Director Andrew Stanton, being somewhat of the miracle worker that he is, has managed to capture the strengths of the original Star Wars trilogy while avoiding much of what was wrong with the prequels with his John Carter. This Disney epic provides for all of a boy’s basic needs, wants, and desires that Lucas’s prequels didn’t deliver upon. Stanton knows their sweet spot – and yes, I know how creepy that reads – by hitting all the major checkpoints required for them: beefy hero, beautiful love interest, sweet weaponry, non-pandering comic relief, big aliens, and exciting flying things that could not look more like the speeder bikes from Return of the Jedi. How do these amazing devices work, you ask? They just do.

Stanton treats the more fantastical aspects of John Carter like George Lucas did, “It’s just there, and who cares how it works or how it got made?” Overall, John Carter bears both many connections and thankful distances to the Star Wars series. Just how Luke Skywalker saw the vast universe Lucas created, there’s not one scene of Carter condescending to the mechanics or bizarro nature of the world – Mars, which they call “Barsoom” – he’s thrown into and never saying something along the lines of, “Isn’t this costume goofy, guys? (*wink* *wink*).” When things get silly, Stanton and his cast always play it straight-faced and with nothing but respect, like the original Star Wars films did. Carter doesn’t question the idea of huge white apes, he just kicks their asses. The tone is spot-on, and it gets right everything Episode I through III of Star Wars messed up, in terms of spirit and adventure. There’s little moping around and zero long, dull political discussions.

Tonally, John Carter isn’t concerned with taking itself too seriously, though Stanton does take Carter, the other characters, and the world they exist in seriously. A prime example of this is a scene between Carter and Powell, a blonde hippie-looking Confederate played by TV’s greatest badass: Bryan Cranston. As Powell begins to unleash the dull type of character exposition we expect from Lucas’s writing at its worst, Stanton continuously plays out a joke, avoiding the possibility of acting too serious for a movie with four-armed aliens and humongous apes. Whenever Powell attempts to give his spiel on Carter, Stanton uses a hilarious gag to cut through the set-up. The prequels rarely had that sense of humor about themselves. While pure goofiness was going on, everyone was crying, yelling, or discussing what the future holds, all in overly earnest ways.

Once the climax of John Carter comes, Stanton still rightfully aims for pure fun, while never forsaking the dramatic stakes. By the end, this served as another reminder of what did not work in the Star Wars prequels. Look at the final battles in Episodes I, II, and III, it’s all brooding. What child is going to take joy in seeing Anakin quickly having his arm cut off by Count Dooku at the end of Attack of the Clones or the horrifying sight of Anakin nearly burned to death in Revenge of the Sith? Lucas always said those films are for kids, but what type of kid enjoys that brand of emo adventure? All kids will have fun seeing Carter, a hero one can mildly get behind, try to save the girl. There’s no tears or emotional speeches in John Carter. Unlike Lucas, Stanton keeps the tone light.

Even when it comes to the ladies, Stanton knows what’s up, something we can’t say about Lucas’s approach to “heroines.” When Lucas put his women into action, there was such a cartoonishly horny nerd approach to it all. Remember in Episode II when we got Padmé in that tight white outfit with her showing off a little skin? That’s all Lucas saw in that character: a sexy girl who’s going to hang back while the boys do all the work. There’s a line in John Carter when Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins) refers to a skimpy outfit as “vulgar,” and it is. In Return of the Jedi and Attack of the Clones, there’s none of that self-awareness over how the female leads are portrayed. Lucas finds that kinky stuff sexy, not demeaning like Stanton does. Yes, Thoris does sport some flattering warrior attire, but it is no more revealing – and possibly less – than what the guys wear.

With the badassery of Dejah Thoris and Sola (Samantha Morton) present, they ultimately end up outshining Taylor Kitsch. This brings up the most overt tie to the Star Wars series, and the biggest flaw of John Carter: we care more about the film’s cool supporting players, not the lead. When we first come to meet Carter, he’s a former Confederate soldier, and you just cannot buy Kitsch, a very modern actor, as a Confederate soldier with that “beard” of his and swagger. Just like our first introduction to Luke Skywalker, it takes time to warm up to our hero. Yet, once Skywalker and Carter start to become watchable and less whiny, the likes of Han Solo, Tars Tarkas (Willem Dafoe), and Kantos Kan (James Purefoy) come in and steal their movie.

When it comes down to the supporting aliens, there is no Jar Jar Binks or C-3P0 in the John Carter universe. While John Carter does have a “dog” companion, Woola, he’s the most badass alien dog ever put on film. There are no fart jokes or a scene with Woola crapping on our hero’s shoes. Woola doesn’t wreak havoc and is never played as a goofy sidekick, and he even gets in on some of the action. Do you recall the first action beat in Revenge of the Sith, when Obi-Wan and Anakin are roaming that giant spaceship? All of that action got annoyingly intercut with R2-D2 making a mess with moronic robot guards, and there’s none of those lame sidekick jokes here to ruin the pacing. When Carter is in battle, Woola joins in. It’s reminiscent of the non-human creatures in the original trilogy: they’re treated respectfully as characters, not a punchline. They serve a purpose and have motivations, like Chewbacca or Jabba the Hutt did.

In the vein of A New Hope, John Carter‘s flaws don’t tarnish the smart playfulness Stanton and the film perfect. This is what I wanted – and I’m sure plenty of you will agree come Friday – from the Star Wars prequels: high-flying adventure, not talk of trade federations, and all that mumbo jumbo. When the closing credits roll on John Carter, you will get the feeling that there are bigger and better adventures to come. This is the introduction, a small piece in something grand. When you rewatch A New Hope past the age of ten, you realize there’s clearly room for improvement, and that’s the case with John Carter as well. If the Movie Gods are out there, then we will get to see Andrew Stanton’s bigger and better Empire Strikes Back.

