SpoutBlog

Will Grant Heslov’s The Men Who Stare at Goats be the greatest George Clooney movie of all time? If you’re a fan of the actor/director’s work in Three Kings, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Burn After Reading and Syriana, then it’s possible you’ll see this as the military/CIA satire he’s been working towards his whole career. The fact that it seems like it should or could have been directed by the Coen Bros. — costars Jeff Bridges, Stephen Root and J.K. Simmons have all worked with the filmmaking duo in addition to Clooney — provides further evidence that this might well be the epitome of Clooney’s career.

Based on the non-fiction book by Jon Ronson, Goats is about a reporter (Ewan McGregor) working on a story about a U.S. Army unit employing psychic soldiers. Clooney is one of these “Jedi warriors,” as you can see in the trailer when he bursts clouds and knocks over goats with his mind. One particular bit of slapstick stolen from the underseen Special has me a little worried about the humor here. But how can I not want to see a movie that basically seems to insert “The Dude” into a modern day cross between DePalma’s The Fury and Spies Like Us?

Check out other film blog reactions to the trailer after the jump:

• Mark at I Watch Stuff sees this as “Coen with aspartame”:
  

  This trailer for Men Who Stare at Goats is basically Diet Coen Brothers. I’m not going to say it will completely fulfill you in the same way a refreshing Coen Brothers will, but I think you’ll detect enough of that distinctly Coen flavor in Grant Heslov’s comedy–especially with a mustached George Clooney and long-haired, druggie Jeff Bridges–that it should at least tide you over until you can get the real deal

• Lane Brown at Vulture offers some more similarities to a Coen Bros. film:
  

  [Clooney's] regrown his O Brother mustache and cast himself alongside Jeff Bridges, who appears to be playing a telekinesis-enhanced cousin of the Dude in military dress…As we learned with Leatherheads, it’s difficult to intuit simply from a trailer whether Coen-y Clooney movies will be funny or lame, but the use of “More Than a Feeling” here is clever enough.

• Anne Thompson at Thompson on Hollywood is excited to see another Coen-esque Clooney role:
  

  Grant Heslov’s comedy The Men Who Stare at Goats looks pretty funny, I must say. I love George Clooney in full-on dimwit mode (see: O Brother, Where Art Thou?).

• Rob Hunter at Film School Rejects references another great Clooney in Coen Bros. role:
  

  I love goofy ass George Clooney. He’s a solid dramatic actor, but (much like Brad Pitt) he’s at his best when he explores the more quirky, smirky, crazy bastard roles. His character here looks to be an extreme example of the weirdo he played in Burn After Reading which can only be a good thing.

• The Playlist doesn’t want to mention the Coens, but does:
  

  We’ll try to not use the term Coen-esque because it doesn’t seem that screwball-y or quirky (not to mention, it’s facile and overused), but there are some similar shades there. Jeff Bridges as a hippie-like teacher who helps these guys kill and maim people with “Jedi mindtricks” seems pretty damn funny.

• Vince Mancini at Film Drunk thinks it could possibly use a little less slapstick:
  

  I’m on the fence…I counted four jokes in the trailer that involved someone getting hit in the face, which is never a good sign.  But on the plus side… Boston.  Man, if I had a nickle for every time I got date raped to that song.

• Jeff Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere is also disappointed by the Blake Edwards-style slapstick all over the trailer:
  

  All I can tell you is that before watching the trailer, I was semi-pumped about seeing this film in Toronto. I had presumed Heslov, a very smart guy on Clooney’s wavelength and vice versa, would play down the inherently bizarre material and keep it real and let the wackazoid stuff speak for itself. But now, having seen the trailer, I’m feeling a little bit worried. Okay, maybe I shouldn’t be. Maybe this is just a matter of the Overture trailer guys looking to bring in the dumb-asses.

• Michelle Collins at Best Week Ever, responding to an earlier post wondering if the film’s title is literal, thinks the movie could still use more goats:
  

  Even if this is a war movie that might not have any goats, we will choose to believe it is full of them.

  Today, we catch our first glimpse of the trailer. And, you guys… there is NARY A GOAT TO BE SEEN. OK, maybe one, but we’re pretty sure that’s George Clooney…

• Gabe at Videogum wishes the book was made into a documentary (which it was) instead:
  

  if it had been a documentary, then the very weird and hilarious details from the book, which are real, would have been super weird and super hilarious because of how when things are real then there is no willful suspension of disbelief, there is just belief and disbelief mixed together, because that is life, jump into life. Instead, it has a semi-generic, strangely common-place military farce feel to it (has anyone else noticed how common-place military farces have become? It’s a real catch-22).

• Big Hollywood is not into the constant military mocking from Hollywood:
  

  With so many tales of military heroism left to tell, Clooney and Company choose this…

  “But “The Men Who Stare at Goats” is inspired by a “true” story,” they’ll say…

  But why is it always these kinds of “true” stories that get picked?

• Kofi Outlaw at ScreenRant believes even pro-military people will find the trailer funny:
  

  Come on, even all you pro-military Screen Rant readers out there have to admit its pretty funny to try to develop psychic weapons by having soldiers stare at goats! In that context, the title really speaks to the absurdity of warfare and certain militaristic mindsets (I AM NOT BAD MOUTHING THE MILITARY). So scary to think this all happened (is happening?) in real life…

• S.T. VanAirsdale at Movieline, who sees this as “Inglourious Basterds for the Iraq era,” isn’t even certain the trailer does poke fun at the military:
  

  I’m not quite sure what’s being sent up (if anything): Army decorum? The military-industrial complex? Journalists? Enh, who cares? Heslov and his ensemble know what they’re doing, as does Overture, which even makes one of the fall movie season’s most unwieldy, unsellable titles look good in the end.

• Owen Williams at Empire sees this potentially more like a Dr. Strangelove for the Iraq era:
  

  The movie, which is looking awesome, gives us McGregor in the Ronson role (renamed Bob Wilton and saddled with an American accent), and a twitchy Clooney as Lyn Cassidy; a reactivated psychic spy and “Jedi warrior”…We’re intrigued about the part where McGregor is being strangled by a guy with a Dr Strangelove arm.

• Dustin Rowles at Pajiba celebrates the film’s screenwriter and hopes for his sake and career that this is a hit:
  

  Peter Straughan, wrote the script. And it’s a great goddamn script about an Army Battalion that employs paranormal powers in their missions (assuming Goats performs well at the box-office, Straughan has two other scripts in development: The Inventor is a dark romantic comedy about what would happen if a fan could become the person he idealizes; and Our Brand Crisis, which has been optioned by Clooney, focuses on American political campaign strategies used in South America.

Here’s the trailer:

The September Issue is an irresistible pop culture mashup: imagine the Teen Vogue segments of The Hills (though her royal highness Anna Wintour is swapped in for cut-rate LA imitation Lisa Love, the MTV reality show’s masterful manner of spinning diegetic commentary out of eye rolls taken out of context is left intact), genetically blended into an alternate universe version of The Office. Except in this office, the workers actually work, and in fact are terrified not to because their boss is Michael Scott’s polar opposite: impatient, undemonstrative, and absolutely incapable of taking no for an answer.

As a portrait of Wintour the person, RJ Cutler’s documentary does little to dig under the surface of Wintour’s iconic, impassive under bangs image. But as a meditation on art vs commerce, emotion vs rationality, and the role of fantasy merchants in the recently-burst economic bubble, The September Issue is both cerebral and accessible. If it’s not as provocative as it could be, it’s definitely entertaining.

The themes of the film emerge most clearly via the relationship between Wintour and VOGUE’s creative director, Grace Coddington. A former model a handful of years older than Wintour, Grace started working at American VOGUE on the same day as her now-superior. Both women worked their way up over the course of decades, only to land in a position where Grace is generally agreed to be the best fashion stylist in the world … and yet every move she makes is subject to Wintour’s approval.

Wintour is credited with transforming VOGUE by putting actresses on the cover, thus greasing the wheels for high fashion and its associated esoterica to enter the entertainment media. Grace is more of a purist; she puts her shoots together with the artistry of the image as the first and only concern, only to continually suffer the humiliation of having her work end up on the cutting room floor by the market-minded Wintour. Coddington is the only person around the office who doesn’t seem to buy into the Fear of Wintour, which is palpable on film not because her near-peers and underlings speak to it, but in the way they speak to her. When Anna asks a question, the answer offered is almost always inflected like another question; the people around her are terminally non-committal, as if the worst crime one could commit in Wintour’s presence is to have an opinion.

If the dominant media image of Anna Wintour, from The Devil Wears Prada and beyond, is that she’s a villain, she doesn’t do much here to disabuse us of that notion, and certainly Cutler does her no favors in the way they present her moments of tyranny. The director begins the film with an clip from a sit-down interview with Wintour, in which the VOGUE editor attempts to defend high fashion from unnamed critics. “Just because someone wants to wear Carolina Herrera instead of” — here she reaches for an example, as if she couldn’t possibly think of anything anyone would “want” to wear more than Carolina Herrera –– “something from Kmart, doesn’t make them a dumb person.”

Of course, only a “dumb person” would accuse someone of being “a dumb person” based solely on what they “choose” to wear. The issue is that for most of us the choice between Carolina Herrera and Kmart isn’t actually a “choice”, but a financial imperative. You could chalk this flub up to linguistic imprecision, but Cutler chooses to include right it at the beginning of the film for a reason: it sets the tone for a character whose extreme focus on the bottom line of her magazine causes her to tune out countless realities, up to and including that most of the critics of the fantasy she sells wouldn’t be able to afford that fantasy for themselves.

Cutler may not offer much evidence that Wintour is deeper than our pre-conceived image of her, but he does offer revelations in terms of her actual image. Wintour is often shot from below, the classic angle given to a person in a position of power, but in this instance, it reveals the imperfections of the facade. We see that her neck and the area under her chin are severely bagged, and up against her comparatively smooth face, one gets the sense that this is less from age or surgical restraint than from her habit of lowering her chin in pursed-lip frown. And yet, she’s so concerned with her own image that Grace is able to use Cutler’s camera crew against Wintour to get what she wants.

Grace and Anna embody the age old conflict between art and commerce, given new spin for an age of luxury obsession with the trap door dropped out. A VOGUE couture spread (Grace’s specialty) was the old, safe way for the masses to indulge in luxuries they couldn’t actually have. But when this kind of photo journalism-as-entertainment is pushed out in favor of cover stories revolving around not just non-models, but “it” girl actresses promoting films via carefully calibrated stories of “relatable” personal heartbreak, the fantasy sold within the pages of VOGUE becomes several degrees less blatant in its fantasy, and moves several steps toward actual accessibility. In a climate in which both the pursuit of art and beauty for the sake of it, and of journalism as mass-culture record of the present and contextualization for the future, have been swiftly pushed to the margins, the pretense of escape via advertisement still soldiers on. Though Cutler’s footage was shot over nine months in 2007, September seems to anticipate our current withdrawl from the addiction of spectacular accumulation. More than just aping the escapism of VOGUE itself, it may be the ideal film for those bitter and bedraggled by our current economic fix.

A slightly different verson of this review appeared during the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

I was hoping the Inception teaser trailer would keep the Christopher Nolan-obsessed fanboys puzzled and therefore occupied for a while. But someone had to go and spoil the premise of that otherwise cryptic film and now the geeks and gossip rags are back to their old favorite online game: spreading rumors about Batman 3.

British tabloid The Sun has made up a story claiming Megan Fox has “signed on” to play Catwoman, despite the fact that there’s no script to guarantee that such a role will even exist. But hey, Fox News has picked up the “news” so it must be true. Then there’s the Harry Knowles-ignited rumor about the third installment potentially being shot “FULLY” in IMAX.

Certainly speculating about big and highly anticipated movies is fun. Whether we discuss why Nolan shouldn’t even try to follow The Dark Knight or if we write a list of actresses we’d like to see cast as Catwoman, it’s important that we recognize that it’s all just wishes and wonders. And being able to tell the difference between a viable scoop and a rumor is what separates us respectable blogs from the unreputable people at British tabloids and, umm, Fox News (which, like The Sun, is owned by News Corp.).

The only silver lining is those websites that immediately nip such rumors in the butt and then proceed to make fun of the idea further through some kind of list or whatever. Especially when it’s a slow news day, such posts provide good reading.

