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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Had Oliver Stone directed the life and times of J. Edgar Hoover, there’s no telling how many conspiracies would have marched across the screen.

Clint Eastwood is a different brand of director. He’s more nuanced, more reasonable, and he won’t let his knee jerk while telling a complicated story.

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Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” is all richer for the director’s cautious instincts. We re-learn why Hoover is both celebrated and mocked thanks to a powerhouse turn by Leonardo DiCaprio as the nation’s longest-serving FBI director.

“J. Edgar” ultimately seems disinterested in Hoover as a law man or rule breaker. The film trots out a series of arguments for and against his hard-line tactics, not bothering to weigh in on either side of the ledger. Instead, it frames a love story between two men who cannot act on their urges – or even admit them out loud.

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Naomi Watts and Valerie Plame Wilson are teaming up – again – but this time it’s about more than whitewashing history via the big screen.

Watts portrayed the former CIA operative in ‘Fair Game,’ the 2010 feature on Wilson’s famous outing by a member of the Bush administration.

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Now, the two women are joining forces to compel the Obama administration to “cut nuclear weapons instead of education and other priorities.”

Their new Public Service Announcement asks citizens to sign a Global Zero pledge found at CutNukes.org. Global Zero is an international movement for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Here’s some text from the just-released PSA:

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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…)

That director Doug Liman’s “Fair Game” would shamelessly lie on the facts when it came to filming the story of “Plamegate” was never in doubt. Lying left-wing propagandists producing lying left-wing propaganda? Color me shocked. What did surprise me, however, was Liman’s decision to push the lies so far as to completely negate the only part of the story that might have actually worked — the central relationship between former Ambassador Joe Wilson (Sean Penn)and his wife, CIA Operations Officer Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts). This lie, which surrounds the infamous Vanity Fair spread, is so audacious and obvious that it destroys any investment one might have in the human drama –which might help to explain the thus far indifferent reception the film’s receiving at the box office. Even those looking for big screen affirmation of their Bush Derangement Syndrome can only suspend so much disbelief.

Liman introduces Plame as a Jack Ryanette, a CIA field agent undercover in the big bad Middle East muscling bad guys, recruiting spies, and at the center of much of the activity involving the pre-Iraq War intelligence gathering  with respect to Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs. Her husband, a former diplomat with extensive experience in Iraq and Africa, runs some sort of international business out of the couple’s lovely home with two young children constantly underfoot.

As part of the case for war, the CIA and the White House are both eager to verify a British intelligence report (that the British stand by to this day) that claims Saddam sought the purchase of enriched uranium from the African country of Niger. Because of Wilson’s experience and contacts, Plame is asked by her superior to draft something up explaining why her husband would be qualified to go to Niger and report back on the lay of the land. She does, and in 2002 Wilson goes and finds no evidence of Iraqi uranium-shopping.  Afterwards, in his State of the Union, President Bush uses those now famous 16 words that seem to contradict Wilson’s report and in turn Wilson decides to go public with a New York Times op-ed that essentially claims the president knowingly lied. (more…)

#15: The Ring (2002)

“What about the person we show it too? What happens to them?”

As we reach the heart of my top ten you’re going to discover that (for the most part) the purer the horror the more satisfied I am. Films that end on a mystery solved/ danger over/group hug beat, like “The Sixth Sense,” make for splendid ghost stories but lack something in The Department of True Horror. And most films that try to fool you into thinking that you may now exhale and roam about the cabin, simply don’t work. You see the final “shock” coming a mile away.  Then there’s director Gore Verbinski’s relentlessly creepy and atmospheric remake of the Japanese horror film “Ringu” (1998) which, thanks to a very well-crafted piece of misdirection, succeeds where so many others fail with what you might call its fourth act; a stunner of a final plot turn that leaves you a little breathless.

