Celluloid Heroes

I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.

If F-words were horses, Martin Scorcese’s The Departed would be a stampede. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Scorcese film without an intensive barrage of R-rated language and this is a prime example of the director in his natural environment, among cops and wise guys and navigating a morally ambiguous urban landscape. Scorcese has spent the last decade away from his natural milieu, possibly pursuing a level of artsy respectability that would earn him that long denied Best Director Oscar. That makes it someone ironic that he finally won the award with a lurid, violent but insightful crime film that played to his strengths.

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In the old days if an agent did something that embarrassing he’d have a good sense to defect. Christ, I miss the Cold War.

You can tell right from the start that Casino Royale is cut from a different mold than the previous twenty James Bond films. For one, the pre-credits sequence features a brutal, drawn-out fight scene that is very atypical for the film series, which usually prefers its violence more stylized and sanitized. The credit sequence also breaks with Bond custom, which usually emphasized the female nude in discreet silhouette, this time depicting violence against male figures without a single naked girl in sight.

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Bloggers! Prepare for glory! Bad movies may blot out the sun, but we will review them in the shade!

The twenty-second installment of Carnival of Cinema is almost a theme episode, as quite a lot of you appear to have seen a little romantic comedy known as 300.

But before we start to spill Persian blood, we’ll take our non-300 reviews first.

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Hey… they’re just using the same actor over and over. What kind of cut-rate production is this?

So how does Pixar keep hitting these animated features out of the park? The Shrek franchise may have had warning track power and the original Ice Age was a sharp single up the middle, but Pixar keeps smacking them into the stratosphere like Barry Bonds in a ‘roid rage. And why I am using so many baseball metaphors for a racing movie?

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If you can’t fix it, Jack, you gotta stand it.

Who would have guess that they could make a movie about gay sheepherders and people would flock to see it? Sorry, but that’s about the only Brokeback Mountain joke that I have not heard in the last eighteen months. I will admit that I went into this film with a degree of skepticism, fearing that it would be an earnest, self-conscious “message movie.” I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was a carefully observed study of two sharply drawn individuals in a doomed relationship and how that relationship impacts their lives.

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As it stands now, Girard is sitting on the pole, which is of course a statement of fact and in no way a comment on his sexual orientation.

Let me say up front: Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is a better NASCAR movie than Days of Thunder. Of course, that’s like having better fashion sense than Britney Spears does these days. In absolute terms, this is a big, loud and very dumb Will Ferrell comedy. It’s also funnier than a loud fart at a church social. You know you shouldn’t laugh, but you do.

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Even if you’re down there for an hour, you’re down there.

Invincible is a reasonably entertaining gumbo of The Rookie, Rocky and a long list of underdog-makes-good sports movies. It’s not particularly groundbreaking or even all that original, but the movie holds together on the strength of a solid cast and attention to detail.

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Next week, Celluloid Heroes will be hosting the Carnival of Cinema, founded by our buddy Scott Nehring over at Nehring the Edge.

If you have something interesting to say about movies, submit your blog post here before the end of the day next Wednesday.

There was abuse in my family, but it was mostly musical in nature.

The biggest problem with A Mighty Wind is that it gets so involved with telling its story that it occasionally forgets to be comedy. Make no mistake, it’s not a bad story, but it’s not a story of talentless but enthusiastic losers like Waiting For Guffman or of hilariously obsessive dog lovers like Best In Show. The faux-folk musicians in A Mighty Wind are actually quite good at what they do and they’re not clueless buffoons like Spinal Tap. The dramatic elements, especially the story of Mitch (Catherine O’Hara) and Mickey (Eugene Levy) take control and the outright comedic elements, especially those of Fred Willard, tend to hang in the air like a loud fart at a funeral.

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Counting those, you’ve already packed six kimonos… We’re in Philadelphia for 48 hours.

Best In Show is easily the funniest of the three Christopher Guest mockumetaries, if only because it keeps a bit of distance from its subjects and is better able to take its jabs at these uncommonly obsessive people. The movie doesn’t hold dog fanciers up for abject ridicule but it does expect them to be able to take a joke at their expense.

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