Let me start by confessing that I was a Theater and English major and have spent much of my academic career studying the works of the bard. William Shakespeare‘s plays were written as entertainment for the everyman and perhaps it does say quite a bit for the dumbing down of human civilization that work once enjoyed by the average Elizabethan “Joe” is now considered incomprehensible – but that doesn’t mean they are incomprehensible. Shakespeare’s been ruined for too many people who sat through interminable high school classes listening to their peers try to read it out loud.

Director and star Ralph Fiennes has made his Coriolanus, one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays, very accessible and very relevant. Maybe because I live in the land of Occupy Wall street, but scenes of heavily armed police ready to bash citizen protesters are chilling for me. There’s nothing really foreign about the language of the film (lifted straight from the stage play); it is still English for goodness sakes. Sometimes, it is a good thing for people to stretch their brains and challenge their minds. Yet, even so, the poetry of the film is used in a very natural way, making it very accessible to an audience not familiar with it. The story is hardly tough to follow, and the updating of the setting is not only effective, but really makes knowledge of Roman history unnecessary. The rise and fall of a stubborn, powerful man who seeks revenge against those who betrayed him hardly requires a history lesson to be understood.

Venal politicians are a staple of our modern lives. The senators who aid in the downfall of Coriolanus could walk right out of the U.S. Senate today, which just last week passed a defense bill allowing the military to use indefinite detention of all terror suspects, including U.S. citizens. It seems to me that Americans can recognize self-serving politicians pretty easily. And Coriolanus (Fiennes), the military man who can’t relate to the people, the man bred to fight who can’t cope with peace, surely is a character that U.S. audiences who have been living with a decade of war should be able to grasp.

This film is a must-see because it not only reshapes and revives one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays, but because it shows how timeless his work is. It boasts stellar performances by Fiennes, Vanessa Redgrave, Gerard Butler, and Brian Cox, and the entire cast do a fine job under Fiennes’ direction. Coriolanus marks his first time behind the camera, and Fiennes succeeds in creating a truly memorable film. Filming in Serbia, the scene of so much bloody conflict, is an inspired setting for a tough, bloody story. The stark and battered landscape and the utilitarian buildings all evoke a militarized nation where the people are restless and looking for someone to take their anger out on.

Fiennes also rounded out his crew with some notable and talented members to up the accomplishment of the film. If upon seeing Coriolanus, you think of The Hurt Locker, it’s because cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (who brought so much gritty immediacy to that film) worked with Fiennes on Coriolanus. There’s the hand-held camera, adding to the in-the-moment feel that serves the updated setting well. John Logan (Gladiator, The Aviator) adapted Shakespeare’s play, paring it down to a very effective and lean two hours.

Fiennes is a great actor and his directorial debut makes me want to see what he does next as a director. What might be a surprise to audiences who know Butler from action films and rom-coms is his ability to go toe-to-toe with Fiennes. Their scenes together are electric, filled with energy. Fiennes makes a spectacular directorial debut worthy of his own prodigious talent as an actor, and it’s clear he wasn’t going to mess around and give one of the most important roles in his film to an actor he didn’t think could match him. Butler is talented, but he needs the right director to really bring it out. The role of Aufidius is perfect for him, and he inhabits it. The relationship between Coriolanus and Aufidius is complex, to say the least, a love/hate affair between two sworn enemies. Butler is tasked with conveying the respect that comes more from the side of Aufidius (who sees Coriolanus as a potential comrade in arms, if only they weren’t on different sides), and Butler more than pulls it off.

But what’s most impressive about the film is that it isn’t a vanity production. Fiennes’ respect for his cast is so evident in the way he really lets them fly. Vanessa Redgrave already picked up a best actor at the British Indie film awards. No surprise, as she’s downright fierce as Volumina, the mother of the fallen Coriolanus. If I had my way, Coriolanus would pick up a truckload of similar awards.

I well understand we live in the age of the short attention span, but this is a piece of  work that might just open eyes and expand minds. It might even introduce audience to some of the most extraordinary works of art created in the history of humankind. Shakespeare, not just for scholars, but as intended, for the masses.

The Upside: Frankly, everything. I’ve seen plenty of film adaptations of Shakespeare and this is one of the best. A modernization that packs an emotional punch, relates to the times we live in and is just plain great entertainment. And no way should you miss the opportunity to see Ralph Fiennes and company show how Shakespeare can be at its best.

The Downside: Frankly, I can’t honestly think of anything. I’m sure there are flaws somewhere in the film, but I was too absorbed to find them.

On the Side: It was a fight for Fiennes to get funding for Coriolanus. In the world of film Coriolanus was made for less than the amount usually paid to one movie star, around just eight million dollars.

The first glimpse we got of Peter Berg’s upcoming board game adaptation (it hurts me somewhere deep to have to type those words) played a little coy with us, and at first made it look like the film would be sticking to the Battleship board game’s naval battle roots. Once a spaceship popped up and the whole thing turned into an alien invasion movie, it was kind of a surprise.

This second look at Battleship, however, doesn’t bother to take any time tying this movie to the board game at all. It’s all alien invasion from beginning to end. And with a color palette very reminiscent of Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, a bunch of elaborately techno ships and weapons that look like they’re right out of Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, sound effects that seem to be ripped from Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, and a big ol’ headline that says this movie is from the company that brought you Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, I think it’s safe to say that Universal is aiming this thing less at fans of grid based strategy games and more at fans of Michael Bay’s big, dumb Transformers movies. It leaves me with a question: if this movie isn’t going to have anything to do with naval battles at all, why even attach it to the Battleship name? Why not just admit what you’re doing and call it Gobots?

Check out the new trailer below.

There was one big surprise that came out of this trailer for me though, and that was that the kid who’s starring in this thing isn’t Josh Hartnett attempting some sort of comeback like I thought he was throughout the whole first trailer. It’s really Taylor Kitsch, the kid from Friday Night Lights with a haircut. Once I realized this and another one of the kids from Friday Night Lights popped up, things started to make sense to me. I thought this was going to be a case of Berg getting the band back together and using this movie as a spotlight to push his small screen actors onto the big. But then…is that Rihanna? What a weird cast this weird movie has. I hope Liam Neeson gets to trade some dialogue with Brooklyn Decker, that will really confirm what a strange, too many cooks in the kitchen, corporate abomination Battleship is going to be.

Battleship gets sunk on May 18, 2012.

Diablo Cody’s upcoming inaugural effort as a director has yet to get a title, but it now has an Oscar winner in its cast. The Julianne Hough-starring film about a religious young woman who loses her faith after surviving a plane crash has just picked up Holly Hunter. Hunter will play Hough’s character’s super-strict, super-religious mother, who I imagine will be none too happy that her now-faithless daughter decides to go out to Las Vegas to get a taste of the naughty side of life.

I’m not a fan of Juno and I’m not a fan of dancers turned actors, so if you would have told me about this project a couple months ago, I would have probably dismissed it completely. But after seeing Hough in the Footloose remake and not being horrified by her acting abilities at all and after hearing all of the positive buzz about this week’s Cody-penned release Young Adult, I’m definitely willing to give this one a try. When you add in a top-tier actress like Holly Hunter and solid additions to the supporting cast like Russell Brand, who always pleasantly surprises me, and Octavia Spencer, who impressed in The Help, it’s starting to sound to me like Cody’s first effort is coming along rather nicely in its pre-production stages. I guess my final decision on whether I’ll see this one or not will come down to how quippy and clever the title ends up being. I demand puns and wordplay! [Deadline Lemont]

Welcome back to Junkfood Cinema; slippery when festive. You and your intrepid team of reindeer, who may or may not be aerial yaks, have flown your sleigh past the mountains of good taste and crash-landed here on the island of misfit movies. Each week I will crank out one of these Charlie-in-the-boxes, pointing at its flaws and laughing like the meanest little bastard on the naughty list. But then, realizing how dangerously close I am to not getting any presents this year, due to the aforementioned bastardness, I will make a sappy speech in front of a glowing Christmas tree professing how much I loved this movie from the start. That cheap gesture should secure me that Chocolate-Covered French Fry Maker I’ve had my eye on. To put a bow on this whole affair, I will offer up a sugar-laden snack food item paired to the film that will constrict your arteries like Santa climbing down a cramped chimney.

