With the quasi-comic horror trifle Twixt, Francis Ford Coppola joins the long list of narrative-conjurers to (mis)appropriate Edgar Allan Poe as a sober maestro of spook. A pallid, somber fictionalization of the author, played by Ben Chaplin, becomes Virgil to the Dante of Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer, looking likeably portly), a bargain-basement witch novelist who gets fittingly embroiled in a small-town murder mystery. Poe counsels Baltimore in the crisp, ghostly digital dream world he plummets into whenever slumbering or getting knocked out, reciting passages from "The Philosophy of Composition" with a syrupy colonial accent, and seeming perpetually ready to stare down an owl. We read this off-kilter avuncular-ness, which is so at odds with Poe's legacy (would the man who wrote "The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq." be so devoid of humor?) as a nod to Coppola's own mentor, Roger Corman. And extrapolating on Corman's own fondness for Poe's thin macabre, we might understand Twixt as an awkward paean to hackwork, from "The Raven" to Spy Kids 3-D Game Over. (The film's own 3D segment, to which we're alerted by a monstrous pair of CGI glasses that non-diagetically enter the frame, is an easily collapsible parody). Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in our annual "Summer of…" series, co-presented by Aaron Aradillas of Blog Talk Radio's Back By Midnight and Jamey DuVall and Jerry Dennis of Blog Talk Radio's Movie Geeks United!Top Gun was released in theaters on May 16th, 1986.]
When I remember Top Gun, I always think of a pair of women's shoes and a message from God.
In the spring of 1986, I was, in addition to my regular gig at Los Angeles City College, teaching a course at UCLA in the History of American Film. They needed somebody in a hurry, I was available, I did it, they never asked me back, and I never wanted to go back. The thing about teaching at UCLA is that you stand behind a wooden lectern that could repel Genghis Kahn and look out at 144 students. They are all 19 or 20, they all have perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect tans, perfect teeth, and are all very bright in very conventional ways. All you have to do is imply something will be on the final exam and 144 heads go down, even though the official notes are taken by one of the graduate student TA's. To me that is not teaching but shooting fish in a barrel. I much prefer LACC, where you never know who or what is going to walk in the door. The UCLA students were all upper-middle or upper class, and were surprised to see Benjamin's father in The Graduate (1967) cleaning his own swimming pool. Didn't they have pool cleaning services way back in the '60s? The students bought into Ronald Reagan's campaign slogan from two years before: that it was morning in America, and we were building up our might to combat the evil empire. That attitude showed up in a number of movies of the period, especially Top Gun. Continue Reading »
"Maybe we're plain Southern people, but that doesn't mean we don't have taste and aren't willing to expand our horizons," says the Nashville Film Festival's energetic artistic director, Brian Owens. In his second year with the event, Owens presides over a full-spectrum program of 110 features and 12 world premieres that comprise the festival's 41st edition. The longest running film festival in the South is located in Tennessee's capital, nicknamed "music city," and is appropriately peppered with music-oriented and country-flavored selections.
All screenings take place in a single Regal multiplex in the tony Green Hills neighborhood, home to such luminaries as Al Gore, Tim McGraw, and Faith Hill. "There are fewer blistered feet at this festival," says Owens, "and a single site festival builds community. When a movie is over you can talk about it right here and then go back in for your next one."
"Our audience members here are good talkers. If they like a film, word-of-mouth is going to spread like wildfire," he adds. Continue Reading »
MacGruber (Jorma Taccone). You might think a full-length feature about MacGruber, Will Forte's bumbling '80s action hero, would feel at least an hour too long. Even Steven Carrell couldn't lift his lumbering feature about Maxwell Smart, the '60s version of MacGruber, off the ground—but maybe he needed Jorma Taccone at the controls.
Saturday Night Life actor/writer/director Taccone, one of the three guys who does those funny videos with Andy Samberg (he also shot a lot of the MacGruber shorts for SNL and is the man behind a Pepsi ad for the Super Bowl), has great sense of comic timing and a deep and gleeful knowledge of comedy conventions and pop-culture icons. In the Q&A after the film, he revealed that he loves late-'80s/early-'90s action movies like Die Hard and Lethal Weapon and Rambo 3 ("not one or two or four—though four is pretty great too"), and that he and his cast intended their movie to be more of a comic tribute than a spoof.
You probably have to love those movies to embrace this one fully, but for those of us who do, it makes for a wildly entertaining night at the movies. Action movie clichés, like the way people keep telling MacGruber, "I thought you were dead!," are given just the right emphasis. You laugh at the dick jokes and gay jokes too, partly because they're cathartic, surfacing and then blowing up all the unacknowledged homoerotic machismo that fuels those movies, but also because Forte does blustery incompetence so well and the editors always know just where to cut. And Michael Bay has taken things so far that you pretty much have to chase your bad guy off a cliff, fire two big guns at him as he goes down, and reduce him to a blackened hole in the ground at the bottom of a canyon if you're going for laughs. This movie also has the funniest sex scene since the South Park movie with the puppets. Continue Reading »
Veteran. Agitator. Provocateur. Bully. Conspiracy nut. Patriot. These are just some of the labels used over the years to describe Oliver Stone. (Subtle isn't one of them.) He has spent his filmmaking career charting the currents that propelled America in the post-war era: war, greed, sensationalism, sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Like Jean-Luc Godard, Stone embraces myth then cuts it up to reveal a truth at its heart. Whether it's the dark side of the counterculture (The Doors), the moment America entered the media age of paranoia and punditry (JFK), the ambition—and folly—that comes with being the leader of the most powerful country in the world (Nixon), or the corporatization of America (Wall Street, Any Given Sunday), Stone has used film to chronicle the dreams, fears, and disillusionments that marked the last half of the 20th century as the most creative—and destructive—in U.S. history. (Is it really a surprise that Stone's latest movie is about the defining moment of the 21st century?) Continue Reading »
"Maybe we're plain Southern people, but that doesn't mean we don't have taste and aren't willing to expand our horizons," says the Nashville Film Festival's energetic artistic director, Brian Owens. In his second year with the event, Owens presides over a full-spectrum program of 110 features and 12 world premieres that comprise the festival's 41st edition. The longest running film festival in the South is located in Tennessee's capital, nicknamed "music city," and is appropriately peppered with music-oriented and country-flavored selections. 
MacGruber (Jorma Taccone). You might think a full-length feature about MacGruber, Will Forte's bumbling '80s action hero, would feel at least an hour too long. Even Steven Carrell couldn't lift his lumbering feature about Maxwell Smart, the '60s version of MacGruber, off the ground—but maybe he needed Jorma Taccone at the controls.
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