Movie Post, Music Rec...

[dawnybee]

New Moon
Don’t think I wanted to see this. My niece forced me to see it as she did “Twilight” and I’m predicting next 2010’s “Eclipse”. I find it interesting that the advertising for the film call it “the ‘Twilight’ saga” because to me saga doesn’t only mean something epic in scope, but drawn-out, exhausting, torturous---which brings me to “New Moon”.

It took two days to secure a ticket because my family lives in a small town where Fandango doesn’t ticket for its theater and Movietickets.com was done and the theater’s own website looked like it was crafted on Geocities and screwed up the ticketing. We had to buy it the night before at the theater to actually get one. The theater was packed and there were a lot of adult women sans kids so evidently they are either jonesing for a vampire film and aren’t picky, ogling Taylor Lautner or actually enjoy the “Twilight” saga.

I kept whispering, “Jhorts” to my niece.



The film was better than the first one, ill-directed by Catherine Hardwick (IMO), but that’s not saying much. That’s like saying you’re happy that you have a staph infection versus the Ebola virus: both are pretty sucky, but one is a extra bit of awfulness. Chris Weitz’s direction wasn’t that impressive, but at least it wasn’t hackneyed and twee like Hardwicke’s take on “Twilight”. I liked that the script this time had a bigger (but not by much) focus on the rivalry between the vampires and werewolves, which was something that piqued my interest in the first film even though it was mentioned in passing.

“New Moon” focused on Bella’s (Kristen Stewart) depression over Edward leaving her (too much of a danger to her in his mind), so she does crazy teenage angst-type things, makes me want to scream and shake her and ultimately reconnects with her friend Jacob (Taylor Lautner) who’s werewolf heritage is threatening the tentative change in their relationship.

Wolf Tribe: The cutest guys in the film.



There was very little Robert Pattinson in the film and my eyes thanked the filmmaker for that. There were a lot of disappointed murmurs in the audience at the ending, because just like “Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”, the ending comes abruptly as it is a bridge to the rest of the series.

Out of all the actors I think Taylor Lautner was surprisingly competent. I can’t even form an opinion on Kristen Stewart because it seems all Bella did was shiver and quake that I could only think how good in bed she must be. She seems very responsive. There was a scene where she was standing close to Jacob, with one hand on his chest and the other dropped down and she was shaking and quivering so much that it looked like she was jerking Jacob off.

I will say the movie wasn’t as bad as Kristin’s weave in this photoshoot.



Now, here’s to my last “Twilight” mention of the year!

New Moon Premiere where the cast attended even though the majority of them had one scene in the film.

Kristin Stewart, Dakota Fanning and Joan Jett. Kristin plays Joan in the upcoming “Runaways” film.



Joan Jett Barbie. Mattel is going to get a lot of my money in 2010



Cyndi Lauper Barbie



Debbie Harry Barbie



I won’t be buying these though



Kristin Stewart and Taylor Lautner





I'm even willing to sacrifice shirtless pictures of Taylor



Jamie Campbell Bower



Anna Kendricks, who is co-starring in “In the Air”



Jackson Rathbone



Edi Gathegi



Edi and Kellan Lutz



Seriously, they do more press than film time





Rpattz



”Twilight” creator, Stephanie Meyer



50 Cent wondering why he’s there.



Maybe the movie would be better if Bella, Edward and Jacob had a threesome. It’d be like “Summer Lovers”, but lamer.













New Couple?



The movie may be over, but I hope the gifs and other fun Twilight mockery never go away.


















And hopefully the Robstew publicity stunt relationship will not take up so much media attention.




















The best Edward? Obviously James Olmos



There’s only one vampire.



Not you, Eric, I mean Mitchell



Pirate Radio
This movie was perfection; absolute perfection. If you love music, not even rock music, not even sixties British rock music, just music; if you believe in the transformative and transcendent nature of it, you’d love this film. See it if you just want to see people having fun in a film. It’s such a pleasing film.

Written and directed by Richard Curtis (writer/direct of “Love Actually”), “Pirate Radio” aka “The Boat That Rocked” is a composite based on Radio Caroline and other British pirate radio stations in the sixties when radio stations would not play rock music. Anchored 25 miles off of the British coast, “Radio Rock” is run by the dapper Quentin (played by the equally dapper Bill Nighy) whose former flame sends her errant son Carl (Tom Sturridge) to him for discipline. Carl finds himself in the midst of a rock station manned by the popular “The Count” (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the gregarious Dave (Nick Frost), his daft roomie Thick Kevin (Tom Brooke) and the put-upon Angus (Rhys Darby).

