The Movie Cricket: All about flicks by Sean P. Means
Monday, March 31, 2008
"Nilbog! It's 'goblin' spelled backwards!"
If you don't know where Nilbog is, you have somehow managed to miss out on what even its cast members call "the best worst movie" ever made: "Troll 2."
Come June, the movie and the town of Nilbog are returning to from whence they came: Morgan, Utah.
Nilbog Invasion, a three-day celebration of "Troll 2," is set to take place June 27-29 in Morgan, where the 1990 movie was shot.
The Alamo Rolling Roadshow, the touring division of Austin's Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, is organizing the event, which will include screenings of the now-cult favorite and other related movies, including the original "Troll" (which has nothing to do, plot-wise with "Troll 2" - and in fact isn't that bad, and has such recognizable faces in it as Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Sonny Bono, Shelley Hack, Michael Moriarty and June Lockhart).
The event also includes a ton of other events, including panel discussions, feasts of goblin food, a popcorn-eating contest (it makes sense if you see the movie), and other stuff.
The Cricket has a fondness for "Troll 2," not because he's seen it (which he has, and it is awful), but because one of his Tribune co-workers, online producer Darren Ewing (pictured at left in the movie, and at right more recently), has a featured role in the film. He plays Arnold, who is credited (or blamed, take your pick) with the strangest utterance of the words "Oh, my Gaaaawwwwd!" in cinema history. Watch it for yourself:
Darren, according to the press release, will referee the javelin toss.
Passes - priced at $40, $100 or $170 - go on sale Sunday.
In this space Tuesday, the Cricket complained that "Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay," the much-anticipated sequel to the 2004 stoner classic "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle," would not be screened for critics before its April 25 opening.
No fair, cried the Cricket, because the movie had already been seen by many critics at South by Southwest earlier this month - and some (like Joe Leydon at Daily Variety) rather liked it.
Well, New Line has seen the error of its ways, and will be screening the movie in time for critics to see and review it.
(By the way, the children's adventure "Nim's Island," which opens this Friday, will have a preview screening - contrary to the Cricket's earlier posting.)
A witness to hell
Dith Pran lived through unimaginable horror, lived to tell the world about it, and lived to campaign to keep it from happening again.
Dith, a Cambodian photojournalist whose harrowing life story was immortalized in the movie "The Killing Fields," died Sunday of pancreatic cancer in his New Jersey home. He was 65.
Dith worked as an interpreter for The New York Times' correspondent Sydney Schanberg in Cambodia. Together they covered the U.S. military's bombings of that southeast Asian nation, and the country's takeover by the Khmer Rouge.
But when Schanberg was forced to leave Cambodia, Dith had to stay behind and endure the genocide ordered by Pol Pot. Ultimately, Dith escaped to Thailand and eventually came to America - working as a photographer for The New York Times.
(Here is his obituary in the Times, and here is the video interview Dith recorded for the Times shortly before his death.)
Will the last critic leaving New York please turn off the lights?
Last week, after the Village Voice's Nathan Lee was laid off, S.T. VanAirsdale of The Reeler joked about the shrinking membership of the New York critical community.
"If this keeps up, who will compose the New York Film Critics Circle?" VanAirsdale wrote. "At this rate, it'll be Armond White splitting the Jim Hoberman and Rex Reed votes, with 'Indiana Jones 4' ekeing out a narrow Best Picture victory come December."
VanAirsdale may not be kidding. Another lion among New York's movie critics is hanging it up: David Ansen, Newsweek's main movie critic since 1977, is among 111 of the newsmagazine's staffers - in the news and business departments - who have accepted a buyout, according to Radar Online.
Anne Thompson at Daily Varietyreports that Ansen found Newsweek's offer too good to pass up. He'll continue until year's end, then take a one-year contract as a contributor - reviewing occasionally and writing longer features. He also plans to teach and write books.
Nine movies open in Utah today - and two of the best focus on Americans' reaction to terrorism and the war in Iraq.
"Stop-Loss" is the long-anticipated drama from director Kimberly Peirce, her first movie since the acclaimed "Boys Don't Cry." The movie centers on an Army unit trying to adjust to life back home in Texas after a harrowing tour in Iraq - and what happens when one of them (Ryan Phillippe) is suddenly called back into service. It's a powerful drama, with strong acting and a timely message about the strain being put on our troops by an uncaring government.
"Taxi to the Dark Side," the Oscar-winning documentary, shows our government to be not just uncaring but cruel and duplicitous. Director Alex Gibney exposes the Bush administration's systematic undermining of the Constitution to support a flimsy policy of torture against detainees in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base. To watch the movie is to get righteously angry about the evils being done in the name of the American people.
This week's major studio opening is "21," a drama based loosely on the true story of MIT students who developed a card-counting system to take Vegas casinos for a ton of money. The drama is interesting, particularly when the lead character (Jim Sturgess) gets fond of the high life, but bogs down in a con-game finale that comes out of left field.
For laughs, there's "Run, Fatboy, Run," the tale of a London slacker (Simon Pegg) who vows to run a marathon to win back the woman (Thandie Newton) he left pregnant at the altar five years before. Pegg (who co-wrote with "Stella" co-founder Michael Ian Black) and director David Schwimmer (yes, the guy from "Friends") go for gentle comedy rather than gut-busting laughs, but the movie is enjoyable enough.
"Married Life" is a sly melodrama, a mix of Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock, about a married man (Chris Cooper) who decides to kill his wife (Patricia Clarkson) to avoid hurting her feelings about his affair with a younger woman (Rachel McAdams). Pierce Brosnan also stars in a well-acted and nicely modulated drama by director Ira Sachs (whose "40 Shades of Blue" won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2005.)
A less-successful art-house movie is Gus Van Sant's "Paranoid Park," which follows a Portland skateboarder (Gabe Nevins) battling his conscience after accidentally causing a gruesome death. The movie follows Van Sant's recent pattern of meandering narrative (as in "Gerry" and "Last Days"), but the observational navel-gazing doesn't add up to much here.
Two Utah-made films also open today. "Happy Valley" is Orem businessman Ron Williams' heartfelt documentary about drug addiction in Utah, focusing in part on a lethal overdose that affected his family directly. On the other hand, "National Lampoon's Bag Boy," filmed in locations around Utah (including the South Towne Expo Center), is a humorless satire of inspirational-sports movies set in the world of competitive grocery-bagging.
One more movie opening today, the scattershot parody reel "Superhero Movie," was not screened for critics.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Hey, I know that person!
