Title: Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked
Director: Mike Mitchell
Cast: Matthew Gray Gubler, Amy Poehler, Jesse McCartney, Andy Buckley, Lauren Gottlieb
Synopsis: Watch the Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked trailer!
Genre: Family
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Title: This Must Be the Place: Trailer
Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Cast: Sean Penn, Frances McDormand, Judd Hirsch, Kerry Condon, Harry Dean Stanton
Synopsis: Watch the This Must Be The Place Trailer. A bored, retired rock star sets out to find his father’s executioner, an ex-Nazi war criminal who is a refugee in the U.S.
Genre: Drama
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Title: Project Nim — Trailer
Director: James Marsh
Cast: Herbert Terrace, Stephanie LaFarge, Jenny Lee, Laura-Ann Petitto, Joyce Butler
Synopsis: Watch the Project Nim trailer. Tells the story of a chimpanzee taken from its mother at birth and raised like a human child by a family in a brownstone on the upper West Side in the 1970s.
Genre: Family
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Title: Contagion: Trailer
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Cast: Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Jude Law
Synopsis: Watch the Contagion trailer. An action-thriller centered on the threat posed by a deadly disease and an international team of doctors contracted by the CDC to deal with the outbreak.
Genre: Drama
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Title: The Devil’s Double: TV Spot
Director: Lee Tamahori
Cast: Dominic Cooper, Ludivine Sagnier, Raad Rawi, Philip Quast, Mem Ferda
Synopsis: Watch the Devil’s Double TV Spot. A chilling vision of the House of Saddam Hussein comes to life through the eyes of the man who was forced to become the double of Hussein’s sadistic son.
Genre: Drama
Release Date: 7/29/2011 5:43:00 PM
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Title: Hugo Theatrical Trailer
Director: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Asa Butterfield, Chloe Moretz, Emily Mortimer, Jude Law, Christopher Lee
Synopsis: Watch the Hugo Theatrical trailer. Set in 1930s Paris, an orphan who lives in the walls of a train station is wrapped up in a mystery involving his late father and an automaton. Break.com delivers official movie trailers previews, teasers and clips in HD for all the hottest coming soon & theatrical releases including the family Hugo
Genre: Family
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Where does appreciation end and exploitation begin? Gorgeous and disquieting, the documentaryBombay Beach wobbles between the two like a beginner gymnast on her first attempt on the balance beam. On one side, it’s a poetic, freeform examination of the lives of a few of the residents of the area of the title, located by the Salton Sea in the Southern California desert. On the other, it’s an uncomfortable fetishization of the community’s outsider status, dictated by poverty, by location and by an inability or unwillingness to exist elsewhere. Israeli-born director Alma Har’el, who comes from a background of music videos and commercials, doesn’t just bask in this abundance of scenic, decaying Americana, she shapes it into choreographed dance interludes with the subjects, who twirl outside their mobile homes and don carnival masks to cavort in an outdoor gazebo. It’s a bit of whimsy as pretty and problematic as the film as a whole.
There’s no question of what drew Har’el to Bombay Beach’s setting, which is almost otherworldly and ripely cinematic. On the edge of the inland sea, the remote, half-abandoned community has the look of a group of survivors of some apocalyptic event. The film starts with old promotional footage from decades ago touting the area’s destiny as the next California paradise (“The future is now!”), a place for resorts and recreation and a more traditional type of escape, before cutting to the fallen reality, the few dilapidated homes and businesses remaining today, and slowly finding its way to the three characters it will follow — the elderly Red, who lives in the Slab City trailer encampment and gets by bootlegging discount cigarettes; Benny Parrish, a boy who’s been diagnosed with bipolar disorder; and CeeJay Thompson, a black teenager from L.A. who’s been sent to the area to get away from the gang violence that claimed the life of his cousin.
Part of what makes Bombay Beach such prime fuel for arguments about hipster appropriation is its impressively chic pedigree.
Part of what makes Bombay Beach such prime fuel for arguments about hipster appropriation is its impressively chic pedigree. Some of Har’el’s most well-known and acclaimed music videos are for Zach Condon and his band Beirut, original music from whom figures prominently on the soundtrack. There are also songs from Bob Dylan, and an enthusiastic endorsement from Terry Gilliam adorns the top of the official website. There’s nothing malicious in the film’s gaze — I have no doubt that Har’el has sincerely fallen in love with her subjects and the region — but that doesn’t negate the way the film doesn’t observe, it palpably imposes a thesis upon these people, about the crumbled American dream, about the nobility of existence on the outskirts, using them as material for an idea in a way that speaks more to the filmmaker than to who they are. What kind of obligation a documentarian has to his or her subjects can be the center of an interesting if endless debate, andBombay Beach regardless has no aims to be any sort of traditional nonfiction film, but there’s still something squirmy in its vision, the way that it continually flirts with condescending to what it would lift up.