This week’s flimsy gingerbread house: Home Alone 2.

Earlier this week, I pointed about some of the genuine flaws running rampant throughout the holiday classic Home Alone. I was dutifully informed, first via email and then by means of a flaming bag of what I assume was once pickled herring crashing through my living room window, that perhaps I was too harsh on this apparently “untouchable” film. I will concede that where I find fault with the film, others may find my finding fault with the film unfounded. So I wondered, how could I deconstruct the problems of Home Alone in such a way as to allow fans to remain objective? How can I review the exact same movie again without it being the exact same movie? Oh, I know, I’ll deconstruct Home Alone 2. After all, Home Alone 2 uses a cookie cutter formula identical to that of the first film, but with a lobotomized script that comparatively makes the script of Home Alone seem more layered than a Charlie Kaufman parfait.

 What Makes It Bad?

So remember our discussion of how Home Alone took careful, exacting steps to tie up every loose end in terms of how Kevin gets left at home? The logic in Home Alone 2 is slightly less concerned with your acceptance of its logic from the get-go. The tumorous pieces of this crap puzzle fail to join in any discernible fashion. First, they try to pull that “parents slept in, everyone’s in a frenzied rush” card again, but in a fashion that shows their half-assery hand early. In the first installment, a wind storm knocks the power out for the whole house. It therefore makes sense that no one was roused by their electric alarms at the appropriate hour; thus the tizzy. But in the sequel, the power remains on and only the dimwitted McCallister parents’ alarm is disconnected. So why is that still not one person in the house got up on time? Did they all assume their game of Nyquil Pong was a safe venture because one alarm in the house was set? As they dash through the airport, Kevin lags behind searching for batteries in his father’s bag. Now given the fact that just one year before Kevin was put into a dangerous situation due to his family’s negligence, any reasonable parent would install a Lojack on their previously abandoned child or, at the very least, attach one of those super-not-humiliating-at-all kid leashes to him.

But no, Kevin stops for a moment, gets separated, and then proceeds to follow a man wearing his father’s same coat to the wrong terminal, then to the wrong gate. He thinks nothing of the fact that “his father” walks right down the ramp and doesn’t even glance back to ensure Kevin gets on the plane. Kevin plows into the ticket agent and loses his ticket in the scattering stack she was formerly holding. He assures her that his boarding pass is somewhere among the mess. She allows him to board SANS TICKET and then leaves him to end up in an alien city sans family. Forget the fact that Kevin’s “I’m In NYC” montage ends with him atop the World Trade Center, THIS is the real reason Home Alone 2 could not be replicated in a post-9/11 America. Well, that and the advent of cell phones; maybe that would have encouraged Kev to call and let ANYONE know where he was. But once again, as soon as Kevin realizes he’s separated from his parents, he immediately assumes he’s made them disappear. Nevermind the fact that you are obviously in New York, you’ve been through this same scenario before in which your squishy “magic powers” theory was debunked, and that YOU KNOW YOUR FAMILY IS IN FLORIDA, you go own believing that you are the David Copperfield of empty-headed sprat dolts.

So now the Swiss cheese exposition is behind us, let’s dig into the meat of the film; apparently in this metaphor Home Alone 2 is a tasty chicken cordon bleu. I guess we’re just going to go ahead and accept the fact that Kevin is not HOME alone in Home Alone 2: Lost Not At Home. I understand the necessity to retain the title for franchise recognizability (a word I’m almost completely sure I did not make up), but it seems to negate the central conceit. It would be like setting House Party 5 at Burning Man. Speaking of House Party, when Kevin reaches New York City, this KID don’t PLAY around. Despite the fact that he’s never been to NYC before, we don’t see him purchase a map until day 2 of his trip. Yet somehow, as soon as he steps off the plane he immediately knows the city and, presumably, the public transit system well enough to efficiently get from landmark to landmark in a few hours. Now granted, we do see him utilizing the New York City Montage Cab Co., but it still seems a bit of a stretch. And I’ve only been to New York once so forgive my ignorance, but is it really possible for a child to purchase a knife at a toy store? Kevin walks up to the counter with a NY map, a tube of Monster Soap (Charlize Theron’s bubble bath brand), and what looks to be a Swiss-made Leatherman. Apparently it was on the shelf between the Nerf balls and the Johnny Spaceman Surface-To-Air Missile Launcher. And I must say Kevin’s improvisation skills (read: super power to slow the passage of time) have greatly improved. He’s able to blow up a six foot inflatable clown (made by Nightmare Toys Incorporated), rig it to a complex, makeshift marionette system, and fill a bathtub in the time it takes one reprehensible concierge to creep from the suite’s front door, to the bathroom. Seriously, stop spending your dad’s money and go fight crime, you’re in New York, for Peter Parker’s sake!

The biggest logical fallacy of Home Alone 2 is once again to be found in the involvement of law enforcement. Whereas in the first film Child Protective Services could not be bothered with the triviality of protecting children, especially when there were donuts to be eaten, the Miami PD from whom the McCallisters seek help in Home Alone 2 follow procedure a little too well. Upon finding out that Kevin has his dad’s credit card, they decide to cancel the card. Wait, what? Why cancel the card? You know your son is alone in New York City, right? Do you not want him to have funds for food and a place to stay? Their concern for their son’s well-being apparently only extends to lengths that don’t dampen their credit score. When the McCallisters get to New York, Kevin’s mom, who somewhere between films found time to become a wholly unlikeable shrew, is actually indignant toward the staff of the Plaza Hotel for letting her child check in alone. Silence, Harpy! Would you have preferred they turn your son away; forcing him into vagrancy and doing things for money that even 2011 Macaulay Culkin would…have to seriously think twice before agreeing to do?

There is a complete tonal shift between original and sequel; the emotional crux of the story taking a bath in the black bile of human baseness. So in Home Alone, even at this most selfish, Kevin just wanted to be alone in his own house having his own Christmas. It’s a movie about the natural childhood conflict of independence vs. the need for family. This is why the film ends with a lighthearted, impish brother’s quarrel; Buzz shouting, “Kevin, what did you do to my room?” In Home Alone 2, the minute Kevin again achieves accidental autonomy (and apparently alliteration), his budding talent for the long con leaps immediately to the surface. He checks into the swankiest hotel in town using fake phone calls, his father’s credit card, and a story of epic flimflamery (still almost no way I made that word up). He runs up an enormous room service bill ordering indulgent junk food, which I realize is not for us to judge here; like the pot calling the kettle fat. He then uses another con to finagle himself a limousine and a, you guessed it, cheese pizza. So where Home Alone was about discovering the importance of familial bonds, Home Alone 2 is about excess, materialism, and identity theft. This actually explains why a chief piece of the film’s merchandising, the Talkboy, occupies a major plot point of the film itself. The sequel’s insipid emphasis on the greed and the consumerism of Christmas made me feel like I was watching Jingle All The Way 2: Lost In Home Alone 2: Lost In New York.

