Beat Ben @ the Box Office: Big Willie Weekend
It’s that time of year: Will Smith season. And the the King of July 4th has another smash hit on his hands with Hancock, costarring Oscar winner Charlize Theron and funnyman Jason Bateman. This is the only major release at the box office over the holiday weekend, and every studio clears a path because, no doubt about it, he’s the No. 1 movie star in the world.
In a summer of superheroes, you also have to admire actor-turned-director Peter Berg for bringing us an entirely new character, who doesn’t have to cater to both fanboys and mass audiences, or worry about staying true to the source material.
So look for Hancock to bank $127 million over the five-day weekend. Smith goes all-out, and the guy even performed a 45-minute set at his own premiere. (I got a little emotional when he introduced DJ Jazzy Jeff and did “Summertime.”)
Don’t think Hancock can save the day at the box office this weekend? Then drop your numbers in the comments!
Hunter Stephenson’s Movie Review: Wanted
The following review contains very minor spoilers.
Not unlike applying an exact birth date to new slang, it’s difficult to gauge whether director Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch) has invented a new language for the modern action film with Wanted. We’ve reached a point where today’s actioners are required to wear moon shoes—films like Wanted and Crank aspire to both hat-tip and one-up the Wachowski brothers’ hyperactive stylings (sans the techno white dreadlocks and Columbine coats), all the while hopping on and off the latest trends in video games, technology and comic book movies like coked-out mosquitoes.
Of course, Wanted itself is based on a comic book miniseries by Mark Millar—some fanboys would say the film merely uses the comics for TP—but the movie feels like a cultural genre gangbang where basic movie logic not only no longer applies, it’s laughed at under a calm hipster veneer for being old school.
Wanted takes the “enlightened chosen one” storyline of Unbreakable, ditches most of the ethic recoil, remolds the central hero as a sleepy, tech-literate 20something (note: resembling today’s bloggers) and posits him in a Grand Theft Auto urban fantasia with endless ammo, life, freedom and a doting, hushed Angelina Jolie at his side. Before he learns the way of the gun/Jolie, our aforementioned hero, Wesley Gibson, played by James McAvoy (Atonement), drifts though a cubicle-strewn life and can’t bother caring that his GF is getting dogged by his BFF on his IKEA table (shades of Fight Club) on the regular. But that’s before Gibson finds out that he can bend bullets (how trendy!); he’s also one of the world’s elite natural born killer-slash-assassins. The movie’s two lessons: 1) not trying too hard is vital to coming off cool and 2) hot doting girls are that much hotter when they rarely speak.
What many viewers will find equally charming and lazy about the flick is how completely over-it it is in terms of making sense. When our mortal (super)hero should be smushed into liquid bits after being caught in the nightmarish destruction of a train, he’s merely stirred. Of course Gibson can’t die in this scenario, the superhero in a movie never does. But Wanted defenestrates any and all rule-books when it comes to placing an action hero in genuine jeopardy. Jeopardy is overrated according to this film, even for a mortal assassin partying in fantasy land. And you’ll like it!
When John McClane cut up his feet in Die Hard and puffed on a final cig as he told Al to get a message to his kids and wife, you knew he wouldn’t die, but damn, it looked like his was felled. That was the standard action hero protocol for years. Here, when Gibson smashes his body atop a train hard enough to kill him on impact, he merely wakes up to find himself inexplicably soaking in a magical bath tub, already back to 98% health. These numerous sauna recoveries serve as geek intermissions between the film’s grandiose stunts. They’re a locker room of sorts for a weightless blockbuster. And when they’re over, Gibson and his newfound Fraternity of killers quickly go back to: shooting people, knifing and being knifed, practicing kills on elderly corpses, blowing up rats, and having a blast. And then bathing some more.
This is the R-rated, vicarious, hedonistic action film of summer 2008. It’s ultimately too pleased with its laissez-faire M.O.—that’s why the rah-rah Ferris Bueller-ish ending is fitting and yet underwhelming BS—but the lavish budget, high production values and the director’s cavalier disposal of genre tropes win out against better judgment, sort of like R. Kelly in court. Bekmambetov proposes that Americans are permanently tired of the chalk board exposition prominent in these types of films, and his picture trades out smart, meaningful dialogue and passable explanation for hipper-than-thou crowd pleasing. if you’re concerned with canon, the Fraternity’s mythology, character backgrounds, Bekmambetov leaves bread crumbs lying around.
