Sep 13 2010 10:50 AM ET

Toronto Film Festival: 'Let Me In' and teen vampires in America

by Lisa Schwarzbaum
Categories: Let Me In, Let the Right One In, Toronto Film Festival, vampires

let-me-inImage Credit: Saeed AdyaniAs a great fan of the melancholy, Swedish, lonely-boy-meets-vampire-girlfriend film Let the Right One In, I was apprehensive when an American remake was announced. Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 original is so essentially Scandinavian in landscape and temperament that I couldn’t imagine how the tone (let alone the topography) could be exported without damage to the film’s sunless delicacy. Good news out of the Toronto Film Festival: As written and directed by Cloverfield‘s Matt Reeves, Let Me In — that’s the remade title of the remake — manages to be both satisfyingly gloomy and American gothic. In fact, devotees of Alfredson’s movie may be rattled by the eerie visual similarities in the English-language version. We’re in a sad apartment complex in early 1980s Los Alamos now (Los Alamos, with the area’s nuclear and scientific associations, is a nice touch, as are glimpses of President Reagan on the TV). But it’s still cold, dark, depressing, and confusing to be a vulnerable adolescent who can’t rely on adult support. And a bullied 12-year-old boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) still meets his unlikely, bloodsucking soulmate (Chloe Grace Moretz) when she is perched, barefoot, on monkeybars in a crummy outdoor playground. And it’s still a heartbreaking thrill when boy asks vampire-girl to go steady.

Young Moretz from Kick-Ass and Smit-McPhee from The Road carry their scenes with tremendous poise. And Richard Jenkins, playing the girl’s guardian/blood procurer, is terrific. For a movie that, in its singularity, had no need to be remade, this one has been (whew) remade with elegance. Incidentally, in the original, the kids were named Eli and Oskar. Now they’re called Abby and Owen. Is it way far-fetched to think that the boy’s name is a twisted wave to my colleague, Owen Gleiberman, in recognition of his own controversial pan of Let the Right One In? Oooh, eerie.

Sep 4 2010 12:58 PM ET

'Machete,' 'The American,' and 'Going the Distance': Did you agree with me? And which one did you like best?

by Owen Gleiberman
Categories: Danny Trejo, George Clooney, Going the Distance, Machete, The American

Machete_danny-trejoImage Credit: Joaquin AvellanBased on Friday’s returns, Machete, with $3.9 million, has cut off the competition so far, but the full weekend box-office report isn’t in yet. (There could well be a horse race for first place.) When the 1-2-3-4 slots are as closely lumped together as it appears they might be, it can be a challenge to look at the numbers and say what they really mean — assuming, that is, that they mean anything at all. (Sorry, but I’m not here to parse the metaphysics of pop-culture consumerism.) My gut analysis is this: Going the Distance (my favorite of the three films), which took in a scant $2.2 million on Friday, had a softer opening than it should have, and The American (my least favorite), which made $3.8 million, did stronger than I expected — a sure testament to George Clooney’s star power, but also, perhaps, to a genuine audience desire to seek out a quiet-cool, dramatically oblique ’70s-Euro-style thriller. What I want to know is this: How did you feel about these three films? Do you think I was too kind to Going the Distance? Or too hard on The American? (I wanted to like it; I just found it unconvincing on its own terms.)

And I’m especially curious about what people thought of Machete. In a strange way, Robert Rodriguez’s gory-witty badass-illegal-immigrant revenge thriller is two movies bundled in one. If you loved the now-classic, super-sly trailer for it in Grindhouse (“He just f—ed with the wrong Mexican!”), then you may well have gone in seeking out a rush of smart/dumb pulp-movie action that dances on the knife blade of parody. In a sense, though, the whole inside joke of Machete becoming a feature-length, wide-release movie is that a trailer conceived as knowing trash could now be expanded, a touch subversively, into a meat-and-potatoes lunkhead action movie for the same crowd that flocked to The Expendables — in other words, for a lot of people who might never dream of watching a movie like Grindhouse. I hope that we can at least agree on one thing: Danny Trejo (pictured above), as the brooding, monosyllabic slasher-stud Machete, rocks, rules, and does everything else that is awesome.

So who liked which movie? And why? And who disgrees with me about Going the Distance? Did it open soft because it didn’t fill the romantic-comedy bill, or because Drew Barrymore and Justin Long, charming as I think they are, still don’t pack the star power of a George Clooney?