For a film that reportedly got a young Tim Burton fired from Disney, that same studio sure seems set on making Frankenweenie a big event film for them this autumn. Burton’s film, an expanded version of his 1984 live-action short that apparently didn’t go over so well the Disney honchos way back when, will now be getting an IMAX release on its already-announced wide release date of October 5. The film will be both the first black and white film and the first stop-motion animated picture to hit IMAX screens.

Like Burton’s original short, Frankenweenie is a family-friendly spin on Mary Shelley’s classic novel “Frankenstein.” In Burton’s world, Victor Frankenstein isn’t a doctor driven to extremes by his desire to reanimate the dead, however, he’s just a kid who has lost his beloved pet dog Sparky. Young Victor takes it upon himself to bring Sparky back from the dead and some sweet and clever hijinks ensue. I don’t think Sparky kills anyone, and I am pretty sure he’s not concerned with learning to read, but who knows just how deeply Burton committed to his source material.

Nathan showed us the teaser trailer for the film last week, and I’m still cooing over how perversely cute it looks (not to mention how cuddly Sparky, a dead animal brought back to life, appears to be). While I’ve never identified myself as a Tim Burton fan in the least, Frankenweenie looks to be both cute and clever, and I can’t stop myself from wanting to hug Sparky.

The film includes voice work by Winona Ryder, Martin Landau, Martin Short, Catherine O’Hara, Charlie Tahan, and Atticus Shaffer.

The IMAX release of Frankenweenie will also be Burton’s second IMAX picture this year, as his Dark Shadows will be released in IMAX on May 11. That is a film I am significantly less excited about. [THR]

Casting on Sofia Coppola’s new celebrity-obsessed crime movie The Bling Ring seems to be coming together quite quickly. It was just about a week ago we learned that Emma Watson had signed on to become the first actor confirmed for the film, and now THR has news that she’s being joined by a gaggle more.

The biggest name added to the cast is Leslie Mann (Knocked Up), who is set to play the mother of two of the female members of this teenage crime ring – but she’s not alone. This movie tells the based-on-a-true story of a bunch of teenagers who break into celebrity homes, and Coppola reportedly wants to use it as an opportunity to break in a bunch of young new actors.

Perhaps the biggest break is going to come to Israel Broussard (The Chaperone), who gets to play the male lead. But, in addition to him, young actresses named Katie Chang, Claire Pfister, and Georgia Rock are all set to make their feature debuts here, and American Horror Story actress Taissa Farmiga is on board as well (in just her second feature appearance). With the members of the crime ring coming together so nicely, will it be long before we start to get word on which celebrities will be making cameos as the people whose houses get broken into? Call me crazy, but it seems like there’s some potential for hilarity there.

By all accounts, one of the coolest things about Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon’s upcoming horror movie The Cabin in the Woods is that it’s layered with all sorts of surprises. So if you want to be able to experience it completely fresh, it would probably be best to not watch any trailers. Heck, it would probably be best if you stopped reading this text too. Probably you should just lock yourself in your bedroom and keep your head under a pillow for the next month.

But for those less nervous about getting a glimpse of what this thriller has to offer, there’s a new trailer on the web being hosted by the folks at Fearnet. The important question is, does it reveal too much? That could only definitively be answered by those that have seen the film, but so far it seems like the answer is yes. Read on only if you’re not afraid of no spoilers.

The answer to that question isn’t clear yet, but the important thing to note is that this trailer also claims that its best secrets are still kept. Despite the glimpses we’re getting, the tagline “you think you know the story” is still hanging over everything. Is it possible that this ad campaign hasn’t shown us as much as we think, and there are yet more layers that are still to be peeled back? Maybe, and after these questions get answered it’s going to be a lot more apparent whether all of this Cabin in the Woods marketing was really effective, or epically stupid. Let’s hope it’s the former.

The Cabin in the Woods will premiere this week at SXSW, and will open on April 13.

In the late 1990s, two quite divergent Iranian films were recognized on the Western stage. During the 1999 Academy Awards, Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven, a touching Satyajit Ray-like neorealist drama about a pair of siblings searching for lost shoes, became the first Iranian film nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Two years earlier, in May 1997, Abbas Kiarostami’s minimalist exercise Taste of Cherry won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the first Iranian film to do so. By the tail end of the twentieth century, Iran had made its way onto the stage of world-renowned arthouse filmmaking. While other cinematically underrepresented nations have oscillated in and out of prominence as the place where great new movies are being pioneered (South Korea, Romania), Iran has consistently, albeit quietly, given the West a limited but incredible output of challenging and innovative films.

Consuming international arthouse cinema is, in some ways, an essentially reductive and problematic venture, for such a practice often involves categorizing an entire country based on their cinematic output, and understanding that cinematic output exclusively by what has been exported. Arthouse films that export well often don’t play an active role in their home nation’s cinematic culture, like Portugese filmmaker Pedro Costa’s barebones studies of slum life, which are virtually absent in his home nation and have found an audience internationally despite the paradox of the cultural specificity of his films. Secondly, the films that ultimately export out of a country make up only a fraction of that country’s cinematic output; thus, it’s rather misleading to say that Christi Puiu and Christian Mungiu represent “Romanian cinema” or Kim Ki-duk and Lee Chang-dong represent “South Korean cinema” in any definitive way.

So, when I make the observation that Iran is making interesting and compelling work that speaks particularly well to this global moment, I am speaking, of course, about what is visible to Western spectators like myself, an exposure that is, in of itself, profoundly informed by global politics. In talking about “Iranian cinema,” I do not pretend to be any sort of expert on Iranian culture (cinematically or otherwise) nor do I desire to coin a “movement” (which is always an essentially meaningless exercise of applying meaning), but merely to recognize the notable increase in the export of interesting films whose content suggest not a push towards establishing a recognizable “national cinema,” but speak to the world about cinema in a way that only a nation like Iran can right now.

