There he was, Jim Carrey, a $25 million a movie star, sitting in the audience at last week's American Idol results show, in an elephant costume. It was a pandering plug for Carrey's new animated film Horton Hears a Who in which the comic voices the elephant title character created by Dr. Seuss. The movie debuted big at $45 million, making it No. 1 for the week, the best opening so far this year for any movie (driving Cloverfield to second place), and the fifth biggest opening ever for animated film, behind Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc, Cars and Ratatouille. No bitching from me. Horton is better than decent family entertainment. What made me sad was seeing Carrey reduced to selling himself out for a Fox movie on a Fox TV show. Carrey's had a tough time of it of late with such flops as The Majestic, Fun With Dick and Jane and—yikes!—The Number 23. But does he deserve this—being forced (I hope) to shill for a kids flick on a massively popular TV show? If I'm being honest, to quote Simon Cowell, it was a pathetic sight. Carrey is a gifted actor who deserved Oscar nominations that never came for The Truman Show, Man on the Moon and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. You could probably think of other examples of primo Carrey. Let's do it, just to wipe way away the bad taste of the Idol debacle.

[Photo: FOX]

Michael Haneke thinks so. Who is Michael Haneke? He's the Austrian director of Funny Games, the movie you'll see this weekend if you read this blog. The rest can line up with the kiddies for a comfy ride with Dr. Seuss in Horton Hears a Who! Funny Games isn't comfy at all. It's as brutal as a buzzsaw. Just the way Haneke likes it. You may not want to stay for the whole movie? Good. Or you may stick it out to the end and go out with your friends to discuss it. Even better. Take a good look at the photo above. You see two preps (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet) in tennis whites who drop in on Naomi Watts at the lavish lakefront home she shares with husband Tim Roth and their ten-yearold son Devon Gearhart. A rampage of brutality follows. Is the purpose theft, rape, murder? No, just torture for the fun of it. You don't see everything,

(more...)

This is the week of the annual Showest convention, where film exhibitors gather in Las Vegas to chase hookers (just kidding!) and (no joke!) pray for gold to rain on the summer's megabudget epics. What shocked me this year was the announcement that the Male Star of the Year award would go to, of all people, Robert Downey Jr. Look, Downey's talent is indisputable. But he's hardly a box-office draw. His latest film, Charlie Bartlett, has already disappeared without a trace. And you can add Fur, Game 6, Gothika, Eros and The Singing Detective to the list of Downey films that won far less attention than his drug problems. So what's the deal with a "Star" award? Two words: Iron Man (see photo), opening on May 2nd, and

.

(more...)

This just in: a movie announcement that chills my blood:

Producer-director Michael Bay is in in talks to remake the 1968 horror classic Rosemary's Baby.

What the fuck? First the cast of American Idol takes on the Lennon/McCartney songook and now this! How does Bay, the hack's hack, get his Transformer mitts on Roman Polanski's masterful take on a young wife (Mia Farrow) who thinks she's been knocked up by the devil? The nagging core of the story is that Farrow's Rosemary may just be paranoid about being married to a selfish actor (John Cassavetes) who isn't Catholic? The heat of the plot is all in the lapsed-Catholic subtext. There's a problem right away. Bay doesn't do subtext. Or subtlety. No doubt one devil baby won't be enough for the Baymeister. Why not twins? Or devil quints? Bay also threatens to redo Hitchcock's The Birds after that. Why doesn't he try to remake his own?

(more...)

FIND OF THE WEEK: STATE OF PLAY

If you've been glued to the sex scandal involving New York Governor Eliot Spitzer (see photo) and a high-priced hooker who called him Client 9, this is the DVD for you. State of Play is actually not a movie, it's a doozie of a six-part, 2003 British miniseries involving a married minister (David Morrissey), the sexy assistant he's having it in on with and the reporter (once the MP's campaign manager) who's leading the media witch hunt on his hypocritical ass. Hollywood is quickly—I bet more quickly now—

(more...)

The Bank Job (see photo), based on a scandal-tinged heist in London more than three decades ago, opened the weekend with wow reviews and expectations of stealing business from that behemoth, 10,000 B.C. It didn't happen. Grossing a dispiriting $5.7 million against $35.7 milion for 10,000 B.C. and $14 million for College Road Trip, The Bank Job hopped on the express train to Netflix. What happened? There are many theories:

1. Lousy title—could it be more generic?
2. Londoner Jason Statham is a surprisingly forceful screen presence. but he is not a star. The champion diver and model for the clothing brand French Connection became an actor best known for three Guy Ritchie crime films (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Revolver, Snatch) and roles in The Italian Job and two Transporter films. That's second tier all the way. Matt Damon, George Clooney or Johnny Depp, who does a creditable Brit accent, could have made all the difference.

(more...)

In this week's video review, the Rolling Stone film critic casts a judgemental eye at this weekend's box office options: the special effects epic 10,000 B.C., the high octane heist flick The Bank Job and the quiet Gus Van Sant-directed Paranoid Park. Click above for the complete scoop. Plus: Read Peter Travers' reviews of Paranoid Park here and The Bank Job here.

Watch every episode of our weekly Peter Travers video podcast by subscribing via iTunes (when prompted, click “Launch application”). Every Friday, a new episode will be delivered to your iTunes. [If you don’t have iTunes, download it here.]

