If The Dark Knight doesn’t turn out to be the biggest blockbuster of 2008 after Warner’s steady trickle of viral sites and its old media marketing/pr push, then people just don’t know how to be tricked into buying anything anymore. (That or the stupid video game excuse the studio behind The Heartbreak Kid isn’t as stupid as we thought.)

The newest issue of Empire magazine features this cover, putting the Joker front and center in full costume for the first time. I’ll be damned if Heath Ledger doesn’t turn out to be the perfect cinematic incarnation of the Joker.

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Combine that with the very cool viral campaign that started oh so many months ago with ibelieveinharveydent.com. Warner launched a slew of new sites including:

TheHaHaTimes.com
RememberingGina.org
GothamNationalBank.com
WeAretheAnswer.org
GothamPolice.com
GothamCityRail.com
WhySoSerious.com/PersonalityProfile

And people who responded to this ad in the Gotham Times, “Charming handsome man with dazzling smile seeks amateur clowns for discreet encounters. No previous sense of humor nexessary. Criminal record a plus. Interested? Write to HumanResources@WhySoSerious.com in the full understanding that we have your email address and might send you alarming, disturbing, or annyoing material at any moment,” they end up getting a link WhySoSerious.com/Mausoleum.   You can visit ComingSoon.net for the latest on all the viral news.

If only I had the time to really dig in to all of these.  Damn day jobs.

No Country for Old Men (2007)–****

I’m writing this review about 20 minutes after watching No Country for Old Men because it’s a film that deserves to be written about when I still don’t have my bearings. I don’t know when I’ll get them back, but I don’t think it will be soon. No Country for Old Men has that severe an effect on the audience.

The characters in this film face something so incomprehensible that the immediate reaction is to call it insane. They are unable to process the horror and its the collateral damage. We the audience are lucky enough to have Ethan and Joel Coen co-direct No Country for Old Men, because these filmmakers, today worthy of being called veterans and masters, don’t make it easy for us to process either.

What are we trying to process? It’s the story of a Texas welder Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who stumbles upon the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad. He’s not a man you would expect to do anything exceptional, but he would most likely do the right thing. When he finds a case with $2 million in cash close to the shootout, he does something stupid. He tries to keep the cash.

Being a man who does what’s right and what’s stupid, Llewelyn returns to the scene that night to give water to a wounded Mexican man, a man who begged him for agua when Llewelyn first stumbled upon the bloodbath. But somebody else was already there looking for the money and they stuck around to wait for Llewelyn. If only drug dealers looking for the cash were the least of his problems. He gets away from them. The money belongs to someone who wants it back and that someone hires Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) to get it for him.

Anton Chigurh isn’t just a killer. He isn’t just a ghost, as Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) describes him. Chigurh is something so cold, so calculated, so confident in principles that he appears to exist on a different plane, even when he is bloodied and broken. He’s so indifferent to killing (using a cattle gun to murder humans) that it terrifies the characters around him. For us, the audience, watching those characters try to understand how they exist in the same world is just as unsettling.

It’s easy to keep an audience off-kilter with the idea of Chigurh alone. The Coens, who here produce their best film since the immortal Fargo, don’t settle just on ideas. With a Hitchockian sense of story and suspense, Coens manage to invert the notion of what an audience can expect from each individual scene, something they’ve been able to do in their best efforts. With No Country For Old Men, it creates an atmosphere of unease, making Chigurh and the other characters exponentially more effective.

After two complete catastrophes and a lukewarm film like The Man Who Wasn’t There, the Coen’s certainly have their mojo back. Shockingly, they do it without the supporting cast we expect to see in a Coen Brothers film. No Steve Buscemi. No John Goodman. No Frances McDormand. Still, with the pitch-perfect Jones and the virile Brolin, the Coens construct two of their staple characters (a small town police chief and an working class schmuck) with nuances they’ve never explored.

For the Coens, No Country for Old Men is all about the unexplored. And for the audience it’s about being shocked and surprised by their deep, unexpected venture into new territory.

No Country for Old Men, starring Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem, directed by Ethan and Joel Coen, opens wide Nov. 21.