Bombay Beach does include some unforgettable imagery, much of it shot toward dusk when the desert has cooled and when the washed-out colors of the landscape blend into the vast sky and the reflecting water. CeeJay and his friend noodle around in a golf cart looking for something to do and talking about the future — he hopes to get a football scholarship, but his pal wonders what would happen if he just stayed put and became a bum. “I’d find you and I’d take care of you, no homo,” CeeJay tells him. Red and his friends, many wizened and shirtless, have a cookout in Slab City, as one woman massages a bowl of limp, grayish lettuce. “That is a salad,” her friend declares.
But it’s to little Benny that the film’s heart belongs — an adorable kid who seems to live only half in this world and the rest of the time in his own imagination, Benny’s on a regimen of Ritalin and Lithium and other meds that sometimes leave him even dreamier than is his norm, and while his mother frets over these side effects she also abides by what the doctor tells her, not having any other choice. She and her husband once had a fondness for setting off explosives and an extreme avoidance of housekeeping — the former landed them in jail, the latter got their children taken away for a while, and she’s clearly trying her hardest to parent according to rules she’s had to teach herself. (When she tells her oldest daughter she was 15 when she first got pregnant, the girl says “I finally know what age you were” — it’s a puzzle she’s been exploring for a while in the face of deflections.) We don’t see the problems Benny’s caused that led to his diagnosis, and his drugged up daze and earnest plea to his teacher that “I hope I behave” are extra heartbreaking because of it. Benny’s playing out in the desert on a beached ship or in a fantasy sequence involving a fire truck are some of the only moments he seems fully himself, and they’re the least forceful and most magnetic instances of Bombay Beach’s Harmony Korine-esque tributes to the concept of the beautiful freaks.
Every time Sam Worthington shows up in a movie, I squint and ask myself, “Who’s that again?” That might happen two or three times with a new actor. But I feel as if I’ve seen a dozen Worthington performances by now, and I still squinted at him in Texas Killing Fields.
Maybe one of the problems is that although there’s a good story here and, Worthington’s aside, some good performances, there’s just too much filmmaking going on in Texas Killing Fields: Ami Canaan Mann doesn’t show anything to us straight when she can show it underlit, slightly tilted or heaped on a pile with dozens of other extraneous details. All that assertive stylishness wouldn’t matter so much if it didn’t obscure the basic plot: Texas Killing Fields follows two Texas City detectives — local guy Mike Souder (Worthington) and New York transplant Brian Heigh (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) — as they scratch their heads over a recent homicide. A young girl has been found murdered. Might it be linked to other murders of young women that have occurred just outside the cops’ jurisdiction? Nah, says lazy, grouchy, pugilistic cop Mike. Probably! says intuitive, caring, principled, deeply Catholic Brian.
But that semi-exciting conflict doesn’t come up until at least midway through the movie. Mostly, we see characters glancing significantly toward one another or arguing about things that don’t matter all that much in the outcome, and there is one oh-so-clever red herring. There’s also some ewky corpse stuff, which is very artistically shot — by DP Stuart Drybergh — but which still makes you go “eww.” (We have the CSI shows and others like them to thank for that trend.) And somewhere in there, murkily lit, is Jessica Chastain, as the exhausted detective of the neighboring precinct who desperately needs help solving these murders. It also turns out she’s Mike’s ex-wife, though how these two could ever have shared a sandwich, let alone a life together, is something the movie never explores. It’s just an extra little checkbox the movie ticks off.
Texas Killing Fields, written by Don Ferrarone, is loosely based on a series of real-life unsolved Texas murders. And there is an element of effective spookiness here, particularly in the performance of Chloë Grace Moretz as Little Anne, a girl just on the cusp of womanhood who’s obviously at risk. Her mother (Sheryl Lee) kicks her out of the family shack every time she has her “friends” over, which is pretty much all the time. With nowhere to go, Little Anne wanders around town, and her presence is ghostly — with her tangle of seaweed hair and pouty half-smile, she’s like a figure from an old folk song, a wronged specter doomed to wander the plains.
Moretz brings some natural gravity to a role that hasn’t been adequately fleshed out.
