ChrisThilk

I watched Gigantic after taking a look at its marketing campaign, so my immediate question that had to be answered was: Did the campaign accurately portray and sell the finished film?

The answer is yes, absolutely.

The movie is funny and offbeat without ever descending into parody or a portrayal of quirk for the sake of quirk. Instead, while all the characters act in what would be considered odd ways they never go over the edge into being just ridiculous. More to the point, they all stay true to their motivations and remain grounded in the reality of this film’s universe, which is even more important and the lynchpin of such directors as Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach.

Dano and Deschanel have obvious chemistry and - and this is essential to the movie’s success or could have been a cause of its failure - are able to deliver the highly stylized dialogue in a way that’s natural and believable. That’s a testament to their skills as actors as well as to the accuracy of the casting.

The campaign lays out the movie’s story pretty well so I won’t rehash it again. But let me say there’s a twist that comes in the movie’s last 10 minutes or so that makes you rethink some of the basic assumptions about the characters. It’s an interesting twist but is the one thing about the movie that doesn’t work for me and actually takes away from everything that’s preceded it. I dig, in general, things like that which shake up your beliefs but this movie didn’t need it.

Aside from that, though, Gigantic is a very good flick that, if you’re in one of the areas where it’s screening, is well worth going and checking out.

For some reason Quantum of Solace, the most-recent outing of super-spy James Bond, got lukewarm reviews when it came out in theaters. I’m not sure why that was since I actually quite enjoyed it and even thought it was an improvement over 2006’s Casino Royale.

Picking up right, more or less, where that previous movie left off, Daniel Craig once again stars as the new stripped-down and highly intense version of Bond the first movie introduced us to. He’s on a mission to not only uncover some shadowy, nebulous organization that specializes is toppling governments and exploiting natural resources but also to - although he doesn’t admit as much - to avenge the death of Vesper, the girlfriend he lost in the previous installment.

The nature of the plot doesn’t really matter though. Quantum of Solace needs to be viewed as the second half of a single film, one who’s primary purpose is to introduce this version of James Bond and give him a mythos of his own as someone who is emotionally damaged and brutal in pursuit of his goals, which often seem personal but which also have the advantage of meshing nicely with those of Queen and country.

Watching Craig as Bond is even more enjoyable this time than it was in Casino Royale. We know better who this guy is now and can read more into his aggressively passive expressions. It’s also more interesting to see him in the movie’s series of chases and action sequences. I found myself thinking over the course of the movie that he reminded me of Indiana Jones in how he escapes not because of some master plan he’s worked out, but instead because he just happened to survive from one moment to the next, not thinking about anything beyond the next ledge he’s going to leap to and he’ll figure out the next move once he’s there.

There’s never really a moment that doesn’t work in Quantum of Solace. Not only are the action scenes great to watch but the quieter moments (if you can call them that) - especially the ones with Dame Judy Dench as M - are pretty good as well. Dench is basically given the same two things to do over and over again - scold Bond and remind him of his duties or look up information based on Bond’s latest discovery - but she sells them with her usual class and talent.

Quantum of Solace comes with a host of bonus features on the two-disc special edition DVD, including:

• Bond on Location: All about the exotic locales and how they play into the story of the movie.
• Start of Shooting: Very brief featurette about the shooting of the movie.
• On Location: More about the settings. Not sure why this wasn’t just rolled into the 20+ minute first bit.
• Olga Kurylenko and the Boat Chase: Covering one of the key action sequences in the film.
• Director Marc Forster: How the man behind the camera did on his first time out.
• The Music: Self-explanitory
• Crew Files: Likewise.

As I said, Quantum of Solace needs to be viewed as the second half of a single story and it works as just that. Well worth checking out.

I don’t know about you but I always think of The Manhattan Project in the same vein as Wargames. You know, two movies about some kid in the mid-80s who’s smarter than adults around him and who uses those smarts to blow up the world, or at least Ithaca, New York and the surrounding states.

