Bryan Keefer is co-author of the New York Times bestseller about
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Category: Movies
Hollywood Becomes a Member of the Reality-Based Community
Apropos of seeing “Capote” tonight, I’m struck by how many Oscar nominations this year are for various celebrity-inspired movies and roles: Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote, Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash, and David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow are all up for best actor; Reese Witherspoon is nominated for best actress as June Carter Cash; and Catherine Keener is up for best supporting actress as Harper Lee.
And then there’s plenty of nominations in the real-but-not-famous category: George Clooney is nominated for best supporting actor for playing CIA agent Richard Barnes in “Syriana,” along with Paul Giamatti in the same category for playing Joe Gould in “Cinderella Man,” and Judy Dench is nominated for best actress as Laura Henderson in “Mrs. Henderson Presents.” You might even count Charlize Theron for best actress and Frances McDormand for best supporting actress in “North Country” (which is a “based on").
Two of the best picture nominess—“Capote” and “Good Night and Good Luck” and—are, to greater or lesser degrees, celebrity-based, and “Munich” is another “based on.” (Last year had three similar films nominated: “The Aviator” about Howard Hughes, “Finding Neverland” about Peter Pan author J.M Barrie, “Ray” about Ray Charles.)
So pick your moral to this story:
• Reality TV (especially celebrity-based reality TV) has taken over Hollywood
• Critics like to watch celebrities playing celebrities
• Truth is stranger than fiction
• Truth(ish) does better box office than fiction
• Truth is more interesting than most of the sludge that makes it to the big screen (yes, I’m looking at you, “Batman Begins")
- March 03, 2006
filed under: Movies
Pop Culture, No Fizz
Is it just me, or is pop culture even more derivative than usual this summer?
There’s the new crop of reality TV shows like “The Next Food Network Star” and “I Want to be a Hilton,” which pretty well finishes saturating the “Apprentice” knockoff market. And if that isn’t enough, there’s also “Hogan Knows Best,” featuring washed-up pro wrestler Hulk Hogan, and “Being Bobby Brown,” featuring washed-up singer Bobby Brown. (I thought reality celebrities were the D-list, but apparently the D-list sees reality celebrity-dom as a step up.)
And then there’s the top ten movies at the box office last week. The top five, and seven of the top ten, are sequels, remakes, or TV tie-ins:
“Batman Begins”
“Bewitched”
“Mr. & Mrs. Smith”
“Herbie: Fully Loaded”
“Land of the Dead”
“Madagascar”
“Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith”
“The Longest Yard”
“Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D”
“Cinderella Man”
And what are the big summer movies being hyped right now? “War of the Worlds” comes out this weekend; “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” opens July 15; and “Dukes of Hazzard” is out August 5.
It’s almost enough to make me excited about “Wedding Crashers.” Almost.
- June 28, 2005
- filed under: Movies
“The Matrix: Revolutions”
I went and saw the last movie in the “Martrix” trilogy the other night. It is so bad it almost works. Visually, it’s quite entertaining (though the graphic violence of characters getting run through with pipes, cut to pieces, and deeply burned was a bit much). The best scene in the movie is probably when Trinity and friends break into a club run by the Merovingian; the guards and the clubgoers look like Marilyn Mason meets Clive Barker.
Sadly, the characters and plot aren’t nearly as good as the costumes and set design. There are whole sequences that accomplish nothing; meanwhile, characters get picked up and summarily dropped (the last we see of the Merovingian and his crowd, for example, he has a gun to his head and his Euro girlfriend is discoursing about love).
The backstory is similarly discombobulated. The first movie seemed like it was heading towards some kind of interesting background philosophy, dropping Baudrillard references and the like. This one, though, throws about 5000 years of philosophy into the meatgrinder and comes out with a bloody, incoherent, postmodern mishmash. There’s everything from yin-yang earrings on the Oracle character to an extended discussion of karma (lifted mostly from Merriam-Webster’s), with a heavy dose of classical iconography thrown in just for kicks.
And the penultimate scene is completely ridiculous. After a fight that busts up lots of walls and carves a big crater in the street, the bad guy says to Neo “Why do you humans do it?” and launches into an extended tirade on the meaninglessness of life. Neo tells him he keeps fighting “Because I choose to.” Oh, really? I liked that movie better the first time, when it was called The Stranger. Or maybe Bartleby the Scrivner, if you want to really dig deep.
Then again, I did miss the first minute or two while I was out getting popcorn. Maybe that explains the whole thing. Somehow, I doubt it.
The really sad part is that the whole movie was so bad (though the action scenes were generally fantastic) that, by the time Zion is cheering, the movie was so bad it was good. But then there’s a lame sequence clearly tacked on because the original, more ambivalent ending (which at least had the virtue of being an interesting plot move) didn’t sit well with test audiences. It features a silly discussion between the two god-like characters to give it a much happier ending (from the view they have of a city across a river, they evidently live in Hoboken, which just totally ruined the suspension of disbelief). So, as far as I’m concerned, it went all the way past bad to good, and back to bad again.
Given all the loose ends, though, they’re clearly setting themselves up for another bunch of movies. I wish they had just left well enough alone and ended the series here, for better or worse - they could always go back and disgrace themselves with prequels a la “Star Wars.”
- November 18, 2003
- filed under: Movies
“Lost in Translation”
I went to see “Lost in Translaion” last week thinking I probably wouldn’t like it. I still can’t forgive Sophia Coppola for ruining “The Godfather Part 3” with her awful acting, and despite all the hype I still wasn’t really sure what the movie was about. But I came out of the theater thinking it was the best movie about relationships I’ve seen since “Eyes Wide Shut.”
There isn’t much of a plot. Bill Murray plays an aging actor who’s in Tokyo to shoot a whiskey ad, and Scarlett Johansson plays a 20-something stuck in Tokyo while her young husband shoots photos for album covers. They meet in a hotel bar, and spend about a week hanging out together.
It gets a lot of feelings right - the feeling of being in a very foreign country, jet-lagged and unable to sleep; the feeling of hanging out in a bad bar in a foreign hotel for lack of anything else to do; the feeling of driving through a strange city at night and just letting the sights wash over you. And it’s a fascinating character study of two people at different stages of their romantic lives crossing paths for a few moments.
If it sounds a little strange and arty, it is, but it’s well worth the $10. As Joe Bob would say, check it out . . .
- October 27, 2003
- filed under: Movies
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