The importance of Iran’s world visibility is certainly not lost on Iranians. Here’s the speech by A Separation filmmaker Asghar Farahi upon accepting the Best Foreign Language Film award at the Oscars two weeks back (and one of the best moments of the night):

“At this time, many Iranians all over the world are watching us and I imagine them to be very happy. They are happy not just because of an important award or a film or filmmaker, but because at the time when talk of war, intimidation, and aggression is exchanged between politicians, the name of their country Iran is spoken here through her glorious culture, a rich and ancient culture that has been hidden under the heavy dust of politics. I proudly offer this award to the people of my country, a people who respect all cultures and civilizations and despise hostility and resentment.”

For Westerners, the visibility of a film like A Separation represents the de-dusting of Iran’s cultural output, a moment that reminds or informs one of the fact that the nation has been making interesting films for decades now (some of which, thinks to a growing interest in Kiarostami and Mishen Makhmalbaf, are making their way into Western DVD players for the first time ever). Farahi’s speech speaks uniquely to the importance of art cinema not only as a forum for exhibiting films that have greater aspirations than the mainstream, but as a communication medium used to transmit messages which would otherwise be lost in translation. This is a unique moment. While GOP frontrunners compete over who would declare war on Iran soonest after entering office (Happy Super Tuesday, btw), a filmmaker accepting an award for making a truly outstanding domestic drama speaks to an investment in culture as the most honorable of ventures that erases even the possibility of hostility and resentment. We may not all speak Persian, but cinema can be a language that’s easy to translate.

The emphasis Farahi makes here is a nuanced but essential one: the honor here lies not the power of storytelling or the potential of the medium of film, but culture as an expression of identity. Farahi’s use of the word “culture” here does not seem to denote culturally specificity or exclusivity – he celebrates A Separation’s transportability as much as he honors Iran’s legacy of artisanship – but rather a shared investment in culture that can become borderless (and Farahi is, of course, distinguishing the Iranian people from its political megaphone-spokespeople, who, it should be noted, quickly reappropriated his speech).

As Iranian cinema grows in visibility, I’m reminded of a transportable text from another medium: Azar Nafisi’s 2003 memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran, which provides a reminder that the act of consuming culture itself can be a great political minefield in Iran. This Iranian perspective, then, travels with a sense of urgency surrounding works of art that knows little comparison in Western experience. In the opening pages of Lolita, Nafisi shares with the reader a warning that she gave the women in her book club:

“do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.”

Arthouse films that have emerged from countries that have been marginalized on the world stage have often been categorized as “neo-realist,” or films that attempt to say something about the everyday struggles of a nation’s people. This moniker has been applied across the board, from Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) to Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955) and even to recent Romanian cinema like Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. Majidi’s Children of Heaven seems to fit this moniker comfortably, but it does not characterize what Iran has exported since, films which bears a much closer affinity and lineage to Taste of Cherry. A Separation may be deemed realist, but in the Mike Leigh (not the de Sica) tradition. Iranian cinema has engaged in a fascinating meta-reflexive mode, like Kiarostami’s work (including his non-Iranian Certified Copy) and, of course, Jafar Panahi’s recently-released This Is Not a Film. Rather than using cinema to depict “real life,” Iranian cinema has instead used the medium to search for the epiphany of truth. Iranian filmmakers have chosen to speak to a global audience about cinema in order to speak to a global audience about Iran.

Iran is perhaps one of few countries with a prolific cinematic output for whom filmmaking – and, as Lolita illustrates, cultural production and consumption at large – can be a dangerous and potentially subversive activity. In an era where it seems evermore difficult to find cinema that dares to say anything new, filmmakers like Panahi risk their lives to use cinema to say anything at all. Panahi, who was banned from filmmaking, shot this non-film in which he describes a film he would like to make, and the result – This Is Not a Film – was miraculously smuggled to the Cannes Film Festival in a birthday cake, and is now in limited release in the US.

Farahi and Panahi, by situating their works as products of cultural and individual expression, highlight the importance of the production of culture as a powerful act in of itself. The very act of making a movie or reading a book or seeing/exporting a movie carries a profound political weight on its own, one that transcends the particular political discourse of a given moment. These aren’t meta-exercises for their own sake. They are essential reminders that the epiphany of truth exists as much in the act of reading as it does in the content of the book.

Discover more truth with Culture Warrior

They always say that the first year of being married is the hardest. So hard, in fact, that watching newlyweds suffer through things can be pretty fertile grounds for comedy. Or at least that’s the bet writer/director Dan Mazer (Dog Bites Man) is making with his new romantic comedy I Give It A Year. This one tells the story of a horribly mismatched couple trying to survive their first year together, and from the title and the cast announced so far, it would seem that it also heavily involves the couple’s skeptical friends.

Prometheus actor Rafe Spall is already set to play the husband, and according to a report from Variety, Anna Faris has agreed to join the film as his wife. That isn’t the end of things as far as casting news goes, though. Margin Call’s Simon Baker and Bridesmaids’ Rose Byrne are also signed up to play what are described as “strong supporting characters.” Whether that term is to be taken figuratively or literally, it presumably points to the fact that they will be the principal actors’ naysaying friends.

With this core foursome Mazer seems to have put together a solid ensemble. Three of the four actors have established themselves doing smaller roles in large films over the last few years, and have bigger roles in even higher profile pictures on the horizon. By the time this movie gets released they could all be burgeoning superstars, and wouldn’t that go a long way in making Mazer and his people seem smart?

The odd man out in that bet is Anna Faris. If her career had a peak, it was a number of years ago already. And her last few efforts, bad romantic comedies like What’s Your Number? and worse children’s fare like the Alvin and the Chipmunks sequels and Yogi Bear, have been kind of embarrassing. Hopefully some of Byrne’s Bridesmaids luck can rub off on Faris with this project and those claiming that she’s already past her prime will be proven wrong. Watching people shut up critics and achieve their potential is always so heart-warming. Once-promising actresses desperately drying to glam themselves up while making bad movie after bad movie: not so much.