The movie doesn’t hold up nearly as well as some others from that era, unfortunately. It’s still fun to watch, though mostly at this point simply for the memories it evokes of watching it on VHS countless times while spending summer days at my grandparents’ house. It’s especially bad when you realize that John Lithgow’s character basically causes his own problems when he gives the kid a tour of his lab - where he’s making highly unstable weapon’s grade plutonium - because he wants to sleep with the kid’s mother. Good job on that, big guy.

Months before the release of Watchmen into theaters, Warner Bros. - specifically their Warner Premiere division - made the first chapter of something called “Watchmen Motion Comics” available as a free download through iTunes.

The format of the video was just what is sounds like, literally the panels of the Watchmen graphic novel put in rudimentary motion and with voice work. It was quite interesting to watch but the future episodes, which weren’t released for quite a while after the first one, weren’t free and so I didn’t continue watching them.

But now Warner Premiere has released all 12 chapters on the two DVD set Watchmen - The Complete Motion Comic.

Unlike the big-screen movie adaptation there’s nothing new or altered from the source material here. Most every panel, including The Black Freighter sub-story and everything else, that appeared in the graphic novel is brought to motion. Dave Gibbons’ artwork is rendered faithfully, with moving limbs and objects being the only alteration.

It’s interesting to watch the whole story unfold like this. I can’t say it’s preferable to reading the printed novel. It’s not. But despite its exact duplication it does provide an alternate way to enjoy the story and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Occasionally things seem silly, but those are few and far between. For the most part it works and is certainly something that fulfills its primary duty as a promotional tool for the feature film.

More than anything, this “version” of the story makes it seem filmable. It’s one thing to look at the amazingly dense graphic novel and say it can’t be translated to film. But this does just that, without any interpretation. The five hour running time of the 12 episodes is just about how long the movie would need to be told. It doesn’t seem like so high a hurdle. While watching it hasn’t impacted my feelings about that feature film, it does make me view the opinions circulating around its making differently.

The two-disc DVD contains only one special feature, a 10-minute featurette on the making of Warner Premiere’s next DC Comics animated feature, Wonder Woman. There’s no finished footage in the segment (which is a bit surprising) but instead it’s made up of cast and crew interviews, with rough sketches from the film giving a glimpse of what it will look like as well as plenty of background on the history of Wonder Woman in the comics.

I went on a movie-watching spree on Hulu recently and wanted to catalog some of the flicks I caught on the site.

Nobody’s Fool: I saw this movie when it first came out and remembered quite liking it so I thought it was cool that it showed up on Hulu and I had a chance to revisit it. Paul Newman, unsurprisingly, gives a great low-key performance as a small town curmudgeon who tries to come to terms with the life he’s lead as he meets his grandchildren, tries to hold down a job and other everyday tasks. There’s no big emotional arc he goes on - he winds up in much the same place at the end of the movie that he started out in - but Newman is always worth watching and he never makes the one long, sustained note he’s asked to hold out boring.

The Stranger: Orsen Welles plays an on-the-run Nazi who has managed to integrate himself into a small town in the U.S. but who is eventually tracked down by Nazi-hunter Edward G. Robinson. Not the best film from either one but definitely worth watching if you can track it down.

Hoffa: I know it’s popular to trash the 1992 Danny DeVito-directed biopic of the union legend, but I like it. It’s another movie I saw around the time of its first release and, upon re-watching, I stand by my assertion that DeVito makes some interesting choices and that Jack Nicholson does a pretty good job in the title role. It’s obviously not going to be a complete story of the man’s life but it hits many of the high points and does so in an entertaining way.

OK, now I’m all caught up.

It’s more or less impossible for me to adequately explain the plot for Ashes of Time, a film from director Wong Kar-Wai, so let me just paste the official synopsis here:

The film is set in five parts, five seasons that are part of the Chinese almanac. The story takes place in the jianghu, the world of the martial arts. Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung) has lived in the western desert for some years. He left his home in White Camel Mountain when the woman he loved chose to marry his elder brother rather than him. Instead of seeking glory, he ends up as an agent. When people come to him with a wish to eliminate someone who has wronged them, he puts them in touch with a swordsman who can do the job.

