THE PROGNOSTICATOR: JUNE 2007

Masochists, take note. It’s been a dry few weeks since Pathfinder was released, but this month you can finally pay twelve bucks to see DOA on a big screen instead of all pixellated and Google video-ey. I hear it hurts a lot more when it’s bigger.

Enough of me. Plan your month at the movies now.

June 1

Knocked Up

Jeremy Says: Judd Apatow follows up his first directorial effort (The 40-Year-Old Virgin) with his second directorial effort. It stars Seth Rogen as a guy and Katherine Heigl as a girl, and Paul Rudd as another guy and Leslie Mann as another girl (only she’s more like a woman because she has birthed two children). When the Rogen guy gets the Heigl girl pregnant, a Vietnam vet (Tommy Lee Jones) takes forceful control of Central Park to remember those who served and died in the Vietnam War. Helen Shaver and Yaphet Kotto co-star.

Prognostication: Well, I liked it. And you’re going to like it, too. In fact, you’re going to take everyone you know to see it opening weekend because everyone’s going to like it. In all seriousness, I haven’t had a bowel movement in four days. Also, I have a feeling this movie will play well into July and make a sizeable amount of cash ($200 million may sound ludicrous for an R-rated, 132-minute romantic comedy, but if Wedding Crashers can do it despite a terrible third act, Knocked Up can certainly do it with a heartwarming third act).

Prognostication: Damn. Devin’s description of young Ms. Schroeder reminds me that she was one of the more striking things about the underrated Mean Creek (along with Scott Mechlowicz, who I had pegged as the next Brad Pitt. WHOOPS!!!). The only soccer movie that matters to me is John Huston’s Victory (in which we see Pelé do the bicycle kick fifteen times in slow-motion), but I can make room in my heart for Gracie on Devin’s recommendation.

Devin says:
True love can be a powerful emotion, powerful enough to make you hire a
guy to throw lye in the face of the girl who spurned you and blind her.
But what makes that woman want to marry you years later when you
finally get out of jail? Crazy Love
examines a bizarre and so, so New York couple who made the headlines
with their odd lovelife over the course of many, many decades.

Jeremy Says: Directed by Sebastian Gutierrez, who’s already won at life by bagging Carla Gugino and taking a credit on Snakes on a Plane, this long delayed movie is yet another variation on the vampire genre in which, this time out, the creatures are sans fangs and unsusceptible to daylight. Lucy Liu plays a "female reporter" who gets turned into a bloodsucker and spends the rest of the movie hunting down the sect responsible for making her undead. Since she’s impervious to sunlight, I don’t quite understand why she’s so cheesed.

Prognostication: According to one negative IMdB review of Rise: Blood Hunter, "the weaponry is disappointing". Well, fuck. Still, Liu allegedly goes topless in this, and Cameron Richardson, so memorable as Vincent’s Coat Room Tryst on Entourage (I’m being totally serious!), co-stars, so I’ll be Netflix-ing this in a few months. When I lived in New York and paid to see at least four movies a weekend, I might’ve seen checked this out theatrically. Oh, and on a big time WTF? note: John Toll shot this.


June 8

Hostel Part II

Russ says: As I understand it, this is pretty much the first film with three girls instead of guys, and with a deeper glimpse into the process of buying a victim at the Eastern European torture playground for the rich. I expect the inclusion of ‘Part’ in the title is meant to connote some direct relationship to the first film, as if we didn’t know that already.

Prognostication: Something happened I never expected: I’ve grown tired of talking smack about Eli Roth. I don’t know if it’s the rising tide of people who mistakenly think Hostel is good, or the fact that Thanksgiving was genuinely fun. I don’t, however, have any more faith in Eli Roth than I do Michael Moore, and I expect this will pander to the same audience and therefore drink up the same, if not a slightly larger audience than before. Roth should just be psyched he ended up with a two-week jump on Captivity.