Moretz brings some natural gravity to a role that hasn’t been adequately fleshed out. And while Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Brian worries about her constantly, he also pretty much leaves her to the figurative wolves. (Having her over to dinner at his house once doesn’t count.) Meanwhile, the disastrously mismatched Mike and Brian bicker and spar. You could really do something with this idea of reluctant police partners: The paired-off detectives we generally see in the movies and on TV always get along so famously, even when they pretend to hate each other.
But Texas Killing Fields has way too many fish to fry to follow that one little minnow. And that just causes the plot — intriguing at first — to become hopelessly tangled. Then there’s the issue of Worthington. He’d be easy to take if he were just a bad actor. But he’s something worse: a perfunctory one. He does work hard in Texas Killing Fields, glaring at Brian, or his ex-wife, or any number of thugs — his recurring line is “Don’t look at me like that!” when it’s obvious that he’s the one who’s looking like that. And, as it turns out, his suspicion and belligerence do serve a purpose. But that doesn’t mean we want to watch him exercise it for two hours. We get all sorts of hints about Mike’s troubled past, but Worthington wears all his inner pain right on the surface. The rural Texas of Texas Killing Fields is a very dark place; Worthington’s performance is like an advertising campaign for all that darkness, instead of a manifestation of the thing itself.
Alfred Hitchcock and Cecil B. DeMille might have been able to successfully redo their own movies, but more recent auto-remakes, especially ones that find directors cranking out a U.S. version of their own foreign-language hit, have been a motley crew. The best, like Michael Haneke’s 2007 Funny Games and Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge, tend to be merely functional enterprises that revisit what worked the first time around with added English-speaking and possibly more famous actors. But others highlight in a painfully clear way the compromises that so often come with working in Hollywood. Ole Bornedal’s wan Nightwatch lost the nasty edge of the Danish original and retained no other distinguishing characteristics, and George Sluizer’s 1993 The Vanishing ditched the finale of his 1988 Spoorloos, an uncompromisingly bleak and great ending, for a studio-friendly happy one that undoes everything toward which the first film built.
So 13, Géla Babluani’s remake of his own French 2005 thriller about an underground Russian roulette ring 13 Tzameti, doesn’t come from the most promising tradition, before you even take into account that it’s been bumping around in international release for well over a year. It does at least have an impressive — really, kind of amazing — cast. Sam Riley, so good as Ian Curtis in Control, is the naïve lead, Vince. Michael Shannon, Jason Statham, Ray Winstone, Mickey Rourke, Alexander Skarsgård and Ben Gazzara all appear, as do, somewhat less remarkably, 50 Cent and Emmanuelle Chriqui. Few of these folks make an impression, which isn’t really their fault (except for 50 Cent, who delivers his lines with a singularly enervating lack of intonation) so much as it’s a function of how the film is structured. Both the original and this new 13 are, depending on your worldview, either odd variations on the deadly tournament formula or bleak ones on extreme gambling, but they are also about a group of desperate men who don’t have a lot of time to spend talking about their feelings.
This is a lumpy, dumb, suspenseless thing that sometimes scarcely feels finished.
At least they shouldn’t. This actually becomes part of the problem with 13: This is a lumpy, dumb, suspenseless thing that sometimes scarcely feels finished. The original gets most of its juice from its minimalism — done in black-and-white and starring Babluani’s brother George in his first acting role, it lets the audience in on its premise only when its main character figures it out, after he’s taken the place of his smack-addicted employer and disappeared down a very dangerous rabbit hole. This 13 starts off with a cheap-looking title card, followed by a shot of money being counted and then a flash of Vince and another man pointing guns at one another, as if the audience would drift away if they weren’t promised violent intrigue right off the bat. And they might — the film’s introduction listlessly outlines the tough situation in which Vince’s family has ended up, having had to sell their house to pay for his father’s medical care, and cuts in backstory for Statham’s Jasper, a shady figure who borrows $2 million for purposes we’ll soon learn. Neither thread offers much interest.
13 may actually have been undone by its own added resources and flashier cast. The beefing up of Jasper’s storyline, which unfolds over awkward flashbacks to show his retrieving of his brother Ronald (Winstone) from a mental institution, and the even more clumsily handled background on Rourke’s Jefferson, who is shown to have been retrieved from a prison in Juarez, do 13 no favors. The film grinds to a halt with each jump back in time, which seem to have been put there primarily to placate the stars in these roles by giving them more to work with. A drama about a Russian roulette tourney is a less-is-more proposition — the more detail that’s offered, the more questions come to mind and the more you start to believe, as is inevitable in this case, that the premise is hopelessly silly and hardly warrants this kind of steady seriousness.
