Damon gets Bourne again

In theaters Friday: Skinwalkers, Stardust, Rocket Science, Rush Hour 3

New on DVD: Disturbia, I Think I Love My Wife

Celebrity birthday: Patricia Arquette turns 39 on Wednesday, and will be 45 when her current film is completed. The film, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood has been shooting since 2001 and will wrap in 2013. No kidding. It will follow the youth of a kid in “real time” so we’ll see him, and his parents Arquette and Ethan Hawke, age 12 years over the course of the movie.

Last week I posed the question: Will Hot Rod make it’s SNL hot shot a star? And nation, you responded. No. The film with Andy Samberg earned only $5 million in its opening weekend. A dismal showing considering the pretty funny trailer that featured Wedding Crashers star and Sacha Baron Cohen spouse Isla Fisher. I admit I didn’t see it either. I saw the Bourne Ultimatum with the rest of the country. Hot Rod should do much better on DVD, and I predict it will be on disc before Thanksgiving.

Remember the last scene from Supremacy when Joan Allen’s CIA agent telephones Jason Bourne to tell him his real name and to basically say that he was okay in her book? Remember how that felt a little out of place and tacked on, like “Why are they just letting him go now?” Well, it turns out that part three, The Bourne Ultimatum, cleverly takes place almost entirely between the Moscow chase that concluded Supremacy’s narrative and that final scene on the phone with Joan Allen. If that sounds confusing, it makes sense once you see it.

Sure the car chases are over the top and the shaky cam makes you feel like you’re watching two hours of NYPD Blue, but a streamlined script with fewer red herrings and false leads really made this movie shine. The flat and uninteresting Julia Stiles continues to be the weak link of the cast here in Ultimatum as Oscar-nominated director Paul Greengrass ups the ante with the brilliant David Straitharn and Albert Finney replacing offed baddies Chris Cooper and Brian Cox.

Greengrass did an excellent job of cranking up the suspense by making the audience care about an English journalist and Julia Stiles’ Nicky Parsons, then putting them in perilous chase sequences that only Jason Bourne can save them from. At this point everyone knows Bourne is like Superman and isn’t going to die (or if he is it will be at the very end of the film), so any real tension has to involve others, and this was executed perfectly here.

Though Matt Damon has stated he doesn’t want to play Jason Bourne anymore, something tells me the $70 million opening weekend at the box office might change his mind. Though it could easily serve as the climactic entry to the Bourne film series, Ultimatum is still somewhat open-ended. Writers could pretty easily script one more adventure for the super agent that ties everything together even more.

So I’ve watched the trailer for Wes Anderson’s latest The Darjeeling Limited about 5 times since it debuted a couple weeks ago. Doing more research on Anderson, I came across this interesting Slate article from 2006 in which Armond White dubs the Royal Tenenbaums director and other American filmmakers of his generation The Eccentrics and wonders why they take so long to make movies when many of their heroes (Renoir, Gordard. Truffaut, Malle, Bertolucci, etc.) produced one—sometimes two or three—films in a single year.

White’s assertion that The Eccentrics are stifling their own creativity by being extreme perfectionists is really interesting. That being said, a writer/director (or auteur if you will) should never be rushed. But when I look at the extensive credits for a deeply flawed picture like Anderson’s The Life Aquatic, I would think many of these auteurs backed by huge second unit crews, art production departments and armies of producers, could turn out a movie every two years rather than the now-standard three.

Bill Murray was spotted for a couple weeks in India earlier this year so it’s a near certainty that he at least has a cameo in Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited but here’s another Murray rumor to chew on: The Ghostbuster star may be playing a recurring role as trashcan-hiding “Agent 13” in Steve Carell’s summer ’08 remake of Get Smart.