In last week’s entry, we (meaning me) talked (wait, me talked?–Tarzan?) about the fact that the Wet Bandits probably would not have survived some of the traps Kevin set for them in Home Alone. If there was a slight chance that Kev could have accidentally brought about their demise in part one, his sole intent in the sequel is to reek savage murder upon his enemies so brutally as to serve as a warning to any who might cross him in the future. There’s not even any build up to deadly intent either. Kevin’s first, and arguably least innovative trap is simply hurling bricks down onto Marv’s head from atop a three story building. Even if you are a card-carrying member of The Royal Order of Home Alone 2 Apologists and want to argue that it isn’t outside the realm of possibility for a man to survive one three-story brick-to-the-head, Kevin lands four to Marv’s skull. Unless Marv is actually living tissue over a metal exoskeleton, and was sent back in time to kill Kevin before he grew into the future leader of the human resistance, he would be a grease spot on that sidewalk. The bricks are just for openers, then we have the electrocution, 100 lb. objects dropped from three stories onto skulls, and the full on cranial combustion. Pesci and Stern survive so many events that would pulverize an actual human being that the film begins to adopt the physical laws of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon; replete with pseudo sentient lit fuse gag. This is a much healthier assessment of what’s happening than the far more painfully obvious scenario that Kevin is a vengeful, tow-headed angel of death.

Why I Love It?

As much as I have a big gooey, spongy soft spot for Home Alone, I have an even bigger, gooier, spongier soft spot for the sequel. When it came out, I was just at the right age that new movies in the theater were still wonderful spectacles of dream-like proportions. I remember going to see Home Alone 2: Lost In New York with my childhood friend Paul and coming out giggling like a couple of little girls over the various misfortunes that befell the bandits; something I now suspect is in the DSM-IV as a potential early warning sign for sociopathy. I also had a Home Alone 2 poster in my room as a kid, the one with the Statue of Liberty locked in Kevin’s signature pose, and by “signature” I mean “stolen from Edvard Munch.” So, like many of the films that earn entry into the Junkfood Cinema archives, nostalgia plays a major role in my appreciation for this film. I was also the victim of a terrible, fiery View-Master accident as a child that caused my rose-colored glasses to be permanently affixed to my face.

I don’t care how you feel toward the rest of the film, because clearly I am no longer the barometer of good taste, you’ve got to love Tim Curry in Home Alone 2. He brings that same brand of slimy, conniving, slightly closeted, charm to the role of the Plaza Hotel’s most evil, and curious-as-a-cartoon-chimp, concierge. You’ve got to admire his misplaced tenacity as he sneaks into a guest’s room just because he thinks a child is guilty of credit card fraud. This is almost as incendiary and hard to swallow as the fact that, well, a child commits credit card fraud in this film. I love the transition, as Kevin watches the holiday classic from his (sigh) limo, from the the Grinch’s impossibly wide grin to Tim Curry’s…equally wide, supposedly human grin.

We don’t watch Home Alone movies for their deep, philosophical deconstruction of the human condition, nor do we watch them for their dialogue…which becomes seared in our brains like brands upon cattle. We watch the Home Alones for the traps. The disquieting thing about this commonality is that it is also the reason we watch Saw movies and the second act of First Blood. But in spite of these films implanting the seed of inventive homicide in our adolescent brains, ignoring the appeal of the traps in Home Alone would be like denying that people watch auto races for the crashes, hockey for the fights, or professional basketball for…the fights. As someone who grew up to be a horror fan, I love that the traps are far more brutal in Home Alone 2. It really does abandon all delusions of being taken seriously the moment Daniel Stern gets brick-kissed on his forehead. To his credit, Stern’s desperate moaning, flailing, and falsettoing illicit genuine laughs from me to this day. In fact both Stern and Pesci seem to be inhabiting the Three (Two?) Stooges with their intensely overblown physical performances. And true to his character, and his raging rage issues of rage, Pesci returns to his litany of pseudo swears all throughout the film; often calling Kevin a “fargin’ fricka’ fatchadul”…even to his face!

I also love that Kevin is, what, nine years old and he already has mortal nemeses? I mean their feud has reached the point where the Bandits talk casually about, and even attempt to, kill a child! Weren’t you guys just burglars in the last film?  This may account for why it’s so much fun to watch these two get their faces trounced and their insides scrambled by Kev’s various do-it-yourself torture devices. Basically this is a revenge movie wherein the revenger is subjected to revenge from the revengee. Mock its simple family film trappings and its porous plot if you must, which I did because I musted, but this is actually the Inception of revenge films. The Talkboy is actually Kevin’s totem! Also, I’m drunk!

Junkfood Pairing: Fruit Stripe Gum

Delicious Fruit Stripe Gum is delicious. It is so good that apparently it is also a system of currency. Kevin offers the bellboy at the hotel Fruit Stripe Gum as gratuity; the bellboy played by Rob Schneider in a remarkably prescient nod to the new career to which this “career” was leading him, pieces of. This seems really cute and innocent until later in the film when he tricks the bellboy into declining a sizable cash tip in order to torment him. He’s in New York, right? Can we go occupy (read: ransack and steal from) this little shit’s hotel room? The original title of this 1%-minded sequel was Home Alone: With All This Goddamn Money, Bitches.

In schoolyards around the world, the debate continues to rage: Is Santa Claus real? Or is he just some concept concocted by parents to keep kids in line year-round? Even us adults can remember having knock-down, drag-out arguments over this. Our parents told us that if we waited up for Santa on Christmas Eve, we’d be quickly relegated to the dreaded “Naughty List,” and we’d get nothing but coal in our stockings.

As a public service, this installment of the Holiday Survival Guide will help you win those arguments. Keeping up with the tradition of every child’s desire to capture jolly old St. Nicholas, here are some tricks we can dish out, courtesy of the big entertainment machine called Hollywood.

Use them wisely, and be sure to only target the real Santa Claus. Failure to do so may result in injury or even death.

1. Hire kidnappers to do the dirty work

In Tim Burton’s holiday classic A Nightmare Before Christmas, Jack Skellington wanted to give his bony hands a shot at handing out Christmas presents. Unfortunately, he was too busy readying Halloweentown for the holiday less than two months away. So he did what any good leader does: he delegated. It may have been a mistake to put his trust in the mischievous trio of Lock, Shock and Barrel, but at least Jack had the right idea. Santa is just so trusting, he never thought that these tiny demons would want to throw him in a box and bury him for 90 years. Just be careful with your own choices. You’ll definitely want to check the references of the Santa kidnappers that you found on Craigslist.

2. Utilize the art of surprise

If there’s anything we know about Santa (aside from his chubbiness and fondness for cookies), it’s that he’s an old dude. And this leads us to ask whether you’ve ever known a really old person to be fully alert and awake? Not a chance. It’s so easy to startle the elderly, partly because they don’t see and hear so well and partly because they often can be found napping. Even though Santa has all year to rest between Christmases, it’s an exhausting night for him. With billions of presents to deliver, he’ll be in the zone, unlikely to see or hear you coming. However, if you do try to surprise Santa, try not to catch him while he’s walking across a patch of ice on the roof. He could end up dead in your front lawn, just as he did at Scott Calvin’s house in The Santa Clause.

3. Use experienced trackers

If you’re having trouble getting your naughty mitts on Santa Claus when he comes to your house on Christmas Eve, you might want to consider going into the wild to find him. Whether you’re digging up an ancient demon who devours naughty children (as seen in Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale) or picking off the stragglers from a herd of Father Christmases in the mountains of Lapland (as seen in the associated Rare Exports short films), you’ll want an experienced tracker to help you out. Contact the good folks at Rare Exports in Finland to help you capture, transport and train your very own Santa Claus.