Now let’s be clear that this brief description of the film doesn’t come close to doing justice to the film itself.

Broken into five parts, the loose center of the film is the man, mentioned above, who finds people for clients who need problems solved.

But what it’s really about is the visual palette that Wong Kar-Wai works with throughout the film. In addition to the highly dramatic - also melodramatic - performances from all the lead actors and actresses the colors and tones the director works with are a character in and of themselves. It’s absolutely gorgeous to look at and behold. I mean absolutely fantastic.

Aside from the visuals, though, Wong Kar-Wai gets some fantasticly deep performances from the actors he uses. The subtleties of those performances - despite the over-the-top emotions they’re asked to portray - are simply outstanding and a joy to watch.

This “Redux” version is meant to be the ultimate version of the film, originally released in 1993 but since disseminated - both officially and unofficially - in various versions. This Redux release, then, is meant to set the record straight and be “definitive” in the eyes of the director. Not being familiar with the original or any of the subsequent iterations I can’t rightly speak to what’s different but I can tell you that if the original was half this moving it has to be fantastic.

The DVD release contains just a couple special features, a Q&A with Wong Kar-Wai and a featurette on the making of the film.

Ashes of Time is full of fantastic visuals and emotive performances and well worth checking out if you’ve heard of the movie or not as it’s a richly rewarding experience.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno might be director Kevin Smith’s most accessible movie to date, even while it also seems like the one that least carries many of Smith’s defining characteristics.

The story takes two childhood friends, Zack and Miri, who have known each other since grade school and who currently live with each other - though in a non-sexual manner - as they find themselves in the middle of a financial problem. With little income and a lot of bills the two find inspiration to their difficulties at a horrendously uncomfortable high school reunion.

That solution? They’ll make a low-budget porno. Hence the movie’s title.

They recruit a hodge-podge of friends to help them make their movie. A co-worker of Zack’s becomes the producer because he’s the only one with money. A high school friend with a video camera becomes the cameraman. And a couple of ladies - portrayed by actual porn stars - become the stars in the movie.

In-between the problems with production that provide much of the movie’s comedy Zack and Miri provide the movie with it’s heart and emotional resonance. These two have known each other for 20+ years and never had a romantic relationship but decide, of course, that it’s going to be the least weird if they have sex on-screen. They just need to convince themselves that it’s not going to impact their friendship. But of course it does and it’s not hard to predict where the story will lead them to.

Zack and Miri doesn’t play like a Kevin Smith movie. By that I mean many of Smith’s verbal ticks are downplayed in the writing, or at least they’re less prevalent in the hands of the actors he’s cast here. While there’s an abundance of jokes about people’s private parts and a huge-honking Star Wars reference, it’s handled a little bit more deftly than is usually the case in his movies. Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks, portraying the titular couple, bring their own style to the characters and makes Smith’s dialogue flow in a way that it hasn’t really been able to in prior films. That’s not a knock against them - I’m a huge Smith fan - but it just works on a different level in Zack and Miri than it has previously.

The movie is now available as a two-disc DVD set. On disc one you’ll find just the movie. On disc two you’ll find a wealth of extras, including the “Money Shots” webisodes that were released on line during the film’s production and a collection of bloopers, ad libs and other fun outtakes.

The best part of the extra features, though, is “Popcorn Porn,” an hour-and-a-half documentary that chronicles the film from inception through the much-documented battle over ratings with the MPAA. This is absolutely the best thing (other than the movie) included in the set and I definitely recommend watching it after you watch the feature.

Dana Carvey is, as you’d expect, the primary reason to watch Opportunity Knocks. The movie, released in 1990 (which was actually around the time his popularity on SNL was beginning to wane) casts Carvey as a con-man who goes around pulling small time jobs to keep him and his partner out of debt to a mobster. On the run from that mobster Carvey’s character winds up getting involved in a much bigger con by taking on the identity of an in-demand businessman, a situation that results in him falling in love and eventually forsaking his lay-about lifestyle.

