Uwe Boll was once the most hated man among the pop-culture fanboy community.

Nearly every movie site was filled with full-on hate for the German schlockmeister because of the way he plucked the rights to any videogame franchise he could get his mitts on and proceeded to ram them straight into the ground. Why anyone would crave great cinema from the properties like “House of the Dead” and “Bloodrayne” is beyond me, but there is no disputing the fact that Boll makes very bad movies.

Some of them are brilliant in how truly awful they are, with “House of the Dead” sitting atop the Mount Olympus of unintentional comedy heaven.  Others are just bad in that they’re boring and stupid. “Alone in the Dark” comes to mind, co-starring Tara Reid as an archeologist, donning glasses in a half-assed attempt to make her look like something approaching intelligent.

The “Citizen Kane” of Boll’s output, though, is “In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale,” a kinda-sorta adaptation of the PC role-playing game. While it never reaches the heights of hilarity that “House of the Dead” does, it more than makes up for it in the sheer volume of bizarre creative choices.

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It’s been 14 years since ‘Cop Land’ first hit movie theaters, but director James Mangold distinctly remembers his first reaction to casting Sylvester Stallone as the film’s heroic sheriff.

“I was dead set against it. I was horrified by the idea,” says Mangold, who would later go on to direct Oscar-winning films like ‘Walk the Line’ and ‘Girl, Interrupted.’ “He played a superhero so often. I didn’t want to make a movie about Judge Dredd.”

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Mangold graciously went to dinner with Stallone all the same and laid out his vision for the role.

“You have to let your body go. I mean let it go … gain at least 40 pounds” the director told the erstwhile Rocky Balboa.

‘He agreed immediately,” Mangold recalls. “He took the leap, and he delivered.”

Stallone’s sensitive performance in the tale of a New Jersey town teeming with dirty cops reminded us he’s more than just a slab of muscle for hire. The film, out this week in a Director’s Cut Blu-ray edition, also proved Mangold could handle a veteran cast led by Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro and Ray Liotta.

“I have a memory of being a young man with this ridiculously heady cast all around me… it’s like pretty big boots to be strapping on in your second movie,” he says. “It demystified working with really important actors.”

The film also taught him that his complete vision won’t always make it to the big screen.

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A pretty good year with a few movies that I would classify as great. The most popular movies were “Home Alone” and “Ghost,” the first of which inspired three sequels and the latter of which inspired what I still contend is the funniest movie trailer of all time.  The Oscars were particularly competitive and geeks are still mad about the outcome.

The nominees:

Dances With Wolves: I love it, but then my Indian name is Struggles with White Guilt.

Ghost: I distinctly remember thinking, really? Ghost? Really?! I don’t dislike it, but it wasn’t exactly Oscar bait. Maybe that’s a good thing.

Awakenings: Mmmmmm, L Dopa. Yummy, delicious L Dopa.

Goodfellas: Scorsese’s career seemed to build to this and plateau with this. I love some early Scorsese, and I love some later Scorsese. But this is the centerpiece of his career, in my opinion.

The Godfather Part III: Okay. Really? Really?!!! There were about a hundred gangster movies released in 1990, so it was practically unavoidable that two of them would wind up Best Picture Nominees, but seriously?

WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN NOMINATED

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A great performance sticks with you long after you’ve scraped the theater floor-gum off your Keds.  But too often, professional drama geeks and mainstream media critics will bestow their blessing on freaky, idiosyncratic performances that hew to the party line *(cough) Heath Ledger (cough) Brokeback Mountain (cough)*, leaving the rest of us to scratch our collective heads.  If that was good, we wonder, how bad do you have to be to be bad?

What follows is a list of the Top 10 performances of the last quarter century.  It focuses on lead roles, or at least substantial ones – no cameos, thank you.  Interestingly, there are no straight comic performances here, and many of the roles are villains.  And it is also focused on movies people have actually heard of. 