4. Don’t dismiss alien intervention

If it’s possible for a fat man and an army of elves living in the coldest place on the planet to assemble gifts for every child in the world, deliver them in one night via flying reindeer and break into every home on the planet without setting off one alarm, then it’s possible there are also polyester-wearing Martians living on our closest planetary neighbor. So why not get them involved in this quest? As laid out in the 60s camp classic Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, these not-so-little green men will fly their spaceship to the North Pole with their cardboard robot and freeze rays to capture him for you without harming a hair on his head… or his face.

5. When all else fails, trust in Jesus Christ

The hardcore religious faithful will often remind people during the holidays that “Christ” should always be in “Christmas,” and it’s not uncommon to see these folks wishing Jesus a happy birthday on December 25th. You’d think that Santa Claus could co-exist with someone who calls himself the Prince of Peace, but as South Park often shows us, the two Christmas legends often butt heads. Whether Jesus in saving Santa’s bacon from being captured in the Middle East or Santa is getting miffed at what the kids think the true meaning of Christmas is, they are formidable opponents. In the end, Jesus is the Lex Luthor to Santa’s Superman, and he is the one guy who can definitely take control… at least in South Park, Colorado.

*Precautions: Leave the chimney out of this. If there’s anything that Joe Dante’s Gremlins taught us in 1984 it’s that if the person coming down the chimney is anyone but Kris Kringle, he’ll likely break his neck, die a twisted mess of a sooty red fabric with white trim and rot away until the family realizes daddy didn’t up and leave last December. Plus, it plugs up the chimney completely, keeping Santa out of the house and leading the kids to believe he doesn’t exist. Poor Phoebe Cates.

Open your heart and make some time for the rest of the entries in our 2011 Holiday Survival Guide.

Why Watch? Early Tim Burton, late Vincent Price, and a stop-motion nursery rhyme for the gruesome ones.

This 1982 team-up between Burton and Price was one of the director’s last short films before landing the directing gig for Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and going down the path we all know he followed. It came 11 years before The Nightmare Before Christmas, but the tones and design concepts are all there (just no Henry Selick).

Instead of a skeletal hero, it’s a little boy who wants to turn his dog into a zombie.

What does it cost? Just 6 minutes of your time.

Check out Vincent for yourself:

VINCENT (1982)

Trust us. You have time for more short films.

You’ve seen Michael Shannon before. Many times before. Similar to screen veterans Chris Cooper or Dylan Baker, Shannon is one of those actors who has had an extended career in front of the camera long before anyone really took notice of him. Even though he has been in films since the early 90s, he gained a strong national presence in 2009 with an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in Revolutionary Road.

Shannon is getting more attention now with the independent hit Take Shelter, playing a man named Curtis who starts having apocalyptic visions, leading him to build an underground shelter to protect his family. With Take Shelter in limited release and acting award buzz building, Shannon took part of his lunch break from his “super” schedule to chat with Film School Rejects about his career and what he hopes will happen with this stand-out independent film.

We’ll jump right in. First question: Is this going to be the year of Michael Shannon?

Shannon: Oh geez. Which year? 2011?

It spills over into 2012. There’s a lot of good buzz for Take Shelter. What do you think?

Well, I have to be honest. I love my film Take Shelter. It means a lot to me. I really just hope and pray that as many people as possible go to see it. As much as any of this can help, that’s what I’m shooting for.

After you made this, your co-star Jessica Chastain’s career blew up. Did you see this coming, and do you have any bets going as to who will get more nominations?

Oh, gee. Well, we knew that Jessica was going to have a big year with all her films coming out. She was very excited about it. But we’re both kinda bashful about that kind of thing, I think. When we were making the film, it was a real nuts and bolts kind of affair. It was a very low budget film. There weren’t any fancy trailers or anything. We were just showing up and doing our job, doing the best we could. Yeah, I don’t think it’s in either one of our natures to toot our own horns. We just like to work.

Do you prefer small independent productions like this, or the big explosive ones? I mean, do you like those big, fancy trailers, or do you like sleeping in a motel?

They’re all different. I’m working on something right now that’s very big, and I’ve had a lot of fun doing it. I think the way that we shot Take Shelter, the budget that we had, really suited the film. If we would have had a bigger budget, it may not have benefited us necessarily. There’s something about how fast we had to work and how hard we had to work that I really feel brought the film to a different level.

Does it bother you that a film in limited release doesn’t get seen by as wide of an audience, as opposed to when Man of Steel comes out, it will be all over the world at the same time? Or do you like that slow burn of a limited release over several weeks?

I think Sony Pictures Classics was very smart about how they’ve done it. For me, as long as the film’s playing in a theater, people can go see it. It doesn’t need to be in 50 theaters because there’s no screening that’s totally sold out. There’s always a seat for anybody who wants to go see it. I don’t think people are getting turned away. It’s just more a matter of people taking a chance on something that is not guaranteed instant gratification or instant entertainment. Take Shelter’s obviously a difficult film. It raises a lot of serious questions and issues. I just hope people have the courage to go and check it out.

How strong of a role does religion play in Take Shelter?

I think it plays on so many different levels. I definitely think there’s a spiritual level to the story. Although it’s interesting though because Curtis doesn’t go to church and avoids that. But I think that he is looking for something spiritually. Because the reaction that he’s having to nature is very understandable if you believe that there’s no one in charge of it.

If you don’t believe in a god or any sort of organizing principle, then nature becomes a very arbitrary thing. These storms that are happening, they’re not evil or ill-intentioned. They’re just a manifestation of something that nobody is really looking after. They become very random, and so I think that’s one of the main reasons that religion exists, to help people deal with how random life is and how random nature can be.

You’ve done a wide variety of emotional characters – including Bug, The Runaways, Take Shelter and even Machine Gun Preacher – all of which go to some pretty tricky psychological places. How do you find your comfort zone to bare yourself like that?

Well, I never really focus on being crazy or being emotional or any of these things. I really focus on what a character wants or what a character’s trying to accomplish. Something like Take Shelter, Curtis is a very practical man. He’s not an overly emotional man at the start of the film. He’s fairly normal, and then he’s confronted with this situation that he doesn’t know how to cope with. But he tries everything that he knows of to do.

For me, I never show up on set thinking, “Oh, this is the day where I’m supposed to be emotional.” I show up and see what I’m trying to do and what’s happening to me, and focus on it from that. Just like people do in your life, you get side-swiped by things, you hit certain challenges and certain obstacles, and you do your best to overcome them. I look at it from that context, really.

Do you carry that emotional burden home with you? Can you detach from it?

Well, I think if you’ve accomplished your objective, there’s been a certain release of energy. I think if you’re going home with the energy still inside of you, then that’s a mistake because that was meant for the camera. It wasn’t meant for you to be sitting at home by yourself experiencing something. So you have to release it. You have to let it go, hopefully while someone’s filming you, and then the rest of the world can see it.

With your long career, in a couple years, people are going to be flipping through cable, run across something like Hellcab and say, “Hey! There’s General Zod!” Does that give you a sense of accomplishment as an actor?

Well, yeah. It’s funny you mentioned Hellcab because somebody brought that up to me the other day. I shot that when I was still in my teens or maybe my early 20s. It certainly gives you a sense of being on a long journey and yet you can never really prop yourself up on your past credits because nobody ever really cares when you’re at work. They want to see what you can do today, not what you did ten years ago. It’s a combination of having some appreciation for what you’ve accomplished, but also wanting to accomplish even more. I don’t feel like I’m anywhere near as good as I can be. I’m always trying to get better.

