Movie Cricket

In an interview with Daily Variety's Mike Fleming, "G.I. Joe" director Stephen Sommers is gloating about how successful his movie was this weekend — as if he had something to do with that success.

Sommers made a big, loud summer action movie, made to order for fanboys and the a movie studio catering to them. But the $54.7 million can be credited more to Paramount's saturation marketing than to any of the movie's charms.

To paraphrase the late Texas Gov. Ann Richards, "G.I. Joe" was born on third but Sommers thinks he hit a triple.

And in his gloating, Sommers lashes out at the movie critics who Paramount kept from seeing "G.I. Joe" before its release — because we would have given away the secret that the movie was a failure even as dumb fun (because it wasn't fun, though it was dumb).

"I make the kind of movies critics love to hate. They love dark and depressing movies. If you make those, you expect they will love you, you need them to love you. The kind of movies I make? They don’t enjoy commercial or popular movies. ... It’s like Michael Bay said, they don’t have a fun gene. These critics remind me of my 78-year old mother. She liked the movie, but it was a little fast for mom."

Let's clear Sommers' delusions right away, with a visit to Rotten Tomatoes, the movie-review clearinghouse.

According to RT, of this year's Top 6 box-office hits, five of them scored a "Fresh," or more than 60-percent positive, on the Tomatometer: "Up" ($287.4 million; 97 percent "Fresh"); "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" ($273.8 million; 83 percent "Fresh"); "The Hangover" ($262 million; 79 percent "Fresh"); "Star Trek" ($255.3 million; 95 percent "Fresh"); and "Monsters vs. Aliens" ($198.1 million; 72 percent "Fresh").

The only one of the Top 6 that didn't score well with critics? "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," the summer's biggest movie at $393.7 million (so far), but only a 20 percent rating on the Tomatometer.

"Transformers: ROTF," like "G.I. Joe," was released by Paramount, produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura, and was a big action movie based on a Hasbro toy. And each was directed by somebody who seems a little too proud about how much the critics "hate" him.

It's one thing for cultural commentators to delve into politics. Frank Rich does it successfully at The New York Times, as does movie critic Roger Ebert at the Chicago Sun-Times. And there's this other fellow who takes a stab at it from time to time.

But when a political commentator tries his hand at cultural commentary — or worse, movie criticism — the sheep dip expands like popcorn.

The New York Times' resident right-wing op-ed columnist, Ross Douthat (pictured), swings well outside his strike zone with this political appraisal of the works of raunch director Judd Apatow.

"No contemporary figure has done more than Apatow, the 41-year-old auteur of gross-out comedies, to rebrand social conservatism for a younger generation that associates it primarily with priggishness and puritanism," Douthat writes as he sums up the celibacy-before-marriage message of "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and the pro-life stance of "Knocked Up" — apparently missing all the pot smoking and penis jokes going on around them.

Douthat also labels "Funny People" — in which karma comes back to punish a famous comedian (played by Adam Sandler) for his past sins — "the most conservative of all his movies. That’s probably what American audiences don’t like about it." 

SPOILER ALERT! Skip this paragraph if you haven't seen "Funny People" and still wish to: Sandler's character, George, regrets losing his long-ago girlfriend (Leslie Mann) because he cheated on her. Now, she's married to a businessman (Eric Bana) who's cheating on her — and she briefly contemplates divorcing him to reconnect with George.

Calling "Funny People" a "conservative" movie only works if you buy Douthat's narrow view that conservatives are the only people who think infidelity is bad. Let's ask Sen. John Ensign or Gov. Mark Sanford or former Speaker Newt Gingrich (just to mention three examples of Republican moralist hypocrisy) about that one.

In fact, Apatow's morality is not pigeonholed as a right-wing or a left-wing thing. He's simply being human, seeking answers that work for the characters he creates — whether they're having a baby or having an affair.

One of the first things you see in "G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra" — besides the mental image of the sign that reads "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" — is a computer-generated vanity logo for Hasbro, the toy company that makes the G.I. Joe action figures.

Hasbro also is responsible for the Transformers toy line — and the twin successes of "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" (approaching the $400 million mark) and "G.I. Joe" ($56 million this weekend) has the company thinking about turning its other brands into movies.

According to this interview on Collider.com, Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner says several titles are already in the pipeline: "Stretch Armstrong" is in the works for 2011, "Candyland" will be directed by Kevin Lima ("Enchanted"), Ridley Scott is attached to a movie based on the Monopoly board game, and a "Battleship" movie is also in development.

