose the character, such as "his shyness, his introspection, his curiosity about life, and his strength." And his "intelligence and a sense of observation. And he had strong charisma. He's also got a certain shyness and an inner strength." Hamburger introduced all the children in his movie slowly to the characters that they were to play, perhaps Mike Leigh-like. There was improvisation. None of the kids saw a script during the shooting of the movie. So no acting class there, unless you count Hamburger's direction; TYMPWOV argues for inborn talent, but only in one in a thousand or so. “The way I work with them is the most important element. I treat them as intelligent people. They are not children. They are spiritual, intelligent human beings. What I look for in casting children is charisma and talent, but, more than that, I want smart people. There is a very natural sense - especially the kids with their reactions...We worked a lot to have this very natural feel, but there is a lot of work behind it.” So roll the film of Michel's audition. What the heck did this kid have to do when he came through the door, number 1013, with Hamburger languishing there in his director's chair, in order to get picked boss boy? Bark like a dog? I coulda been a contender? Put on blackface, fall to his knees, and sing Mammy? We'll never know. Now my niece - those auditions are brutal. She crawls on her belly like a reptile. They badger her about her tattoos. Surely there were tattoos in Shakespeare's time, weren't there, even if they weren't coupling ferrets over You Suck! in red and green on her shoulder blades?When I say that the kids were fine in the movie, I just mean that I watched the movie and never found myself thinking, "This kid is acting." What they were actually doing onscreen, I wasn't exactly paying attention to. Sometimes in a movie I do think about what the child is up to: when Cameron Bright gets into the bath with a naked Nicole Kidman in Birth, I found myself speculating about how that was accomplished without breaking any laws. When Dylan Baker has a talk with his son in Happiness, about Baker's pedophilia and his abuse of the boy's sleepover friend the night before, I knew in advance that Baker was actually talking to the air and his son's reaction shots were filmed later. But in general, I don't sit watching for signs that actors are acting, child or otherwise. Mary Badham and Phillip Alford in To Kill a Mockingbird? How much were they given to do? Can't remember. Scout narrates the movie, but as an adult. Are kids mostly asked to just look worried, or angry, or confused? How often does a kid have to laugh in a movie? What's the story on kid monologs? 726,000 Google hits for "kid monologs," including the following from Henry V:BOY: As young as I am, I have observed these three swashers. I am boy to all three; but all three, though they would serve me, could not be man to me; for indeed three such antics do not amount to a man. For Bardolph, he is white-livered and red-faced; by the means whereof 'a faces it out, but fights not. For Pistol, he hath a killing tongue and a quiet sword; by the means whereof 'a breaks word and keeps whole weapons. For Nym, he hath heard that men of few words are the best men, and therefore he scorns to say his prayers, lest 'a should be thought a coward; but his few bad words are matched with as few good deeds, for 'a never broke any man's head but his own, and that was against a post when he was drunk. They will steal anything, and call it purchase. Bardolph stole a lute-case, bore it twelve leagues, and sold it for three halfpence. Nym and Bardolph are sworn brothers in filching, and in Calais they stole a fire-shovel. I knew by that piece of service the men would carry coals. They would have me as familiar with men's pockets as their gloves or handkerchers; which makes much against my manhood, if I should take from another's pocket to put into mine; for it is plain pocketing up of wrongs. I must leave them and seek some better service. Their villainy goes against my weak stomach, and therefore I must cast it up.Wow. Maybe Michel laid that one on Hamburger.When I think of "bad acting," am I just reacting to bad line readings? In Son of Rambow, the boys have a lot to say and every once in a while I'd raise an eyebrow. In TYMPWOV, Joelsas and Peipszyk and the other kids are required to show their chops as follows:First twenty-five minutes: Michel (Joelsas) is the only child in the first quarter of the movie, except for a brief interaction with Hanna (Piepszyk). He plays by himself, asks his parents questions, looks out the car window at the big city and, by the way, narrates the film creditably. Sustains hugs from his parents. (As a child, I was hugged by a woman in a play once and I had to stand there and take it with a smile.) This is a good-looking young man. The camera loves him. So he walks, runs, waits, frowns at strange food, pisses in a flowerpot. It all looks real to me. I guess that's acting.Second twenty-five minutes: Michel gets slapped, runs away, cooks in the kitchen, kills time around the house. Now some face time with Hanna - mild dialog - but since I don't speak Portuguese, how can I evaluate their line readings? Rats. (And by the way, watching the movie, I mostly couldn't distinguish Portuguese from Yiddish; be nice if the subtitles would indicate which was being spoken - and ditto for Swedish and Finnish in Mother of Mine). At 39 minutes (out of 100), Michel meets Hanna's friends, three boys. They refer to Michel as the goy. Ten minutes of ensemble child acting; all five seem a little stiff, but they're just meeting each other for the first time, so maybe in real life they would be stiff. Will the stiffness persist? Now Michel settles in with his neighbor, the elderly Shlomo next door, and makes friends throughout the neighborhood. He's not asked to say much by Hamburger, but he does a lot of worrying about his parents, running around the neighborhood, so on. At the halfway point in the film, the World Cup begins. Third twenty-five minutes: First World-Cup match with everyone watching; Michel spending time alone again in the apartment; then with a whole crowd of kids - minimal dialog; back home at the one-hour mark. Second match. Polish Jew, Italian Jew, Greek, African, German Jew, Hamburger really pushing the melting-pot theme. Local soccer game. Narration by boy. He wants to be a goalie. Another World-Cup match (sees first with Shlomo, second at the union, third with the old women. Local kids game with