This week on the HomeVideodrome podcast, Jim finally sees “Drive” and weighs in, Hunter reviews “A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas” and Jim reveals his love affair with “A Fish Called Wanda.” Also, we discuss Ryan O’Neal’s finest moment on film in Norman Mailer’s “Tough Guys Don’t Dance.” Head over to The Film Thugs to give it a listen.

You are already aware of whether or not “A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas” interests you. “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” is a bit of a stoner classic, possessing the sort of random logic that strings the best weed-fueled movies together. The sequel, “Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay,” was raunchier and had some hilarious bits, but never really came together as a complete product the way a lot of modern comedies fail to do. This third outing fares better than the second, adding a Christmas-driven plot to the stoned “After Hours” shenanigans.

This time around, Harold & Kumar have gone their separate ways as friends. Harold is a big-shot executive on Wall Street and lives in mortal fear of his father-in-law, which is completely understandable since the in-law is played by Danny Trejo. Trejo’s fearsome father has an intense love of Christmas, with special attention reserved for the magic of his homegrown Christmas tree.

While his wife is out with the family for midnight mass, Harold pledges to decorate the tree, hoping to make into a magical display and win the respect of his in-laws. His hopes are dashed when Kumar, still a bloodshot walking disaster, shows up to give him a mystery package, which contains a magical joint. One thing leads to another, and Trejo’s Christmas tree is destroyed in a freak accident, leading Harold & Kumar on an evening excursion to replace the tree, even if it means getting attacked by Russian mobsters, going on a claymated acid trip, or having yet another run-in with Neil Patrick Harris.

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The trailer for 2011’s”Dream House” seemed to give away more than most movie snippets. That could be why “Dream House,” out Jan. 31 on Blu-ray and DVD, ended up making less than half its estimated budget.

The film doesn’t deserve a rebirth on home video. The story is difficult to swallow, and thrillers need far more shocks than the few doled out here. But star Daniel Craig invests so much in the main character that you’ll keep watching just to see how the tortured story resolves.

Craig plays Will Atenton, a writer who leaves his posh publishing gig to write the next great American novel — or British novel, perhaps, given his plummy accent.

Will retreats to his family’s snow-kissed home and a wife (Rachel Weisz) and two daughters who look like they sneaked out of a ’50s family sitcom.

It’s all too bloody perfect, and soon we’ll see why.

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This weekend, a film which cost $1 million will go up against Tom Cruise, Robert Downey, Jr. and a bunch of other movie stars who pulled in that amount before arriving on their respective movie sets.

Does it even matter which film comes in first at the box office?

“The Devil Inside,” the no-budget faux documentary about demonic possession, already covered its costs from the midnight screenings, according to Deadline.com.

Now, anything else it makes will be gravy – minus marketing fees and other related costs.

Compare that to “Dream House,” the 2011 horror flop starring Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz.

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Need a good celebrity quote? Why not ring up British star Daniel Craig.

The star of “Cowboys & Aliens” and two James Bond films is chatting up a storm these days. First, he slammed the Kardashians in vulgar terms. Then, he blasted politicians in similarly indelicate language.

Now, Craig is confessing he nearly gave up the gig which made him a superstar – playing 007.

There was that long hiatus where Bond maybe wasn’t happening. I’d got it into my head that if it went another two years on top of the two-year gap we’d already had, then they should probably find someone else. And I should think about getting on with things.

We should probably take him at his word.

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For viewers unfamiliar with the Swedish original, David Fincher’s ripping remake of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” should be a knockout.

Fincher, a master of uneasy mood and unflinching depravity, is a perfect match for the very raw material of novelist Stieg Larsson’s 2005 bestseller. And while he doesn’t necessarily improve upon director Niels Arden Oplev’s 2009 picture, he amps it up in a major way. In this he’s been well-served by his sharp eye for casting: Rooney Mara, who played the wronged girlfriend at the beginning of Fincher’s The Social Network, here gives a spectacular performance as the psycho-punk computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, and for the length of the movie, at least, she obscures the memory of Noomi Rapace, the actress who so fully inhabited that character in the earlier film.