It's a strange and disorienting thing when you're watching a documentary about something completely outside your personal sphere, only to see a friend show up on screen.
That happened this morning at a screening of "The Rape of Europa," an absorbing documentary about the Nazi regime's systematic looting of Europe's art treasures. (It opens April 4 at the Broadway Centre Cinemas.)
Amid all the interviews with art historians in Poland and France and Russia, suddenly the words "Utah Museum of Fine Arts" show up on the screen - and, a moment later, there is Cricket's former colleague (and backup movie critic) Christy Karras.
You may remember in 2004, UMFA learned that a painting in its collection, Francois Boucher's 18th-century work "Les Amoureux Jeunes (The Young Lovers)" (at right), had belonged to Andre Seligmann, a Jewish art dealer in Paris whose collection was stolen by Hermann Goering. UMFA returned the painting to Seligmann's daughter - and the press conference of that event is included in the documentary.
So there's the Cricket's friend Christy (now an editor at Wasatch Journal) in the front row of the press conference, busily taking notes. There also are local news photographers snapping away, while Salt Lake TV reporters Larry Warren and Carole Mikita are taping their reports. (This is at least the second major documentary where KSL's Mikita has made a cameo; she was seen interviewing Paralympic athletes in "Murderball.")
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
A legendary villain
When your first movie role involves pushing a wheelchair-bound woman down a flight of stairs, odds are you're going to play a lot of bad guys in your career.
Richard Widmark - who memorably pushed that old lady in the 1947 noir thriller "Kiss of Death" (for which he received his only Oscar nomination) - played a lot of mobsters and sociopaths in his long career.
But Widmark, who died Monday at his home in Connecticut at the age of 93, also played good guys: The knife-adept Jim Bowie in John Wayne's "The Alamo"; an Army prosecutor of war criminals in "Judgment at Nuremberg"; and a U.S. Cavalry captain aiding Indians in John Ford's "Cheyenne Autumn" (which, according to The New York Times obituary, Ford based in part on Widmark's college research about the suffering of the Cheyenne).
A Utah film producer dies
Bryan Lampropoulos, who worked as a producer and financier of several Utah-made movies, died last week at the age of 36.
Lampropoulos is listed on the IMDb as an associate producer of "The Singles Ward," Kurt Hale's first Mormon-themed comedy.
Lampropoulos (who also worked as an executive for Merit Medical, the company founded by his father, Fred) also started a company to bankroll two more Hale films, "The Home Teachers" and "Church Ball." Relations between Lampropoulos and Hale went sour, though, leading Lampropoulos last November to sue Hale, producer Dave Hunter and HaleStorm Entertainment.
Here is Lampropoulos' obituary from The Salt Lake Tribune, and condolences can be left here and here.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Free Harold & Kumar!
When movie studios hide their product from the critics - and it's happened 16 times so far this year, and we're still only in March - there must be come calculation on the studio's part.
Sometimes it's a horror movie (such as "Shutter" or "The Eye" or "One Missed Call") aimed at teen audiences who don't care what critics say. Sometimes it's a dumb comedy ("Meet hte Spartans," "Witless Protection") aimed at audiences who don't - or can't - read anyway. Sometimes the movie is a train wreck, and the studio is dumping it and hoping nobody notices.
Next week, two movies - the horror movie "The Ruins" and the children's adventure "Nim's Island" (train wreck?) - will open without screening in time for critics to get their reviews in the Friday paper.
But New Line's decision to hide the comedy "Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay" (opening April 25) from critics is a new level of stupid. The stoner comedy is already out of the bag, having premiered earlier this month at South by Southwest - and it's getting rave reviews (e.g., this one from Variety's Joe Leydon).
What's more, the movie's satire of the Bush administration and the paranoia about terrorism makes it the sort of movie that could break out of its niche - the raunchy stoner comedy - into the wider mainstream. For that to happen, though, the studio needs critics have to sing the movie's praises.
New Line should ask itself: What would Neil Patrick Harris do? NPH would let the critics see the movie.
Another critic axed
The Village Voice has laid off movie critic Nathan Lee, for "economic reasons" according to the e-mail Lee sent around to friends (and wound up on S.T. VanAirsdale's The Reeler blog).
"I am, as they say, 'looking for work,' though presumably not as a staff film critic as such jobs no longer appear to exist," Lee writes in his e-mail.
Good luck, Nathan. Newsdayjust gave buyouts to its three-member movie crew, and the Cricket recently counted about 20 critics who have either taken buyouts, retired or been laid off in the last two years.
The "High School Musical" cast flew into Salt Lake City on Monday, to start rehearsals on the third movie in the franchise. (Two paparazzi sites, X-17 and the Gossip Girls, got photos of co-stars Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Tisdale leaving the Los Angeles airport last night.)
"High School Musical 3: Senior Year" starts filming in Utah on April 27, giving the cast just over a month to get their choreography down.
The third movie follows Troy (Zac Efron) and Gabrielle (Hudgens) in their last year of high school, facing the prospect of attending different colleges. These issues will play themselves out in song, in the school's splashy spring musical.
"High School Musical 3" will open in theaters - that's right, not on the Disney Channel like the first two - on Oct. 24.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Meet the new Wildcats
Disney announced three new cast members for "High School Musical 3: Senior Year."
The movie opens in theaters on Oct. 24. It starts shooting in Utah this April.
The three play sophomores at East High, carrying on the tradition when the movie's leads - Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, et al - graduate at the end of this movie.
The three are: Matt Prokop (top left), Justin Martin (top right) and Jemma McKenzie-Brown.
Prokop has a couple of movie credits, and appeared on an episode of Disney's "Hannah Montana." Justin Martin was in the recent TV adaptation of "A Raisin in the Sun," and has several movie and TV credits. McKenzie-Brown co-starred in the British mini-series "The Amazing Mrs. Prichard."
Friday, March 21, 2008
Friday roundup - Easter weekend edition
Apparently Hollywood decided to celebrate Easter weekend by hiding its releases, like Easter eggs, from the critics.
Of the five movies opening in Utah theaters today, three of them were not screened for critics: "Shutter," another Americanization of an Asian horror movie; "Meet the Browns," the latest laugh-cry-and-say-Amen effort from Tyler Perry; and "Look," an experimental drama in which several vignettes are acted out in front of surveillance cameras.
The movies that critics did see should have been hidden.
