Do you have the need for speed?

Well, "Speed Racer" is a fast mover of a movie - all action and color and spectacle. But at 134 minutes, there's a lot of spinning of wheels in the story, too. Also, the Wachowski brothers don't know whether they're aiming at kids (who get the comic antics of Speed's little brother Spritle and chimp Chim-Chim) or at older viewers (who can tolerate the mild profanity and violence).

But "Speed Racer" is a masterpiece compared with "What Happens in Vegas," a mean-spirited and humorless romantic comedy that exhausts whatever charms and sex appeal that stars Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher had.

David Mamet's "Redbelt" is a curiosity, a kick-boxing drama that casts the always-good Chiwetel Ejiofor ("Talk to Me," "Children of Men") as the prototypical Mamet hero: The one steadfast guy upholding his personal code of honor, even when beset by liars and deceivers. But Mamet overstuffs his movie with shady side characters (with a cast that includes Tim Allen, Alice Braga, Rodrigo Santoro, Emily Mortimer, and Mamet regulars Ricky Jay and Joe Mantegna) who gum up the works.

The Broadway has a delightful documentary, "Young@Heart," which profiles the members of a Massachusetts community choir - average age 80 - who sing rock 'n' roll standards. The stories of these senior singers are, by turns, humorous and touching.

Best of this week's lot, by far, is Thomas McCarthy's "The Visitor." This gentle and moving drama stars Richard Jenkins (a veteran character actor, best known as the deceased father in "Six Feet Under") as a widowed professor who discovers two undocumented aliens - a Syrian musician and his Senegalese girlfriend - living in his Manhattan apartment.

Warner Bros. has decided to close down two of its indie arms, Picturehouse and Warner Independent, reports Daily Variety.

Reading through this statement by Warner's Alan Horn, the upshot is that the more offbeat Warner films apparently will be handled by a re-worked New Line Cinema.

Picturehouse was built out of the remnants of New Line's Fine Line division, along with Newmarket Films and HBO Films. Its recent slate includes the double-Oscar winner "La Vie en Rose," as well as "Run Fatboy Run" and the upcoming "Mongol" and "Kit Kittredge: An American Girl."

Warner Independent so far this year has released "Snow Angels" and Michael Haneke's remake of "Funny Games." Its cinematic high spot was releasing George Clooney's "Good Night, and Good Luck" in 2005.

When the Cricket compiled his list of movie critics who have lost their jobs in print publications in the last two years, he deliberately left Glenn Kenny of Premiere magazine off the list on a technicality: The magazine ceased publication in April 2007, but Kenny was still employed as senior editor for Premiere's web site.

Scratch that technicality.

Kenny is getting the boot from Premiere.com, as he announced on his blog today. He hopes to keep the blog going, and says he needs some free-lance work.

Labels: disappearing critics

One of the growing missions of the Sundance Institute is the encouragement of movies about science - due largely to the sponsorship of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Thanks to the Sloan Foundation, the Sundance Film Festival now gives a $20,000 prize to a movie that spotlights science and technology, or features a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character. (This once prompted writer-actress Guinevere Turner, at a Sundance awards-night ceremony, to dispense this advice to filmmakers: "Dude, stick a robot in your movie - this is $20,000.")

Today, the Sundance Institute announced a commissioning grant and a fellowship to filmmakers for their science-themed projects.

The grant, of $25,000, goes to filmmaker Michael Almereyda, for his film "The Stanley Milgram Project," which profiles the Yale professor whose studies of human behavior in the 1960s showed how people could - when following orders from authority figures - inflict serious pain on other people. (The studies were cited in documentaries about the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.) Almereyda has been at the festival before, with the vampire drama "Nadja" (1994) and his modern take of "Hamlet" (2000).

The fellowship goes to Ryan Knighton for his screenplay "Cockeyed," based on his memoir of his life as a punk rocker and poet - and the unexpected onset of blindness due to retinitis pigmentosa. Knighton workshopped his script at this January's Sundance Screenwriters' Lab.

