Don't you hate it when a movie reviewer says they don't want to tell you much about a film for fear of ruining the experience? Me too. But in this case, it's true. And I'll tell you why. You don't want to know anything about a movie in which 8 people fly a bomb into the sun hoping to reignite the dying star and save all of mankind because the characters in the movie don't know anything about it. Sure, the crew is made up of astronauts, a physicist, a psychiatrist, and other brilliant minds who are the last hope of humanity. They are educated and have planned as much as possible, running drills and knowing their theory backward and forward. But since no one has ever done anything like this, successfully or otherwise, there is no way to know what it will really be like. And that unknown, like all unknowns, is utterly terrifying.

In this case it is particularly terrifying because the fate of Earth hangs in the balance. And while Sunshine is, indeed, Science Fiction, the trailers that played before the film, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio telling us about the dire state of the planet due to global warming, are very real. I don't mean to get all super cereal on you guys, but it's true. The film is even more effective because of the storytelling method. Director Danny Boyle (28 Days Later) and writer Alex Garland (The Beach) just drop you into the action, without the typical Sci-Fi cheesy voice over or showing you first hand a C.G. depiction of the disaster that living under a dying sun caused on Earth, thus eliminating any opportunity for the viewer to be overwhelmingly reminded that this is Science Fiction. Instead, we see a tired but hopeful crew in the midst of their mission, knowing they are the last hope and trying their damnedest not to crack under the pressure of it all. Unfortunately, despite all their training, they are still humans susceptible to human errors in judgment (especially under pressure). And this is one hell of last job.

Many of these errors stem from the theme that while too much sunshine is bad for you, both physically and psychologically, mankind simply cannot survive with out it.

Story aside, the visuals are absolutely stunning, the future technology not at all silly, despite them being on a space ship, the acting subtle and nuanced and Cillian Murphy's eyes as unearthly as ever.

Go see Sunshine right now. The future depends on it.

July 30, 2007
Categories: Filmpinions . Tags: thereel . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

X-Posted to the the Reel.

Movies about Hit Men with a Heart of Gold are played out. Seriously. There is nothing new you can do with them. They will never be as funny as “Grosse Pointe Blank” or as touching (inappropriate relationship with little girl aside) as “The Professional”. Yet I like Ben Kingsley and Tea Leoni so I thought I'd give “You Kill Me” a…ahem…shot.

The first thing I noticed at the screening for “You Kill Me”, was that this was the same audience who attended the SIFF “Death at a Funeral” premiere. In other words, everyone was old. Apparently, the new Retiree Generation likes their comedies like they like their coffee at Denny's. Black and stale. This is comforting, in a way, because it's nice to know that when I'm old I won't necessarily choose to be at home watching Matlock reruns when I could be at the cinema. Unfortunately, it also means that I will be out uproariously enjoying movies that are mostly lame.

“You Kill Me” is the story of Frank Falenczyk, a Gold-Hearted Hit Man with a bit of a drinking problem. When his drinking causes him to botch a very important job, his employers, who are also his family, ship him off to San Francisco to dry out. There he meets a bespectacled (and grossly underused) Bill Pullman who is there to make sure he stays on the wagon. Frank begrudgingly attends his first AA meeting, and encounters Luke Wilson, as the harmless gay punchline who later becomes his sponsor. Pullman also scores Frank a job at a funeral home where he works under the Sassy Black Lady stereotype making dead people look nice. Frank doesn't have a problem working with bodies because he's a hit man, you see. Isn't that just darling?

And then it's time for Frank to meet the younger woman who will eventually warm his cockles and give him a new lease on life etc. The dry-spoken Tea Leoni walks into HIS funeral home to bury her unlikeable stepfather and it's love-at-first sight for these two odd-ball lonely souls. It's all too easy, really. Sure, there are obstacles, but they are precisely the ones you would expect. Leoni must be fine with Frank killing people for a living but she must have an unrelated relationship hangup to get over. Frank must have a relapse and miss a dinner date with Leoni. Frank's family back home must have problems with the man Frank neglected to kill and Frank must overcome his resistance to recovery and his relationship issues in order to save the day. The only thing that's missing is a sweet montage wherein Frank teaches his girlfriend how to kill people. Oh wait, they have that too. I think my monkey wrote a similar script in his sleep last week. Kingsley and Leoni are fine. Wilson and Pullman are fine. The Sassy Black Lady is fine. But no one and nothing is spectacular.

