A shout-out to screenwriters

I was driving down Venice Blvd. today when I saw an electronic billboard for Whip It!, Drew Barrymore's directorial debut, which was released last Friday.

What was unusual on this billboard were the names listed. Drew Barrymore? Check. Ellen Page? Check. Shauna Cross?

Who?

I thought it might be one of the stars, but if so, how come I've never heard of her? I'm obsessive about knowing the names of actors -- a post for another time -- so I don't come across many movie advertisements where a star is big enough to have his/her name on the poster, but small enough for me to not know.

Then as I got a little closer, I saw it said "screenplay by" in smaller letters above Ms. Cross' name.

It struck me as funny, but only because it was so unusual, not because she shouldn't get the credit. As I've discussed on this blog previously, our common practice is to assign "authorship" of a film to its director, even though most times the director is not literally a person who does any "authoring." But the screenwriter is the person who, in most cases, originated or at least adapted the story, without whom the director wouldn't have anything to do.

But screenwriters usually only get hyped if they are someone noteworthy -- Charlie Kaufman, William Goldman, Robert Towne, Diablo Cody, Dave Eggers, etc. Someone whose previous screenwriting efforts have been so heralded, they've been given more credit for their films than the person who directed.

So I looked up Shauna Cross when I got home, and found out that she had had only one previous assignment to her credit: a 2007 comedy called Taking Five, which does not star anyone I've ever heard of. On wikipedia, I saw that she is also the author of the book Derby Girl, on which Whip It! is based. It must be semi-autobiographical, because Cross is also a member of the Los Angeles Derby Dolls, who have become an only semi-ironic pastime that has become semi-popular with Angelenos.

Still, it's safe to say that most people have never heard of Shauna Cross. So it's hard to imagine, purely from an advertising perspective, what advantage there is to having her name on the billboard. It's true that this is where Cross lives -- not unusual for screenwriters -- and that she has probably gained some limited fame as a member of the local roller derby team. But it would truly be limited -- my guess is that of the people who do go to see the Dolls, few become involved to the point of getting acquainted with them.

Then there's another, sort of far-fetched theory: that Diablo Cody herself set some kind of precedent. Cody wrote the Ellen Page hit Juno, and became an overnight celebrity as a result. So maybe, just maybe, the studio thought that people would be drawn to another screenwriting-heavy film featuring Ellen Page. In fact, Cody has another thing in common with Cross -- they are both unlikely screenwriters. Cody's celebrity was perhaps not due primarily to her clever (sometimes too clever) dialogue in Juno, but the fact that she was, famously, once an exotic dancer. Exotic dancer? Roller derby girl? Close enough.

But I'd like to pin the credit on Drew Barrymore. She's produced numerous films, so she knows who's who and what's what on a set. If my theory is correct, she wanted to be magnanimous and share her "authorship" with a truly deserving partner. Barrymore seems to me like the kind of person who values a good script, and wants to spread the love if the movie is a hit. After all, there would be no Whip It! without Shauna Cross.

Sadly for Whip It!, it failed to clear $5 million this past weekend, but at least some critics seemed to like it.

Me? I can't promise to see it in the theater -- I didn't make it to Zombieland or any of the other films I intended to see this last weekend -- but it looks cute, and I'll definitely give it a watch eventually.

As for getting to a Los Angeles Derby Dolls game? match? roll?, well, one thing at a time.

Without translation

My wife and I were watching the brilliant Spanish language thriller Sin Nombre last night, directed by the tongue-twister-named Cary Joji Fukunaga, when a question occurred to me:

Why are some films marketed in English-speaking territories with their original titles, while others are marketed with the titles translated to English?

Sin Nombre literally means "without name" in English. So why do I know this movie as Sin Nombre rather than Without Name, or Nameless? And who decides?

Don't get me wrong, I prefer Sin Nombre. But I just don't understand the system, or whether there even is a system. It could be case by case, or there could be a rule of thumb.

