Reeling

Another 1980s staple gets the remake treatment

Variety reports a remake of John Landis' 1981 horror comedy An American Werewolf in London is in development at Dimension Films. I'm guessing someone at the studio figures that after New Moon and the Benicio Del Toro remake of The Wolf Man, both due later this year, werewolves are going to be the new vampires.

No matter who makes it, a remake of London is doomed to fall short of the original, because one of the things that made the 1981 movie so memorable was the Oscar-winning makeup effects work by Rick Baker. Those effects, which depicted the Dr. Pepper guy transforming into a shaggy beast, were unlike anything moviegoers had seen before.

The new version will presumably just use boring old CGI, which just isn't as effective. Plus London was one of the first horror movies to combine laughs with scares throughout, which has become old hat now. A much better candidate for a remake is The Howling, which came out the same year and had a premise you could spin out in a new direction.

Review: "Public Enemies"

 

Michael Mann's extraordinary Public Enemies is an unusual sort of gangster picture: A near-impressionistic recreation of the last year in the life of one of the most notorious bank robbers in American history. The movie doesn't coddle or ingratiate itself to the viewer: Mann, further honing his emotionally cool aesthetic to a diamond-like hardness, doesn't trade in the conventions of biography. For those willing to invest in what he is doing, the rewards are plentiful.

Plunging into the action with no set-up, Public Enemies opens with John Dillinger's brazen orchestration of the prison break of his pals from the Indiana State Penitentiary in 1933. That sequence, shot with the same you-are-there verisimilitude Mann employs through most of the picture, gives you a quick sketch of the camaraderie and loyalty between Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and his men, his place as the unquestioned leader of the gang and the profound pain he feels whenever one of them is felled by a lawman's bullet.

Those qualities, which are further explored and expounded on as the movie progresses, are mirrored by the relationship between FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) and his men, who are under considerable pressure by J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) to apprehend Dillinger, dead or alive. Public Enemies is essentially a chase picture, centering on Purvis' dogged pursuit of Dillinger, who proves impossible to hold onto even after he's caught.

 

Mann has been intrigued by the ballet between the law and the lawless since the beginning of his career, which began with 1981's Thief, segued into Miami Vice and continued with the cool-as-ice epic Heat. In Public Enemies, Mann transplants that obsession to the Depression era, drawing parallels between Dillinger's gradual alienation from organized crime, where his headline-grabbing antics and antihero popularity had little purpose, and Purvis' increasingly obsessive quest to apprehend him, which more than once results in less-than-sound judgment on the part of the straight-arrow lawman.

Depp's penchant for playing oddballs and weirdos has made him something of a hermetic actor, but the role of Dillinger frees something inside him, the way Sean Penn seemed energized by the opportunity to play Harvey Milk. Mann isn't interested in a biographical recounting of Dillinger's life: Public Enemies, which was based on the scrupulously researched book by Bryan Burrough, provides surprisingly few details about who he was or what formed him.

 

Instead, Mann is interested in burrowing deep inside Dillinger's psyche, which he does primarily through the criminal's relationship with Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard), a coat-check girl who captures his heart at first sight. Their romance, which initially seems manufactured and improbable, gradually becomes the heart of Public Enemies, revealing the sincere passion lurking underneath Dillinger's bad-boy persona. Depp's natural charisma is invaluable to the movie, humanizing Dillinger by showing us the ordinary man behind the extraordinary facade.

By comparison, Bale's performance as Purvis is more limited, relegating the character to the cliché of incorruptible, unrelenting sheriff. But if the movie is emotionally lopsided in Dillinger's favor, Mann is careful not to sway the audience's sympathies too strongly in his direction by constantly reminding us of the trail of bodies he and his gang left in their wake.

 

Every death in Public Enemies - and there are a lot of them - stings. Mann's emphasis on the value of human life adds a layer of suspense and excitement to the film's plentiful action sequences, the best of which is the FBI's raid on the Little Bohemia Lodge in Wisconsin where Dillinger was holed up. The sequence, which marries the immediacy of Mann's high-definition digital photography with the connection the audience has built to the characters, is a hair-raiser, worthy of comparison to the bank heist from Heat (still Mann's finest hour as a choreographer of shoot-'em-up action).

If, by the end of Public Enemies, you have more questions than answers as to who John Dillinger was, the movie, along with Depp's tricky, elusive performance, leaves you feeling as if you had met him in the flesh. For all its genre trappings (the tommy guns everyone wields are as cool as the light sabers from Star Wars), Public Enemies is ultimately more of a character study than a rat-tat-tat action picture, a first-hand account of what it felt like to live moment-to-moment as public enemy No. 1, never thinking about tomorrow because that would mean dwelling on the inevitable.