When the British government creates a task force to take on this piracy. Led by Alaistar Dormandy (played so laughably rigid by Kenneth Branagh) and his minion Twatt (the sexy Jack Davenport). To get counter and get support from advertisers, Quentin brings back his number-one dj, the charismatic Gavin(Rhys Ifans).

This is less a plot driven story versus a story driven one. It’s like having someone waxing romantic about a time past and it’s so comforting and nostalgic. It’s like “Meatballs” meets “WKRP” but with better music.

There was no sour note in the film. Everyone was great. The costuming and set pieces were impeccable. Bill Nighy was so marvelously droll and unflappable as Quentin and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Rhys Ifans were great as the dueling djs.

Tom Sturridge was beautiful to look at, but I just found out he’s BFFs with Robert Pattinson so he loses points for that.

The Real RobSTU





All this sexing is making Robert tired.



Tom Sturridge







2012
Surprisingly I liked this film and I was proclaiming how much it would suck. The FX were just a step up from something you’d see on the SyFy channel and the acting, with the exception of Chiwetel Ejiofor, wasn’t anything to write home about, I still enjoyed it. Maybe I just needed mindless entertainment. Maybe I was just relieved it didn’t suck outrageously like Roland Emmerich’s other films “The Day After Tomorrow” and “10,000 BC”.

The plot is that a government scientist (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is notified by his friend (Jimi Ministry) that the Earth’s core is becoming unstable. In three years time, 2012, it progresses to the point of the world’s inevitable destruction.

A divorced father (John Cusack) stumbles upon the news and the escape plan by the government, by way of a conspiracy theorist (Woody Harrelson) and he races to get his family and himself out of harms way. What follows is massive, wanton destruction of Southern California, a lot of implausible scenes of escape and cartoon-like villainy courtesy of Oliver Platt, but there is also a very pragmatic truth that Roland Emmerich (writer/director) lays out that I found refreshing that all things are not equal and that even when it comes to the end of the world as one knows it, money still carries more weight than basic humanity.

They could’ve shaved off twenty minutes from the 2 hour and thirty eight minute runtime, but if you have time to kill, it’s time well spent.

And being a big ‘ol disaster flick, they topped it off with two bombastic end songs. “Time for Miracles” by Adam Lambert and “Fades Like Photograph” by Filter. Not the best Filter song, not by far, but I’m just happy to have Richard Patrick (younger brother of actor Robert Patrick) back on the scene.

Click to view

The Road

If “2012” is the popcorn Apocalypse flick, “The Road” is the weighty, thought-provoking one.

Adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s (“No Country for Old Men) book, “The Road” centers on an unexplained apocalyptic event that destroys the planet: blocking out the sun, causing fires, killing insects and animals, making life harsh and pretty much uninhabitable for human existence. It revolves around a man, we only know as Pa (Viggo Mortensen) who is trying to find a more hospitable place for he and his 10-year old son (Kodi Smit-McPhee); a child born after the apocalypse (Charlize Theron as the mother, agonizing over the plight of her child, is wonderful).

Torn between wanting to teach his son the values that one learns in the world (carrying the torch, as he teaches his son) and wanting his son to adapt to the bleak realities of their life, it’s an examination of what happens when there is no future? Do you still try to keep the basic humanity you’ve always had, how do you survive? Is it worth surviving when there is no upside and no hope for a better existence?

I didn’t read McCarthy’s book and I didn’t read anything about it until I saw the film, so I think a great exercise is seeing the film unspoiled and then going back and read what McCarthy says is the point of the book. It’s like a new way of seeing who is an optimist and a pessimist because what I took away from the film is completely contrary to what McCarthy says it’s about.

Great film, definitely the prestige film for Dimension Film and the troubled Weinstein Company.

Serious Moonlight

Serious mistake ::rimshot:: Thank you!

The late Adrienne Shelley (actor, writer of “Waitress”) wrote the script . Her widower has made it his goal to get some of her works produced post-humously. This is one. I think if Adrienne herself had starred in it, it would’ve worked better. Or maybe this is a draft that had never been completed and needed reworking, but the movie was very indie---and not in a good way. It seems clunky and amateurish and the laughs are far in between.

The film stars Meg Ryan as Louise who discovers her husband (Timothy Hutton) is leaving her for a young woman (Kristen Bell). Louise ties him up and refuses to let him go until he falls back in love with her.

In true indie fashion; a lot of talking, a lot of navel-gazing. The only difference is that with true indie films you get a sense of developed characters, which is lacking her. Meg Ryan hasn’t learned her lesson with the terrible film “Addicted to Love” she starred in when she was trying to get out of the America’s Sweetheart pigeonhole. The problem though is that while Ryan wants to get out of that hole, she continues with her “America’s Sweetheart” behaviors: you never really feel that this is a woman on the edge and desperate, instead it’s just Meg’s character in “You Got Mail”, “Sleepless in Seattle”, “Innerspace”, but really manic. Tim Hutton doesn’t fare much better.

