The onscreen Catherine Zeta-Jones is quite the contrast to the off-screen one. While off screen, she prefers 67-year-old hubby Michael Douglas; on screen she prefers her 25-year-old nanny. Or, at least, her character Sandy in “The Rebound,” a mother of two and recent divorcee, does.

There’s a lot to like about “The Rebound,” available on DVD and Blu- ray tomorrow, but it ends up too much like typical rom-com fare than it needs to be. Director Bart Freundlich (who has directed some great episodes of Showtime’s “Californication”) talks about how he was inspired by the New York set films about relationships by Woody Allen in an interview on the DVD, but “The Rebound” never lives up to that kind of potential. It’s tame when it needs to be excessive and excessive when it needs to be tame.

Sandy (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is living a typical suburban life with her two kids and husband when she stumbles across a tape of her husband cheating on her with a neighbor. After packing up the kids and heading to the city, she meets Aram (Justin Bartha), a young coffee shop employee living in the apartment beneath hers who agrees to start babysitting for her as she works late and goes on disappointing dates. As Aram becomes more and more responsible for the children, Sandy realizes she enjoys spending her late nights at home with the mature-beyond-his-years nanny than spending them with dates who have a bad habit of talking to her while they utilize a porter potty (Eh, it’s the city. Who can judge?).

Sandy and Aram begin seeing each other but have to face a world that scoffs at the idea of their 15-year age difference. Sandy’s friends see Aram as nothing but a rebound, and she becomes confused as to whether he is or isn’t. Thus, “The Rebound” presses forward trying desperately to be the next Woody Allen pic; the problem is there’s none of the subtlety or depth of Allen’s work. (more…)

THE ARTIST STAR’S RACY ‘LES INFIDELES’ POSTERS DRAW COMPLAINTS

JoBlo’s Alex Riviello chimes in:

It’s always amazing to me how a few morally uptight individuals can ruin things for everyone else. Enjoy the posters.

Maybe I’m a prude or just old-fashioned, but men used to reflexively want to defend women, to protect their dignity and honor.

What a con that feminism has made it not only a virtue for women to behave in this fashion, but also for men to wag their fingers at the rest of us for wanting to speak out against women demeaning themselves.

THE UNDERRATED FILMS OF WOODY ALLEN

Other than “What’s up Tiger Lily,” which I’ve always felt was OVERrated — a 3 minute joke taken to feature-length excess, I am in full agreement. I would also add “Mighty Aphrodite,” “Manhattan Murder Mystery,” “Another Woman,” “Cassandra’s Dream,” and “Sweet and Lowdown.”

Other overrated titles would most definitely include “Midnight In Paris,” which was nominated for an Oscar this year.  But that probably says more about the state of movies today than anything else.

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It’s unfair to hold Woody Allen to the standard he set 35 years ago with “Annie Hall.”

Allen’s romantic comedy, which beat out “Star Wars” for the Best Picture Oscar in 1977, remains an unabashed delight in its newly minted Blu-ray format. You’ll fall in love with Miss La-dee-dah herself, Diane Keaton, and marvel how Allen could smuggle in so many laughs without sacrificing the film’s bittersweet core.

It’s that rare comedy that hasn’t aged a minute, even if we still scratch our heads over why a stunner like Annie would fall so hard for a neurotic comedian.

What’s more remarkable about re-watching the film is seeing how Allen the artist handled the political divide then … and now.

In “Annie Hall,” Allen’s Alvy Singer is a liberal stand-up comic who is seen at one point performing for an Adlai Stevenson fundraiser. It’s clear from that sequence, and from other stream-of-conscious bits, that he’s a man of the Left. Yet Alvy never rubs us the wrong way no matter how he kevetches about his inability to be truthful to his girlfriends or his unabiding hate for the Left Coast.

Contrast that demeanor to two of Allen’s more recent films, “Whatever Works” and “Midnight in Paris.”

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With six feature credits already under his belt, some of them classics, co-writer/director Woody Allen finally became Woody Allen with the brilliant “Annie Hall,” and in doing so would be rightfully rewarded with four major Academy Awards: Best Picture, Original Screenplay (co-written by Marshall Brickman), Director and Actress (Diane Keaton). 35 years later, the simple story of Manhattan neurotic Alvy Singer (Allen) and his years-long romance with the delightfully ditzy Annie Hall (Keaton) still delights in ways that few romantic comedies ever come close to.