Labels: Sundance

One of the Cricket's readers recently sent this e-mail: "Have you ever had an independent thought? Or do you always toe the Liberal line? And does it bother you to know that Ann Coulter has proven that all Liberals are Godless Traitors? Thanks for your time."

Besides the underlying hypocrisy (being accused of groupthink by someone who quotes Ann Coulter), the Cricket would beg to differ with this comment. His thoughts are his own, and he hopes he can find something interesting or compelling in any person depicted in a movie, no matter what their political stripe.

So this week's Entertainment Weekly cover story, touting Oliver Stone's yet-to-be-filmed biography of George W. Bush, certainly got the Cricket's attention - especially with Josh Brolin's uncanny physical resemblance to Dubya. (Elizabeth Banks looks pretty good as Laura, too.)

The money quote comes when EW asks Stone about his agenda: ''I'm tired of defending the accuracy of my movies. I'm past that now. 'JFK' was a case to be proven, 'Nixon' was a penetrating biography of a complex and dark man. But I'm not bound by those strictures anymore. Bush is not a complex and dark man, so it's different. This movie can be funnier because Bush is funny. He's awkward and goofy and makes faces all the time. He's not your average president. So let's have some fun with it. What are they going to do? 'Discredit' me again?''

Shooting on the movie starts in two weeks, and Stone still hasn't cast his Dick Cheney. (EW says Stone denies that Robert Duvall turned it down, and now Paul Giamatti is a possible candidate for the role.)

... doesn't usually stay at CineVegas, fortunately. That's why the Las Vegas-based film festival, which has its 10th annual edition June 12-21, is such a hot ticket.

CineVegas's artistic director, Trevor Groth, (who also is a senior programmer at the Sundance Film Festival), announced its lineup today.

The opening-night film will be the world premiere of "The Rocker," directed by Peter Cattaneo ("The Full Monty") and starring "The Office's" Rainn Wilson as a former rock-band drummer given a second chance at stardom when he joins his nephew's high-school band.

The closing-night film is "The Great Buck Howard," which was the Salt Lake City gala opener for Sundance this year. It stars John Malkovich as a washed-up magician who gets an eager young assistant (Colin Hanks).

Here's the complete lineup.

The Cricket has ignored, so far, the idea that an online petition could force a filmmaker - even a bad filmmaker - to quit making movies.

Such a petition has been bouncing around the Internet for a while now, demanding that hack director Uwe Boll - whose videogame adaptations of "Alone in the Dark," "House of the Dead" and "Bloodrayne" are settling in the IMDb's Bottom 100 - get out of the business. Boll told an interviewer on FearNet that he would comply if 1 million people signed the petition.

But now it's getting serious, and free stuff is involved. The makers of Stride gum say that if 1 million people sign the petition by May 14 (that's one week from today), they will give free packs of gum to every signer.

OK, it's a nice publicity stunt and all, but what's the harm of a bad filmmaker making bad movies? It's not like people are being forced to see Boll's movies, and, based on the box-office figures ($10.2 million for "House of the Dead," $5.2 million for "Alone in the Dark," $2.4 million for "Bloodrayne"), nobody's going of their own volition.

Think about it, people (and Christopher Campbell did last month on Spout Blog) - isn't it better for Uwe Boll to be making bad movies than mucking up some other institution? What if he became a lawyer? Or a banker? Or a politician? Think of the carnage his incompetence could produce.

The cable-TV arm of Robert Redford's indie-film empire, The Sundance Channel, is being sold for $496 million to Rainbow Media, according to Daily Variety.

Rainbow, which is part of Cablevision, already owns AMC and the Sundance Channel's main rival, the Independent Film Channel.

The Sundance Channel was co-owned by NBC Universal, CBS's Showtime and Redford's Sundance Group.

UPDATE: According to The New York Times, Redford will remain with the channel. The Times also reports that some analysts are suggesting that the Sundance Channel and IFC will merge into a single channel.

Labels: Sundance

As you've probably heard, "Iron Man" stunned the skeptics by taking in a $100 million opening weekend.

So mark your calendars - in just under two years, you'll see the sequel.

Marvel Studios - the film division of the comic-book publisher - announced that "Iron Man 2" will open on April 30, 2010. Later that summer, on June 4, get set to see "Thor," based on another Marvel title.

