Joe's View

With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

Archive for December, 2009

‘Orson Welles’: the year’s saddest flop

Wednesday, December 30, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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The gulf between movie hits and flops is wider than ever these days.

The other night at a local multiplex large crowds were pouring into one of the auditoriums featuring the 3D blockbuster “Avatar” while “Me and Orson Welles” played to an audience of three (me and my two companions — a fellow reviewer and a young filmmaker).

There is no good reason for Richard Linklater’s charming bio-pic to be one of the year’s most notable failures. It’s a very entertaining look back at Orson Welles as he was preparing his legendary modern-dress stage production of “Julius Caesar,” with a fantastic performance by Christian McKay (above) as the genius director a few years before he made movie history with “Citizen Kane” (1941).

The “me” in the movie — a high school drama student who lucks into a small role in “Julius Caesar” — is played by teen fave Zac Efron (below), who is very good in the movie.

The casting of Efron as Richard Samuels might be one of those seemingly smart commercial moves that end up backfiring on the producers of a film.

The hip art house crowd that loved earlier Linklater films such as “Slacker” (1991) and “Dazed and Confused” (1993) would probably be put off by any film featuring the star of the Disney “High School Musical” series.

And, Efron’s teen girl following must have figured out in advance that this was a 1930s period piece in which Efron did not dance and sing. Efron is zac clearly a fine young actor but it might take him a few more years to break out of his teen idol straitjacket (remember how long it took Tom Hanks to move beyond “Bosom Buddies”?)

“Me and Orson Welles” has been well reviewed in most quarters — and there is a very slim chance that the acting branch of the Motion Picture Academy might nominate McKay in the supporting actor division — but it took more than a year for the movie to be picked up for theatrical distribution.

Linklater and the cast appeared at a Toronto Film Festival premiere in 2008 where none of the major studio art house subsidiaries expressed any interest in the picture (a shocking event considering the subject matter and Linklater’s status within the independent film movement).

“Me and Orson Welles” will, no doubt, be gone from most U.S. theaters before the new year begins, but it is definitely worth seeking out before it vanishes into a DVD limbo.

A terrific thriller for the new year

Tuesday, December 29, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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It never ceases to amaze me how many good writers are working in the thriller genre these days.

Since so many of the best authors work on a book-a-year pace, it can be hard to squeeze in a new writer when you want to read the latest novel by Lee Child, Daniel Silva, Sandra Brown, Christopher Reich, Lisa Scottoline, Joseph Finder, etc. etc.

But, boy am I glad I found the time to read “Altar of Eden,” the new James Rollins novel that William Morrow is publishing today.

The book reads like a blend of the real science of the Michael Crichton technothrillers with the larger-than-life organized evil of a vintage James Bond novel by Ian Fleming.

“Altar of Eden” opens in Iraq with the destruction of the zoo in Baghdad unleashing some horrible animal experiments gone awry that were funded by a private U.S. military contractor.

The scene shifts to New Orleans and the book’s wonderful protagonist, Lorna Polk, a veterinarian working in a lab specializing in saving endangered species.

A shipwreck unleashes one of the retrieved Baghdad experiments — a super Jaguar with much larger teeth and much more intelligence — and Lorna becomes part of the team assigned to capture and study the strange mutation. altar2

Rollins orchestrates the suspense brilliantly and adds on a strong human drama when Lorna is forced to collaborate with a Border Patrol agent named Jack Menard with whom she shares a tragic personal history.

The tension and the scope of the horror keep growing as Rollins reveals more of the awful “Baghdad Project” and we learn that much of the experimenting is designed to create a race of super soldiers.

Lorna and Jack eventually find themselves trapped on a Caribbean island with evil madmen who make Dr. No look like Mary Poppins.

“Altar of Eden” is my first Rollins novel and it is good to know he has a backlist of 11 thrillers that I can start working my way through in 2010.

‘Rome’: perfect for a snowy winter weekend

Monday, December 28, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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HBO pulled the plug on its “Rome” series in 2007 after only two seasons, but I didn’t catch up with the addictive show until HBO Video sent me the recently released “complete series” package.

Now that winter is upon us, it’s nice to have some good DVD sets to curl up with over the long and snowy weekends we have ahead of us. “Rome” has more heft than most HBO series — it has the period detail and epic scope we expect from good historical drama — but it is also packed with the juicy sexual elements that have become standard in the cable network’s original programming.

The show was a co-production of HBO and the BBC budgeted at well over $100 million — reportedly the most expensive series in television history. The reviews and viewership were strong, but the financial model simply didn’t work for non-commercial television.

The mix of the personal and the historical elements in “Rome” reminded me of one of the great TV achievements of the 1970s — the British production of “I, Claudius” that caused a sensation when it was shown on the PBS “Masterpiece Theater” series in 1977.

There is something wonderful about the TV serial format when the material is as strong as “Rome.”