Documentaries done right serve a number of purposes for cinephiles – to educate, to inspire, to reflect, to synthesize – but my favorite brand of documentary has always been the kind that chronicles a people and a lifestyle that are diametrically opposed to the sort of person I am and the lifestyle I lead. And thus, enter The Source, which looks to fit perfectly into my preferred type of doc.

World premiering at SXSW, Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulos’s film chronicles “The Source Family,” an “Aquarian tribe” that embodied just about everything people think of when they think of hippies, the 70s, and what it meant to be groovy. The Family was “a radical experiment in ’70s utopian living. Their outlandish lifestyle, popular health food restaurant, rock band, and beautiful women made them the darlings of Hollywood’s Sunset Strip; but their outsider ideals and spiritual leader, Father Yod, caused controversy with local authorities.” You read that right – they weren’t just a group of young beauties – they also crafted their own cottage industries. But what happened to Father Yod and his Family? You’ll just have to find out.

After the break, get an embrace from Father Yod himself with the full poster for The Source.

The Source will screen at SXSW on the following dates and times:

Sunday, March 11 at 1:15 PM at the Vimeo Theater
Tuesday, March 13 at 11:00 AM at the Alamo Lamar C
Friday, March 16 at 6:45 PM at the Alamo Lamar B

There was a time when Zombieland writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick turned in scripts for it and a time when Hunger Games director Gary Ross was looking to direct, but the Spider-Man 4 implosion defeated Spidey’s nemesis as well. Sony was keen to get things rolling for Venom – based, of course, on the drooling symbiotic mirror enemy – and now that The Amazing Spider-Man is attempting to re-deliver the franchise, it’s time to start having meetings about who could bring this character to life best, apparently.

According to an anonymous source quoted in the LA Times, Sony is looking to Chronicle co-writer/director Josh Trank to be taken over by the alien monster.

It would be a good move for a newly found director, but there’s something gimmicky about it all. It’s as if Sony is purposefully trying to do the opposite of what Marvel is doing (and with its own characters no less). While Marvel is focusing on individual movies for its heroes, Sony is left (copyright style) to explore individual characters in the Spider-Man universe, so they’re going with villains. Venom was a popular character, but the big question is whether the all-brawn, no-brains baddie deserves to be the center of his own movie. What story do you tell? How much CGI saliva will it take? Would it be followed by a Lizard movie? Or a Green Goblin flick?

The Hollywood Reporter has announced that Michael Bacall, co-screenwriter for Project X, has been hired to create a treatment for a possible sequel. Both producer Todd Phillips and Warners will get to decide whether they want to move forward with it, but only a money allergy (or some sort of artistic integrity) would keep them from doing so.

With films like this, we’re all entering a new era where studios have gotten wise to the pitfalls of shelling out $400m for a budget and advertising on one movie. It’s no surprise then that movies made for $10m-$20m that provide steady returns are looking a bit shinier, and Project X2 would certainly fit that bill while piggybacking on sequel success.

This is all about as unsurprising as Rush Limbaugh saying something offensive about women on air, but the real question is whether or not a movie like Project X will inevitably succumb to the don’t-wash-don’t-rinse-but-repeat story problems of The Hangover 2. With Phillips’s name attached, it’s an easy comparison, but it’s also easy because with movies that are exercises in one-upmanship, it seems natural that the sequel can do little but repeat and continue that challenge. Is there enough meat to the movie to transfer its characters over into a second helping? It doesn’t seem likely, but maybe Bacall has a trick up his sleeve. Or maybe it’ll just be another outrageous party…this time in college!

Skepticism aside, it’s a valid question simply because of the movie’s structure. A great treatment, and a great sequel could be in the works, but this is undoubtedly a challenge for Bacall to either face or embrace.

At a certain age, everyone has them – people they love, friends they’ve grown up with, beloved compatriots that have turned into frazzled, mewling monsters. Let’s call them what they are – Friends With Kids. In Jennifer Westfeldt‘s film, she stars as one half of a non-couple with no kids – her Julie Keller has a great apartment and a great job and a great pack of friends, but she’s nowhere near the stage of life when she’ll announce at a dinner that she’s pregnant, or move to Brooklyn to have more space for the rugrats, or to turn into a shell of herself after months of no sleep and no sex and a crying baby. Her best friend, Jason Fryman (Adam Scott) is in the same boat – a bit of a playboy, he’s loose with both his morals and his money, and in absolutely no state to settle down and have a kid.

Which doesn’t quite explain how much they both secretly want to. When the other four members of their inner circle (including Bridesmaids veterans Maya Rudolph, Chris O’Dowd, Jon Hamm, and Kristen Wiig), already paired off and married, start having children, Julie and Jason are both struck by two thoughts. One – they want kids. Two – they don’t want to have them the way their friends have them. All Julie and Jason can see is the disintegration of romance, beaten down by babies screaming for binkies, lack of sex, and abject exhaustion – which is why they come up with the brilliant plan to buck tradition and have a baby together, sans romance, splitting everything down the middle, while still maintaining their regular (non-romantically involved) lives and building a brave new world.

What’s most obvious to the audience (but not to Julie and Jason even to their friends to some extent) is that they have already built their own world together even before they have their cute baby boy (who is conceived, albeit awkwardly and begrudgingly, the old-fashioned way) – they live in the same building, they rely on each other for support and understanding, they know each other through and through, and they function as a couple when they are amongst their other friends. Adding a child into the mix is really not such a wacky idea – though most people seem to think it is. The arrangement works well for awhile – their friends are aghast and jealous at just how well – until Jason meets the minxy Mary Jane (Megan Fox) in the park, and a somewhat stunned and surely hurt Julie decides she needs to jump back into the dating pool, too, eventually meeting the perfectly lovely Kurt (Edward Burns) and starting a perfectly lovely relationship with him.

But, obviously, this just won’t do. Or will it?