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Aug 26 2010 12:28 PM ET

Owen's reviews revisited: Was I wrong to pan 'Metropolitan' and 'Pump Up the Volume'? Yes and no

by Owen Gleiberman
Categories: Christian Slater, Metropolitan, Owen's reviews revisited, Pump Up the Volume, Whit Stillman

Eigeman-SlaterImage Credit: Everett CollectionIn the issue of EW that came out 20 years ago this week (cover story: Elvis Presley!), I gave negative reviews to a pair of movies that both arrived on the scene to a kind of instant cachet: Whit Stillman’s insect-under- glass preppy drawing-room comedy Metropolitan and the Christian Slater midnight-radio- outlaw fable Pump Up the Volume. I wasn’t with the pack on either one; both had legions of fans, and critics, behind them. So I thought I’d go back and take another look at both movies to see if I still agreed with my original reviews. I ended up batting one for two. (Read full post)

Aug 21 2010 01:09 PM ET

Jennifer Aniston, Michael Cera, and, you know, Katharine Hepburn: Is it bad when an actor is always the same?

by Owen Gleiberman
Categories: Actors who are always the same, Jennifer Aniston, Katharine Hepburn, Michael Cera

Jennifer-Aniston-CeraImage Credit: Kerry HayesLately, I’ve been hearing a lot of bellyaching from readers about actors who, you say, essentially give the same performance in film after film. The prime offender — as, according to this criticism, she has been for years — is Jennifer Aniston, who is accused of never having grown past her performance as Rachel on Friends: same cheerleader- next-door sexy wholesomeness, same silky straight goddess-of- shampoo-commercial hair, same lonely-princess aura. But in the last year or so, a lot of folks have been singing a similar song about Michael Cera, with his flat turtle stare and high school girl’s voice and 21st century Woody Allen neurotic-nerd patter. I hear what you’re saying (let’s agree right now that there’s some truth to it), but what’s amusing, and at times infuriating, about all this she/he is always the same! high dudgeon is the absolute, outraged presumption that if an actor doesn’t vary his or her personality very much (or, in fact, at all) from movie to movie, then that’s automatically a bad thing.

I have two words to say in disagreement with that idea: Katharine Hepburn.

Okay, you know the next line, so let’s all say it together out loud: Jennifer Aniston is no Katharine Hepburn!

There, do you feel better? Well, Jennifer Aniston certainly is no Katharine Hepburn, and no one else is either. But you get my point, which is not about the relative merits of The Break-Up and The Philadelphia Story but about the principle at stake. (Read full post)

Aug 17 2010 10:59 AM ET

The girl cast in 'Dragon Tattoo': Can Rooney Mara be the punk pierced Vivien Leigh?

by Owen Gleiberman
Categories: David Fincher, Rooney Mara, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Vivien Leigh

Tattoo-Rooney-Scarlet-WindImage Credit: Kevin Winter, Getty Images; Everett CollectionThe moment I heard that David Fincher, the director of the upcoming American remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (scheduled release date: December 2011), had settled on his choice for an unknown actress to play Lisbeth Salander, the morosely punked-out cyber-genius/abuse victim/delinquent/ investigator/smashmouth heroine, I eagerly looked up her credits to see if I could remember her in any previous roles. I couldn’t. Her name was certainly promising: Rooney Mara (that’s her, above left) sounds exotic, vaguely foreign, and a little sinister, like Mata Hari with attitude. And she’s striking-looking, with an old-fashioned small-boned, sculptured-ivory elegance, and big blue eyes that seem to take in everything. I had seen most of Mara’s prominent films, like Youth in Revolt and A Nightmare on Elm Street, but when it turned out that I had no recollection of her performances in any of those relatively minor roles, I was glad. I think that Fincher did the right thing, and in fact made a very bold and ingenious move, by choosing a relative unknown. It gave me a tingle of anticipation that I had no idea who she was.

That’s because Lisbeth Salander, even when you do get to know her, has a certain distant, mysterious, and forbidding punk-ghost quality. She never ingratiates, the way that a conventional movie star does. She’s sneaky and remote and a touch sociopathic, slinking in the shadows of her torment — a self-styled cipher-avenger. In a certain sense, the actress who plays her has to vanish emotionally, to dial down her expressiveness to a barely visible simmer, and to make that slight stuntedness itself expressive. A name star like Natalie Portman or Scarlett Johansson would have had a harder time doing that. (Mara, to be fair, will be a little bit known by the time Dragon Tattoo comes out, since she’s got a major role in Fincher’s upcoming Facebook movie, The Social Network.) By turning his whole casting process into a kind of role-of-the-century Cinderella event, a contemporary version of the search for Scarlett O’Hara (that’s Vivien Leigh as Scarlett, above right — is the resemblance between her and Rooney Mara a coincidence?), Fincher did something extremely shrewd: He captured and built into the movie, before it even started shooting, the momentous quality of Lisbeth as a character. She speaks to readers around the world, and especially to women, because she represents a new-style fusion of victimization and empowerment. She’s Clarice Starling with the agony (and fiery revenge) of her past etched onto her skin. (Read full post)

