225BatonRouge.com - Blogs

First thing's first. If you didn't see this on the Web yesterday, behold, the teaser trailer for Spiderman 3. See how I said "Web" instead of Internet? I'm clever like that.

I decided to have a “Harrison Ford saves his family” festival last weekend and rented Frantic and Firewall. Both are technically “thrillers,” but filmed nearly 20 years apart. Roman Polanski’s Frantic is a strange movie, poking along at a glacial pace, spiked with momentary lapses of complete weirdness, and the most unbelievably perverse case of missing luggage a vacationing couple could stumble upon. I actually preferred Ford’s performance in Firewall, though the film suffers from pacing problems and a week ending—as does Frantic—but heist mastermind Paul Bettany is always interesting to watch for his acting choices, and if you’re not expecting anything more than a run-of-the-mill thriller, Firewall might be worth the rental.

Opening this week are The Devil Wears Prada, and of course, Superman Returns.

Word is Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour is in a royal tizzy about The Devil Wears Prada, a film adapted from the tell-all book penned by Lauren Weisberger who’s first job in New York was as Wintour’s executive assistant. I worked among New York literati for a while, and there, Weisberger is less an author, and more a 29-year-old legend, like a preternatural avatar whose charge it was to speak up (and profit handsomely) from her days on the low rungs of the media circus. Go ‘head girl.

Okay, so a friend asked me the other day if I had heard that Superman was gay. Have you heard this one? I wasn’t sure whether he meant the actor or the character. But, regardless, what a ridiculous rumor. First of all, director Bryan Singer, who is openly gay, says Superman likes the ladies, and secondly, if Superman were gay, he’d be super gay. By that I mean you’d know it. Plus, he’s got super honesty, so there’s no way he’d be in the closet.

Woody Allen moved from New York to London to give us Match Point last year, and the veteran filmmaker seems to have set up shop in the mother country. The trailer for his latest, Scoop, a comedy starring Scarlett Johanssen and Hugh Jackman can be seen here. It looks like your typical murder mystery farce and bumbling romance from Allen, albeit with a quirky supernatural twist to it.

Finally, here are some DVD picks for the week to get you all worked up: Austrian thriller Cache starring Juliette Binoche, and controversial documentary on the military-industrial complex Why We Fight.