Check out the film blog responses to today’s ridiculous rumors after the jump:

• Joseph Baxter at The Feed agrees that it’s almost nice to see these sorts of Batman 3 rumors circulating again:
  

  While they were rampant at the end of 2008, amidst more credible ones such as Rachel Weisz’s possible casting, it’s been a while since we heard some off-the-wall, “wtf,” Batman 3 rumors. This latest one, therefore, almost seems like an old friend has come to visit. Of course, it joins some others of its ilk such as the “Cher as Catwoman” rumor and of course, the UK Sun’s previous pre-Christmas masterpiece, “Eddie Murphy as the Riddler and Shia LaBeouf as Robin.” Hey, in the bizarro world where these reports are even close to being truthful, it seems that Batman 3 will be a Transformers reunion.

• Lane Brown at Vulture has one good reason why this rumor is false. And he points out what today is the anniversary of:
  

  The Sun “reports” that Megan Fox has “signed on” to play Catwoman in the next Batman movie, which means that Megan Fox will almost certainly not play Catwoman in any upcoming Batman movie. Also, today is the one-year anniversary of last summer’s made-up rumor about Cher playing Catwoman.

• Kyle Buchanan at Movieline has a list of ways to tell a British tabloid casting rumor is fake. The only one that matters is #5, but here’s the one directly dealing with Batman 3:
  

  1. The rumor in question is about an actor cast in the next Batman film, when even presumptive director Christopher Nolan (currently shooting the Leonardo DiCaprio starrer Inception) has not signed on yet, nor struck a deal to write the script.

• Mark Lisanti, also at Movieline, has a list of other people who won’t be playing Catwoman. Here’s the one that says the most about how these tabloid rumors get started in the first place:
  

  3. Renee Zellweger
  Zellweger’s people are still waiting for Warner Bros. executives to return a call from 2002.
  Proposed tabloid headline: “Renee Zellweger’s Publicist Promised Us An Exclusive On ‘Bridget Jones 3’ If We’d Float Her Name For Catwoman! So, Zellweger Might Be Catwoman, Maybe!!! OK, We Can’t Do This. We Just Can’t. Let The Daily Mirror Be Their Filthy Little Whore This Time. We’re Going Back To Cosmetology School, This Is Getting Undignified.”

• Mark at I Watch Stuff has come to a conclusion regarding who/what will indeed be playing Catwoman:
  

  To sum things up for those of you who haven’t been following every British tabloid casting announcement, the part of Catwoman will now be played by the ensemble of Angelina Jolie, Cher, Miley Cyrus, Julie Newmar, an actual cat, a CGI cat, a lab-created, actual cat-woman, a lady who just owns a lot of cats, Eddie Murphy, and Megan Fox.

• Todd at IDontLikeYouInThatWay.com guesses how simple and disturbing the Batman 3 plot would be if this rumor were true:
  

  Nobody is reporting this except The Sun, so who knows if this is true or not. If it is, congratulations. 120 pages of Batman jacking off seems like it would be pretty easy to write.

• John at The Movie Blog claims that if the Fox rumor is true then “Santa Claus is real, O.J. didn’t do it and the Oscars love comedies.” Here’s his simple argument:
  

  This is not Michael Bay. Nolan is not all about tits and ass. This is his Batman franchise, and there is no way in hell this genius is going to put Megan Fox in it. Period. End of story. No questions asked.

  I simply can not believe how many people I’ve read on the web today that actually believe this tripe.

• David Oliver at CHUD.com says it’s not true unless his site says so:
  

  Now, until you read it from Devin, Nick or some other outlet way, way more reputable than a British rag, make of that what you will.  Chalk it up to however you like.  I feel I’ve done my civic duty to disseminate info with a flatbed of salt with which to to take it.

• Neil Miller at Film School Rejects has a list of reasons Batman 3 will not be shot completely in IMAX. Most of his arguments have to do with the expense, but his fourth point is still the most important at this point in time:
  

  4. The movie might not happen at all. Through all of this, I think we miss the most obvious points. There is no script, the director has not signed and there has been no official indication that a third Batman movie will happen anytime soon. Sure, it is easy to assume that Warner Bros. will want to make another film and capitalize on the heat generated from The Dark Knight, but that doesn’t mean they will be able to get Chris Nolan back on the horse. He has said time and time again that the story needs to be there. What if it is never there? And if the movie never happens, it can’t be in full IMAX then, can it? I know it’s semantics, but I like to reinforce my arguments — especially when I’m clearly right.

• Alex Billington at FirstShowing isn’t entirely in the doubting boat regarding an all-IMAX Batman:
  

  At this point in time, almost anything we hear about the third Batman is always a rumor, because Chris is 100% dedicated to Inception right now and they haven’t so much as even written a single line of the script yet (or so we’ve heard). But then again, if IMAX is to work with Nolan to develop a camera that is smaller, quiet, and can shoot more than 3 minutes, they might as well start working on it now. Nolan is shooting Inception as we speak and an IMAX rep told me that “Inception is definitely one of the titles that we are looking at for 2010.” I have a feeling that means he’s already shooting with IMAX as much as possible.

• Simon Dang at The Playlist represents the fanbase that wouldn’t even want an all-IMAX Batman:
  

  Rumor has it, Christopher Nolan wants to film the third “Batman” film totally in the IMAX format he toyed with in “The Dark Knight.” As good as those certain scenes looked, we hate to admit the idea of having to watch long features on that wide screen doesn’t sound too appealing.

• Harry Knowles at Ain’t It Cool News pretty much showed us the best way to handle the spreading of an unsourced tip (aka a rumor) in his introductory disclosure. If only all tabloids used this sort of line:
  

  I have to say upfront that the nature of this story is a rumor, not because I don’t have solid sources, I do… but because it could simply NOT WORK OUT. That happens sometimes. It is something that the production team are “considering” - but it is an extremely costly process, but one that I believe we would all love to see happen.

Under discussion:

We Live in Public  (2009)

“I was the smartest kid in town, and the reporters knew it,” brags Josh Harris in We Live in Public, Ondi Timoner’s documentary on the rise and fall of the Internet’s first (and still its most charismatic) video mogul. It’s a telling statement, in that it points to both Harris’ 1990s raison d’etre, and also his Achilles heel: it’s not what you do that matters, it’s that people are watching you do it. Timoner’s portrait of the prescient (and quite possibly crazy) web pioneer will be a must see for anyone interested in internet fame and the phenomenon of casual over-sharing, even if her storytelling tactics are surprisingly stale.

A quick-cut pileup of stock footage, video captured by Timoner over a decade on Harris’ trail, and footage recorded during his surveillance projects, Public outlines Harris’ troubled childhood and tricky relationship with his alcoholic mom before clicking into its comfort zone with Harris’ founding of Pseudo.com. Pseudo, launched in 1993, morphed from a Prodigy chat service into an internet TV network, complete with themed channels and on-air personalities. The company –– and Harris –– became best known for throwing wild parties, which by the late 90s had formed the core of the Silicon Alley social scene. For a brief, heady moment in time, celebrities mingled with nerds, and nerds became celebrities — just because, as Silicon Alley Reporter & Weblogs Inc founder Jason Calacanis puts it, “you knew how to set up a modem.”

Riding high on hype (and an $80 million “on paper” net worth), in 1999 Harris launched a massive art project called “Quiet,” where he invited dozens of artists to live with him in a bunker complete with firing range and communal showers, with each bed outfitted with a camera and a TV screen. Life was filmed constantly, residents were subject to the interrogation of a CIA operative, and no one was allowed to leave. When the FBI broke into the bunker and made everyone evacuate (they thought it was a cult, and as one member says on screen, “We were quacking and walking like a duck”), Harris and his girlfriend Tanya moved into a loft outfitted with motion control cameras in every room, broadcasting their relationship 24 hours a day to an audience of eager chatters. This project, called “We Live in Public,” fell apart when the relationship cracked under the pressure of surveillance. By this point, Harris’ sanity was slipping away as fast as his fortune, and in late 2001, the entrepreuer disappeared to an apple farm upstate.

Harris is a great anti-hero, and the film more than convinces that we haven’t even begun to grapple with the ramifications of our “always on” internet personas. But for all of its fascinations, the frantic pace is frustrating. Timoner’s montages move so quickly that you can’t begin to connect to or contemplate the bulk of her images. This technique is effective in conveying what it felt like to be in the middle of the whirlwind, but it blocks any beyond-superficial understanding of what that whirlwind meant. (The exception to this rule is the section of the film using footage from “We Live in Public” to talk about Josh and Tanya’s break-up; Timoner gives this material time and space to breathe, which only draws attention to the airlessness of the rest of the piece.) Timoner also relies a little too heavily on pop music for commentary. It’s one thing to set a montage of “Quiet” footage to Le Tigre, to remind us what 1999 felt like; it’s another to ask LCD Soundsystem’s “New York I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down” to bring the poignancy to a 9/11 montage. The song might have been a fresher choice had it not been used not long ago (and to greater ironic effect) on an episode of Gossip Girl, but it still would have been a lazy, literal way to inject feeling.

But Public ultimately overcomes its grating stylistic flourishes. Most striking is the footage of “Quiet,” which looks like a mash-up of The Real World and Abu Ghraib. In the late 90s, Harris anticipated not just our country’s use of quasi-fascist interrogation, but the fascination with documenting it and sharing that document on social platforms. Every Harris project seen in the film includes a chat room. He figured out the core truth behind social media years before the rest of us: the news, the art, the event itself is nothing unless you enable people to talk about it.

This review first appeared during the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. We Live In Public opens in New York this week.

Here’s a story that broke yesterday but has continued to pick up steam through the movie blogs today: The Weinstein Co. is planning to release box office champ Inglourious Basterds on DVD by the end of the year in order to use the discs for a cheap but aggressive Oscar campaign. This isn’t surprising news considering Harvey Weinstein’s Oscar addiction, but it has suddenly made me aware that Basterds is both deserving of and sure to receive a nod for Best Picture, which would be Quentin Tarantino’s first such nominee since Pulp Fiction 15 years ago.

Seriously, if we can be talking about District 9, Star Trek and other genre movies for the top category now that it will include ten contenders, how couldn’t Basterds be seen as a likely nominee? People have celebrated Christoph Waltz’s performance since Cannes, and he’s sure to garner a Best Supporting Actor nod, but few have noted how the film itself is a lock, too. Certainly if Weinstein can get The Reader a surprise Best Picture nomination with only five available slots, he can get this film onto a ballot double the size.

Don’t forget the Holocaust rule; how could the Academy ignore a movie that features vengeful Jews assassinating Hitler and 300 other Nazis all at once in a blaze of glory? Never mind that they didn’t get some of the worst offenders involved in the genocide.

Could Basterds garner more than the two obvious nominations? I doubt Tarantino will receive recognition for either directing or screenwriting, but who knows? Any other performances worthy? Any tech fields? Variety has an interesting article today on the costume design by Anna B. Sheppard. She’s been twice nominated for, interestingly enough, Holocaust films (Schindler’s List and The Pianist), but this time she was presented with more of a challenge. I have a feeling this third Holocaust-related project could be the one to get her the Oscar.

Check out what the other film blogs are saying about Basterds‘ Oscar chances after the jump:

• Tom O’Neil at Gold Derby first scooped the Weinstein’s Oscar plans, claiming they’re modeled after the Crash strategy. Here is his expectation of the outcome:
  

  Beware, Hollywood. Given how red rivers flow in Tarantino pix, the town will be engulfed in a blood tide this December when Harvey unleashes his “Inglourious Basterds” DVD campaign. It will probably pay off with two Academy Award nominations: best screenplay (Tarantino) and supporting actor (Christoph Waltz). Maybe more. “Pulp Fiction” got nommed for best picture when there were only five slots; this year there will be twice as many.

• Ross Miller at ScreenRant is worried this campaign means a slim, feature-less DVD release, for now anyway, but here are his thoughts on what Basterds‘ Oscar future looks like:
  

  Having seen the film twice now, it easily deserves a Supporting Actor nomination for Christoph Waltz (he should also win, IMO), and also a couple for Original Screenplay and Best Director for Tarantino. I have a feeling that at least a couple of those will end up being the case (Actor and Screenplay), with Best Picture maybe slipping in there as well, since the Academy has expanded the Best Picture nominees from five to ten entries.