"Drillbit Taylor" is the newest product of the Judd Apatow laugh factory, starring Owen Wilson as a bum who poses as a martial-arts expert hired as a bodyguard by three bully-plagued nerds. The Cricket's colleague Brandon Griggs reports the movie is derivative and not very funny.
The indie drama "Sleepwalking" premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, and the movie rips out every cliche from the independent-film playbook. It centers on a 12-year-old girl (AnnaSophia Robb) dealing with an inept and absentee mom (Charlize Theron), a moody uncle (Nick Stahl) and a fateful meeting with the mean grandpa (Dennis Hopper) she never knew. The movie is a dreary mess, with long interludes of pointless moodiness.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
His final season
Sir Paul Scofield, the great Shakespearean actor and a Best Actor Oscar winner in 1966 for "A Man For All Seasons," has died at the age of 86.
Scofield's movie triumph was in "A Man For All Seasons," playing the 16th-century statesman Sir Thomas More, whose clashes with King Henry VIII (Robert Shaw) led - as many clashes with Henry did - with his execution. It was a role he perfected on the London stage, and brought to Broadway for a Tony Award.
Scofield's many stage triumphs - and you can read Michael Billington's appreciation in Britain's The Guardian to recount those - were matched by his great film performances. He was soulful as the worried French king in Kenneth Branagh's "Henry V" (1989), haunting (literally) as Hamlet's father in Franco Zeffirelli's "Hamlet" (1990), and imperious as a judge in "The Crucible" (1996).
In the Cricket's opinion, one of his greatest recent performances was a moving (and Oscar-nominated) turn as Mark Van Doren, the poet and the disappointed father of game-show cheater Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes) in Robert Redford's "Quiz Show" (1994).
(Photo: AP via Yahoo!)
For sale: Sundance Channel
Pssst, buddy - you want to buy a cable channel?
An industry analyst says Robert Redford's Sundance Channel (OK, really it's Robert Redford's, NBC Universal's and CBS's Sundance Channel) is for sale. The reported asking price is $400 million.
The concern for viewers, of course, is whether a new owner would maintain the channel's quirky mix of independent films, documentaries (like the channel's "Iconoclasts" series) and imported TV (such as the superior "Slings and Arrows") - and keep the channel's link to the rest of the Sundance empire.
As they say, stay tuned.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
A vision of the future
Before human beings set foot on the moon, Arthur C. Clarke had told us what it would be like out there - and beyond.
Clarke collaborated with director Stanley Kubrick to bring an accurate yet astonishing vision of space exploration to the screen in "2001: A Space Odyssey." Clarke and Kubrick wrote the screenplay, while Clarke simultaneously wrote the novel.
Clarke - the science-fiction writer, futurist, and expert on outer space - died early today in his adopted home of Sri Lanka. He was 90.
As this Associated Press obituary shows, Clarke's influence went beyond his many works of fiction. He proposed the idea of geosynchronous orbits, placing satellites in stable positions relative to the earth - making communications satellites possible. He was a commentator for Walter Cronkite's coverage of the Apollo missions. And, from his perch in Sri Lanka, he was an early adopter of the Internet, so he could communicate with friends and peers around the world.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
A master of the erudite
Few filmmakers could read a book, and read it back to you, better than Anthony Minghella.
Minghella, who died Tuesday at the age of 54, was best known for three movies, each of them sterling adaptations of famous novels: "The English Patient" (1996), "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (1999) and "Cold Mountain" (2003). In each case, it could be argued, he translated the author's words to the screen beautifully.
His crowning achievement was "The English Patient," the stirring romantic World War II drama that earned nine Oscars - including Best Picture, best director for Minghella and a supporting-actress statuette for Juliette Binoche. Not bad considering Michael Ondaatje's book was considered unfilmable. (The New Yorker's Anthony Lane famously dismissed Ondaatje's book as "so finely written that I found it, to all intents and purposes, unreadable.")
Minghella, who died of a hemorrhage after recent surgery, was busy right up to the end. He directed Binoche and Jude Law in "Breaking and Entering" in 2006, recently shot a segment for the anthology "New York, I Love You," made a cameo appearance as a TV interviewer in "Atonement," was executive producer on "Michael Clayton" and had just finished shooting in Botswana on an adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith's "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" for the BBC and HBO.
"Take" 12 in Utah
T, the style magazine of the New York Times, is serving up something unusual: A 12-episode video soap opera, each part featuring a single actor and building on the previous one.
The series, called "Take: Viking Lodge, Utah," was filmed here during the Sundance Film Festival. The series was shot by New York writer-director Brody Baker.
So far, two episodes have been posted, the first featuring Josh Hartnett (right) as a drifter and the second with Morena Baccarin (who played the courtesan on Joss Whedon's "Serenity" and "Firefly") as an apparent OCD sufferer waiting in a motel room. Each day a new episode will be posted, with such actors as Saffron Burrows, Josh Lucas and Lukas Haas taking roles.
More critics get the ax
This job of movie critic is getting lonelier by the day.
Newsday, the Long Island newspaper, announced Monday that it avoided layoffs when 36 employees took the buyout offer. According to this report on Defamer, that number includes the paper's entire movie section: Movie editor Pat Wiedenkeller and critics Jan Stuart and Gene Seymour.
(David Poland, editor of Movie City News, blogs that the Newsday moves will leave only five full-time movie critics within the 11 major dailies of the Tribune Company chain: Carina Chocano and Kenneth Turan at the Los Angeles Times, Michael Phillips at the Chicago Tribune, Michael Sragow at the Baltimore Sun, and Roger Moore at the Orlando Sentinel.)
Closer to home for the Cricket, two critics' jobs at papers in the Media News Group chain (which also owns The Salt Lake Tribune) are going away.
At the San Jose Mercury News, critic Bruce Newman has reportedly been reassigned to a general-features beat. And Mary F. Pols, the critic for the Contra Costa Times, is listed here as one of 107 employees at MNG's Bay Area papers to take a buyout offer.
(The Cricket counts these critics still working for MNG papers: Himself, Lisa Kennedy at the Denver Post, Tom Long at the Detroit News, Chris Hewitt at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and Glenn Whipp and Bob Strauss at the L.A. Daily News. There may be others, though, that have slipped the Cricket's mind.)
When the folks who own newspapers run the numbers, the math tells them that a staff movie critic can be more expensive than running wire-service reviews. But something else is lost: The flavor of a unique voice.
Look at what happened to the San Diego Union-Tribune, which found itself apologizing for running an AP review of "The Other Boleyn Girl" that was deemed sexist. (Hat tip: Movie City News.)
