The latest from art house icon Alain Resnais (Hiroshima mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad) starring Sabine Azema, Andre Dussollier, Emmanuelle Devos, Anne Consigny and Mathieu Amalric opens June 25.
Hiroshima and Marienbad are frankly the kinds of foreign films that make people hate foreign films. Slow. Inscrutable. Tortured. There’s something oddly compelling about the latter, but I’ve never warmed up to the former.
Judging by the fawning critical reaction at Cannes, Wild Grass will likely delight Resnais fans.
My first thought when word got out they were making a sequel to John McTiernan’s 1987 sci-fi action flick Predator was: “great, more studio grave robbery.”
Then I thought about it some more and I remembered the original was a great idea, but I never actually liked it all that much. I know it’s beloved by men of a certain age, but Schwartzenegger is a liability in almost everything he’s ever been in. There. I said it. The first Terminator is fine. I still have fond memories of Twins. I like Total Recall, but that’s in spite of Schwarzenegger and not because of him. He was better in Predator than in some others, but he still sucked.
So, ok. A new approach to a solid concept with upgraded special effects and a cast that includes Laurence Fishburne and Adrien Brody. Fine. I can get behind that.
But then there’s this trailer and I’m back to square one. Unremarkable and virtually indistinguishable from dozens of other movies of its type.
At least no one growls “If it bleeds, we can kill it.”
I’m not the target audience for this movie based on Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestseller Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia and part of my brain wants me to run from it screaming – the privileged white woman getting her spiritual groove back by traveling to foreign countries thing sets off alarm bells aplenty – but I have to admit the trailer kind of grabbed me anyway. The truth is, I like Julia Roberts. Also, cliched as it may be, I’d rather see a movie about a woman seeking spiritual nourishment than the ghastly materialist monsters in Sex and the City 2.
Besides, I had similar apprehensions about Julie & Julia and that turned out ok. This film should appeal to the exact same group of over-30 females who are comfortable yet wondering if there isn’t a little bit more to life than they’ve gotten out of it so far. Being an underserved demographic, it will probably be huge.
Richard Jenkins, Viola Davis, Javier Bardem, James Franco and Billy Crudup round out the cast.
We’ll find out if director Ryan Murphy has atoned for the terrible Running With Scissors on August 13.
Thanks to everyone who entered either via Twitter or email.
Don’t forget the film version opens in limited release tomorrow.
The story follows a disgraced journalist as he investigates the 40-year-old disappearance of a young girl from a wealthy Swedish family. He’s assisted by a mysterious and withdrawn young computer hacker: the girl with the dragon tattoo.
You can keep the wide releases this weekend, but there’s some good stuff opening in limited release including Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg starring Ben Stiller, the Swedish mystery thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the music bio The Runaways.
If nothing here grabs you, check out what else is now playing updated each Friday.
Opening in wide release:
Repo Men. It’s probably telling that the title of Eric Garcia’s novel The Repossession Mambo has been dumbed down to the more innocuous and less interesting Repo Men to appeal to wide swaths of unthinking stooges who’ll turn up to see anything that doesn’t confuse them. As always, we’re left to determine whether the movie itself has been similarly stupidified or if it’s just the marketing. Based on the hard R (for “strong bloody violence, grisly images, language and some sexuality/nudity”), I’m going to hold out hope for the latter. Jude Law and Forest Whitaker play repo men in a dystopian future where human organs can be replaced by mechanical copies. The catch is that these life-saving organs are very expensive and if you miss a payment, you’re liable to have monsieurs Law and Whitaker showing up at your doorstep to take the organ back the hard way. When Law is implanted with a mechanical heart of his own, he begins to have second thoughts about his chosen profession. Without his job, how will he ever pay for the heart and if he doesn’t, whom will they send to take it back? Trailer / Showtimes
Armond White finally saw Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg and has included his thoughts in a wider rant about Village Voice critic J. Hoberman.
To quickly recap for those of you who don’t pay attention to critical squabbles: The internet worked itself into a tizzy a week and a half ago when an anonymous email made the rounds after White was reportedly “disinvited” from a screening of Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg by the film’s publicist at the request of Baumbach and Greenberg’s producers. Invoking the first amendment and comparing publicists to Nazis, the letter called for the critical community to rally around Mr. White.
Except it didn’t. First, there’s the matter of White having said in an interview that Baumbach was an asshole: “You look at Noah Baumbach’s work, and you see he’s an asshole. I would say it to his face. And, of course, he gets praised by other assholes, because they agree with his selfish, privileged, stuck-up shennanigans. I don’t need to meet him to know that. better than meeting him, I’ve seen his movies.” And then there’s the matter of White, in a review of Mr. Jealousy, possibly having suggested Baumbach’s mother (former Village Voice film critic Georgia Brown) should’ve aborted him. J. Hoberman dug up the review in question, though to be fair White’s comments are cryptic at best.
Here’s a two-part look at the restoration process behind the 3/23 Blu-ray and DVD release of John Huston’s The African Queen starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn.
Also available in Blu-ray and DVD as a commemorative box set with an “all-new hour long ‘making of’ feature with never-before-seen images and commentary,” an audio CD with the original The African Queen radio broadcast starring Humphrey Bogart and Greer Garson, Katharine Hepburn’s out-of-print memoir The Making of The African Queen or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind, plus some assorted collectible gewgaws and knickknacks.
Meet Roger Greenberg, an easy five to ten years beyond the point where being too hip and principled and above it all to commit yourself to something (anything) is boyishly charming. A misanthrope clinging to a loose collection of faded ideals backed up by a knot of excuses and justifications for his current state of non-being, he’s returned to Los Angeles to mind his brother’s comfortable upper class house in the Hollywood Hills. After years spent in New York, he’s hardened but otherwise unchanged. The cynical protective armor that was once his sense of humor has withered into an unappealing husk which he drags around behind him from one disappointment to the next. Nursing old resentments, still hung up on past mistakes and keen to relive past triumphs, he reaches out to old friends only to find that life in LA did not stop moving forward in his absence. While the rest of the world has grown, Greenberg has merely congealed.
I’ll be wrapping up the contest to win a hardback copy of Stieg Larsson’s bestselling The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo sometime tomorrow so if you’re a US resident, remember to drop me a line at:
win [at] livingincinema.com
That’s it. It couldn’t be much easier.
Dragon Tattoo is the first of a series known as The Millenium Trilogy. All three mysteries including The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest have been adapted into films in their home country of Sweden and the first one opens in the US on Friday, March 19. Check out Music Box Films for more on the film including release dates nationwide. Stay tuned for the official LiC review of the film.
and part of my brain wants me to run from it screaming – the privileged white woman getting her spiritual groove back by traveling to foreign countries thing sets off alarm bells aplenty – but I have to admit the trailer kind of grabbed me anyway. The truth is, I like Julia Roberts. Also, cliched as it may be, I’d rather see a movie about a woman seeking spiritual nourishment than the ghastly materialist monsters in Sex and the City 2.
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release of John Huston’s The African Queen starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn.
and 
as a commemorative box set with an “all-new hour long ‘making of’ feature with never-before-seen images and commentary,” an audio CD with the original The African Queen radio broadcast starring Humphrey Bogart and Greer Garson, Katharine Hepburn’s out-of-print memoir The Making of The African Queen or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind, plus some assorted collectible gewgaws and knickknacks.
and 
have been adapted into films in their home country of Sweden and the first one opens in the US on Friday, March 19. Check out 