In 2011, "The First Avenger: Captain America" will fill the first-weekend-in-May slot (rumor has Matthew McConaughey as a possibility to carry the red-white-and-blue shield), with "The Avengers" - Marvel's version of D.C.'s "Justice League," with Iron Man, Thor, Cap, Hulk and others all fighting for the same team - later that year.

(If you wait around through the "Iron Man" credits, you get a hint of what's to come: S.H.I.E.L.D. boss Nick Fury, played by Samuel L. Jackson, asking Tony Stark a k a Iron Man to join "The Avengers initiative.")

When politicians do Top 10 lists on Letterman and movie stars endorse candidates, the already-blurry line between politics and celebrity is pretty much obliterated.

Two examples:

- Tom Hanks endorsed Barack Obama on Saturday, in a self-produced video posted on Hanks' MySpace page. The cool part of this is that Hanks posted the thing himself, and apparently just wrote it without telling the Obama campaign first. The other cool part is that Hanks acknowledges the limited impact of his endorsement, albeit sarcastically: "As official celebrity, I know my endorsement has just made your mind up for you."

- Amid the more pressing issues (you know, like the war and $4-a-gallon gas), somebody asked Hillary Clinton for her opinion on the Miley Cyrus photo foofooraw. "From everything I’ve heard she’s a great kid and obviously very talented, but I think we need to do more to preserve our kids’ childhood," Clinton said.

Further proof that the Sundance Film Festival has attained a special place in the American consciousness: It got skewered on "The Simpsons" last night.

The episode, "Any Given Sundance," found Lisa's homemade documentary about her family's bad behavior getting into Sundance - but with the rest of the family upset at how horribly they were depicted.

The "Simpsons" writers and artists did their homework - they drew the marquee of Park City's Egyptian Theatre quite nicely, indie maverick Jim Jarmusch was funny as Lisa's self-appointed film-festival mentor, and John C. Reilly has a funny bit at the end.

When we first see the Sundance programmers (sign outside: "Sundance Film Festival: Do Not Feed Ben Affleck"), the lead programmer - who looks rather like festival director Geoffrey Gilmore - is going over the submissions. When he picks up Lisa's, it seems to fit everything Sundance wants:

"A vegetarian [other programmers gasp], intellectual misfit [more gasps] - people, you have to control your gasps at this altitude! - and she's eight years old! [Gasps, followed by fainting]."

When the Simpsons take the winding mountain drive to Park City - "where Parker Posey meets parka-ed posers," reads the banner over Old Main - Marge soon learns that movie titles are misleading: "Regularsville" shows a sad transvestite, "Candyland" has a scene of junkies about to shoot heroin. "I get it - every title means the opposite of what it means," Marge says.

Meanwhile, Principal Skinner and Superintendent Chalmers, who are the producers of Lisa's movie, can't get into the screening. When Skinner suggests they go over to Slamdance, Chalmers replies, "I'd rather die." (Ooo, burn.)

Lisa's film is an instant hit, but Jarmusch teaches her that "festival buzz is, like my movie 'Coffee and Cigarettes,' a funny thing." Another documentary - this one by Springfield bully Nelson Muntz (with an ending taken from "The 400 Blows") - becomes the new festival sensation. As one festivalgoer says, "I like this movie way better than the one by that little girl, because I saw this one today."

As they have said before on "The Simpsons," it's funny 'cuz it's true.

UPDATE: Hulu has the whole episode available. Watch and enjoy. (Hat tip: Karina Longworth at the Spout blog.)

Labels: Sundance

The Cricket and Mrs. Cricket took in The Swell Season at The Depot on Friday night - a great, emotional show, with heartbreaking songs and a joyous performance.

For those not in the know, The Swell Season is the band formed by Irish singer-guitarist Glen Hansard and Czech-born singer-pianist Marketa Irglova - the pair whose little movie "Once" wowed the world and won an Oscar for the plaintive song "Falling Slowly." Sometimes backed by members of Hansard's other band, The Frames, Hansard and Irglova played several songs from "Once," a couple of new numbers, and topped it off with a rousing rendition of Van Morrison's "Into the Mystic." (For this number, they brought on Hothouse Flowers singer Liam O'Maonlai, who opened the show with some charming solo Celtic songs.)