Told with a scattershot timeline (that somehow works) and through an endless number of short scenes that could stand on their own as insightful, amusing, and romantic skits, “Annie Hall” is a story told to us in the first-person by Alvy, a famous New York comedian. His story isn’t so much about his romance with Annie; it’s more about what he’s learned from the experience — not only about himself but human nature in general. And if you judge the film by its touching closing scene (as I do), you can count this among Allen’s rare optimistic offerings.

Keaton’s performance is a wonder to behold. When you compare the “la-dee-da” Annie Alvy first meets to the more worldly and composed Annie she eventually becomes (much of it due to Alvy pushing her in that direction), Keaton’s Oscar win is a no-brainer.  Right along with Alvy, we fall in love with Annie at first sight and, in the end, long for the innocence she loses. And this, of course, is also why the film is so bittersweet. With the best of intentions (mostly), Alvy helps Annie grow up, and she ends up outgrowing him.

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Yes, the Woody Allen screen persona is well-known and established, but the actor does play different characters within that persona. Sometimes it’s just a few degrees off and hardly perceptible to the naked eye, but his Isaac Davis in “Manhattan” is noticeably unique. Isaac is something of an innocent, an unassuming man whose unwavering integrity comes naturally.

In a city like Manhattan, this, of course, might lead to his downfall, and the genius of Allen’s absolutely brilliant screenplay (Marshall Brickman co-wrote) is how this story is all about driving towards the film’s final line, a beauty of a closer that perfectly hits every cinematic sweet spot right before the fade:

“You have to have a little faith in people.”

Another of Isaac’s weak spots (and much of the film’s humor) comes from his inability to suffer pretentious, elite, liberal intellectuals. This is what likely cost him his first two wives, both of whom were pretentious, elite, liberal intellectuals. Overall, though, when we first meet him, Isaac is doing just fine. He’s making good money as a television comedy writer, is a loving father to his son, and his close friends — the married Yale and Mary (Michael Murphy and Anne Byrne Hoffman) — have taken him under their wing like a kid brother.

Isaac isn’t perfect; he is involved in a love affair with Tracy, a 17 year-old high school student. In his defense, she is more mature than he is and he refuses to lie to her. He’s very open about the fact that eventually she will have to move on with her life, that she has to experience life without him, and that what they have together isn’t permanent.

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This week on HomeVideodrome, Hunter reviews Haywire, Shame, and Warrior, Jim has cedar fever, and we plow through a cornucopia of new releases.  Head on over to The Film Thugs to check it out.

Okay, so I was a little hard on Real Steel when it came out.  Revisiting it, I still stick by most of my criticisms, as I still find it irritating that the intelligence level of the Hugh Jackman and Dakota Goyo characters varies to insanely disparate levels whenever the script finds it convenient.  Goyo’s screechy kid-who-talks-and-thinks-like-an-adult is also excruciating (the fault of the writing and directing, not the child actor), and their robot Atom’s suggested sentience is nothing less than a ploy to attempt to make the audience care whenever he gets pounded on.  And no matter how nifty the CGI robot boxing is, nothing can compare to the dramatic potential of two actual humans fighting in the ring for family, country, or dignity.  But when it comes to the stock fanboy line of the greatness of “robots hitting each other,” “Real Steel” trumps Michael Bay’s cynical “Transformers” films on every level.

“Real Steel” has a heart that has hints of saccharine, but the film has a touch of middle Americana that is lacking from mainstream movies today, and despite its shortcomings, the father/son story does have a potent emotional core that pays off when it should.  “Transformers” has none of these things, as Bay is only interested in boys and their toys, said toys including cars and women.  “Real Steel” has higher aspirations that don’t have the stink of pseudo-family-friendly misogyny and vapid materialism.