Not only has Wanted ta-ta’d the rules for action, but it’s reinforced a new type of action star. When doing press on The Daily Show and Craig Ferguson, McAvoy (Atonement) has appeared humorously apologetic and surprised that his film doesn’t play like a $10 shrug burn—a movie experience he’s clearly familiar with as a viewer. This type of actor is to action what the man-child was to comedy two years ago. Unlike Jason Statham, who is cut from a grizzly ’80s cloth, McAvoy plays this role like a post-ironic Mario. I hope Hayden Christensen gets whacked and McAvoy takes his place because his indifference is ours, not the cause of it. And his spin/PR act is warranted. He’s a smart lead in a film where God, some divine power or something orders out random hits on people using a weaving apparatus called a loom. It’s so random, it’s liked getting slapped with a cartoon fish. There are even Pai Mei-wannabe training sequences using the mysterious loom with McAvoy, Morgan Freeman and Jolie that would draw a dumb blank in Dirty Dancing or The Karate Kid. Not very badass.
Right when your mind starts telling you, “This scene makes me think of Gone in Sixty Seconds,” the film takes a sharp turn, leaves you welcomely disoriented and drops a successful twist/stunt in your lap. Cars flip and shimmer in the air with rockstar finesse and execution, as if caught in the invisible hands of a precocious six-year-old, and the film is not afraid to repeat such stunts, or bad one-liners like “I’m sorry,” for the pure goofy hell of it. Hey, it works. The violence is graphic, plentiful and lends the film a much needed subversiveness to level out the taffy sensibility. As Gibson’s mentor, Fox, Angelina Jolie has chosen to keep her dialogue at a coy minimum, and in this R-rated sandbox where anything can happen, she utilizes the silence to emphasize wild sex and lust that’s not there with her student. This is easily her choicest role in my opinion. She’s finally iconic on screen. She’s like Christina Lindberg in They Call Her One-Eye if those years of degradation and abuse never happened but the character still possessed a refined palette for mayhem (and bad tattoos).
Wanted banked $50 million this weekend, we can once again wonder where—not so much the comic book movie—but the action genre goes from here. Obviously, a sequel to Wanted is happening. And in post-post-Matrix worlds like Wanted’s where snipers can blow out the brains of marks from across an entire city, using tribal-etched, bending bullets like messenger pigeons (god, that sounds like it would be lame on film), we can expect more plots, characters and stunts that treat the adrenal gland like mystery meat in films that will more likely than not belong in a loony used DVD bin. John Woo goes big budget, R-rated Mouse Hunt for a subgenre, one fathered by The Transporter. To answer the film’s rhetorical “What the fuck have you done today?” line, I haven’t done much, but Timur Bekmambetov just let a lucrative cat out of the bag where any 20something character with a gun is Superman with a magic bathtub (don’t ask questions viewers), and right now the potential for exploiting this free-for-all style is breeding inside the heads of movie execs like feral rabbits. Unlike Rambo, which was a similarly violent but sturdier crowd-pleaser, Wanted is recalled like a lobotomy days later. Also, Common is sticking around.
7/10
Bonus Semi-Unrelated Movie Experience: Before I went into the screening room for Wanted, I waited online with my friend for 15 minutes to simply purchase a drink, blahblah. Between the totally unnecessary bombardment of trailers playing on TVs all around us (more than I’ve ever seen in a lobby this summer or ever), posters vying for every inch of personal space, and lots and lots of loud people in sandals it was pretty intense. In front of us was an old fat guy wearing a pink, salted cap. He already had an XL popcorn and a huge soda. Why the fuck was he on line again? At his feet was a little kid carrying an empty, greasy popcorn bucket. They get to the front, I’m already over the wait. They take forever for no apparent reason. I say to my friend, “This is a fucking anxiety attack waiting to happen. What is going on?” Finally, the old dude boosts the little kid up to the counter, and the kid drops 50 cents into the hand of the theater employee. His bucket is filled with popcorn, topped off with five huge buttery squirts and handed back to him, while still in the old guy’s grip. Then the little kid says, “Thank you” and waddles off. And the old guy says, “You’re welcome. Have fun lil’ buddy.” He then buys four boxes of candy. They were complete strangers. Maybe you had to be there, but it was fucking bizarre. After taking a seat in the screening room with a small Sprite and five Sour Patch Kids wrapped in a napkin, the movie started. It was that much more enjoyable watching a modern dork/hero gobble Xanax after Xanax to counter severe anxiety induced by the world’s expanding suckage.
Movie Rating due to this experience: 7.5/10
Cameron, Spielberg Remember Winston at Funeral
Stan Winston wasn’t just a monster mogul. He was also a kid at heart, a Beatles fan and a Hollywood visionary.
That’s according to colleagues who gathered in Los Angeles on Sunday to remember the Oscar-winning special-effects master, who died June 15 at age 62 after a seven-year battle with cancer.
“He inspired a generation of fans,” James Cameron, one of the F/X maestro’s closest collaborators, said at a private memorial service at the Hillside Memorial Park and Mortuary.
