"Iron Man" soars at the boxoffice

It wasn't just critics who went gaga over Iron Man. The movie grossed a whopping $104 million this weekend, proving audiences liked the film just as much as reviewers.

That opening also gets the summer movie season off to a strong start, and with all the other A-list blockbusters heading our way, I'm predicting this will be Hollywood's biggest summer season ever. Next up: The Wachowskis' Speed Racer and the Ashton Kutcher-Cameron Diaz comedy What Happens in Vegas.

Miami represents at Tribeca Film Festival

Old Man Bebo, a documentary about the life and work of legendary Cuban musician Bebo Valdes, won the Best New Documentary Filmmaker award last night at the Tribeca Film Festival, which carries a $25,000 cash prize.

The film, directed by Madrid-based filmmaker Carlos Carcas (who was born in Hialeah), charts Valdes' life from his childhood in 1920s Cuba to his runaway international success as a pianist in his 80s.

The award was accepted by former Miami Film Festival director turned music producer Nat Chediak (pictured here with executive producer Angelica Huete), who served as a consultant on the film. "Bebo's story is one of the greatest third acts in music history," Chediak said via telephone from New York. "And I'm very happy to have played a part in telling it."

Plans are underway to screen Old Man Bebo in Miami as a benefit for public radio station WDNA in September.

Relive the 80s with Rambo

As a way of promoting the upcoming DVD release of this past January's Rambo, several theaters across the U.S. will have a one-time showing of 1982's First Blood at 7:30 p.m. on May 15, complete with the original ending in which the Vietnam vet dies.

That's how David Morrell 1972 source novel ended, but the book also made John Rambo a much more murderous and dangerous anti-hero. On his website, Morrell posted his thoughts on the last Rambo film, which he felt was the first movie in the series that was "spot-on in terms of how I imagined the character: Angry, burned out and filled with self-disgust because Rambo hates what he is and yet knows it's the only thing he does well."

The "Rambo dies" ending (actually, he commits suicide, unlike the book, in which he was shot by the cops) was filmed and shown in test screenings, but audiences didn't like the downbeat finale and the character was allowed to live.

The footage has long been available on DVD, but it will be fun to see First Blood on the big screen again, with the original finale incorporated into the film. Participating theaters in South Florida are: Southland, Palace, South Beach and Kendall Village in Miami-Dade; Cypress Creek, Oakwood, Westfork and Sawgrass in Broward.

Miami Film Festival seeks a new director - again

For the fourth time in eight years, the Miami International Film Festival is looking for a director.

Patrick de Bokay, who took over the festival from Nicole Guillemet last year, has been shown the door by Miami-Dade College for unspecified reasons. School officials declined to comment on the decision not to renew De Bokay's annual contract, but I'd bet this year's attendance of 74,000 - which bested last year's figure of 70,000, but with 40 more movies in the lineup - had something to do with it.

No one at the school is talking, and I haven't been able to reach de Bokay on the phone, but I've also heard that de Bokay wasn't the best fit with MDC staff. Whatever the reasons, they were big enough to seem insurmountable to school officials, since they chose to let de Bokay go instead of giving him another year.

This means another long "international search" for a director is about to begin, even though it is obvious - at least to me - that MDC should be looking to hire someone from Miami, who understands the city like a local and who has been around long enough to have a sense of where this festival has been. Or they could just try calling Nat Chediak and see what he's up to.

Here, from a statement MDC sent via e-mail, is the requirements for the job, in case you're thinking about applying:

The college seeks a candidate who can continue taking the Festival to a higher level among the world’s top film events with extensive experience in film programming, fundraising and marketing. Excellent budgetary, communications, creative, and consensus-building skills are also a must.

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Who will rule the summer boxoffice?

The 2008 summer movie season is going to be an embarrassment of riches for geeks everywhere. Fandango.com recently conducted a poll asking people which of the films coming out between May and August they are anticipating the most and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull topped the list by a wide margin..

Here is the complete list. Interestingly, Tropic Thunder didn't make the cut, but that trailer is so hilarious, I can't imagine the movie won't be a monster hit. 

1. INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL (82%)
2. THE DARK KNIGHT (42%)
3. IRON MAN (38%)
4. THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: PRINCE CASPIAN (37%)
5. THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR (30%)
6. GET SMART (29%)
7. THE INCREDIBLE HULK (22%)
8. THE UNTITLED X-FILES SEQUEL (20%)
9. SPEED RACER (19%)
10. SEX AND THE CITY (19%)

I stand corrected: "The Ruins" doesn't completely suck

Contrary to my earlier fears, The Ruins turns out to be a fairly decent adaptation of Scott Smith's novel - up until the chickens--t last two minutes.

You can read my review here. It'll be interesting to see how the film fares this weekend, considering Paramount has pretty much dumped it.

Also, here's hoping the alternate endings that were shot but not used end up on the DVD Blu-ray. The worst of the three is the one that made it into the film. The other two sound pretty cool.

If bloody movies about killer shrubbery don't do it for you, then go check out Shine a Light. I'm not even that big of a Stones fan, but the movie is so good that I may go see it again in IMAX just for fun.

Uncovering "The Ruins"

Scott Smith hadn't even finished writing The Ruins - and Stephen King had not yet hailed it as "the best horror novel of the new century" - when Hollywood started clamoring for the rights to turn it into a film.

Smith was only two-thirds done with the book when Ben Stiller's production company, Red Hour Films, snapped up the screen rights based on an outline of the plot. "They told me they wanted me to write the screenplay, too," Smith says. "So while I was writing the last third of the book, I already knew I'd be adapting it for the movies."

This helps explain why The Ruins - the harrowing tale of a group of vacationers stranded on a hill in the Mexican jungle where some wild, evil things grow - is such a cinematic read. An instant bestseller when it was published in the summer of 2006, the novel is filled with passages that practically scream to be put on film, such as a nerve-racking descent into a pitch-dark crevice in the earth where something ancient - and hungry - lies waiting.

It's ironic, then, that the film adaptation of The Ruins opening Friday differs so much from the book. Although the basic narrative remains the same, several surprises await fans of the novel, many of them effective, while a few - like the new ending - more open to debate.

What hasn't changed is the Big Bad in The Ruins, which joins the ranks of the horror film genre's most improbable monsters. In the past, there have been films about evil cars (The Car, Christine) and evil 18-wheelers (Maximum Overdrive), killer St. Bernards (Cujo) and killer bunny rabbits (Night of the Lepus).

There have even movies about trees that eat babies (The Guardian) and aliens that walk around disguised as plants (The Day of the Triffids). But there has never been a movie about a vine that eats human flesh and talks - or rather mimics human voices - in order to lead prey to its doom.

Even when he was writing the book, Smith says he had doubts about the viability of his killer vine. "I'm usually very private when I'm writing, but at certain points, I shared portions of the book with people close to me, and their reactions made it clear the vine was a dubious choice," he says. "But I felt strongly that if you take the situation and treat it realistically, you can get away with things that are, on the surface, ridiculous."

What was difficult to pull off on the page, however, became infinitely more daunting when transplanted to a film set populated by flesh-and-blood actors. Carter Smith, the first-time director who landed the Ruins gig on the strength of his creepy short film Bugcrush, says he always thought of the vine as "the big unknown" in the overall scheme of the movie.

"If the audience is going to buy that this vine moves and can get into your body and all that, the world of the film has to be absolutely realistic," the director says. "We took elements from lots of different real-life plants when designing our vine. It's in every shot of the film after the characters reach the hill, so it has to look like it could really be growing there. But it also has to look menacing once you realize what it's capable of doing."

Part of what made The Ruins such an intense read is that the desperation of the characters never let up: Smith even went without traditional chapter breaks, so the book unfurled in one relentless rush. In order to give the film the same sense of urgency, the screenwriter made a critical change to the story's first act. In the book, the vacationers are barred from leaving the vine-covered hill by armed guards from a nearby village who threaten to kill them if they try to escape.

In the movie, though, the villagers do more than just threaten.

"Carter and the studio wanted to shut that door right from the beginning with something stronger than verbal threats and shots fired into the air," the writer says. "They wanted you to feel the gravity of the situation of the characters in a palpable way. But that one change resulted in a lot of changes later in the story. In a weird way, the process of adapting the book echoed the plot, in that you make choices that have ramifications you don't foresee."

Smith, who didn't have much involvement with the production after turning in his script, says he hasn't seen the final cut of The Ruins, which underwent major revisions after test audiences laughed unexpectedly at some of the vine's antics, confirming the filmmakers' fears.

The movie also sports a drastically different ending than the book - one of three that were shot during production. "We shot a bunch of different stuff to see what would work best with the finished film. There's a testing process you go through with a studio movie and as frustrating as it can be, it also really gives you a good sense of how an audience feels about an ending.

"Our final decision was informed by what audiences found the most satisfying after watching a really punishing film. I love the ending of the book, but if the movie had ended the same way, the audience would have wanted to kill themselves."

Despite some early positive buzz on the Internet, Paramount Pictures, the distributor of The Ruins, has opted not to screen the film in advance for critics, which is normally a sign that good reviews are not in the cards. But director Smith isn't losing much sleep about what critics think of his directorial debut.

"My initial reaction when they told me they weren't going to screen it was 'Oh, does that mean you don't like it?'" he says. "But genre movies are, for the most part, never screened for critics. I made this movie for audiences, not critics. A theater filled with 17 and 18 year-old kids screaming and jumping will be much more rewarding to me than the idea of some critic writing about the movie."

Everyone in the entire universe has a MySpace page now except me

Even Martin Scorsese has one.

"Paranoid Park" delayed until May 16

If you read my review of Paranoid Park in today's paper or on the blog post below and decided to check it out, you may have discovered the movie didn't actually open.

I just spoke with a rep at IFC Films, who informed me the film won't open here until May 16. The decision was made at the last minute: As recently as Tuesday, Paranoid Park was still scheduled to open today. They just forgot to tell us it was being bumped.

Smells like teen spirit

Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant's mesmerizing new movie, melds the dreamy languor of his last few films (Gerry,Elephant, Last Days) with a page-turner of a plot. The camera still floats lazily behind the protagonists as they take long, rambling walks. But these walks actually lead somewhere.

That's not to say Paranoid Park, which Van Sant adapted from Blake Nelson's young-adult novel, unfolds in a straight line. As the film's narrator, the teenaged skateboarder Alex (Gabe Nevins) warns us early on, ``Sorry this is a little out of order. I didn't do so well in creative writing.''

Chronology is a key factor in Paranoid Park, which doesn't always let us know whether we're watching past, present or future, and occasionally replays moments we've already seen, revealing significance in previously mundane details.

Even though the subject of Paranoid Park -- Alex's growing guilt over his involvement in the accidental and unspeakably gruesome death of a security guard -- is dead-serious, the movie finds Van Sant in a creatively playful mood, using unexpected musical cues (from Beethoven to old Fellini film scores) and complex sound designs to illustrate the inner state of his characters. In one scene, the cacophonous sound of birds plunges us into the churning stress and anxiety Alex is feeling. In another, a musical melody drowns out the bad news Alex's girlfriend Jennifer (Taylor Momsen, from TV's Gossip Girl) is reacting to in unfortunate fashion.

The somewhat irreverent nature of Paranoid Park extends to the film's visuals. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle keeps Alex's parents out of focus for almost the entire movie to illustrate the disconnect between adolescents and their guardians. When Alex's father, oblivious to the quandary his son is struggling with, asks him ''How's school going?'' the scene is strangely funny, a sad reminder of the no-one-understands-me angst every teenager inevitably feels at some point.

In Alex's case, though, that isolation has a precise reason for being. Nevins, who like many of the film's other actors answered a casting call Van Sant posted on MySpace, has an awkward, halting delivery and manner that makes Alex's inexpressive nature seem all the more real. Unlike most Hollywood films about high school life, the kids in Paranoid Park feel like just that -- kids -- which gives their dilemmas, such as losing their virginity or breaking up with their partner, the same gravity you felt when you went through it.

Paranoid Park takes its title from a skateboarding park where Alex starts to hang out, and the movie is peppered with interludes of Super-8 photography of skaters flying through the air, performing balletic stunts on their boards, oblivious to matters of gravity or injury or anything else that takes place in the world below. It is down in that world that Alex is stranded, weighed down by his conscience over a murder along with the usual issues of girlfriends and schoolwork and chatty little brothers. The story of Paranoid Park may center on an extreme and unusual case, but it's Van Sant's understanding of -- and compassion for -- the hell of growing up that makes the film such a profound and lasting pleasure.

NOTE: As of Tuesday, Paranoid Park was scheduled to open today at the Intracoastal and Gateway cinemas in South Florida. Unfortunately, distributor IFC Films bumped the release to May 16 at the last minute and did not alert us to the change. Sorry for the confusion.