The show follows two soldiers (above) Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and Titus purefoyrome Pullo (Ray Stevenson) whose paths cross with the high and mighty — including Julius Caesar (Ciaran Hinds) and Mark Antony (James Purefoy, left) — as well such lesser known figures as Caesar’s mistress Servilla (Lindsay Duncan) and Caesar’s cunning, sexual predator niece Atia (Polly Walker).

“Rome” is big and complex but it’s not heavy. The personal stories dominate — some verge on soap opera but keep us watching — and there are surprising infusions of black comedy (in episode six, Atia gives Servilla a shocking sex toy).

It’s too bad that HBO hasn’t found a way to justify the higher cost of series set in the past. “Rome” joined “Deadwood” and “Carnivale” on the list of the network’s noble, time-traveling failures.

Are we experiencing a second ‘Youthquake’?

Saturday, December 26, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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The January Vogue has a neat retro 1960s feel thanks to the “Youthquake 2010” banner headline and a wide array of stories and pictures focusing on the way pop culture and fashion are mixing today. It’s a breath of fresh youthful air that will introduce the magazine’s readers to bands such as Vampire Weekend (above), The Horrors and Chester French (bottom); rising actors Aaron Tveit and Carey Mulligan; and the hot L.A. chef Travis Lett.

It was Vogue under the leadership of Diana Vreeland in the 1960s that helped shepherd the counterculture into the mainstream when the brilliant and eccentric editor decided to youthen up a somewhat stodgy magazine.

Vreeland coined the term “Youthquake” when she took over Vogue in 1963. She was referencing the pop culture boom in England — fueled by the young and the hip — that was revolutionizing film (“Tom Jones,” “From Russia with Love”), music (The Beatles) and fashion (Twiggy, Mary Quant).

Within a few years, however, the “Youthquake” would be shaking this country’s pop world down to its foundation thanks to the San Francisco music (and hippie) scene; what was happening in downtown Manhattan with Andy Warhol and his followers (below); and the Woodstock music festival in 1969. news_auction_glinn

Because the massive baby boom generation was just moving into its teens, there were major commercial considerations at work in a shift to stories and photos aimed at much young readers than the mass circulation magazines of a decade earlier.

In place of the stars of the previous generation who tended to be in their 30s or 40s at the peak of their fame (Doris Day, John Wayne), most of the “Youthquake” stars were in their 20s.

Vreeland risked alienating her older readers when she put Twiggy and Edie Sedgwick on the cover of Vogue in the 1960s, but she brought new consumers into the tent.

Vreeland had photographers Richard Avedon and Irving Penn turn their lenses on The Beatles, Barbra Streisand and Mia Farrow among other icons of that long ago era.

The baby boomers have been more or less in charge of pop culture for the past 40 years, but that is all changing thanks to aging and new technologies that much of the over-50 crowd still can’t get their heads around.

The current youth generation might not be as big as the baby boomer demo — or have its 1960s and 1970s buying power — but they have a new and immense pop culture networking clout that they are literally holding in their hands.

How smart of Vogue and photographers Steven Meisel and Norman Jean Roy to recognize a major cultural shift in the January issue of the brand new decade.

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Merry Christmas!

Friday, December 25, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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‘Night and Day’: A Korean in Paris

Thursday, December 24, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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For an American viewer, the latest film by Korean director Hong Sang-Soo could be called “Culture Clash x Two.”

“Night and Day” is about a 40-year-old Korean artist stranded in Paris for a few months while he waits for a drug charge back home to go away.

Seong-nam Kim was caught smoking a joint with an American tourist but fled the country before charges were filed.

The married man lands in a Paris rooming house populated by Koreans and we follow him as he tries to kill time in between phone calls home to his distraught wife.

The movie has a distinct casual style that makes it impossible to predict what might happen in the next scene. “Night and Day” finds humor in the fish-out-of-water story, but the dominant tone is melancholy displacement.

Hong Sang-Soo brings a fresh eye to Paris, avoiding the postcard monuments in favor of teeming side streets and Asian restaurants where expats gather.

Yeong-ho Kim gives a remarkably natural performance in the central role, night-and-day-poster_280x415 hiding the character’s feelings in scenes with other people and then erupting in tears when he is alone. We never feel like we’re watching an actor.

The style of the film is so low key and yet so intimate that we aren’t shocked when the husband asks his wife to have phone sex with him one night — the surprise, considering his loneliness and desperation, is that he waited so long.

“Night and Day” has no music score or other melodramatic embellishments and runs almost two-and-a-half hours, so some viewers will find it “slow.” But I enjoyed the realistic pacing and the absence of judgement of the protagonist — I can’t say that I understood the man completely at the end of the movie but I enjoyed the journey Hong Sang-Soo took me on.

“Night and Day” isn’t opening in U.S. art houses this week. Instead it was unveiled Wednesday by IFC Films through cable on-demand services around the country (including Cablevision, Comcast, Cox, Time Warner and Bright House). This is the same innovative U.S. release platform IFC used for two of this year’s best foreign releases, “Gomorra” and “Hunger.”

