Screenhead

Admittedly, when I went into New Moon this morning, I wasn’t expecting anything good.  My experience with Twilight was only a few months old, and it still hurt to think about that slow sludgy mess of sparkly emo boi vampires dragging the genre down with it.

But when I grit my teeth and walked in,  what I got was something somewhat different from what I was expecting.

Just to catch you up on the plot, we’re still with screechy loser Bella Swan and her sparkly emo boi vampire boyfriend Edward.  Only now, we discover that werewolves are also thrown in the mix (it was probably supposed to be a surprise but they tipped their own hand on this point MONTHS ago) and for some reason, both vampire Edward and relative newcomer werewolf Jacob Black are all very much into this pasty cipher of a girl who seems to exist for no other reason than to give the teenage girl fans in the audience an easy point for self-insertion.

Yes, there’s still plenty wrong with this whole thing.  One, none of these people can act worth a fart in a stiff wind–Kristen Stewart still seems dazed by the whole thing and is acting like she’s been suffering a concussion since about ten minutes into the first movie.  Robert Pattinson is a willowy mess–when he takes his shirt off and reveals his new “six pack” it looks like nothing so much as a man in desperate need of a SANDWICH.  Taylor Lautner is the girliest macho man I’ve ever SEEN.  He’s trying DESPERATELY hard to be some kind of bad-ass but then everything he tries is toned down so hard for the consumption of the tweenagers in the audience.  It’s like someone told him, “Be a bad boy, but don’t actually be THREATENING.”  He’s doing his best, I think, but he’s doing it under terribly strained conditions.

Also, why isn’t White Wolf suing holy hell out of Summit, Stephenie Meyer, et al for copyright violation?  I remember the nature-boy werewolves and cosmopolitan corporate vampires back when I was one of the handful of people playing the Rage card game back in 1995!  Now all of a sudden it’s a major motion picture and I don’t think White Wolf’s getting any taste on this.  They DO still have the license at last report even if it’s been sold more times than real estate.

But, like I said originally, this was better than I expected.  If for no other reason than the only way it could be much worse is if Stephenie Meyer personally came to theaters at random and gouged out the eyes of one of the viewers.  There was more action in this, and a developing storyline that still seems rather limited (White Wolf, for Pete’s sake, it’s werewolves versus vampires.  You did ALL this long before them!), but is actually somewhat bearable.

There’s still plenty of slow parts in this, though, and lots of reason to be unhappy, though not nearly as many as the FIRST Twilight installment gave us.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, naturally, agrees with me and hands over a five out of ten to a vampire franchise that may well be starting to look up.  If it continues improving at this rate, Breaking Dawn’s going to be a non-stop bloodbath and even I’ll be impressed.

Crazy Heart looks good, pure Jeff Bridges at his best. 

Crazy Heart is written and directed by Scott Cooper as his directorial debut. The movie stars Jeff Bridges, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Robert Duvall.

Four-time Academy Award nominee Jeff Bridges stars as the richly comic, semi-tragic romantic anti-hero Bad Blake. He is a broken-down, hard-living country music singer who’s had way too many marriages, far too many years on the road and one too many drinks way too many times.

And yet, Bad can’t help but reach for salvation with the help of Jean (Golden Globe nominee Maggie Gyllenhaal), a journalist who discovers the real man behind the musician.  As he struggles down the road of redemption, Bad learns the hard way just how tough life can be on one man’s crazy heart.

It’s a surprise to say but Expired, which The Asylum sent me a copy of,  may well be the scariest thing that The Asylum has ever released, and it’s not even a horror flick.

See, apparently, sometime while I wasn’t looking, The Asylum started to go after offbeat comedies and romantic drama, and it’s the latter that we’ll be referencing today.  Expired, however, is a romantic drama of the worst sort–the kind that won’t stop hurting.

In Expired, two horrendously deformed personalities–a total doormat of a woman and a complete jackass of a man–manage to find each other and engage in a tumultuous relationship that takes them through fights and death and bereavement and a horrendous New Years Eve featuring karaoke that has probably been banned by the Geneva Convention.  But will these two prove a match made in Hell?  Or will they realize that they’re both complete wastes of life and go their separate ways?

I’ve never watched a movie that hurt quite so badly as Expired did.

I spent insane amounts of time screaming at my television.  I never wanted a character dead quite so many times, either, as I wanted THESE two dead.  They were like needles.  Needles in my EYES.  By the hour mark I was shrieking in agony, wishing this would finally end.

And eventually, it did.  But by then, I was feeling so badly for pretty much everyone involved, but most badly for myself who had to sit through this misery tour, that I was glad to eject the DVD it came on.

I wondered, what kind of masochist would subject themselves, voluntarily, to watch a movie where a guy tries to score with a woman literally the SAME NIGHT HER MOTHER DIED.  And what kind of cynic would fail to be amazed that she ACTUALLY LET HIM GET SOME.

And it’s like this for the whole movie.  It’s a hundred and seven minutes of some of the most horrendous relationship I’ve ever seen.  These two halfwits make Bobby and Whitney look like Ozzie and Harriet.

Oh, sure, you want to believe that they’re both getting better, in their way.  And you can actually start to see that, after a fashion.  But it’s just too little, too late.  The damage is done.  This movie is downright painful to watch for entirely too little payoff.