It’s not a great movie - sometimes it can be downright painful to watch and it’s not aged well in the 19 years since its release - but it is funny more often than not and Carvey is quite charming in the role. It’s essentially an outlet for him to pull out a handful of impressions and voices, but that’s exactly what the audience was asking from him at that point. When the humor drops, though, Carvey seems oddly capable of expressing some genuine emotions.

Like many of the movies I’ve been watching lately, Opportunity Knocks is available on Hulu right now so if you’re one of those that saw it when it came out and want to revisit it, now’s your chance.

If you’ve never seen Support Your Local Gunfigher, or its predecessor Support Your Local Sheriff, you really are missing out on a couple of highly enjoyable movies.

In Gunfighter, James Garner plays a con man of sorts who, in an attempt to sneak out on the high class madam he’s engaged to, winds up in the town of Purgatory, a small Western outpost that has two mining companies that will stop at nothing to put the other one out of business. He’s mistaken for a famous gunfighter one owner has hired to take out the other, but the other - played by Harry Morgan - tries to hire him away. Eventually Garner’s character turns the situation to his advantage and wackiness generally ensues, especially when Morgan’s daughter - played by Suzanne Pleshette - gets involved.

It’s a slow paced buy quick-witted movie that has nothing offensive about it and is great to watch. It and Sheriff were often on TBS or some such channel about 15 or 20 years ago and I would always wind up watching them if I came across them on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. So when I saw that Gunfighter was on Hulu (it’s only available there for a couple more days) I immediately started it up. I’m very much hoping Support Your Local Sheriff, which is just as funny and features many of the same cast members, is available there soon.

There have been a number of successful, at least as measured by box-office and critical standards, biopics of legendary musicians in the last few years. Ray, Walk the Line and a handful of others have all followed a pretty standard formula. Talented young adult, tragic story, drug and alcohol abuse, redemption. It’s all very sentimental.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is just what was needed to have more than a little fun with that formula.

John C. Reilly stars as Dewey Cox. After slicing his brother in half at a young age, Cox turns to music to express himself and the pain he feels. That leads him on a career path that will see him have a number of hit records, a wife and several dozen children, heavy drug use, groupie-filled orgies, an encounter in India with The Beatles, a divorce, another marriage, a TV show and ultimately a shot at reclaiming his legacy.

If it doesn’t sound all that funny in the telling let me assure you that is is very funny in execution. Reilly is fantastic as Cox, a character that brings in a little Johnny Cash, a little Brian Wilson, a little Jim Morrison and a little of a handful of other musical icons whose stories have been told. It’s not quite on the level of something like Talladega Nights or Anchorman, mostly because without someone like Will Ferrell to play off of Reilly to often figuratively winks at the audience about how funny all this is.

Still, it’s well worth checking out as it’s a much needed lampooning of the musical biopic genre and all the emotional manipulation those movies bring with them.

French beauty Julie Delpy wrote and directed 2 Days in Paris, so it’s not that big a surprise that it winds up playing a lot like Before/After Sunrise. That’s not to say it mimics the formula from those films entirely, just that it carries the same sort of attitude.

In 2DIP, Delpy plays one half of a couple who, after vacationing in Venice and other parts of Europe, stop by her parent’s home in Paris. This of course leads to all sorts of problems between her and her boyfriend (played by Adam Goldberg) as they run into some of her exes and otherwise find their relationship tested by being on ground that’s at once familiar and not so much.

It’s a loose, natural film with good performances from both the leads that gets you involved in their characters and their well-being. Well worth checking out if you’re a fan of walking-and-talking type movies about relationships.