For one, I would imagine the title would be translated if there's a good chance an English audience would stumble over it. Let's take the excellent French thriller that we know as With a Friend Like Harry ... The French title for this movie is actually Harry, Un Ami Qui Vous Veut Du Bien. Now, only two of those words are even more than one syllable. But most American wouldn't know what the hell to do with this title -- they wouldn't know which letters are silent (for the record, it's the s and the t), whether Qui was "kee" (which it is) or "kwee" (which it is not) or "kwigh" (which it is also not), or why the comma appears in a spot they're not used to seeing it. What's more, With a Friend Like Harry ... is not actually a literal translation of the title, which would be something more like (excuse my rusty French) Harry, A Friend Who Wants You Well. Even if that's not exactly it, it's close enough to show you how a literal translation doesn't work either. (Incidentally, the original English translation they used when showing the film at festivals was Harry, He's Here to Help).

But the ones that puzzle me are the ones where the original title would not be that difficult to pronounce. Take one of my all-time favorite movies, Run Lola Run. In the original German, the film is called Lola Rennt, or, quite literally, "Lola Runs." Or at least, that's what I thought it quite literally meant. Oddly enough, when I looked up the word "rennt" in a German-English dictionary online, the closest it could give me was "renntag," which means "race day." Well in any case, Lola Rennt should be something even the dumbest American can pronounce, because it's pronounced almost exactly how it looks. Even the dumbest American won't be thrown off by the extra n in a word that is very familiar to them.

So that rules out pronunciation/ease of saying the title as the sole factor. Clearly, there's a desire to convey meaning as well. I would not expect anyone who doesn't speak German to get that "rennt" has anything to do with running, even though Franka Potente is running on the poster. So Run Lola Run works much better in that sense. However, I have such respect for the film that when I reviewed it years ago for my website -- one of the top five films I've ever gotten to review in terms of my personal affection for it -- I listed it on first reference as "Lola Rennt (known in the U.S. as Run Lola Run)." I'm sure it's known as Run Lola Run in other places than just the U.S., but this was the fourth film I ever reviewed for this site, and perhaps I was a bit nervous. (Though I do still like the review, even nine years later).

Part of the reason the title needs to convey more about Run Lola Run is that it's a high-concept film. Most people know going in that it's a movie that occurs in "real time" (more or less), that it has a repeating "choose your own adventure" narrative structure, and that it involves a lot of running. This knowledge was, in fact, key to why most people wanted to see it.

Not so with Sin Nombre, and that's probably why it got to keep its original title. In fact, I didn't know a thing about it -- other than that my friend really liked it -- before I popped it in. Neither translation of the title conveys much about the actual plot -- it might just as well be called Egg Salad Sandwich for all it prepares you for the movie you are going to see. Not that it's an inappropriate title, either -- it's just the kind of title that makes more sense to you after you've seen it than before. To be sure, there are other factors in it keeping its name, such as the fact that many Americans speak a little Spanish anyway, and Sin Nombre sounds infinitely more deep and poetic than Without Name.

Just as Y Tu Mama Tambien sounds so much more high-minded and sophisticated than And Your Mother Too.

Not interested any Moore?

So what's happened to Michael Moore in the last two years that makes me not very interested in seeing his latest movie?

When Sicko came out in 2007, I saw it in the theater, and was incredibly moved by it, even if Moore was certainly manipulating my emotions with that whole "taking patients to Cuba to get treatment" scene. I liked the film a lot better than Fahrenheit 9/11, which I thought gave too much ammunition to Moore's critics, and I ended up ranking it in my top 10 for the year.

If anything, Moore's profile should have only improved since then, as Sicko can probably be viewed as some kind of catalyst for the health care debate that's currently dividing the country. Certainly, the election of a progressive Democrat to the White House plays a larger role, but let it not be said that Moore's movie played no role in getting this discussion going.

But maybe I've put my finger on it in that last paragraph. Maybe the election of a progressive Democrat to the White House has reduced Moore's relevance. Maybe his primary function was as a fly in Bush's ointment, as a rallying cry on the liberal side. After all, Moore's last three films -- the period when he gained international celebrity/notoriety -- all came during the Bush administration. Now that the liberals have rallied, and elected Barack Obama, maybe there's just not as much room for Michael Moore (no size jokes please) as there once was.