This set Kevin Kelly, over at Cinematical.com, off on a rant. Under the headline "Dear Hasbro: Enough already," Kelly wondered when "Spirograph: The Series" will hit TV screens, reminded us of the woeful 1985 mystery/comedy "Clue" — and lamented on the state of Hollywood that has put us at this moment: 

Hollywood needs more original ideas, and we need to stop cramming popcorn in our mouths while toys come to life in horribly written stories onscreen. That is, unless the "Tonka" movie manages to cross boundaries and make grown men and women cry.

Speaking of "G.I. Joe," check out Bilge Ebiri's hilarious riff on the AMC "Future of Classic" blog, which offers a point-by-point comparison of "G.I. Joe's" plot with Trey Parker and Matt Stone's 2004 action-movie parody "Team America: World Police" — minus the copulating marionettes, of course.

The demographic lines couldn't be more clearly drawn this weekend: Action boys or cooking women?

For the boys, it's "G.I. Joe," a big, loud and empty action movie inspired by the Hasbro toy line (and perhaps inspired even more by the '80s TV cartoon series). The movie introduces us to a crack international anti-terrorist team whose motto — intoned by the team's commander, Gen. Hawk (Dennis Quaid) — is "When all else fails, we don't." The acting comes in two modes: Stiff and over-the-top, with Channing Tatum and Sienna Miller representing the first group and Marlon Wayans and Christopher Eccleston in the second. It's supposed to be dumb fun, but in fact it's so chaotic and overstuffed with maudlin backstory that nobody seems to be having any fun at all. (Paramount Pictures refused to show "G.I. Joe" to movie critics, so the Cricket stayed up late for a midnight screening and will be posting a review online shortly.)

For the women, there's "Julie & Julia," Nora Ephron's take on food and marriage, following two parallel stories: The life of Julia Child (Meryl Streep) and her diplomat husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) in '50s Paris as Child discovered her gift for cooking; and Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a post-9/11 cubicle drone who is inspired by her loving husband Eric (Chris Messina) to write a food blog, based on her efforts to cook all 524 recipes in Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The Childs' story is by far the more interesting of the two, in no small measure thanks to Streep's joyous and fully realized portrayal of the great Julia. (By the way, the Tribune's food writer Kathy Stephenson interviewed some Utah foodies about their favorite Julia moments.)

Also from the studios: "A Perfect Getaway," an overcooked thriller about a honeymooning couple (Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich) vacationing on Kauai when news breaks of a murder on Oahu — causing suspects to pop out of the jungle like frogs. Writer-director David Twohy ("The Chronicles of Riddick") produces some good scares, but he also cranks out some ridiculous dialogue and a "twist" you see coming a mile away.

The week's best movie is "The Cove," this year's Audience Award-winning documentary at Sundance, an activist expose of the secret slaughter of thousands of dolphins in a coastal Japanese town. Director Louie Psihoyos, a National Geographic photographer and co-founder of the Oceanic Preservation Society, paces the story like a heist picture — focusing on the daredevil team he assembles, "Ocean's Eleven"-style, to get the evidence of the slaughter. The results are both entertaining and deeply moving.

In a similar vein, "Burma VJ" is another Sundance '09 documentary about getting the video evidence of something somebody doesn't want out. In this instance, the somebody is the government of Myanmar — a k a Burma — and the something is the military's brutal crackdown of dissent. The story of how the footage is attained is heroic, but the footage itself gives the movie its purpose.

Lastly, there's the droll Norwegian comedy "O'Horten," about a retired railroad engineer (Bård Owe) who's at loose ends when he hits retirement. The humor is as dry as an Oslo winter, with moments of wry whimsy.

Director John Hughes — who gave a generation of teen-agers a view of themselves as they wished they could be — died this morning, suffering a heart attack while walking around Manhattan. He was 59.

Hughes defined the '80s teen movie, with such titles as "Sixteen Candles" (1984), "The Breakfast Club" (1985), "Weird Science" (1985) and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (1986). In Hughes' films — and around that time he also wrote "Pretty in Pink" and "Some Kind of Wonderful" — teens like Molly Ringwald's Samantha Baker and Matthew Broderick's Ferris Bueller all dealt with the awkward teen years in ways that made adolescence seem cool and, what's more, survivable.

As a director, he aimed to graduate to grown-up stories like "She's Having a Baby" (1988) and the comedic travel nightmare of "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" (1987).

Hughes also was a prolific writer and producer through the '80s and '90s, responsible for launching the "Vacation" and "Home Alone" film franchises, as well as remakes of "Miracle on 34th Street" and "The Absent-Minded Professor" (retitled "Flubber").

Hughes had pretty much quit Hollywood — his last film as a director was "Curly Sue" in 1991, and his last credited script was "Just Visiting" in 2001 — to run a farm in northern Illinois and support independent arts.