Look At My Briefs -- 9/30/10

Cool, one more day until the start of ROCKTOBER! WOOOO! What better way is there to start such a festive month than by reading another edition of my brief comments on various subjects I like to call Look At My Briefs.

I absolutely loved the Swedish film Let The Right One In, a movie that is both a gruesome horror story and a touching coming-of-age film. Therefore, I wasn't happy when I heard that an American remake would be coming out soon. Tomorrow, in fact. I simply assumed they would try to jazz it up with action sequences and probably give it the Twilight treatment by making the kids into sexy young adults instead of 12 year olds. Well, not only did they not do that but the movie is garnering excellent reviews. The fact that the movie might be good actually seems like a violation of some sort, as if the natural order of things has been upset.

Speaking of violations and natural orders being upset, I present this: AAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!! Yes, it's true, aliens have replaced George Lucas with a guy who's planning to do a 3D conversion to the Star Wars movies. This is all part of the alien plot to destroy all that is good and holy. After this, some sort of puppy killing virus will be introduced to the water supply then the atmosphere will be polluted with some sort of additive that will cause all the world's soft ice cream to harden up. If I'm wrong and this really is George Lucas doing it, I'm sure he'll try to make it up to the fans by offering to edit Shia LeBeouf out of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Last week, I expressed my dislike for the new Fox drama Lone Star. Despite its generally high rating from critics, I found it boring and wondered if I was the only one. Then I read this from an article on Hollywoodreporter.com:

From the beginning critics wondered if "Lone Star" could draw a broadcast-sized audience. The show best resembled the sort of nuanced character-driven dramas seen on basic cable networks like FX and AMC. But Fox expressed high confidence, with entertainment president Kevin Reilly telling critics the only reason shows like "Mad Men" pull such low numbers is because they're not on his network.

"The only reason those shows aren't watched by more people is they're not on Fox," Reilly said. "The [basic cable networks] don't have this [promotional] machine."

Those are the final paragraphs added in, I assume, because of the writer's cruelly ironic sense of humor. I say this because the subject of the article is the cancellation of Lone Star after only two episodes. One thing Fox Entertainment President Kevin Reilly failed to take into account when boasting about the incredible Fox marketing juggernaut was that Mad Men is excellent while Lone Star sucked.

Roland Emmerich is doing a period thriller about the true authorship of Shakespeare's plays. I'll get back to this in about six months as my brain is incapable of processing the concept of the guy who made Armageddon, 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow switching gears like...see? I can't come up with anything else.

Staying in perfect character, however, is Uwe Boll. His last movie was a comedy that opened with the destruction of the World Trade Center called Postal. The fact that most of you probably think I'm kidding tells you all you need to know about the critical and financial success of that film. Now, Boll took the conclusion of the public that he couldn't possibly sink any lower as a challenge and has made a movie about Auschwitz. Judging by the article, Boll's artistic vision was to remake Saw and set it in Auschwitz, just as those who died there would have wanted it. There are two pieces of good news. The first is that, like all of Boll's films, it will only make a profit because it cost so little to make. The second is that Boll will have to die someday.

Chris Noth has a point. If film critics didn't have such discerning taste that allowed them to easily identify godawfully bad films, Sex and the City 2 would have been more popular.

Things I've Learned From Watching Movies Part 83

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Money, So They Say, Is The Root Of All Evil Today

It's been over 20 years since Oliver Stone made Wall Street. In that time, the movie has gone from being a searing commentary on the lawless and greedy behavior of the financial sector to a quaint farce about a trader who wasn't smart enough to evade the law like all the others do. I suppose this is why Stone felt the need to make a sequel called Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. That and the fact that the financial sector has destroyed a great deal of the world without much in the way of punishment to some of its largest players.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps covers the recent financial crisis through the eyes of some fictional characters. Some are obviously based on either actual people or composites of actual people. Then there's Jake Moore (Shia LaBeouf), a trader whose faith in the employer and the system that just gave him his first million dollar bonus before the age of 30 is blinding him to the fact that Keller Zabel, the Lehman Brothers type company for whom he works, is about to collapse under the weight of bad debt. Even when his company's stock loses 50% of its value in a day, Jake begs his boss and mentor, the honorable Louis Zabel (Frank Langella in an Oscar worthy performance), to tell him that this proud, old Wall Street firm isn't about to collapse. What he doesn't know is that the firm has already been sold for a pittance to Breton James (Josh Brolin), head of Churchill Schwartz, the movie's answer to Goldman Sachs. James is the one who started the rumors that Zabel had a mountain of debt it couldn't handle. The open secret is that everyone in the room full of bankers and brokerage firms that decided Zabel's fate had the same huge debts caused by the same crazy mortgages that brought down Zabel.