The only pleasant surprise was that Derek Carter from a former Oxygen channel series “Campus Ladies” had a very small role, surely because director Cheryl Hines loves him as much as I do, seeing as that she was the producer of “Campus Ladies”.

Leap Year

Amy Adams is trying to be the new Meg Ryan. Or maybe the new Sandra Bullock, with her run of rom-coms. This film is short on both IMO. I don’t like romantic comedies as a rule, but I can get behind a good one (“PS, I Love You” being one), but I think the worst romantic comedies are the ones where the script is weaker than a sopping wet paper towel cradling a brick, but the filmmakers think they just have to cast a plucky, adorable lead and it’s all good. Wrong. I’m talking Lindsay Lohan brand leggings wrong.




Leap Year is about (AMY ADAMS) a planner, loves structure who decides to propose to her boyfriend on Leap Year per an Irish tradition. Bad weather prevents her from landing, so she employs a cabbie, Declan (Matthew Goode) to get her to Dublin in time for February 29th. Mishaps happen, situations in which we’re supposed to think how swell a couple they’d make doesn’t happen. Adams and Goode are great independently, but the characters weren’t jibing for me as a couple, strangely enough. But Matthew Goode looks real good with facial hair.




Kick-Ass
Slated to come out sometime in 2010, “Kick-Ass” is the film adaptation of Mark Millar’s graphic novel of the same name. My friend who actually reads the graphic novel quizzed me on the film and it seems the film stays faithful for much of the graphic novel.

Kick-Ass stars British actor Aaron Johnson as Dave Lizenski who decides to become a superhero and after getting soundly beaten (gaining him a metal plate in his head) in his first venture, he discovers that he can withstand pain. His next foray into crimestopping results in a fight that is captured and uploaded to YouTube and he becomes Kick-Ass, a media sensation.

Kick-Ass attracts the attention of real crimestoppers Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and his daughter, Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz), as well as crime boss Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong) and another “hero”, Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who is trying to uncover Kick-Ass’ identity for D’Amico.

Director and co-writer Matthew Vaughn lends his vibrant style to the film. Vaughn, a peer and oft-time partner of Guy Ritchie, knows how to do action (most notably a scene that as of my viewing the working music used was Pulp’s “This is Hardcore” and it was sensational). That coupled with the little comic touches (like Clark Kent, Dave has to hide his identity, Red Mist is like Red Robin in a lot of ways, Hit Girl like Robin and Big Daddy Batman) works well for the film. That said, it’s not comic-booky enough to get a lot of fans who don’t know the source material, and then there’s the Nicolas Cage problem of it’s Nicolas Cage and he hammier than a pig stuffed with a ham wrapped in bacon.

Aaron Johnson who looked a lot like a hybrid of Kyle Gallner and Superman’s son Jon Kent…



…was excellent and sweet and befuddled just like you’d envision a newbie hero to be. Mark Strong, who I loved in “Rocknrolla” and “Body of Lies” was just okay. But it was good to see Ritchie’s “Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels” alums Jason Flemying and Dexter Fletcher in small roles.

Very enjoyable film, the crowd went wild. I don’t know how they’re going to get around the title and I don’t know how they’re going to get around with the character of Hit-Girl, no more than 12-years old, being a ruthless killer, but there you go.

And as much as I enjoyed this and “Wanted”, I don’t want Mark Millar doing Superman EVER. He needs to shut up about wanting to do it before someone takes him seriously.




Red Mist












UpComing Films

The Princess and the Frog

Disney’s first African American princess, Tiana, voiced by Anika Noni Rose.

Anika and Bruce Campos: Tiana and Prince Naveen



Anika with Ne-Yo who performs the song for the film



Costars Jenifer Lewis and Keith David



Angela Bassett, Courtney B. Vance and their children at the premiere



Sherlock Holmes

This will be less about “Sherlock Holmes” and more about my unbridled lust admiration of Jude Law.

These are the ads I saw all across LAX.

Teh Sex



And here is the one of the “For Your Consideration” ads running in the trades.

Elementary, my dear Watson, you want to shag me silly.



Jude may have more sperm than willpower, he’s been in some unimpressive films of late and his hairline is retreating like the sea at low tide, but his talent in undeniable. The first film I saw Jude in was “Music From Another Room”, a film I don’t believe was even released in the theaters. He was beautiful and charming and keen at comedy and I was in love. The next film I saw of his was “Wilde” starring Stephen Fry as Oscar Wilde and Jude as his beautiful, bratty lover Bosie. That’s when I stopped just looking at Jude as a pretty face, but an actor. When Bosie unleashes on Oscar in a fury and then quickly reigns in it, replacing the fury with cold contempt, I was a goner.