What do you want to do next after Take Shelter, Man of Steel and beyond?

Oh, gee. Well, it’s hard to know. I like to be surprised by what I’m offered and the opportunities that I receive. Right now, I’m looking forward to doing some theater next year, getting back and hitting the boards a little bit. But something like Take Shelter, even though it’s a very volatile story, it shows that I’m capable of being a father and a husband on screen. I don’t always have to be a loner. It’s hard for me to say because I just appreciate continuing to get any sort of opportunity. It’s hard to be picky about it because you never know when things might change.

Take Shelter, starring Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain, is currently in release in selected markets.

Franklin Leonard’s Black List has become something of a cultural phenomenon, and for good reason. Every year he compiles the list, a compendium of the best scripts that are floating around Hollywood but not getting produced, and creates a media stir by publishing them. This, in turn, makes studio heads give the scripts another look, and many times put the projects into production. Every year the Black List is one of the main ways that we get movies made that aren’t sequels, remakes, or film versions of consumer products that have brand recognition but no inherent storytelling potential; so I am in full support of giving it all the publicity possible.

How are titles chosen for the list? According to the list itself, “The Black List was compiled from the suggestions of over 300 film executives, each of whom contributed the names of up to ten of their favorite scripts that were written in, or are somehow uniquely associated with, 2011 and will not have begun principal photography during this calendar year.”

Topping the list this year, with 133 votes, is a script by Graham Moore called The Imitation Game (a script Warner Bros has the rights to, and that Leonardo DiCaprio has been rumored to be circling). It’s the life story of Alan Turing, who was the British cryptographer that cracked the German Enigma Code in WWII, and who committed suicide later in life after being prosecuted for homosexuality. Those 133 votes make The Imitation Game the big winner, and therefore the script most likely to benefit from this year’s list. Comparatively, the second film on the list got 84 votes. It’s a script titled When the Street Lights Go On by Chris Hutton and Eddie O’Keefe that tells the story of a town dealing with the aftermath of a brutal double murder in the early ’80s.

Looking through the rest of the top ten reveals another WWII story, a movie about Peter Mayhew’s experience playing Chewbacca, a zombie movie, a “what if” sci-fi yarn about the Apollo 11 mission, a movie about a guy going on a crime spree with his 11-year-old daughter, and that’s just the beginning. Taking a further look down this year’s lengthy list reveals scripts about the life of Grace Kelly, more zombies, Jurassic Park, killers, sex tapes, drug deals, and what have you. Give it a look, if you’re interested, and see what Hollywood may have in store for us next year, now that they’ve been taken to task.

Anyone who saw the disturbing things actress Charlotte Gainsbourg was willing to do in Antichrist to get director Lars von Trier’s vision up on the screen knows that she isn’t a shy woman. But it turns out we may have just explored the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how far she will go for her art. Variety is reporting that Gainsbourg is in talks, once again, to star in a von Trier film, and this one will be his look at the sexual development of a woman from birth to age fifty, called Nymphomaniac.

Von Trier’s upcoming erotic epic is said to be broken up into eight chapters and will be filmed with two different cuts in mind, a more softcore version to get wider distribution, and a hardcore version that will be made, well, just because I guess. When this project was first announced, von Trier explained his approach to Entertainment Weekly by saying, “As a cultural radical I can’t make a film about the sexual evolution of a woman from zero to 50 without showing penetration. I know it’s something very European. However, that doesn’t mean it will be a porn film. It principally it is a film with a lot of sex in it and also a lot of philosophy.”

This is pretty much my problem with von Trier’s movies in a nutshell. You always have to struggle with whether there is any real artistic merit in what he’s doing, or if he’s just trying to shock his audience and get a reaction like a little child throwing a temper tantrum. While I don’t deny that he’s a talented man who has made some more than worthwhile stuff, I often come down on the side that says he’s just an antagonist (a position that looks even stronger after the circus he caused at Cannes this year).

If Nymphomaniac needs to show hardcore sex acts to fully realize its concept and to affect its viewers in the intended way, then that’s fine. I’m no prude or censor. But what does it say that two different cuts of the film are going to be made? If the story can be told in a softcore version that doesn’t feature penetration, then what is the point of filming the hardcore stuff at all? Once again, it seems to me that von Trier is acting out in an attempt at stirring the cultural pot, and it’s starting to look like Gainsbourg is one of his enablers.

What say you, reader? Are you looking forward to seeing Gainsbourg get dorked on film, or do you wish von Trier would focus his considerable talents more on making good movies and less on being a “cultural radical”?

Indie director turned studio comedy director David Gordon Green has been talking about doing a remake of Dario Argento’s cult horror classic Suspiria for a couple years now. Back in March of this year, he insinuated that he would be making the remake his next film after the release of The Sitter. Well, The Sitter is out now, and it’s time for Green to move on to his next project, so what’s the deal with Suspiria?

The director recently told IFC, “I’ve turned in the script. We’re just looking at casting and locations and trying to figure out budget and if it works.” Fans of remakes all over the world probably just let out a cheer at the news that the script is finished, but what is that about figuring out budgets? Does it seem likely that an agreement on the price of this thing will be reached, or is this a script likely to sit on the shelf because it can’t get financing?

“I’ve been trying to make it for four years and trying to find the support entity to finance it,” Green says. “It’s a very specific movie and the horror genre is in a very specific place right now that’s very much inspired by the success of movies like Paranormal Activity that show you can make a very economical killing at the box office, so to speak.” That doesn’t sound good to me. Any remake of Argento’s work is going to have to be pretty visually astounding to not get crapped on by everyone who has ever seen the original Suspiria, so talk about budgets and trying to find funding this early in a possible remake’s pre-production has to be viewed as a huge roadblock.

The one bit of good news I can see for people who want this one to get made is that Green himself has a history of making movies look way more expensive than they are. There were bits of Your Highness that looked just as good as any big budget fantasy film, and that was just a stupid comedy. If anybody could get this thing done and done right on a pinched penny, Green just may be the man.

And, if nothing else, he still seems to remain optimistic that this project is a possibility. “I hope I get to make it. I hope somebody takes those risks,” he said. “I feel like I’m closer every day to having people embrace the script and the story I’m trying to do and the technique I want to execute it in. I hope so.” That’s a far cry from when he was calling this his next movie, but it doesn’t appear to be a dead deal yet.

Which way do you want to see this one go? Do we hope Green gets this one off the ground, or is remaking Argento just a dumb idea in the first place? Personally, I’m just glad to hear the guy talking about doing something other than another stupid comedy. The Sitter was about thirty times more boring than his early films, and I’m running out of patience waiting for more Green greatness.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s a thing that chronicles the day in movie news. Or in many cases, a day’s worth of interesting articles that you should be reading. If you want a bunch of trade news reprinted with a lone, snarky comment, there are plenty of mediocre movie blogs out there who can deliver such things. We choose the higher road. Or the lower road, depending on our mood.

We begin this evening with a mural painted by Australian street artist Anthony Lister in Los Angeles. He’s painted a mural in honor of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which just so happens to come out on DVD and Blu-ray this week. Go figure. The completely marketable timing aside, it’s quite cool. I’ve even included a time lapse video of Lister putting this work together just after the jump.

Watch the time lapse footage of Anthony Lister’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes mural:

In honor of the release of the very smart spy thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Matt Patches of Hollywood.com fame writes up a list that includes A Spy Movie for Every Type of Person. I question his list only in that he seems to suggest that there are only 9 types of people. What about the spy movie for the homeless meth addict who longs only to have his front teeth back? Come on Patches, you were better than that when you wrote for us.