Every time we lose a movie critic's job, we lose a unique voice championing movies. Often that voice is female or a person of color (Pols, for example, is a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists), in a profession that needs as much diversity as possible.
Last week at its ShoWest presentation, Universal Studios showed the restricted - or "red-band" - trailer for "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," the latest raunchy romantic comedy from producer Judd Apatow (which opens April 18).
"Red-band" trailers - which open with a red screen to denote their restricted status, compared with the "green-band" general-audience trailers - are always a goose to the audience, a way of saying, "Hey, this movie's walking on the wild side." And they are as rare as rare can be.
Maybe not so rare in the future. According to this story from The Hollywood Reporter, the nation's largest theater chain, Regal Entertainment (which doesn't have any screens in Utah), started telling studios at ShoWest that it would start showing "red-band" trailers with R-rated movies in its theaters.
That's all to the good, because the sanitized "green-band" trailers for such films as "Superbad" or "Knocked Up" can give the wrong impression that those movies are OK for younger audiences. Now adult audiences will know what they're getting themselves into.
The growth of digital projection in theaters makes it easier to program "red-band" trailers - and make sure they don't play in front of, say, "Horton Hears a Who" - because the software allows theater operators to move trailers around as easily as an iPod owner compiling a playlist.
The interesting part will be whether other theater chains will follow Regal's lead.
"A blog is a blog is a blog" - or not
The multi-hyphenated Mark Cuban - Internet entrepreneur, Dallas Mavericks owner, movie distributor and former "Dancing With the Stars" contestant - has raised a stink on the Web about the journalistic legitimacy of bloggers, and who is or should be writing blogs.
First, Cuban banned bloggers - notably Tim MacMahon, who writes a Mavericks blog for the Dallas Morning News - from the Mavs' locker room, claiming a shortage of space for people crowding around super-tall basketball players toweling off.
Then Cuban defended his decision on his own blog, and made the argument that newspapers starting their own blogs "is easily one of the many bad decisions that newspapers have made over the past 10 years." A blog run by a newspaper (like, ahem, this one), Cuban says, is a poor use of the newspaper's brand.
"When I see content branded as a blog, I'm probably not going there unless its via a link from some other source," Cuban writes. "If I happen to find my way to a given blog multiple times, Im probably going to subscribe to the RSS feed. Even then, I don't ever consider a blog an authoritative source. I don't ever expect that all sources were confirmed and facts were check. Regardless of who hosts it. That's not a good thing for newspapers. They still have a chance to assign some level of authority to what they produce for their websites and calling it a blog is a huge mistake."
Cuban's blogger ban drew a response from Kim Voynar, a movie writer who blogs on Cinematical. Voynar's argument, briefly stated, is that a blog's reputation - like a newspaper's - rises or falls on its credibility, and some bloggers have worked their tails off building up their credibility over time. The good news is that some people (Voynar cites some film festivals, which now give press credentials to movie web sites and bloggers) are recognizing that some bloggers have the same journalistic standards as the best newspapers.
(The Cricket would point to Joshua Micah Marshall at Talking Points Memo and TPM Muckraker, who who a Polk Award - a major honor for investigative journalism - for exposing the Bush administration's political chicanery behind the firing of U.S. Attorneys.)
As for Cuban's notion that newspaper-backed blogs bring down that paper's brand, the Cricket would second Voynar's argument that it all depends on the quality of the blog and the paper behind it. And that judgment is for readers (like yourselves, and has anyone told you how attractive you look today?) to decide.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Friday roundup
The Cricket is back from Vegas - what's with all this hail falling around Salt Lake City?
Anyhoo - there's one big elephant in the multiplexes this weekend.
He's Horton, Dr. Seuss' positive-thinking pachyderm. In "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who," he's computer-animated and wittily voiced by Jim Carrey, in a story that puts Horton in the role of defender of the microscopic folk of Whoville. Steve Carell is equally hilarious voicing the Mayor of Whoville, who has as much trouble convincing the Whos of Horton's existence as Horton does swaying the minds of his jungle neighbors. Animated by the same studio that made the "Ice Age" films, it's the first Seuss adaptation that really gets it right.
The other worthwhile movie this week is for a completely different audience. Michael Haneke's "Funny Games" is a shot-for-shot remake of Haneke's 1997 German-language horror-thriller, about a rich family (Tim Roth, Naomi Watts and Devon Gearhart) terrorized by a pair of psychopathic preppies (Michael Pitt, Brady Corbet). It's a harrowing film, tense and nauseatingly violent - which is Haneke's point, as he needles you to think about the effects of the screen violence going on in front of you.
Also opening today: The by-the-numbers ultimate-fighting drama "Never Back Down"; John Sayles' detailed but empty "Honeydripper"; the zombie follow-up "George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead," which the Cricket's colleague Vince Horiuchi hated; and "Doomsday," a post-apocalyptic thriller - which looks like a mix of "Escape From New York" and "The Road Warrior" - that was not screened for critics.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
ShoWest: 99, Batman and Lucas
LAS VEGAS -- Holy salesmanship, Batman! Those Warner Bros. folks know how to put on a presentation.
The studio started its showreel for the ShoWest attendees with a grandiose montage of its past hits - heavy on "Harry Potter" and "The Departed," with "I Am Legend" and "Michael Clayton" prominent among last year's titles - and long speeches by WB executives. But then the good stuff hit.
Producer Joel Silver showed off a clip from "Speed Racer" (opening May 9) that showed off the Wachowski brothers' candy-colored vision of the classic cartoon. Emile Hirsch, Matthew Fox and Christina Ricci then joined Silver onstage, each declaring how cool the movie looks.
"I'm a little blown away," Fox said of the clip.
Hirsch countered, "I'm in it, and it blew me away."
Then director Peter Segal talked up "Get Smart" (opening June 20) with a humorous intro and brought out Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway, his Maxwell Smart and Agent 99.
Carell, sucking up to the exhibitors in attendance, said "Get Smart" "is not just a popcorn movie - it's a popcorn, Goobers, soft pretzel and a drink movie."
Next up was director Christopher Nolan, who talked about making "Batman Begins" three years ago, and the decision to follow it up with "The Dark Knight" (opens July 18).
"We felt we had an epic tale to continue," he said.
