Screenhead

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.

I found the movie for the perfect date on Valentine’s Day.  Dear John, it’s a tear jerker from Nicolas Sparks novel of the same title and directed by Oscar nominated Swedish filmmaker Lasse Hallström, My Life as a Dog, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Cider House Rules and Chocolat.

Channing Tatum stars with Amanda Seyfried about a couple who fall in love.  Yet, Tatum’s character is in the Army and is consistently deployed away from the woman he loves. For seven years they are constantly apart only to stay in touch through a stream of love letters — typical Sparks romance.

I like Tatumin this trailer and Seyfried is brilliant as ever.  The movie opens in February 2010, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

Folks, I’ll be honest with you–I know, aren’t I usually?–but I’ll tell you right off the bad that Couples Retreat is not the kind of movie I usually go to the theater for.

Frankly, a movie like this, you don’t HAVE to.  There are no big special effects, no huge crashes of audio, nothing that would necessitate a screen measured in feet and a speaker count that requires you to take off your shoes to match the count. But the really interesting part about Couples Retreat is that you’ll WANT to.

Somewhere out there, there are four groups of friends, and their marriages frankly have seen better days.  One of them, a hard-charging type-A couple that is almost incapable of carrying on a conversation without Powerpoint, is actually inches from divorce.  And to that end, they’re seeking therapy at an island resort called Eden.  But Eden doesn’t come cheap, and as such, the type-A excelsior couple wants to enlist its circle of friends to go on a package deal, which is significantly cheaper.  Lured by promises of sun and frolic, the other couples retreat, and discover a whole lot about themselves, their partners, and their lives.

There are several moments in this movie that can really only be described as awkward.  Faizon Love naked, for example.  A day at the spa.  A really uncomfortable yoga sequence.  Some moments in here break open the awkward scale and segue into creepy.

But there are also a lot of good laughs to be had here, and some poignant bits that’ll actually make you think.  Couples out there…how much of your life is “his” and “hers” and how much of it is “ours”?  It’s a question to ask, for anyone who’s ever been or ever thought about being in a relationship.  You would not think of me, a man who can pummel virtually any horror movie trivia into the very ground, as a person to enjoy a romantic comedy, but Couples Retreat qualified.  It was funny, it made me think a bit, it gave me Vince Vaughn as a dad, there’s plenty of great points here.

Of course, I also got to watch a four year old thoroughly use a display toilet in a home improvement store.  Twice.   And that’s something you never want to see.

The Screenhead Ten Scale is prepared to sift through a bit of dross for some comedy silver, and understands that getting laughs is downright important.  Despite the awkwardness, it hands over a seven out of ten for being a thoroughly satisfactory comedy with its share of rough spots.

My gut feeling is that this will be a great movie because Gary Marshall directed the comedy with a long list of stars. Yet, the trailer does not do the movie justice.  This is the first one, so perhaps we will see more in the next one. I look forward to the movie when it opens February 2010.

First off, yes, Kristen Stewart DOES in fact have an action figure, based on her character Bella from the truly godawful Twilight series that everyone seems to love despite all logic and good common sense.

But anyway, she’s not terribly happy with that action figure, and you won’t believe why.

It turns out it has…ahem…larger attributes than she does.  I’ll let her be more specific:

“I think she has a much bigger rack than I have,” Kristen said. “I also think she looks much older than me.  I guess I can live with that. In fact, I’m getting used to the bigger rack.”

There are a great many things that could be said at this point but most of them would likely get me sued by somebody for some reason or another.  I’ll just suffice it to say that Hollywood’s weirdness truly knows no bounds.

It’s hard to pin down exactly how I feel about volume two of Primeval, which just came out yesterday from the folks at BBC America.  But we’ll go through exactly why in a minute.

First, a plot recap.  There’s an organization in England, the ARC,  that’s devoted entirely to hunting down various beasties that emerge from some kind of time-dilation portal known as an anomaly.  These anomalies spew beasties like a dime store gumball machine spews toy beasties when you put in a credit card.  So needless to say, there are a whole lot of beasties running wild in and around London at any time.

This is where our fearless collective of heroes steps in and takes care of business in the grandest possible sense, ushering the beasties back through the anomalies wherever possible and occasionally killing a few when it’s not.  Meanwhile, the ARC is being hounded in every possible direction, like dealing with overzealous journalists and former operatives who are convinced that they have seen the enemy, and the enemy is ARC, just not right away.

Alternately thrilling and baffling by turns, Primeval is going to do a whole lot of interesting things, some of which even manage to make sense.  But it’s not just science fiction in here, no sir–there will be some laughs and some occasional romantic bits that will actually allow guys, who came here for the beasties and the sheer staggering array of hot English chicks, to convince their girlfriends to see it too, because there will be plenty of drama and romantic tension among our leads.

In other words, Primeval is one of those really, really rare collections that manages to be a whole lot of different things to a whole lot of different people.  And that’s part of its great appeal.

Whether you’re here to watch beasties try and eat people or see if those two favorite characters of yours will EVER manage to kiss, Primeval pretty much has everything you’re going to be wanting.

And that’s why the Screenhead Ten Scale hands it a hefty seven out of ten, because even though it’s a bit niche, it’s nowhere near as niche as anyone expected.

Well, folks–it’s true.  And as much as I may wish I weren’t here typing this right now, it’s just entirely too true to not write about.

If this doesn’t qualify as a sign of the Apocalypse it’s hard to tell what will, but Sarah Jessica Parker is reportedly hard at work filming the sequel to Sex and the City. And as much as it may make me cringe to even think about another foray into the upscale female version of a bad eighties movie, it’s no less there.

The scene she began filming features her emerging from the apartment she bought and sold with Big in the last go-round, and by all accounts, she’s looking happy.  What exactly this means for the film is hard to tell, but one thing is clear enough–the game is on, whether we like it or not.

The Sex and the City sequel hits theatres May of 2010.

Boy Meets Girl. Boy Falls in Love. Girl Doesn’t. – This is a story of boy meets girl, begins the cynical, and with that the film takes off at breakneck speed into a funny, true-to-life and unique dissection of the unruly and unpredictable year-and-a-half of one young man’s no-holds-barred love affair. These two actors play off each other brilliantly. Critics love this movie and I am posting it again because it’s still in the theaters, and if you haven’t seen it yet — do so.