• C. Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark celebrates the return of Rod Taylor in a post that has me wondering if maybe the Academy will honor his very short performance as one of those lifetime-achievement-type nominations. It’s not that unlikely, even if he hadn’t put in such effort:
  

  Taylor came out of retirement to play Sir Winston Churchill in Tarantino’s highly personalized take on World War II (as much about the cinema as it is about the War). According to the Miami Herald, Taylor “watched dozens of DVDs to get Churchill’s voice, complete with lisp, and the hunched body language”…Taylor as Churchill appears in one scene only of Inglourious Basterds, saying very little, but dominating the scene with his presence as only a true star can.

• Brad Brevet at RopeofSilicon would love to see Michael Fassbender nominated, but he just doesn’t see any potential for Basterds outside the Waltz nomination. He presents why the film won’t make the cut for Best Original Screenplay:
  

  The Academy can sometimes be hard to judge and I think categories such as Best Original Screenplay will be much easier to sort out as we move along, but I won’t be writing off Inglourious Basterds anytime soon considering the news Inarritu’s Biutiful may not be released this year and the fact Apatow’s Funny People didn’t do so well. But that still has Tarantino battling out with the likes of the following in alphabetical order:

  * (500) Days of Summer – Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber
  * Bright Star – Jane Campion
  * Broken Embraces – Pedro Almodovar
  * The Hurt Locker – Mark Boal
  * A Serious Man – Joel and Ethan Coen
  * Up – Bob Peterson

  You tell me, do you see it fitting inside the top five with those names?

• Kristopher Tapley at In Contention sees Basterds more deserving of tech nominations than a writing one:
  

  A couple of pieces caught my eye today featuring talent associated with Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” a film that, despite my feelings of the narrative, had a rather refreshing visceral sheen to it.  That’s a tribute, no doubt, to folks like Bob Richardson, David Wasco, Anna B. Sheppard, etc.

• One of the pieces Tapley highlights is the pre-Variety showcase of Sheppard at Boxwish, which points out the achievement:
  

  Clearly her CV made her an ideal fit for whipping up the era’s authentic period costumes, but it was a challenge that Sheppard was slow to accept until assured that Inglourious Basterds wasn’t a traditional by-the-book retelling of World War II’s horrors, but a boisterous, imaginative and spiky vision of it. As the trailer’s tag-line says “you haven’t seen war until you’ve seen it through the eyes of Quentin Tarantino,” and Sheppard was thrilled to learn that this applied to costumes as well.

• Lane Brown at Vulture questions the merit of Basterds:
  

  Why didn’t the Weinstein Company release Inglourious Basterds closer to awards season? We figured it was because it they didn’t plan on it winning many awards. But Tom O’Neil posits today that Harvey’s plan is to make an Oscar push around the time of its DVD release later this year…It worked for Crash, so we suppose anything’s possible.

• Bob Westal at Premium Hollywood has doubts about the Academy’s appreciation for both Tarantino and his treatment of the Holocaust:
  

  Quentin Tarantino’s films are not Oscar-friendly. The older members of the Academy have traditionally leaned strongly towards a very traditional, essentially literary and middle-class, view of quality which is pretty much the antithesis of the Tarantino aesthetic. It’s only been through his widespread acclaim and a subtle loosening of old prejudices that his films have gotten the definitely limited Oscar recognition they have and, considering what some regard as a too lighthearted view of World War II horrors, I wouldn’t expect this one to be much different. Of course, with ten nomination slots for Best Picture, and the universal groundswell of acclaim for heretofore internationally unknown German actor Christoph Waltz, two or three nominations (including the semi-inevitable “Best Original Screenplay” nod) are almost a certainty.

• Peter Bart at Variety less-directly addresses Basterds‘ qualifications for the Holocaust rule:
  

  Writing in The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg struggles to find a subtext in “Inglourious Basterds” dealing with “Jewish empowerment.” I would argue the only thing on display here is Tarantino Empowerment. He has the power to make very long movies with very self-referential dialogue. He owns the play pen.

• Kevin Jagernauth at The Playlist sees a potential for four major nods but wonders if Basterds will be hurt more by the fanboy rule than helped by the Holocaust rule:
  

  But as the Oscar season shapes up, it will be interesting to see how viable (or not) of a player “Inglourious Basterds” will remain in the major categories. The danger with throwing Tarantino’s film into the Oscar mix is that Harvey could end up with a “The Dark Knight” situation on his hands. As readers might recall, that film did boffo box-office numbers and was universally loved by critics, but as far as the Academy was concerned, it was still just a fanboy film.

• Jeff Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere sees the problem being the film’s violence, despite the fact that we’ve seen a movie like The Departed win four Oscars, including Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture. His argument:
  

  The only Inglourious Basterds Oscar nomination that’s going to happen is Christoph Waltz for Best Supporting Actor — end of story. Harvey can blanket Hollywood with DVDs to make sure this happens, but isn’t Waltz’s nomination already pasted into most people’s heads? Tarantino’s screenplay hasn’t a prayer of being nominated for Best Original Screenplay. Not with that damn baseball-bat/brain-matter scene. Gran Shaggy Poo sez the over-50s ain’t goin’ for it.

Someone commented on my list of Avatar comparisons last week noting that such a practice could be done with any movie. He/She is correct, though it doesn’t really matter since the point of that exercise was to respond to the certain expectation that came with that film’s hype that it would be unlike anything we’ve seen before. With the teaser for Christopher Nolan’s Inception, however, the similar claims of derivation are simply a normal thing we film bloggers to do trailers, particularly those that give us little clue as to what their movie is about.

But deep in our hearts, we all trust Nolan, right? We don’t think he’d make a movie that people would say is just like The Matrix or Identity or Fight Club or Jurassic Park or whatever. Just like the illusionists in The Prestige and also like Batman, I guess, Nolan has a lot up his sleeve. The fact that nobody knows anything about the plot of Inception makes its trailer even more cryptic than it would seem otherwise to just the regular moviegoer who doesn’t follow script reviews and production developments. I wish I knew so little about Avatar — and about pretty much any upcoming movie, for that matter.

Check out what the film blogs are saying about the new Inception trailer after the jump.

• Beaks at Aint It Cool News says about this trailer pretty much what I had wished I could have said about the Avatar trailer:
  

  Thus far, all we know about Christopher Nolan’s INCEPTION is that it is a contemporary science-fiction thriller “set inside the architecture of the mind.” This might be frustratingly vague for some, but it’s good enough for me. All I need to know is that one of the world’s most talented filmmakers is hard at work shooting a brainy sci-fi flick on a $200 million budget…

• Kristopher Tapley at In Contention celebrates the vagueness of the trailer:
  

  In fact, it reminds me of a time when trailers did what they were originally supposed to do: pique a viewer’s interest without giving away the plot.  And that’s what this discombobulated series of images and sounds does.  In fact, I almost wish I didn’t know as much about the plot as I do, because the disorienting action sequence at the tail end of the trailer makes a certain kind of sense that it wouldn’t make if I knew nothing, making the “WTF” moment that much more resonant.

• Erik Davis at SciFi Squad also celebrates the lack of known plot details:
  

  This, I think, is a good thing — too many movies are ruined too far in advance these days, and so for this to hit the teaser trailer stage without a somewhat meaty synopsis having already been revealed, that, well, is a pretty cool thing.

• Mike Sampson at JoBlo.com is also glad the trailer is so vague, claiming it beats the weekend’s other new trailers for Avatar and Wolfman:
  

  …Christopher Nolan’s INCEPTION teaser, is online today and strangely is my favorite of the bunch. Primarily because we still have no real idea what this movie is about and trying to figure it all out with the footage we have in this teaser is part of the fun.

• Graeme McMillan at i09 isn’t sure if the Matrix similarities are a disappointment:
  

  This is, of course, just a teaser, but it does its job - We’re curious to see what’s behind the seemingly random images (One of which is repeated on the movie’s just-launched official site), and wondering whether or not we’re feeling underwhelmed by being reminded of The Matrix so much.

• Sean at Film Junk is interested in the film because of the Matrix vibe:
  

  As I mentioned on the podcast, there are definite echoes of The Matrix here, and since we know it’s supposed to be a sci-fi action film, it seems that the mind will likely serve a surreal battlefield where anything goes. Count me in.

• Chris Hewitt at Empire is also turned on by the Matrix similarities:
  

  It’s pretty damned impressive, and slightly reminiscent of The Matrix in its trippy, free-floating, gravity-defying style, and it’s not at all what we were expecting. We still haven’t the foggiest about what’s actually going on here, but there’s no doubt that it’s going to be cool. Very cool.

• Neil Miller at Film School Rejects has faith in Nolan and in a particular scene spotlighted in the trailer, even if it is Matrix-like:
  

  He’s a great storyteller who is following the second highest grossing film of all-time with an aggressive science fiction pic. And at this point, it’s impossible to judge this movie based on less than a minute of actual footage. But I will say this: that fight scene in the hallway looks pretty cool.

• Adam Rosenberg at MTV Movies Blog wonders if the film will be as game-changing as The Matrix:
  

  I’ve got to say, I get a very “Matrix” vibe off of this trailer. I mean that in a good way; “Inception” doesn’t look like “The Matrix,” it just makes me recall the initial sense of wonderment I felt at seeing the first teaser.

  Does anyone remember those first teases, before anyone knew a thing about what the Wachowski bros were cooking? What we had was this visually compelling assortment of quick shots, filled with action and all sorts of fancy CG effects. No one knew anything about red pills or blue pills or robot masters or anything of the sort.

• Kyle Buchanan at Movieline was more reminded of another, earlier film than he was of The Matrix:
  

  In particular, how ballsy clever interesting for the teaser to include as one of its few images a direct lift from Jurassic [Park]’s own trailer, which made simple use of a disturbed glass of water. Here, instead of the water reflecting the impact tremor of a nearby T-Rex, it’s tilting upward as though coaxed by the gimbal in Leonardo DiCaprio’s mind. We knew that DiCaprio was playing a rich and powerful CEO, but who could have guessed his fortune was derived from such a novel new take in the sippy cup?

• Lane Brown at Vulture brings up comparisons to one of Nolan’s own films and also to Fight Club:
  

  Plus, there are a bunch of Dark Knight–style aerial shots of a city, indicating that Nolan’s love of helicopter rides has not abated. The tagline (”Your mind is the scene of the crime”) makes us a little worried that this will be one of those films in which, at the end, the good guy turns out to also be the bad guy.

• Eugene Novikov at Cinematical sees another derivation, but he’s not at all concerned:
  

  My immediate instinct was to think of the John Cusack/James Mangold thriller Identity, which I quite liked but would rather not see again, if you get me. But suffice it to say I am not worried that Inception will be a retread.

• Gabe at Videogum likens the movie to Vanilla Sky, The Matrix, Minority Report and Dark City before attempting to guess the actual premise of the film:
  

  But if they’re not going to tell us what this movie is about, we are going to have to make it up. I love making it up! SO, Inception is about a man named Brian (get it? SPOOKY ANAGRAMS!) who is a special agent for the CIA’s Mind Crimes Division who has to go deeper into his own mind than he ever tried before, via Mind Helicopter, to investigate the murder of a Mind Hotel Concierge. But then he wakes up and it had all just been a Dream Crime.

• Krystal Clark at ScreenCrave also tries to figure out what’s going on:
  

  From what I can tell Leonardo DiCaprio’s character seems to be under a lot of stress. I caught a glimpse of Joseph Gordon-Levitt literally bouncing off the walls, and Cillian Murphy being carried off of a helicopter ramp by a couple of suited men. What’s going on here? I think that’s the whole point. I will admit that I am intrigued.

• Mark at I Watch Stuff tells us what he hopes the movie is not about:
  

  Just so long as the mind being the scene of the crime doesn’t mean some Fantastic Voyage scenario where Leonardo DiCaprio is shrinking himself down to the side of a brain cell to literally enter a criminal’s head and find the clues to solve a murder.

  Ah, who am I kidding? I would love that movie.

• Katey Rich at Cinema Blend focuses on deciphering one particular scene:
  

  The longest scene — just a few seconds– is of a truly awesome fight sequence, in which two people are fighting in a hallway that seems to have lost contact with gravity. One of the fighters appears to be Joseph Gordon-Levitt, while the other might be DiCaprio– or, for all we know, is Ellen Page.That scene is what sells the teaser for me, a vague promise of what’s to come, something weighty and awesome befitting the director of The Dark Knight.