Step Brothers is probably the out-and-out raunchiest of the movies made by Will Ferrell and director/co-writer Adam McKay. Where their previous collaborations like Anchorman and Talledega Nights had their moments, they were more about gleaning the comedy from a collection of characters more than trying to get a laugh from, say, Ferrell rubbing his testicles on John C. Reilly’s drumset (and no, that’s not a metaphor - it’s a set of drums).

But Step Brothers is extremely funny if you go along for the ride. All of the sequences seen in the trailers play out even better when surrounded by the supporting material. Watching Ferrell hit Reilly in the face with a shovel and then try to bury him alive, for instance, was all over the marketing but actually works better in the film itself.

The thing that makes it funnier than it probably should be is that the actors are so committed to their characters. That’s the same secret ingredient that makes Anchorman and the other films work so well and it’s in good supply here.

When I originally saw The Dark Knight in theaters I more or less punted on actualy trying to review the movie, saying it was too dense to really talk about after just one viewing.

Now, thanks to Warner Bros., I’ve seen the movie again on DVD and can more fully contemplate the film.

Many critics are putting The Dark Knight on the year-end best-of lists and it’s completely warranted. The film is filled with stylistic story-telling of the highest caliber. Director Christopher Nolan and his screenwriters have created a super-hero tale that, like the best such stories, serves as a morality play. The characters, all brought to life by actors that do much more than what the script gives them (which is saying something), are all caught up in their own conflicts that come crashing together in the end.

Bruce Wayne is conflicted as to his effectiveness as Batman and sees the election of Harvey Dent as a seemingly uncorrupt District Attorney as a way he might be able to rest and lead a more normal life with the woman of his dreams, Rachel Dawes. Dent, though, faces problems at every turn as he tries to put Gotham’s criminal element behind bars. Dawes is dating Dent, which brings her into conflict between her emotions for Wayne and Dent.

The only two characters who are sure of their paths are Lt. Jim Gordon, head of the Major Crimes Unit and later in the film promoted to Commissioner, and The Joker, the unpredictable force of villiany in the movie, a character that weaves in and out of the story causing mayhem seemingly for the fun of it, without any goals of making money or anything predictable like that. He, as Wayne’s butler Alfred says, is just one of those people who want to see the world burn. His actions effect everything in the movie, even when he’s not directly involved.

While all the performances are top-notch - this really is Shakesperean-theater-level acting going on from everyone involved - it’s the latter two that realy stand out for me the second time around. The praise for the late Heath Ledger’s performance is nearly ubiquitous and so I’ll cop out slightly and say I agree with what’s been said by others. It’s a fearless performance straight out of the best radical theater (Ledger would have been right at home at Steppenwolf) and keeps you engrossed the entire time.

Receiving less notice, though, is Gary Oldman’s turn as Jim Gordon. While everyone is so dramatic around him - everyone else swings from one emotion to the other constantly - Gordon is the rock of the movie. He’s a public servant who is willing to put cops with questionable pasts on his payroll because that’s what needs to be done. He publicly says The Batman is to be arrested on sight but clears out the police from a crime scene so Batman can do his own investigation. He knows Dent is on the side of the angels but can’t get past the bad feelings from when he was in Internal Affairs. Finally, he helps make a decision that will salvage Dent’s legacy but turn Batman into a truly hunted villain.

Oldman goes about his job with an incredible efficiency of motion - his eyebrows often contain the entirety of his performance in some scenes - but also makes Gordon the most easily accissible of the characters in the movie because he’s just a guy doing his job.

The single-disc edition of The Dark Knight DVD contains just the movie. Other editions are available but if you aren’t all that interested in bonus features and just want the movie to enjoy time and time again this is completely suitable for purchase.

That’s how one of the Spout folks described the “Create a Document” feature you can add on to your Gmail, whether traditional or through Google Apps for Small Businees, account. It adds a button on the right side of the page that lets you turn that email thread into a Google Doc instantly. So if you have a conversation that’s been going on that you want to archive for later use this let’s you easily and effectively do so.

To turn that on for your account just visit your Settings and then click the Labs tab and scroll down to find it.