Of course, the audience LOOOVED the movie. They laughed and clapped and waved their canes in the air. Me, I need something a little less formulaic.

One day, I will be the cane-waving person in the audience, happy to know what to expect. Who knows what my formula will be. Since the current Moons Over My Hammy set likes black comedies with heart, perhaps my Rootie Tootie Fresh and Frutie ass will need to see hardcore snuff with heart. Whatever it is, I'm sure it will drive the whipper snappers in the audience crazy. Right now, however, I'm going to go home and watch Grosse Pointe Blank.

July 3, 2007
Categories: Filmpinions . Tags: thereel . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

“Knocked Up” is the next film from the creators of the sleeper hit, “The Forty-Year-Old Virgin”. Most of the same team is there including Writer/Director Judd Apatow, and improv geniuses, Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd. This time, there is no Steve Carell to steal the show. And, that, I think, is what makes “Knocked Up” a superior movie. Steve Carell is just too big. Especially now whatwith the “The Offices” and “Evan Almightys”. So even though he does always play the (mostly) lovable loser, he's just not as relatable as a Seth Rogen.

I have been wanting to see Seth Rogen in a lead role since he played one of my favorite characters on the short-lived but absolutely brilliant TV show, “Freaks and Geeks”. He wasn't improvising so much then, but he was only a kid. Now he has definitely blossomed into his own glorious comedic flower.

In “Knocked Up”, Rogen plays Ben, an underachieving stoner who is coasting through life thinking about nothing but himself. Everything changes when he, with the aid of alcohol, manages to score a one night stand with a beautiful, successful woman named Allison (Katherine Heigl). Alcohol also contributes to the titular state in which Allison finds herself 8 weeks later. She decides to keep the baby and, because he's a good person, he decides to raise the baby with her.

Rogen is ably backed by Paul Rudd who, on screen, can do NO WRONG. This time Rudd plays Pete, Allison's brother-in-law who is going through a bit of a rough patch emotionally. Rudd and Rogen could be much funnier versions of people I hang out with every day. The script is heartfelt, hilarious and, because it's about having a baby, TERRIFYING.

The script also does a fantastic job of balancing the male and female sides of dating, relationships and accidentally growing up. In most movies that attempt to show the female side, the women are shoe-obsessed bags of shallowness or else they are cute but completely insane. In contrast, the women in Knocked Up are completely realistic and actually pretty cool. Sure, Allison's sister, Debbie, can be a little crazy at times, but Leslie Mann (Apatow's real life wife and mother of his children) plays Debbie sympathetically as an otherwise level-headed woman who just didn't realize what having kids was going to do to her life. Allison might be smoking hot and working for the E! network, but she's still a down-to-earth, normal girl who's willing to try and work it out with her baby-daddy. She knows that deep down, he's a good person who just needs a kick in the pants to be a great father. I've read that Heigl beat out actresses like Jennifer Love Hewitt, Anne Hathaway and Lindsay Lohan for the role of Allison. And thank God. It would have been a completely different film. Much more traditional Rom Com and far too Hollywood. The reason I don't like most Rom Coms are because I just don't know people like Lindsay Lohan. I'm not a Jennifer Love Hewitt. I could kick it with a Katherine Heigl.

Of course, the character in the move I most relate to isn't a woman. The thing that really struck a chord with me while watching this movie is the fact that I saw more of myself in Ben and his lifestyle than in Allison. Think about that when you watch this movie. What if BEN were the one who got knocked up. Yikes.

“Knocked Up” is one of those rare comedies that goes deeper than just getting from point A to point B. It's about how real people (who are, granted, funnier than you) deal with life not turning out the way they'd planned. And that's something that EVERYONE can relate to.