Fincher was right to go to Sweden to shoot this picture—the film has a Nordic chill that seeps into your bones. Once again we are in Stockholm, where crusading magazine publisher Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) has just lost a libel suit to a corrupt business mogul he had targeted in an exposé. Handing over the reins of the magazine to his colleague and girlfriend, Erika Berger (Robin Wright), Blomkvist just wants to disappear for a while. And on a faraway island off the Swedish coast, an aged industrial titan named Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) has just the place for him to disappear to.

Vanger wants to bring Blomkvist in on an investigative assignment. Ostensibly he’ll be writing a history of the Vanger family, many of whose unpleasant members also reside on the island. Actually, however, this hired outsider will be looking into the disappearance of Henrik’s beloved niece, Harriet, who went missing some 40 years earlier.

You can read the rest of the review at Reason.com

Audiences who meet Lisbeth and Mikael, the damaged heroes of director David Fincher’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” will wonder why Larsson’s saga took up so much oxygen in the first place.

The American version of the popular European film, drawn from the trilogy of best sellers by Stieg Larssons, is a solidly constructed thriller with enough sex, danger and escapism to keep audiences engaged. But Fincher’s film is nothing if not perfunctory, and it doesn’t help that the director falls back on the same drab color palette he used to better effect in last year’s hit “The Social Network.”

Daniel Craig stars as Mikael, a disgraced journalist who lucks into a sweet gig after losing his shirt in a libel suit. An avuncular old man named Henrik (Christopher Plummer) hires Mikael to solve the decades-old case of a teen girl’s mysterious death. The girl happens to have been Henrik’s niece, part of an extended family with more skeletons in its closet than that “Poltergeist” graveyard scene.

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Let’s be honest. Movies, today, aren’t just one step away from being left wing propaganda, they just plain suck.

We’ve gone from Dirty Harry to Jason Bourne (or whatever his name ended up being; the camera was too shaky for me to ever tell what was going on). We’ve gone from Humphrey Bogart to George Clooney.  We’ve gone from John Wayne fighting Indians to Na’vi fighting Americans.

But, don’t fret. For there is an answer to our problems, fellow film buffs. I know you’re six feet from that ledge, but let me give you hope…they are called books. They are these contraptions with bindings and pages with words on the inside. Together this all creates a story one hundred times more fulfilling than today’s dim-witted liberal flavor-of-the-month films.

Hollywood has always been a liberal town. They give us anti-Iraq war movie after anti-Iraq war movie despite the fact that they all flop at the box office. But what of the literary world?  They must surely share Hollywood’s contempt for conservatives and enriching stories, right? Wrong. The publishing world seems to get it, for the most part. They like to publish what sells and what seems to sell today are right-leaning stories.

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JAMES GARNER’S DAUGHTER OPENS TRIBUTE SITE TO HER AWESOME FATHER

The Mighty James Garner’s daughter, Gigi Garner (a successful talent manager in her own right), has opened a tribute website to her father. She seems to be updating it fairly regularly with a number of terrific family photos and excerpts from Garners’ new memoir “The Garner Files,” which I loved and reviewed here.

Please check the site out.

Anyone who’s been reading me for any amount of time (or who has seen my Twitter wallpaper), knows of my all-consuming affection for all things James Garner, most especially “The Rockford Files.” You can imagine how much this tweet meant to me.

Tell me how it gets any better than that. You can’t, because it doesn’t.

The only bad news is that if this photo on Ms. Garner’s site displays the actor’s real signature, that means I got robbed on Ebay.

Cue my well-rehearsed of-course-I-got-swindled-again Rockford face.

FINALLY: AN HONEST ASSESSMENT OF HOLLYWOOD’S BOX OFFICE BLUES

With all of Hollywood and most of their sycophant entertainment media blaming box office and DVD woes on everything but bad product, this is the rare break from that absurd narrative:

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ALEC BALDWIN IS A SAD AND MISERABLE MAN:

From 2008:

