Screenhead

I have to admit, some of the most interesting movies I get copies of to review are the documentaries.  Strange little pieces about strange little things, like the entire career of H.P. Lovecraft.  And today, I’m bringing out a documentary of the kind the History Channel would probably love–War Dogs of the Pacific.

They mean it literally, you see–War Dogs of the Pacific is all about the dogs who fought in the Pacific theater in World War II.   They were trained pretty extensively, and they served a whole host of roles in the war, including guard duty, ferreting out enemy positions, sensing enemy movement, and even outright combat. See, back in the last days of World War II, the Pacific was about the only game in town left.  And the Japanese had developed an especial talent for hiding and attacking from ambush, so the idea came to use dogs to track hiding places.  And boy, did it ever work.

This movie is spectacularly informative, and will almost certainly tell you at least something new about World War II and about the role that dogs played in this war.  It’s a downright amazing role, too–considering that people back then handed over their pet dogs to serve in the war, in some cases for good,  is just plain old amazing.

Of course, getting past the sheer awesomeness of the idea, you’re left with a pretty good if somewhat short documentary–this has a runtime of about forty five minutes.  But it’s a pretty sweet forty five minutes, especially if you love documentaries or war movies.

The Screenhead Ten Scale loves this movie, but it realizes its tastes are a little unique, and thus hands War Dogs of the Pacific an eight out of ten for giving us all an excellent, if esoteric, view of World War II.

There are things that you’d never imagine going together in life.

Tom Cruise and John Woo is easily one of them.  But when you consider John Woo’s newest project announcement, a movie about a little known side of World War II, in which the Americans helped the Chinese.  Check out what Woo said in a recent interview:

“It’s based on a true story in WWII, about a group of American volunteer fighter pilots who worked with the Chinese Air Force fighting with the Japanese and they won the war. Also, it’s the story of Clair Chennault, and they did a great contribution for the Chinese, and the Chinese people love and respect them. The whole story is about a friendship between a Chinese and an American and they worked together.”

That’s not something you’d expect to go together either–the Chinese and the Americans.  Especially not lately!  But is this story going to be too obscure for World War II buffs?  Or will it be a shot in the arm for Cruise’s career, currently flagging under a weight of Scientology and insanity?

The Messenger is gripping.  The story is deep, it’s about war, not a fun subject. Ben Foster is Will Montgomery, a U.S. Army officer who has just returned home from a tour in Iraq and is assigned to the Army’s Casualty Notification service. Montgomery is partnered with fellow officer Tony Stone (Woody Harrelson) to bear the bad news to the loved ones of fallen soldiers. Montgomery finds himself drawn to Olivia (Samantha Morton), to whom he has just delivered the news of her husband’s death. The story is  surprising, humorous, moving and very human portrait of grief, friendship and survival.

But I really like this widget because it offers a lot of information about the movie. Enjoy!

I found the strangest thing today–an alternate poster for the recent Tarantino release of Inglourious Basterds.  And frankly, strangely…it was better.

Everyone who compares this to the old Star Wars posters or the old Indiana Jones posters…well, they’re right.  There’s no two ways about it.  Frankly, Tarantino’s original marketing push for Inglourious Basterds was a cheap come-on by comparison.  All that nonsense with Brad Pitt smirking and bloody baseball bats…it was a joke. Especially given that this new poster manages to encompass so much of what the film offered: the explosions, the running, the subterfuge…all of the things that really made Inglourious Basterds interesting.

But then, the new poster was so very typical of Quentin Tarantino.  No subtlety…going straight for the gore factor…really, looking at it all it’s not surprising that they would have eschewed the better, somewhat more subtle look for the “go for the throat”  posture of the actual release.

Sadly, that’s all neither here nor there–the poster as-is definitely worked; people went to see the movie in huge numbers.  But oh…what might have been.

Like Marmite or World music, you either love or hate Quentin Tarantino movies. Especially recently, when his films reek of self-indulgence due to his singular vision and overwhelming confidence as a film-maker. But if you give into Tarantino’s vision, you’ll find yourself lost in a fascinating and entertaining world of references and downright coolness. Kill Bill merged kung fu with spaghettis westerns and revenge flicks to make a thoroughly thrilling film that was accessible even to those unfamiliar to the genres. And now Tarantino has taken a stab at the almost forgotten action war genre with his strangely misspelt Inglourious Basterds.

The Basterds are a group of mainly Jewish tough-guys led by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), whose mission is to murder and scalp as many Nazis as possible. But the Basterds mettle is tested when they become involved in a plot to destroy a French cinema that will host the premiere of an SS film, attended by the likes of Goebbels and Hitler himself. And while the cinema’s owner, Shosanna, a Jewish girl in disguise, is hatching her own plot to destroy the heads of the Nazi party, she must avoid the steely smarts of Colonel Hans Landa, a man who earned the nickname The Jew Hunter and who is most likely to uncover the plots of both her and the Basterds.