You’ll just have to see. Westfeldt’s film takes its time with its characters’ lives - Friends With Kids covers approximately a decade in Julie and Jason’s lives – so though some expected things happen in the film, they don’t often happen in expected ways or even in expected timeframes. And though the film has some standard plotting and familiar beats, Westfeldt’s ear and eye for truths (both great and small), combined with a cast that frequently exhibits great chemistry, elevates Friends With Kids far beyond your run-of-the-mill romantic comedy. In short, it’s a delight, a funny and frisky film that also hits on some deep emotional truths.

The film marks Westfeldt’s directorial debut, but she’s previously penned and starred in two other (quite charming) films that deal with pairs of people who attempt to live their lives in unconventional (but loving) ways. In Kissing Jessica Stein, Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen starred as two straight women who, fed up with singles scene in New York City, try to date each other. In Ira & Abby, Westfeldt’s Abby Willoughby is a free (if not just directionless) spirit who proposes marriage to Chris Messina’s Ira Black – after they’ve known each other about six hours. Her Julie isn’t as extreme as Jessica or as wild as Abby, but Westfeldt’s characters do exist in the same wheelhouse – independent women who find themselves perhaps a bit surprised to discover that they want some traditional things too, like a partner, a husband, or a child. And, in each film, no matter how honest the parties are, or how good their intentions may be, there are bumps in the road.

Yet, what’s most impressive about Westfeldt’s work is that she does not hoard all the good bits (and bumps) for her own characters – Friends With Kids eventually evolves into belonging to Adam Scott in terms of performance more so than it does to Westfeldt, and though the film could stand to offer more in the way of developing the characters of those “friends,” Westfeldt’s co-stars each get opportunities to break out in their own way. Most notably and unexpectedly, Kristen Wiig and Jon Hamm’s Missy and Ben are the most troubled pair of the friend circle, a married couple whose intense sexual relationship fizzled out after their first child arrives. But whereas Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd’s Leslie and Alex have trouble finding the time to have sex after their kids arrive, though their affection for each other remains clear, Missy and Ben’s lack of sex highlights much deeper issues in their relationship. Which is all a long way of saying that Wiig and Hamm get some heavy lifting in the film, which they accomplish quite handily.

Jennifer Westfeldt has done wonderful work in her directorial debut - Friends With Kids a warm and funny romantic comedy with the right amount of grit and a healthy dose of honesty. The film is both a natural progression from her two previous feature scripts and an impressive step forward. Unsurprisingly, it signals that, in addition to her acting and writing chops, she’s a skilled and keen director who we should hope to see much more from.

The Upside: Friends With Kids is brimming with the three h’s that are essential to making any type of romantic comedy work – humor, heart, and honesty.

The Downside: Some of the supporting characters could stand to be a bit more developed.

On the Side: Westfeldt attended Yale University, where she sang with the a cappella group Redhot & Blue. Is there nothing she can’t do?!

Why Watch? To make his latest short, Joseph Ernst took a camera onto a London street. What makes it special, is the camera – a hand-cranked wooden beast that’s rocking 18 frames per second and coming up on its 100th birthday.

What he captures is a kind of temperal confusion that seems gimmicky, but still speaks loudly to the films of the past. What we all wouldn’t give for a hi-def camera to take back to the 1920s to see what real life looked like back then. All too often, watching a movie from another era means seeing a time through the lens limitations and imagining things in their sepia-toned saturation instead of how they looked through everyday eyes. Ernst has done the reverse here, and it’s fascinating and funny.

What will it cost? Only 1 minute.

Skip Work. You’ve Got Time For More Short Films.

Ah, Elaine Benes. The spastic dancing, the contraceptive sponge hoarding, the big wall o’ hair. She’s the Seinfeld character nearest to my heart, which speaks both to the deep admiration I have for uncouth women with practical, somewhat masculine taste in footwear and Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ endearingly brassy performance. Though there was never any reason to doubt her talent during the ‘90s, in my eyes, no TV character that Louis-Dreyfus tackled post-Seinfeld was going to come close to matching iconic Elaine.

At first, this stubborn assessment (originally made when I was a very self-possessed 17-year-old) seemed on point, but then the trailer for her new HBO series Veep was released last week. Even though the comedy isn’t set to premiere until April, it already looks like we have another classic Louis-Dreyfus character on our hands. In other words, if TV shows were potential lovers, Veep would be looking pretty sponge-worthy right about now.

In Veep, Louis-Dreyfus plays Selina Meyer, a former senator who becomes the vice president of the United States. According to the series’ creator Armando Iannucci, the character, who appears to be a feckless train wreck, isn’t based on a real politician. This being said, the brief clip perfectly captures what I think we’ve all kind of imagined it’s like to be the VP: not really knowing what the hell you’re talking about or what you believe in from day to day, peppering conversations and speeches with meaningless buzz words and phrases, and, naturally, waiting around for the president to die. Selina Meyer appears to be a combination of Liz Lemon and Elaine, she’s flawed, coarse, and relatable in her ineptitude. What I hope you noticed (aside from the appearance of My Girl actress Anna Chlumsky) is that this trailer is less than two minutes long but every second of it is funnier than any of the shows built around Louis-Dreyfus after Seinfeld’s finale.

Watching Ellie, her initial, post-Elaine Benes effort, was canceled after two seasons, lumped together with other failed sitcoms starring her former castmates, and taken as evidence of some kind of Seinfeld curse. Then there was the dreadfully titled The New Adventures of Old Christine, which chronicled the dull neuroses of a bumbling, middle-aged divorcee. This one fared better with Nielsen families and Louis-Dreyfus garnered and Emmy award for her performance but the writing was so bogged down in sitcom stereotypes (a forty-something woman dealing with hormones, illogical slapstick), that the humor was never more than just quaint (the kind of jokes that make you think, “I could see how that could make someone laugh” but don’t actually arouse any laughter). Louis-Dreyfus is a capable comedic actress, even with some mediocre work under her belt, that fact is apparent when you consider guest-starring roles on shows like Arrested Development and Curb Your Enthusiasm. But that talent obviously needs to be supported by sharp writing and for the first time in more than a decade she’s going to star on a show that might just have that.