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Aug 16 2010 11:29 AM ET

Tales of the box office: Why retro '80s action works -- and 'hip' marketing to the kids doesn't

by Owen Gleiberman
Categories: Eat Pray Love, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, The Expendables

Expendables-Eat-Pray-LoveImage Credit: Karen Ballard; Francois DuhamelIt’s not every weekend that finds three major Hollywood movies in competition, but this weekend’s triple threat of The Expendables, Eat Pray Love, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was more or less perfectly arranged to appeal to three separate — and, in theory at least, equally powerful — slices of the demographic pie. What resulted probably looks, in hindsight, like it was all too predictable. But the eternal fascination of the box office horse race is that nothing in Hollywood is ever truly foregone. (Especially the retro-lug appeal of Sylvester Stallone.) Here’s what the success, or lack of success, of these three movies tells us.

* * * *

Now that the numbers are in, the popularity of The Expendables seems, in every sense, a no-brainer. Extravagant big dumb action movie. With a dozen veteran machos. Including the formerly hot (Sylvester Stallone), the newly hot (Jason Statham), the still sort-of-hot (Bruce Willis), and the once-hot-then-not-now-hot-again (Mickey Rourke). All served up with a cheeky dash of self-deprecatory Man, we’re old! nostalgia. The result? A $35 million opening weekend gross. Like, duh. But let’s get real: The relative smash-hit opening of The Expendables was not, by any means, a sure thing. Though I personally thought that the movie delivered the goods, the reviews, on the whole, were middling, if not downright hostile. And in a summer where a movie as stoopid/clever as The A-Team foundered, this latest meathead retread of The Dirty Dozen looked as if it might have an even more severely limited appeal to women. What The Expendables was selling, however, wasn’t just action, it was ’80s-action nostalgia. The success of the movie delivers the same message that the success, back in the ’80s, of movies like Stallone’s Cobra did: that when it comes to blowing stuff up real good, it’s hard to aim too low. These are the kinds of pulp-vengeful, smash-slice-and-blast fantasies that Robert Rodriguez spoofed so exquisitely in his Grindhouse trailer for Machete (and, one hopes, in the upcoming feature based on it), and what evolved in the Reagan era is that this sort of picture moved, for the very first time, from the grindhouse to the multiplex, with bigger stars to sell it. (Cobra was like Machete starring Rocky.) That the formula still works to the degree that it does, and with a movie as grimy/fun/disreputable as The Expendables, is proof that tastes haven’t changed — if anything, they’ve just grown more resolutely devolved. (Read full post)

Aug 13 2010 12:01 AM ET

'Scott Pilgrim' vs. 'Eat Pray Love' and more: Owen and Lisa chow down on summer movie moments

by Owen Gleiberman
Categories: Eat Pray Love, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Summer Movie Watch, The Expendables, The Other Guys

Have you ever seen a movie you completely forgot in a week — except for one moment in it, which stayed with you for years? When you think about it, a lot of movies are like that. Lisa and I recently took time out to recall a handful of the movie moments from this summer that we suspect will be sticking in our heads for a very long time. (You know, like that final machete thrust in The Expendables. Or Julia Roberts savoring the perfect plate of Roman pasta in Eat Pray Love.) Of course, some movies are better than others, but what makes a moment memorable has its own mysterious chemistry. Check out our video conversation after the jump, and then tell us about some of your favorite movie moments from this summer. (Read full post)

Aug 5 2010 12:09 PM ET

3-D: Where do you stand on it now?

by Owen Gleiberman
Categories: 3-D movies, Avatar, J.J. Abrams

3d-moviesImage Credit: Photodisc/Getty ImagesWhen the history of the current 3-D boom is written, the last couple of weeks may well go down as having marked the early rumblings of a tectonic shift — the moment when the movie industry’s underlying doubts and anxieties about 3-D began to crystallize, for the first time, in a very public way. On Tuesday, a front-page story in The New York TImes put the spotlight on several noteworthy Hollywood filmmakers who have now gone on record to voice their lack of enthusiasm for the 3-D trend. In particular, the story quoted a line that J.J. Abrams dropped at Comic-Con. He said, “When you put the glasses on, everything gets dim.” That’s a very pithy line, a casual condemnation that carries more resonance the more that you think about it. If it were just an off-the-cuff, drive-by remark by a celebrity director that some rude blogger had insisted on posting, that might be one thing, but Abrams, who after last summer’s Star Trek is as potent — and commercially powerful — a purveyor of blockbuster fantasy as anyone now working in Hollywood, knew that his remark was inherently political. He knew that he was speaking as a de facto representative of those in the industry who are 3-D skeptics. When you put the glasses on, everything gets dim. That line has meaning because more than a few people — in the film industry, and in the audience, too — may now feel that way as well. (Read full post)