Then again, today's release of Capitalism: A Love Story is also well timed, in a way. After Obama got an initial honeymoon of about three to four months, the Republican backlash has hit him hard. All those people who called him Barack Hussein Obama last fall have come back out of the woodwork, their thinly veiled racism as thinly veiled as ever. They've poured into town hall meetings to throw the world "socialism" around, and basically created the appearance that the vast majority of Americans do not want the health care reform that would benefit most of those making the protests.

So is this a deceptively appropriate moment for Moore to rise again?

Well, it's hard to say, especially when Moore himself doesn't think so. In fact, the man has gone on record recently saying he may be finished with documentaries, at least for now. Before Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly go doing a victory dance on their anchor desks, they should know that Moore will probably touch on his familiar liberal concerns in the fiction films he's discussed making after his documentary career ends.

And maybe that's part of why Capitalism doesn't interest me that much, either: Even the man considers himself done, and wants to leave the scene before he becomes a parody of himself, if he hasn't already. I think when I saw the first trailers for Capitalism, I thought, "Oh here we go again -- Michael Moore and his microphone doing something outrageous." And this reaction is from one of his ideological soul mates, mind you. However effective your gimmick -- and I don't really mean to insult Moore by calling it a gimmick -- is, it always gets tired eventually. Like if we see Sacha Baron Cohen haul out yet another character he wants to send out to shock and offend people, we'll probably react to it even more negatively than we reacted to Bruno (which I still haven't seen).

But then there's the part of me that worries about that Beck/O'Reilly victory dance. Any tendency to recede from the public eye on Moore's part could easily be viewed as Moore "giving up," as a victory for conservatives. The last thing I want to do is let the conservatives think they fatally wounded their target last year when the execrable An American Carol was released. You may remember me discussing it here, but if not, I'll synopsize: A thinly-veiled -- okay, not veiled -- Michael Moore clone named Michael Malone wants to boycott the 4th of July because of his rampant anti-Americanism. (See, Moore is always accused by his critics of being unAmerican). What results is a sort of Naked Gun-style, heavily conservative spoof of A Christmas Carol, in which Malone receives his comeuppance (and numerous physical pratfalls) in the course of being visited by three ghosts, all played by famous conservatives (Kelsey Grammer, Jon Voight, Trace Adkins, etc.). The movie was downright terrible -- I'd like to think I would have ranked it last for the year on execution alone, even if I hadn't disagreed with its politics. But with Moore announcing that he's getting out of the game less than a year after its release, both the filmmakers and the film's ideological supporters will probably think An American Carol had something to do with it. Conveniently ignoring, of course, the massive victory Moore scored over them when Obama was elected president.

So I'd like nothing more than to contribute to a large box office haul for Capitalism: A Love Story this weekend, the same way I wanted to stick it to the religious people who boycotted The Golden Compass by boosting that film's box office.

But I just don't think I will, and I don't think I'll be the only one of Moore's former flock to make that decision. I've got too many other movies I'd like to see first -- Zombieland, Paranormal Activity, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Big Fan, Whip It, The Informant! ... the list staggers me without even including Capitalism. If other liberal movie fans are in my camp, and feel barraged by a surprising number of September releases they need to see, the movie may struggle to make $5 million.

Well, I guess we'll just have to be satisfied with our Democratic president and our Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. If we're still measuring our successes by the zingers Moore scores, and are so easily agitated by the conservative windbags who try to get under our skin, then we're just dropping down to their level.

And I for one am interested to see Moore's next attempt at a fiction film. I haven't actually seen the much-maligned John Candy vehicle Canadian Bacon, but it can't be the best he has to offer, can it?

Plausible reviewability

One thing that's clear about this blog: I can't hide anything from you guys.

That's right, the lists on the sidebar keep me pretty damn honest. Whatever I'm seeing, re-seeing or reviewing, I include it there. If my wife were out of town and I watched Debbie Does Dallas (because, you know, porns from the 1970s are the best), I'd have to include it. Sure, I could cheat and leave it off, but what fun would that be?

It's not that kind of movie I'm worried about. Some of the stuff I watch is a lot more embarrassing than Debbie Does Dallas, for entirely different reasons.