• Ross Miller at ScreenRant also wants to know what’s going on in that scene:
  

  What the hell is going on in that hallway?! It looks like they’re in a hallway that is either being turned on some sort of swivel, or the gravity has been removed/lessened. With all this talk of entering dreams and being, “set within the architecture of the mind,” I wouldn’t be surprised if that was some sort of Matrix style fight sequence dreamt by Leonardo DiCaprio’s character. And what’s with that weird silver spinning top (which can also be found on the film’s official website)? I could go on and on with the questions…

• The Playlist has some of the more interesting detective work going on with this trailer:
  

  First off the man fighting Leonardo DiCaprio in the “Matrix“-style fight is definitely Joseph Gordon-Levitt so we can assume that makes him a villain? Is it Leo he’s fighting? It’s hard to tell. And the man dragged away from the plane as DiCaprio’s character looks on, appears to be Cillian Murphy Lukas Haas.

  Something odd. Note this screen-cap with Gordon-Levitt and this one too. He’s clearly fighting a black man, but when you cut to other clips of them fighting, it’s clearly two white men. What’s up with that? Another clue of what happens within the film possibly? Strange to think considering so far there are no major African-American actors in the film that we know of.

• Renn Brown at CHUD.com notes that even when we see the whole film it might not be the easiest to understand:
  

  True to his tradition of minimal teaser trailers, Nolan has revealed about a dozen shots- most of which imply gravity will be doing weird shit. Reliance on the ever-rising-strings aside, the trailer is creepy and interesting, and does its job well enough.

  If the maze logo is any indication, Nolan has made his biggest puzzle movie yet.

• Anne Thompson at Thompson on Hollywood agrees that a film like this may have no rules:
  

  Everything is genre these days. This looks like Matrix meets Shutter Island, which also stars DiCaprio. The scary thing about mind-movies—anything can happen, you don’t know what the rules of reality are.

• Alex Billington at FirstShowing points out something that makes me wonder if even Nolan knows the whole story yet (or that he could still change the rules if he wants to):
  

  …an awesome teaser, especially for a project we’ve known nothing about until now. This hasn’t even finished shooting yet either, they’re still working in Paris, which makes it even more exciting to see.

• Jeff Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere gets the last word for having the only real concern for this movie, a concern that is hardly worth having regarding the difference in size between Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page:
  

  His head is at least 50% larger than hers. Look at them! He could pick her up and carry her under his arm like one of those stuffed Jack Skellington dolls. Page is a very fine actress — nobody’s talking about her emoting here — but she’s obviously in the same size realm as the superb Peter Dinklage (who easily gave the best performance in Sidney Lumet’s Find Me Guilty), Billy Barty, Mickey Rooney and Danny DeVito.

Now check out the puzzling trailer:

The new trailer for Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story debuted yesterday on CNN.com, but obviously the world (including me) was too busy crapping on the Avatar trailer to notice. Even the Wolfman spot received more notice. For awhile last night I thought maybe people, even those on the left, were tired of Moore completely. But no, there has finally been some discussion of the thing today.

And the consensus appears to be that Moore isn’t making films any fresher or more groundbreaking than James Cameron is. In fact, Moore’s latest seems surprisingly dated. This is something we’ve expected, of course, given the ongoing story of the economic meltdown, but it is interesting to see so much Bush as well as a complete lack of footage that appears to have been shot since Obama was elected.

Worst of all, everyone agrees, is the use of M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” on the soundtrack. Even if that song hadn’t been used to death by Pineapple Express and Slumdog Millionaire ads, I would think I was watching a trailer from 2008. How about, given the current events, Moore just rereleases Sicko instead?

Check out what the rest of the film blogs are saying about the film/trailer after the jump:

• Seth Abramovitch at Movieline thinks this film looks too vague, gimmicky and outdated:
  

  And unlike his past topics (guns, healthcare, the Bush regime), which still felt worthy of having some light shed upon them, there’s nothing here that suggests Moore is covering new ground on a topic that has earned wall-to-wall coverage for well over a year. Has any stone yet been unturned with respect to this particular subject? There’s Bush, and there’s Bush again, and there’s Bush again pressing flesh with Henry Paulson. Moore has made a movie about the crash, but has he made an interesting movie?

• Ryan Adams at Awards Daily disagrees, believing this will be better than the wall-to-wall coverage of the past year:
  

  No matter what your personal feelings might be toward Michael Moore himself, it’s a safe bet that we’ll get a sharper explanation of the meltdown panic from his latest movie than we’ve learned from watching the toadying financial correspondents on cable for the past 8 months. Will it be an accurate explanation? Who knows. But at least it won’t pretend to be authoritative news coverage. It’ll be more useful than most media analysis (by being smarter), and more enjoyable (by being meaner).

• Lane Brown at Vulture addresses the “Paper Planes” use by pleading with M.I.A. to record a new song to feature in trailers and such:
  

  Isn’t it time to give this track a gold watch? We know M.I.A.’s a new mom, but couldn’t she hire a babysitter for a couple of hours, sneak down to the studio, and record a new song about taking people’s money, now that she’s completely desensitized us all to the sound of gunfire?

• Alex Billington at First Showing is okay with the topic and the M.I.A., but he does have a slight issue with one old-looking aspect:
  

  Being a Moore fan, I’ve got to say this looks as awesome, hilarious, and controversial as any of his previous films. This time, Moore tackles Wall Street and our economy. I’m not so sure I like his use of all the cheerful 50’s style footage, but I do love his not-so-subtle use of MIA’s “Paper Planes.”

• Jeff Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere thinks the film looks too familiar:
  

  …my first reaction to this trailer was “haven’t we seen Moore dealing with security guys while trying to confront corporate bigwigs a few times before?” It feels a little tired, is all. A little rote.

• Alex Riviello at CHUD.com sees this as being too much like the antiquated, pre-Sicko Michael Moore style:
  

  I’m genuinely curious about the film but am a little worried from the trailer that Moore has become too big of a presence once again. Part of the reason I think Sicko is his best work is that he mostly let the subject speak for itself rather than cheapening things with silly stunts that are good for laugh and not much else.

• Dustin Rowles at Pajiba is glad to see Moore back to his old style and weight, but agrees the movie is too late:
  

  Unfortunately, the bailout debacle seems a little dated. Sicko might have been more appropriate now, while Congress is debating a health-care bill (read: Getting pushed over by a few screechy nutters). We’re slowly coming out of the recession (fingers crossed), and the last thing we need is a reminder of what got us here. We know what got us here: Deregulation and subprime mortgages. I’m not sure I’m that interested in rehashing it. And it’s not like Michael Moore has ever offered solutions.

• John Cook at Defamer also thinks Sicko should have come out this year instead of this film:
  

  Sicko is an exception in a way, but only because it came out too soon. His collection of health care nightmares showed how “death panels” already exist in America (they’re called “insurance claims adjusters”) wcame out during the Bush years and not when, you know, health care reform might be on the top of the political agenda.

• Mark at I Watch Stuff points out that Moore has become useless since Sicko didn’t seem to influence public opinion on the health care situation:
  

  His next documentary should be about why the U.S. should switch to the metric system. That should make for similarly well-intentioned but ultimately futile entertainment.

• Sean at Film Junk is apparently for once not interested in a Moore film:
  

  have to say though, even as a fan of Moore’s films, this is looking a bit weak to me. Maybe they just wanted to get across the basic premise in the trailer and deliver a few punchlines without getting overly complicated, but it really looks like there is absolutely nothing to this movie. I might even say I feel dumber having watched it.

• Neil Miller at Film School Rejects believes he’ll enjoy the film, but he dislikes the way it’s being marketed:
  

  I strongly dislike trailers for Michael Moore’s movies. As you can see in the trailer for Capitalism below, much of the substance is stripped away and the trailer becomes a clip reel of Moore’s shock-gags. I have no doubt that his movie will address the issues at hand, but at this point it appears that he’s just trying to perform a citizen’s arrest on the heads of AIG.

• Gabe at Videogum thinks the marketing of the film is improving, and he notes that it feels even older than 2008:
  

  Well, at the very least, this trailer is much better than the last trailer, right? For one thing, the movie has a name now, which is really useful when advertising a movie, and also (BONUS!) makes you seem like less of a self-involved narcissistic nightmare who is selling a movie on his involvement alone in some kind of distracting cult-of-personality which definitely undermines any serious political point you might have been trying to make. It is also just in general a much less coy trailer. And of course Paper Planes! 2007!

• Josh Tyler at Cinema Blend believes the  movie will fail regardless of how fresh or dated it is:
  

  Maybe I’m just cynical, ok I’m definitely cynical, but somehow I think Michael Moore’s new movie is going to fall on deaf ears. Not just because it’s Michael Moore and there’s a large portion of the population that always tunes out when his name is mentioned, but also because America has never been stupider. People are no longer interested in information or facts, they’re mostly interested in whatever they happen to believe, which may or may not be based on reality.

Here’s the trailer, courtesy of CNN:

James Cameron’s Avatar is supposed to be like nothing we’ve ever seen before. So why does it look so familiar? One of the most disappointing things about the film’s promotion so far is how derivative the film looks in the trailer that (eventually) debuted online today. And much of what we’re reminded of wasn’t even that great to begin with. To help illustrate our feeling of déjà vu, we’ve captured a few screenshots from the trailer and, where available, put them next to their older visual counterparts.

Hellboy (2004)

The first shot that looked familiar to us is still the one we believe to be most similar to its predecessor. We don’t want to say Cameron ripped off Guillermo Del Toro, but we don’t imagine this is intended as homage, either. Likely it’s just a coincidence, but when the blue guy spoke later on in the trailer I was disappointed that he didn’t have Doug Jones’ voice.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001)

We’re not the only ones crushed by how much this movie recalls the Final Fantasy adaptation, a movie that also was expected to be a groundbreaking piece of cinema, yet which was anything but. The sadder thing is that it doesn’t even seem as much like a video game adaptation as it does an actual video game. Hey, if we’re given joysticks in addition to the 3D glasses, we won’t complain. But we don’t think Cameron is that innovative just yet.


Starship Troopers (1997)

Humans on an alien planet being eaten by nasty creatures? Obviously that’s reminiscent of a certain Paul Verhoeven movie. The military outfits even remind us of those in Starship Troopers. We’ll assume there are no references to Nazi propaganda, but we can dream. Maybe there’s at least a Nazi-like character who wishes to wipe out all the aliens in a sort of blue-person Holocaust.


Dungeons & Dragons (2000)

We could have gone easy on the dragon-riding shots and say they’re reminiscent of a Harry Potter movie or maybe even The Neverending Story. But honestly the first thing that came to mind was the atrocious RPG adaptation Dungeons & Dragons. We only wish we could find a screenshot of Thora Birch riding a dragon to show how bad that movie’s visuals are. Not to say Avatar’s effects aren’t better, but the reminder still depreciates our interest.


Star Wars: Episode II -: Attack of the Clones (2002)

We’ll ignore the first Star Wars prequel, because this honestly doesn’t look that terrible. But it does look at least as bad as the latter two films in that trilogy. There’s not really a specific shot to focus on with this one. Just look at any of the busy shots, action scene or otherwise, with all that CG mess going on in the background. Is Cameron the new George Lucas? Well the romantic dialogue in Titanic is as cheesy as that of Attack of the Clones, so we’re not expecting much better from the blue person love story of Avatar. But at least Cameron hasn’t gone back and “fixed” parts of his movies, as much as he probably would prefer to with The Abyss.


Delgo (2008)

We’re giving credit to this harsh comparison to our friend Drew Taylor, of The Playlist, who Tweeted simply “Delgo, baby, Delgo,” in reply to his editor’s complaints about the Star Wars prequel similarities. We haven’t seen the infamous animated flop, but we’ll take Taylor’s word for it. How many other movies have strange humanoid creatures embracing like those two pairs above? Meanwhile, Kyle Buchanan over at Movieline compares the same shot to a more color-appropriate one from Watchmen.


Willow (1988)

There are a number of fantasy films in which a main character is suddenly surrounded by enchanting faerie type creatures. The one that first came to mind, though, is the Lord of the Rings wannabe Willow, a movie that was groundbreaking in its effects 20 years ago but which now looks rather silly. Will there be a giant faerie queen that shows up just after this shot?


The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003)

It’s actually not much better that Avatar also reminds us of the real LOTR. Maybe if any of the CG creatures looked as real as Gollum, but instead this trailer called back one specific character and one specific failed sequence from Return of the King. Thanks to the archery gear, the Na’vi look like blue elves, and thanks to the seemingly bad CG, we can’t help thinking back to that embarrassing bit of special effects depicting Legolas battling an oliphaunt.


