Review: American Harmony

Filmmaker Aengus James sympathetically captures the trills of victory and the agony of defeat at the International Championships of Barbershop Singing in American Harmony, an efficiently constructed and emotionally involving documentary with a sharp eye for revealing detail and a pleasing amount of low-key charm. It's kicking off a limited theatrical run today at Houston's Angelika Film Center and other theaters, and you can read my Variety review here.

Danny Boyle: Cool dude

Danny Boyle poses with his Best Director award (for Slumdog Millionaire, of course) from the Houston Film Critics Society. And before you ask: Yes, I voted for him. And no: He didn't shake it while murmuring: "Rosebud."

Review: Kaminey

Imagine a freewheeling Bollywood version of a Guy Ritchie seriocomic caper and you're ready for Kaminey, a tasty cinematic masala that is energetically entertaining, if not consistently coherent, while charting the misadventures of estranged twin brothers (both played by Kismat Konnection star Shahid Kapoor) who are repeatedly mistaken for each other by heavily armed antagonists. You can read my Variety review here.

Britney Spears for President

A bikini-clad Commander in Chief? Why the hell not?

It's official: Sarah Palin is a punchline

Listen to Sarah Jessica Parker's throwaway line in this trailer -- for a movie that, not incidentally, looks pretty damn funny -- and you'll see what I mean.

St. Elmo's Fire: The Series

Actually, I'm surprised somebody didn't already try this years -- no, make that decades -- ago.

Review: The Art of War III: Retribution

The third time isn't the charm. See my Variety review here.

Bacon and Baldwin: Remembering John Hughes

Over at the Huffington Post, Kevin Bacon and Alec Baldwin fondly recall working with John Hughes on She's Having a Baby. Interestingly, Bacon confirms what I noted a few days ago -- the film was an autobiographical effort by Hughes -- but goes a few steps further: "The fact that it didn't perform as well as some of his other films was extremely hard for him, because he felt like, 'Okay, I'm doing something now that is truly from my heart,' and in a way, I was really playing him."

Just how weird were the '70s?

Back in the day, a major Hollywood studio -- in this case, Warner Bros. -- might release something as odd as... Performance.

Summer surges

Good news from IndieWire: As of this weekend, Marc Webb's delightful (500) Days of Summer is the top-grossing "specialty film" release of 2009. BTW: Another movie featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt also made some money at the box-office this weekend.

Free from SnagFilms: Second Skin

As I wrote in Variety last year: "Is Everquest a harmless distraction or an addictive scourge? Does World of Warcraft forge communities or fray relationships? The answers are as diverse as the interviewees in Second Skin, a sometimes celebratory, sometimes cautionary look at the phenomenon of massively multiplayer online computer games (MMOs). Filmmaker Juan Carlos Pineiro Escoriaza includes cogent observations by scientists, social commentators and game designers, and repeatedly flashes germane factoids (example: The latest edition of Warcraft software posted $96 million in first-day sales). But the human dramas of individual gamers are what really make this technically polished documentary so fascinating..."

The movie "emphasizes the allure for male and female players of assuming the identity of a dashing digital avatar in a virtual online universe of swinging swords and derring-do. Interactive gamers can compete against -- and establish friendships or begin romances with -- unseen strangers hundreds or thousands of miles away. Trouble is, gaming can be extremely habit-forming, leading, in extreme cases, to alienation and depression. Gamer Dan Bustard struggles to recover after losing almost everything while lost in virtual worlds; unfortunately, his is not the worst-case scenario in Second Skin."

But don't take my word for it. Through Aug. 13, you can go see it yourself here.

What's nude, pussycat?

Being a cat owner, I have no trouble at all believing this alibi.

A hare-razing experience

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan, I now know of a website devoted to running photos of animals in casts. Not quite as funny, perhaps, as a site devoted to running photos of cats who look like Hitler. But the above picture reminds me of the subplot involving an injured rabbit in one of my all-time favorite films, Local Hero. "Why don't we kill it? Hit it with something hard..." "You've already done that with a two-ton automobile!" Priceless.

R.I.P.: John Hughes (1950-2009)

I can't say I was a big fan of John Hughes' Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club -- though, to be fair, I already was a decade or so past their target demographic even when they first appeared in theaters -- but I can't deny, and won't denigrate, the pop-culture impact and enduring popularity of those teen-centric "Brat Pack" comedies. Indeed, during the next few days, I fully expect to be reading a lot of deeply personal, achingly bittersweet obits written by Gen-Xers who came of age while watching those flicks multiple times in theaters, and viewing them again and again on cable and VHS throughout the '80s and early '90s.