Hugh Jackman is such a likable lead that he’s laughable when he’s attempting to be unlikable like he is during the first act of “Real Steel”, however Jackman’s potent presence alone keeps this from ever actually hurting the movie.  He’s entertaining to watch, even in the worst movies he’s been in, as he was one of the few things that made Gavin Hood’s dreadful “Wolverine” something one could feasibly sit through from start to finish. The humanity Jackman brings as an actor pumps blood into the heart of “Real Steel”, more so than the undercooked boy-and-his-robot sub-plot could hope to.  The father/son relationship a the movie’s center is marred by an obnoxious child performance, but it hits the necessary emotional beats that help one overlook the painful dialogue fed to the child actor, as well as the delivery seen as acceptable by the director.  Because it it hits those beats, it manages to mask most of its flaws, giving the movie an emotional core that is lacking in most blockbusters.

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Edward Burns’s tenure as Long Island’s version of Woody Allen didn’t last long.

Burns’ 1995 film “The Brothers McMullen” suggested a new, exciting voice had entered Hollywood. But Burns couldn’t replicate the sly charms of his film debut, and his tenure as a writer/director seemed over. He wasn’t exposed as painfully as fellow auteur M. Night Shyamalan, but it was clear Burns didn’t fit into the Hollywood mold.

The handsome triple threat – he acts, too -  could have retreated, licked his wounds and found a new career path. Instead, he turned to new media to keep his directorial options alive.

His latest film, “Newlyweds,” hit the Video on Demand market Dec. 26 and cost a measly $9,000 to make. That means covering his costs should be practical even if the film lacks A-list talent. And he’ll grab a bigger share of the profits should “Newlyweds” become a modest hit.

Burns explained why he doesn’t mind working with microscopic budgets during an interview featured on Comcast digital stations.

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This week’s episode of the HomeVideodrome podcast is running behind schedule, so check The Film Thugs for updates and subscribe on iTunes!

“Nostalgia is a powerful feeling, it can drown out anything.”

So says director Terrence Malick, who decidedly avoided nostalgia in his debut film, “Badlands,” but threw in subtle allusions to the pop-culture of the period so that they might inform the characters rather than the audience.

This is a stark contrast to other movies of Malick’s early era, in which some filmmakers laid the glassy-eyed longing for days gone by on thick, as George Lucas did in his breakthrough hit, “American Graffiti.” Lucas romantically looks back on early ’60s teenage innocence, when all kids cared about was cruising, fast food, and rock n’ roll before the reality of the Vietnam war set in.

Filmmakers often deal with nostalgia when depicting a certain time or place, usually because it’s one that they have lived. So how does one become nostalgic for a time they have never experienced? (more…)

Actress Diane Keaton’s new memoir feels like we’re sitting beside the Oscar-winning actress on a therapist’s couch.

“Then Again” lets Keaton, best known for roles in “Annie Hall,” “The Godfather” and “Something’s Gotta Give,” open her soul for a most unconventional look at her life.

And none of it would have been possible without her mother, Dorothy Deanne Keaton Hall.

“Then Again” is like two memoirs in one, the tale of a gifted but insecure actress and her ma, a woman whose artistic talent lacked the outlet her daughter possessed.

Keaton rights that wrong in “Then Again,” a book that’s vigorously self-reflective without being boastful. The beguiling Keaton isn’t like many of her acting peers, and her thoughtful essays reflective that fact.

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“The heart wants what it wants.”

Director Woody Allen’s famous line regarding why he pursued Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of then-girlfriend Mia Farrow, became one of those quotes that captures the pop culture zeitgeist.

“Where’s the beef?” did the same back in the ’80s, but that was merely a comical riff from a burger commercial. Allen’s explanation for why he began dating his longtime partner’s daughter made most people queasy.

That line came back to mind today after this news snippet hit the Web courtesy of IMDB.com:

Director Woody Allen was secretly pleased by the media attention surrounding his 1992 love affair with his then-girlfriend Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter, because the scandal added a little “edge” to his boring Hollywood reputation …

… The filmmaker has refrained from speaking in detail about the odd relationship for years, although he has now opened up about the romance for new TV special “Woody Allen: A Documentary, which is set to air in America on Sunday [Nov. 20].