Another Reject writing abroad, Mr. Brian Salisbury, chronicles The Many Faces of Sherlock Holmes over at Movies.com. He talks of Robert Downey and Basil Rathbone, even spending some time with Michael Caine and Benedict Cumberbatch. Like James Bond, this Brit lit hero has been played by a number of badasses.

Speaking of Benedict Cumberbatch, his version of Sherlock will return January 1st according to a report from Bleeding Cool. At least, that’s when it will return to the BBC. When it will come to BBC America is still up in the air. The last report I saw was sometime in May. There’s also a broody poster:

Over at Cinema Blend, Mack Rawden has assembled a list of 12 Things Troy Wouldn’t Do On Community If Actually a Jehovah’s Witness. If Troy were to follow his claimed religion, it would take a bit of the flare out of his character. This article also serves as a reminder that I miss Community right now.

In his own words over at The Huffington Post, director Ridley Scott talks about The Only Way to See a Film and extols on the virtues of the theatrical experience. He also praises, to a great extent, the Blu-ray format and its ability to deliver said experience in our living rooms. He also has a new movie coming out next year. Did you guys hear about that one?

“I tend not to be too emotional on the set, I find that doesn’t help me do my job,” said Christopher Nolan about making his final Batman movie. “But you definitely get a little lump in your throat thinking that, ‘OK, this is going to be the last time we’re going to be doing this.’ It’s been quite a journey. Hopefully, reflecting that journey — by all of us who made the films — in the three films together will make it so they have a real span to them, some real heft.” There’s more in that interview. You should read it.

If you buy Louis CK’s new comedy special, he might make a movie. And that needs to happen. So go buy his special for $5 over on his website.

We close tonight with a gruesome parody trailer that reminds us of the marketing done in advance of The Muppets. This one is called The Muppets: Saw, and it’s quite fun.

Channing Tatum is back as Duke, Ray Park is in as Snake Eyes, and Lee Byung-hung is reprising his role as Storm Shadow, but that’s about all the true connective tissue you’ll find between G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and its sequel, G.I. Joe: Retaliation. Plus, from the looks of the trailer, its Dwayne Johnson as Roadblock that will really be leading the team.

Behind the scenes, Joe is being led by a new director in Jon Chu and new screenwriters in Zombieland scribes Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese.

It’s truly a brand new team.

But the trailer speaks for itself with pyrotechnics. Check it out for yourself:

Kaboom. The first was incredibly cartoonish, so it’ll be interesting to see whether they keep that tone or if the flick will live up to this trailer’s promise of pure muscle, Adrianne Palicki outside of a Wonder Woman outfit, and an aerial sword fight.

Netflix is really jumping envelope first into the production game, having already set up deals to bring David Fincher and Kevin Spacey’s House of Cards, Jenji Kohan’s Orange is the New Black and more episodes of Arrested Development to the little screen. Now, according to Deadline Hemlock Grove, they’re close to securing a deal with Gaumont International Television to produce 13 hour-long episodes of Hemlock Grove, based on the novel of the same name by Brian McGreevy.

McGreevy will be involved as a writer (alongside writing partner Lee Shipman), but the biggest name attached is executive producer and director Eli Roth who would bring his baseball bat into the mix.

The story is focused on the murder of a young girl who is found ripped up near a steel mill and the two young men trying to solve it. Werewolves are inevitably involved. The big question is whether original programming will help save Netflix. If you’re considering dropping them, are shows like this enough to make you reconsider?

It may shock you to realize that you, dear reader, are a reader. You are reading this right now! Bizarre, right? And, if you can read things on the Internet, you can certainly read things that come in the traditionally accepted reading format, better known as a “book.” And if you can do it, surely the people in your life that you love enough to buy holiday presents for can do it, too! Enter The Holiday Gift Guide, and more specifically, enter this particular contribution: 18 Books for Movie Lovers. So shiny and wrap-able! So easily order-able and ship-able! So key to preventing widespread illiteracy!

After the break, check out seventeen (but really eighteen) books for the movie lover in your life for holiday season gift-giving. Unlike some of those other guides, not all of these books hit shelves in the past eleven months, as I stretched beyond just this calendar year to come up with some unexpected literary picks to make your gift-giving that much more original. Did I make an egregious omission? Of course I did. Put your obvious suggestions in the comments. And, hey, if you gift one of these books and it’s a big hit, let us know which one it was. It’s always nice to hear praise. Happy Chrismakwanzakuh, you guys.

You may notice that I have not listed one single e-book on my list, and that’s because they are not books and I refuse to acknowledge them, sorry! But for those of you who are, sigh, e-inclined, the vast majority of these are indeed available for your electronic readers. Also, may God have mercy on your soul, paper pages forever, the end.

For the Recovered Twi-Hard
The Hunger Games trilogy box set by Suzanne Collins
The first film in the (no-duh) franchise hits theaters in March, so it’s high time you gave the full set of Collins’s three books to whoever in your life has recently kicked their Twilight habit and expressed an interest in, oh, I don’t know, a strong female protagonist worth caring about?

For the Boozehound History Buff
The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant
John Hillcoat directed the adaption of Bondurant’s fact-based book (based on lives of his own bootleggin’ relatives!) that will finally hit screens in April. Getting into the spirit of the film will be easy with a quick read and a look at the film’s amazing cast, including Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Jessica Chastain, Shia LaBeouf, Mia Wasikowska, and Jason Clarke.

For the Sad-Eyed Artist
Just Kids by Patti Smith
Smith herself is co-writing the adaption of her own memoir that chronicles here life in 1970s, but more specifically, her life with artist Robert Mapplethorpe.

For the Zombie Freak
Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion
Jonathan Levine‘s 50/50 follow-up is a cinematic spin on Marion’s complicated but fresh tale of star-crossed lovers: one human, one zombie.

For the Burgeoning Sci-fi and Fantasy Nerd
The Stand by Stephen King
I guarantee that there’s at least one person in your life who considers themselves “into” sci-fi and fantasy and dark dystopic visions who has a startlingly small knowledge base of the giant genre. Give ‘em “The Stand” and change their life. Take note, Jennifer Garner.

For the Community Fan
The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To by D.C. Pierson
The Mystery Team kids are teaming back up to bring D.C. Pierson’s own novel to the screen, a funny and touching story about high school mysteries that go far beyond the norm.

For the Recovered Potter-head
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Morgenstern’s novel is a gorgeous (in the most true sense of the word) tale of dueling magicians bound by a curse, a magnificent circus, and (of course!) a star-crossed love. The detail that Morgenstern uses to describe the world of “The Night Circus” is profound, the sort that will (hopefully) be translated to the screen with just as much care.

For Your Parents
The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings
Well, I mean, obviously.

For Your Just-Graduated-From-College Sibling
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
You know how your kid sister graduated college in June and still doesn’t know what she’s doing with her life and is, like, totally bummed about it? Give her this, it’ll perk her right up.

For Any and All Family Members You Secretly Hate
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Happy holidays from the Lamberts, a Midwestern family so dysfunctional that Franzen needed nearly 600 pages to out their secrets, which still wasn’t quite enough for HBO, who are turning the book into a television series.

For Your Smarter-Than-You Mate
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel chronicles (sort of) a loosely connected group, all of them centered on an aging musical mogul. I assure you, a short synopsis doesn’t do it justice, pick it up, wrap it up, you’ll be surprised.

