This week on the HomeVideodrome podcast, Jim weighs in on the 3D in “Hugo,” Hunter reviews “Immortals” and we go on a few other tangents. The show is running late and will be up Wednesday, Dec. 7th over at The Film Thugs site.

“The Help” is a film that pulls off the impressive balancing act of depicting the explosive subject of race and class in the most crowd-pleasing manner possible. Naturally, this means that “The Help” is not a movie that will necessarily challenge you on its subject matter, but most movies that try to come off as crowd-pleasers while using race and class as themes often come off as condescending or sanctimonious. “The Help” manages to dodge these bullets, ultimately winning over the audience with its memorable characters.

Taking place in Jackson, Miss. in the early sixties, the film is about a gal named Skeeter (Emma Stone, going all frizzy blonde) straight out of Ole Miss, who returns to her home in Jackson seeking a job as a writer. Relegated to a simple household cleaning column at the local paper, Skeeter seeks cleaning tips from a maid named Aibileen (Viola Davis), who works for one of her childhood friends. Her experiences with Aibileen causes her to consider the manner in which “the help” are treated in white Mississippi homes, and she looks to pen a book that will show the world from their perspective, in order to kick-start her career as a serious writer.

However, the intricate tentacles of Jackson’s supposedly polite society make this effort difficult, if not flat-out dangerous. The malevolent head of the wicked gossip-kraken is Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard), a potent villainess who reaches Nurse Ratchet-levels of audience scorn. (more…)

It’s Halloween, and that means it’s time to trick-or-treat or attend costume parties or seek out a local haunted house.  But for me, it’s hard to find a better haunted house than my plasma TV.

I was a bit of a fraidy-cat when I was a kid.  I used to sleepwalk after seeing scary movies, or if that didn’t happen, I would awake-walk into my parents’ room for a hug from Mom.   In order to confront that embarrassing—if amusing—childhood demon, I became a bit of a horror buff.  Hopefully my pain is your gain.

Five Movies to Watch This Halloween

“Return of the Living Dead” (1985)
In this “cult classic,” a group of punk rock-loving teens venture out to pick up a friend from his job at a medical supply shop in Louisville, Kentucky.  When a foreman opens up a military drum that was accidentally sent to the shop—which, oh-by-the-way has an UNDEAD BODY IN IT!!—all zombie-hell breaks loose.

The film is genuinely funny, has a couple of good scares, and a rockin’ soundtrack, but it also injected life into the genre because all the zombies run (fast!) and most of them talk.  Like this one:

Doesn’t she look familiar?  Check out this zombie from “The Walking Dead.”

The B-plot, featuring an Army Colonel on a mysterious, tedious, yet seemingly extremely important mission, is tied up brilliantly in the frightening, apocalyptic conclusion.

But what really puts this film over the top is that it features the best zombie of all time, Tarman.  Gruesome, evil, and with just the right amount of camp, the zombie that first exclaimed “BRRAAAAAIIIIINNNNSS!!” before chowing down on the cerebral cortex of some young punk deserves a place in cinematic lore. (more…)

Well guys, I’m glad to be back from three weeks of traveling. First I was on vacation in Thailand. While there, I thought I was going to be able to write a lot except that for four of my eight days there, I was on Koh Ngai, a tropical island in the Andaman Sea. Unfortunately, Koh Ngai had no Internet. So, that plan disappeared. Then, I was in Toronto for five days and had no time to do anything except for the business this business trip was about.

Saturday I got home and caught up on my personal life. So, yesterday, I had some time to kill and thought I would see “The Help.” After all, it has been doing incredible business and being a producer, I figured I had better see it. I had no interest in the material and thought I was going to end up seeing a typical liberal-slant Hollywood film about the mistreatment of blacks in this country.

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Boy was I surprised when I left the theater. ”The Help,” at this point, is the Best Picture of the Year and should be nominated by the Academy and every other major organization. In fact, there is nothing even close to the quality of this film released thus far this year.

Taking a book about pre-civil rights south and converting it into a movie that would appeal to the masses is difficult at best. However, when you factor the chick flick factor into this one, it becomes almost impossible. Well, writer/director Tate Taylor has succeeded on a grand scale. He has taken a best-selling novel about southern mores during the early 1960s during the beginning of the civil rights movement and turned it into a four quadrant movie. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if this film tops 200 million in domestic box office before its run is finished.

