Weekend Forecast: 12/21/07
By Craig Kennedy - December 19th, 2007; 1:51 am
Johnny Depp is Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
There are a bunch of wide releases this week so I’m rolling out the Weekend Forecast a day early in order to get them while they’re as fresh and hot as one of Mrs. Lovett’s meat pies:
- Charlie Wilson’s War. Mike Nichols directs this scrubbed and somewhat deballed, yet still charming and entertaining movie about the Texas congressman who helped fund a covert war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Tom Hanks is enjoyable as the black sheep Charlie Wilson, but Philip Seymour Hoffman (as cranky CIA agent Gust Avrakotos) takes the patented Aaron Sorkin patter, makes it his own and steals the movie in the process. Julia Roberts also co-stars.
- National Treasure: Book of Secrets. Producer/Antichrist Jerry Bruckheimer assembles a terrific cast including Nic Cage, Jon Voight, Harvey Keitel and Helen Mirren, eats them alive, shits them out onto stale RyKrisp crackers and serves them up to audiences with cold bottles of urine. You can tell me all you want how you just like fun popcorn movies and I will tell you you’re simply lining the devil’s pockets. Popular cinema is being flushed down the crapper and you’re holding the handle. We all have to make a stand somewhere and this is where I draw the line.
- P.S. I Love You. Richard LaGravanese directs Hillary Swank in this romance about a woman who finds help from an unusual source in dealing with the death of her husband. As a single male, I’m so clearly not the target audience for this movie it’s not even funny, but I’d rather be strapped to a chair with electrodes clamped to my nipples watching an endless loop of P.S. I Love You than catch a single frame of the Bruckheimer flick.
- Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. There will be blood indeed. Tim Burton brings the Broadway musical to the big screen in most entertaining and bloody fashion. Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Coen, Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall are all along for the fun. Musicals about serial killers don’t come down the pipe very often so don’t miss this one.
- Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. First Todd Haynes deconstructed the musical biopic and now Judd Apatow, Jake Kasdan and John C. Reilly make fun of it. This kind of thing can turn out good or bad. I’m willing to put a certain amount of faith in Apatow and Reilly though, despite a few fine moments, Talladega Nights was one of the laziest, least funny popular comedies I’ve seen in a long time. I have no memory of Jake Kasdan’s Orange County except I remember having no memory of it.
Expanding this week are a handful of movies I’ve talked about here and there:
- Atonement. Recommended.
- The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Recommended and Alison approved.
- Juno. Oddly, recommended even though I didn’t care for it.
- The Kite Runner. Haven’t seen it.
- The Savages. Heartily recommended.
And a scattering of limited releases:
- Flakes. (Wed 12/19) I don’t know. No energy to manufacture a blurb. Something about a cereal bar owner. I don’t know what a cereal bar is, but it sounds like a waste of Zooey Deschanel. Here, ask these people,
- Romance and Cigarettes. John Turturro’s musico-romanto-comedy drama starring James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi, Mandy Moore, Christopher Walken, Eddie Izzard and Elaine Stritch has sharply divided critics. For some strange reason, I’m really curious. Go ahead, make fun of me Bruckheimer lovers!
- Steep. Documentary about big-mountain skiing. Sounds like just the kind of thing the Spicoli worshipping, Vans wearing meatheads in my high school would’ve flocked to back in 1985.
Filed under: Upcoming
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- Review: Romance and Cigarettes (2007) *** 1/2
- Weekend Forecast: 2/1/08
- Weekend Forecast: 7/25/08
- Weekend Forecast: 11/2/07
A friend asked around if anyone wanted to go with her to see P.S. I love you. Her argument? “cute guy, irish accent and I am sure the movie is nice as well”. The fact that the guy is apparently dead 90% of the movie didn’t really seem to phase her. I guess that’s box-office success, right there…
Just for the record, I did decline her kind offer. And made an agreement to watch Sweeney Todd when it comes out :-D
I look forward to hearing your response to Sweeney. I think you’ll like it, but one never knows for sure about these things.
Wouldn’t be very interesting if we could predict these things perfectly, would it? :-)
Hedwig, the curious implication of the PS I Heart XX Chromosome Box Office trailer is that the male lead, while dead, is essentially in the entire movie due to flashbacks and the contrived plot device. My guess is that the producers saw the opportunity to get the weepy part out of the way early and follow that up with lots of romance. Unresolved, after-he’s-dead romance, but romance none the less. It’s like English Patient crossed with Amelie.
Except without all the Amelie parts I liked.
Looks like here we’ve got Sweeney Todd and Charlie Wilson’s War opening while Diving Bell and Savages are still MIA. I’ll probably try to see both of these this weekend as neither one is necessarily guaranteed to survive long in theaters, regardless of what critics claim.
Craig, Craig, Craig. Diving Bell only ‘Recommended’ while The Savages is ‘Highly Recommended’? ;-)
Ah, well, at least you didn’t ‘Highly Recommend’ National Treasure 2.
I’m also very curious about Romance and Cigarettes. I’ve always liked Turturro as an actor.
Besides, there’s a wacky-looking Christopher Walken in the film once again. Who can resist?