Iannucci, who created the British series The Thick of It and directed and co-wrote the film In the Loop, is a shrewd political satirist (there isn’t an unhilarious moment within the first fifteen minutes of the latter). He mixes high-brow, intellectual humor with crude humor and ends up with this great bouillabaisse of wit and, like, jokes about shit. In short, he’s brilliant. HBO has become this prestige network—it’s a place where actors can go to reinvent themselves and I think that’s exactly what Louis-Dreyfus is going to do.

So what did you think of the trailer? Will you be watching Veep on April 22?

Get plugged in with more Channel Guide

Getting the other side of the piracy debate, I speak directly to an online pirate about why he does it and how he sees it.

Plus, Goon co-writer Evan Goldberg talks hockey and the violence of comedy while Detachment director Tony Kaye proves he’s still slightly crazy.

Download Episode #124

On This Week’s Show:

Telling Jokes With a Bloody Mouth [Beginning - 14:00]: Evan Goldberg, co-writer of movies like Superbad and the forthcoming hockey flick Goon explains how going to bars is a great way to hear stories.

They Wobble, But That’s What  They Do [14:00 - 39:15]: The debate isn’t going away, so we’re digging deeper into it by talking directly to an online pirate who has a lot to say about the laws, the entitlement issue, and the not-at-all-simple act of sharing.

Detached [39:15 - The End]: Tony Kaye torched his own career after American History X. Now, he’s emerging again with teacher drama Detachment, which stars Adrien Brody, and he’s still crazy after all these years.

By the way, Goon is available On Demand currently, and you can seek it out here.

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On Last Week’s Show:

A View From Below the Line – conversations with production assistants.

On Next Week’s Show:

Tales from Development Hell!

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Last week the Academy Award-nominated Polish film, In Darkness, expanded its small limited release from LA and New York to a suburban art house near you following the award show’s exposure for the Anne Frank meets Caligula World War II drama. Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz) was a real man who hid and protected a dozen Jewish refugees in the sewers of Lvov from 1943 to the end of the war, all while trying to keep his own reluctant do-gooding a secret from his wife and the Nazi soldiers inhabiting his city. Unlike previous films which share similar plots to In Darkness, this one registers as little more than a dirty sex film. Not to say the film’s constant depiction of sex is particularly pornographic, but rather it is dirty due to its location—a sewer.

Yes, the film has a lot of sewer sex. As in, people on the run were bumping uglies next to rats swimming in filth. In the words of Twitch’s Peter Martin: “who knew that raw sewage was such a strong aphrodisiac?” I certainly did not, and after sitting through the approximately 100 hours In Darkness takes to unfold, it became clear that maybe I was missing out on this new world of weird places to get it on. I will admit now, I did not run down to my closest manhole to explore the going-ons of the Dallas underworld, however I did put together a list of unconventional (yet hot?) places films have graciously deemed perfect for fucking.

Sewer – In Darkness

Having said that, let’s go back to In Darkness, shall we? There is enough to rant about here for days, but rather than waste your valuable work boredom reading time I’d like to just focus on the task at hand – the sewer. From the film’s first five minutes, director Agnieszka Holland quickly establishes the audience should expect some personal loving time in excruciating long takes, as Socha and his wife get all kinds of intimate after he stops by his beloved sewers (he knows them better than his wife) to drop off some stolen loot. Reeking of city he crawls into bed with his young daughter barely asleep near them, a moment we will see repeated by refugee and cheating father Yanek (Marcin Bosak) a few scenes later when he fucks his mistress while his wife and daughter watch. Yes, this is that kind of film.

Once safely secured in the sewer, Yanek cannot control himself any longer (I guess the excitement of running from the Nazis is also a bit of a turn-on?) and again sneaks into bed with his mistress while all but one of their fellow bunkmates try to sleep through it. The sole witness to this round of stress relief is Klara (Agnieszka Grochowska) who is so aroused that she begins pleasuring herself along with the couple, stopping only when she is caught by the object of her affection, Mundek (Benno Furmann). Later, those two find themselves clumsily boning in rain water drainage after they are reunited following a short trip Mundek takes to sneak into a local concentration camp. It’s hard to decide if the sex is used as a clever plot device to expose these characters as human or show an aspect of human nature we rarely see in war films, but it is certainly shocking to see people so insatiable that they will ignore the smells and ick around them.

A Hot Tub with a Paraplegic – Our Day Will Come

In the above clip, the creepy-sexy French dish Vincent Cassel (Patrick) is sitting in a hot tub with a couple trying to unwind after a long day. Patrick invades their personal space as his psycho sidekick Remy (Olivier Barthelemy) holds them hostage with a crossbow. In a previous scene he tired of two young girls he invited back to his room for some light gag-play, and in a moment of extreme madness he slips into the hot tub with the man and his paraplegic wife. Patrick stares at them, daring the couple to do anything but watch as he begins to masturbate under the bubbles. The powerful scene provides an intense look into the sexual thrill of power and humiliation, as Patrick is both turned on and disgusted with himself upon his climax. He leaves the cowering couple in the hot soup, while he and Remy continue on their trip of terror from Paris to Ireland.

A Horse Trailer– Target (Mishen)

Like we’ve mentioned before, 2011 was a great year for groundbreaking sex depictions in film. The Russian retelling of Anna Karenina, Mishen (Target), will hopefully spend some more time on festival circuits this year with a potential American release so anyone looking for an endurance test can watch this visually stunning work of art. A film meant to both mental and sexual stimulate, Mishen holds nothing back when it comes to talking about the destruction sex and love can have on people. In one particularly grueling scene, lovers Zoe (Justine Waddell) and Nikolay (Vitaly Kishchenko) are going crazy, each approaching psychotic breaks, and have run away with each other to Victor’s horse farm.