After brief words from Christian Bale (who reprises his role as Bruce Wayne/Batman) and Maggie Gyllenhaal (who takes over from Katie Holmes), Nolan showed the movie's opening minutes - a bravura bank-robbery set piece that introduces Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker. You can tell already this movie, and Ledger's portrayal of Batman's worst nemesis, are going to be something special.
Next the conventiongoers - and quite a few left the Jubilee Theatre at Bally's (where the Cricket watched the simulcast from Le Theatre des Arts at the Paris next door) left after "The Dark Knight" - was a clip reel from "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2," its director Sanaa Hamri, and two of its stars, America Ferrara and Alexis Bledel.
The big surprise was saved for last, with an introduction of "Star Wars: The Clone Wars," a computer-animated film that fills in the gaps between "Attack of the Clones" and "Revenge of the Sith." Out stepped the man himself, George Lucas, accompanied by a line of white-plastic-helmeted warriors.
"I never go anywhere without my army," Lucas said, before recounting how "The Clone Wars" began life as a TV series before he made the decision to make a feature-length film.
"This is really where it belongs, on the giant screen," Lucas said.
ShoWest: Hulk, ABBA and Angelina
LAS VEGAS -- Universal Pictures showed off its summer slate at ShoWest today, seven films heavy on action and comedy.
The blockbuster of the bunch is "The Incredible Hulk," another go-round with Marvel Comics' big green guy in which everyone magically forgets the Ang Lee version. (Is the Cricket alone in believing Lee's version came closest to exemplifying the comic-book style than any graphic-novel adaptation outside of "Sin City"?) The cast - Edward Norton as Bruce Banner, Liv Tyler as Betty Ross, William Hurt as Gen. Ross and Tim Roth as the villain - looks cool. (The movie comes out June 13.)
But for mega-cool, Universal's trump card may be "Wanted," with Angelina Jolie training James McAvoy in the fine art of assassination. Not only did ShoWest attendees see the trailer, but they also got to see an extended action scene that is outlandish in its adrenaline-pumped action - and it features Jolie driving a car with her feet while the rest of her hangs out the windshield firing a shotgun.
Universal's Adam Fogelson, who introduced the trailers, referred to McAvoy's interaction with Jolie in the film: "I want to be him, and there's no chance." ("Wanted" is slated for a June 27 release.)
Also in the action vein are two sequels: Guillermo del Toro's "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" (July 11) and Rob Cohen's "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" (August 1). Of the two, "Hellboy" looks a heck of a lot more fun.
The biggest laughs were for the red-band trailer (that means it's R-rated, not the "green-band" all-audiences version) of the Judd Apatow-produced "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" (opening April 18). Universal also showed an extended scene from the Tina Fey/Amy Poelher comedy "Baby Mama" (opening April 25), which looks hilarious.
Then there's "Mamma Mia," the adaptation of the hit musical featuring ABBA music. The trailer sets up way too much about the plot - bride-to-be (Amanda Seyfried) tells mom (Meryl Streep) she wants to invite her father to the wedding, but learns three men (Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgaard) could be the one - and not enough of the musical aspect. At least this trailer actually shows Streep as a major character, as previous versions (aimed at the younger market, no doubt) shoved La Streep into the background.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
ShoWest: Partying 'til you're "21"
LAS VEGAS -- A veteran of ShoWests past told the Cricket that the party Sony threw for Wednesday night's screening of "21" was the swankiest he's ever seen there.
Not surprising, since the party at the Planet Hollywood Hotel and Casino (formerly the Aladdin) wasn't merely a ShoWest schmoozefest but the official premiere for the film - which was filmed in part on the PH casino floor.
The party included a dance floor, blackjack games with pretend money, acrobatic dancers dangling from the ceiling, showgirls lining the entrance and the requisite Vegas-sized buffet.
The stars - Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, Laurence Fishburne, Jim Sturgess and many of the supporting players - showed up after 11 p.m., turning many of the partygoers into a five-deep throng of cameraphone-wielding amateur paparazzi.
ShoWest: Light entertainment
LAS VEGAS -- Credit the folks behind "Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D" with some creativity in the giveaway department.
While other movies previewing at ShoWest were content with passing out free hats ("Fly Me to the Moon," "Tropic Thunder") or T-shirts ("Hamlet 2," "The Love Guru"), the freebie given out after "Journey" - an update of Jules Verne's classic, starring Brendan Fraser - actually had something to do with the plot.
It was a miner's lamp, a tiny flashlight attached to an elastic headband. It's something every movie critic needs, so they can read a good book during a boring movie. (Though, to be fair, a critic wouldn't get much use out of it during the whizbang effects of "Journey.")
ShoWest: Rich, chocolatey marketing
LAS VEGAS -- Another star sighted at ShoWest:
Though much of the attention given to ShoWest goes to the movie stars and the summer movie slate that studios are promoting, the four-day Las Vegas event is also a trade show where companies try to sell their wares to theater operators.
Those wares range from digital projectors to theater seats. Even people selling cleaning supplies and countertops are represented.
But a major industry bloc is the grop that sells concession-stand goodies (including, as you may have guessed from the big brown bunny, Nestle's Quik). After all, that's where theaters make their real money.
It would be possible to snack your way from one end of the Bally's trade floor to the other, on popcorn, chocolate and Red Vines. Thankfully, the giant Coca-Cola and Pepsico displays along the way will help you wash it all down.
ShoWest: "Moon" shot
LAS VEGAS -- Even the smaller distributors are jumping on the 3D bandwagon at ShoWest.
A day after Jeffrey Katzenberg showed off DreamWorks 2009 animated project "Monsters vs. Aliens," upstart Summit Entertainment unveiled a 10-minute sampler of its 3D animated tale "Fly Me to the Moon."
The movie, arriving in August, recreates the Apollo 11 moon landing, seen through the experiences of three astronaut flies who hitch a ride with Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins.
Summit's distribution president, Richard Fay, touted the movie as being both fun and scientifically accurate (on the moon landing, not the anthropomorpic flies).
Children, Fay said, "don't really realize they're learning as they're being entertained."
ShoWest: Diaz does Vegas
LAS VEGAS -- The Gossip Girls website reports on a star sighting that happened after the Cricket's bedtime last night at ShoWest: Cameron Diaz.
Diaz was here to promote her upcoming romantic comedy, "What Happens in Vegas," in which two people (played by Diaz and Ashton Kutcher) who discover they got married after a wild night in Sin City -- and that they have to share a slot-machine jackpot.
Diaz schmoozed the ShoWest conventiongoers before a midnight sneak-preview of the film, which is scheduled to open nationally May 9.