It’s Heartily Recommended for Savages. Not sure if that exceeds Highly or not, but for the record I do think there’s a difference. I’m pretty sure that Heartily is fairly positive though, at least rating higher on the scale than “shitting on stale Rykrisp crackers” would imply.
My point is, if this is an anti-Heartily, National Treasure 2: Electric Cage-aloo has warranted it.
You’re right, Joel. I read that wrong.
Still, ‘Heartily Recommended’ is definitely higher than ‘Recommended’.
National Treasure 2 is definitely anti-Heartily, and as Craig has pointed out, Bruckheimer is, after all, the anti-Christ.
Aahaha. Somehow, I knew I was going to catch hell for that. I had to do something to elevate The Savages from the pack, but look at it this way: it’s like ice cream. I’d heartily recommend Chocolate Chip Mint, but that doesn’t mean I don’t also love other ice creams.
Except for rum raisin. It’s the National Treasure 2 of ice creams.
Ok, here I’ll change it…
:-)
You know that National Treasure 2 is going to be the #1 Box office draw, sadly.
Yes I do, and the worst part of that is that this means there will be an NT3.
Full Disclosure: Never saw the first one. Could be the best movie ever, but it’s Bruckheimer so I don’t care.
I’m only down with Bruckheimer when the films admit to being satanic and disposable, a la Bad Boys 2. The majority of them you can keep though.
I never saw the first one either.
Also, I never saw POTC 2 or 3. Nor did I see the first POTC in the theater. I wasn’t in the country and after seeing the ads I thought it would be another Cutthroat Island (remember that lemon?). So, I didn’t catch it until after it came on television.
I couldn’t stomach BB1, so I’m guessing I need not bother with BB2.
You’re my new hero Alison.
:-)
It’s really unfortunate that it took POTC to get them to notice Johnny Depp. To this day, Ed Wood remains my favorite performance of his. He was seriously snubbed for that.
I was duped into seeing the first POTC on DVD by people who promised me that it was the best movie ever. First Bruckheimer movie I’d watched since Beverly Hills Cop II in 1987. Boy was I pissed!
It wasn’t awful, but 90% of that was because of Depp…so at least his attention was deserved. But yeah, Ed Wood. You can’t beat that.
Can National Treasure 2 actually unseat King Will? Ah hell no!
Close second and a lock for a part 3? I’ll buy that.
I’m a born and bred angeleno, but I went to a second-run theatre in Dallas to see National Treasure six months after it was first released. The theatre was standing room only; packed wall-to-wall with all four quadrants (to borrow some suit lingo).
I’ll admit it was a guilty pleasure (Cage makes everything work for me) and I am looking forward to the sequel, but my complicity aside, the film will do business. People in middle America will devour this, and while Bruckheimer may be a detriment to the inherent quality of popular cinema, he is a godsend for the business of it .
The better his films do for the majors the more flush with cash, and thus less gun shy, their respective specialty divisions will be when it comes to both festival acquisitions and greenlighting in-house productions.
You’ll have to forgive my blind snobbery Roman. Fairly or not, Bruckheimer is my poster boy for a lessening of quality in Hollywood and a dumbing down of audiences in America.
I know he can’t be blamed for the fact that The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford only made $4 million, but he’s my lightening rod.
There will always be empty blockbuster entertainment as long as there are big studios, but I think it’s important to always try and raise the bar and fight it every step of the way just to keep the blockbuster mentality from taking over completely.
I also have a huge soft spot for Cage and my dirty little secret is that if I’d seen NT1, I might even have enjoyed it in spite of myself.
I wish Cage would start taking on roles like Leaving Las Vegas, etc. again. He’s got the talent, but he’s become more of a movie star than an actor. I’d welcome it if he began to challenge himself again.
I would like to believe Roman that your analysis of the suits is right but it would appear to me that rather than being less gunshy on the non-commercial fare, they instead tend to just order more of the same and make everything else more like the stuff that made money. As long as studios are run like corporate America, what makes money is all they’ll want to hear about.
I guess the only thing that stops the studio product from being completely skewed towards popcorn or other “entertainments” is that their divisions can still turn a profit from art house and/or more substantial films. The profits aren’t necessarily as big, but healthy enough in light of small budgets to ensure their continuation.
And there are still some folks in the studios that actually like movies, people who are motivated by more than simple greed. There’s always hope for movies and TV because it’s a creative process and so by default, some creative and intelligent folks will slip through the cracks and embed themselves in the process.
It’s just frustrating that there are literally more movies than anyone could hope to see in a given year now and yet the vast majority are so forgettable it borders on being obscene. Spending more money than the GNP of most industrialized nations and yet having very little to show for it.
Great point about the involvement of creative people who are motivated by more than greed. I remember being struck by William Goldman’s observation that despite the often disappointing quality of Hollywood films most of the creative people involved aspire to being part of something they can take pride in.
National Treasure 1 was not enjoyable. It was a watered-down Da Vinci Code ripoff (not that that movie was any good) and probably - and this is the clincher - the most boring Bruckheimer movie I’ve ever seen. I mean boring in the sense that there’s only one or two action sequences in the whole thing and the rest is a scavenger hunt and a lot of banter. Which means it was cheap to make/highly profitable.