Alec Baldwin, who stars in “30 Rock,” the NBC sitcom that has revived his career and done nothing to lift his spirits, has the unbending, straight-armed gait of someone trying to prevent clothes from rubbing against sunburned skin. He is fifty years old, divorced, and lives alone in an old white farmhouse in the Hamptons and an apartment on Central Park West—feeling thwarted, if not quite persecuted. In conversation, he lets out an occasional yelping laugh, but he is often wistful, in a way that is linked to professional and romantic regrets, and to a period of tabloid notoriety last year, when an angry voice mail that he left for his daughter, who was then eleven, became public. He is very conscious of what is lacking in his life—a spouse, for example, and a film career something like Jack Nicholson’s, and the governorship of New York—and his rhetoric can sometimes bring to mind a scene from “30 Rock” in which Baldwin, in his role as Jack Donaghy, a shameless but astute TV executive, stares at an equestrian painting by Stubbs and, in a growled whisper of longing, says, “I wish I were a horse—strong, free, my chestnut haunches glistening in the sun.” According to Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of “Saturday Night Live” and an executive producer of “30 Rock,” Baldwin “guards against enjoyment.” (Michaels is a friend of Baldwin’s and was a model for the Donaghy character.) “I’ll say, ‘Alec, you have one of the best writers in television’ ”—Tina Fey—“ ‘writing this part for you. It’s shot in New York, where you chose to live. You work three days a week, you get paid a lot of money, you’re getting awards. It’s a great time in your life. It’s an all-good thing. And, if you were capable of enjoying it, it would be even better.’ ” Or, as William Baldwin, one of Alec’s three younger brothers, said recently, “There’s always something for him to fucking whine about.”

The price of being a narcissist is that happiness is an impossibility. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.

THE 10 BEST CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD TOUGH GUYS

Nothing to disagree with here, especially the “special mentions.”

PIERCE BROSNAN FINDS NO COMFORT WATCHING HIS BOND FILMS

Shame, really:

Pierce Brosnan doesn’t mind leaving the James Bond-watching to his sons these days.

“I never go near them,” the actor tells Zap2it about his four rounds as Agent 007 that began with “GoldenEye” (1995) and ended with “Die Another Day” (2002). “I’m badly criticized by my boys that I will not sit and watch them with them, but I just don’t have any desire to see them. I find no nourishment in them.”

At the same time, Brosnan maintains he’s “deeply proud” of the work he did as the Bond predecessor to Daniel Craig, who will mark the movie franchise’s 50th anniversary in “Skyfall” next year. “I just don’t find any comfort in watching them. I’ll cast my eye over them, but I have to move away and say, ‘Go ahead, boys. It’s all yours.’”

Brosnan was a very good Bond. Sometimes the films let him down, but I was sorry when he left the franchise,  and after “Quantum of Bourne-ShakyCam,” I was real sorry.

In related news….

DANIEL CRAIG ON WHAT WENT WRONG WITH ‘QUANTUM OF SOLACE‘

Blame the writers strike:

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Regular readers of my Daily Call Sheet know that one of this summer’s tentpoles I was most excited to see was “Cowboys and Aliens.” The concept, trailer, and director (Jon Favreau) really sold me, and who doesn’t love them some cowboys and aliens? Much to my surprise, though, the $165 million sci-fi epic opened and flopped… hard, once again confirming my long-standing rule never to embarrass myself with public box office predictions.  After the fact, the failure was attributed to a film that just wasn’t very good, but that doesn’t explain why what looked like a no-brainer would open to a paltry $36 million weekend. Now that I’ve actually seen the Blu-ray (which hits stores today), it’s all starting to make sense.

What audiences sensed, I think, is exactly what’s wrong with the movie itself and that’s the casting. While Daniel Craig impressed us in “Casino Royale” and especially “Layer Cake,” he just doesn’t register as the mysteriously dangerous stranger who shows up in a corrupt Western town. This isn’t necessarily a criticism of Craig. Bogart’s a legend, but not every legend looks comfortable wearing a cowboy hat. Craig does look the part, but what he is missing requires some explanation.

As The Man With No Name, Craig fails to register. The story really does rest on his ridiculously toned shoulders, and this is where things falter most and also where I’m about to get a little unfair. As much as I would like to, it’s impossible for me to separate my love and knowledge of film from what Hollywood’s producing today, and when it comes to this kind of “town” Western and this kind of character, Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone’s “Fistful of Dollars” (1964) is the standard. As is Eastwood in his own masterpiece “High Plains Drifter” (1973), and I would even include Bruce Willis in “Last Man Standing” (1996), Walter Hill’s imperfect but still memorable updated remake of “Dollars.”