There they can hardly keep their hands off each other, as sex allows them moments of clarity nothing else can afford them, and the couple spends the next few days crawling and fucking in his hay-covered horse trailer. Acting and living as animals doesn’t have the affect on two well-to-do people we would think, rather it offers them a sense of calm even though Victor and Zoe are buzzing with sexual and mental arousal. It isn’t until Victor shoves a metal horse bit in Zoe’s mouth that the couple is able to break from their role play to see the reality from the fantasy.

On the Floor, Next to Your Fellow Soldiers – Enemy at the Gates

Finally no list of strange, head-scratching turn on locations is complete without 2001’s Enemy at the Gates. In the infamous scene above Tania (Rachel Weisz),a woman torn between two men, makes her dramatic choice between Vassili (Jude Law) and his friend Cmmisar Danilov (Joseph Fiennes) by sneaking into Vassili’s sleeping bag for some intimate time while his platoon sleeps soundly next to him. Even with the constant interruptions of soldiers walking around and one sitting mere feet away on watch, the couple is able to climax together (a true fantasy if I ever saw one!) before settling in for a quick nap. Unsurprisingly, this scene is both incredibly sexy and anxiety provoking for anyone with an exhibitionist side to them. Something I hope director Jean-Jacques Annaud intended.

What are some places films presented as perfectly suitable sex locations that make you question the characters’ sanity?

Get a little closer with some more Reel Sex

Just on the heels of the announcement that Kristen Bell had signed on to be the first of Adam Brody’s many ex-girlfriends in Some Girls, THR has a report that a whole bevy of additional actresses have come out of the woodwork to fill out the ranks of Brody’s former flames. You see, Some Girls is an adaptation of a Neil LaBute play about a young writer who is looking to take stock of his past romantic entanglements and gain closure with each of his exes before he moves forward in his life and marries his current fiancée. Bell is said to be playing a character named Bobbi, a whip-smart little lady who Brody’s character walked away from without so much as a word. And with this new casting announcement, it’s looking like the Jennifer Getzinger-directed film version of this story will be including four other girls that have a bone to pick with the reflective protagonist as well.

The biggest name of the bunch is Emily Watson, who will be playing a married woman named Lindsay who Brody’s character had an affair with. Watson has had a whole bunch of great roles before this, but she’s probably best known for her Oscar nominated performances in Breaking the Waves and Hilary and Jackie. To say that she adds some pedigree to this production would be something of an understatement.

And pedigree isn’t all this casting announcement has going for it, there’s also a healthy injection of new blood on display. Joining Bell and Watson as the rest of the dreaded exes will be Jennifer Morrison, Zoe Kazan, and Mía Maestro; three young actresses with something to prove. Morrison was most recently seen playing the Joel Edgerton character’s wife in Warrior, Kazan has recently shown up in indie flicks like Happythankyoumoreplease and Meek’s Cutoff, and Maestro just got done playing one of those pretty people standing around during all the melodrama in Breaking Dawn. That’s a diverse resume these three ladies bring to the table, so it will be interesting to see their different approaches to portraying ex-girlfriends. Brody should be very afraid.

John Turturro’s new effort as a writer and director, Fading Gigolo, sounds like a pretty fantastic story, and already it’s attracting a pretty fantastic cast. First, the story: Fading Gigolo tells the tale of two cash-strapped friends who decide to get into the prostitution business, one as a gigolo and the other as a pimp, which quickly attracts the suspicions of the community living around them; because they happen to be Hasidic Jews. Oh, also they take on the names Virgil and Bongo.

Now, the cast: Turturro plans on playing the gigolo himself, and in the role of the pimp will be none other than Woody Allen, the famed director who hasn’t acted in somebody else’s work (in Picking up the Pieces) for twelve years now. This project must look pretty interesting on the page to get a guy who’s busy making a movie a year to take time out of his schedule and do some acting.

Turturro and Allen aren’t the only names that have already been added, either. A couple of Turturro’s lady customers have also been cast. Sharon Stone is set to play a dermatologist in need of his unique services, and Modern Family’s Sofia Vergara is expected to play a bored housewife looking to get a three-way going with both Turturro and Stone’s characters. Stone and Vergara at the same time; that’s a pretty outrageous situation for a guy like Turturro to be in. It’s easy to picture how incredulous Woody is going to be about the whole thing already. [Variety]

Albert Hughes’ next project, Motor City, is in a bit of a pickle. You see, Dominic Cooper was all set to star in the movie, playing a recently released prisoner going about the business of tracking down the men who framed him and thus sent him away. There have been some scheduling conflicts, however, and Cooper has now been forced to drop out. So what’s a director to do? In this case, Hughes is solving his problem by looking at an even bigger name to step in and take over.

Variety is reporting that Jake Gyllenhaal is currently in negotiations to become Motor City’s new leading man. Gyllenhaal is an actor who hasn’t been working much lately, so there shouldn’t be any further scheduling conflicts if he signs on. Then again, Gyllenhaal hasn’t been working much lately, and clearly that must be his choice, so what’s it going to take to get his name on the dotted line? You have to imagine that Motor City’s producers are pretty intent on getting Gyllenhaal signed, sealed, and delivered, as he’s one of the few people out there who still has enough star power to guarantee a few extra box office dollars on opening night, so whichever way this one goes, we should know the results soon.

Whoever ends up in Cooper’s place will be starring alongside Amber Heard and Gary Oldman, who are still attached to the project. Hughes will be directing from a Black List script written by Chad St. John, which sounds like a porn star name but in this case isn’t.

Not to be hyperbolic, but this is the kind of role that earns Oscar nominations. Iconic public figure? Check. Oscar nominated screenwriter? Check. An actor capable of pulling off a rounded, difficult role? Triple check.

