Channing Tatum Will Fireman-Carry Your Movie

Channing Tatum has appeared in 3 relatively inexpensive movies in the last 6 months: "The Vow," "21 Jump Street," & "Magic Mike". Each picture has grossed >$100M US, most notably "Magic Mike," which cost an estimated $7M to make and has grossed about $102M so far. Wow.

 Another Tatum-Soderbergh team-up (as well as Douglas and Banderas and Paxton and Fassbender and! McGregor) that I really enjoyed is "Haywire." It wasn't nearly as profitable, but is approximately 169% more high speed-low drag. Burnt mercenaries, tradecraft, duplicity and fistfights. What more could you want.

If a more soulful Tatum is your jam, go back and check out "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints." He has a small part, but it's compelling. The movie also features a pre-"Transformers" Shia LaBeouf and a post-rehab/pre-"Iron Man" Robert Downey, Jr.

The Vanishing

Now I understand the anxiety and full-body-rocking I've seen a girlfriend experience when watching a suspense that tickles her particular worry, e.g., marriage, fertility, infertility, post-season candy sales. It is difficult to watch the helplessness Rex suffers for. years. searching for the super-cute Saskia, his missing girlfriend, wife? (He calls her his wife at first, and his friend 3 years later.) It is so difficult I can almost, but not quite, understand his late-3rd act choice.

Incidentally, this movie was released abroad as "The Man Who Had to Know," which I find is a much clearer title than "The Vanishing." The vanishing, so to speak, takes place in the 1st act, and we're left to puzzle out the psychodrama for the remainder of the picture. Knowing going in that we're following "the man who had to know," would make the whole affair seem a bit less anticlimactic. Just a thought, still, a solidly intense, creepy movie. You'll never see a chin beard quite the same way again. Skip the remake.

What I Saw in Theaters in 2011, Part 5

The ad to the left is one piece of the viral marketing campaign that accompanied the release of "Limitless," which included a fairly convincing dummy website for the designer pharmaceutical NZT that only definitively reveals itself on the side effects page. "Others reported experiencing violent thoughts, brain damage, blackouts, suicidal feelings, homicidal feelings, extreme paranoia, rapid aging, time dysplasia, psychosis and possibly even death." Perfect pitch, pitch perfect.

Like high concepts that seem a bit thin in previews but turn out to be pretty dense, as well as Spike Lee's best movies ("Clockers," "Malcolm X," "25th Hour," and maybe even the rumored "Oldboy" remake), "Limitless" is adapted from original, written material. This phenomenon supports the strongest piece of advice Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon offer in the excellent, hilarious and mildly-depressing-if-you-allow-it "Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too!," which is "You simply have to write an outline to write a screenplay." Spend a lot of time and energy on the blueprints and the skyscraper almost builds itself.

Oh, also, if you have any interest in writing movies for a living, click the link, buy and (important step I skip about half the time) read the book, purchase a slick new suit and submit your resume to Initech.

What I Saw in Theaters in 2011, Part 4

The popcorn wasn't stale.

What I Saw in Theaters in 2011, Part 3

I'm dropping "and liked" from the title of this series. I plan to write about everything I saw in theaters last year and, turns out, I didn't like every one of them. But let's keep in mind going 4 for 10-career would make you a unanimous first ballot hall of fame lock. And at the very least these folks are doing something, anything. I'm sitting here in my pajamas. So I am going to make an effort to unearth the gold nuggets we might have overlooked in the rocky soil of disappointments. Or at least keep it light.

It turns out "disappointment" is a big part of the movie-going and movie-evaluating experience. We head off to see a picture we've been itching for since the trailers started showing up 9 months earlier. "I love that director," those actors, the book, the screenwriter, the director of photography, popcorn and red vines! Whatever. We're convinced it's going to shake the foundations of experience. Suck it Bill Blake! I want to fall from innocence!

And then we realize the director is punching a ticket (one for me, one for the studio), that actor, as charismatic as a stranger in cream-colors, is miscast, the book is better, the screenwriter's voice is washed out by the 12 mercenaries the studio hired, the DP, well, his work is always beautiful, but the popcorn is stale and, Jesus wept, red vines are $5.75! Whatever. There are, without exaggeration, at least 6,000,000 ways any given picture can die. Choose one. That as many as 10 good movies per year survive death sentence by committee is a bona fide miracle.

My point being we rashly, harshly and somewhat casually dismiss solid movies in that moment of hot disappointment, only to return to them later and concede, "Y'know "Observe & Report" was pretty good. It just wasn't what I was expecting that day. I'm going to go back and add a star in Netflix."

Peace be with you.
And also with your soul.