It sounds like an urban legend (and a hokey concept for a movie), one of those tales teenagers tell to scare one another. Out there somewhere is a VHS tape of what would otherwise come off as a pretentious short art film if not for the fact that when it’s over your phone rings and someone informs you that your life expectancy has just been reduced to seven days. When the legend becomes fact for Rachel Keller’s (Naomi Watts) teen-aged niece, the Seattle Post Intelligencer reporter sets out to uncover a mystery she’s sure will involve something worldly (like drugs) but instead finds herself embroiled in an enthralling, supernatural puzzle involving, among other things, insanity, horses that commit suicide, and an unsettling little girl named Samara who might have been killed by her own mother.

Watts is superb carrying the film all on her own lovely shoulders. As the stakes steadily increase and as time runs out, Rachel is never anything less than capable and resourceful – only a step or two ahead of the audience (as it should be). Nothing contrived occurs to artificially move the plot and best of all, Rachel never does anything stupid. She’s a formidable protagonist and Ehren Kruger’s intelligent screenplay doesn’t let her down.   (more…)

The brilliant Humberto Fontova tells a story in one of his books (I believe it’s Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him), about guitarist Carlos Santana being confronted once about wearing the iconic Che T-shirt. After deservedly getting an earful about what a murdering coward Che was, and how the counterculture’s favorite revolutionary icon despised musicians and artists like Santana himself, an irritated Santana reportedly sputtered, “You’re just hung up on the facts, man.”

In a recent article entitled “Washington-Set Films May Fudge Facts, But Good Ones Speak To Larger Truths,” the Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday discusses how D.C. audiences composed of political insiders scrutinize Hollywood’s D.C.-based historical dramas for fidelity to the facts. “Myth or reality?” she asks. “That’s the question posed by movies based on true events, and it’s a conundrum that Washington officialdom seems to have a perennial problem in reconciling.” As examples, she references such films as Charlie Wilson’s War, Thirteen Days, All the President’s Men, and of course, Oliver Stone’s controversial oeuvre: JFK, Nixon, and W. (I can’t tell you how long I’ve been wanting to use the word “oeuvre” in one of my blogs).

History buffs and D.C. insiders may nitpick about such films, but as Ms. Hornaday writes, “You don’t have to support Stone’s signature brand of revisionism to agree that overweening literalism can sometimes obscure a larger truth.” (more…)

Summer hasn’t even begun and yet we here at Big Hollywood are already looking toward the fall for the big screen debut of Fair Game. Notice I say “looking toward,” not “looking forward to.” Believe me, there’s a big difference.

Marriage Encounter? Or propaganda?

Anyhoo, Sean Penn dusts off his acting chops — more like jowls these days — to play Joe Wilson, wannabe high rolling diplomat and husband of Valerie Plame (played by Naomi Watts), who claims her CIA cover was blown by the Bush White House in an attempt to make Joe Wilson look like a fool for his op-ed in the New York Times that claimed the Bush administration misled Congress and the public on the need for war with Iraq.

But you all know the story. Suffice it to say, there was no conspiracy to “out” her, and it was Richard Armitage, a State Department staffer and noted Bush critic – not Bush chief of staff Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, or Darth Cheney – who casually mentioned her name to the late Robert Novak. The whole incident, which should have been a big fat nothing, turned into a huge political bombshell that dominated the headlines for weeks and months, and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, VP Dick Cheney’s assistant of national security, ended up being convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice. (more…)

The political thriller Fair Game premiered at Cannes today. (Pause for giant, collective yawn from Big Hollywood readers…)

The Sean Penn-Naomi Watts “starrer” (hey, it’s fun using unnecessarily awkward Variety-speak!) revisits the Valerie Plame Wilson scandal, an episode I’m not even going to bother recapping, because to do so would simply be coma-inducing for all of us. Besides, I already summed up the affair and dissected the screenplay’s political slant for Big Hollywood here. Suffice it to say, it’s a tale the Hollywood Left is hell-bent on getting Americans to care about.

As are its water-carriers in the media. In a deceptive puff piece an article last week for the Los Angeles Times, Rachel Abramowitz discusses the film and interviews its director Doug Liman. The first clue that we’re about to be sold a crockpot of hooey comes when she describes Valerie Plame as “the undercover CIA operative whose name was leaked to the media by the Bush White House in an effort to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson.”