Jude is classically trained, but you wouldn’t know it because is so fearless and unhindered by a desire to be a classic leading man, that he approaches acting with a Stanislavski type honesty and nakedness. He’ll willingly play beautiful people who have ugly souls.

Jude is getting great reviews as “Hamlet” on Broadway (“Glee”s Cory Monteith tweeted “I pray thee, go see “Hamlet”), but I’m hoping “Sherlock Holmes” will give Jude the cred he lost in recent years.

And he has a nice peen (NSFW)

Death at a Funeral
Chris Rock drew Sean Penn’s ire (yeah, the same Sean Penn of “Shanghai Surprise” and “We’re No Angels”) when he made a tiny joke about Jude Law at the Oscars several years ago. With Rock’s documentary “Good Hair” making favorable reviews at Cannes and wherever it was released, he still has his eye on general comedy films. There’s the upcoming “Grown Ups” featuring his Saturday Night Live castmates Adam Sandler, David Spade and Rob Schneider as well as a remake of the British film “Death at a Funeral” (because it was just begging for a remake?).

Death at a Funeral trailer

Click to view

Grown Ups trailer

Click to view

Chris Rock, with his mom Rose at a “Good Hair” screening.



Chris with wife, Malaak



Hair stylist, Derek J, featured in “Good Hair”



Raven Symone



Nia Long





David Spade



Although it seems I’ve seen a lot of films lately, there’s a lot I haven’t seen yet. I haven’t seen “Where the Wild Things Are”, “The Fantastic Mr. Fox”, “Ninja Assassin” (Rain, I will see you in action!) and “Precious”. Everyone I know who have seen “Precious” all agree it’s excellent, with some saying it’s downright depressing, to some saying it’s rough but there is hope-tinged to it. So I will see it before it leaves the theaters.










Gabourey Sidibe winner of newcomer awards at the Hollywood Film Festival and Satellite Awards



I haven’t read everything on this yet, but M’onique had Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Newton, two Oscar nominees on her show and asked them about the Oscar race and why should she campaign.

Taraji and Terence





People are picking up on this story and getting their knickers in a twist as if she’s being ungrateful, when in reality she’s just exposing the politicking involved with Oscar campaigning. She’s acknowledging that it’s a game and she’s not hating on it, she’s just seeing whether or not she wants to participate in it. There was a book about the history of the Oscars that I read years ago and it was illuminating at how much actors pour into their own campaigns. I think studios should foot the bill: they already pay for the “For Your Consideration” ads, set-up screenings for guild members as well as send out screener DVDs and agents could get involved by maybe campaigning for their clients, but it should be about talent, not about how much an actor will shill for an award.

Mo’Nique questions campaigning and Butthurt Blogger

~
From New Moon

Meet Me on the Equinox-Death Cab for Cutie
White Demon Song: The Killers
Hearing Damage :Thom Yorke

From Pirate Radio

This Guy’s in Love with You: Burt Bacharach
Stay With Me Baby: Duffy

*After the movie , my friends and I went to Amoeba Records, a huge warehouse-esque record store where your fingers get covered in dust and dirt as you pour through the bins filled with vinyls and cds. Looking through, I saw The Smashing Pumpkins’ Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” was on sale-for pretty much the same price I paid for it when it was released in the Nineties. It was so fitting that just leaving a movie that filled me with such joy that I would find the cd that really defined a moment in time for me, where I was just ready for adulthood, where anything seemed possible and I think that’s why I loved “Tonight, Tonight” and its lyrics that encouraged that thinking.

Tonight, Tonight (video)
Tonight, Tonight: Smashing Pumpkins (song)

Random
Bad Romance: Lady Gaga

*Weezer’s lead singer, Rivers Cuomo was involved in a bad bus crash that caused injury to his spleen. He’s on the mend, but has had to cancel upcoming Weezer tour dates. He’s improving by the day so it won’t be long before he’s plugging away at peppy ditties like this one. I Want You To: Weezer ft. Sara Bareilles

*A year ago or so Kanye West blogged a picture of he and Jared Leto. Word is that they were working on a song together. That specific song (War, IIRC) doesn’t feature Kanye, but Kanye lends his voice to this one. Hurricane: 30 Seconds to Mars ft. Kanye West

And mystery solved. The night I went to the Dead Man’s Bones concert I saw Jared Leto and wondered what he was up: if he was shooting a video or if he was participating in Critical Mass. He was doing both. He joined other riders for their monthly ride and used the opportunity to film a video.