King Kong (2005)

If Cameron isn’t the new George Lucas, he’s at least the new Peter Jackson, attempting to seem like the savior of effects-driven cinema only to really deliver a lot of disappointing CG garbage alongside his otherwise innovative visuals. This is why the shot above, despite first making us think of the groundbreaking Jurassic Park, is being compared to the stuff in Jackson’s King Kong that rip off Spielberg’s film. It looks every bit as messy and cartoonish as the prehistoric monsters of Jackson’s disappointing last movie.

District 9 (2009)

And when Avatar doesn’t simply seem like a Peter Jackson movie, it at least reminds us of a Peter Jackson production, specifically this summer’s District 9. Even though the idea of a human-alien hybrid here involves an intended operation, it is now too reminiscent of the unwanted transition in D9. It doesn’t help Avatar’s case that while different in concept there is still the moment when the hybrid character angrily wishes to leave his prison-like operating room. Does this mean D9 will at year’s end be the more original and influential, if not more groundbreaking, sci-fi movie of the year? We think we should still wait until Avatar is released to really think so. But we’re leaning towards the idea.

When I first saw Inglourious Basterds at Cannes, I walked out of the theater and felt like something was … off. I rushed to my computer and wrote a dismissive review. “Quentin Tarantino,” I wrote, “has never seemed to strain so hard to just make A Quentin Tarantino Film.” I complained about the film’s pacing, the quality of its dialogue, the excessive exposition. “Basterds plays almost like an assembly edit, defiantly presented as-is,” I concluded.

And then I saw the film again, this week, in New York, in a version said to be different from the one I saw at Cannes. Some scenes are said to be shorter, although I couldn’t tell you specifically which ones; one scene excised before the French premiere has been reinstated. After that screening, I went back and read what I wrote about the film from France, and cringed. The review of Inglourious Basterds I wrote in May simply does not apply to the film I saw with the same title this week.

This happens sometimes. We don’t talk about it much, but it happens. Sometimes movies change — and Tarantino and The Weinstein Company have made no secret of the fact that Basterds has changed sine its Cannes screenings. But critics change, too.

The plot is the same. The titular elite squad of Jewish-American soldiers assigned to hunt and scalp Nazis, led by Brad Pitt’s noose-scarred hillbilly Aldo Raine, is only on screen for about half the film. We spend much more time in the company of Colonel Hans Landa, otherwise known as The Jew Hunter, played as a cartoon of logical evil by  Christoph Waltz, and Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), a beautiful young French Jew whose family’s murder at Landa’s hands caps off the first iteration of Tarantino’s talk-talk, bang-bang structure. Later, Shoshana emerges in Paris as the owner of a small cinema. There she becomes the object of infatuation of a German war hero-turned-star of his own Goebbels-produced biopic, and the next thing she knows, she’s agreed to host a gala, no-Nazi-detractors-allowed premiere for the film at her theater. Knowing that Hitler and Goebbels will be in the audience, Shoshana and her projectionist boyfriend Marcel (Jacky Ido) plot to lock the theater during the film and set it on fire. Meanwhile, the Basterds, in cahoots with a German film star (Diane Kruger) and British film critic-turned-military officer (Michael Fassbender), separately plot to do essentially the exact same thing.

The film’s guiding spirit is encapsulated in an exclamation by Landa in the first scene: “I love rumors! Facts can be so misleading.” Tarantino has made a movie about World War II filtered through rumor — verbally-transmitted urban legends, to be precise. There is no casual conversation in Inglourious Basterds; virtually every scene involves an interrogation and a chance for someone to brag about and/or live up to their reputation. Concsious of the world they live in — ie, not Hitlers, not ours, but Tarantino’s — characters on both sides of the divide take an active role in their own myth-making, to make sure that word gets out as to who they are and why they are to be feared, and everyone takes great pride in knowing that word is getting around. The film’s most oft repeated phrase is “What have you heard?”

This myth-making provides both Basterds’ most fascinating subtext, and its most bloated primary text. Take for instance, our substantive introduction to the Basterds themselves, in which multiple reputations are discussed before three acts of Basterd-on-Nazi violence occur. One Basterd gets his own awkward origin story flashback, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, before we get to the point of the scene, which is defining which rumor will carry the day. The story of what happened that day will be told in three different forms. There’s what the Basterds tell the sole Nazi survivor of their massacre to tell Hitler; there’s what Hitler tells the sole survivor to tell everyone else, and then there’s what really happened.

Stories are propaganda, and propaganda is a weapon. This is not a film about how the war was fought on the ground (or in concentration/death camps, which are never mentioned), but a film about how both sides fought the battle on screen. In the single Basterds scene that I think is nowhere near long enough, Fassbender’s film critic-turned-British spy describes Goebbels as a warrior in the guise of a studio mogul, fighting for the dominance of the German film industry as a strike against both Weimar silent film and the Hollywood, both the provinces of successful Jews. Shoshanna uses celluloid as a weapon in a more literal sense. Her two-part revenge gambit involves film as an expolosive, and an explosive film in which she proclaims to be “the face of Jewish vengeance” (“in English,” Marcel insists when directing the scene — the language of the passive Jewish vengeance coming from Hollywood). Marcel’s goodbye to Shoshanna, delivered to her face on a movie screen after her actual body has already expired, is the closest thing to moment of genuine romance that Tarantino has ever filmed.

Ironically, though the film relies on the audience’s knowledge Nazi atrocities for its effects, it has little interest in actually depicting them. Tarantino reduces the Nazi high command to Hitler, chief propagandist Goebbels, and Martin Bormann (essentially Hitler’s press secretary). The public face and architect of Nazi supremacy and his right-hand men in its promotion are represented, but not Mengele or Höss, none of the real-life figures involved in the nitty gritty of designing and implementing genocide. Inglouirous Basterds not only avoids the depiction of the real figures responsible for the Final Solution, but it only presents the Nazi mass killing techniques as they’re appropriated as punishment onto Nazis by the Basterds.  If you don’t walk in knowing that Nazis branded Jews, shot them en masse, locked them in buildings which they then burnt to the ground, Tarantino isn’t going to tell you, but the Basterds would lose all justification for their brutality if such events hadn’t happened.

What does this all mean? It depends, I think, on how much credit you’re willing to give Quentin Tarantino as a political provocateur. Is he really talking about the world we live in today? If so, what are we to make of a film that plays like apolitical fantasy, but nevertheless devotes its final images to broadcasting the idea that even when we win, Jews will remain an angry people who will neither forgive nor forget the wrongs done to us? If you want to see Inglorious Basterds as a contemporary allegory, you don’t have to strain — in fact, Tarantino makes it easy by presenting American soldiers who treat torture as entertainment (“watching Germans getting beat to death is the closest we ever get to going to the movies,” says Pitt), in a setting 60 years removed from Abu Ghraib, within a fight that, like our current excursions in the Middle East, is in part about the right of Jews to simply exist. And then, by giving us multiple (if ambiguously intentional) Jewish suicide bombers, Tarantino makes sure that the heroes of Basterds not only do onto their 20th century oppressors what has been done to them, but they also give their key 21st century foes a taste of their own medicine. You could make the argument that Inglourious Basterds is a palpably anti-Semitic film as easily as you could argue that it’s a rah-rah work of pro-Imperialism, propaganda for US/Israeli collaborative war against those who threaten either’s global interests.

Either reading, I think, probably gives Tarantino too much credit — when has he ever been a filmmaker who ached to make a statement about contemporary events? Plus, the film’s best source cue tempers either extreme. A key, glorious sequence is set to David Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting out Fire)” — borrowed, fittingly, from the soundtrack of the Paul Schrader remake of a Val Lewton horror number that allegorized the struggle of European immigrants in WWII America. It’s one of those musical-montage-as-mission-statement moments: you can’t put out a fire with gasoline without adding to the flames. Every act of war has fallout, and extreme acts burn for decades. Maybe this, too, is giving Tarantino too much credit, to assume that he’d take an active step to undercut his promotion of revenge, particularly when he’s talked at length about wanting to overturn the typical Holocaust film power dynamics to show “Germans that are scared of Jews.” But let’s just say he has a pretty strong track record of speaking through his soundtracks.

I’m still struggling with Basterds, as a statement of ideology (or lack thereof), and as a work of art. There are still things that bother me in terms of the way it flows, and I still think Tarantino sometimes over-exerts himself with the telling at the expense of the showing. But still  — mea culpa. My initial assessment of the film was wrong. Maybe what I saw this week in New York really is a complete revitalization, so completely different from what I saw in Cannes as to excuse me from blame for not fully engaging with it in the couple of hours I had to form a correct opinion before the film was rendered old news by the maw of the festival cycle. But probably not. Probably, it is a couple of things. The film is now unquestionably a little bit tighter than the first version I saw; my complaints about the flow and movement of the action sequences is no longer valid, and as far as my complaint about the lack of “rock n’ roll efficiency”, well, that is idiotic now and probably was then, as well. But I honestly don’t know what has changed more since May: the cut of Inglouirous Basterds, or me.

Maybe this is unfair to you, the reader — maybe film critics shouldn’t change. Maybe we should go out of our way to lead extraordinarily stabile lives, to avoid financial stress and familial trauma, to not get depressed or even date for fear of swinging too far towards any emotional extreme in the hopes of maintaining absolute objectivity. If that’s the case, I didn’t do what I should’ve done — I’ve been sent through the wringer by all the above over the last three months, and come out a different person. But the world changes, whether or not I stay the same, and at the rate this one is changing, it’s unrealistic to expect something as trifling as a movie opinion to stay fixed indefinitely. In May, I was visiting France from a country just barely emerged from the glowing spell of Obama’s first hundred days. Today, I am currently living in an America where — apparently — it’s okay to compare the President to Hitler because he is trying to make it easier for poor people to go to hospitals and for old people to draw up living wills, and the only person doing anything substantial to combat that theory is a gay Jew who uses “dining room table” as an epithet. The question of what it means to act like a Nazi is suddenly relevant to our everyday lives. It’s possible that we need Inglourious Basterds now more than ever.

It’s not too surprising to learn many movie bloggers aren’t fans of Mad Men. They’re movie geeks, not TV viewers, and they probably spend their Sunday nights re-watching favorite horror flicks and Dark Knight DVD extras. That’s why a lot of sites commenting on the news that Jon Hamm is joining Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch focus on the movie and the Watchmen director more than on the actor. Which is fine for now, even if it makes the casting decision seem questionable, because ultimately this career move is going to help Hamm acquire fanboy fans, and that’s one thing he needs in order to truly become the next George Clooney.

After all, Clooney’s first major film role after becoming a star on TV’s ER was Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s vampire picture From Dusk Till Dawn. And Snyder’s movie isn’t too far off, regardless of the fact none of us really know what Sucker Punch is going to be like other than maybe a Return to Oz knockoff. That movie will bring Hamm to Comic-Con, which will potentially gain him more followers who think he’d be perfect for a Superman movie (Clooney played Batman soon after FDTD). And so on.

Many Mad Men fans might prefer for Hamm to concentrate on dramatic roles as he segues into a movie career, but like Clooney, Hamm is likely better suited for genre films and silly comedies first. He certainly has shown he enjoys and can do comedic acting via 30 Rock, SNL and a FunnyorDie sketch that already got the geeks’ attention with his portrayal of Lex Luthor. Might he try being cast in a Coen Brothers film next? Or should he reconnect with the makers of The Ten and make David Wain & co. his goofball collaborators instead?

The only Clooney career step I’d like Hamm to avoid is the big budget, non-geek-centric action movie. He doesn’t need a Peacemaker or a Perfect Storm, and we kinda hope he got that sort of thing out of his system with The Day the Earth Stood Still. Plus, Hamm is already entering the film biz later than Clooney. When he was Hamm’s age, Clooney’d already made two of his best films, Out of Sight and Three Kings.

Let me know what kind of films you’d like to see Hamm do and what you think would be good for him to do. Before commenting, though, check out what some other film bloggers are saying about his latest film choice after the jump:

• Anne Thompson at Thompson on Hollywood disagrees with me, preferring another of Hamm’s film choices as the right direction to go in:
  

  I have high hopes for the first film, The Town, director Ben Affleck’s romantic thriller set in Boston, which starts shooting in September.  I’m less confident in Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, a 50s action fantasy for Warners. Hamm has enormous potential—he could be the next George Clooney—but has to pick right while he has the chance.