Michael Clayton didn’t strike me as an Oscar film sight unseen. It was a small heralded political thriller from the guy who wrote the Bourne movies. After watching, however, I got that same feeling I had about In the Bedroom, Capote and The Queen. It’s a quiet contender, one that probably won’t get any solid buzz until it wins a National Board of Review award for actor (George Clooney), supporting actor (Tom Wilkinson) or directorial debut (Tony Gilroy). But its buzz will build.

Michael Clayton is a pensive, socially conscious movie with moments of rage, much like the films Sidney Lumet was nominated for in the 1970s. There are differences of course, even differences from the recent nominees I mention above. But with more cash in the bank than any box office watcher anticipated (closing in on $40 million) and recent Oscar winner Clooney giving another stellar performance, Clayton is setting itself up for a solid run this awards season.

Word of mouth caught on enough to carry the film up to Holiday blockbuster season, but Michael Clayton dropped out of most theaters this past weekend. What will Warner’s big move be? A re-release? How about a DVD release about the time people are voting for nominees? Clayton isn’t an art house picture, already playing in wide release. That means the collapsing window between theatrical release and DVD may give it a final push into contention after the critics are done with it. Hey, it worked for Little Miss Sunshine.

Top 8 Chances
Look for Clooney to snag his first Best Actor nomination, while the respected veteran Tom Wilkinson could quickly jump into frontrunner status for the supporting actor trophy. (He’ll have to take down Javier Bardem’s No Country for Old Men performance.) Co-star Tilda Swinton could finally get the nomination she’s been long denied, playing the legal counsel to a company that has poisoned the water supply in farms across the Midwest. Swinton only gets her nomination after a nod for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay.

TheFilmChair.com 2007-2008 Oscar Charts

Late in the documentary I Am an Animal, PETA co-founder Alex Pacheco says that PETA founder and president Ingrid Newkirk believes there’s no such thing as bad publicity. If that’s the case, PETA could have used a scathing indictment and not this boring, balanced portrait.

I Am an Animal is at once a profile of Newkirk, an historical look a PETA, a contemporary tale of animal activism and a look at PETA’s controversial publicity machine. After catching the recent release Your Mommy Kills Animals, a documentary on the history of the animal rights movement which didn’t have anything kind to say about PETA and its fundraising over fur-saving, I fully expected this film to be a rebuttal. It’s not. It’s hardly anything. With fairness in its sights, I Am an Animal, in a mere 75 minutes, woefully attempts to cast a very wide net without knowing what it is trying to catch.

We are teased in the first moments of the film with a look at a PETA investigation into abuse at ConAgra’s turkey processing plant. This could have served as an emotional anchor for the film but is hardly revisited as the program proceeds. The film, with its facts and figures approach, never even captures the spirit of the activists.

Maybe that says more about PETA than it does the actual film. I Am an Animal is a corporatized version of the unfortunately titled Your Mommy Kills Animals (named, ironically, after a PETA flyer), much like PETA is a corporatized version of the animal rights movement. It’s at times dreary in its labored ambitions to find out who Newkirk and PETA are, and there’s never a sense that it breaks down the organization’s image control. The documentary proceeds like a cable news show’s profile of a seasoned politician who is making a run for the White House. There’s just no bark or bite.

Even when the film does address PETA’s less than perfect image in the eyes of non-PETA animal rights activists, it does so without the vigor we should expect from a documentary on HBO or otherwise. There are moments in the film when Newkirk and her employees discuss the apparent failure in their ConAgra investigation, maybe for dramatic effect or maybe as an subtle admission that the focus of the film, too, had disappeared. I hope for the sake of the filmmakers that the former is the case. If not, it may be time to return to film school. That or get a job at CNN covering the 2008 election.

I Am an Animal premieres Monday, Nov. 19 at 8 p.m. on HBO.

Fun with Photoshop…Click for a Larger Version

Much is being made of the box office failures that have been the so-called Iraq War films. Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah, Reese Witherspoon-starrer Rendition and now, Robert Redford’s star-powered Lions for Lambs have all tanked, struggling to attain anything they could call respectable box office tallies. Politics aside, these weren’t good films in the first place (though I can’t speak to Rendition, which I avoided, but does have a lousy 55/100 on MetaCritic.com).

There’s a broader cultural imperative evident in these failures and the successes of other films. Why is American Gangster a big box office hit, and now potential Oscar-contender, while films so overtly in tune with the political landscape continue to flounder? The easy answer is escapism. But as films are a reflection of the culture, we can’t help but pay attention to the films that have made an impact while America was at war.