Ocean’s 13

Russ says: The history of American rock music is littered with prototype endeavors that most people, even those who consider themselves music fans, will never rediscover. That was the fate of the 13th Floor Elevators, an Austin, TX band formed in 1965 by singer/guitarist Roky Erickson. The Elevators had an electric jug player and basically created psychedelic rock, but broke up in ’69 when Erickson chose a psychiatric hospital over prison as punishment for a pot bust. That’s where the film begins — it follows escape attempts, horrific shock treatments, full mental breakdowns and a family that’s torn between prayer and medicine as treatment for a creative and broken son.

Prognostication: Think Brian Wilson went bugfuck crazy? Did Crumb push your ‘fractured family’ buttons? Erickson’s story goes a lot further, and though it does finally have a happy ending of sorts, there’s a lot of good down home American horror in the way. The Elevators and Erickson deserve wider love, and this might be the way to finally see some of it.

The Method

Russ says: Seven job applicants arrive for interviews, at first not realizing that they’re competing for a single position. Pressured into testing themselves according to the ‘Gronholm Method’, the group engages in paranoid games and humiliating acts to prove their worth to the company.

Prognostication: This sucker was being shooped around in 2005, and it would have been a smarter release then, when audiences who bellied up to The Apprentice could easily have been reeled in. Now that the tide of Trump’s cultural glow has receeded past his hairline this is a harder sell, and right now Palm Pictures has enough to do just getting something onto screens, much less in front of an audience. Too bad, too, because I remember some good notes from this two years back.

La Vie en Rose

Jeremy Says: Marion Cotillard reportedly gives the performance of the year as Edith Piaf in Olivier Dahan’s follow-up to… Crimson Rivers 2: Angels of the Apocalypse? Piaf, the beloved chanteuse who entertained Nazis at the One Two Two Club while cleverly assisting the French Resistance, is a fascinating figure; it’s about time someone got around to offering up a definitive take on her life. I’m just not sure Dahan is that someone.

Prognostication: The early reviews indicate that Cotillard’s phenomenal performance compensates for Dahan’s overbearing style. It’s a bit lengthy at 140 minutes, but the subject matter should pack ’em in for months at art houses all over the country. I bet Picturehouse will be booking and re-booking this one until the fall, when Cotillard will certainly start being touted as the frontrunner for Best Actress (though I hear Jessica Alba’s quite good in Good Luck Chuck).

June 15

Devin says:
Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben are back, and this time they’re saving the
world. On the eve of Reed and Sue’s marriage, a mysterious silver guy
on a surfboard shows up – and his name, counterintuitively enough, is
The Silver Surfer! He’s pretty powerful, and brings the noise to our
small blue planet, but it turns out that he’s really the recon force
for a bigger threat: Galactus, devourer of worlds.

Russ Says: Emma Roberts is the plucky, willfully stuck in the ’50s Nancy Drew, whose father moves her to Los Angeles so he can take a new job. She promises to stop sluething, but golly! There’s a mystery that just won’t let her well enough alone. And she’s so smart and full of good ideas and intentions! That Nancy always does the right thing.

Prognostication: This is what I said about the film to someone I’d just met earlier tonight who was surprised that I’d gone to see a screening of Nancy Drew last week: I would have been thrilled to walk out of the film wishing I had a daughter* so I could take her to see it; instead I was happier than ever that I don’t have kids so I don’t have to talk them out of it. Roberts is fine, and there’s a sorta fun Bruce Willis and Adam Goldberg cameo, but the idiot manchild sidekick and doublemint twats meant to provide comedic respite are just the top layer of a badly misconceived script. It’ll make a goddamn mint on DVD.

*Not a sexist comment, necessarily. Guys, when this movie comes up in conversation: "Huh? There’s a new one?" Women: "OMG! You’ve seen it already? I can’t wait!" There’s a built-in audience here, and it ain’t boys.

Eagle Vs Shark

Jeremy Says: Miramax is clearly hoping that they’ve got summer 2007’s Napoleon Dynamite with this whimsical New Zealand comedy about two nerds who fall in love at an annual "come as your favorite animal" party. Jarrod (Jermaine Clement) is the Eagle, Lily (Loren Horsley) is the shark, and this all sounds like it could be terribly unbearable. I’ve heard "deadpan", "quirky" and "wry" being thrown around regarding this movie, which makes me nervous. I’d rather "good", "genuinely funny" and "not a complete waste of ninety minutes".