• Simon Dang at The Playlist also thinks Hamm is hurting his career with this part:
  

  Why a respected, much-loved actor like Hamm would join this film is beyond us. We’re sure in years to come he’ll regret having a character named High Roller tainting his resume next to Don Draper. Hamm also has Ben Affleck’s “The Town” and Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s James Franco starrer “Howl” on his plate.

• Renn Brown at CHUD.com recognizes that this should introduce many geeks to Hamm, and maybe even Mad Men:
  

  John Hamm is an actor I know better from his online comedy work (he’s done a few great Funny Or Die sketches) than his film work. I’ve yet to jump on the Mad Men train and I never caught The Day The Earth Stood Still. I’ll definitely be seeing Hamm in Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch –the cast of which he has just joined– but that’s not till 2011. Maybe I’ll grab a Mad Men DVD by then.

• Katey Rich at Cinema Blend is more hopeful that young girls will become Hamm fans through this movie:
  

  If teenage girls aren’t currently in love with Jon Hamm, either their parents are keeping them away from quality TV or they just haven’t yet learned the appeal of a square jaw and a slight smirk. But with the Mad Men star joining the cast of Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch, it might just be time for a teen girl awakening.

• Over at Aint It Cool News, the commenters are arguing a bit over whether Hamm should play Superman or Batman (or should have played Green Lantern). Meanwhile, “CaptainAxis” puts it out there that Hamm’s casting will give Snyder credibility more than get Hamm in good with the fanboys:
  

  I wasn’t overly interested in this movie, but the addition of Jon Hamm definitely helps. I’m not a Snyder fanboy but I do think he deserves a lot more credit than some of you give him, so I defend the guy when I see some pretentious douchebag on here ranting about him being a hack. You may not like Snyder or the films he makes, but that doesn’t make him a hack. Hopefully he will prove it to the “haters” with Sucker Punch.

• Adam Rosenberg at MTV Movies Blog also wonders if Hamm will help Snyder more than vice versa:
  

  Snyder has plenty of pop culture cache after “Watchmen,” though his controversial treatment of the source — and liberal changes made to the ending in particular — has probably left some fans in doubt…Hamm is certainly a valuable addition to the cast; not only is he a talented performer, but the ever-growing “Mad Men” crowd will certainly boost the interest surrounding “Sucker Punch.”

• Amos Barshad at Vulture sees the setting as being appropriate for Hamm:
  

  There are no details available for the role, but two things make this sound like a good fit: The movie is set in the fifties, so Hamm can just bring a suit from Mad Men; also, his character’s name is High Roller.

• Alex Billington at FirstShowing has no idea if Hamm will be good for the role, due to its secrecy:
  

  While we know Hamm’s character goes by the awesome name High Roller, all other details are being kept under tight wraps. And it’s not easy to figure out what his role might entail with a movie described as “Alice in Wonderland with machine guns.”

• Neil Miller at Film School Rejects just hopes it’s not as bad a career choice as The Day the Earth Stood Still:
  

  Without more information it is difficult to say whether or not this is a good fit for Hamm, or vice versa. It certainly is good to see Dick Whitman getting some work outside of Madison, Avenue though. I just hope that this, like his previous forays into the world of cinema, doesn’t come out the other end smelling nearly as bad as say, that movie with Keanu Reeves as the alien. That, was bad.

• Krystal Clark at ScreenCrave guesses the nature of the character:
  

  As if the story wasn’t creepy enough, we know next to nothing about Hamm’s character. The only thing the studio’s released is his name, which will be “High Roller.” What is he a pimp?

• Elisabeth Rappe at Cinematical takes another educated guess:
  

  …he’s only known to be playing someone named High Roller. But given what major role has yet to be cast, I’m willing to bet he’s playing the stepfather. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Hamm doing a bit of Captain Hook duty, and popping up as the antagonist of the girls’ dream world as well.

• Dan Hopper at Best Week Ever doesn’t care about character details so long as the role is similar to a certain other part in a prior Snyder picture:
  

  John Hamm is set to star as a character named “High Roller” in the upcoming Zack Snyder-directed film Sucker Punch. I’m sure I’m not the only one kiiiiind of hoping for a shirtless-Hamm yelling “SPARTA” scene.

Under discussion:

Sleeping Dogs Lie  (2006)

World's Greatest Dad  (2009)

This interview was originally published during the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. World’s Greatest Dad debuts in New York this week, and it’s already available on VOD.

In the director’s statement slipped into the press notes for his Robin Williams-starring Sundance entry World’s Greatest Dad, Bobcat Goldthwait says it took him 25 years in show business to figure out that what he really wants to do is direct movies, and doing so makes him feel like he’s “getting away with murder.” That’s a fair description of what he pulls off in Dad, in which a frustrated novelist/high school teacher (Williams) exploits the death of a loved one to plump up his own popularity. Though far more polished than Goldthwait’s 2006 Sundance competition film Sleeping Dogs Lie (also known as Stay), Dad rides the same line between obscene satire and almost mushy sincerity. I talked to Goldthwait about self-Googling, why he has no desire for his stand-up fans to see his movies, and why he’s not going on Celebrity Fit Club any time soon.

I was a really big fan of Stay/Sleeping Dogs Lie.

Well, I actually know that. I would like to pretend I was more secure and didn’t Google my own name, but you - you were very supportive. [laughter] It meant a lot to me. And you’re also a funny writer. That’s my girlfriend over there, she’s the costume designer and we’re kind of a team. I started reading your stuff out loud to her, because it made me laugh. Not just to hear you say flattering things about my movies.

Wow, thank you very much. Anyway, I noticed a sort of interesting theme between that film and the new one, which is that they both kind of send the message that lying makes your life a lot better.

I thought it was the other way. I wanted this to be, like, the flipside.

Right, ultimately he turns away from lying.

Right. And actually, [the main character of Sleeping Dogs Lie] embraces it. No, that was kind of the idea. I thought of the end of this one first and I wanted it to be - the last one was kind of about unconditional love from other people. This one was about … [pause]. This is so pretentious. Often when I’m doing interviews, if I heard them I’d have to come over and punch myself in the throat. But it is a really unpopular thing, I think, [to talk about] a man learning to take care of himself. And this is the part that’s gross for me to say: “to love himself.”

Because to me, Lance, he has to earn my caring about him. Because the only people that are kind of nice in this movie, to me, is Andrew, the little boy.

When you say that you sometimes say things in interviews that are so pretentious that you’d punch you if you heard it - there was a thing in your director’s statement about how it took you your whole career to figure out you wanted to make movies. And then there this line in the movie about how movies are “for art fags and losers.” Did you feel some resistance earlier in your life about making independent films, or about being a director? You also said something when you were introducing the move about how you’re not an “auteur.”

Here’s the thing. I spent all this time in the system being miserable and being really beat up. Not realizing that this is my second life. When I turned away, I was so happy. My goal is to keep on making movies, and really I know that if I do them like I did Stay which was with a crew from Craigslist and was shot in two weeks, I have no problem with that. I really don’t care. And not like I used to say, “I don’t care, man!” [raises both middle fingers in the air]. I really don’t care. I just want to keep making movies. Sometimes they connect and sometimes they don’t, you know? I don’t mean that. I certainly wish I could connect with a bigger audience. But I’m not going to worry about that because I’m happy right now.

You also said something about how sometimes you just want to say, “**** it,” and write a Kate Hudson movie.

[laughter] I’ll say this. I’m probably the only director here who in three weeks is going to be playing an Indian casino in Iowa. Which is true. It’s true. And I go out on the road and I don’t like doing stand-up comedy. And what’s funny is I can say that to you in this interview, that I hate stand-up comedy. And the people who come out to see me, they’ll never see that quote. Because those people come - it’s like I’m Foreigner, going out on the road. There’s still going to be an audience to see Frampton.

Are you saying you’re a nostalgia act?

Oh, totally. Totally. These people don’t come - the last time actually I went on stage, I had to make some money to pay the rent, and I was on the road. I figured it out, and I’d been on the road and only three times did someone bring up that movie. And the rest were like, “Remember that movie with the homeless dude?”

Do you think if you starred in the films there would be of more of a connect with that audience? Or do you not even want that connection?

I don’t want to star in my movies. Because I don’t. I don’t. I don’t want to. It took me this long to get out of it. I truly don’t like acting. I’m in this one, and I wanted Guillermo from the “Jimmy Kimmel Show.” I don’t know if you ever watch the show, but he’s the parking lot attendant. And he had become my friend, and he had to work that day. Which is truly why I’m in the movie.

My daughter and I were laughing about how bad my acting voice was. I almost had Tom Kenny loop my voice, not have it match, because I thought it would be really funny. But then I thought it would take you out of the movie.

One thing I really like about both of these last two movies is something that seems to stem from your personality: there’s a split between being obscene and satirically funny, and then being really sincere. And that seems so perfect for Robin Williams, too.

Yeah. Well, thanks. I am sincere. It’s so funny, like - I mean, that’s probably why I had that persona all those years, because it was a place to hide and not have to reveal who I was. But these movies are way more about who I am than anything I’ve done or anything…It wasn’t until I’d finished it recently that I realized, “Oh, I get it. Lance turns his back.” It’s like no one believes you that you don’t want to be in front of the camera. If I want to be on “Celebrity Fit Club” it’s one phone call, you know what I mean?

Right.

I could still be out in the public eye. And I remember at that point during my stand-up, when I set the “Tonight Show” on fire, the director - obviously something happened. I don’t want to become an armchair shrink, but I was trying to get out, you know? But that made me more bookable.

When you do something like that you just create attention around yourself. And then attention feeds on attention.

Yeah. I really do like being behind the camera. The whole set ends up being like everybody’s family. And all these guys, I’ve worked with them and they show up. Like Tom Kenny and Jill Talley, they show up briefly. I just like working with friends.

The actors did a lot of ad-libbing?

It’s really funny, because Robin got really defensive when people asked him if he was ad-libbing. And he says, “No. It was all in the script.” I go, “No, but that’s a compliment, they just thought you were being natural.”

I’m not a writer who goes, “Ah, these are my precious words.” I like that you do it and you keep working on it and you do some where it’s staged, really, and some where it’s straight as a heart attack. And then I’ve got all these choices when I go back to edit. I don’t like directors who almost embarrass the actors. That’s a real thing.

Just to get the kind of performance they want?

Yeah. **** them, it’s just a movie. We should all be in the same thing. Some days though - I don’t know if you know Tom Kenny, but he one of my best friends since I was 15. He’s Spongebob. We grew up together. And I never felt funny because I always just watched him. He’s really, really awesome. That’s why I like directing him. I’m back to watching Tom Kenny. It really was like the Marx Brothers [on set]. Screaming and running around this PBS TV stage. And I’m pulling out what’s left of my hair. “Come on, guys, really, we’ve got o finish.” And they’re all like, “Whoo-oo-oo.” And I was like that too. And it just feeds it, and it’s good.

Does the finished film end up looking really different from what you had in mind before you started?

Robin is such a great actor that he exceeded my expectations. And Daryl. And I have to say Alexie, she could be in these scenes with Robin and to not disappear is really impressive for the both of them.

There was a guy in the Q&A who thanked you for making movies that make him squirm. He said that that’s what Sundance should be about. But it really isn’t. There are so few independent films or really any films that take risks and are comfortable with making the audience uncomfortable. Why do you think that is?

I had the luxury of being recognized and all that crap. I know that it’s bullshit, and I think a lot of these young filmmakers are hoping to make it. And I know that people, when they’re trying to sell a movie, that’s just more pressure. Because I don’t want anyone to take a hit because they believe in me. I want the movie to recoup.

But this is the destination. I just want to shake them all and go, “I didn’t even have a distributor and they let me in, and gave me a good crowd to see a movie.”

Another thing that you said in your director’s statement was that you whole goal is to have an audience see the film, that’s why you make the films. There’s been a lot of talk this week about new distribution models, movies skipping theatrical distribution to go on video-on-demand and all these other things. But aren’t there are certain types of films that need to be seen in a theater with an audience, like the kinds of comedies you make?

Yeah. That’s how it’s made. People second-guess whether something works [when watching it alone] versus watching it with a crowd. That’s the nature of comedy. I do hope people - do I want to say I hope people see it? Because that’s not true. [laughs] I hope the right people see it.

Who are the right people?

I don’t give a shit if people who went to see that goddamn Kevin James movie see this movie. [laughter] I don’t give a **** if they see my movie.