The Screenhead Ten Scale’s off in a corner retching right now, but it told me to pass on that it gave this horrendous misery tour a two out of ten.  Wait…it just said something about “rewarding effort”, which is fair enough.  It DID try, after all.  It just didn’t end well at all.

Up in the Air is looking pretty good.  I like the rhythm of the movie and George Clooney doesn’tmiss a beat.  I’d love to get a hold of the soundtrack.  The clarity of the sound is weak. You can see a better version of the trailer at Apple.

Author Stephanie Meyer talks about her story in the recent New Moon Featurette.  Actors offer their insight into their characters and how they relate to Meyer’s story. It’s like a who’s who of Twilight vampires.

If you are like me, who loves to see how scenes are created, then you’ll love this featurette because it’s all about setting up the scene.  I have posted this scene in full, but this is how they created the scene and made the actors look so strong and violent.  Even the stunt coordinator talks to us about setting up the violence. 

While watching, see if you can catch Robert Pattinson holding a cup of tea while wearing his robe as the stunt coordinator goes over some moves with him for the scene.  Somehow it’s surreal to see an actor holding a cup of tea while discussing a fight scene with a crew member — it’s so British.

A Single Man in HD

Trailer Park | MySpace Video

A Single Man, a romantic story interrupted, is both co-written and directed by American fashion designer Tom Ford, who makes his directorial debut with this film. David Scearce helped with the script, which is adapted from Christopher Isherwood ’s novel of the same name. The Weinstein Company is bringing A Single Man to limited theaters starting on December 17, 2009.

Colin Firt does an extraordinary job of playing an English professor, whose partner dies suddenly and he tries to live ha typical day, which is a struggle to say the least.  Will he find the meaning of life?

You’ll never guess who, of all people in the UNIVERSE, wants to star in a romantic comedy!  Let’s just say it’s probably the most unlikely person you can imagine–let’s have a little fun and see if you can guess who!

A. Artie Lange

B. 50 Cent

C. Bruce Campbell

The answer?  Shockingly, it’s B!  FITTY CEN!  Can you believe this?  After the sheer number of craptacular games and albums he’s put out, he actually wants to star in a romantic comedy. I mean, come on now…I’ve heard some idiotic ideas in my time, but this second rate halfwit in a romantic comedy?  That’s one of the dumbest ideas I’ve heard since “John Kerry, reporting for duty.” !  And this is how he put it:

“I’d do a romantic comedy if I liked the script.  But it has to be believable and I have to feel I can bring the character to life.”

Kinda like you “brought your character to life” in that horrendous game you put out about the crystal skull a month or so ahead of Indiana Jones, Fifty?  Yeah, okay…call me when you discover reality.

I’ve got to give a hand to Disney for making the first Prince of Persia trailer very compelling while letting us in on the story. Usually, first trailers try to tease us, so we are asking for more information about the story and that can be not so fun. 

Disney’s first trailer of Prince of Persia tells us what the story is about and we get a flavor of the tongue and cheek between the prince and the princess, although I am not quite sure what  Ben Kingsley’s role is, accept he is the bad guy.  Is he also interested in the princess or does he just want the dagger?

Here is the domestic trailer for Broken Embraces, starring Penelope Cruz and directed by Pedro Almodovar.  I love the vivid colors and dramatic looks of Cruz as she takes on personas in the trailer.  I am not familiar with Almodovar’s work but it looks surreal. But I am compelled to watch the trailer over and over again. It’s quite striking. Don’t you think?

I don’t think the trailer sets the movie right, so I have included the story line below.  The movie opens November 20, 2009.

A man writes, lives and loves in darkness. Fourteen years before, he was in a brutal car crash on the island of Lanzarote. In the accident, he not only lost his sight, he also lost Lena, the love of his life. 

This man uses two names: Harry Caine, a playful pseudonym with which he signs his literary works, stories and scripts, and Mateo Blanco, his real name, with which he lives and signs the film he directs. After the accident, Mateo Blanco reduces himself to his pseudonym, Harry Caine. If he can’t direct films he can only survive with the idea that Mateo Blanco died on Lanzarote with his beloved Lena.  

In the present day, Harry Caine lives thanks to the scripts he writes and to the help he gets from his faithful former production manager, Judit García, and from Diego, her son, his secretary, typist and guide. 

Since he decided to live and tell stories, Harry is an active, attractive blind man who has developed all his other senses in order to enjoy life, on a basis of irony and self-induced amnesia. He has erased from his biography any trace of his first identity, Mateo Blanco.

One night Diego has an accident and Harry takes care of him (his mother, Judit, is out of Madrid and they decide not to tell her anything so as not to alarm her). During the first nights of his convalescence, Diego asks him about the time when he answered to the name of Mateo Blanco, after a moment of astonishment Harry can’t refuse and he tells Diego what happened fourteen years before with the idea of entertaining him, just as a father tells his little child a story so that he’ll fall asleep.

The story of Mateo, Lena, Judit and Ernesto Martel is a story of “amour fou”, dominated by fatality, jealously, the abuse of power, treachery and a guilt complex. A moving and terrible story, the most expressive image of which is the photo of two lovers embracing, torn into a thousand pieces.