Here are a few: A History of Violence, The Departed, Million Dollar Baby, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Children of Men, Mystic River, Grindhouse, Saw, 300, Sin City, Kill Bill, and a brand new vision of the superhero Batman. Throw in the onslaught of fantasy films and even musicals since 2001 and you have a genuine idea of how we really are responding to the post-9/11 world.

When America is at war, there is no single genre of film that resonates with an audience, be it popular or elite. In WWII audiences were drawn to war films because it was a war worth fighting, but also because those were the films the market demanded. Most of those films are classics even today, including the seminal propaganda romance Casablanca. As the medium grew its escapist quality combined with serious cultural reflection resulted in war time movies being the ones we still hold dear today. Vietnam, Korea, the Gulf War, all of these conflicts resulted in films that have maintained their position as classics. We rally around film when we are at war and the artists behind these films produce their most enduring works.

There are exceptions of course, but looking at the rise of the fantasy genre, the return of the movie musical and an obsession with violence, torture and zombies since the start of our war against the Taliban and continuing into Iraq, we see again the culture rallying behind the medium. The films of the mid- to late-1990s can’t hold a candle to the films that have been produced in the early 21st century, much like the films of the 1980s couldn’t compete with the quality of the Gulf War films (1990-1992).

With these Iraq War films, we are seeing, quite abundantly, a betrayal of the audience by filmmakers and studios and people are not responding. The segmented, polarized audience of the past few years had decidedly adopted two opposing viewpoints, one of black and white, good versus evil and one of extreme moral ambiguity in the face of evil.

So what’s an Iraq War film? It’s the hopeful, yet bleak Children of Men and not Lions for Lambs. It’s the internal conflict of characters in The Departed and not that of the characters in In the Valley of Elah. It’s the discussion of the morality of torture in Saw and not that same discussion in Rendition. It’s a return to the realistic, sober, socially conscious films of the 1970s with Michael Clayton and the upcoming release of the most violent musical to ever hit the screen with Sweeney Todd. We’re watching Iraq War films all the time. And when you get right down to it, the only films that aren’t our Iraq War films are the films actually about the war.

Lions for Lambs (2007)–**
Quickie Review

The story of America at war is told from the perspectives of a college professor and a promising student, a reporter and a senator, and two soldiers in Afghanistan. As boring as any of Robert Redford directorial efforts and as an unartful as any of the recent Iraq War films, this exercise in rhetorical pomposity isn’t nearly as influential as it thinks it should be. Sure, Redford’s film demands American civic engagement, but judging from the number of people eligible for AARP membership who made up the audience at my screening, it will still be unsuccessful in getting suburban kids to do something other than watch MTV or play video games. Featuring dreary, dispirited performances from Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep and Redford.

I wrote about Ratatouille’s positioning in the Oscar race a month ago, not expecting that anyone else to start a conversation about the film’s chances. Well, I was wrong about that. The L.A. Times Patrick Goldstein just interviewed Pixar head John Lasseter on that subject, specifically. Here’s the first question in a four question Q & A session:

According to Metacritic.com, Ratatouille remains the best reviewed American movie of the year. Yet none of the Oscar pundits even mentions it as a best picture contender. Doesn’t that bug you?

You’d love for me to complain, wouldn’t you? Well, I’m not. But I will say I’m proud that the academy has an Oscar that celebrates the best animated feature.

It used to be the best you could hope for was a musical nomination. I guess you have to view it as akin to the best foreign language film. You’re still eligible for other categories, even if it doesn’t happen very often.

You can read the rest of Lasseter’s interview here. Let’s just hope the best reviewed film of the year gets its due come January when the nominations are announced.

Ocean’s Thirteen (2007)–***
DVD Review

Ocean’s Thirteen is the first film in the Ocean franchise I actually enjoyed. I laughed and smiled, charmed by the cast like in none of the films before it, even the Rat Pack original. Maybe it’s because after two outings, Ocean and his band of merry men have finally involved themselves in something so rapturously absurd that Ocean’s Thirteen bludgeons you into buying its game.