So if the right people aren’t the people who go see a Kevin James movie, and they’re not the people who go see you do stand-up, who are they?

I don’t know. I might just be me and a couple of my friends. [laughter] **** “American Idol.” **** ‘em all.

They just gave me the wrap-it-up signal, so I’ll just ask you one more question…

Do the voice. [laughs]

[laughs] No, I’m not going to go there. What else are you working on? What’s coming up?

There’s another script in the so-called the “Boo-Hoo Trilogy, ” in the same tone of these two, although there’s not the same characters. Although my daughter’s really funny. I go, “It’s a little bit based on us, but not really” - she goes, “**** off, that’s my life!” But I’m super lazy. This movie was like me remembering horrible things some people said, and I put it in the screenplay. [laughs]

That’s basically your process, is just remembering your pain?

Just like hearing someone saying something and it be so cringe-worthy that I go, “Ahh.”

While most of the film blogosphere is wondering why Sony hasn’t yet greenlit a District 9 sequel, our old friends at the Oscar blogs are addressing a potential awards campaign for the sci-fi hit. According to Peter Bart at Variety, an Academy screening of the film over the weekend was very well received (best applause in years? come on), and the news has sparked buzz of a possible Best Picture nod. After all, there are ten available slots this year.

Honestly, I enjoyed the movie very much, but if it’s being considered Oscar-worthy, I’ll be the first to begin the backlash (against the awards push; Armond White already took care of the general backlash). District 9 shouldn’t be nominated for Best Picture any more than Star Trek should. It shouldn’t even be nominated any more than Transformers 2 should. Regardless of how much better it may be.

And I don’t necessarily have anything against a sci-fi movie being up for the award. If Cameron’s Avatar is groundbreaking and brilliant, give it a nomination. I just want to make it clear that District 9 is very good, but it is not that good. And just saying that it deserves an Oscar campaign adds to the continued depreciation of the Academy Awards.

Read what other film bloggers are saying about the District 9 Oscar buzz after the jump:

• Graeme McMillan at io9 thinks it’s too soon to be Oscar-buzzing about D9:
  

  It’s not even been released for a week, and already, people are talking about how District 9 is going to be robbed of the Oscars it apparently so richly deserves. What is going on?

• Tom O’Neil at Gold Derby, having already recently addressed the Academy’s sci-fi curse in relation to D9’s chances, can’t believe the buzz:
  

  Perhaps it sounds outlandish — maybe even as wacky as the story of reptilian aliens lustily devouring cat food while being imprisoned by humans in “District 9” — but Variety reports that Oscar voters are gobbling up the hit sci-fi flick. They’ve only endorsed a few in the past (”Star Wars,” “E.T.”). Now Variety’s Peter Bart reveals a “dirty little secret” — asserting “‘District 9‘ is an absolutely brilliant movie that could easily sneak away with some Oscars.”

• Sasha Stone at Awards Daily is doubtful that applause is a gateway to kudos:
  

  Not necessarily; Academy members are people too.  Just because they were entertained and loved the movie doesn’t mean that they’ll consider it as a Best Pic contender…is this Variety trying harder to get into the Oscar game in order to get those Oscar ads flowing?  Finally, is it unethical of Bart to talk the Oscar talk if he is a member?  Does that influence the vote?

• Kristopher Tapley at In Contention claims Academy screening applause can be a gauge for Oscar potential. He goes on to speculate on D9’s nomination possibilities:
  

  I have a friend, AMPAS member, who always says you can place a smart bet on a film’s Oscar chances across the board based on the way applause ebbs and flows during the closing credits…Maybe something like an original screenplay nomination could be in the cards?  Or — hey, there are 10 — a Best Picture berth?  In a perfect world, Sharlto Copley would be in the BEst Actor running, but let’s not get carried away.

• Tambay at Shadow and Act also weighs in on which categories are within D9’s reach:
  

  At best, maybe Best Original Screenplay? Although, director Neill Blomkamp himself stated that there really wasn’t even a screenplay written for the film – more like an outline of events which were filled in while on set, in order to reflect the kind of realism we see in the end product. What else? Special Effects? I think we’ve seen, and will likely see, better effects work in other effects-laden films this year. Best Director? Best Picture? Best Actor? Can’t see it in any of those either.

• S.T. VanAirsdale at Movieline points out that D9 could help its studio get back on the Academy’s map:
  

  Sony hasn’t had a Best Picture nominee since 1997, when TriStar pushed As Good as it Gets into contention. On the other hand, it has no real potential horses in the field unless Julie and Julia manages some word-of-mouth streak deep into fall — which it won’t. So what’s the worst that can happen? If the studio could market an inexpensive genre thriller to such lofty highs, who wouldn’t want to see how it sells aliens to Oscar?

• Anne Thompson at Thompson on Hollywood was already wondering about Oscar chances for D9 in yesterday’s box office report:
  

  Not so sure how the Academy will handle District 9, which will be on many film critics’ ten best lists at year’s end. But it’s an intense genre thriller. Maybe VFX and some technicals. Neill Blomkamp is an outsider. LOTR Oscar-winner Peter Jackson, who made the film possible, is not.

• 2morrowKnight at 2morrowKnight’s Awesome Blog was already predicting D9 for the Best Picture win, let alone nomination, last week. Could he be joking? I hope so given this excerpt:
  

  Right now, I believe it’s the front-runner for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Sure, a movie like this doesn’t usually get any Oscar-love. After all, classics like Remember the Titans (1998), The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), Mona Lisa Smile (2003), and Spider Man 2 (2004) weren’t nominated for Best Picture.

“Another depressing movie for the depression,” Abel Ferrara cracked, after a screening of his 1992 film Bad Lieutenant at Anthology Film Archives on Saturday night. The screening was held to raise money for Cinema Nolita, an indie video store on the verge of having to shut down for lack of funds (they’re having another benefit tonight, a concert featuring The Virgins and a DJ set by Animal Collective). Ferrara, who lives in the neighborhood and is a regular patron of the store, turned the the post-movie Q & A into an angry but resigned meditation on the ways in which New York, indie film and the world have changed in nearly two decades, to get us from the point where someone like Ferrara could make a film on the streets of New York, to the point where someone like Ferarra may soon be unable to rent a film on the streets of New York.

“Watching this film, it’s kind of sad,” Ferrara said. “At that time, there was some kind of indie film scene going on, and we could make a film and get it distributed. Why that indie film industry isn’t there [now] is caught up in the changing times.”

Several times during the evening Ferrara grumbled over the compromises involved in getting his upcoming 50 Cent-starring Jekyl & Hyde adaptation off the ground. “We’re just trying to get the movie made, and now every movie’s being made in Grand Rapids, Michigan, even if it’s set in Liberia. I’ve never been to Grand Rapids, but they’re bending over to give movies cash [via tax incentives].”

“I don’t know if we could have made [Bad Lieutenant] in Grand Rapids,” Ferrara said, pausing to laugh to himself. “But in this day and age, if you get money to do a movie, you’re gonna go to Mars.”

For Ferrara, his difficulties financing and distributing films in North America - his last feature, 2007’s wonderful Go Go Tales, remains unreleased here due to legal issues — are tied into the demise of places like Cinema Nolita. Several times, he asked the audience things like, “How do you guys watch movies? Is everyone shaking down the internet?” It quickly became apparent that, in Ferrara’s world, “internet” is a dirty word.
“When I made [Bad Lieutenant], they were trying to sell the internet to me as the best thing to come along,” he said. “At this point, I feel like it’s another knife in the back of the filmmaker’s spirit. Somehow, having direct access to your audience is not turning out to get movies made.”

Tom Jarmusch, brother of Jim, was in the audience. At one point, Abel asked him to talk about how his brother continues to get his films financed and distributed. He didn’t — the obvious answer is “casting BIll Murray” — but he seemed to agree with Ferrara’s stance on the paradox of technological change. “It seems like all these opportunities are opening [doors], but they’re really shutting,” Jarmusch said. Ferrara responded, “It’s open, but it’s a rip off,” and then ranted a bit on piracy via YouTube.

Speaking of YouTube: at one point, Ferrara announced, “We got a special attraction.” He motioned to the projectionist, and soon we were watching the trailer for Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, the project that famously provoked Ferrara to comment that he hoped Herzog and his production team “die in Hell.” Ferrara’s post-trailer comments were still bitter, but more restrained.

“Unfortunately, anyone involved in our film wasn’t invited for that film, but I was told I should be really happy that such great people are ripping off our ideas.” A voice in the crowd called out, “You didn’t see a dime off that?” Ferrara: “Well … I might have saw A DIME.” Another voice asked if Ferrara planned to see the remake when it comes out. He shook his head vigorously and gestured to the screen where the trailer had played. “That’s enough of that.”

Cinema Nolita, one of the only independent videostores left in New York City, was supposed to close down at the beginning of this month, but they’ve managed to stay open and continue to rent movies. According to their Facebook page, after this New York Times blurb was published, the store’s landlord agreed to give the organization a couple of weeks to raise money to pay their back rent, and they’re throwing two fundraisers over the next few days to that end. Tomorrow night, Abel Ferrara will appear for a Q & A after a screening of Bad Lieutenant at Anthology Film Archives. This should be a must-attend event for those who have been gleefully following Ferrara’s rage towards Werner Herzog’s remake. Then, on Monday, The Virgins (who appeared in Ry Russo-Young’s You Wont Miss Me) will perform at a benefit show at Santos Party House, also featuring a DJ set by Animal Collective. There’s more info about both events and the general effort to save Cinema Nolita on their website.

UPDATE: At /Hammer to Nail, Lena Dunham talks to Cinema Nolita employee/The Pleasure of Being Robbed star Eleonore Hendricks about the benefits. Apparently, Ferrara will also be screening his still-undistributed Go Go Tales at Anthology on Sunday, with proceeds again going to the Cinema Nolita cause.

Let’s play that game where we compare quotes from two seemingly unrelated stories that happened to come out on the same day and thus seem to say something about the zeitgeist.

First, from an interview with District 9 producer Peter Jackson (via Scott Kirsner):

Peter Jackson: You know, in the old days it was very difficult to make movies ’cause you had to have 35 millimeter cameras, which were phenomenally expensive. Or you had to have rich parents that could send you to film school. Nowadays, anybody, any kid or young person with a desire to make films … (has) access to this equipment. You have great video cameras and the quality’s fantastic. You can make soundtracks and do visual effects. You can do very competent computer effects quite easily.”

Q: What impact do you see this having on Hollywood?

Jackson: “There are no excuses anymore. If people really want to make movies, they can go out and do it. And I think we’re going see in the next 20 or 30 years a real influx of creativity to the world of entertainment because I believe a lot in the young generation coming along … the pop culture generation who now can grab these cameras and go make films with them.

Then, from a story in the NYT by Michael Cieply, titled Independent Filmmakers Distribute on Their Own:

Here is how it used to work: aspiring filmmakers playing the cool auteur in hopes of attracting the eye of a Hollywood power broker.

Here is the new way: filmmakers doing it themselves — paying for their own distribution, marketing films through social networking sites and Twitter blasts, putting their work up free on the Web to build a reputation, cozying up to concierges at luxury hotels in film festival cities to get them to whisper into the right ears.

Cieply’s key example of sucessful self-distribution is Anvil!:

“I paid for everything, I took a second mortgage on my house,” said Sacha Gervasi, the film’s director.

Mr. Gervasi, whose studio writing credits include “The Terminal,” directed by Steven Spielberg, nearly three years ago, began filming “Anvil!” with his own money in hopes of attracting a conventional distributor. The movie played well at Sundance in 2008, but offers were low.

So Mr. Gervasi put up more money — his total cost was in “the upper hundred thousands,” he said — to distribute the film…

So! You can make a movie! All by yourself! As long as you’re okay with not ever shooting on film! And then you can release it yourself! Because no one’s going to do it for you! And if they do, they won’t pay for TV advertising, so no one who doesn’t follow you on Facebook will ever hear about it! And so after you’ve put up your own small fortune and invested years of your life making the movie on your own, you can then devote at least another year to Twittering about it! And you can spend eve more money flying yourself to film festivals so you can hang out in luxury hotels talking to anyone who will listen to you ramble on about it! And in short, it’s a good thing you made money writing a screenplay for Steven Spielberg, so that you have ample money and time to devote to this endeavor, because without that, your self-distribution gambit might not have been feasible! It’s so great that we live in this time of opportunities for all humans!!!!!!! Are you inspired yet?!?!

Under discussion:

Pierrot Le Fou  (1965)

Drama/Mex  (2006)

I'm Gonna Explode (Voy a explotar)  (2008)

Voy a Explotar (I’m Gonna Explode) is the contemporary Mexican teenage Pierrot le Fou. It knows this, and it wants you to know it, and it doesn’t care if this makes you hate it on principle. The third feature by Gerardo Naranjo (director of Drama/Mex, co-writer and star of Azazel Jacobs‘ The GoodTimeskid), it’s the rare love letter to influence that’s infused with enough personal style and sentiment to transform the stolen into something thrilling and moving.

15 year-old Maru (Maria Deschamps) is a prep school bad girl with a mangy mane of hair and, apparently, a drinking problem. When spoiled little rich boy son of a right-wing politician Roman (Juan Pablo de Santiago) gets kicked out of his school and transfers to Maru’s, he introduces himself via faking his own hanging at a talent show. The girl is instantly besotted. “He exists, but I also made him up,” she writes in a letter to a friend which doubles as internal monologue. “The best part is that he’s angry.” Roman is equally smitten, and soon the pair are scheming to run away together.

Or so they want their parents to think; really, they’re camped out in a tent on the roof of Roman’s father’s mansion. Maru’s hysterical mother and sister come over to the house to become part of the rescue effort––which, under the oversight of Roman’s distant dad, consists mainly of drinking tequila and waiting for clues to come to him. With a stolen cell phone, Roman calls daddy’s security detail with false leads to get the grown ups out of the house so that he and Maru can crawl downstairs and collect provisions. It’s only when the pair decide to finally leave home for real that their saga starts to hew to the traditional tropes of love-on-the-run.

Explotar is so blatantly indebted to Pierrot le Fou that it’s tempting to play Count the References –– here Maru clomps around singing “I don’t know what to do!” There the screen fills with her notebook-scrawled ephemera about romantic destiny! But Naranjo has made Maru more than the beautiful mystery that embodies the typical Godard woman. This girl is a loud-mouthed firecracker who vacillates between unguarded passion for Roman and brittle rejection of his advances. In cutting off her hair to become Roman’s “twin”, Maru reveals that her attraction to Roman is actually a kind of jealousy. Deluded as she is about most elements of the real world and grown-up life, she knows her power over Roman ends the moment she becomes a “put outer.” even if she puts out in the name of love, and there’s a resentment there. She’s the kind of realistically conflicted girl almost never seen on screen.

The sex scenes between the two teenagers are surprisingly sexy, not because of what you see but because there isn’t much to see at all. Though the nudity is borderline frank in that Euro, “teenage breasts=freedom” sort of way, it’s not overtly titillating so much as it’s recognizably real, from the nervous twitching leading up to it to the lack of assuredness that runs throughout. Maru and Roman’s romance is brittle and tentative at first, but then the floodgates open, at which point, with an almost fin de siecle spirit, it gushes.

The peak of Maru and Roman’s relationship coincides with the puncture of their invincibility. Once they cement that they are one another’s “perfect accomplice,” as Maru puts it, the time comes to pay the bill for their rebellion. This is the essence of teenage romance ––the first love will be the last love–– and thus, it’s something we’ve seen on screen before. What feels unique, and genuinely tragic, about Explode’s denouement is not that shit gets violent and people get hurt, but that Maru and Roman, like most kids, clearly never really wanted to get in trouble at all. Mouthy and lazy but ultimately uninterested in any kind of criminal nihilism that would take them too far away from the womb of parental-funded modern comforts, Maru and Roman went looking for a Ferris Bueller-style charmed but temporary time-out from mundane responsibility, and end up bumbling into Bonnie and Clyde. In these climes of quirky indie romantic lessons learned, the punishment of starry-eyed delusion feels not only refreshing, but almost like a corrective with political implications.

This review appeared in slightly different form during the 2008 New York Film Festival. I’m Gonna Explode premieres tonight at the Film Society at Lincoln Center and screens there through September 18.

Before even seeing District 9, we had a feeling there’d be at least a hint of human-alien sex, because science fiction, smart or dumb, has always had a fascination with the idea of inter-species love. And while bestiality may still be a taboo subject for Hollywood, the movies are always okay with the interplanetary variety, probably because it’s (usually) more consensual.

The aliens in District 9 are not sexy, though (not to us, anyway). They look like, and are derogatorily called, Prawns. So there are no apparent romances between these creatures and humans. But there is a reference to Nigerian prostitutes selling sex to the prawns, and there’s also sort of a depiction of a man and a prawn going at it “doggy style.”

While human-alien sex is commonly found in outer-space tales, such as Star Trek, we decided to look primarily at examples of visitors to Earth getting it on with the locals, similar to international sexcations that occur in the real world. Of course, because we’re not too familiar with sci-fi porn, there are likely a few good sex scenes we’ve left out. Feel free to tell us about them (if you’re not embarrassed) in the comments section.

Steve Guttenberg Gets a Burst of Sex, in Cocoon (1985)

Any man would love to get physical with an alien that looks like Tahnee Welch, but unfortunately her character’s species doesn’t have sex the way humans do. Still, Steve Guttenberg looks pretty satisfied with the way she does it to him, apparently tossing a burst of light and energy, or something, at his chest. The only problem is it’s clearly one-sided. Then again, we never do find out if what we’ve seen is just foreplay.

Kim Basinger Learns About Sex, in My Stepmother is an Alien (1988)

If your mission calls for you to travel to Earth and marry a human, naturally you’re going to be expected to consummate the marriage. Fortunately for Kim Basinger’s sexually ignorant alien, her purse-dwelling, phallic-looking companion can project instructional films and dispense Debbie Does Dallas videotapes. In no time, Basinger is a an expert on the subject, or at least in the ways of turning on hubby Dan Aykroyd — and probably way too many young boys in the audience of this seemingly family friendly PG-13 movie. The scene cuts just before the actual sex begins, but it may as well have kept going. It couldn’t have gotten anymore explicit than this. And we’re pretty sure Aykroyd has already come by the end of this clip, anyway.

Geek Loses Virginity to Evil Alien, in Evil Aliens (2005)

We like this sex scene because it makes us think of all those fanboys at Comic-Con who’d likely have sex with an alien, even one as disgusting and evil as the one here. They’d probably even do the Queen from Aliens, and the Predator, and the thing from Mac and Me. Because not only would they finally get to finally lose their virginity, they’d also become the envy of all their fanboy friends. Then they’d wear a crown and act all superior like Ken Jeong in Role Models.

Natasha Henstridge Finally Loses Her Virginity, in Species (1995)

Some fans of the continued Species franchise might prefer the first sequel’s sex scene involving tentacles coming out of Natasha Henstridge’s nipples, but for us it’s all about the first film’s ultimate copulation, in which the alien-human hybrid (made from transmitted DNA instructions) succeeds in fooling future Doc Octopus Alfred Molina into impregnating her. It’s a pretty straight sex scene, save for the protruding back fins and the post-coital murder. See, throughout the film, we actually want the seemingly evil alien to succeed, probably because we’ve empathized with her ever since she was a young, confused experiment played by Michelle Williams in her first film role. It’s not her fault her nature is so lethal, you know? Besides, if Molina’s character has trouble recognizing her just because she’s changed her hairstyle and color, and he’s so eager to bed a stranger when he should be more wary, he probably deserves to die/father an extra-terrestrial offspring.

Geena Davis Gives In to Shaved Jeff Goldblum, in Earth Girls Are Easy (1989)

When the aliens from this movie first arrive on Earth, they aren’t all that sexually appealing. But once they shave their fluorescent, furry exteriors they’re miraculously as human looking as can be. Enough that Geena Davis is easily attracted to the formerly blue Jeff Goldblum (the two had previously had a sort of interspecies affair in The Fly). But she is hesitant until she sees that a man from outer space is anatomically compatible with a girl from the valley. While the actual sex scene is really cheesy and resembles late-80s soft-core porn with its colorful cinematography and glitter, Davis is great in her doubtful sequence just prior to doing the deed, and her artsy post-sex nightmare, in which she initially regrets what she’s done is plenty fun, too.

Steve Vincent Thinks Earth Girls Are Ugly, in Space-Thing (1968)

This single outer space sex scene is given the exception because it’s so amazing. And we’ve never even seen the sexploitation flick it comes from (we only saw the clip here, where you can also see the Evil Aliens scene). Also, it has a neat inverse situation to the scene from Earth Girls Are Easy, in that an alien in the form of a man is doubtful and hesitant to go to bed with one of the female crewmembers of the S.S. Supreme Erection, because he thinks humans have ugly bodies. Throw in some terrific ‘60s music and ingenious narration (“I think she wants something of me”) and what more could you ask for? It’s hard to understand how io9.com considers this scene “embarrassing.”

David Bowie Shoots Blanks, in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

Leave it to Nicolas Roeg to give us some of the most artsy human-alien sex scenes of all time, and leave it to David Bowie to be in the strangest. Bowie is the glam-looking alien who falls into obsessions with alcohol and television with his human lover, played by Candy Clark. Honestly, we really have a strange love for the cat-eyed true-form Bowie in an earlier sex scene montage involving what looks like playful mud wrestling. But this is the more insane and notorious sex scene, and though we don’t like thinking of shooting blanks and sex at the same time, the guns and lovemaking scene is pretty awesome in a ridiculous, John Waters-esque kind of way. Speaking of which, why hasn’t Waters done a human-alien sex scene yet?

Starman Gave Karen Allen a Baby Last Night, in Starman (1984)

It’s one thing for an alien to look human, but when it looks like your dead husband, there’s even more difficulty of resisting the urge to try out a very close encounter. Not that Karen Allen is quick to jump Jeff Bridges’ Starman bones. Aside from the fact that he’s an extra-terrestrial and the fact that sex with a clone of your husband is a bit too close to necrophilia, the Starman is really weird. Eventually, though, Allen’s character falls for the doppelganger and makes love to it in the very romantic setting of a boxcar filled with hay. The best part comes afterward, though, when the Starman nonchalantly tells her, “I gave you a baby last night.”

Woman Discovers She’s Screwing an Alien, in They Live (1988)

John Carpenter makes the top spot, as well, for this very different human-alien sex scene that closes out his cult sci-fi flick. Hopefully this isn’t a spoiler for anyone, but at the end of the movie, Roddy Piper disables a broadcast signal that makes the alien invaders look human. Following this, we see a short montage in which these creepy-looking aliens are suddenly revealed as such to the people around them. The final shot is the most hilarious, though, as it involves a woman having sex with what she thinks is a man. She looks down and sees she’s straddling an alien, who gets the film’s last line: “Hey, what’s wrong, baby?”

If there was any question as to the changing face/function of the studio-dependent art house division, the just-announced 2009 New York Film Festival line-up offers compelling proof that the concept of the indie label-as-Oscar bait factory is losing currency. The last two NYFFs featured the US or North American premieres of studio-division-distributed eventual Oscar nominees The Queen, The Wrestler, Happy-Go-Lucky and I’m Not There (as well as red carpet and/or press conference appearances from the likes of Hollywood movie stars such as Nicole Kidman and Angelina Jolie and American cinema stars such as Wes Anderson and Steven Soderbergh). Though the NYFF 2009 lineup is full of films with US distributors, it’s notably lacking in excuses for Oscar campaigns (with the exception of Lee Daniels’ Push, which is hardly a fresh choice — it’s basically played every major festival in the world since winning Sundance, though it was pulled from what should have been its Film Society debut) and, with the exception of Penelope Cruz in Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces, is virtually star-free. I’m not complaining — the kind of film I’m talking about often ranks amongst NYFF’s biggest disappointments — but it does seem like a notable swerve away from business as usual. (And will I *ever* see The Road?)

What the NYFF 2009 lineup lacks in Hollywood-friendly star power, it makes up for in auteur weight. The festival will screen newish films (many first screened at Berlin, Cannes, Venice or Toronto) from Lars Von Trier, Pedro Costa, Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais, Todd Solondz, Claire Denis, Michael Haneke and more. Cannes favorites Vincere and Police Adjective will be there. Catherine Breillait’s Bluebeard and Maren Ade’s Everyone Else, both missing in action since Berlin, will be there, too. But if NYFF is going to function as a near-year-end best of the fests, there are still some titles that seem noticeably omitted — will *you* ever see Dogtooth?

The full line-up is here.