For my own part, I'm truly bummed out that the guy who gave us the wonderfully droll Ferris Bueller's Day Off and the guilty-pleasurable Weird Science is no longer among us. But I smile as I remember a conversation I had with Hughes back in 1988 during the New York junket for his under-rated She's Having a Baby. After some gentle prodding, he admitted that, yes, the movie was partly autobiographical -- in spirit, if not in fact -- and that, sure, he was kinda-sorta using actor Kevin Bacon as his on-screen alter ego, just as Francois Truffaut used Jean-Pierre Leaud to represent himself in the Antoine Doinel movies (especially Stolen Kisses and Bed and Board). Which makes me wonder about untaken roads and might-have-beens. Hughes direted only two other movies after Baby -- Uncle Buck and Curly Sue -- though he continued to remain active as a scriptwriter. (You may have heard about one of the movies he wrote -- a little comedy called Home Alone.) But if Baby had been a hit, would Hughes have continued directing movies in that vein? Would he have continued directing, period?

BTW: Hughes suffered his fatal heart attack at age 59. In two weeks, I will be 57. Yikes.

You can run, but you can't hide...

Evidently, the folks who came up with the bright idea to keep G.I. Joe away from critics forgot that Variety is an international publication.

R.I.P.: Budd Schulberg (1914-2009)

He coulda been -- and was -- a contender for immortality simply for writing On the Waterfront. But I must admit: There is a part of me that also cherishes Budd Schulberg for being the guy behind a half-forgotten favorite from my youth, The Everglades, the 1961 TV series starring vet TV actor Ron Hayes as "Lincoln Vail of the Everglades, the man on patrol in the Everglades..."

There go my Presidential ambitions...

Well, I guess the cat's out of the bag... (Hat tip to David Poland.)

And if you want to trace your own roots, click here.

News flash: Major studio refuses to screen popcorn movie for critics

Of course, you have to ask: If Paramount was willing to press-screen Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, just how scathing do they think the reviews for G.I. Joe will be?

The wrecking ball claims another one

From my New Orleans buddy John Guidry comes the melancholy news that yet another picture palace where I dallied during my formative years -- the Robert E. Lee Theatre, one of the last great "roadshow" houses built in the Big Easy during the 1960s -- is about to become history. I took the above photo during a sentimental journey to N.O. just a few months back -- partly, I suppose, because I was amazed to see the once-magnificent structure had survived so long, 18 years after its closing.

The Robert E. Lee is where I saw for the first time such diverse movies as Funny Girl, M*A*S*H, The Exorcist and (during an early '70s theatrical re-release) Lawrence of Arabia. (I'd like to say I saw Gone with the Wind there, too, for obvious reasons, but I didn't catch that reissue until it played at the Pitt Theatre, a long-gone second-run house where I also saw for the first time, during a Saturday matinee in the mid-'60s, Plan 9 from Outer Space. No, really.) But my most vivid memory of the Robert E. Lee is one focused on the night a friend and I saw Johnny Got His Gun -- Dalton Trumbo's grueling 1971 film version of his own novel about a World War I soldier who's turned into a basket case after sustaining horrific battlefield injuries. You have to understand that my friend and I both were of draft age at the time, and had to cope with the possibility of winding up in Vietnam. And we couldn't help thinking while watching the movie that, well, there but for the grace of God... Except that God hadn't yet revealed Southeast Asia definitely wouldn't be on our agendas. So there remained the possibility...

After the movie, we walked slowly out of the lobby and into the parking lot, looked at each other in the moonlight -- and burst out laughing in the way that only very frightened people ever do when they're too scared to actually talk about something that's terrifying the hell out of them. We wound up holding onto each other for support, because our frantic guffawing left us so weak, we were in danger of collapsing before we made it to his car.

I've often said that, if you're of a certain age, you can remember everything about the theaters where you saw the great movies you saw during your youth. (Indeed, if you think hard enough, you can probably remember what day of the week you saw certain movies, what the weather was like, and who you were in love with at the time.) For me, the Robert E. Lee was one of those theaters.

Fred and Ginger, meet Hugh and Anne

I'll bet you never suspected while you were watching the opening number of this year's Oscarcast that you were witnessing the first joint performance by The Fun Couple of 21st Century Movie Musicals. Maybe.