Let's take yesterday. Yesterday, I watched New in Town, a romantic comedy starring Renee Zellweger and Harry Connick Jr. (Incidentally, a friend of mine recently described Renee Zellweger in the funniest and most apt way I've ever heard: "She always looks like she just smelled a fart." Brilliant.)

You could rake me over the coals for wasting 97 minutes on formulaic trash like this. And you'd be right.

But aha! New in Town has plausible reviewability. And by that I mean, you have no idea whether I'm watching it as an assignment, or just for pleasure. And you won't actually know until you see the title pop up in my Most Recently Reviewed list. But not seeing it there also won't confirm anything for you, because it's possible I'm seeing it now in the hopes of being able to review it in the future. And even if you watch that list every day until I get sick of writing this blog, you still won't know what my intentions were when I watched New in Town. Maybe I intended to review it, but someone else grabbed it before I could request it. You don't know.

Unless, of course, I rat myself out and tell you.

No, I will not be writing the review for New in Town. The review is already up on the site, and has been since the film was released in January. I did, indeed, waste 97 minutes of my life on formulaic trash.

But I have my reasons.

You see, lately, I've been hitting the gym so regularly, it's like I have no fear of the gym hitting me back. My wife and I have been trying to shed a pound or two in the last couple weeks, which has meant I've been getting to the gym on the average of three weeknights a week. And because I'm a creature of habit, I can no longer imagine passing the time on the stairmaster listening to music, watching the TVs they have there, or reading. The only thing that can mentally distract me is a movie on my portable DVD player.

The problem I have, as I mentioned briefly in yesterday's post, is that I have to watch something my wife doesn't want to watch with me. Since my wife is as big a film fan as I am, and generally interested by the same titles, this limits my choices. Sometimes, even when I think I've found the perfect thing, I'll start watching it, realize it's good, and then be compelled by the rules of film fandom to tell her it's good, that she should probably take the time to see it. We've had a couple times where she catches up on the half I watched at the gym, while I occupy myself doing something else, and then we finish the film together. (I usually give her some kind of visual cue for when to come get me, something that won't be confused for another part of the movie, but also something that won't give away any plot points prematurely. For example, "Come get me when the main character dies" doesn't work.)

So usually I go for middle- to low-brow films that I've requested to review. This is what happened on Tuesday with Crossover -- a movie I sort of liked, though not enough to tell my wife about. The problem is, it's not always possible to have a movie I need to review ready and waiting. In that case, I just need something, anything, to get me through the workout.

Which is how I picked up New in Town on the same library visit where I got Crossover. I also picked up the 2006 kids movie Hoot, which was adapted from a story by an author I like, Carl Hiaasen.

But New in Town had something going for it that Hoot didn't. Namely, it was released in this calendar year, which means watching it would give me one more title for my year-end list of rankings from top to bottom. Now, New in Town had little chance of ending up anywhere but near the bottom. But the theory is, the more of a cross-section of titles I see, the more relative worth my rankings have. Your best movie of the year carries a lot more weight if you saw a hundred movies, than if you saw ten. Better to achieve one goal by watching New in Town than to achieve none.

But just because I will not actually be getting paid to review New in Town, does not mean I won't actually review it.

That's right, kids, you've come to The Audient on just the right day. For the first time ever, I am going to write a review as if I were getting paid for it, but not submit it. It'll also be your first chance on this blog to see what my reviews actually read like. And just for this exercise, I've held off on reading the review that's already posted on the site -- it's a little ritual I have after finishing a movie, in order to compare notes with other critics. But I don't want my own "review" to be biased by that one, so I abstained until after I publish this post.

One other thing: Don't forget that the film is synopsized on a separate tab on my site, so I don't have to include plot synopsis in my review.

Ready?