Prognostication: The internet critics seem to love it, but the trade publications both went negative when it screened at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The thick Kiwi accents will probably keep it from crossing over into the mainstream, while the mixed response could hurt Miramax’s marketing efforts in limited release. But there’s always an audience for this kind of twee nonsense, so maybe it’ll develop a cult following on DVD. Or maybe it’ll just go away like Happy, Texas.

Fido

1408

Russ says: Elisha Cuthbert is a model who gets kidnapped, put in a cell and tortured a lot. For a detailed, hilariously high-minded bullshit description, read the one by production company After Dark Films right here. Seriously. They actually want to play the ‘inspired by real events’ card?

Prognostication: Like others, I’ve half rejected this out of hand without seeing it. That’s bad. I mean, someone could read a very similar description of Funny Games and write it off, too, which would be a big mistake. But even if The Killing Fields director Roland Joffe was calling the shots, do you really see this having anything like the commentary embedded in a single scene of Haneke’s movie? (The original, not the remake, which I can’t wait to see.) At least Elisha is sexy, eh? Why didn’t they just call it Die Hawt?

Evan Almighty

Jeremy Says: How the sequel nobody wanted became the most expensive comedy of all time should form the basis of a great cautionary tale ala Julie Salmon’s The Devil’s Candy. Though everyone saw the casting of Steve Carell as a budget conscious attempt to avoid Jim Carrey’s $20 million quote, this film, about Congressman Evan Baxter being commanded by God (Morgan Freeman) to build a second ark in anticipation of another great flood, somehow ended up costing upwards of $175 million. I hope all of that money didn’t go into the erecting of this.

Black Sheep

Russ says: Admit it, you’ve always wanted to go to New Zealand and bang a sheep. In the head with a hammer, of course. Either way, this one’s got you sorted. Arrive with desires to nail a farm animal from either end and you’ll go home happy. Genetic experiements cause an army of angry maneating super-sheep to terrorize a small part of the countryside, as an increasingly small number of humans tries to find another bottle of mint relish.

Prognostication: I saw Black Sheep at a packed festival screening last year and had a great time. Not that I loved it, but the mixture of classic WETA phsyical effects with a fun script had me fully engaged. Yeah, it’s an obvious cop on Dead Alive, but it’s a fun film in it’s own right. Unlike, say, Evil Aliens, which was also a direct lift from Raimi and Jackson, but one I found boring and quite bad, this one stands on it’s own and has a handful of memorable gags. It’s never going to go very wide, but there are far worse ways to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Live Free or Die Hard

Jeremy Says: The first (allegedly) PG-13 rated Die Hard will either revitalize a franchise that’s lain dormant since 1995 or end it like Fernando Rey in French Connection II. I’m rooting for the latter because I don’t want Len Wiseman straying out of his depth; if he has to go on making movies, let’s please relegate him to dopey action-horror hybrids about werewolves fighting vampires. In this fourth Die Hard, Bruce Willis’s John McClane battles a terrorist (Timothy Olyphant) bent on shutting down the entire infrastructure of the United States.

Prognostication: McClane’s back in Los Angeles for the first time since Die Hard I, but he’s got the writer of 2004’s pathetic Godsend penning his quips. Had Jeb Stuart and Stephen E. de Souza been corralled to give the quintessential regular guy action hero of the 1980s a proper sendoff, I’d be excited. As it stands, we’re getting an anonymous, watered down summer popcorn flick. It’ll open respectably, and die easily the following weekend when Transformers shows up.

Evening

Devin says: Get out the hankies: while Ann lies on her deathbed, she recounts to her daughters stories of her life 50 years earlier, especially stories about Harris, the man she loved and could never forget.

Prognostication: It’s a weepy chick flick fo’ sho, but look at that cast: Vanessa Redgrave is old Ann, while Claire Danes is Young Ann. And just in case the idea of Redgrave telling this touching story to her daughters on her deathbed doesn’t get to you enough, one of the daughters is played by her REAL daughter, Natasha Richardson! The other daughter is Toni Collette, whose career really should have been better by now, I have always thought. And finally there’s new CHUD mancrush Patrick Wilson, who’s quite possibly going to star in Watchmen. Can we all be gay about this guy and forget about one note Christian Bale already?