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–WOODY ALLEN FINALLY LETS DOWN HIS GUARD FOR PBS– 

Heaven help me, I love Woody Allen. And not just his “older, funnier” stuff. I hung in there straight through to 2003’s “Anything Else.” It wasn’t until “Melinda and Melinda” that the 75 year-old filmmaker lost my rabid loyalty. “Match Point,” however, was a major comeback — a brilliant film. “Scoop” was weak but entertaining. “Cassandra’s Dream” gets better with each viewing. Unfortunately, although I haven’t seen his latest and biggest hit “Midnight and Paris,” the three films prior to that weren’t even watchable.

When you go back into the ’70s and ’80s, though, you’re talking about a dozen or so masterpieces and near-masterpieces; movies I watch again and again and again. Allen’s impact on film is forty years-old now and and his extraordinary ability to pull a success out of nowhere just when just about everyone says he’s washed up, has been going on for two decades.  My guess is that his impact will live for as long as he does.  

And so it’s good news that he’s agreed to cooperate for a retrospective documentary honoring his work. Regardless of what you think of Allen personally (and I don’t think much of him), he’s been a major part of the cultural landscape for over forty years now — and something of a mystery. Like many famous artists, Allen can be a loathsome character, but the work stands on its own and will for as long as there’s a civilization.

Now, if someone could just convince Allen to do DVD commentary…

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Good piece today by Christian Toto in the Washington Times on Woody Allen’s critical darling “Midnight in Paris.”  I found the film to be quite the disappointment; as Toto notes, Allen takes a bludgeon to America and the Tea Party, but more irritating still is that–aside from the eye candy–the movie is basically one joke repeated over and over from beginning to end.  Aside from a couple of very funny scenes with the talented Michael Sheen, the premise runs thin within the first 45 minutes.  The payoff is also a letdown.  Furthermore, the pompous underlying theme is that Allen equates today’s crop of artists with history’s all-time greats.  Is Allen subtly suggesting he is the Hemingway or Fitzgerald of our time?  Well, he’s not not suggesting it.

[I]n finding artistic and commercial renewal across the pond, Mr. Allen often has flattered European vanities by ogling the sights of their storied capitals with his camera. Unfortunately, in “Midnight,” he also has pandered to European stereotypes of the Ugly American.

[...]

The cross-cultural comedy concerns a burned out Hollywood screenwriter named Gil (Owen Wilson) who hopes a trip to France will inspire him to finish his novel. Gil fantasizes about Paris in the 1920s, a time when artistic giants such as Ernest Hemingway, Cole Porter and F. Scott Fitzgerald roamed its streets.

One mysterious car ride later, Gil finds himself magically transported back to the Lost Generation golden age of his daydreams.

“Midnight in Paris” taps into a timeless American attraction to the City of Light as a cultural beacon, a place even ordinary artists can visit and emerge reborn. Throughout the film, Mr. Allen treats the city’s creative minds, native and transient alike, as intellectual titans.

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Director Woody Allen is responsible for some of the most interesting feature films ever made, and some of the worst.  His latest work doesn’t fit into either category.  It actually fits somewhere in the middle of his oeuvre.  Comparatively, it is similar in tone to his 1985, “The Purple Rose of Cairo.”  That is all I want to say, as I do not want to give away the big spoiler.

—–

Owen Wilson portrays Gil Pender, a Hollywood screenwriter on holiday in Paris with his fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her parents.  Gil is on vacation from being a Hollywood Hack and in the process of writing his “Great American Novel;” the theme of which is being enamored of the past.  You can tell from the beginning that he is not happy with either his life or his fiancé and wishes to be part of a better generation and era.

Inez, the direct opposite of Gil, is a materialistic ambitious character who is pretty much unlikable from the beginning.  Her mother is such a bitch that you cannot help but expect the same of her.  Her father is portrayed as a right-wing “tea bagger” who is constantly getting into arguments with the liberal Gil, mostly over politics.  There is never a point in the film when you feel the slightest sympathy for anyone in Inez’s family.  You just simply know that Inez will do something during the course of the film that will allow Gil to get out of the engagement and relationship.

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We’ve all watched well-known, highly regarded actors for the umpteenth time on screen — perhaps even raucously enjoying both their performance and the movie — and thought about how painfully derivative and self-referential they’ve become. Somewhere along the way, over a period of many years, these talented thespians stopped surprising us. They ceased bringing to life fleshed out individuals and  began using and reusing tired sets of predictable quirks and tics.