If you looked up "fish-out-of-water comedy" in a glossary of film terms, Jonas Elmer's New in Town might be the picture next to it. Unfortunately, the same picture might also appear next to "cookie cutter" and "ultra-formulaic." Not a single thing that happens in this Renee Zellweger vehicle is the least bit unexpected; the film's structure pokes through at every turn, with this particular story draped over it to make the world's most predictable romantic comedy. The familiar Hollywood concerns are all here: a big-city striver reevaluates her priorities after being purified by small-town life, falls for the scruffy local guy (Harry Connick Jr.) with whom she initially clashes (but who ultimately has a sympathetically tragic story), and helps the town fight to save its factory when the parent company wants to shut it down. Along the way there's plenty of room for slapstick set pieces appropriate to the Minnesota environment, like Connick's character getting a buttock full of buck shot when Zellweger's gun accidentally goes off on a hunting trip. If any of this sounds like a spoiler, you've vastly overestimated New in Town's capacity to surprise. This is not to say the film is utterly without value. As we all learned from Fargo, Minnesota accents are a lot of fun to listen to, and Siobhan Fallon and J.K. Simmons get theirs down perfectly. But if you go to the movies for actual content, turn elsewhere. New in Town is hardly new. In fact, it's one of Tinseltown's oldest tricks in the book.

Okay, so I spent only about 10 minutes on it, and came up about 45 words short of my usual 300.

Then again, maybe New in Town just doesn't inspire 300 words worth of commentary.

So if you ever find yourself wondering in the future "Why the hell did Vance watch that?" ... well, I may just be reviewing it.

Or -- heh heh -- I may not.

Trying to impress the locals?

Two of the three gyms I regularly attend are predominantly African-American. This is neither intentional nor unintentional. It's just a matter of geography.

Which gym depends entirely on my circumstances. Lately, it's most common for me to hit the gym on my way home from work, in which case, the 24 Hour Fitness on Slauson is the best one, as it involves only a slight detour. If I'm going before work, I'll hit the one in Hawthorne, which requires a short drive east on the 105. But I do that less often these days, for two reasons: 1) It involves factoring in all the extra time to shower after my workout, and making sure I don't forget a key part of my workday wardrobe (say, underpants or a belt, both of which have happened before); 2) They've set the stairmasters at this gym for a 20-minute maximum workout, which just won't cut it. The third gym I attend is the one in Santa Monica off Ocean Park, which is where I go when I'm planning to both leave from my house and return there. This is the one that's actually closest to home, but it's the wrong direction from work. It's also the only time I don't need a locker, because I arrive and leave in the same outfit.

The first two I've listed are predominantly African-American. Why does this matter, and why am I even mentioning it?

Well, for one, let's be honest -- it pumps up my sense of liberal self-esteem to attend a gym where I'm a minority. I haven't been fortunate enough to have many black friends in my life -- it just hasn't worked out that way -- so a liberal like me wants to prove (to the world, to himself) that he's as color blind as he fancies himself to be. I'm not saying that going to a black gym proves a person is not racist, but I do think people who are racist might choose the geographically inconvenient gym, to avoid those they don't like.

Like most people, I'm conscious of how my behavior is perceived, especially in situations where I'm interacting with other races. I don't think this makes me unusual in the supposedly post-racial world we've lived in since we elected Obama -- being conscious of how you may be representing yourself is just a prudent thing to do. Yeah, it would be wonderful if we could behave exactly the same way around everyone, but I'm conscious of things like seeming aloof or looking annoyed. I don't want it to be misinterpreted, to unintentionally perpetrate someone's idea that he or she is being disrespected. So I like to smile and nod at people at the gym whenever I get the chance. (I am also neurotic by nature, which I'm sure has something to do with it.)

And so it is that I also wonder what people think when they see me watching a movie like Crossover on my portable DVD player at the gym.

Now, I'm not going to say I'm as white as they come. They come much whiter. But my ancestors do date back to when the Angles met the Saxons, and a person probably wouldn't know my politics just by looking at me. (Though I do often have the crazy hair and bushy sideburns you might associate with a liberal.)

Most of the time, the movie I watch at the gym is just some dumb comedy or action movie, something I have to review that I know my wife won't want to watch with me. But I do also watch my fair share of movies intended for black audiences.

I've mentioned before that I can review any movie that doesn't currently have a review, and since movies for black audiences aren't the most hotly sought-after by the site's regular staffers, many of them are available. This serves a dual purpose for me. Not only does it pay me, but it also satisfies my democratic need to have all movies reviewed, not just the ones that the predominantly white society of film critics would naturally gravitate toward. I'm not going to assume that all the site's readers are white hipsters. Movies for minorities need to be reviewed, too. I'm not delusional in my liberalism, so I'm not going to tell you that I would watch most of these movies anyway -- I probably wouldn't. But I can tell you that I've had my share of nice surprises over the years, and am the better film fan for having seen so many movies that are clearly aimed toward a different demographic than my own.