Notice how matter-of-factly those lies are delivered. Matter-of-fact because the left-dominated entertainment industry clings to its anti-Bush narrative about the affair as received wisdom: courageous patriot Joe Wilson dared speak truth to power by exposing the lies neocons used to promote a “war of choice,” and then the wicked Bush and his flying monkeys Rove and Cheney plotted vengeance against him from their White House lair. (more…)

[Editor's Note: Script reviews of upcoming projects have been around for as long as there's been an Internet. Therefore it's no secret that a film can evolve into something quite different from its screenplay. Please keep in mind that this article represents a look at a particular script and not the final product.]

The truth is, it was State Department official Richard Armitage – a Bush critic, not an evil neocon – who leaked Plame’s name. Yet Armitage’s name never appears in the script. And how could it? That would defuse the filmmakers’ intent to demonize Rove and Bush and to condemn the war as shameful, unjust American aggression.

Coming soon to a theater near you: a movie starring Sean Penn as a great American patriot taking a courageous stand against a tyrannical power. No, it’s not a biopic about Penn’s South American idol, Hugo Chavez, facing down the imperialistic Goliath of the United States. It’s a dramatization of “Plamegate,” the affair of the CIA operative whose identity was outed in the run-up to the Iraq War, ostensibly by a vindictive Bush administration. Fair Game, based on Valerie Plame Wilson’s autobiographical book of the same name, stars Naomi Watts as the aggrieved Plame and Penn as her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, in a role apparently already gaining Oscar buzz.

(By the way, what Oscar voters in recent years refer to as “buzz” is actually the sound of audiences all across this country snoring – such is the disconnect between Oscar winners and what Americans usually like to see). (more…)

What is horror?

The word comes down to us from the Old Roman, horrere, which means literally “to stand on end” (as in hair) or “to shiver,” whether from fear or cold – Ovid refers to the “chill-bearing breath” of the North Wind (Metamorphosis, I.65).

Halloween is a unique holiday, marked for the celebration of the chill bearing, when demons and witches are allowed to come out to play and scare the bejezzus out of us – or at least, that’s how it used to be.

Over the last decade or so, Halloween has become less about creep and more about camp; Dracula and Frankenstein costumes replaced by Octomom and Obama masks (OK, those are more scary). What I want to do here is help those who would like go old school this year, and have a truly frightful All Hallows’ Eve.

(First suggestion – avoid bars. Like St. Patrick’s Day and New Year’s, Halloween brings out the amateur drinkers, a more loathsome species than any undead thing you may encounter. No, Halloween is best spent alone with someone special to snack on in the dark, with something scary to read, listen to, or watch.) (more…)

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Hollywood stars Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts, with their two children Samuel, 6, and Alexander, 1, recently visited Israel.

Schreiber said his grandfather was a strong Zionist who had always begged him to go to Israel. His grandfather died before he could make that happen, so this trip resonates for him. It may also have additional meaning following his most recent role as Zus Bielski in Defiance, the Holocaust movie recounting the Bielski brothers, Jewish partisans who lived and rebelled against the Nazis from a Bellarussian forest with a band of fellow refugees.

Schreiber recalls some intensely personal history: (more…)

This* one lost me at “From the Writer-Director of ‘Michael Clayton,’” a film I found dreadfully dull and completely illogical. (Of course, Tilda Swinton’s intelligent, savvy high-powered lawyer would fall for the old taping-you-without-you-knowing-it trick — not everyone saw “Wall Street.” And who knew you could so easily fake your death by tossing a wallet and watch into a burning car? The coroner must have been relieved to find identification in good enough shape to name a body burnt to nothing.) Suspending disbelief is not the same as suspending intelligence.

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To be honest, anything with Julia Roberts** pretty much loses me from the start. She was never a great actress female actor, but before Diva-dom struck about 40 minutes into “Erin Brockovich (2000),” she had a remarkably warm and accessible screen presence. That’s gone now. Even the famous smile feels calculated. Roberts can’t do “empowered” without coming off as cold and distant. Kate Winslet*** and Naomi Watts can play ‘em tough without losing the important undercurrent of vulnerability and tenderness. In her day, even Sharon Stone could pull this off on some level. (more…)

Tween girls will unite this weekend and transform Kevin, Joe and Nick into box office stars. Last year, Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour ignited a box office wildfire with a $31.1M opening weekend despite only 683 3-D-equipped screens. Now Disney has the teen stars of the moment, Jonas Brothers, in the same sort of concert movie vehicle. The difference is that Jonas Brothers: The 3-D Concert Experience will open on about twice as many screens.