Jake, meanwhile, is living with a young woman named Winnie Gekko (Carey Mulligan, one of my favorite rising actresses). If you're thinking her last name sounds familiar, it's because her father is disgraced Wall Street trader Gordon Gekko (do I really have to tell you who plays him?). This is where the movie starts to take off. Seven years after serving a seven year prison sentence for the crimes he committed in the first movie, Gordon has written a book called Is Greed Good? in which he accurately predicts the coming financial crisis and the general state of insanity caused by monied elites basically running our planet. After Zabel throws himself in front of a subway car, Jake finds himself lacking in mentors and that's when he seeks out Gekko.

Like much of the movie, Gekko is an exercise in wish fulfillment. Unlike many men in his situation, Gordon Gekko actually served a proper sentence for his crimes and didn't exit prison a rich man. He does, however, still have his ambition and his instincts that will prove to be both a bane and a boon to Jake as he seeks out some sort of retribution against Breton James, the man he blames for the collapse of his company and the death of his employer.

The first half of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is a pretty good fictionalized look at history. The second half, as I mentioned above, is melodramatic wish fulfillment in which evildoers are punished and even try to atone for their actions whereas in real life the people responsible for all this are not only still there but like to moan publicly about their taxes and loss of their bonuses. Still, while not as good as the 1987 film, this is a watchable film filled with entertaining performances from, oh, just about everybody in the movie, even that guy with the weird name who normally makes me itch. It's not a must-see but is a see-it-if-you-want-especially-if-you-can-sneak-into-the-theater-without-getting-caught movie so it's probably worth your time.

Swift and Merciless Judgment

Doing a bit of a twist on my somewhat-regular liveblog feature today. Instead of watching something on Netflix Instant, today I'm doing real time comments on a recently premiered television show currently available on Hulu.com. My main rule on these is that it has to be something I haven't seen before but I did see this. I watched the first five minutes anyway. That's how I know it will be a great vehicle for my sarcastic commentary. With that, sit back and watch me while I watch the pilot episode of the new Jimmy Smits drama Outlaw.

00:00 -- Oh cool, a commercial for Suave hair care products telling me to rethink salon hair. Hulu really gets me.

02:00 -- After the ad, we see some lawyer walking furiously through a prison in Pennsylvania. I'm not sure if he's doing something important or if he just had chili for lunch and is trying to find a bathroom. Ah, he has a client on Death Row who's facing imminent execution and whose final hope is a stay of execution from the U.S. Supreme Court. Usually, the problem with that is making a convincing Constitutional argument. In this case, the problem is that the Justice who has to break a 4-4 tie is Cyrus Garza (Jimmy Smits). Most Justices, when they're not Justicing, are giving speeches to law students or writing books about Marbury vs. Madison but now Garza. No, he's one of those flashy Justices who breaks the blackjack tables of Vegas and is a common paparazzi target. I see this going well.

03:20 -- Garza is something of a rock star/strict constructionist Justice who packs auditoriums surrounded by his screaming fans. He calls the young, female ACLU attorney pleading the inmate's case a flag burner before coming on to her in a somewhat creepy way so yeah, he's a jerk. Gee, I hope there will be some sort of process or series of events through which Garza can redeem himself.

06:00 -- Garza has a tightass clerk named Eddie who has just met a woman whose ass is tight in an entirely different way named Lucinda. Lucinda is some sort of miniskirt wearing researcher/hacker who introduces herself to people by saying she doesn't want to sleep with them so she fits right in with a guy who's described as the most conservative justice on the Supreme Court.

11:00 -- An evil Senator threatened Garza with impeachment if he stayed the execution. A quick Google search showed that only one Supreme Court Justice has ever been impeached. That would be Samuel Chase in 1798 and he won his impeachment trial. This means that there's never been a Supreme Court Justice who's been forcibly removed from office. Still, the execution, the Senator's threat and the recent death of his liberal father have come together and made Garza to decide that it would be much better to resign his position and become a trial attorney. Let me say that again. The makers of this show have created a character so fucking stupid that he actually thinks he can do more good as an attorney than he can as a god damn SUPREME COURT JUSTICE. My God, television can be stupid. The ad for LG refrigerators in which a woman pulls a fully laid out dining room table from her fridge was actually a relief.

19:22 -- Garza has joined a high powered corporate law firm that has agreed to pay him an outrageous salary and let him do whatever he wants even if it makes zero dollars for the firm. I don't mind unrealistic plots. Hell, I like the new revamp of Nikita and unicorns are more realistic than that. What I don't like is when something is both unrealistic and stupid, especially when I get one stupidly unrealistic event piled on top of another such as, oh, let's say a Supreme Court Justice being threatened with something that hasn't happened in 200 years so he quits in order to do more good off the Court than on so he joins a law firm run by money grubbing bastards who give him a huge budget to do whatever he wants. And the first thing he wants to do? That would be to represent Greg Beals, the inmate to whom he just granted a new trial. Not only do his clerks and sexy hacker/whatever the hell she is go along for the ride but he also scoops up Beals' lawyer, Al Druzinsky, to be part of his legal team. In about five minutes, they discover that the eyewitness who placed Beals at the scene of the crime recanted before he died. For some reason, this makes everyone think they shouldn't go forward with the new trial but should accept a plea agreement instead. Everyone, that is, except Garza. Cause that's how Garza rolls. Also, they needed something dramatic for Garza to do before they cut to commercial. My ad this time was for one of those icky KY sex gels. Thanks Hulu.

25:40 -- Beals was granted a new trial but, for some reason, he's have an appeals hearing. Can't Garza say something like, "Um, I kind of gave this guy a new trial." The important distinction here is that the defense has severe limitations when it comes to introducing new evidence in an appeal and boy oh boy, have they ever come up with new evidence. Seriously, I think I'm more likely to have committed the murder than Beals. Should be smooth sailing from here on but, unfortunately, we have around 15 minutes of broadcast time left which means some sort of godawful conflict is about to happen to set up the episode's third act. Let's watch.

28:30 -- Shockingly, the judge threw out their new evidence but there's something even more important. Due to a Three's Company level of misunderstood eavesdropping, Garza's very young law clerk, Moreta, thought he was dying and professed her love for him. she did this despite the fact that he sexually harasses her pretty much non-stop though this is probably why she hasn't filed numerous lawsuits against him by now.

33:30 -- I am watching this while logged into my Hulu account. This means they know it's me. I also click every one of those damn "Is this ad relevant to you?" boxes so they have some idea of what I like. So why the hell does Hulu think I am interested in ads for women's hair care products, Axe body spray and sex gels? Anyway, through actions both quasi-legal and highly unlikely, Garza and his team have tracked down some lab tech who hadn't testified in the first trial so instead of a devastating plot point setting up the final act, we have a hopeful one. This means all will appear to be lost before Garza pulls this witness out of his ass and saves the day. I wonder if I'm right.

37:30 -- Garza's witness knew all along that it was the deceased's husband, a police officer, who had committed the murder but never told anyone because, if she had, this whole story would have been denied its dramatic ending. This leads to a Jimmy Smits monologue about fairness and justice in the middle of the hearing. The judge, a man who until this point was a strict adherent of rules and process, tosses all that out the window and lets him. I may as well get comfortable as this could go on for the show's final four minutes.

42:00 -- Beals was set free so Garza and his team celebrated in the only truly proper way. They ate large amounts of nitrate laden barbecued meat while everyone tells lame jokes and half baked sexual innuendos. Garza spots an intimidating looking man following him but we never find out who he is. This sets up a mystery to be solved in future episodes, a mystery whose answer will never be known to me because I am never watching this definition of televised mediocrity again.

Look At My Briefs -- 9/23/10

I've officially lost 40 pounds this week so I don't want to write anything big. What a perfect time for another round of brief comments on various subjects I like to call Look At My Briefs.

I was looking at gossip sites to see what the current whereabouts of Lindsay Lohan were (can't be too careful with that girl) when I saw this story about the possibility of Glee star Lea Michele posing topless for Playboy. The final two paragraph shows why this story defines the term "burying the lede."

Sacha Baron Cohen as Freddie Mercury? I'm in. Oh, I hope Cohen isn't the kind of actor who will hold back on screen and not give a completely fearless performance.

Variety blogger Michael Schneider says Fox isn't giving up on its new drama Lone Star just yet. My response: Really? Why not? For those of you who missed Lone Star, which is most of you if the ratings are true, it's the story of a con artist who married into a wealthy family who starts developing a conscience and tries to turn his life around. At the end of the first episode, one of the ways he does this is by taking on a second wife. I was expecting a fun, interesting look into the world of con artists and instead received a slow, depressing tale of a bigamist anti-hero. It's "critically acclaimed" which makes me think the critics who are going around and acclaiming it never saw the whole thing. The question isn't if Fox should give it another week but how it got on the air at all.

Speaking of unimpressive new shows, Hawaii Five-O also left a lot to be desired. I only watched it because my mother asked me to record it for her and it was pretty much what I expected. I am no longer a fan of old fashioned, conventional shows that could just have easily been on the air in the 1970s which doesn't leave much hope for shows like Hawaii Five-O that actually were on in the 1970s. This includes sitcoms with laugh tracks and standard fare cop shows. Oddly, this should have made me a huge fan of Lone Star but that's another story. Hawaii Five-O has generic characters, villains who are impossible to capture until suddenly they're easy to capture and lame jokes. It also had Grace Park in both her bikini and underwear so I do appreciate their effort on that front.

Big Hollywood's S.T. Karnick is well known to me as the guy who's always wrong. In the past, he has wholeheartedly endorsed shows like the quickly canceled Eleventh Hour and the sucky Kelsey Grammer vehicle Hank, embraced the Will Farrel version of Land of the Lost for a perceived anti-evolution message and tried to convince us the low brown Jack Black/Michael Cera comedy Year One was actually a deeply spiritual film. Given that track record, NBC should be thrilled that he didn't like The Event.

I Love Ben Affleck Like Tacos

On his Twitter feed, Leverage producer John Rogers said that anyone who directs movies like Gone Baby Gone and The Town deserves to be called one of our country's best directors. That's a good observation. Let's just zip over to IMDB real quick and see who it was that directed those two fine films and WHAT? BEN AFFLECK? The guy from Paycheck/Pearl Harbor/Armageddon/Jersey Girl/Surviving Christmas? Ben "Gigli" is now one of our finest filmmakers? How did we, as a nation, allow this to happen? Did the Republicans filibuster the legislation that would have prevented this?

Snark, aside, I've always liked Ben Affleck. Oh, not for any of the crap mentioned above. I like him for movies like Good Will Hunting, Boiler Room and Changing Lanes. I like him for The Sum of All Fears, a movie whose sole fan seems to be me but that's how it goes sometimes. More recently, I like him for the outstanding Gone Baby Gone, a movie you couldn't see him in because he was behind the camera the whole time though, coincidentally, the lead character was played by a guy whose last name was also Affleck. Hell of a coincidence, that. Now I can like him for being writer/director/lead actor of the new heist film The Town.

Calling it a heist film does it a bit of a disservice, I suppose. It's like saying 2001: A Space Odyssey is a space film. It's more of a character study of people who happen to be robbers. The movie opens by informing me that the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston has spawned more bank robbers than any other area on the planet. Affleck plays Doug MacRay, leader of a group of thieves that does this neighborhood proud. Joining him in his criminal pursuits is The Hurt Locker's Jeremy Renner playing violent loose cannon James Coughlin to Doug's calm, cool professional who tries to avoid violence and bloodshed. I'm not sure what makes James so crazy though it may be that his sister, Krista, is played by Blake Lively which means he knows a girl who's a dead ringer for Blake Lively that he can never see naked.

Trouble is introduced to the group when, during a bank robbery, James suddenly gets the brilliant idea to take the bank's assistant manager, a woman named Claire (Rebecca Hall) along as a hostage. Doug decides to follow her around for a bit to see if she would be able to identify them. Doug and Claire simultaneously make the mistake of finding the other one attractive and start falling for each other. Doug does this knowing full well that his best friend is a crazy man who wants to kill this woman and that his friend's sister is an unstable drug addict as well as his sometime girlfriend. It's an unlikely scenario, of course, but Affleck constructs Doug's evolving relationship with Claire in such a natural and logical way that you could see it happening.