But like I said, I wonder what message it sends to the guy on the stairmaster next to me when he sees me fire up Crossover, a movie about street basketball with literally an all-black cast. Does he smile and think I have good taste in movies? Or does he think I'm pandering to him, like those whitest of whites, who break into ebonics to show the person they're talking to how much they can relate? Does he even notice what I'm watching? Or that I'm watching a movie?

I know the answer to this last one. I know because it's difficult to miss me at the gym. Not only am I one of the few whites, but I'm also the only one who straps a portable DVD player to the top of the stairmaster using two thick rubber bands. Plus, if you're working out next to me, you have little choice but to be occasionally distracted by what's on my screen, even though I'm listening to it on headphones. Which is precisely why I try to keep everything I watch at the gym to a PG-13 rating, and why I get occasionally paranoid if nudity or graphic violence slips in, especially when I'm working out next to a woman.

But I also know because someone commented to me once about the movie I was watching. A nice woman in her late 20s noticed that I was watching Chris Robinson's ATL. In fact, when I reached the end of my time on the machine, she chided me that I couldn't turn the DVD player off because she was still watching. She then told me that ATL was her favorite movie. A sense of belonging ran down my spine in the form of a chill.

But most times, I don't get this kind of feedback, so I have no idea. And the answer is, what the person thinks -- if he or she thinks anything at all -- is probably a function of what biases he or she carries around. Which, when you think about it, is the basis for all racism anyway. If he or she is mostly untouched by racism, perhaps he or she just thinks "Right on, man." But if he or she deals with some dude who's always "blacking up his language" every time he talks to the person in question, perhaps this just seems like another instance of that.

Of course, there's also a third possibility -- that this person doesn't like Crossover or ATL at all. Just because a person is black does not mean he or she is interested in movies aimed at black audiences. And shame on me for suggesting it.

Aren't racial politics grand? To even have an academic discussion about it, as I try to do from time to time on this blog, is to make generalizations, even if just for the purposes of argument. Generalizations whose very nature tends to support what the proponents of racial equality are fighting against. Generalizations that I am in some way trying to attack, and root out, by discussing them here, in a public forum.

So I have no idea what the guy who was working out next to me yesterday thought. I didn't even throw him a surreptitious glance to see if he was watching my screen. And for the second half of my 45 minutes of huffing and puffing, my neighbor was a Latino guy.

Maybe I should have saved my screening of Sleep Dealer for him. ;-)

Landlubber

A confession: Up until a few minutes ago, I thought the "lubber" part of "landlubber" was a derivation of the word "lover." Therefore, a "landlubber" would literally be a "land lover," a person whose fear of the sea is so intense, it can only be described in terms of his love of the sea's opposite.

Not the case:

lubber: a big, clumsy, stupid person; lout.

So using this term to describe diminutive Jesse Eisenberg is even less appropriate than I originally thought. But at least I didn't call this post "Land lover" -- which would have been intended to remind you of "landlubber," even though the two are not related, and "land lover" itself does not actually mean anything.

Enough of all that.

The point is -- and it feels very belabored -- that Jesse Eisenberg seems to love land, if his last two film titles are any indication: Adventureland back in April, and now Zombieland this coming Friday.

If he does indeed hate the ocean, could it be because he's still scarred from watching the central epic battled in The Squid and the Whale?

(Someone give me a rim shot.)

I wasn't a particular "lubber" of Adventureland, but I sure as hell am looking forward to Zombieland. Not only does it look like they got the black comedy tone just right, but it also features Emma Stone, whom I've praised in this blog previously.

This Sunday afternoon, anyone?

About five years too late

A couple years ago, I was sitting in the theater when a trailer came on featuring a bunch of boisterous young people dancing in one of those loft studios, the kind that always seem to be in New York City. The kids were of different races and genders, and their dialogue was pretty snappy.

And I thought: "Finally, the remake of Fame."