And, to make Taylor’s accomplishment even more unbelievable, Taylor is not known as a writer/director. In fact, this is his second feature; the first being a relatively unknown film. The remainder of his career to date has been as a bit-part actor. Let’s just say he will have no problem getting his next feature financed with an “A” list cast.

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As “Crazy, Stupid, Love” begins, Cal (Steve Carell) sits in a crowded restaurant with Emily (Julianne Moore), his wife of nearly twenty-five years. When Cal, oblivious to the affair that his wife has had with a coworker, says that he wants dessert, his wife states that she is looking for something as well:  A divorce. This couple’s relationship is one of several that is explored in depth in “Love,” a new comedy that examines love from a variety of different perspectives.

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Dan Fogelman, who previously wrote the delightful “Tangled,” penned this new film and balances several different romantic relationships in it. The main romantic relationship is the one between Cal and Emily, who talk past each other instead of talking to one another. When the couple eventually separates,  Cal starts spending his time at bars complaining about his failed marriage.

Jacob (Ryan Gosling), a smooth-talking ladies man, eventually takes him under his wing and gives Cal a much-needed makeover. Jacob teaches Cal the rules of picking up women but inevitably begins falling in love with a girl himself. Jacob’s relationship with Hannah (Emma Stone), the girl that he develops feelings for, is the other main romantic relationship that is explored in depth in “Love.” A third relationship, between Cal and Emily’s son and his babysitter, is also focused on in this film about the highs and lows of being in love.

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“Taking care a white babies, that’s what I do, along with all the cooking and the cleaning. I done raised seventeen kids in my lifetime. I know how to get them babies to sleep, stop crying, and go in the toilet bowl before they mamas even get out of bed in the morning.” –“The Help”

The quote above comes from the first page of Kathryn Stockett’s bestselling novel “The Help,” which tells the story of a group of black maids who worked in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960’s. These maids, who are often mistreated by their female employers,  eventually decide to talk about their work experiences to a young author who is compiling a book about them. Stockett’s novel has now been adapted into a movie and I recently had the opportunity to participate in a group interview with director Tate Taylor and actress Octavia Spencer about their new film, “The Help.”

Taylor, who is great friends with Stockett, talked about one of the main reasons that he enjoyed her manuscript and wanted to make it into a film. After noting that his single mother brought in someone to help raise him, Taylor added that he loved the idea of exploring the personal lives of maids and caretakers who help take care of other people’s children. Oftentimes, he said,  “a lot of African-American characters are just one-dimensional. They just help to serve information.” However,  in this film, the lives of these African-American maids are explored in depth and the characters are fully-realized individuals.

The story of the book itself is quite impressive. After being rejected dozens of times, it was finally published and became a national bestseller. Taylor was an early believer in the story and told me that he had “the rights to [Stockett's] book before she even had an agent or a publisher so we thought we were going off to make an independent film based on my friend’s unpublishable manuscript.”

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If you enjoy the halting, semi-detached, half-ironic, superior snark-enese spoken by that “endearingly off-beat” and shockingly pale woman who runs the Kubrick-ian retail store that serves as the set for those Progressive Insurance commercials, you might make it through “Easy A,” because that’s how most every character talks. Well, at least the ones whose semi-detached, half-ironic superiority we’re supposed to be impressed with.  I guess it was only a matter of time before Hollywood tried to save themselves from the difficult work of writing good dialogue by replacing it with attitude.

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Just as Amy Heckerling’s charming and timeless “Clueless” (1995) set Jane Austen’s “Emma” in a modern-day California high school and populated it with Valley Girls, “Easy A” is a much less successful comedic attempt to update “The Scarlett Letter.” And we know this because the movie Won’t. Stop. Telling. Us. This. In fact, as though it were a theme, the desperate act of self-referentialism is a constant presence. Worse still, you would think most everyone was aware that the first rule of smart films about teen angst is to Never Reference John Hughes. But this is not a smart film.