June 12, 2007
Categories: Filmpinions . Tags: thereel . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

It must be incredibly difficult to make a documentary about your friend. Especially if your friend died reasonably young and happened to be one of the Founding Fathers of a musical movement. Julien Temple’s “Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten” is remarkably objective and concise for being a touching tribute to such an important man. However, it still, perhaps unavoidably so, falls into the trappings of a documentary made by a friend. It's just too long. The good news is that is my ONLY criticism of this film. Everything else is just nitpicking. The film covers Joe Strummer's entire life from his childhood with his brother and his foray at boarding school to dealing with his brother's suicide and how that contributed to the man he became. It covers the quiet period between the end of the Clash and the beginning of The Mescaleros that has previously been a bit of a mystery. It ends, of course, with Strummer's untimely death and implicates the full extent of why this was a tragedy. The man simply had so much more to do.

The Clash is absolutely my favorite band. They are also one of the most documented bands and definitely the most documented founding punk band besides, perhaps, The Ramones. It wasn't as easy back then to just carry a camera around with you so it must have been pretty clear to everyone that Joe Strummer was a big deal. What he was doing was important and needed to be filmed. Much of this footage must have been filmed by Temple himself because I have seen every Clash documentary I can get my hands on and I only recognized a handful of the shots in this movie. The only narration is from the man himself, taken primarily from a radio broadcast he recorded. The film is filled with interviews from the people who were close to him, most of which were shot around a roaring camp fire in several cities. The way the interviews were shot, with the people who loved Joe gathered together around a warm campfire, really illustrates how much of an influence he really had on everyone who he touched. This is evident even before you learn that the campfires are a tribute to an ongoing event that Joe had organized himself.

Temple also ignored another documentary film staple. Titling his interviewees with their names. You either recognize an interviewee (the most recognizable of whom is Bono) or you learn who they are through the stories they are telling. If you never learn who they are (the Sex Pistol's Steve Jones is quite a bit more bloated than his skinny young counterpart), it doesn't really matter. The film isn't about them. It's about Joe. His story has been told before and will, thankfully, be told again. But Julien Temple's telling of it is perfect.

June 5, 2007
Categories: Filmpinions . Tags: thereel . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

“The Ten” is written by the same team responsible for one of my favorite comedies of all time, “Wet Hot American Summer”. You might also know these folks from an old MTV sketch comedy show called “The State”. Some of the alumni went on to make “Reno 911” and another sort of surrealistic comedy troupe called “Stella”. I think all of these projects are brilliant (save the short-lived “Stella” TV series that was a bit of a disaster). So I was half ecstatic, half worried to see “The Ten”. Would it be the filthy surrealistic humor that I love from David Wain and Ken Marino, or would it be the flaccid failure that was the “Stella” TV show?

I was overjoyed to learn that it's the former. “The Ten” is glorious. It's very difficult to make a sketch film. Not even all the “Monty Python” movies are great. There are bound to be some weak moments, as with most film, but they will become more apparent when the moments are entire concepts for a scene. Wain and Marino were smart to start with such a strong theme: Take the 10 Commandments and write 10 scenarios in which each commandment is grossly broken. Hilarity doth ensue.

It's true, there ARE still weak moments. But they only serve to introduce characters who will go on to be a part of a really strong moment. Our narrator is the ALWAYS enjoyable Paul Rudd. (And I do mean ALWAYS. I haven't watched “The Object of My Affection” at least 5 times on Lifetime because I'm a big Jennifer Aniston RomCom fan.) Rudd introduces each story after furthering his own plot as man who is in the midst of breaking the commandment about adultery. His jilted wife is played by the tremendous Famke Jansen (Jean Grey!) who can make the phrase “There's something you're not telling me about the pec juice” uproariously funny. Trust me, it makes sense in the context of the scene. Sort of.

The film is actually filled with usually dramatic actors being absolutely hilarious. Liev Schreiber plays a man obsessed with competing with his neighbor…by buying the most CAT scan machines…with tragic results. Winona Ryder plays a woman who has a steamy affair with a ventriloquist's dummy….with tragic results! Of course, all this tragedy is actually hilarious because they are spot-on parodies of dramatic film conventions. And now that I think about it, the less you know about this film, the better. This film scored a distribution deal at Sundance, but whether that means it will be coming to a theatre near you or a streaming video website near you, I'm not sure. All I know is that “The Ten” is destined to be a comedy classic a la “The Meaning of Life” and “Kentucky Fried Movie”.

June 5, 2007
Categories: Filmpinions . Tags: thereel . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment