TFC Journal at TheFilmChair.com

I haven’t posted about the tragic events that took place this week involving Academy Award winner Jennifer Hudson’s family. I did it intentionally. No statement of support on a blog could ease their pain. It was just too big, too devastating.

But I’m writing about it now. Some fool PR guy has forced me to do so.

Being someone who writes press releases for a living, I know that there are benefits to writing topical press releases. But there’s a fine line between taking advantage of a cultural trend and soulless attention grabbing.

This press release, changed since its first posting, falls into the latter category.

Original headline: Could a Bedside Shotgun Rack Have Saved Jennifer Hudson’s Family from Tragic Death?

Original lede: Tragedy strikes in a Chicago home leaving 3 people dead and an Oscar winner forced to identify the bodies of her family. Jennifer Hudson’s mother and brother were gunned down in their home Friday. Could an invaluable device have saved their lives? It’s called The BackUp and it is a bedside shotgun rack.

The Chicago Trib has the original full text release.

While this stupid press release is probably the last thing on the Hudson family’s mind right now, I do hope Jennifer Hudson’s attorney is paying attention.

From this week’s New Yorker.

David Sedaris sums up what it’s like to be an undecided voter:

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

Six Days to Go.
www.BarackObama.com

I begrudgingly switched to Blockbuster’s DVD rent-by-mail service a few months ago.  It’s no Netflix, but at least my DVDs are making it to the warehouse when I return them.

I miss Netflix, especially the company’s comittment to their film-loving customers. Blockbuster just doesn’t get what it means to be a film buff.  After seeing this on my Blockbuster homepage, I don’t even think they can defend themselves:

Drama Classics: Never Back Down?  WTF.

I expect to see a TV Classics category with Two and a Half Men any day now.

Anyone who saw High School Musical 3 knows that Zac Efron was bigger than that movie.  He knew it, too.  Efron had better chemistry with the camera than he did any of his costars.  He charmed it like he was trying to take it home at the end of the night.

Yes, Efron is a big enough deal now to get away with it. But he still needed the $42 million dollar weekend to prove his worth. Thanks that  huge opening for High School Musical 3, Paramount is fast-tracking their Footloose remake with Efron in the lead.  Production should start in the spring (for a late-2009 release?).

So the tweens are the target, right? Not so, says Variety:

Unlike HSM3, Footloose will aim for an older teen and adult demo. Efron is just about set in a deal that will pay him a mid-seven-figure salary and give him script approval.

No surprise there.  At my HSM3 screening, there were just as many screaming twenty-somethings and mothers in the audience as there were teens. (After one scene, the screams were followed by disappointed groans when Efron didn’t show his abs.)

Stay tuned.

As someone who fancies himself a bit of a film critic, I try to manage my own expectations despite my genuine love of cinema. (That sound pretentious, but bear with me.) Before this year, I would generally see anything that was thrown in front of me because I would rather watch a bad movie than no movie at all. Lucky for me, from 2005 to 2007, I was able to sit down in front of movies that were great beyond all expectations or at least interesting in spite of their flaws.

The three years prior to 2008 were amazing years for cinema. We saw great filmmakers working at the peak of their powers. From Spielberg with Munich to the Coens with No Country for Old Men, filmmakers were responding to the world in a way that audiences haven’t seen since the 1970s. Why then has 2008 sucked so bad?

Most people leave a comment like that for their year-in-review. And to some, every year is a bad year if it’s not a 1939 or 1999. This year, however, has been exceptionally disappointing. The Coen Brothers returned to a form we didn’t want to see from them again with Burn After Reading. Brazil’s Fernando Meirelles crashed and burned with Blindness, a film so universally panned that I didn’t even bother to see it. David Gordon Green’s working class drama Snow Angels wasn’t nearly as good as his stoner comedy Pineapple Express. Even Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light, a Rolling Stones concert film, didn’t start me up the way I wished it would have. Then there’s Spielberg, who made a summer blockbuster that shall not be named. The masters were at work, but they weren’t producing the work of masters.

It’s nearly November and the best movie I’ve seen so far this year is WALL·E. It’s a future classic to be sure, but not the movie I thought would be at the top of my list at this point in the year. I’ve had fun at movies like In Bruges, Iron Man, and Religulous. I was surprised at how good an Iraq War film could actually be when I watched Stop Loss. And of course, there was Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. The difference between these movies and the movies I saw in years past is none of them have moved me to regularly visit my local cineplex. I feel as disillusioned about the movies this year as most Republicans do watching John McCain run for president. Something is going terribly wrong.

I watched more movies this year than I have in years past. Most of the ones I caught, however, were classics or personal favorites, movies I could curl up with at home. I read more about movies than I have ever had the pleasure to do, too. I didn’t fall out of love with the cinema, but I hit a rough patch that had me searching through my memory box to reflect on better days.

Sure, 2008 is backloaded. Revolutionary Road, Milk, Doubt, The Wrestler, Slumdog Millionaire, Australia, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Frost/Nixon are still to come. Rachel Getting Married just opened here in Cleveland. Plus there’s an Eastwood one-two punch coming at us with Changeling and Gran Torino. But if history has shown us anything, it’s that at least half of these pictures won’t live up to the hype.

So, fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy 65 days.

This.

Aww. Isn’t he precious.

A message to all the ‘undecideds’ out there.

www.BarackObama.com
www.VoteForChange.com

“I have been watching my life. It’s right there. I keep scratching at it, trying to get into it. I can’t.”
–Dick Whitman, a.k.a. Donald Draper, to the wife of the real Donald Draper. 

So I did it.  I finally watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull tonight on DVD.  My reaction may not be as venomous as some, but the lack of an emotional response to the film says more about Indy 4 than any series of expletives.  Indy 4 is a simply movie that no one seemed to want to make.  It was as if Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg just said to George Lucas, “Fine, George. We’ll make the damn thing. But we’re not going to enjoy it.”

If Spielberg was really interested in making the film, he wouldn’t have chosen Janusz Kaminski as the director of photography, a man who can’t shoot a blockbuster for his life. Give Kaminski something with teeth, a Munich or a Schindler’s List, and he’s a damn fine cinematographer.  But we know what his War of the Worlds and The Lost World looked like. In a word, uninspired. (Hmm…maybe he was the right guy for this job.)

I felt bad for Ford, who looked every bit his age playing Dr. Henry Jones, Jr.  He looked like he’d rather be flying his helicopter than fighting the Reds.  There just didn’t appear to be much action left in this action hero, which may be why they make a nod now and then to Indy’s kid, played by Shia LaBeouf, carrying the Jones family torch.

My strongest reaction doesn’t have much to do with the film itself.  It has to do with the audience who saw it.  I haven’t talked to one person who liked the movie, many of whom acknowledged that it was going to sucklong before they spent $10 to see it.  It’s your money people, all $700 million of it, that is going to keep this soulless franchise going. I snagged Indy 4 using a free rental code, and I still feel like I betrayed an old friend. If you paid for to see this movie and you don’t feel guilty, then all I have to say to you is enjoy Transformers 2. 

W. (2008)–***

When I told a co-worker that I was going to see W. this weekend, he asked why anyone would want to see a film about George W. Bush. It’s a good question. Why would anyone voluntarily endure another two-hours hearing about the life of an almost universally reviled president? My answer to him was simple: If we go see the film while Bush is president, we won’t have to think of him once he’s out of office.

Director Oliver Stone’s W. does us the added favor of being a film we won’t necessarily want to remember. It’s not a bad film. In fact, it’s Stone’s best narrative work in more than a decade. But its claim to fame as the first picture about a sitting president doesn’t make it entertaining. Watching W. is at times like watching a film about you and your soon-to-be ex while you’re going through the bad break-up. For both Stone and the audience, it’s impossible to prevent the outside world from encroaching on the experience.

W. follows our current president from the frat house to the White House with a focus the relationship between Dubya (Josh Brolin) and papa Bush (James Cromwell). We see the moment when Bush, the younger, calls his dad from prison after a rowdy Yale football game, facing dad’s disapproval. It won’t be the last time he’ll feel like disappointment. In a later scene, one where papa Bush accosts Dubya over pregnancy rumors and boozing, he even tells Dubya that he’s disappointed.

Dubya is imperfect, for sure. But he’s determined to be something both for his father and in spite of him. For Dubya, this father/son dynamic turns everything into a personal crusade.

If W. does one thing well, it makes the audience empathize with a man whose actions are considered by many to be beyond the pale. We see that he can never measure up to his father’s lofty expectations. He’s not the favorite son. He’s not the heir apparent. Even when he’s on his way to becoming president he seems lost. Brolin’s earnest portrayal is mesmerizing because he captures Dubya’s haphazard nature, his lack of leadership and foresight, while entertaining the idea that maybe, just maybe he went after the presidency for the wrong reasons.

There are great moments that don’t have to do with the father/son relationship, too. In one war room scene, Colin Powell (played by the always fantastic Jeffrey Wright) urges the president and his security team to stop the march to war in Iraq. In that same scene, Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss) explains why a war in Iraq (and Iran) is necessary for America’s future prosperity. “Empire,” he says with a map of Middle East military bases on a screen behind him. It’s the only scene about the Iraq War that pulls me into the movie instead of pushing me out.

What Wright and Dreyfuss do in that scene is exceptional because it’s the only scene where the actors are given the time to perform. The scene unfolds naturally while most others are quick, contrived vignettes. Short scenes about planning the war only make performances like Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice, Scott Glenn as Donald Rumsfeld, Bruce McGill as George Tenet, and Ellen Burstyn as Barbara Bush feel more likeSNL parodies than well-developed characters.

Some people criticized Stone’s Nixon for being overlong, but occasionally a story needs to be told with patience and consideration. W. is one of those films. Though W. is photographed and often performed as a comedy, Stone’s heavy-handed direction and overt symbolism clash with the attempts at humor. Stone could have created the contemporary equivalent to Dr. Strangelove. Unfortunately, he never directs a “Gentleman! You can’t fight in here. This is the War Room!” moment. There was opportunity, but sometimes simply laughing at Dubya doesn’t quite capture the complexity of this life misunderestimated.