Michel as goalie. Piepszyk gives him a gift in a one-on-one scene with dialog. Michel goes to synagogue.Final twenty-five minutes: The kids do an excellent acting job at a bar mitzvah celebration. And then some acting by Joelsas, as he helps a young union member hide from the army and secret police. Emoting, face to face with an adult! Some intense moments. Then more alone time for the boy, now coping with his worries in a more mature way than at the beginning. And the final soccer match, and more perfect-pitch behavior from Joelsas. And drama to wrap up. The boy has charisma, for sure. I believed him, from start to finish, and the other kids too.And lest I forget, every time a goal was scored, everybody whooped and waved their arms in the air and I wondered if all the women in Brazil were shaving under their arms in 1970. According to a Brazilian I asked, the answer is yes. Looks come first in Brazil, she told me, and that includes proper underarm maintenance. http://www.spout.com/blogs/warmovieblog/archive/2008/9/4/34769.aspx Post By: WarMovieBlog
Post To: WarMovieBlog Blog
Post Date: 9/4/2008 6:01:21 PM
Body: Son of Rambow (2007) IMDB So. What if the only movie (or TV show) you ever saw in your entire life to date was none other than Stallone's First Blood? What kind of impact would that have on you? Especially if you were brought up in a staunchly religious environment?Son of Rambow takes on that issue, and proceeds to be a fun ride down the road of youth and the imagination and exploration of it.Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) is that boy. Brought up somewhere in the UK by his widowed mother in a "Plymouth Bretheren" household (for us in the states, think Amish, sort of, kind of), he's not allowed to watch TV or movies of any kind, even educational videos in his school. One day while sitting in the hallway (not watching a video!) he runs into the misfit Lee Carter (Will Poulter) and his trek towards realizing that there is a larger world outside of his sparsely furnished and dim house begins.Through a series of mishaps, he happens to watch the entirety of "First Blood" and is totally blown away by it. His already imaginitive mind begins to fabricate a detailed and intricate new story, where he must rescue his father, Rambo from the evil scarecrow. He puts his artistic talents to use creating a series of comic-like storyboards for his new epic.As luck would have it, Carter's got an itch of being a filmmaker, and between his camera and Will's story, they start to put the story to tape. By the end of it they enlist practially the entire school, including French exchange student and Didier (Jules Sitruk).Really, though, the story is a lot more than that. It explores Carter's relationship to his brother, Will's discovery of the world around him, the ideals of friendship, and takes a tongue-in-cheek jab at the movie industry, with all of its infighting and everyone inviting everyone else to be involved....So, not being exactly what I expected, (which was something more down the war-movie alley), it still wound up an excellent film. And, although the cast is mostly made up of, and the story revolves around, the kids... I don't think I'd recommend it for the youngsters, at least not in this day and age. Some of the things they do and the places they wind up might be difficult to explain. ("Um, no you can't do that, ever!")Unfortunately there are some moments which could have been left out, such as Will's inciting all of the older students' commons area into a giant dancing jumping fit. Didn't quite get that one, I'm afraid.Son of Rambow is just a lot of fun. Check it out. Son of Rambow (2007) on Spout.com Originally posted on:War Movie Reviews and News
]]>Thu, 04 Sep 2008 22:01:21 GMTWarMovieBlogWarMovieBlog Blog9/4/2008 6:01:21 PMSon of Rambow (2007) IMDB So. What if the only movie (or TV show) you ever saw in your entire life to date was none other than Stallone's First Blood? What kind of impact would that have on you? Especially if you were brought up in a staunchly religious environment?Son of Rambow takes on that issue, and proceeds to be a fun ride down the road of youth and the imagination and exploration of it.Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) is that boy. Brought up somewhere in the UK by his widowed mother in a "Plymouth Bretheren" household (for us in the states, think Amish, sort of, kind of), he's not allowed to watch TV or movies of any kind, even educational videos in his school. One day while sitting in the hallway (not watching a video!) he runs into the misfit Lee Carter (Will Poulter) and his trek towards realizing that there is a larger world outside of his sparsely furnished and dim house begins.Through a series of mishaps, he happens to watch the entirety of "First Blood" and is totally blown away by it. His already imaginitive mind begins to fabricate a detailed and intricate new story, where he must rescue his father, Rambo from the evil scarecrow. He puts his artistic talents to use creating a series of comic-like storyboards for his new epic.As luck would have it, Carter's got an itch of being a filmmaker, and between his camera and Will's story, they start to put the story to tape. By the end of it they enlist practially the entire school, including French exchange student and Didier (Jules Sitruk).Really, though, the story is a lot more than that. It explores Carter's relationship to his brother, Will's discovery of the world around him, the ideals of friendship, and takes a tongue-in-cheek jab at the movie industry, with all of its infighting and everyone inviting everyone else to be involved....So, not being exactly what I expected, (which was something more down the war-movie alley), it still wound up an excellent film. And, although the cast is mostly made up of, and the story revolves around, the kids... I don't think I'd recommend it for the youngsters, at least not in this day and age. Some of the things they do and the places they wind up might be difficult to explain. ("Um, no you can't do that, ever!")Unfortunately there are some moments which could have been left out, such as Will's inciting all of the older students' commons area into a giant dancing jumping fit. Didn't quite get that one, I'm afraid.Son of Rambow is just a lot of fun. Check it out. Son of Rambow (2007) on Spout.com Originally posted on:War Movie Reviews and News http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/comedy/MemberTagFilms.aspxcomedy
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