Flickgrrl

Since I'm not much of a fan of the Indiana Jones films, I went to a preview of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull with dread, watched it with a mixture of nostalgia and bemusement, and left shrugging my shoulders. "There are two hours of my life I'll never get back," one depressed fanboy said to another as we left the theater. I didn't think it was as awful as all that, and it definitely was better than the Temple of Doom.
Happily, Crystal Skull has plucky Karen Allen, returning as Marion Ravenwood, and dominatrix Cate Blanchett -- talking like Natasha of Boris and Natasha -- in a Louise Brooks wig. Are you an Indy lover, a Raiders-hater, something in between? What do you enjoy/dislike about the movies? Me? Love Harrison Ford's nonchalance, hate the colonial racial stereotypes and have been scratching my head about why in the second and third installments the females were so dispensible.

Is it because this is the season of the Hollywood blockbuster or is a specter haunting arthouses like the Landmark-owned Ritz Theatres: The vanishing Indiewood movie? Indiewood is a catchall term for the off-Hollywood independent movie such as Sarah Polley's Oscar nominated Away from Her starring Julie Christie, pictured.
If I had a nickel for every time this month readers, friends and acquaintances have told me, "I haven't been to the movies since Oscar time," I could finance my own indie picture.
It's not that there aren't worthy off-Hollywood films out there. I very much like The Visitor, The Counterfeiters, Son of Rambow, Flight of the Red Balloon, and Young @ Heart, but these films haven't been flypaper for cinephiles.
Initially I thought that the word-of-mouth for these films couldn't be heard over the relentless tub-thumping for Iron Man (which I also like) and other big-budget blockbusters. But I think there are other factors at play.
One macro-factor is that some Hollywood studios are killing off their specialty-film divisions, such as Warners' Picturehouse, which distributed the Oscar winners Pan's Labyrinth and La Vie en Rose. Some specialty-film producers, like Sidney Kimmel Films, which produced the excellent Talk to Me, Kite Runner and Lars and the Real Girl, are in downsize mode because their films haven't met with commercial success.
(The big Indiewood success of the past year is Juno, which was made for $7 million and thus far has grossed $225 million. Besides being a terrific movie, it represented nearly a 1:40 return on investment.
One micro-factor is evident in Philadelphia: Landmark Theaters, which acquired the locally-owned Ritz chain a littkle more than a year ago, is churning films through its theaters so fast that audiences don't have time to find them. When the late Ramon Posel, who built the Ritz chain, was booking the theaters, the fare was more distinctive -- and stuck around a little longer -- than it has been so far under Landmark's aegis.
What Indiewood films do you like this spring? What do you think of the Landmark operation?

Has it really been a decade since the Ol' Blue Eyes stopped sparkling? Frank Sinatra (pictured), subject of a deserved retrospective on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) this month, appeared in 58 movies, about a dozen worth TIVO-ing. (In this twelve I do not include the 1960 Ocean's Eleven, an excuse for Sinatra and his Rat Pack to get paid for partying at their Vegas clubhouse, the Sands Hotel.)
As a recording artist, he was peerless. As a film actor, in the 1950s he was as important as Marlon Brando in personifying moody masculinity. (And you gotta admit, in Guys and Dolls, Sinatra's insouciant Nathan Detroit blew Brando's Sky Masterson off the screen.) In Sinatra's best performances, he suggests two warring impulses. Often he is a casualty of the romantic and the social wars, flintily defending what Stephen Holden called his bruised romanticism. In comedy (see The Tender Trap) Sinatra carries a lightness of spirit with a darkness of experience. In drama (see The Manchurian Candidate) he defends his masculinity while baring his vulnerability. And we haven't even talked about the velvet rumble of his voice, which David Thomson likened to "a noir sound, like saxophones, foghorns, gunfire and the quiet weeping of women in the background." Sinatra's was also a boudoir sound, like violins, a belt unbuckling, sighing and the quiet rustle of sheets.