Except it wasn't. It was Step Up 2: The Streets. Yet another pop culture outlet for young people undergoing the rigors and challenges of becoming performers.

I say "yet another" because American society has been inundated with movies and TV shows devoted to the heartwarming stories of unlikely youngsters overcoming the odds to excel at their chosen craft: singing, dancing, acting, playing an instrument, kabuki theater, what have you.

In this sea of product that has been influenced in some way by American Idol, how does a film like today's Fame remake have any chance of standing out?

It seems like a rare failure on Hollywood's part to strike while the iron's hot. While we were all waiting for the Fame remake as the least surprising "idea-that-would-eventually-transpire" of all time, dozens of other movies and TV shows were barraging us with the same material, inevitably blunting the impact an eventual Fame remake could have.

The actual movies riding this country's wave of renewed interest in the performing arts -- such as Save the Last Dance, Step Up, Center Stage, Step Up 2: The Streets, Take the Lead, the High School Musical series, etc. -- pale in comparison to what you can find on TV. In the last half-decade we've been force-fed all manner of performance competition-based reality programming, from the aforementioned American Idol to Dancing With the Stars to So You Think You Can Dance? to America's Got Talent to even a revamped (and short-lived) version of Star Search. And now this fall, a prominent fiction TV show -- Glee -- is also offering up a dance number and show tune every five minutes.

Again, how does Fame compete?

Answer: It probably doesn't.

Even though conventional wisdom might project a successful theatrical run precisely because America is inundated and obsessed with this stuff, I don't think that will happen. Instead, I expect Fame to be lost in the shuffle. Its thoroughly unmemorable advertising campaign -- the above image looks like a reject from an ipod commercial -- won't help.

Prediction: $40 million total box office take, tops. That's not a bad haul, but it's not what the studio expects from a brand with this kind of name recognition.

And it's half of what they probably could have gotten, say, five years ago.

My name, but not my face

Well just lookee what the good old internet can find for you. A five-panel montage of the most common outdoor ads for Surrogates, due out tomorrow.

(And yes, I do recognize the following irony: I vowed last Friday to dig deeper into the meat and potatoes of films, rather than dwell on things like their advertising campaigns, yet three of my four posts since then have been about movie posters. Let's just say that old habits die hard.)

The first billboard I ever saw for Surrogates was the middle one, the blonde lying on her stomach. I considered there to be a couple interesting things about this billboard:

1) I laid my eyes on it about three times before ever realizing it was even an advertisement for a movie. Since it was executed in the abstract style of ads for perfume and clothing, at first I just mistook it for one of those -- a prospect made easier by needing to keep most of my attention on the road while passing at 35 mph. I think the second or third time, I noticed the word "surrogates" and thought that seemed like a strange name for a perfume. I now laugh at myself that it took until the fourth time before I realized the woman's midsection was incomplete, composed only of metal endoskeleton. That would have been more immediately evident if I'd seen either of the top two posters first.

2) Bruce Willis, whose name is on the billboard, does not appear on the billboard. Nor does he appear in any of these other four pictures, though his name appears in each. With the two that feature the guy -- who, like Willis, has a shaved head -- you might for a second think "Damn! Bruce Willis has been working out!"

It was #2 that made me realize that there can be an odd disconnect between wanting to advertise the star of a movie, and wanting to advertise its content.

Now, I'm not saying that the only posters that should bear the names of movie stars are the posters that also bear their faces. That would obviously be quite restrictive. Besides, many of the best movie posters don't have the face of an actor or actress on them at all.

But I do think it's a little weird when there's one name on the poster, and one face on the poster, and they don't match. If you'd added one more star -- um, let's see, Radha Mitchell -- then it might have made a little more sense. But as it was, it struck me as odd.

Yet I really like the concept of the campaign. I'd hardly want to sacrifice that, either. It tells you a lot about what you might be getting -- without telling you much at all. What the hell do I mean by that? It sets a mood. You know this film will be something about the artificial creation of physical beauty. The fact that they appear to be androids makes it all the more intriguing -- it's science fiction, and science fiction always holds the potential to blow your mind. (If you're like me, you forget all the times it massively disappoints you).