Ratatouuille

Russ says: Patton Oswalt, a cute dwarf who sometimes makes me chuckle, voices a rat with culinary ambitions in Brad Bird’s latest Pixar effort. The rat can read and understand humans (duh) and manages to create a sort of French Master/Blaster relationship with a hapless cook in one of Paris’s best restaurants, the better to advance both their careers. Yeah, that’s right. What Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome was to Hamlet, this is to Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. Don’t look at me like that.

Prognostication: I hate being suckered in by marketing. Brad Bird’s name had barely elevated this above a ho-hum interest level (which says a lot, because I’d give up a kidney before The Iron Giant) and then I saw the preview footage. Not that I was wowed, but Oswalt works, and the whole enterprise promises the same sort of charm that the rare ’70s Disney feature offered. That’s probably not exactly where Pixar wants to be right now, though. Without the easy merch hooks that kept Cars from falling flat, I’m afraid that Ratatoullie will be Pixar’s first non-smash, and the repurcussions could be distasteful.

Sicko

Russ Says: Michael Moore stays mostly behind the camera this time as he follows the plight of several Americans who are unable to get the health care they need. In his crusade to tear down what passes for the US health system, Moore avoids the confrontational interviews that have become a trademark, going instead for more intimate stories.

Prognostication: I’ve stated publicly more than once that I have no faith left for Michael Moore; his last two films proved to me only that he was more interested in his own PR than in making a cogent argument. I’ve also stated that I’d eat my words if Sicko lived up to Moore’s own proclamations, and word out of Cannes suggests that it may do just that. I know that Moore suggests we scrap what we’re working with and start over; I’m looking forward to what he suggests we enable in the resulting void. I’m also curious to see how many other people want to get sick with Mike. Without the partisan hook of his last two pictures, Sicko seems doomed to relatively middling returns.

Death at a Funeral

Devin says: Nothing says comedy like a dead dad. At least Frank Oz hopes so – he’s directed this British comedy about a man who dies and whose secrets may come out at his hilariously incompetent funeral.

Prognostication: I don’t think Frank Oz has been involved in anything worth seeing this entire century. Could Death at a Funeral be a return to form for the director of Bowfinger, In & Out and What About Bob?? (Double question mark not meant to express a large amount of exasperation!) I would like it to be so, and while the buzz has been positive for this movie, which played the US Comedy Arts Festival, it hasn’t been deafening. But maybe that’s good – I love seeing a movie and being completely surprised by how good it is. And with a cast that includes Alan Tudyk, Mathhew MacFadyen and The Dink, Death at a Funeral has a real shot at being worth seeing.

Ghosts of Cite Soleil

Devin says: In 2004 Haiti is falling apart. The first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, has turned out to be a dictator, and he’s been employing gangs from Cite Soleil slum – called the most dangerous place on Earth by the UN – to intimidate protestors. This documentary follows two gang leaders, Haitian 2Pac and Bily, who also happen to be brothers. Haitian 2Pac has turned against Aristide and writes rap about him while Bily remains a loyal supporter. As rebel forces get closer to toppling Aristide, the two brothers must deal with daily pressures in the slum as well as their feelings for a French aid worker.

Prognostication: This film is sort of incredible in that the story it tells would rival any Ed Zwick Hollywood action romance. The filmmakers have seemingly unlimited access to the gang lords, even filming them while showering. Their relationship, and their relationships with the aid worker, are gripping, and all set against a background of incredible national strife that both men know will probably lead to their arrests at best but most likely their deaths. Truly gripping.

Vitus

Jeremy Says: Bruno Ganz plays "Grandfather" in this poignant tale of a young piano prodigy whose parents’ enthusiasm for the exploitation of his innate ability forces him to take charge of his own destiny. Sounds like it should be called Searching for Glenn Gould. It won Switzerland’s equivalent of Best Picture and has done well at various film festivals, so maybe it’s worth seeing.