Mind you, they’re still charismatic and entertaining to watch, but in an almost clownish way. We now go to see them not to be wowed by their acting, but to be entertained by their chewing the scenery and hamming it up. Whereas in the past they lost themselves in a part, now their well-known, theatrically overblown personalities overwhelm everything else on screen.

Who are the worst offenders? My own Top 5 list was compiled with two ground rules: each candidate had to be alive (so James Dean and Marlon Brando each get a reprieve), and they have to have won at least one Academy Award for acting (which spares modern, less-laurelled hams such as Robert Downey Jr., Johnny Depp, Woody Allen, Jeff Goldblum and Mel Gibson.) Again, the following actors are not necessarily unpleasant to watch — raw charisma goes a long way — but they have become predictably one-note parodies of themselves. (more…)

French mystic Eliphas Levi had the most profound, yet, mostly ignored observation about his compatriot Voltaire when he said that Voltaire was a great man but he laughed at every opportunity when he was supposed to learn. 

Had Voltaire been alive today, who knows, he might have had a show on Comedy Central between Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert spots. Not to equate the hit and run style of Jonnie and Stevie’s social ridicule to the genuine wit and devastating satire of Voltaire but the early Enlightenment secularists and their late night TV comedian descendants are the representatives of the same school of social criticism through ridicule. 

—— 

The analogy between bucolic Rousseau and another nocturnal creature Bill Maher falls within the same line- both men embarked on a journey to expose the emptiness of the religious beliefs of their time.   

Mockery and ridicule are the most used and powerful tools in the armory of secular liberalism. Once I ran into Woody Allen in New York.  Since I lived on the Upper East Side, a block away from his office, I knew that one day I would run into one of my favorite directors. 

I saw his “Annie Hall” more than I saw my father when growing up, so Woody was, however strange this may sound, my childhood hero. 

I was ready for the encounter; to tell him how much I loved his movies. 

Then it happened. I was dumping garbage into one of those New York metal bins reminiscent of  Hitler’s bunker when I saw my hero rapidly approaching me along with his wife.  To my astonishment my only thought was, “If not for his movies and humor, this guy could not get laid in a whorehouse.”  (more…)

When Jack Schaefer’s novel Shane first appeared in France, the translator did a curious thing: he snuck Brandon De Wilde’s famous movie line “Shane! Come back!” into the text. That bit, of course, never appeared in the novel. But the fact that the unethical (aw heck, let’s be generous and downgrade the charge to “impish”) translator felt obliged to include it, either by himself or on orders from his editors, speaks volumes about the power of George Stevens’ cinematic version of the tale.

“As far as the favorites of my own films,” George Stevens said late in life, “I have a warm spot in my heart for Shane. It was enormously satisfactory to me from many standpoints. . . We were attempting something on more than one level, more than just the surface level. That’s where a film gets most interesting to me, with those aspects of it that are somewhat hidden, the secondary and third levels of interest.”

Shane is a myth, with all the grandeur and thematic sweep that the term demands. It revealed itself as such even at the beginning, back when it was just a pulp story written by a harried newspaperman who had never been out west. It became even more so when re-interpreted by a Hollywood director haunted by memories of the Holocaust, who was himself aided by a group of actors with a variety of talents and backgrounds, a cinematographer with thirty years in the Tinseltown trenches, and a musician taught in Europe by men who themselves had sat at the feet of Tchaikovsky. All of these people came together to craft a tale that digs deep into our collective psyches, stirring up ghosts from ancient layers of cultural sediment. This was clearly apparent to movie reviewers in 1953. “A homeless cowboy St. George slays the homesteaders’ evil dragon,” said Look magazine when Shane appeared, while Life titled its review “Galahad of the West.” (more…)

Back in the summer of 1951, Jackson, Wyoming was a sleepy town nestled amidst a vast untamed wilderness, and George Stevens was there in the valley shooting a film called Shane. To maintain as much creative control as possible, he acted as both Producer and Director.