What’s the game this time? Good old-fashioned revenge. Casino mogul Willie Bank (Al Pacino) steals control of what was once to be named the Midas Casino from Ocean Pack member Reuben (Elliot Gould). Reuben, who saw Midas as his last shot at being a Vegas player again, has a heart attack that nearly kills him. Danny Ocean (George Clooney) doesn’t take kindly to seeing his friend incapacitated, so he decides to sabotage the opening of Bank’s The Bank Casino.

Ocean’s gang has to get around an impenetrable, futuristic security system, rig every game on the floor, and simulate an earthquake with a giant burrowing tunnel drill. When the money runs out, he’s forced to go to his old nemesis, Bellagio owner Terry Benedict, for a loan. Benedict adds another assignment to the revenge plot: he wants Ocean’s gang to steal Bank’s collection of diamond necklaces, which serve as a personal reminder to Bank of his 5-Diamond Award hotels. Impossible? Maybe, but this is Danny Ocean.

Ocean’s Thirteen is the most gratuitously star-powered Ocean film yet. Clooney’s suave, sophisticated charm is supplemented by the usuals: Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Bernie Mac, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan, Don Cheadle, Carl Reiner, and the rest. Better, though, is Al Pacino as Bank, an inspired, deliciously good addition to the cast. Pacino may walk through the role, but he does it with the savvy and sophistication of a veteran star.

Ellen Barkin, Eddie Izzard, and international star Vincent Cassel also have significant roles. Nearly everyone is a one-note character, but in a film that barely gives you any room to catch your breath, it doesn’t matter.

There’s an old Hollywood charm to Ocean’s Thirteen that was always ready to be tapped in the previous films. For the first time, franchise director Steven Soderbergh and new writers David Levien and Brian Koppelman (Rounders, Knock Around Guys) have mastered the art of balancing star power with storytelling. It’s a fresh new series after Ocean’s Thirteen. Now, I actually want a sequel.

DVD Extras:
Documentary: Vegas - An Opulent Illusion - A Look At How Las Vegas Has Created An Illusory World Of Opulence Through Its Design
Featurette: Jerry Weintraub Walk & Talk - Weintraub Takes Us On A Tour Of The Casino

Ocean’s Thirteen, starring George Clooney, Al Pacino, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, directed by Steven Soderbergh, is available on DVD Nov. 13.

Pixar’s short film collection, featuring every computer-animated short produced thus far by the pioneering animation studio, is the first DVD I was compelled to curl up with in a long time. I indulged in watching this disc not just because in Pixar’s short history (about a quarter century) it has produced some of the most charming animations you’ll ever encounter, but also because this DVD celebrates that short history.

The disc features a total of 13 films, most of which have been seen in theaters or as DVD extras. The five original Pixar shorts featured on the disc, ones from 1984 to 1988, really make the DVD worth a purchase. Each of these five films features a short but sweet commentary from Pixar’s first animator and current chief creative officer, John Lasseter. He can’t provide much insight in five minutes (max) but is so passionate about the shorts that you love to hear his stories.

When we listen to the way his mind works as a storyteller, how his infant nephew slobbering on toys inspired the Academy Award-winning Tin Toy or how the idea of the baby lamp in Luxo Jr. came about, you get the sense that the Pixar story was set in stone from the start.

Of course, much of the commentary is just a redux of the 20-minute extra The Pixar Shorts: A Short History. This all too brief documentary chronicles the rise of Pixar, albeit slightly superficially. The DVD extra does, however, remind us that innovators behind the shorts are what fuel the spirit of Pixar. Hearing from these pioneers of animation will invigorate the viewer and enhance the pleasure of watching short films that were already so pleasurable to watch. If that doesn’t interest you, then the documentary at the very least provides some interesting geek night trivia.

How much did their animation computer cost in the 1980s? What was the company’s first function? From what company did Steve Jobs buy the animation unit to be known as Pixar? If you already know the answers to these questions, then go ahead and get the disc for the shorts. All 13 of them (yes, even the underwhelming Lifted) make for great entertainment. After all, if it’s Pixar, you know it’s good.

Shorts featured on the DVD:

• The Adventures of André & Wally B.
• Luxo Jr.
• Tin Toy
• Red’s Dream
• Knick Knack
• Geri’s Game
• For The Birds
• Mike’s New Car
• Boundin’
• Jack-Jack Attack
• Mater and the Ghostlight
• One Man Band
• Lifted

Pixar Short Films Collection - Volume 1 is available on DVD and Blu-ray Dec. 6.