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Aug 3 2010 01:59 PM ET

Justin Bieber and Zac Efron: How to market a teen idol -- and how not to

by Owen Gleiberman
Categories: Charlie St. Cloud, Justin Bieber, Zac Efron, teen idols

beiber-efron-idolsImage Credit: Pamela Littkey; Diyah PeraThe announcement that Justin Bieber, the hip-swiveling Canadian teen-pop sensation who looks like a 12-year-old Hilary Swank in a windswept helmet, would be starring in his very own 3-D biopic, to be released next Valentine’s Day, occasioned shrieks of gratitude (at least, from his fans), along with more than a few chortles and eye rolls. All of that may be deserved. Bieber is now 16 years old, which sort of makes you wonder: Will the first half hour of this movie take place while he’s still in a high chair? To put it mildly, he doesn’t seem to have lived a long enough life to be telling his life story, and the list of biopics that actually star the subjects as themselves is very, very short, and not auspicious. When Muhammad Ali chose to portray himself in The Greatest, back in 1977, even that, coming from one of the most mythological self-promoters of the 20th century, seemed at the time like a rather startlingly blunt act of egotism run amok.

Nevertheless, I have to say: This is an incredibly shrewd move on Bieber’s part. For one thing, he’s a very talented dude, with more personality in his soaring rockin’-bird vocals, and his dance moves, than you’d find in all three Jonas Brothers mashed together. What’s truly savvy about the idea of a Justin Bieber biopic, though, as shameless and calculated an act of marketing as it may be, is that it’s just so damn…in-your-face. It’s Bieber’s way of saying: I’m here. I’m a sizzling commodity. Get used to it. And that’s what a teen idol today has to do to cut through the clutter. He, or she, must seize the focus, force the hot spotlight right onto his talent. I imagine that the Bieber movie will feature a fair amount of performance footage anyway — that the “biopic” aspect may, in fact, be just a way of dressing up a concert film. For the sheer audacity of the announcement, though, I’d have to say that Bieber and his army of handlers have won the week.

The week’s big loser, of course, is Zac Efron, who I treated rather harshly — and I stand by it — in my review of the saccharine, inert dud Charlie St. Cloud. Since I’ve liked Efron, a lot, in all three of the High School Musical films, there’s a reason I beat up on him here. (Read full post)

Jul 26 2010 11:58 AM ET

La Femmes Ni-Kickass: Angelina Jolie and Lisbeth Salander have made the female action star the new normal

by Owen Gleiberman
Categories: Angelina Jolie, Lisbeth Salander, Noomi Rapace, Salt, female action stars

angelina-jolie-noomi-rapaceImage Credit: Andrew Schwartz; Knud Koivisto The most relentlessly plugged nugget of information surrounding the snappy/ preposterous espionage-action thriller Salt is that Angelina Jolie took on the title role after Tom Cruise turned it down. That may well, in fact, be true. But the fact that you’ve read about it in virtually every review of the movie, and every feature pegged to it, tells you that it’s also a very craftily orchestrated piece of the publicity, a calculated way of shoring up Jolie’s image as an action star. (She took on a role designed for Cruise!) What’s fascinating is that the Jolie/Cruise connection has been exploited in a much different way than it would have been, say, 15 years ago.

Back in the ’90s, if an action role tailored to Tom Cruise had ended up going, instead, to a prominent actress, that tidbit of casting gossip would have been dropped into the media to legitimize the then fairly out-of-the-ordinary prospect of a chick heroine leaping off speeding trucks and using human beings for target practice. Now, it has a subtly different effect: Instead of calling attention to the novelty of it all, it reinforces the casual, no-sweat nature of the gender flip. Jolie as a CIA assassin who can fashion a rocket launcher out of the contents of a supply closet, who kick-boxes her way out of every jam, who walks on ledges like Spider-Woman, who mows down adversaries (Russians and Americans) with such heartless efficiency that she makes Jason Bourne look like a wuss…well, of course. As a thriller, Salt offers a cutting-edge example of how big-screen action heroines have edged their way past novelty, through legitimacy, and into inevitability. They’ve become the new normal. (Read full post)

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