If you're a TCM subscriber, TIVO Guys and Dolls (May 11, midnight), The Tender Trap (May 14, 8 pm), High Society (May 14, 12:15 am), Pal Joey (May 18, 9 pm), Young at Heart (May 18, midnight), Some Came Running (May 21, 4:45 am), On the Town (May 25, 9 pm), The Man With the Golden Arm (May 28, 8 pm), The Manchurian Candidate (May 28, 10:15 pm) and Suddenly (May 28, 2:30 am). If you're going the DVD route, to this list add From Here to Eternity and Von Ryan's Express.

Did I forget one of your favorites? What do you think of Sinatra as an actor? Pet performance? Pet song? (For me, best performance is a tie between Tender Trap and Manchurian Candidate ; best song a tie between his recording of "Blue Skies" with the Tommy Dorsey orchestra and "Angel Eyes.")

How do we love Iron Man? (That's Robert Downey, Jr. as Himself.) Let us count the ways. He's the most satisfying superhero since Terminator.
While I agree with Peter Hartlaub that few things are harder to come by than a good superhero flick, with two exceptions my nominations for Best. Supers. Ever. diverge from his. The Incredibles is on my list. Likewise Superman II. Then Terminator. RoboCop. And Minority Report (the pre-cogs are supers, are they not?) I would add Alien and Aliens, however, strictly speaking, Lt. Ripley is not a superheroine -- she lacks that cosmic additive -- but rather an action heroine.
Since we're strictly speaking, is Iron Man, a self-made hero, a superhero? Are there experts out there who can define the difference between a super and a mere action hero? And if you're not an expert, what is your favorite super movie -- and why? One of the reasons I like Iron Man is though he is physically compromised, he's not depressed, an affliction shared by so many supers.

In what promises to be the summer of superheroes -- Batman, Hancock, Indiana Jones, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk -- the lone superheroine is Angelina Jolie (pictured) as the badass babe in Wanted. Where are the Electras, the Lt. Ripleys, the Wonder Women, the Xenas? Is Hollywood suffering from Women in Refrigerators Syndrome?
I miss Sigourney Weaver as Lt. Ripley in the Alien movies. I miss Linda Hamilton in the Terminator flicks. Not coincidentally, those franchises were created by James Cameron and Gail Ann Hurd.) While I don't miss Halle Berry's Catwoman, she was a high-force Storm in the X-Men films, as was Famke Janssen's Jean Grey. From this vantage point, those '60s wonder women Samantha (in Bewitched) and Jeannie (I Dream of Jeannie) are looking like foremothers of feminism's second wave.
Real-life wonder women Tina Fey (the writer/TV star/actress who stars in Baby Mama) and Helen Hunt (who wrote, stars and directed Then She Found Me) are in movies where their career-woman characters suffer from baby fever.
Put on your sociologist's hat: Why is this happening? Put on your movie geek's hat: Who are your favorite gal supers? Put on your fanboy or fangirl hat: Which female supers deserve their own movie franchise? And who should play them?

That's Jason Segel, screenwriter and star of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, bellying up to the bar, giving new meaning to the word "highball" and proving that there is gender parity in at least in one small corner of Hollywood . Segel -- like his producer, Judd Apatow -- believes that Hollywood should objectify men as well as women, although except for Kathy Bates in the hot-tub scene of of About Schmidt I can't immediately think of female nudity in the service of comedy, can you?
To continue the spring-fever theme of the prior post, here's a link to "Boys in the Buff,"I a pictorial feature from the Los Angeles Times about actors who drop trou. (Hat tip, Anne Thompson.) I agree with Thompson that Ewan McGregor is missing from this list, and so is Richard Gere. But none of them made my heart race as fast as Denzel Washington in the opening sequence of Devil in a Blue Dress , where he slithered across a room in an undershirt and pleated trousers. The woman sitting behind us in the theater -- and this was the weekend of the first O.J. Simpson verdict, if I remember correctly -- sighed libidinally, "They say that this is a divided country; I say that Denzel can unite us!" You said it, sister! What do you say?

One of the pleasures of moviegoing -- sometimes the only pleasure -- is the performance that induces swoons. So I wasn't surprised by the e-mails last week from Gerard Butler fans wanting to know if the great Scot of The Phantom of the Opera and 300 takes his shirt off in the family-friendly Nim's Island. What surprised me is that I didn't even notice. (BTW, Gerard's sculpted six-pack in 300 looked like latex to me.)
What I did notice was John Krasinski (pictured, with Leatherheads co-star and director, George Clooney), and I didn't know whether it was the woodwind voice or the bedside manner or the loping gait -- or a combination thereof -- that made me melt, but frankly, I didn't even notice that Clooney guy, was he in the movie?
Guys and gals, has this happened to you lately? Who makes you swoon? And if you're too demure to answer that, John Krasinksi or George Clooney?