The stranger has to carry a sense of mystery about him that’s both unspoken and intriguing. Without a word of exposition, we have to want to know who this guy is and what makes him tick. Is he the good guy? Is he the bad guy? Moreover, there has to be a sense of unpredictable danger — the sense that this man is capable of anything. Lastly, a wicked sense of humor doesn’t hurt.

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Current Bond actor Daniel Craig shook headlines this week by blasting the Kardashian Klan in a GQ magazine interview.

Easy targets, to be sure, but Craig’s comments quick went viral. In that same publication Craig also stirring up something far more important than any reality show clan, but it didn’t get the attention it deserved.

The star of “Cowboys & Aliens” talked about the line stars walk when intersecting with the public:

Craig. 43, made the remarks as he opened up about his marriage to Rachel Weisz last June, which the two kept under wraps.

“I think there’s a lot to be said for keeping your own counsel,” he told the magazine.

“It’s not about being afraid to be public with your emotions or about who you are and what you stand for. But if you sell it off it’s gone. You can’t buy it back – you can’t buy your privacy back.

“‘Ooh I want to be alone.’ F*** you!” he said vehemently.

The subject reminds us of two movie stars who excel at keeping their private lives private.

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Actors don’t just get a fictional license to kill when they’re cast as British superagent James Bond. They get a career boost unlike any other.

What other franchise can transform an ordinary lug into a hero capable of bedding multiple hotties and saving the world – all in under two hours? But so far new Bond Daniel Craig has yet to take advantage of one of the best gigs in the movie business.

Craig’s latest movie, “Dream House,” arrived DOA in theaters over the weekend, and critics weren’t even allowed a glimpse at the film before its release. The flop comes on the heels of “Cowboys & Aliens,” the summer tentpole wannabe which also underwhelmed with critics and crowds alike.

Heard any talk of a “Cowboys & Aliens II?” Me neither.

Craig’s other post-Bond roles, “Defiance,” “The Golden Compass” and “The Invasion,” didn’t make an impression on audiences despite big budgets and capable co-stars.

The craggy-faced star doesn’t want for talent. The underrated crime drama “Layer Cake” proved that. And, in an age of metrosexual leading men, Craig brings a virility to his work that’s impossible to deny. Just ask the ladies who marveled over his choice of swimwear in “Casino Royale,” his first Bond outing.

But Craig isn’t the only Bond to struggle outside the spy franchise.

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Cowboys & Aliens is a highly enjoyable film with a good heart. It’s a great way to while away a couple of hours, and audiences will be the better for having been exposed to its themes. It could have been a classic, however, had the filmmakers done a bit more homework about how great movie Westerns of the past were assembled.

Directed by Jon Favreau (the Iron Man films, Elf, Zathura) from a script by multiple hands, Cowboys & Aliens has plenty of energy and action and is quite enjoyable, but it suffers from a curious lack of interesting plot twists and a rather glaring casting misstep. Most classic Westerns, contrary to contemporary beliefs, were given excellent, complex plots with strong character motivations. Unfortunately, the plot of Cowboys & Aliens is relatively simple.

We know from the film’s title and trailers that aliens are going to attack in the Old West, and it’s axiomatic that once that happens, the earthlings will fight back. So, no surprises there. Once the Western-standard mysterious stranger Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) arrives in town, we know the aliens won’t be far behind. And once he poses a challenge to the rule of the Western-standard arrogant ranch king Col. Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford), we know that the two will reconcile at some point in order to fight the aliens together.

The same is true of the choices made by Dolarhyde’s arrogant idiot son, Percy, Indian guide Nat Colorado (Adam Beach), and the tribe of Apache Indians who capture the small band of people fighting the aliens. Colorado is a likeable character, thanks to Beach’s understated performance and his character’s interesting and laudable longing to be a valued member of the society and in particular of Dolarhyde’s ranch team. Unfortunately, he’s not seen all that much.