[Video: Jennifer Hsu]

False advertising thy name is movie trailers. You know what I'm talking about. The trailer for Cloverfield promised thrills the movie failed to deliver. I can say the same for Jumper, Vantage Point, Semi-Pro and dozens of others. Bad trailers are rare, though Fool's Gold qualifies, as does Meet the Sparatans. Hollywood has made an art out of the come-on. Our best protection is learning how to read a movie trailer for tell-tale hints that we're being sold a bill of shoddy goods. Let's take three examples—trailers for movies due to open in a few weeks and that studios aren't eager to show to critics like myself until the last minute or beyond. I choose these trailers because, like you, I don't have any idea of how good or bad the movies themselves are. I'm choosing at random. If you have better examples of how the scam works, send them along. Here are my exhibits A, B and C.

DRILLBIT TAYLOR Opening March 21st

A comedy trailer that capitalizes on our affection for star Owen Wilson, who's had a tough time following his reported suicide attempt last year. The trailer wastes no time time telling us what the movie is about. Wilson's title character is a bodyguard. We hear him tell prospective clients: "I've protected three Vice-Presidents, Bobby Brown, and Sylvester Stallone" (pause), "not quite as tough as he looks." The line isn't funny, but Wilson puts a fun spin on it. Then—boom—comes the BIG JOKE, the ONE BIG JOKE. Wilson's Drillbit Taylor is talking to—are you ready?— kids. They want to hire him to protect them from the school bully. We see Drillbit humilated at the hands of children. Then we see him humiliated again. In fact, we see the whole movie or all we need to know of it. Giving away the store is a major flaw in trailers today. In a comedy trailer, we know they're telling us the best jokes. Training his clients—a fat one and a skinny one in the Jonah Hill-Michael Cera tradition— Drillbit teaches them Judo "as in ju don't know who you're messin' with, Homes." If that's the best joke, Homes, this movie is in deep doodoo.

SHUTTER Opening March 21st

Asian horror Americanized is a sure sign of trouble. The trailer tells us right off that Shutter is from the executive producers (can anyone define what they do?) of The Grudge and The Ring. It makes no mention that they're home-schooled remakes of films that the Japanese did way better. The trailer has one of those deep Mr. Moviefone voices to take us through the plot, involving Spirit Photography with images of the dead appearing in photographs. It's a solid gimmick, except nothing that shows up in the trailer is remotely scary. You should know that the 2004 film of the same story from Thailand is bowel-emptying scary. The biggest giveaway in the trailer that the movie has problems is the appearance of its star, Joshua Jackson. The trailer cuts away from him fast, but not fast enough to make us forget that Jackson brings a safe, PG-ish Dawson's Creek meets The Mighty Ducks affect to the whole enterprise. Are your hopes sinking? Mine are.

SUPERHERO MOVIE Opening March 28th

This trailer had me at hello or at least at the first sight of Leslie Nielsen. Visions of the eightysomething actor as Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun, Dr. Rumack in Airplane! and most recently President Harris in the Scary Movie series whet my appetite for fun. I gave this goof on superhero movies like Fantastic Four and Batman Begins the benefit of the doubt just watching Nielsen wield a nail gun. Then the trailer makes it clear that Drake Bell will be doing the the heavy comic lifting as a high school kid who develops powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men as The Dragonfly. A careful viewing of the trailer reveals something even more dire: the focus is on spoofing Spider-Man to the exclusion of all else. Then everything starts to feel older than Paris Hilton's first stupid utterance. Geez, Spider-Man has been spoofing itself since 2002. Even quick cutting and a hyper pacing can't disguise the fact that this trailer is its own worst enemy. But in showing the good sense to show us Nielsen, it's a trailer that will sell tickets.

Reading Mark Harris' potent provocation of a book, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, got me thinking of what's needed to kick Hollywood in the ass. The book focuses on 1967 and the five films Oscar nominated for Best Picture: Two groundbreakers (Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate) versus a tired old Hollywood musical (Dr. Dolittle) and a pair of films about race relations (Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, In the Heat of the Night). Harris uses those films, and the process to develop them that stretched back to 1963, to show us Hollywood at a crossroads. It was a time of rule breaking—you can feel director Mike Nichols cracking through youth formula in The Graduate and director Arthur Penn and producer Warren Beatty reinventing the gangster genre by investing techniques of the New Wave into Bonnie and Clyde. The eventual Oscar winner, In the Heat of the Night, was a safer choice, but the change in the air was undeniable and you can feel it whipping through the pages of this witty, wizardly book.

(more...)

As the movie weekend nears with 10,000 B.C. and College Road Trip, the hardcore film enthusiast has only one defense: hunker down with the best of today's DVD releases until the shitstorm ends, hopefully sometime this year.

PICK OF THE WEEK: Into the Wild

I ask you: How did Sean Penn's magnificent odyssey into one young man's yearning heart fail to be Oscar nominated as Best Picture, Best Actor (Emile Hirsch), Best Adapted Screenplay (Penn), Best Director (Penn) and Best Score (for the songs of Eddie Vedder)? Did Academy voters not see the passion in what Penn worked nearly a decade to get on screen? Did they side with Robin Wright Penn in her split with the volatile Penn after eleven years of marriage? Or are they just blind, deaf and stupid? I have to go with the last reason.

(more...)