ShoWest: Funny "Thunder"
LAS VEGAS -- If "Tropic Thunder" is as funny as the two scenes director-star Ben Stiller and co-star Robert Downey Jr. showed off Tuesday night, get set for one of the raunchiest and most hilarious movies of the year.
Stiller and Downey introduced two scenes from the summer comedy, in which they (along with Jack Black) play self-absorbed actors making an "Apocalypse Now"-like war movie that turns more real than they could imagine.
After the first scene, in which the movie's director (played by Steve Coogan) delivers a rousing pep talk - and then promptly steps on a landmine - Stiller said to partygoers at a Planet Hollywood restaurant, "Not quite 'Atonement.' "
Both scenes feature Downey's character, a Method actor who learns his character was written as black and decides to perform in blackface. (Yes, that's Downey in the middle of this photo.) News of the role has already generated controversy, but Downey's precise (and darn funny) performance should defuse that controversy.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
ShoWest: "Panda" to an audience
LAS VEGAS -- Tuesday night's ShoWest screening of DreamWorks Animation's "Kung Fu Panda" had the theater operators in attendance laughing.
So did the pre-show warm-up.
DreamWorks Animation's CEO, Jeffrey Katzenberg opened by talking about the success he had seven years ago, bringing the first rough-cut of "Shrek" to ShoWest.
" 'Shrek's' the greatest good-luck charm you could hope for," Katzenberg said. "I only wish I could have Shrek here with us tonight."
That was the cue for Katzenberg's "surprise guest" to join him onstage at Les Theatre des Arts at the Paris Las Vegas. Yep, Mike Myers stepped out and slightly discombolated Katzenberg with ad-libbed praise for the CEO's physical appearance.
Myers came out to show off clips from his latest movie, "The Love Guru," being released June 20 by DreamWorks' parent company, Paramount. Myers introduced his co-star, Jessica Alba, who walked onstage baby bump and all.
Myers introduced Alba by saying, "she is, by the way, carrying my child." When Alba corrected him, Myers said his outrageous statement was a ploy to get himself in the tabloids -- and therefore get more publicity for the movie. And, "given the ethics of entertainment journalism, they will never fact-check."
"Kung Fu Panda," as screened Tuesday, is only 90 percent finished - the animation in a few scenes is not polished yet, a few sequences are still just in storyboard form, and the music and sound-effects tracks were temporary. (So you'll have to wait until the movie's release in June for the Cricket's review.)
ShoWest: Redford tells a joke
LAS VEGAS -- Robert Redford was self-deprecating when he accepted the first-ever Visionary Award at ShoWest.
"Are you sure you've got the right guy?" he asked the luncheon of theater owners, who responded with applause.
He explained his confusion with an anecdote. While eating dinner recently at a Napa Valley restaurant, he noticed someone at another table looking at him. Eventually the man walked up to Redford, apologized for interrupting, and declared what fan he was.
The man concluded, Redford said, by saying, " 'and I wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your salad dressing.' "
But an even funnier anecdote came from producer James Schamus, who with director Ang Lee received a Freedom of Expression Award for the release of the NC-17-rated "Lust, Caution."
Schamus recalled the MPAA appeals process when an earlier film he produced, Todd Solondz' "Happiness," also received the NC-17. Schamus was allowed eight minutes to defend the film, followed by the MPAA representative's argument. Schamus quoted the MPAA man's argument as follows: "It's obvious why the movie should be NC-17. Mr. Schamus, you have three minutes for your rebuttal." (Schamus lost the appeal.)
ShoWest: Coogan's bluff
LAS VEGAS -- The big-money dealmaker at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, "Hamlet 2," was a hit with the conventiongoers at ShoWest.
Star Steve Coogan, who plays a talent-less drama teacher who inspires his students with an avant-garde musical sequel to Shakespeare's classic, was in good humor introducing the film in Les Theatre des Arts at the Paris Las Vegas.
Taking the stage, he looked down at his cellphone: "Sorry, I'm just texting Gov. Spitzer. I went out with him three nights ago, and I lost track of him."
ShoWest: Seeing "Monsters"
LAS VEGAS -- The Cricket's lowly status in the media pecking order kept him out of the opening ceremonies of ShoWest this morning - so he has to rely on reports of others who did get in.
The speechmaking - by the MPAA's Dan Glickman and by John Fithian of the National Association of Theater Owners - was typical state-of-the-industry stuff, along with the usual warnings about movie piracy. (Camcorders are bad, evil, wicked devices invented by Satan himself.)
The real news was DreamWorks preview of "Monsters vs. Aliens," a new 3D animated movie that's due in March 2009. Gordon McAlpin has the buzz on the web site Movie Make-Out.
ShoWest: Wheels on fire
LAS VEGAS -- Is this a movie convention or an auto show?
Warner Bros. is showing off vehicles at ShoWest from two of their big summer titles: The Mach 5 from "Speed Racer" and the new Bat-cycle from "The Dark Knight."
Elsewhere in the convention area of the Paris Las Vegas, the walls are lined with posters and cardboard stand-ups for a wide array of movies from blockbusters to oddball foreign and indie titles.
Earlier today, the Cricket ran into a familiar face: Cal Gundersen from Larry H. Miller's Megaplex Theatres. He's seen some movies, met with studio folks and will be talking to movie-tech people, as well. "A lot of schmoozing" is how he described ShoWest.
Vegas, baby!
LAS VEGAS - That's right, the Cricket is in Sin City.
He's here in Las Vegas for ShoWest, the annual convention and trade show for movie exhibitors. This is where theater operators get to check out the latest equipment, and get schmoozed by the Hollywood studios who show off their summer merchandise.
This afternoon the Cricket will be covering a luncheon where Robert Redford will receive ShoWest's first-ever Visionary Award. The honor is for his role, as founder of the Sundance Institute, in fostering a market for American independent film.
Redford isn't the only star expected at ShoWest. Tonight we're supposed to hear from Jack Black, Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr. about two movies - Black's animated "Kung Fu Panda" and Stiller's directorial effort (starring Stiller, Downey and Black), "Tropic Thunder."
Monday, March 10, 2008
Fighting cancer
If you watch the entertainment-news shows, you've probably heard some celebrity - notably former co-stars like Jennifer Grey and Whoopi Goldberg - express their support of Patrick Swayze as he battles pancreatic cancer.
Now comes word of another notable name who is also suffering from pancreatic cancer: New York Times photographer Dith Pran.