Shannon vampily oversees the proceedings, dictating the rules, which involve increasing the number of bullets and the odds of death in each round, and waiting for the illumination of a lightbulb before firing. Ronald reveals himself to be Vince’s primary rival, though he, like many of the participants, likes to retain an illusion of control. There’s talk of the value of experience, of skill, as if what’s at play here were anything other than blind luck. It’s actually the one thing that could have benefited from more exploration in what has to be the most inert film about millionaires betting on the ritualized shootings of morphine-addled outcasts ever — the way these men have chosen to look at and, in some way, normalize the barbaric thing they’re doing. That it’s left hanging is just another reason 13 is such a disappointment. Nothing to see here.
“You might say hey, maybe punk rock was never meant to grow up — but it did, so too bad. We’re in uncharted territory,” Bad Religion’s Brett Gurewitz, also the owner of Epitaph Records, says early in Andrea Blaugrund’s documentary The Other F Word. Billing itself as a “coming of middle age story,” this earnest and intermittently lovable look into the lives of prominent punk rockers who’ve gone on to become responsible fathers doesn’t break as much ground as it seems to hope and believe.
Punk’s hardly the first counterculture movement to age into less cutting-edge adulthood, though with its roots in the rejection of conformity, of authority and established structures it may be the one most suited to be left to the young, angry and focused on what they don’t want to be rather than what they do. But how these tattooed veterans of mosh pits and countless tours deal with being authority figures in their own families is a question this film treats with great tenderness if little impact — as one bemused punk pop puts it, “How did we go from rebelling against our own parents to becoming parents ourselves?”
Blaugrund pulls together a solid assembly of interviewees for The Other F Word (if ones that stretch past the boundaries of punk) — Gurewitz is joined by Fat Mike from NOFX, Mark Hoppus of Blink-182, Everclear’s Art Alexakis, Lars Frederiksen from Rancid, Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and plenty of others, including skateboarder Tony Hawk and BMXer Rick Thorne to pipe in from outside of the music world. The main arc of the film is built around Jim Lindberg of Pennywise (incidentally the author of a book called Punk Rock Dad: No Rules, Just Real Life) who finds himself exhausted by the endless loop of touring that’s the reality of band life for most these days, a brutal schedule that allows him to support his family but also keeps him away from them for a large part of the year. He’s placed in a situation in which his obligations to his kids come up against those to his bandmates of 20 years, and at the close of the film he makes the difficult decision to quit.
It’s as much the shifting ground in the music industry as the burdens of image and ideology that make life difficult for these mohawked fathers, though it’s this aspect The Other F Word handles least well, touching on complaints about downloads and the reasoning behind putting an album on MySpace that are part of a discussion no one’s even having anymore. But with the idea of making money from record sales gone, touring’s all that’s left, and for a band like Pennywise, that’s no glamorous proposition. We watch Lindberg check into an Econolodge with a suitcase full of antacid and clothes he didn’t have time to toss in the laundry, to at night comb dye into his goatee to hide the gray. The film splashes lyrics across the screen during the lively performance footage, but off stage the interviewees talk of exhaustion with their songs and with the cycle of having to summon enthusiasm each night for each new town.
Punk may be best suited to the young and carefree about consequences (“Sometimes you think, ‘Oh shit, should I have tattooed my forehead?’” muses Frederiksen, whose brow reads “SKUNX”), but it’s of course the scenes of these unlikely dads doing typical dad things that’s where the movie sings, from Flea tearing up talking about his daughter to Alexakis singing “The Wheels on the Bus” to his little girl in the car seat behind him to Fat Mike in a zebra-print bath robe spraying toast with — is that I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!? The idea that these men, many of whom came from rough backgrounds and troubled home lives, find such fulfillment and meaning in being better fathers to their kids than their own fathers were to them is touching, especially given how ill-suited to the role many of them at first considered themselves.
It’s lovely to see these attempts at punk parenting, but there’s really not much “punk” to them beyond appearances.
The heartfelt sincerity of these scenes almost obscures how little there is to The Other F Word beyond them.It’s lovely to see these attempts at punk parenting, but there’s really not much “punk” to them beyond appearances. Even the kids with the liberty spikes have to grow up eventually, or risk being left the oldest guys at the show, hitting on high school girls, developing liver damage and bragging about never selling out while living in their parents’ basement. That this film acts like it’s unexpected to find such paternal dedication amongst these pierced, guitar-playing dudes seems terribly naive. Why would being in a hardcore band preclude you from being a decent dad? You need only flip through the current roster of reality TV to see that far scarier and less-prepared people become parents every day.