The Town is like an old fashioned movie in that it allows for fully developed supporting characters. People like Jon Hamm, Pete Postlethwaite and Chris Cooper are allowed to be interesting and memorable on screen even though none of them are the movie's biggest star. Co-writer/director/producer/star Affleck could have easily taken all of their best lines and given them to himself, something you often see in big budget studio films but instead he decided to make an interesting film that people would actually want to see.

It amazes me that, along with Easy A, I saw two good movies in a row. It also amazes me that the guy who embarrassed himself in Bounce and Reindeer Games took on three different tasks in the making of this movie and excelled in all of them. Possibly, the price for this and Gone Baby Gone will be that Affleck has to make Pearl Harbor 2 but I think that would be worth it.

For A Good Time, Call Emma Stone

Easy A is one of the most pleasant surprises I've had at the movies in a while. It's flat out hilarious and, except for a one dimensional villain, the characters grew on me and didn't insult my intelligence. This is pretty much the opposite reaction I expected to have when I saw the trailer. The trailer made me think this would be a contrived plot and a sitcom episode expanded to a two hour movie. It wasn't, or at least the movie was so well made that it didn'ty feel like it was.

The lead character, Olive, is played by Emma Stone, an actress who gained attention when she played the object of Jonah Hill's affections in Superbad. After that, she starred in some shitty movies, left movies for a shitty TV series then came back to movies just in time to be in Zombieland where, again, she became noticed. After I saw Zombieland, I was hoping to see her again in a more substantial role. She's the kind of actress who always seems to be smart and strong on screen even when she doesn't have much to do which is probably why she landed a role that I'm certain every young actress in Hollywood tried to get.

The movie is told through flashbacks in the form of a webcast that Olive has put together to tell the world that everything they think they know about her is wrong. Olive's problem is that she's 17 and is so anonymous at her high school that even horny teenage boys treat her life she's invisible. Things must have changed since I was in high school because I don't remember girls as pretty and sexy as Emma Stone being invisible. Then again, if they were, I guess I wouldn't have noticed so I'll have to take the movie's word that this is possible. Anyway, her troubles begin when she tells her best friend Rhi (Aly Michalka) she has a date as an excuse to not go camping with her and her nudist parents. This leads to her lying about losing her virginity to this non-existent guy she supposedly just met. Unfortunately, this lie was overheard by Marianne (Amanda Bynes), head of the school's "Don't Fuck Till Jesus Says It's OK" Club and, thanks to modern Facebook culture, it only takes minutes for her to get a reputation as a slut. You older folks out there who read overblown articles about today's so called "hookup culture" that make you think all teens are sluts these days and that blowjobs are the new way of saying hello might be surprised that this is still a bad thing but it is.

Still, she's not anonymous anymore. People notice her even if it's only to sneer or making thrusting motions as she walks by so she goes with it and pretends to have sex with a gay male friend so he will no longer be beaten up for being gay. This begins a series of circumstances that leads to people thinking she's selling herself. I wish she'd consulted me on this because I could have told her it would only be a matter of time before a boy actually tried to pay her for sex which is pretty much what happens.

The movie has its flaws. As I said, Amanda Bynes' Marianne is a weak link in the story. Except for a funny sequence in which she tries to befriend Olive, her character isn't particularly entertaining and is probably the least realistic thing in the movie. Still, that only lowers the movie to an A to A- in my book so it's still pretty damn good.

One major complaint stems from a hilarious scene near the beginning of the movie when Olive receives a musical gift card from her grandmother that plays Natasha Bedingfield's Pocketful of Sunshine. At first, Olive dismisses it but, in a sequence that gets funnier as it goes, she ends up belting out the tune along with the card and making it her ringtone. That was the first clue that I was in for a treat and that the movie could even stand along with the films of John Hughes as an excellent teen film. It's also how I got that damn song stuck in my head. For that I say: Screw you, Easy A.

♫ Take me away-ay ♫ GAH DAMMIT GET OUT OF MY HEAD!