So, this is not an exhaustive list – it overlooks plenty of great performances.  But it is my list and based on my criteria alone – and I’m sure I’ll hear about my myriad defects of insight, taste, breeding and general mental competence in the comments.  For example, Daniel Day Lewis is missing because I decided not to invest three hours into There Will Be Blood (2007) since after seeing the “I drink your milkshake!” clip I just can’t take it seriously.  (more…)

It’s a cinch to see why actors like Ray Liotta, Forest Whitaker and Jessica Biel signed up for the gritty drama “Powder Blue,” out this week on DVD. The film lets them wallow in bleak, bleary-eyed scenarios, the sort of heightened reality that acting school monologues are made of.

It’s even easier to see why “Blue” shot straight to DVD.

The film goes the “Crash” route, a trail that, more often than not, gets most screenwriters hopelessly lost. Jessica Biel famously sheds her top to play Rose, a single mother and stripper who goes by the name Scarlett on stage. What, Rose wasn’t strippery enough?

Her son is in a coma and it’s all she can do to make ends meet while keeping her cretinous boss (Patrick Swayze, enlivening a very silly role) at arm’s length. She’s less wary of Jack (Ray Liotta), a new strip club customer who doesn’t seem very interested in watching her doff her clothes. We also meet Charlie (Forest Whitaker) a man whose personal grief has left him suicidal. Charlie meets un-cute with a waitress (Lisa Kudrow), but he’s too numb to respond to her advances. He doesn’t need a Friend. He needs a shrink – or a more fully realized character to play. (more…)

Jessica Biel plays a hard-luck stripper in “Powder Blue”

It ain’t easy being pretty in Hollywood.

New clips went up this weekend from “Powder Blue,” Jessica Biel’s latest film, which premieres May 8. It’s a “Crash”-type ensemble piece about the intertwining lives of unhappy people just trying to get by.

But, as Collider.com notes, it will probably always be known as the “movie Jessica Biel is topless in.” (The site also has clips and an interview with the actress.)

Biel plays a stripper in need of money to support her child, who has medical issues. It’s a well-worn trope and has garnered the indie film a lot of what might be the wrong kind of attention. That’s a shame because “Powder Blue’s” trailer hints the film, which comes out May 8, might actually be good. (more…)

She has a hit TV show on the Disney Channel, a pair of albums that have debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts, a concert tour with 69 sold-out arenas in North America, and now a second #1 movie in as many years. Miley Cyrus is the biggest teen star in the world.

With most of Hollywood (including myself) expecting an opening in the mid-$20M’s for Hannah Montana The Movie (Disney), Miley has surprised “grown-ups” with her box office clout once again. The picture opened with a heavily front-loaded $17.39M on Good Friday then dropped 40% on Saturday to an estimated $10.34M, and it will reach an estimated $34M by the end of Easter weekend, making it the all-time #2 opening for the bunny holiday weekend. My Friday night early 3-day projection was for $33.6M, but then I raised my number to $39M on Saturday. As it turns out, I should have stuck with my first pass. These young skewing movies are tricky to project, and the Easter Weekend, where Saturday traditionally drops from Friday, makes it even more complicated.

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Easter weekend 2009 will almost certainly be an all-time record-breaker for Hollywood with a pair of new releases that could be among the top six bunny holiday openings of all time. Although neither Hannah Montana: The Movie (Disney) or the new R-rated comedy Observe & Report (Warner Bros) will challenge 2006’s all-time Easter weekend opening champion Scary Movie 4 ($40.2M), both new offerings look very solid in pre-release industry tracking, and they will be joined by some strong holdovers.

Universal’s Fast & Furious is likely to cross the finish line first for a second consecutive weekend, following up last weekend’s almost $71M with about $30M, which would mark a 58% drop. Still, it must be considered a triumph that the re-teaming of Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez may have $120M in US sales after just 10 days. That will mean that Fast & Furious will have almost doubled the domestic gross of The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift (the last film in the franchise), and this souped-up thrill ride could be headed for $160M US.

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