“I think that just maybe the words of a bunch of people who didn’t even know him personally may be his best tribute,” Cameron continued before reading aloud a number of online tributes from fanboys at Ain’t It Cool News. The Titanic helmer also revealed that he spoke to Winston the day before his death and proclaimed their mutual love.
Winston, who died of multiple myeloma, earned Academy Awards for creating the out-of-this-world monsters in Cameron’s Aliens and Terminator movies, as well as the eye-popping dinos populating Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park.
For his part, Spielberg hailed Winston’s extraodinary ability to turn artists’ imaginations into reality.
“What Stan did is that he took our dreamshe took all of our dreamsand he blended them with his own dreams,” said Spielberg. “He then workshopped those dreams with pencil, clay and, later years on, the computer. He would basically give life to all of our ideas. He would make them come to life.”
Other showbiz associates and friends in attendance: Aliens star Sigourney Weaver; actor Robert Patrick, who played the T-1000 cyborg in T2; Iron Man filmmaker Jon Favreau; and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his True Lies sidekick Tom Arnold.
Son Matt Winston recalled that after a tearful goodbye to his family, filled with kisses, hugs and laughter, the last song his father heard was the Beatles’ “All My Loving.”
Lexi Alexander Talks Punisher: War Zone’s Exploding Heads, Color Scheme, Trailer, Tom Jane Fan Club
When I posted the teaser trailer for Punisher: War Zone last Thursday, the 70 comments from you guys were impressively heated and divisive. Until then, the R-rated Lionsgate/Marvel actioner from director Lexi Alexander (Green Street Hooligans, karate) had flown under the radar, with many pegging the movie as a star-less runt in Marvel’s newly consolidated, unpredecented game plan. And many fans still do, even after the teaser, but Alexander appreciates the early attention and welcomes the hate. She was surprised, albeit pleasantly, by the teaser’s release, and once again, she’s emphasizing her flick’s generous helpings of violence and mayhem. Not to be sexist, but it’s pretty strange and cool to hear the rare female director who’s more excited about a comic book film filled with carnage than most geeks. From her blog…
“I’m not sure what kind of impression I would get from this trailer if I didn’t actually know the film. I am utterly impressed, though, they managed to find that much PG rated action footage at all. It had to be a challenge to cut a trailer from our action stuff without showing any gore and blood.
I’ve been told that you can’t even show heads blowing up in red-band trailers. I hope that’s not true because that would suck. It’s weird to see Castle shoot all those bullets and not see the thugs who are catching them. That’s the best fucking part about it!!!”
Of course, many fanboys would respond, “Big whup. AVP: Requiem had a lot of gore, an R-rating, a lot of hype and it still sucked ass. Takes more than that to make a good genre movie.” Thankfully, Alexander has clarified a few of the questions/criticisms brought up in our comments section. Many fans have taken issue with the film’s heavily stylized scorched neon color palette, comparing it to Joel Schumacher’s Batman Nipples and Robin Nipples. Personally, I dig the retro ’80s look so far. It looks like the poster for Cobra meets laser tag. And yes, that is cool. But Alexander is all, “Wait a second, I’m lifting the look directly from the comics. You guys read Punisher comics, right?” She includes various stills from Punisher: MAX (part of Marvel’s adult imprint) like the one seen here for reference.
“I’m very happy that the hardcore Punisher fans recognized the lines taken directly from the comic books (all credit goes to Ray Stevenson for that), and that MAX fans appreciated the color theme that was also directly copied from the books.”
Another gripe, which probably started with outspoken screenwriter, Kurt Sutter, is that the criminal element in Punisher: War Zone is not stapled to reality a la Scorsese’s Goodfellas or Taxi Driver or David Chase’s The Sopranos.
“Every director has to make a call on the vision and style of a film and putting The Punisher in a realistic and gritty setting would be like having Det. Vic Mackey of THE SHIELD run around with a big ass skull on his chest, or Ray Liotta’s character in NARC suddenly go: “Hey, I think I just saw a guy whose face looks like a Jigsaw puzzle.” Ha, ha.”
What surprised me most about the reaction to the teaser was the number of readers that expressed fond memories for 2004’s The Punisher with Tom Jane (who fit the part, yes) and John Travolta (I’m still not sure what the hell was up with that). The movie plays on insomniac cable quite a bit, and maybe when bunched in with guilty pleasures like Executive Decision and other Die Hard knockoffs, it grows on some. I dunno. Alexander says she doesn’t aspire to ”become a member of the Dolph Lundgren or Thomas Jane fan club. This film is about the mythology of FRANK CASTLE, it is ultra violent…”
She compares her movie’s trajectory to The Incredible Hulk, which she thought rocked. But unlike that late-blooming film, her’s has months ahead of it (opens in December), and I’m already optimistic (though I don’t think Peter is).