It's bonkers in the blogosphere what with the cinephiles and gun haters worrying which Charlton Heston to remember. Like most people, Heston contained multitudes. (You can read my obituary here.) Cinematically, he was the larger-than-life guy who played larger-than-life men like Moses, Michelangelo and El Cid and also the B-movie hero besieged in Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green. Politically, he was the man who marched with Martin Luther King in Washington in 1963 and the National Rifle Association president in 2000 who said that gun-control advocates would have to pry his rifle out of his cold, dead hands. As a moviegoer and a person of politics I'm with him about half the time, preferring his looseness in B-movies to his comparitive stiffness in the epics, preferring his civil rights advocacy to his gun rights advocacy. Though sometimes I disagreed with him politically, I admired Mr. Heston just as I admired his political opposite, Gregory Peck, as a person who always stood up and spoke out. Whatever you think of Heston's ideology, you have to admit that he did humans proud in Planet of the Apes.

Of the many actors I've interviewed I have to say that Mr. Heston was the most self-aware about his own strengths and limitations. And that he had a terrific sense of humor. If you were to see only three films of his, I'd nominate A Touch of Evil (his participation allowed Orson Welles to get this thriller financed), Will Penny, at his best as the cowboy loner, and Soylent Green, as a furistic cop investigating the murder of a VIP, a movie perfectly scaled to his particular brand of heroism.

Most of his fans love Ben-Hur , his Oscar-winning role. The chariot race is pretty terrific, even if the overall movie suffers from gigantism. My favorite Heston anecdote is told by Gore Vidal, a scriptwriter on Ben-Hur who solved the structural problems of the screenplay by suggesting a veiled homosexual attraction between Stephen Boyd's Messala and Heston's Judah Ben-Hur. According to Vidal, he took the new pages to director William Wyler who read them, and nodded, "OK, but don't tell Charlton." When this was reported in the 1990s, Heston furiously denied that it happened. Having watched the movie, I believe Vidal on this one.

Your favorite Heston performance/movie? Your thoughts on the difficulty of differentiating an artist from his political beliefs? Most memorable Heston line of dialogue? For me, that would have to be, "Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!" from Planet of the Apes.

"Americans won't go see this stinking pile.... it will pass into oblivion just as all the other anti-military, anti-American mega-bombs that have been put out have done." So commented "gulfwarsailor" on the previous blog entry re Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss (pictured is the lead, Ryan Philippe). While I agree with his post that for the most part films about the Iraq war have failed to connect at the box office, I beg to differ with gulfwarsailor on three points:
1) On only 1200 screens, the film made $4.5 mil over the weekend, which is excellent for a drama.
2) Though critical of the "stop-loss" policy of redeploying soldiers after the tours of duty are completed, the film is not anti-military.
3) I don't see how anyone who's actually seen this fine film could call it anti-American.
Readers, have you seen it? Or are you staying away because you're seeing too much Iraq in the newspaper and on TV? Is it battle fatigue? Your thoughts?

Governor Eliot Spitzer's extracurricular activities beg the question of how the movies handle the adultery narrative. In the case of Citizen Kane (pictured are candidate Kane, Orson Welles, and his wife, Ruth Warrick), the pol is outed, his campaign crashes and he leaves wife for mistress. In An Unmarried Woman -- in which cheating Michael Murphy and his wife, Jill Clayburgh, physically resemble Spitzer and spouse Silda -- first the straying husband leaves, then wants back, then wife finds happiness with abstract painter Alan Bates. In sex, lies and videotape Peter Gallagher enjoys nooners with Laura San Giacamo, sister of his wife, Andie McDowell, who leaves him for James Spader. Besides Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, where brittle blondes Barbara Stanwyck and Lana Turner play around on their husbands I'm having trouble thinking of erring wives. For the most part the movies say that marriages don't survive adultery. Can you think of films that suggest otherwise?