“I personally like to see films that are the work of as singular a consciousness as possible,” Stevens explained about his decision to do two exhausting and difficult jobs at once. But as with everything, there was a price to be paid. “It’s like trying to be a traffic cop and write a poem at the same time. You need an executive head to handle all the vast paraphernalia of moviemaking. You need another, more sensitive head to get the delicate human emotional values you are trying to put on film.”

The making of Shane, then — indeed, the making of most great films — is largely a tale of an artist using all of his powers and guile and energy to bend the technology and the paraphernalia to the arduous task of making those delicate emotional values come to life on an empty screen.

*****

The opening of Shane. A little boy, played by young Brandon De Wilde, stalks a large-horned buck with an unloaded rifle. The buck is startled by something in the distance, looks up — and there, poised right between its antlers, is a distant horseman lazily riding toward us. (more…)

One of George Stevens’ filmmaking maxims was: “The camera is not the instrument. People are always the instrument.” Nowhere in his oeuvre is this more evident than in Shane, perhaps the most peculiarly cast A-grade Western in Hollywood history.

It all started with a memo from Paramount Studios, where the director was currently under contract: “Herewith story and treatment entitled Shane, which we would like you to consider for one of your two remaining pictures. . . This property is now being supervised by one of our studio producers, but no serious problem would be involved in re-assigning it to you, and we are prepared to do so if you like it. . .” Stevens did like it, and soon began reading both the novel and existing script, marking them up with marginal notes that contained the seeds of dialogue and shots that would go on to become immortal.

As packaged, the movie was set to star Alan Ladd, Paramount’s most popular star — only John Wayne eclipsed Ladd’s popularity in moviegoer polls during those heady years. But Stevens initially considered other options. Many of his jotted notes about the character of Shane referenced “Monty,” showing that Stevens was thinking of using Montgomery Clift, the young, tight-jawed brooder then appearing in the director’s tragic love story A Place in the Sun (1951). Gregory Peck was also in the running. Meanwhile, author Jack Schaefer wanted “a dark, deadly person” — someone more like tough-guy gangster actor George Raft — to portray his hero. For the part of Joe Starrett, the homesteader and father of the young boy, names like Broderick Crawford, Burt Lancaster, and William Holden were bandied about. (more…)

In 2008, when Woody Allen last spoke of Barack Obama to a group of Spanish journalists, he declared that it would be a “disgrace” if the then-U.S. Senator failed in his quest to become the 44th President of the United States. Now, 16th months into Obama’s first term, Allen has apparently mistaken La Vanguardia, a Spanish newspaper, for the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

The famous director proclaimed in a recent interview:

“It would be good…if (Obama) could be dictator for a few years because he could do a lot of good things quickly.”

If Allen had any regard whatsoever for the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, he would never fathom such a scenario. The day that the citizenry of this nation is forced to live under a tyrannical dictatorship, the great American experiment would suffer an unimaginably horrible demise; our cherished land of the free and home of the brave would be relegated to nothing more than dirt and real estate.

For whom exactly would an Obama dictatorship be good for? (more…)

Why does talent get a pass? And to what extent does the “morality paradox” color our view of great artists? 

Roman Polanski’s best films, like all great films, are very moral—in particular Chinatown and The Pianist. They deal with socially repugnant behavior (incest, domestic abuse, prejudice, oppression, war) and the human spirit’s attempt to triumph over ethical transgression and evil-doing. But as a new allegation of sexual assault surfaced against the director last week, the famous filmmaker’s life has been anything but a model of morality. 

So why do some in the entertainment industry have such a hard time separating the two? Why is it so hard for them to judge the art with the yardstick of criticism and the life with the yardstick of justice? Whence the urge to intermingle the two and excuse the opprobrium of the one because of the merit of the other? 

Despite the fact that in 1977 Polanski pleaded guilty to unlawful intercourse with a minor (legally equivalent to statutory rape), his apologists typically downplay—or outright forgive—the director’s crime on one of five grounds: (1) the rape occurred over 30 years ago; (2) he’s paid his debt to society; (3) he’s a nice man being persecuted because of his religion and/or celebrity; (4) the victim was somehow complicit; and (5) he’s an accomplished valuable artist.  (more…)