The Apaches inject dramatic energy and an amusing element of political incorrectness in their savage, unruly celebration after capturing a group of white settlers. But none of them are given complex or particularly unusual characters. Of course, although classic Hollywood Westerns showed the Indians in a much more positive light than contemporary film historians acknowledge, they weren’t always given characters as complex as the protagonists’, just as is the case here. That’s natural to any story: the subsidiary characters aren’t explored as deeply as the main ones. And in Cowboys & Aliens, as in the best Westerns of Hollywood’s golden age, the Indians are shown making real, reasoned choices, which is a nice throwback to the classic Western approach.

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First and foremost, “Cowboys & Aliens” is a Western. It features cowboys, gunslingers and, of course, a woman at the center of the storm. These distinct characters and the beginning of the story set up the movie like a normal Western until a few alien invaders get in the way. That is when “Cowboys” combines two film genres and becomes a story about a typical group of cowboys who must defend the Earth from a group of extraterrestrial visitors.

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“Cowboys” begins with a befuddled outlaw named Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) waking up in the middle of the desert with a strange mechanical bracelet attached to his arm. Lonergan doesn’t remember who he is or where the bracelet came from but he does remember how to defend himself, which he does when a group of cowboys surrounds him. Eventually, he heads into a local town where some of the townspeople remember Lonergan and his criminal past.  Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford), whose gold was stolen by Lonergan,  arrives in town shortly after Lonergan is arrested.  While Lonergan and Dolarhyde’’s rebellious son Percy (Paul Dano) are preparing to be transferred to another prison, aliens attack the town and kidnap some of its people. The story then revolves around the cowboys and their efforts to fight against the extraterrestrials.

Jon Favreau, who previously directed the first two “Iron Man” films, is smart enough to focus this film solidly in one genre before switching gears. Before the aliens attack, “Cowboys” works as a typical Western and could have succeeded as one. The characters are well-drawn and both Ford, whose gruffness reminded me of his work in last year’s “Morning Glory,” and tough-guy Craig were well-chosen leads. The strong supporting cast includes Sam Rockwell, as a man whose wife is abducted, and the underused Dano, who was so memorable in 2007’s “There Will Be Blood.”

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Cowboys & Aliens is the highest of high concepts. Its entire premise is contained in its title, which, in the classic manner, could be scribbled on the back of a postcard. Unfortunately, the filmmakers have mailed that postcard off to nowhere.

Remarkably, it required six writers (and 16 producers, among them Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard) to turn a slim 2006 graphic novel into a movie. The book, by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, Fred Van Lente, and Andrew Foley, takes an interesting narrative stance, setting up an alien invasion of the Old West in 1873 as a mirror of the earlier invasion of North America by European settlers. For some reason—presumably time constraint—the movie has ditched this element of the story. Which leaves us with, well, cowboys and aliens.

The picture begins with a man named Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) waking up bruised and wounded in some parched canyon lands. An intricate metal cuff is affixed to his left wrist, and he’s also carrying a photograph of a woman he doesn’t know. But then he doesn’t know his own name, either. When three surly lowlifes approach on horseback, Jake, being Daniel Craig, overwhelms them in a spasm of furious butt-kicking. He makes his way to a shabby mining town that has fallen on hard times (the gold ran out). After a violent encounter with a gun-waving punk named Percy (Paul Dano), Jake draws the attention of both a mysterious young woman named Ella (Olivia Wilde) and the town sheriff (Keith Carradine), who recognizes Jake from a wanted poster and tosses him in jail. Then Percy’s angry father, Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford), the local cattle baron, arrives in search of the man who whupped his no-good son…among other things I’ll not go into.

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Even in a world where most movie heroes have to take on superpowers before they can fight properly and often find themselves toeing the PC line while saving the world, it’s good to know that some movie concepts are just good, clean, ridiculous fun. And riding onto the nation’s movie screens this weekend is a perfect example of just that kind of film: the new Western/sci-fi hybrid genre mash-up “Cowboys & Aliens.”

The “plot” couldn’t be more basic, yet it took nine people to assemble the script, which opens on tough-guy cowboy Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig) waking up in the desert with a nasty gash in his belly and a mysterious iron bracelet on one arm.