According to this post from the National Press Photographers Association, Dith was diagnosed in January, ended a three-week hospital stay last Friday, and is now in a New Jersey care center.
Dith is best known for his work in Cambodia, his home country, as a translator and journalist assisting Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times in covering the U.S. attacks on Cambodia and the civil war that brought the Khmer Rouge to power.
Dith's story, of survival in a Khmer Rouge labor camp and his long walk to the Thai border, was the basis for the movie "The Killing Fields" - and fellow Cambodian survivor Haing S. Ngor won an Oscar for portraying Dith.
Let's get active!
Can movies make a difference? Can celebrities?
The "yes" argument for those questions is explored this week in two national magazines.
Time magazine's Rebecca Winters Keegan writes this week about the efforts of movie stars and moviemakers (particularly documentarians) to try to effect social change through the movies they make. One conclusion of Keegan's article is that, like so many things in this world, the credit or blame for the current spate of socially active filmmaking can be traced back to Al Gore.
In Sunday's New York Times Magazine, contributing writer James Traub dissects the world of the "celebrity-philanthropy complex" - the growing trend of celebrities to align themselves with causes, and of activists to find celebrities who will champion and publicize those causes. The article talks about the big names in celebrity activism - Bono, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie - but finds a rich story in actress Natalie Portman's advocacy in the less-publicized issue of microfinancing in developing nations.
So do celebrities and their films change the world? The celebrities think so, which may be enough for now.
Friday, March 07, 2008
"Falling" at a festival
Congrats to Utah's own Richard Dutcher, whose searing drama "Falling" has been accepted into the 10th annual Method Fest independent film festival, which runs March 27-April 3 in Calabasas, Calif.
Method Fest bills itself as "the only major film festival in the U.S. focusing on acting, celebrating breakout acting performances in story driven independent films."
The lead actor in "Falling" is Dutcher himself, playing a jaded L.A. videographer going through a spiritual crisis when faced with an ethical decision - just as his wife (Virginia Reece), a struggling actress confronted by the infamous "casting couch," has an ethical dilemma of her own.
Method Fest's web site lists "Falling's" screening as a World Premiere. Not so, merely the West Coast premiere, according to a press release from Dutcher's production company. The world premiere was a short theatrical run at Salt Lake City's Megaplex 12 theater in January.
A few other titles on the Method Fest slate: Helen Hunt's directorial debut, "Then She Found Me," and the Sundance '08 hit "The Visitor" starring Richard Jenkins.
Friday roundup
Not the best weekend to see a movie, unless you're going to the art house.
The biggest studio movie is also the silliest: "10,000 B.C.," easily a funnier prehistoric situation than those Geico cavemen - except that director Roland Emmerich ("The Day After Tomorrow") is being serious in his depiction of a tribe of mammoth hunters fighting enslavement by marauders collecting labor for pyramid-building. Yes, it's as dumb as it sounds.
"College Road Trip" tries to fit Martin Lawrence into the Disney dad mold, as he plays an overprotective pop escorting his daughter (Raven-Symone) to her college interviews. Donny Osmond appears as the perky dad of another college-bound daughter, to give you a sense of how squeaky-clean this is. The Cricket had to skip this one (it screened the same night as "10,000 B.C."), so the Cricket's colleague Vince Horiuchi saw it and found some merit to it.
The Cricket wanted to like "Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day," and there is much to like in Frances McDormand's performance as a dowdy governess - and even more to like in Amy Adams' scene-stealing turn as the American starlet who hires Miss Pettigrew as her social secretary. But the farcical elements never move as fast or as lightly as they should.
"The Bank Job" is based on a real-life heist in London, 1971, in which a group of thieves tunnel into a vault - then must deal with the consequences from the incriminating stuff they find in some of the safe-deposit boxes. The movie is lurid to a distracting level, leaves you no one to root for, and wastes the talents of Jason Statham (who plays the lead thief).
The good new stuff this week is at the art houses. The Broadway has "The Band's Visit," a sweet little comedy from Israel, about an Egyptian police band stranded in an Israeli town and mingling with the locals. The movie was Israel's entry for the Oscars, but was disqualified because half the dialogue is in English - albeit heavily accented and broken English.
But the Tower has the best show in town: A compilation of the five nominees for this year's animated-short Oscar. It's an intriguing mix of animation styles - and, for once, the most deserving nominee won. That would be "Peter and the Wolf," a well-done stop-motion version of the classic tale. (Warning: Just because it's cartoons doesn't mean it's all for kiddies; there is some violence here, as well as disturbing images.)
Thursday, March 06, 2008
10,000 laughs
Like many movie fans, the Cricket is also a fan of "Mystery Science Theatre 3000," the late and much-missed send-up of bad movies made by a bunch of Minnesota oddballs with more wit than budget.
An unfortunate side effect of "MST3K" fandom is the occasional habit of wanting to talk back at the screen - the way Mike Nelson, Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo do - during a bad movie.
The Cricket usually keeps himself in check with his fellow critics, never being the one to issue the first strike. But at last night's screening of Roland Emmerich's unintentionally comic action movie "10,000 B.C.," he couldn't help himself.
After a few minutes of actors traipsing around in dreadlocks and animal skins, we were treated to the sight of one character clad almost head to toe in dangly bits of bone. The Cricket leaned over to Missy Thompson, the critic from the Tooele Transcript-Bulletin and whispered, "How can you be a band of stealthy hunters when you sound like a wind chime?"
Missy doubled over giggling, and it was on. We, along with a few other critics in the row, laughed our way through the entire movie. Oddly enough, we weren't being disruptive - because most of the preview audience was laughing at the movie's ridiculousness as well.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
It's the pictures that got small
For people who use their cellphones to, you know, talk to people - as opposed to using them as an all-in-one destination for video, internet and social networking - a breakthrough project last year by the Sundance Institute probably went by unnoticed.
The institute's Global Short Film Project commissioned six Sundance Film Festival filmmakers - Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton ("Little Miss Sunshine"), Jody Hill ("The Foot Fist Way"), Justin Lin ("Better Luck Tomorrow"), Maria Maggenti ("Pucinni for Beginners"), and Cory McAbee ("The American Astronaut") - to make five short films to be seen exclusively over cellphones. A year later, the shorts are available for download on the Sundance web site.