Like a more intelligent but less-damaged Lindsay Lohan, Emma Stone brings her considerable screen presence and phone-sex voice to the character of Olive, an “invisible girl” at an Ojai, California high school. Though she’s still a virgin, in a moment of weakness Olive makes up a story about a weekend spent with a college boy to impress her less-virginal friend, Rhiannon (Alyson Michalka). The sex-tastic fable is unfortunately overheard by Marianne (Amanda Bynes), the leader of a group of mean-spirited, evangelical Jesus freaks who hate loose women and gays (but this is a Hollywood film, so therefore I repeat myself — MEMO TO GUTLESS LIBERAL FILMMAKERS: right here) and within days Invisible Girl becomes School Skank. (more…)

Rebooting Bond with Daniel Craig was Bold. Christopher Nolan’s Reinvention of Batman was genius. But some thought it was overly-ambitious, even audacious, to attempt to restart the Star Trek franchise. It has begun to pay off already for Paramount Pictures, and there will dividends for years to come.

A shiny new Enterprise is luring in a new generation of STAR TREK fans

J.J. Abrams is officially the Lazarus of movie directors as his all-new Star Trek has gone “Boldly Gone Where No Star Trek Movie has Gone Before.” With a cast of relative unknowns, the 42-year-old has resurrected a franchise that had been killed by insular “nerdyness” and timid imagination. The Gene Rodenberry creation didn’t so much bomb as it died slowly over a period of years. First, the 2002 movie Star Trek: Nemesis starring the Next Generation cast disappointed with a meager $43.3M domestic. Then, the final TV series Enterprise, which starred Scott Bakula, was not embraced by core fans or broader audiences and was canceled after four seasons, ending May 13, 2005.

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Several sources at competing studios have told me that J.J. Abrams’ all-new reboot of Star Trek (Paramount), which debuted last night at 7pm at many of its 3,849 locations, may have grossed as much as $6.5M-$7.5M. Studio honchos are “locked down tight” about actual numbers, but that is in the same ballpark as Transformers (Dreamworks/Paramount), which grabbed $8.8M in its previews starting at 8pm on Monday, July 2 during the summer of 2007. (What portion of ticket sales fall into Thursday and what percentage fall into Friday will likely be an open question even after final numbers are in.)

William Shatner (left) with Captain Kirk 2.0 Chris Pine

Keep in mind that Paramount never changed its Star Trek marketing to promote the 7pm Thursday start, so the opening night audience was likely heavy on Trekkers or Trekkies (not sure which term is “politically correct” anymore). So this was a “soft” opening and what amounts to a night of word-of-mouth screenings. Keep in mind that Transformers premiered during the summer when kids are more available while Star Trek has made its premiere during the school year.

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The all-new J.J. Abrams reboot of Star Trek (Paramount) will win the second weekend of the Hollywood Summer Box Office season by at least a couple of light years over Fox’s fast-fading X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but some of the astronomical numbers I’ve seen floating around in the blogosphere are very over-heated. Make no mistake, this movie will open extraordinarily well, but it’s not going to play out as a typical front-loaded blockbuster. Moviegoers need time to shake off the disappointment of the final TV series Enterprise (starring Scott Bakula and canceled after four seasons) and the disastrous 2002 final film Star Trek: Nemesis ($43.3M domestic). It will take time for a new generation of fans to discover the magic of Gene Rodenberry’s vision of the future through Abrams’ magical lens.

As of Wednesday night, Star Trek is cruising with 94% Fresh (positive) reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, and critics are slinging some seriously glowing hyperbole.

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Hollywood execs seem to be waking up to the power of women at America’s multiplexes. The success of He’s Just Not That Into You (Warner Bros) and this weekend’s Confessions of a Shopaholic (Disney) can be traced to Meryl Streep’s witty riff on the tyrannical Anna Wintour in The Devil Wears Prada in the summer of 2006. Prada opened to a $27.5M weekend on its way to a $124.75M domestic cume (Streep also earned an Oscar nomination).

Then in July of 2007, New Line grabbed an almost identical $27.47M with the opening weekend of the female-skewing Hairspray, translating to $118.87M domestic. Also Enchanted, starring Amy Adams, was a hit for Disney over the holidays reaching $127.8M domestic.

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