Hansard, a true Irishman in the best sense, can spin a story with the best of 'em, and his rambling introductions to songs reflected the joy he and Irglova apparently are feeling about their strange brush with worldwide fame. (That fame, Hansard recalled, started in Utah when "Once" premiered at Sundance '07.)

The only downside on the night were the two drunken yahoos in front of Mr. and Mrs. Cricket - one of them named Sean (who kept yelling this to Hansard at various pints, er, points in the evening) who dropped a drink which splashed all over the Depot's main floor, and his buddy who kept checking his cellphone for text updates on the Jazz game going on across the street at EnergySolutions Arena.

Lessons learned from today's press conference with the cast and filmmakers of "High School Musical 3: Senior Year," held at Salt Lake City's East High School:

1. Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. will go wherever there's a camera. Giving his daughter Gracie a chance to ogle Zac Efron up close is just a bonus.

2. Everybody - from director Kenny Ortega down to the lowliest cast member - is happier than heck to be in Utah to film this movie.

3. Watching reporters whose expertise is politics and state government try to ask questions of Hollywood people is as uncomfortable on both sides.

4. If a reporter begins a question with, "I'm not from The National Enquirer, but ...", the question will invariably be something rude and overly personal. And somewhere, that reporter's J-school professor is spinning in his or her grave.

5. Vanessa Hudgens will stick to a script like it's a life preserver in the ocean. She said, "we're here to talk about the movie" in response to a question about Miley Cyrus' photo scandal and about whether she and Efron are dating (see point No. 2). Nobody had the bad taste to ask her about her own photographic missteps.

For more about the press conference, read the Cricket's colleague Vince Horiuchi's account on sltrib.com.

The first weekend of May is the traditional start of the summer movie season, as blockbusters line up one after the other.

The Salt Lake Tribune marks the occasion with its Summer Movie Preview. Read up on the summer's big and not-so-big movies here - and also read about the appeal of comic-book movies, the fan worship of "Sex and the City," a comparison of movie-ticket and concession-stand prices along the Wasatch Front, and interviews with "X-Files" director Chris Carter, and actors Brendan Fraser and Richard Jenkins about their summer movies.

The first blockbuster out of the gate is "Iron Man," a good accounting of the Marvel Comics hero's origin - weapons manufacturer Tony Stark is kidnapped by terrorists who use his products, he sees the error of his ways and builds a super-powered armored suit to combat evil. What makes the movie really fun is Robert Downey Jr.'s hearty portrayal of the playboy Stark, along with fun supporting turns by Gwyneth Paltrow as Stark's loyal assistant and Jeff Bridges as his ruthless business partner.

Counterprogramming against the blockbuster is the alleged romantic comedy "Made of Honor," a strained and humorless story of a lothario (Patrick Dempsey) who figures out he really loves his best friend (Michelle Monaghan), but only after she gets engaged to another guy. After about an hour, you're rooting for the other guy.

The best movies of the week are playing at the Broadway Centre Cinemas.

One is "Caramel," a gentle romantic comedy following the love lives of the workers and customers of a Beirut beauty salon. Writer-director Nadine Labaki, who also plays the shop's lovelorn owner, creates a warm portrait of women caught between the modern West and the traditions of the Middle East.

The other is "The Year My Parents Went on Vacation," a subtle but powerful coming-of-age drama about a 10-year-old boy sent to live in the Jewish neighborhood of Sao Paulo when his parents are on the run from Brazil's dictatorship in 1970.

Not so good is "Flawless," a diamond-heist drama starring Demi Moore and Michael Caine that should be more fun than it is. It's playing at the Tower Theatre.

The movie doesn't even start shooting until tomorrow (at Salt Lake City's East High), but "High School Musical 3: Senior Year" already has a cool movie poster, which the movie blog Cinematical premiered today.

For all the attention the Sundance Film Festival gets, the real jewel of the Sundance Institute is its lab program - where new scripts and fledgling filmmakers incubate their projects, and get advice on how to push them out of the nest.

Today the Sundance Institute announced the 13 projects - eight for the monthlong Filmmakers' Lab, and five more for the weeklong Screenwriters' Lab - that will be workshopped this June at the Sundance resort in Provo Canyon.

Here are the eight Filmmakers' Lab projects:

-- "Blood Abundance, or the Half-Life of Antoinette," about a woman raising seven children in the poverty of New Orleans. Written and directed by John Magary, whose short film "The Second Line" played the Sundance Film Festival.

-- "Casa Grande," about a Rio de Janeiro teen who tries to get away from his overprotective parents - who are secretly sinking into bankruptcy. Directed by Fellipe Gamarano Barbosa (Brazil), whose short films "Salt Kiss" and "La Muerte es Pequena" have played at Sundance, and written by Barbosa and Karen Sztajnberg (U.S.).

-- "Meadowlandz," about a black American teen who, with his friends, tries to unload his African-immigrant stepfather passed out in their tenement hallway. Written and directed by Moon Molson.

-- "Pariah," about a lesbian teen living multiple lives to please her friends and family. Written and directed by Dee Rees, whose short film of "Pariah" played at Sundance this year.

-- "Poletown," about three men whose fates intertwine after a racially motivated murder in Detroit's Polish community. Written and directed by Daniel Casey, whose 2007 feature "The Death of Michael Smith" won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2007 Slamdance Film Festival.

-- "Return," about a young mother returning from a military tour-of-duty, looking for her place in her family and her town. Written and directed by Liza Johnson.

-- "Shockheaded Peter," in which British writer-director Frank Budgen adapts his West End stage show, billed as "a deliciously gruesom, hilariously nasty cautionary tale for adults."

-- "Tshepang," a story of child abuse in a rural South African town. Written and directed by South African filmmakers Lara Foot Newton and Gerhard Marx.

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Here are the five projects that will join those eight for the Screenwriters' Lab:

-- "Agua Fria de Mar," about a well-off woman's chance encounter with a strange little girl on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. Written and directed by Paz Fabrega (Costa Rica).

-- "All Fall Down," in which a 9-year-old decides, in October 2001, that he wants to go trick-or-treating as Osama bin Laden. Written and directed by Jonathan Wysocki.

-- "Look for Water," an "emo-thriller" that interweaves several stories, all with a common theme of people lost and found. Directed by Jennifer Phang, whose feature "Half-Life" premiered at Sundance this year, and written by Phang and Dominic Mah, on whose play this script is based.

-- "That Year When We Were Young," about a young Chinese man seducing a young woman in order to exploit her. Directed by Chinese filmmaker Peng Tao, and written by Peng and Zeng Wenwen.

-- "The White Circus," about the parallel lives of a young pilot and an old man in a world where war has no end. Written and directed by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, the Canadian team behind the Oscar-nominated animated short "Madame Tutli-Putli."

The plight of film critics - and whether the declining numbers of critics in print publications are offset by the boom in do-it-yourself criticism online - was hashed out in a couple of forums yesterday.

On Wednesday's "Talk of the Nation" on NPR, The New York Times' A.O. Scott opined on the subject - along with Margo Mealey, who writes the blog DC Girl @ the Movies. A good conversation on the subject, but too brief.

Michael Ventre, writing for MSNBC.com, offers a perspective on the situation. Too bad that he begins with the old saw that it's all the fault of Siskel & Ebert - their darned thumbs having dumbed down film criticism to an either/or proposition that paved the way for aggregators like Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes, where opinion is reduced to a number between 1 and 100.

But the most disturbing aspect of Ventre's article is the accompanying collection of comments from readers, who find movie critics to be elitist or preachy or (worst of all) unnecessary.

The biggest misconception about critics is that we don't actually like movies, and our criticisms somehow suck the joy out of moviegoing. For the Cricket, nothing could be further from the truth. If he didn't enjoy seeing movies, he'd hightail it into another line of work - preferably one that paid better. Most of the critics the Cricket knows got into this job because they love movies so much they had to share that experience through writing about them.

Labels: disappearing critics