Cleaning out the Columbia vaults

Wednesday, December 23, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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Movie studios have utilized the compact size of the DVD format for all sorts of interesting multi-disc packages, but it’s hard to make much sense out of the Columbia Pictures “Martini Movies” series.

When I first heard about the new Columbia line, I assumed the movies would be kitschy, retro flicks from the late 1950s/early 1960s “Mad Men” era of guilt-free drinking, smoking and messing around.

The 1957 rag trade expose, “The Garment Jungle,” fits into the well-dressed, heavy-drinking Manhattan world we have all come to love on the hit AMC series, but what are “Dollars” (1971) and “The New Centurions” (1972) doing with “Martini Movies” tags on them?

“Dollars” is a forgettable Warren Beatty-Goldie Hawn heist comedy — set in wintry Germany and padded to 120 minutes — and “The New Centurions” is a rather grim Los Angeles police drama, starring George C. Scott, about the personal toll of law enforcement work.

The only common ground I could find in the series was the fact that the movies were all rather obscure Columbia Pictures releases that had not yet appeared on DVD.

Another picture in the set, “Affair in Trinidad,” has the campy elements that “Dollars” and “The New Centurions” are lacking, but is a pretty standard Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford melodrama from 1952.

Hayworth was never a great actress, but if you watch “Trinidad” you can see why she was such a big star. She’s luscious but likeable, taking the darker elements out of the bad girl roles she played so often.

In “Trinidad” Hayworth plays a nightclub singer-dancer whose husband appears to commit suicide in the opening scene.

We quickly learn the couple was estranged and that Hayworth’s hubby might have known too much about a spy ring on the island. Glenn Ford arrives in the role of Hayworth’s grieving brother-in-law, but it doesn’t take long for things to heat up between these two mourners.

The picture often plays like a bargain-basement “Casablanca” but the stars are fun to watch. Hayworth does two numbers in the movie — dubbed by another singer as was the case in most of her films — and oozes sex appeal. 197166_1020_A

The spy plot turns out to be more topical than you might expect — the bad guys are terrorist-gangsters with plans to build a missile launcher in Trinidad that could hit targets in the U.S.

The best of the “Martini Movies” bunch is “The Garment Jungle” which I had never seen before. Although the picture was made at a time when studios often faked New York City on Hollywood backlots, the drama has extensive location work that adds tremendous color to this tale of corruption in the garment business.

Lee J. Cobb stars as a business owner who has been paying a shady character played by Richard Boone to keep the union out of his shop. Cobb’s straight arrow son (Kerwin Matthews) comes home from his stint in the service, eager to go to work for dad.

Soon, the young man is embroiled in a labor-management dispute that escalates into extortion and murder. “The Garment Jungle” has a tough film noir feel — and some surprisingly shocking violence for the late 1950s — and is packed with wonderful character actors such as Robert Loggia and Joseph Wiseman.

‘Rethink Afghanistan’: Obama’s Vietnam?

Tuesday, December 22, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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Progressive journalist Robert Greenwald has produced strong documentaries about everything from big box stores (“Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price”) to the excesses of Fox News (“Outfoxed”).

Through his Brave New Productions company, Greenwald has created a new template for up-to-the-minute, ever-evolving non-fiction filmmaking that combines traditional edited material on DVD with links to brand new interviews on his website and Facebook.

Greenwald’s latest project, “Rethink Afghanistan,” is a sobering and timely look at the chaos in that country just as President Obama has committed tens of thousands of troops for what he says will be a strictly limited military action.

The documentary deals both with the continuing breakdown of order in Afghanistan and the fact that Obama may be setting the stage for his own political demise in a quagmire strikingly similar to the one in Vietnam that ended Lyndon Johnson’s presidency.

The U.S. populace is so caught up in its own economic chaos that it is has given Obama a pass on Afghanistan for the time being, the film asserts. When the huge financial and physical cost of the war begins to be felt, the public could turn on the president as quickly as it did on Johnson.

Progressives are so thrilled by Obama’s sophistication and intelligence that they seem to be looking the other way when it comes to Afghanistan. There is pretty strong evidence that things have gotten worse in the country with American involvement — suicide bombings were unknown before we arrived and they are now escalating.

Greenwald shows how U.S. policy in Afghanistan may be as misguided as our terrible venture in Iraq. Support for Muslim extremism is increasing around the world as a result of our military ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the latter country we seem to be lumping the Taliban (above) and al Qaeda together (even though they have little use for each other).

Apparently, our Iraq fatigue and euphoria over the end of the Bush II era have set the stage for another military/political disaster.

In “Rethink Afghanistan” Greenwald (below right with journalist Anand Gopal) has assembled an impressive array of intelligence experts, journalists and people in Afghanistan who point out that U.S. military occupation is destined to make things worse in an intensely nationalistic culture (one politician asks what we would do if a foreign army was stationed in the U.S. to “restore order”).

(Much of “Rethink Afghanistan” is available online at www.rethinkafghanistan.com) 3658060538_5e16ce1703

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