For Your Favorite Hipster
Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman
Sure, Klosterman’s second novel, The Visible Man, hit shelves recently, but why not go vintage and pick up his first one? “Downtown Owl,” like “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” brings together interconnected stories to tell one tale, but this tale is also told with Klosterman’s trademark wit and bite.

For the Bridesmaids Fan
Clown Girl by Monica Drake
Kristen Wiig picked up the rights to this book a while back, and I am determined to not let her forget it. Listen, clowns can be sad and dirty and broke, too, but Drake’s book is also funny, funnier still if you imagine Wiig as the clown girl in question, known only as, you guessed it, Clown Girl.

For the Sentimental Movie Buff
Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas by Alonso Duralde
Fellow film critic Duralde crafted this compendium of Christmas movies that would be termed “exhaustive” if it wasn’t just so damn fun.

For the Intellectual Movie Buff
Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow
Required reading.

For the Tech Wonk
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
“The most important book of the year” or similar. If nothing else, Isaacson got on the inside and has Jobs’s final interviews. Read it on an iPad, as Jobs intended.

For the Ladies
Then Again by Diane Keaton
A memoir from one of Hollywood’s most talented (and most firmly herself) leading ladies.

For the Pixar Fan
The Art of Pixar by Amid Amidi
A stunningly comprehensive and beautiful look at every Pixar film to date.

For more gift ideas, visit The Holiday Gift Guide homepage.

Why Watch? Master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami delivered the Israeli/Palestinian problem as a schoolyard fight back in 1975, but its message and meaning still resonate today.

Especially almost a year into the Arab Spring. Or, you know, for any situation where society clashes with society.

What does it cost? Just 4 minutes of your time.

Check out Two Solutions For One Problem for yourself:

TWO SOLUTIONS FOR ONE PROBLEM (1975)

Trust us. You have time for more short films.

Over the course of the second half of the 20th century ,an entire cottage industry sprung up around sticking James Dean’s face on things and selling them. Shirts, posters, coffee mugs, license plates, postage stamps, what have you, they’ve all been sold to James Dean fans. And a lot of the imagery stuck on them comes from Dean’s penultimate film Rebel Without a Cause, which was released just a month after the star’s infamous death. Dean’s portrayal of the angry young man in this film has become iconic, prototypical, and is just about as much of a part of pop culture as the actor himself. After he died, his performance in Rebel got elevated up to a mythic standard, it became something that symbolized not just one of Hollywood’s preeminent figures, but an entire generation of disenfranchised youth.

Eight years after Rebel Without a Cause exploded onto the screen in full color and became a cultural phenomenon, another movie about a rebellious young man was released. This one was shot in black and white and looked more like a classic Western than it did a modern, youth-centric tale of teenage rebellion. The film was called Hud, and instead of James Dean it starred Paul Newman as a guy who would rather get drunk and throw a punch than put in a day’s work. Who would rather sleep with a man’s wife than support a family of his own. Who would rather sell a contract for the oil on his family’s land than run a cattle ranch. This tale of generational strife is, in my opinion, superior to Rebel Without a Cause in nearly every way, but it doesn’t even have one tenth of its fame. The reason for that is up for debate, but I think it’s got something to do with the long, full life that Newman lived after its release.

What do they have in common?

Both Dean’s Jim and Newman’s Hud are struggling to figure out what it means to be a man and how to fit into a changing world. They both see their childhood images of masculinity changing, and they find themselves raging against the new models for manhood being set up. Jim sees his father as henpecked, and it has given him a preoccupation with cowardice. Hud sees his father as an old fogy, an idealist who refuses to change with the times and is content to watch the world pass him by. His preoccupation with not being like his father has led to him being selfish and cutthroat, and it brings him into conflict with the old guard.  Each of these characters have young children looking up to them in their own search for masculine ideals as well. For Jim it’s the troubled Plato, who we first meet killing puppies, and for Hud it’s his nephew Lon, who looks up to Hud’s glamorous, hard-partying life.

Why is Rebel Without a Cause overrated?

My confusion with Rebel Without a Cause started almost immediately, because James Dean looks like a 40-year-old man, but his parents treat him like a 12-year-old-boy. Even if you accept the fact the the 24-year-old Dean is really supposed to be 16, and just looks older because he’s dressed up in sport coats and slacks, it still doesn’t explain the way he relates to his parents. They don’t seem to be all that concerned that he has a drinking problem, and yet they send him off to his first day of school holding a sack lunch and a thermos. In another scene Jim’s new lady friend (Natalie Wood) is upset because her father won’t kiss her on the mouth anymore. We’re supposed to think he’s a jerk because he says she’s too old, and then he slaps her face when she presses the issue. What the hell? I can’t quite explain all of the weird stuff going on with people’s varying ages in this movie and the way they behave around each other because of them, but suffice to say, this movie looks dated and weird.

The other big problem with watching this one with modern eyes is all of the ridiculous melodrama. Dean’s performance is astoundingly over the top. He’s chewing scenery every second he’s on screen. His parents try to have simple conversations with him and he starts screaming for seemingly no reason. You begin to wonder if he’s mentally handicapped or just emotionally disturbed. And the bullies at school are comically evil. Instead of doling out wedgies and wet willies they try to slash the new kid with switch blades and drive him off the edge of a cliff. After multiple attempts on his life, instead of going to the police, Jim decides to just sulk in his bedroom. Then he snaps and screams after his dad drops a tray of food. Rebel Without a Cause has a lot in common with teenagers; it’s all aimless raging and uncontrolled emotion, and trying to apply logic to it will get you nowhere.

And if you think Dean’s character is unlikable, you ain’t seen nothing until you’ve dealt with Sal Mineo’s Plato. Most of the pointed morality and the clunky dialogue comes from him, and it gets so bad that whenever he spoke I wanted to reach into the screen and strangle him. We’re supposed to catch on to the fact that Plato is seeing Jim as a replacement father figure, so the script has him yell lines like, “We can have breakfast like me and my dad used to! If only you could be my dad!” How on-the-nose can dialogue get? I’ve never seen a movie that spent so much time explaining to me all of its subtext and themes, but which still left me so confused as to what it wanted to say. Rebel was losing me fast in its first half, when all of the focus was on Dean, but for the last bit of this film, when the focus was more heavily on Mineo, I downright wanted to harm myself.

Why is Hud underpraised?

Hud isn’t confused and strange, he’s just a bad person, and we need to study him to figure out why. This movie trades confused characterization for complex characterization. There’s a dead mother in the picture and her absence seems to have left a hole in the middle of everyone. Hud and his father clearly have an affection for one another, but they don’t understand each other, they don’t know how to communicate, and they find themselves constantly at odds. Because they’re both proud men who keep things bottled up, it becomes our job to peel their layers back and figure out what the source of the rift between them is. And it becomes the job of the actors to let us know what their characters are feeling, because there isn’t any clunky dialogue to spell it all out.

Over the course of the film, Hud does things that we don’t agree with, he makes choices that paint him as unlikable, but because of Newman’s performance and the quality of the script we never give up on rooting for him. The more we understand his past, the more we understand his present. And when he squints his eyes and says something non-committal like, “Nobody gets out of life alive,” suddenly it takes on volumes of meaning. We want him to grow and change, but as things progress it starts to look like betting on Hud might be a doomed prospect. He might be too set in his ways, his environment may be too limiting for growth. And this just feeds his anger further. Rather than playing a confused youth who is lashing out for no reason, Newman creates a character struggling against constraints. He’s a rebel, but with a very specific cause.