As he struggles to remember what led to his desert awakening, Jake is confronted by three horsemen who threaten to turn him in for a bounty.  He still can’t remember his name or where he came from, but he does know how to open a can of whupass on the interlopers and proceeds to kill them before riding into the nearest town wearing their clothes and riding their horses.

When he finds that the town is ruled by the terroristic clan of corrupt cattle rancher Woodrow Dolarhyde (Harrison Ford), he proceeds to stir things up by humorously beating Woodrow’s son and henchmen. Just as he’s about to have to run for his life or fight to the death with Woodrow, however, a fleet of alien spaceships comes swooping in out of nowhere to blow a bunch of stuff up for no immediately apparent reason – and Jake and Woodrow have to team up and bring their respective posses together to fight back against the aliens with one cohesive force. (more…)

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This might go down as Daniel Craig’s chest-waxing moment, where a big, likable star appears in a smug, image-shattering PSA that forever alters our perception of him.

Further proof of  how insular the modern-day celebrity bubble is. Regardless of one’s opinion of the cause behind this embarrassing production, no one in the real world would even consider suggesting anyone appear in such a thing, much less the guy playing James Bond. Only a Hollywoodist would dream this up and only a Hollywoodist would say, “Yeah, great idea. Let’s do it.”

Palate cleanser, anyone…?

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[Ed. Note: This is the first part of a series that will run every two weeks in this slot and examine each of the James Bond films individually. Many, many thanks to Lawrence for agreeing to take this on, but after reading his defense of "Quantum" I had to ask -- JN]

Certain movies take a second viewing to really appreciate their depth.  Such is the case with Quantum of Solace, the under appreciated second film to star Daniel Craig as James Bond.  I initially had a lukewarm reaction to the movie. I wasn’t crazy about the story or the surprisingly short length (99 minutes, compared to 120 or more for most Bond adventures), I felt the editing was choppy, and the climax predictable.  Critics felt that, as the second in a trilogy, is was merely marking time, and I felt the same.  Ugh, and that title!

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I watched it again on Blu-Ray and I’m pleased to say that the film has a lot more to it than meets the eye.  Some may argue that if a film doesn’t have the intended impact on its first go-round that it hasn’t succeeded, period.  I disagree.  Every time a viewer watches a movie, the circumstances differ while the film remains a constant.  Therefore, the viewing experience will differ.  The degree of change depend upon which variables are altered.  In my case, it was mostly the transition from movie theatre to home theatre.

I think what both I and critics missed on a first viewing, is that Quantum is a revenge film.  Audiences simply aren’t used to this theme in a Bond film, save License To Kill, an under-appreciated offering with Timothy Dalton’s Bond from 1989 that also starred Big Hollywood’s own Robert Davi.  However, Quantum is most definitely a Bond film, one that simultaneously deepens our understanding of the character in both an immediate and historical context. (more…)

Summer is the slow time on Broadway as theatre pros recover from their Tony Award hang-overs and try to rush out to the Island for a few days of R & R before the new season begins.  This year it seems there are a few plays aiming for early fall openings hoping to ride a crest of popularity into the always-lucrative holiday season.

Just as last season brought a record number of plays as well as stellar gross sales (despite doom-sayers in the industry) this season already looks locked and loaded with a huge number of shows scheduled to open between October 1st and the first week of May (the traditional Tony nomination cut-off).  So to help the readers of Big Hollywood plan their trip to the Great White Way (we can still say that, can’t we?), I submit the top 10 things to look for from the center/right perspective:

10.  ”Superior Donuts” – A transfer from Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre (one of my personal favorite regional houses in America), the play stars “Spinal Tap”’s Michael McKean as an aging hippie who owns a donut shop in a largely black neighborhood and Jon Michael Hill (do all young Broadway actors HAVE to go by three names now?) as a 21-year-old from the neighborhood who talks his way into a job at the shop.  From the New York Times review:  ”In one of the play’s most amusing exchanges Franco challenges Arthur to name 10 black poets. Arthur names a few, then stands dumb, a look of deep concentration on his face. “It’s like watching George Bush on ‘Jeopardy!’ ” Franco cracks.” (more…)