You can read Read/Write Web’s write-up of that feature here.

I, along with just about everyone else, questioned the release of a new X-Files movie at this point in time. It’s been 11 years since the first movie and something like six or seven years since the series left television. So a lot of people were asking “what’s the point?”

Well the point was apparently to tell a pretty interesting story. I Want to Believe doesn’t fit into the show’s mythology of alien invaders and political manuvering. It is, as many people described it, more or less an extended version of one of the show’s “monster of the week” stand-alone episodes.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot in the movie for fans of the show’s running plotlines to love. We not only get to catch up on the lives of Mulder and Scully (who have a very different relationship now than what was portrayed on the show) but also get to see how that relationship translates to a working one when they find themselves once again chasing down something inexplicable by both rational science and religious faith.

If you’re a fan of the X-Files franchise you should definitely watch I Want to Believe. It doesn’t exactly provide closure (if that’s what you were looking for) but it does bring you up to date on the stories you enjoyed on TV.

My review of the new DVD edition of 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still is contained within my Movie Marketing Madness column covering the remake of the movie.

The best part about the appearance of the new movie is that it prompted Fox to re-release the 1951 original.

Re-watching the film via a review copy provided to me of the new two-disc special edition, I was struck by just how great this movie is. It’s not epic or intensly personal along the lines of classics like Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind or others along those lines. But it is just a really, really good movie that captures the feelings of the era it was produced in while still remaining relevant to contemporary audiences.

In the movie, Klaatu arrives on earth with the robot Gort, landing in a Washington D.C. park. Taken into custody after he’s mistakenly shot by a trigger happy soldier, he explains he has a message of importance to the entire world and rejects attempts by single countries to dominate his presentation. Eventually he escapes the hospital he’s being held at and assumes the identity of Mr. Carpenter, trying to get to know what the citizens of the world are like as opposed to their arrogant and short-sighted rulers. He becomes involved in the lives of a single woman and her young son and through them meets one of the leading scientists of the day, who conveniently lives just down the street, and tries to convey to his colleagues the message he has come with from the other inhabited planets.

day-the-earth-stood-still-screenshotEveryone knows the movie was an allegory for the international unrest enveloping the world at the time, the beginning of the Cold War and not long after World War II, and that’s certainly true. But let’s also look at the name Klaatu gives himself: Carpenter. The fact that he comes with a message of peace for the world, is mistrusted and hunted by the authorities, dies and comes back for a short period in order to finish his mission gives him kind of undeniable Christian overtones as well. I had never really caught that until watching it this time and now it’s a notion that I can’t shake.

The DVD special edition transfer looks fantastic. I’m by no means an expert in pixels and compression rates or other matters but the picture to my eye was crisp and clean and looked great. The first disc also contains a pair of audio commentary as well as - and this is super cool - an isolated audio track that allows you to listen to the legendary theramin-dominated soundtrack all by itself.

Both discs also have between them a handful of documentaries and retrospectives that focus on everything from the movie’s production history to the decoding of the movie’s legendary command phrase to how science fiction films serve as cautionary tales in their respective places in history.

Watching National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation is an annual tradition and this was the kick-off movie for our Christmas film viewing of the year. Always kills me.

It’s not that Get Smart is bad - It’s that it’s just sort of pointless. Steve Carrel is funny, yeah, in his role as Maxwell Smart. And Anne Hathaway certainly performs ably as Agent 99. But the jokes either lie there and don’t amount to much or are so underlined to make it clear that they’re JOKES! that it actually serves to make each one less funny.

The story is alright, basically showing Max’s introduction to the world of being a field agent for CONTROL after years of being a detail-obsessed analyst. He of course blunders and bumbles through his assignments but survives and ultimately saves the day, as well as overcoming the initial reluctance of 99 to his methods.

But it’s so blatant about its desire to be funny and its desire to be an action film that it forgets to capture any of the spirit of the source TV show. Get Smart is worth watching but you shouldn’t be looking for anything too interesting from it.