Newman isn’t the only great actor in this either. Patricia Neal is charming, tragic, and memorable as the housekeeper Alma, a character who could have come off as a generic maternal figure or a victim in other hands, but who hints at untold complexities in Neal’s. I couldn’t imagine watching this movie and not relating to her completely. And Melvyn Douglas is heartbreaking as Hud’s dad, a man who has some real wisdom and perspective, but who can’t get through to his troubled son for the life of him. The tension between Hud and his father builds and builds over the course of the film, and eventually it crescendos in a climactic moment that doesn’t involve a confrontation between the two directly, but that still manages to be one of the most brutal, bleak film climaxes I’ve ever seen. Hud is affecting, ahead of its time, and skilled in every aspect of its execution. It boggles my mind that nobody has ever recommended it to me and I had to randomly stumble across it one night on cable.

Evening the odds.

A lot of people may argue that Rebel Without a Cause is worth watching as a time capsule of a potential career that never got the chance to blossom. Or even that there hasn’t been a male celebrity more beautiful and perfect than Dean since his untimely death, and this movie will always be the way that we remember him; young, raw, and alive. But I would argue that Newman in his prime is every bit as dreamy as James Dean was. People can have their James Dean velvet tapestries, I’ll take a button with Newman’s face on it.

You need a cause, rebel – read some more Over/Under

UPDATED: Hello, musical theatrics! Director Adam Shankman‘s take on Broadway hit Rock of Ages will undoubtedly be slick, highly produced, loud, melodramatic, and positively crammed with toe-tapping song-and-dance numbers (did you see Hairspray?) – essentially, it’s a film that will likely upset fans of the stage musical while also becoming a big commercial hit with a bizarre kitsch sensibility. That’s not just me guessing – that’s information hardily reinforced by the film’s first trailer.

The film stars Julianne Hough, Diego Boneta, Russell Brand, Paul Giamatti, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Malin Ackerman, Mary J. Blige, Bryan Cranston (really?!), Alec Baldwin, and Tom Cruise as (very different) people who populate and influence Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip music scene in the 1980′s. Hough and Boneta are trying to make it, Cruise already has, Zeta-Jones scream-sings a lot, that old story. The film is set to a cadre of ’80s classic jams, including Def Leppard, Joan Jett, Journey, Foreigner, Bon Jovi, Night Ranger, REO Speedwagon, Pat Benatar, Twisted Sister, Poison, and Whitesnake. If you’ve yet to grow out of your big-haired, leather-clad rocker glory days, this is the film for you.

Weirdly enough, despite Cruise (and his hair and his hips) being the marquee name on this film, we don’t get a whole lot of him until the last half of the trailer. And then we don’t get so much of him and his character, Stacee Jaxx, as we get some random groupie and her boobs. Bravo to everyone. Get your hairspray ready and check out the trailer for Rock of Ages after the break.

The trailer is now live over at iTunes – give it a glimpse! (Will add an embed when available.)

If you are interested in the Broadway version of the Rock of Ages story, Wikipedia has a great summary that also includes all of the musical cues for the play. I, too, have dreamed that a gentleman would take me on a Hollywood-set hike with “Waiting For a Girl Like You” serving as the principal musical piece, and I suspect most of you have as well.

Rock of Ages opens on June 1, 2012. [JoBlo]

Looks like Sony’s official bid to make you happy you’re not a member of a twisted and wealthy Swedish clan of apparent criminals is coming a day early! That’s right, “the feel-bad” movie of Christmas and the spark of one of film journalism’s biggest hullabaloos of the year is opening a whole day early (well, really about five hours early, if you’re into midnighters). David Fincher‘s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo will now open on Tuesday, December 20 at 7PM.

It’s a smart move by Sony, as the holiday marketplace is already damn crowded. Next week sees the opening of no less than nine new picks, with further expansion by awards bait flicks The Artist and My Week with Marilyn. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo will be going up against a strong slate of other awards contenders – including War Horse, Albert Nobbs, The Adventures of Tintin, In the Land of Blood and Honey, and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Oh, and The Darkest Hour is opening next week, too.

Sony Pictures chairman Jeff Blake commented on the move, “This is one of the busiest times of the year for moviegoing and we can’t wait to share this outstanding thriller with audiences all over the world…We feel that by opening for night-time shows on December 20th, fans of the book will be given the perfect opportunity to get a jump start on the release of an exceptional film.”

Other possible reasons? Maybe that embargo kerfuffle by critic David Denby or, on a more positive level, perhaps Sony was pleased with last night’s special screenings of the film, which played for free in cities around the globe. Our own Rob Hunter will be reviewing the film next week, so get ready for that slice of gold. [/Film]

In the mire and bog of awards season, suddenly – a bright light. A shining grin. A guffawing laugh. A grown man that looks like Fozzie Bear? Sign me up! Film Independent (the non-profit arts organization that produces the Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival) has announced that Seth Rogen will serve as the host for the 2012 Film Independent Spirit Awards (better known as the Independent Spirits Awards). The 27^th annual awards ceremony will be held as a daytime luncheon in a tent on the beach in Santa Monica (fancy!) on Saturday, February 25. The show will be broadcast on television that night at 10P.M. ET/PT on IFC. A lunch on the beach with Seth Rogen? Did someone steal my dreams?

And it appears that this hosting choice is just as exciting to the Film Independent bigwigs, with Film Independent Senior Director Sean Mc Manus weighing in: “We’re incredibly excited to have Seth as the host for the 2012 Film Independent Spirit Awards and join us in celebrating this year’s exquisite films and talented filmmaking artists. Seth’s charm, intelligence and quick wit are sure to light up the room and will make for a truly entertaining afternoon.” IFC is jazzed, too, as Jennifer Caserta, Executive Vice President & General Manager, IFC said, “Seth is one of the smartest and funniest actors today and we look forward to him making this one of the most entertaining Spirit Awards yet. IFC is a growing brand for original comedy programming, and our viewers are in for a good time with Seth hosting.” I am tempted to agree (um, obviously).

I’ve covered the Independent Spirit Awards on-site in years past, and the addition of Rogen as host has me thinking that I may need to swing by the ceremony again this year. Be sure to check out the full list of nominees for the Film Independent Spirit Awards HERE. It’s one of my favorite nominee lists of the season.

For their latest juicy (and exciting) scoop, Twitch reports that Chris Pratt is in talks for “the lead role” in Kathryn Bigelow‘s upcoming Navy SEAL true life tale (often referred to by Kill Bin Laden, but currently without a new official title). Joel Edgerton was originally cast in the film, but had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts, and Jason Clarke took on a role in November. It’s unknown if Clarke has taken on what was to be Edgerton’s role, but this news might well signal that’s not the case and that Pratt’s assumed “lead role” is the lead role. He’s an off-beat pick, but Bigelow has proven with The Hurt Locker that she’s more than capable of directing emerging talents into star-making performance (hi, Jeremy Renner, Brian Geraghty, and Anthony Mackie).

Pratt is slowly morphing into a very interesting actor who is more than able to pull off some different roles with aplomb. Consider his work in 2011 alone – playing a jerk-off in Take Me Home Tonight, a gross dude in What’s Your Number?, and a pivotal (and oddly heart-tugging) part in Moneyball, all while pulling regular duty on Parks and Recreation as one-half of my current favorite television couple (eating off Frisbees and hilarious role-play are my hallmarks of a successful relationship). But a hard-core action role with enough drama to keep intellectual hearts pounding? That’s different, and damn if I don’t like the sound of it.

Producers are reportedly aiming to start shooting the film in February, so hopefully we will get the official word on this (and maybe that pesky title) sooner rather than later.