Flickgrrl

"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?

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.

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?

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?

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?

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.