What I Saw, And Liked, in Theaters in 2011, Part 2

Ugh. I have no love for "Sucker Punch" other than the affection implied when I say this, what I experienced must be the same five stages of disappointment a teacher suffers when a star student submits a stiff, stale, stolid stinker.

What do the Zack Snyder triumphs "Dawn of the Dead," "300" and "Watchmen" all share that "Sucker Punch" does not? Each was adapted from original material written by other storytellers. "Sucker Punch?" Story and screenplay by Snyder. The visuals are insane, and I'll suffer any excuse to watch Carla Gugino merely draw breath, even if the exhalation produces a hysterically terrible com-bloc accent. I suggest "Californication," Season 4, or "Watchmen" for that matter, to reset your crush.

But even watching the preview a-way back in 2010, with a woman over 40, thank you very much, I felt a mounting anxiety, like watching the soda jerk pile your ice cream too high in the dish. And then she stage-whispered "that looks ridiculous." And it did. And it was.

Sidebar. I also bear a special, everlasting grudge for this particular movie because it was the first one I saw in 2011 at a Harkins theater, which offers free-popcorn loyalty shirts ($20) and $1-refill loyalty cups ($5). And despite seeing a matinee ($7), the privilege of being sucker-punched by one of my favorite filmmakers cost me 30-[redacted]-2 dollars.

Okay, I've drained the abscess. Excelsior!

What I Saw, And Liked, in Theaters in 2011, Part 1

I'm going to attack this chronologically, and it's just going to be quick and dirty, whatever comes to mind. Nnngo!

"The Fighter," what more can I say that hasn't already been said, now, a year later? It was David O. Russell's first feature since the difficult "I Heart Huckabees," (2004), a movie I feel I should like more than I do, but will have to watch more times than I have.

This one is more accessible, being straightforward uplifting biopic grist. Wahlberg is his usual sturdy lead, "The Happening" notwithstanding. Amy Adams plays a fully formed, gritty, sexy adult ladywoman. A refreshing change of pace. Conan O'Brien's sister is here too, playing one of the knockabout sisters. And Christian Bale, again with the whipsaw weight loss and gain and loss again. From machinist Trevor Reznik to Batman to Dieter Dengler to John Connor to Dicky Eklund, he continues to worry me. These ups and downs are just not good for you. (Which brings to mind the ascendance of the brutal, fantastic Tom Hardy, but I'll get to him on another day.) The performance is spooky, sad, funny and sympathetic. And pretty spot on when compared to the real life footage played through the end credits, and was amply rewarded at the business end of several red carpets.

"Megamind," great script, great cast of voice actors, and an actual scary villain in the Jonah Hill-voiced Titan. Hell hath no fury like a fanboy scorned. But despite making about $140M, it cost about $130M to make and had the misfortune of following close on the heels of another villain turned hero tale: "Despicable Me," ($69M to make, made $250M+). Still, a lot of fun.







Harrison Ford continues to insist on bringing the curmudgeon he seems to have actually become to the screen. Enjoy!

Actually, do. It's the right choice here. But I would like to see him whoop it up with something approaching joy just one more time. I'm looking at you "Cowboys & Aliens." Even though it's the right choice there too. Would someone just cast him in a cupcake shop on the skids movie already?

Well, Diane Keaton, Jeff Goldblum, Patrick Wilson and Ty Burrell are all charming and funny and winning and the anti-Phil Dunphy as necessary for this paper cone of cotton candy to work as it does. And Rachel McAdams, or her booty double (who cares which, really), provides pretty solid proof that she looks Frosted Flakes in boy shorts: grrreat!

"The Social Network." Yeahyeahyeah, Eisenberg plays sinister like you haven't seen before. Timberlake surprises. He's a remora along for the ride in "Alpha Dog," but here he's the dead-eyed shark, circling. Fincher crushes as usual. Sorkin writes the impossible, the story of facebook, equaled, maybe surpassed, only by the adaptation of the baseball economics treatise "Moneyball." Oh, which Sorkin also wrote. I hear he's got a treatment for Tom Friedman's "The Lexus and The Olive Tree." In theaters July 4th!

But what jumps out at me now, a year later, is the introduction of Rooney Mara to big time features. Briefly appearing as Zuckerberg's girlfriend in the opening, she jilts him and sets his obsessiveness in motion, the engine that drives the whole picture. Now she can be seen reprising Noomi Rapace's role as the girl with the dragon tattoo in the English-language remake. (Noomi, Rooney, that's funny.) Well, having read the book, and seen both movies, as good as Rapace's performance was, Mara's Lisbeth Salander seems the more feral and faithful to the book. But more on that later.