The precise number of 3-D screens is difficult to pinpoint. Last month, Lionsgate confirmed 1,033 Digital 3-D runs for the remake of My Bloody Valentine, and although I have not been able to confirm a hard number for Coraline (Focus), it was probably close to 1,100. Now, as the expensive $100K per screen digital conversion creeps along for exhibitors, Jonas Brothers could reach 1,200 3-D screens. Unlike Coraline, the new Disney concert movie will not be boosted by traditional 2-D 35MM playdates.

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Tyler Perry is the king of the Hollywood box office for Academy Awards weekend. Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes To Jail (Lionsgate) debuted with just 2,032 playdates on Friday and scored a monstrous $14.65M for a Per Theatre Average of over $7,000. The final weekend take could be $41.12M.

The box office king....err....queen of Oscar weekend

Although I am not necessarily a fan of Tyler Perry movies, I am a Tyler Perry fan. He traveled the country for years doing live stage shows in order to fine-tune his act, and he identified an under-served audience – African Americans, and more specifically black, Christian women. Now he makes two movies a year, and he has two television series’ on TBS – House of Payne and Meet the Browns. He built a multi-million dollar studio in an under-served area in Atlanta, taking advantage of tax credits for building in a blighted neighborhood. Now he is building a mini-empire. He produces, writes, directs and stars in his projects, and he even helps to finance them.

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Filmmaker Tyler Perry, with Oprah Winfrey as a role model, has consistently outsmarted Hollywood moguls since his debut feature Diary of a Mad Black Women. That Gospel-infused “fat-suit-in-drag” comedy was made for a mere $5.5M and scored an opening weekend of $21.9M, ultimately generating $50.6M in domestic sales.

The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well with Tyler Perry

At only 39, Perry is building an empire. He officially christened Tyler Perry Studios last October in Atlanta with a star-studded event. The multi-million dollar project is a sprawling 30-acre working production facility in southwestern Atlanta, and the opening night party featured appearances by legendary African American actors like Sidney Poitier, Cicely Tyson, Ruby Dee, Lou Gossett, Jr. and Will Smith.

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“Friday the 13th” and “Confessions of a Shopaholic” are what they are. You’re either up for that kind of thing or you aren’t. No review is likely to have any effect, so I chose to screen “The International,” hoping to pass along the good news that there was a smart, adult oriented sleeper to catch over the weekend, but instead found myself wishing I’d gone to get my Jason on.

Two appealing stars in the form of Clive Owen and Naomi Watts, enough exotic locations for two James Bond films and one very well staged shoot out in the Guggenheim museum just isn’t enough to cut through a confusing, lifeless plot and lack of spark between the two leads.  Let me then suggest a second screening of “Taken” for your weekend viewing pleasure. (more…)

Liam Neeson is officially a full-fledged action star. The Irish-born actor has often played heroes, whether it was Oskar Schindler in Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece Schindler’s List, the wise Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace or determined sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in 2005’s biopic Kinsey, Neeson has always had a knack for playing the earnest-but-flawed good guy. In his new movie Taken (Fox), writer/producer Luc Besson and director Pierre Morel have turned him into a Dad with the “mad skills” of a super-spy – think Mike Brady crossed with Jason Bourne.

The result is a well-reviewed (56% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) action film that will help to satisfy blockbuster-hungry audiences waiting for Warner Bros’ Watchmen (due March 6). Taken has scored big on its opening weekend. After grabbing an estimated $9.4M, the movie surged on Saturday to $11.62M (up almost 24% from opening day) and, despite today’s Super Bowl, the film could reach $24.62M according to studio estimates. That will be more than enough to win the Super Bowl 3-day, and positive word-of-mouth could get this one into the $70M-$75M range domestic.

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