Lately Tarantino has been seemingly attempting to revive long lost sub genres of cinema, such as the poorly made gore of Grindhouse cinema, or blaxploitation movies (Jackie Brown). WWII action seemed like a genre that isn’t worth reviving, an insultingly “entertaining” view of the most horrid period of the last century. Even its best examples, such as The Dirty Dozen, are forgettable at best. Yet the downright dour tone of all recent WWII films are not only too heavy but predictably so, and none of them coming close to the brilliance of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. But how does Tarantino manage to make an enjoyable without appearing irresponsible to the families of concentration camp survivors? He does this by being Tarantino. Inglourious Basterds constructs a world, not of the real 1940’s in Europe, but rather an imagined TarantinoWorld, where everyone knows their cinema, where Mexican standoffs are a dime a dozen, and where our history is rewritten so drastically that it seems preposterous to be offended by its attempt to entertain. Read the rest of this entry »

Seriously, when I first heard that Steven Spielberg was looking to handle the Halo movie I was just all sorts of perplexed.

One, I thought that role had already been offered to District 9’s Neil Blomkap.

Two, seriously…what’s Spielberg doing handling video game translations?

Three, aren’t video game translations supposed to suck out loud?  What if this one turns out to be, you know, GOOD?  Granted, this isn’t so much a video game adaptation as it is an adapation of a book based on a video game (the movie’s script is slated to center around The Fall of Reach), but that’s really just semantics.  At its roots, this will be a Halo movie.

I’m not sure this will work out, but one thing’s clear, the whole thing will probably prove to be pretty interesting before it’s all said and done.  Whether or not Spielberg can make a video game movie is up for grabs, but considering his array of successes, I’d figure he’s got a chance.  Might be interesting to have a GOOD game movie to talk about for a change.

Director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal  of The Hurt Locker are working together again on action-adventure Triple Frontier.

Triple Frontieris an ensemble project where the stakes are high. The story is set in the notorious border zone between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil where the Igazu and Paranan rivers converge, making “la triple frontera” difficult to regulate, a haven for organized crime.  Bigelow and Boal pitched the original idea together; however the logline is being kept hush-hush.  Of course, Boal is writing the script and Bigelow will direct. Both will also be executive producers.

The Hurt Locker, an Iraq war thriller based in 2004 Baghdad, grossed $9 million in just seven weeks with a very limited release, turning in a strong box office record.

I’m not sure, exactly, why the folks behind G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra felt the need to keep this one out of the critics’ hands.  You’ll find out why in just a second.

First, the plot.  Someone apparently took the Patriot Act WAY too far and built a clandestine team of highly-powered and extraordinarily well-equipped soldiers from around the world (I don’t even want to think about how much international law THAT maneuver breaks).  And frankly, it’s a good thing they did, because they find themselves facing a nearly-equally highly-powered and well-equipped force of terrorists / mercenaries / general bad guys.  There’s a lot more than that going on in here, but suffice it all to say that the plot can basically be reduced to “G.I. Joe is going to fight Cobra, much like it did back in your childhood”.  Though don’t expect this to look too much like your childhood–they have, of course, dispensed with canon.  Which kind of sucks–I WISH they’d kept Cobra Commander as a former used-car dealer turned mercenary.

Let’s be clear–this is NOT an Oscar contender.  This is Short Attention Span Theatre at its absolute zenith.  I didn’t think to bring a stopwatch with me but something or someone will get shot / blown up / stabbed / sliced / run over with alarming frequency.  The movie is essentially one long fight scene occasionally broken up by dialogue.  Sometimes the two will even overlap, causing a kind of plot development and backstory.

In the strictest sense, this really isn’t that great a movie.  It has precious little story to it, and doesn’t really challenge the viewer in any way. This may well be why no one wanted critics there–so that they couldn’t go on any diatribes (like this) about how the film community is basically out to turn the world, in a truly Cobra Commander style plot (double bonus irony points! Woo hoo!). into a legion of mindless sheep by feeding them a steady diet of crap.

Basically, they could’ve titled this movie “Violence!” and no one would’ve noticed a difference, nor likely cared.

But that was the point.  This is just a fun movie, something you go see for an adrenaline rush and to watch hot chicks fight and see stuff blow up on a regular basis.  It’s quite possibly the new gold standard of “popcorn movie”.  This movie might well appear in a dictionary entry next to the phrase “aggressive mediocrity”.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale awards it a seven out of ten for doing EXACTLY what it set out to do and nothing more.  In the grander sense, it’s a C-student–make no mistake about that–but it’s definitely the BEST C-student ever.  There’s nothing wrong with this movie–but there’s not as much right as there could have been, either.

Uh-oh, folks…we’ve got some serious problems here.  Seems that virtually all the early buzz around the trailers and such for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra has been almost universally negative.  And worse yet, Paramount will be running critics’ screenings for the sci-fi actioner, but they’ll only be running them about a week before the movie opens, leaving in some cases precious little time to release reviews ahead of deadline.

For those of you out there who don’t follow the industry, or aren’t film critics like myself, if a studio won’t put up a movie for critics’ screenings, that generally means they’re not counting on it to do very well.  They want to get one big weekend out of it to try and get its shooting budget back, but then word of mouth–not to mention the delayed critics’ reaction–will kick in and pretty much sink repeat business.

The excuses are already flying hot and fast around this one’s nigh-inevitable financial castigation, including my personal favorite: “We wuz trying to beat the writer’s strike!”

Way to pass the buck, fellas…anyway, we won’t have too much longer to wait to see just how this one turns out–you know I’ll be hitting this one opening day for you.