Evan Rachel Wood joins the Spider-Man universe

Evan Rachel Wood, who displayed some fine singing chops in Across the Universe (and is terrific as a simpleton with a heart of gold in Woody Allen's Whatever Works, which opened yesterday), will play Peter Parker's girlfriend Mary Jane Watson in Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the Broadway musical scheduled to premiere next February.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Alan Cumming has also joined the cast as Norman Osborn, who goes on to become the Green Goblin. Julie Taymor, who reinvented The Lion King for Broadway, is directed, and Bono and The Edge are supplying the songs. Being a fanatic of both Spidey and U2, I can't help but be very excited about this, no matter how ridiculous the show sounds.

Opening today

 

Here's my Q&A with director Sam Mendes about his new film Away We Go, which opens today (you can read my review here). Woody Allen's latest, Whatever Works, is also his funniest in a long while (review here),

Connie Ogle says masochists will find plenty to love in My Sister's Keeper (review here) and that Michelle Pfeiffer is miscast in Stephen Frears' Cheri (review here). There is also, of course, Transformers, which had an astonishing opening-day gross of $60 million on Wednesday - more than all four of these other movies will earn combined during their entire runs.

.

RIP Michael Jackson

I'm a Generation Xer, which means I learned to shuffle-skate (shut up) at the old Midway Skating Rink at Midway Mall to Don't Stop Till You Get Enough; tuned in along with millions of my peers for the world premiere of Thriller  on MTV and never thought about music videos the same way again; caught the Victory tour in Miami when the Jacksons played the Orange Bowl; happened to be at Epcot the weekend that the Francis Coppola-directed Captain Eo premiered there; and danced to a sped-up remix of The Way You Make Me Feel while celebrating my 21st birthday at the former China Club on South Beach (now Jerry's Famous Deli).

But when I heard the news today that Jackson had died, I realized I had only thought of him for the better part of 20 years as a performer turned bizarro eccentric by his own fame.

It's a testament to his artistic legacy that today, I haven't really been thinking about Wacko Jacko, but about the man who was such a big part of the soundtrack of my youth. Rest in peace, Michael. 

Those Oscar betting pools just got a little more interesting

 The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has announced next year's Oscars will have ten - count 'em, ten - Best Picture nominees instead of the traditional five.

The number of Best Picture contenders used to vary from year to year in the Oscars' early days. For example, there were 12 nominees in 1934 and 1935.

Academy President Sid Gannis said that "having 10 Best Picture nominees is going to allow Academy voters to recognize and include some of the fantastic movies that often show up in the other Oscar categories, but have been squeezed out of the race for the top prize.”

  In other words, popular movies like The Dark Knight, which many people felt should have been a Best Picture contender, will no longer be shut out of the race. That will hopefully translate into higher ratings for the Oscar telecast, which airs March 7 next year.

The American Black Film Festival returns to Miami

After a two-year stint in Los Angeles, theAmerican Black Film Festival returns to Miami today. Here is a link to my story about the festival, which runs through Sunday.

The story ran on the front page, which also featured a tease to my Transformers review. I like it when they run my name in big red letters on 1A. You never see them running this guy's name on 1A like that.

Is Michael Bay worried about "Transformers 2?"

Michael Bay never looks like he sweats the small stuff, but after seeing Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen last night, I'm starting to understand why the director fired off that hissy e-mail to Paramount executives last month complaining the studio was doing a poor job hyping the movie.

Aside from Bay's interesting use of English ("I would of got something saying how we broke download records"), the letter is fascinating as the writings of a man who, having cut a sweet deal to take home a fat chunk of the sequel's profits, may now be starting to worry the film won't match the original's mammoth $700 million gross.

Maybe Bay has been checking out the early reviews for Revenge of the Fallen, which thus far have been much more vicious than the ones that greeted the first film.

You can read Bay's pouty e-mail in its entirety here. Warning to the grammar police: Writing is obviously not Bay's strong suit.

Review: "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen"

 

Just how enormous is the scale of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen? Big enough that the movie has a prologue set in the year 17,000 B.C. Big enough that the film's opening setpiece, in which the good robots (i.e. the Autobots) suss out a bad robot (i.e. a Decepticon) in their midst in modern-day Shanghai, is awesome enough to make practically any other summer spectacular wish they could have it for their climactic finish.

Just how slight is the plot of Fallen, which was written by Ehren Kruger, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman? Slight enough to fill up 45 minutes of screen time, maximum, and that's with Ingmar Bergman directing. Slight enough that there are long chunks in the film during which you could leave the theater, take a leisurely stroll to stretch your legs, catch up on your e-mail, and rejoin the movie in progress without having missed a thing.

 

Perhaps the biggest problem with Fallen, which is probably the most anticipated movie of the summer, and will undoubtedly be the biggest at the box office, is the same problem that afflicts most sequels: The freshness and sense of discovery of the first film, which depicted mankind's discovery of giant robots living among us disguised as cars, is gone.

Instead, the Autobots are now an established (albeit secret) branch of the U.S. military, fighting to make sure the bad machines vanquished in the 2007 original stay vanquished. Meanwhile, the teenaged Sam (Shia LaBeouf), who is preparing to go away to college at Princeton, and his girlfriend Mikaela (Megan Fox, who suddenly looks five years too old for her role, and has actually gotten worse as an actress since the last film) are planning to keep their relationship going long-distance.

The two are not kept apart long, though, since soon after Sam arrives on campus, he and Mikaela must reunite to help their mechanical giant pal Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen) fend off his deadliest foe yet. Director Michael Bay, reluctant to mess with what worked the first time around, increases the unexpected humor and slapstick of the original film, devoting lots of screen time - arguably too much - to the antics of Sam's manic college roommate (The Wire's Ramon Rodriguez), Sam's goofy parents (Kevin Dunne and Julie White), and a pair of smart-mouthed Autobots named Mudflap and Skids.

 

But all the humorous hijinks in the world cannot counteract the terminal case of bloat that afflicts Fallen, which runs at least 40 minutes too long, a common problem among Bay's films. You could, for example, excise all the scenes featuring Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson as elite Army soldiers and not lose a thing. The needlessly long running time also helps to obfuscate the story, which, despite essentially being an exercise in villain-of-the-week formulas, often borders on the incomprehensible.

What saves Fallen, aside from La Beouf's undeniable charisma (he's a natural born star, that kid),is that Bay continues to tamp down his worst instincts as an action filmmaker. The movie may be nonsense, but it's dazzling, visually striking nonsense, be it a free-for-all battle between a badly outnumbered Optimus Prime and a squad of baddies in the forest; a sequence in which a giant mass of shiny ball bearings coalesces into a robot; or the sight of a gigantic Decepticon comprised of construction cranes climbing one of Egypt's Great Pyramids, the ancient stone crumbling beneath its weight.

 How and why a robot is running around Egypt is one of the problems with Fallen, which often seems to intentionally take good ideas - like the concept of a vintage fighter jet at the Smithsonian as a slumbering Decepticon - and then do the least interesting things imaginable with them, such as sending it in search of a key unwisely named the matrix.

 

At least the special effects work in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is remarkable: You never tire of the endless variations of robots Bay and his computer-generated effects crew come up with, and there are only a couple of shots in the film in which those effects don't meld seamlessly with the flesh-and-blood actors. In its climactic half-hour, the picture degenerates into an endless procession of explosions, as every movie Bay directs is contractually bound to do, But at least the thing looks astounding. More substance would have been nice, sure. But in the thick of the summer movie season, sometimes slick, vapid thrills are all you need. Well, that, and some air-conditioning in your movie theater. Are you listening, AMC Aventura dudes?

The saddest movie animal deaths of all time

The rascals at Lemondrop.com have compiled a list of the 11 saddest movie animal deaths of all time, wisely including the 1989 Tom Hanks vehicle Turner & Hooch, which I hadn't thought about in 20 years ago, probably because I blocked it out. 

For most of its running time, the movie was a broad and wacky buddy-comedy about a detective and the slobbering French mastiff helping him a solve case - until the end, when they killed off the dog for no good reason, sending the audience home teary-eyed and depressed. 

That sudden 180-degree turn from hijinks to tragedy is one of the oddest I've ever encountered in a supposed comedy. At least Marley & Me (which somehow didn't make the list, but deserved to be near the top) eased you into what was coming and gave you time to prepare to cry your eyes out.

Review: "Year One"

 

The bad buzz around Year One began building the morning after the Super Bowl, when the only thing anyone could remember about the ad for the film that had aired during the game was how unfunny it was. Now, almost six months later, the movie proves the commercial was misleading. Year One is not really that bad and not entirely without laughs, the way no episode of Saturday Night Live passes without invoking at least one fleeting chuckle.

The SNL comparison is apt, since Year One is really a collection of scattered skits - some skirting the outermost edges of that PG-13 rating - strung together to fill the minimum running time of what constitutes a feature film (95 minutes, including credits). Compared to Year One, even the Airplane! pictures come off as models of intricate plotting. More than once during the movie, I suddenly realized that I had absolutely no idea what was transpiring on the screen. Then I remembered that it really didn't matter and just sat back and waited for the next joke.

 

The wait was never long. Director Harold Ramis (Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day), who also co-wrote the script with Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg (writers on TV's brilliant The Office), takes the personas of his two stars - the wild and woolly Jack Black and the polite and demure Michael Cera - and plops them into a series of situations, careful not to let too many minutes go by without a gag. Watch Jack Black eat poop! Watch Michael Cera rub massage oil onto the chest of a disgustingly hairy fat dude! And so on.

Some scenes have a prehistoric theme, like the mating rituals at the protagonists' village, which involves conking women on the head with a large stick. Other situations have biblical underpinnings, such as the heroes' encounter with a bickering pair of brothers named Cain and Abel (David Cross and Paul Rudd), or a man named Abraham (Hank Azaria) who advocates a bizarre new ritual he calls circumcision: "Trust me, it will be a sleek look," Abraham promises. "This is gonna catch on."

 

Eventually, Zed (Black) and Oh (Cera) end up at a city known as Sodom ("Where sinners are winners!"), but even after the movie zeroes in on one locale, the plot still ambles all over the place. To be fair, there is undeniable humor in finding out what happens when a captive who has been shackled to a prison wall upside down needs to urinate. I double dare anyone not to laugh at that scene. Even Tommy Lee Jones would laugh at that scene.

And Black and Cera are game for whatever silliness Ramis throws at them: Unlike bad comedies in which you can practically see the actors squirming before the camera, hoping to just get the thing over with, everyone here appears to be giving their all and having a fine time in the process. But the overall laziness permeating Year One eventually sinks the picture. A movie that doesn't respect its audience enough to muster a sliver of a story is practically impossible to warm up to, no matter how likable its actors.

Year One is destined to become one of those movies you always stop to watch a little of while channel surfing late-night TV, but there's too much dead air to warrant its survival past next week, when Transformers 2 arrives to clean house.

The "Three Stooges" movie loses a stooge

The Hollywood Reporter reports Sean Penn has unexpectedly dropped out of the Farrelly Brothers' long-planned film revival of the Three Stooges, opting to take a year off his career to focus on his family.

Penn's departure - he was to play Larry to Jim Carrey's Curly and Benicio del Toro's Moe - makes me a little less excited about the movie, since it was the idea of Penn clowning it up that was the main selling point to me. My suggestion is to replace him with Russell Crowe, who is in need of a career jolt (i.e. willing to share top billing) and would probably be hilarious in the part. 

Michael Bay apologizes to the little people

Transformers 2 director Michael Bay has formally apologized to the 600 fans who waited in the rain to meet the filmmaker and actors Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox at the red carpet premiere of the film June 9 in Seoul.

 

Bay and his entourage arrived 90 minutes later than scheduled and barely had time to consort with the public before the screening started. The next day, the group was 30 minutes late to a scheduled press conference, which led several journalists to stage a walkout.

In his apology, Bay said he was late to the screening due to airport delays, while a pulled back muscle caused his tardiness to the press conference.

No word yet as to whether Bay plans to issue another formal apology to anyone who ever sat through Armageddon.

I'm hoping to get a quick interview with Bay when he's in Miami next week. Despite all the mean things I have written about his movies in the past, he must like me a little bit, because he keeps one of my articles about him archived on his personal website.

Red-carpet premiere of "Transformers 2" to be held in Miami - and you're not invited

Director Michael Bay and actors Tyrese Gibson and Ramon Rodriguez will be walking the red carpet at a local premiere of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen at the Regal South Beach 18 at 6:30 p.m. on Saturday June 27. An after-screening party will follow at the Fontainebleau Hotel.

Unfortunately, the event is invitation-only, which means you can't go unless you are a close and personal friend of Bay, who has a home in Miami. Besides, the movie opens in theaters on June 24th, so it's not like you can't go watch Optimus Prime get his butt kicked at another theater.

You can still attend the festivities to catch a glimpse of the celebs as they walk the red carpet, or you can find something better to do with your time. Your call.

RIP David Carradine

Like most people, I knew the late David Carradine primarily from the TV series Kung Fu and two famed exploitation pictures, Boxcar Bertha and Death Race 2000. So when Quentin Tarantino cast him as Bill in his Kill Bill opus, it felt like I was rediscovering a long-forgotten actor and hoped the Tarantino experience would lead to more high-profile film roles.

I've never seen Bound for Glory, the film that earned Carradine an Oscar nomination, but now intend to chase it down on DVD. Glenn Garvin had a lengthy telephone interview with Carradine last year and has posted a nice remembrance here.