Screenhead

If you really, REALLY, just couldn’t get enough of the movie Seven, then I’m somewhat happy to announce that you’ll get to enjoy a low-rent knockoff in the form of Horsemen, new from Lions Gate.

When a recently widowed detective finds himself forced to make ends meet between his detective work and his family, he ends up on the bad end of a murder spree focused around the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  And as his family situation steadily deteriorates around him, the case only gets stranger and more horrifying.

Okay, okay–so it watches like a low-budget version of Seven, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Just because we don’t have Brad Pitt screaming about what’s in the box doesn’t mean we can’t have fun with Dennis Quaid being a mostly absentee father!

But it’s true–Horsemen is a fairly involving crime drama, but it does leave a lot of unpleasant plot holes.  Frankly, I wondered why they even bothered with the whole family thing at all–it’s not like it made much difference on the plot.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile, hands this ambivalent crime thriller a four out of ten for not being too bad, but not being anything special, either.  Plus, being derivative is never helpful in these situations; if you’re going to rip someone else off, at least do it right.

So after seeing–and enjoying!–the trailers for Despicable Me, it’s interesting to see that another supervillain-centrated cartoon will be hitting theatres.

After catching my colleague Kenna’s take on the whole thing, I had to throw in my own two cents–this is just bizarre.  Really, bizarre.  Took about two minutes to scrape my jaw off the floor after THAT little chunk of news hit.  I mean, in what universe do you replace   ROBERT DOWNEY JR. with Will Ferrell?  Isn’t this like replacing A-Rod with Charlie Brown?

And, even on the off chance you’re going to try and replace Robert Downey Jr. with ANYONE, why Will Ferrell?  I can think of a hundred better candidates off the top of my head! Seriously–couldn’t Stiller call in some help from his Mystery Man days?  Surely William H. Macy could’ve handled the job.  After playing The Shoveler, I can’t see how he couldn’t get Metro Man down.  Dan Castellaneta’s Blue Raja comes easily to mind, and even Paul Reubens’ The Spleen could’ve probably done a better job than Will Ferrell.

Will this incredibly brave–or incredibly stupid–move pay off?  We’ll have to wait to see–this is slated for a November 2010 release.

Dreamworks has made some casting changes for their latest animation project Oobermind.  Will Ferrell, Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill offer their voices for the comedy that is schedule to open in fall 2010.

Wait a minute…Where’s Robert Downey, Jr.?

Ferrell replaces Downey in the title role of the super-villain who imagines all his dastardly dreams coming true after defeating good-guy rival Metro Man (Pitt), only to find life can be very boring without an enemy to fight. To fill the emptiness, Oobermind creates a new superhero, Titan (Hill), who also has a desire to be bad. Thus, Oobermind has to switch sides and be good. It’s a crazy story but works for me.

Look here, another actor joins the trio. It’s Tina Fey, who actually has been on board for some time. She plays the reporter, who must keep track of the city’s confusing superhero situation. Only a woman could do that! The movie sounds like fun.

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 »

Entertainment Tonight’s film clip of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is so far the best one I have seen yet.  ET grants the wild, horrific comedy lots of viewing time and worth the watch just to get a better feel for the film.

I like the pacing of this trailer better than the first one.  Tarantino is written all over it.  The quality is poor toward the end, but it is brutally edited.

I have to admit, when I finally managed to lay hands on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I really wasn’t all that sure what to expect from it.  Of course, the plot was obvious enough…everyone had been talking about it since its Oscar bid.  But what I found when I watched it was unusual enough to make it worth talking about.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is about life in its most primal form, reversed—for most, life can only be lived forwards and understood backwards.  But for Benjamin Button, it’s lived backwards, and strangely, understood forwards.  Born in his eighties due to a bizarre condition that ages him in reverse, we follow Benjamin Button throughout his life, his loves, and his own inevitable end.

It’s a strange movie, this one—similar to titles like Forrest Gump, focusing on the unusual life of an unusual person, it’s a deep and rich epic with lots of stories to tell, both heartwarming and horrifying in their ways.  It’s told from the perspective of a woman dying in a hospital, her granddaughter reading the diary of the man that meant so much to her over the years—specifically, Benjamin Button.  There’s so much to see here that it’s a lot like being with an elderly person.  It has all the stories of a lifetime.  Not all of them are interesting, and some of them are downright sad, but some of them are beautiful.

And that’s exactly what this movie is, almost three straight hours of stories.  Benjamin Button will find love, find loss, find war, find peace, find hope and charity and everything in between.  You’ve got to really want a movie like this, because a movie like this is an undertaking.  It’s a project.  You’ve got to block out nearly three hours if you want to see this one, and three hours is not easy to come by these days.

But if you put the three hours into it, what you’ll get is a story of shocking depth for Hollywood.  You’ll get great performances—those who said that this is some of Brad Pitt’s greatest work were not kidding—and you’ll get some beautiful images.  Even when Benjamin went to war, they managed to make it look beautiful in a way.

And as I grew to realize, fumbling along through this…this enormous brick edifice of a movie…I began to wonder, maybe this was too much.  Maybe there’s too much going on here.  Maybe it’s made itself downright inaccessible to just about everybody by requiring so much of its audience.  And in a way, I’m happy that they thought enough of me to subject me to this monster, knowing that I could take it or leave it, but if I wanted to take it, I would have to EARN it.

This movie questions my worth to be part of its audience.  After years of being underestimated by movies, it’s nice to be challenged so blatantly.  The only question that remains is, do you want to take them up on their challenge?  Do you want to sit through a three hour movie and watch beauty and loss and pain and joy and everything else that makes up one man’s life?  Do you want to care this much about one guy?  If you do, then go.  Go and get a copy of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  If not, well, there’s plenty else for you out there.  You can get two, most of three movies into that same place.  But none of them will be quite like what you could have had with Benjamin Button.

Variety sends word that Demetri Martin (Taking Woodstock) has joined Steven Soderbergh’s Moneyball for Sony Pictures.

The film, an adaptation of Michael Lewis’ book, follows a ballplayer-turned-general manager Billy Beane as he attempts to field a competitive team on a slim payroll.

Brad Pitt stars as Beane, while Martin will play Paul de Podesta, a Harvard graduate who turned down Wall Street jobs to use his statistical skills to change baseball scouting tactics. His system, known as “Earned Run Value”, allowed Beane to evaluate valuable players he could hire at a low cost.

Shooting begins this June.

Vanity Fair spellchecks Inglourious Basterds, premiering at Cannes. You could call Quentin Tarantino’s latest film one of his best as he defies Hollywood. The story is set in Nazi-occupied France. Brigitte Lacombe of Vanity occupies the set of the film, starring Brad Pitt. In the May issue you will find a n exclusive scene from Tarantino’s script. Click on the picture of Pitt to view Lacombe pictures from the set.