Faris and Dayton's "A Slip in Time" is an interesting slow-motion study of classic comedy poses - banana peels, pies in the face, etc. Hill's "Learning to Skateboard," about a working drone who rebels, is pointless. Maggenti's "Los Viajes de King Tiny" is a cute but indulgent bit about a cute dog. McAbee's "Reno," with music from his group The Billy Nayer Show, is a strange music video in a convenience store. The best of the bunch, though is Lin's "!La Revolucion de Iguodala!," a smart send-up of how revolutionary images are co-opted in pop culture.
One of the coolest programs for young filmmakers-in-training is Reel Stories.
This collaboration between the Sundance Institute and Salt Lake City's Spy Hop Productions takes 12 high-school students through a four-month workshop to develop, write, shoot and edit their own short documentaries.
The students gather every Thursday night, starting March 20 through June 26, to work on pre-production and story development. From July 1 through August 9, the students shoot and edit their films - and everyone acts as crew for each other, each getting a turn as director, camera operator and sound recorder.
Spy Hop screens the finished films sometime in August, and the films often have lives after that. Sundance frequently screens selected Reel Stories films alongside the institute's monthly documentary-series presentations at the Park City Library Center.
Tonight, in fact, one such film will show before Sundance's screening of "Hear and Now," the 2007 Sundance Film Festival entry in which director Irene Taylor Brodsky follows her deaf parents through the process of cochlear-implant surgery.
The Reel Stories short, "Culture," is a movie described as "a film that looks at the different approaches to growing up and living life."
It's directed by Avijit Halder, who has seen a lot in his young life. Halder - born in the red-light district of Calcutta, India - was one of the eight children spotlighted in the Oscar-winning documentary "Born Into Brothels," which captured the children's impoverished living conditions and followed the efforts of photographer Zana Briski to teach them to shoot pictures of their lives.
The program changed Halder's life. He was invited to a world photojournalism seminar in Amsterdam (an event seen in the film). After the film's worldwide exposure, Halder came to the United States to study, first in New Hampshire and eventually to Rowland Hall-St. Mark's in Salt Lake City. (Halder discovered Utah thanks to Geralyn White Dreyfous, the executive producer of "Born Into Brothels" and the creative director of the Salt Lake City Film Center.)
The entry deadline for this summer's Reel Stories workshop is Saturday. Click here for the application.
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Playing "Games" on a Saturday night
When the Cricket was a teen-age pupa, he stayed up late and alone one Saturday night watching John Carpenter's "Halloween" on HBO - with the lights off for full effect.
Needless to say, the movie scared the crap out of the young Cricket, who has never forgotten the experience of solitary horror viewing.
This weekend, the Cricket repeated the experience - sort of - by watching Michael Haneke's 1997 Austrian/German thriller "Funny Games." It's a mind-blower of a movie, about a vacationing couple (Ulrich Muhe, the late star of "The Lives of Others," and his real-life wife, Susanne Lothar) and their son (Stefan Clapczynski) who are terrorized by two preppy killers (Arno Frisch and Frank Giering).
Haneke has directed the American remake of "Funny Games," which played at Sundance in January and opens nationally on March 14. Tim Roth and Naomi Watts play the couple, Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet play the psychos, and Frisch makes a cameo appearance. It's going to have to be awfully good to match the original.
What's French for "Put a cork in it"?
Movie stars are no more or less intelligent on average than people in any other profession - and you listen to what they say about the world situation at your peril. For every George Clooney or Robert Redford, well-spoken and well-informed advocates for numerous issues, there are some numbskulls.
And then there is Marion Cotillard, newly minted Oscar winner for "La Vie en Rose," whose publicists are working double-time on damage control after an interview she gave last year got out.
In the interview, according to this account from The Times of London, Cotillard opined that the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center was a conspiracy by the building's owners to demolish the buildings to avoid expensive rewiring. She also, according to the story, buys into the old conspiracy theory about the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing being faked.
Expect a full-scale charm offensive soon, with Cotillard hitting the talk-show circuit to atone for her past statements. Good luck with that.
Monday, March 03, 2008
48 hours of fun
"TimeCatcher," a movie by a group of Tel Aviv filmmakers, won top honors at Filmapalooza, the culmination of last year's 48 Hour Film Project.
The 48 Hour Film Project was set up in 55 cities, with teams trying to make a short film in a weekend - after being assigned a genre and being told to incorporate a common prop, character name and line of dialogue.
"TimeCatcher," by No Budget Productions of Tel Aviv, took honors for Best Film, directing, script and editing.
"Don," by La Lumiere Soudaine of Rome, was runner-up for best film and received the best acting (individual) honors. The second runner-up, "Sweetie" by New Mexico's Trifecta-plus Entertainment, also received the ensemble acting prize. The cinematography award went to "Room 303" by Team KC from Amsterdam.
Salt Lake City's entry, "Klaus" by the group 172,800 and Counting, didn't win any of the big awards (handed out this weekend at Cinequest in San Jose, Calif.). But "Klaus" is one of the 16 films (chosen from 55 regional winners) on the 48 Hour Film Project's "best of" DVD.
The 2008 edition of the 48 Hour Film Project will arrive in Salt Lake City sometime in May. Click here to sign up for updates.
Emphasis on the "Semi"
If you needed any proof why New Line Cinema was being subsumed into its larger corporate sibling, Warner Bros., look no further than the box-office figures for New Line's latest movie, "Semi-Pro."
The movie was No. 1 for the weekend, making $15.3 million, acccording to Daily Variety. That's chump change for a Will Ferrell movie - in fact, it's the smallest opening for a Ferrell comedy in nearly a decade.
Blame the R-rating, blame the bad reviews, blame the overexposure of Miller Lite and Old Spice ads, blame the bad idea of having Ferrell star in yet another sports comedy. But one must blame the fact that New Line (stealing a phrase from Charlie Pierce, of Boston Globe and NPR fame) couldn't organize a two-car funeral if you spotted them the hearse.
Further down the box-office charts, the made-in-Utah road movie "Bonneville" didn't fare so well, either. According to Leonard Klady's box-office analysis on Movie City News, the movie made only $140,000 on 101 screens - for a paltry per-screen average of $1,410.
Sean P. Meansis the movie critic for The Salt Lake Tribune.
The Cricket has a fondness for "Troll 2," not because he's seen it (which he has, and it is awful), but because one of his Tribune co-workers, online producer Darren Ewing (pictured at left in the movie, and at right more recently), has a featured role in the film. He plays Arnold, who is credited (or blamed, take your pick) with the strangest utterance of the words "Oh, my Gaaaawwwwd!" in cinema history. Watch it for yourself:
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