In theaters Friday: The Good Shepherd, Night at the Museum, Rocky Balboa and We Are Marshall.
New on DVD: All The King’s Men, A Scanner Darkly, Invincible, Lady In The Water, Little Miss Sunshine and When The Levees Broke.
I’m going to wager that Rocky Balboa not only recoups its $24 million budget before the end of the year, but that it will be the undisputed champ at the weekend box office. Sylvester Stallone’s relic of a franchise faces pretty steep competition going up against De Niro’s slice of CIA pie, The Good Shepherd, the mindless Ben Stiller comedy Night at the Museum, and the gridiron tearjerker We Are Marshall. When you combine a real-life tragedy, the death of an entire college football team, with the sexiest man alive, Mathew McConaughey, studio execs might have another Titanic on their hands. But Rocky always was the underdog and solid advance reviews and a wave of nostalgia should do wonders for the movie even if it is simply “not that bad.” Here is an extensive, brutally honest, and often self-deprecating Q and A series Sly did with Ain’t It Cool News.
Lots of new movies on DVD this week. I can’t recommend Little Miss Sunshine enough, and Lady In The Water I just plain can’t recommend. Sunshine was a true surprise for me this fall—a laugh-out-loud comedy with heart that didn’t have to try too hard to get its point across. Plus it stars Steve Carell as a depressive Proust scholar and the always-underrated Greg Kinnear as a “never say lose” motivational speaker. Sunshine introduces us to a dysfunctional middle American family as they race across the Southwest to get young daughter Olive to a beauty pageant. It’s the kind of film that reminds you of the importance and power of family (no matter how screwed up its individuals are), so it would actually make a pretty good holiday movie for everyone to watch together.
All The King’s Men is out on DVD this week too. I think this movie got a bad rap in theatres…all two weeks it spent in them. The cinematography was gorgeous and Sean Penn and Patricia Clarkson in particular notched head-turning performances. It’s too bad then that Penn, Jude Law and Kate Winslet look like conjoined triplets on the DVD cover. I know Louisiana should be commended for the strides it’s making in the movie business, but I hope we soon can be commended for actually producing a good movie, one that is critically praised. Seriously. We’re getting there in terms of quantity, but as far as quality, the state has a long way to go. But, as they say, beggars can’t be choosers, and as Louisiana establishes itself as a real player in Hollywood the state has to take all the projects it can get.
Spike Lee’s four-hour (!) documentary on Katrina and the failure of the federal government to do much of anything correctly to help the victims, When The Levees Broke, is now out in stores. Any film that features LSU’s Ivor Van Heerden and Kayne West has got to be worth a look.
Okay, so you probably know this, but Night at the Museum looks really bad. Bad, like, those responsible should have pulled the plug after a couple weeks and realized it just wasn’t working before they spent millions on making a T-Rex skeleton try to chow on Ben Stiller. And you also probably know that Stiller once had an incredible track record with smart, hilarious comedies (Reality Bites, Cable Guy, Meet The Parents, The Royal Tenenbaums). Well, MSNBC is on the case and feeling nostalgic. Here is their open letter to big Ben. Ouch. Me, I’d put Stiller’s current career on the same level as his buddy Jack Black. Neither has done anything great in the last three years. Stiller is 41 and Black is nearing 40. If they want to maintain the audiences that first liked them as teenagers, both need to grow up a little, or at least do as Will Ferrell has done recently and balance the slapstick with more thought-provoking roles.
Here’s the teaser trailer for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I really respect how these movies mature by growing darker and more intense as the series (and its young readers) grow up. That’s just smart writing and it also makes a lot of sense. As we all grow up, life becomes more threatening, challenging and intense, so why shouldn’t our myths do the same?
And finally, this is more like it. When Clint Eastwood, “The biggest yellow belly in the West,” debuted Flags of Our Fathers this fall, the soggy been-there-done-that drama fell pretty flat. But here is the trailer for Letters from Iwo Jima, the sister film he shot simultaneously that tells the story of the war from the perspective of the Japanese. And this film looks great! Ken Wantanabe should earn an Oscar nod here. Though I wish Eastwood had kept the original title, Red Sun, Black Sand, and not saturated everything with the Saving Private Ryan treatment, the movie looks like a vast improvement on Flags.