Variety is reporting that Diego Luna has hired Michael Peña to star as Cesar Chavez for Chavez – the story of the celebrated labor rights advocate and the guy that 489 streets in the southwest are named after. The man is an idol, and Peña may be the perfect choice to play him. The actor has been all over the map, proving to be versatile and powerful no matter the genre or the role. Plus, the Academy apparently loves it when people play real people – regardless of whether they’re minority figures or old white leaders.

But the awards talk is way too early, and it’s secondary because this project sounds like a fantastic movie no matter the gold potential. Keir Pearson (Hotel Rwanda) has written the script, Luna is a strong creative force, Gael Garcia Bernal is producing, as is John Malkovich (unless it’s John Cusack simply pretending to be John Malkovich), and Rosario Dawson and American Ferrara are co-starring in prominent roles. The puzzle pieces are all there to create something phenomenal. Not to mention, award worthy.

According to a press release, CBS Films has rounded up a fantastic cast for the upcoming movie Get A Job – which taps into the zeitgeist with frightening precision to tell the story of a group of college graduates struggling to find work alongside a father who is, surprise, also trying to find work. Why is it so exciting? For one, Bryan Cranston will be playing that father.

For two, it’s being directed by Dylan Kidd – who may not be a household name, but should be after his hip indie flick Roger Dodger which paired a young Jesse Eisenberg with a brilliant Campbell Scott.

For three, the rest of the cast features Anna Kendrick, Miles Teller (Rabbit Hole, Project X, How’s that for diversity?), Alison Brie, Brandon T. Jackson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Nick Braun, and comedian Jay Pharaoh. That’s three great reasons to get excited about this project. Some are even multi-partite. That’s how serious this is. Also, Pharaoh’s character is named Skeezy D, so there is clearly genius at work here. Great to see CBS Films pull something excellent out of the hat here.

Troma is many things to many people. Scratch that. Troma is either one of two things to some people. If you grew up watching classic Troma flicks like The Toxic Avenger, Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD, or Tromeo & Juliet, you probably have a soft spot for the low budget film company headed by icon Lloyd Kaufman.

If, however, you missed out on these classics and instead just picked up some of the more recent offerings, you probably think Troma is a pile of shit.

I have a lot of respect for Troma. I’m a big fan of Lloyd Kaufman and I’ve read three of his “Damn Movie” books. History should remember him in the same vein as Roger Corman – a low budget businessman with a vision. Few people have had a bigger impact on the world of independent film.

Even I must admit that in recent years, the offerings from Troma have not always been fantastic. Much like how Corman disappeared for years, Kaufman too shrank back from the public eye. Movies were made, but little attention was paid. With the recent success of his books though, Kaufman and Troma are coming back in a big way and leading that charge is Father’s Day.

Kills

There are at least twelve on-screen deaths and six bodies that we see, implying, of course, more deaths. It’s a bloody and violent film.

Ills

I left a lot of room in my notes to list all the sick shit I expected from this movie and Father’s Day more than delivered. There are at least four instances of gay ass rape, a dismembered body, a penis gets bitten off, bits of a guy are eaten, there are dozens of gunshots, heads are blown off, people are impaled, and a demon baby gets stomped to goo. There are a lot more crazy violent gore bits, including guns, bricks, and chainsaws, but you should just experience them. Much of the gore work is also excellent from a technical standpoint.

Lust

Again, I expected a lot of nudity from this film and it delivers. There is a strip club that gets visited at least twice, so we see five or six pairs of breasts. We also see a penis a few times, some old man ass, a homosexual blowjob, some bloody boobs, some testicles, a WINCEST sex scene, angel boobs, and one stripper fights the Fuckman without a top on.

Learning

God and Satan are the same person. Or absolutely nothing.

Review

Father’s Day is sort of presented like late night cable programming. It starts off as such and ends as such with one commercial interlude, but mostly it plays out like a regular film – well, no. It plays out like the modern wave of Grindhouse-inspired films, and it actually uses the technique quite well. It never plays it off as a gimmick, there are no missing reels to cut out scenes, the film never leaves the track, and the look remains consistent. It’s far and away better than Tarantino’s Death Proof, both as a movie and as a technical exercise in creating a faux Grindhouse film.

The plot involves a city plagued by The Fuckman, a brutal rapist who goes around raping fathers. There isn’t much about the film otherwise that is suggestive of the title, but who cares? A fat man ass rapes old men, cuts them into pieces, and eats them. This is Troma to the core. A trio of men – an eyepatch-wearing badass, a priest, and a homosexual prostitute, set out to bring The Fuckman down and will chase him all the way to hell and back. Almost.

It’s a silly film with an odd sense of humor that works far more frequently than it doesn’t. The lead badass, Ahab, who predictably only has one eye, is obsessed with making maple syrup, despite the fact that he’s been tapping trees that aren’t maples.

Fans of Troma will know that the studio is well known for reusing footage or inserting stock footage – this isn’t done obviously in this film, but there is one insert shot of a large bear that I picked out as most likely stock footage – not in a bad way, but in a way that made me smile.

Written and directed by (and starring) Astron-6, a group of five filmmakers from Canada,  Adam Brooks and Jeremy Gillespie get top billing as writer/directors, with Brooks also portraying Ahab. Despite an obviously limited budget (Troma never writes a big check), the filmmakers are clearly savvy artists who make use of good camera work and framing, which keeps you within in the movie despite cost saving measures like composing shots with all three actors in frame with no movement. Often, this looks like shit, but it works here. The creators also throw a few tricks at the screen – there are only a few instances of CGI, one is campy fine, the other could have been left out, but many of the effects are practical and grotesquely beautiful.

The film works as a fun Grindhouse movie most of the way through and then takes an unexpected and psychedelic turn with around thirty minutes to go. From then on out, the film is straight up weird, with journeys to heaven and hell, incest, demons, and tons of bloody wounds, from smashed demon babies to a dude throwing up his own internal organs. It is wonderful.

Father’s Day is definitely not a film for everyone, but it was definitely a film for me. This is what Grindhouse films should aspire to be.

Continue Reading Coroner’s Report