Someone must have felt the same sense of uneasiness I did about Willis' name next to the body of a smoking hot cybernetic organism, because after awhile, I started to see these posters appearing:



Okay, that answers one concern: You've got Bruce Willis appearing next to his name.

But what else do you really know about Surrogates from this poster? The blue hue and the circular tunnel both give you an idea that it probably takes place in the future. But you really have to squint if you want to see what else they're trying to offer you, which is a row of, well, surrogates, I guess, along the bottom. And squinting's not that easy to do at 35 mph.

So the posters of the models win. But then, do you take Willis' name off?

Like most of the discussions on this blog, this one is academic. The movie comes out tomorrow, and there will be no new posters made.

And I think I might go. In fact, I think I might go tomorrow. My wife has not shown particular interest in Surrogates, which means it gives me the perfect opportunity for a solo expedition after work. I'm not "opening day pumped" for it -- it just happens that tomorrow is the day I can conveniently see a movie, and it's opening day. After all, it's been a whole nine days since I've seen a movie in the theater. I'm falling behind during this September, which has been a surprisingly fertile one for new releases.

Normally, a sci-fi film released in late September should not inspire a person with much hope, and there's every chance this could be more S1mone than The Terminator. However, there is a chance it could be The Terminator, and here's why: Surrogates is directed by Jonathan Mostow, who also directed the quite passable Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Of even more interest to me is that he directed a little 1997 Kurt Russell thriller called Breakdown, which I happen to love. (As well as U-571, which I did not see).

So ultimately, whether Bruce Willis is in it (not the draw it was ten years ago), or whether there are hot model robots in it (still a draw), is not as important to me as the guy behind the camera.

Where's the Surrogates poster featuring Mostow's mug?

A retraction

In two different posts earlier this year, I cast a skeptical eye on a little Mexican sci-fi film called Sleep Dealer. In the first post, it was a direct attack. In the second, it was indirect, more of a dismissal of it as "the best they could come up with" for the Latino image awards.

Well, I saw the movie last night, and darn it if it wasn't really good.

You may remember (especially if you just followed the first link above) that my skepticism was primarily based on what I considered to be its theft of the iconography of The Matrix in its billboards. I'm pleased to tell you that writer-director Alex Rivera does not actually owe a debt to the Wachowski brothers -- at least, no more so than any other filmmaker who has been influenced in some way by their landmark film. It's got plenty of its own interesting ideas about the way linking our bodies to machines may one day change our day-to-day existence -- even if those ideas are in fact purely science fiction.

For example, the central idea is very interesting: That one way for the U.S. to outsource its labor would be to have not only its tech support in other countries, but to keep the actual people doing the grunting and lifting there too. Sleep Dealer posits a world where workers slaving away on 12-hour shifts in Tijuana could connect their bodies to machines via cables that enter nodes affixed to their skin. In that way, they could remotely control robots that climb up and down the sides of a San Diego skyscraper under construction, or milk cows in Iowa. The movie sardonically -- though, alas, probably accurately -- suggests that some Americans would love the benefits of Mexican labor, without having to look at or tolerate actual Mexicans.

Oh, and that's only one of the many interesting ideas this movie touches on. You should definitely check it out.

Another complaint I had was that I doubted there would be any way for Sleep Dealer to meet the visual expectations of a viewing public raised on top-notch special effects. Well, having watched it, I feel guilty for having blithely assumed that good visual effects were impossible without Hollywood money. Yeah, you can tell that Industrial Light & Magic wasn't involved, but darn it if those effects don't look plenty good on their own. Good enough, anyway, when the script is as good as Rivera's script is.

I was already planning to pimp Sleep Dealer in my blog today when I noticed over breakfast a newspaper ad for Pandorum, which made me realize I had even more reason to let Sleep Dealer off the hook. I don't think Pandorum has much to do with The Matrix either, but it's no less guilty of trying to remind us of The Matrix with its own poster, as seen above.

And if I'm going to give either movie the benefit of the doubt, it should be the one that really needs the help to get the viewers it deserves, not the one starring Dennis Quaid.

Don't judge the book

Now that 13 years have passed since David O. Russell's Flirting With Disaster was released, I think it's safe to say -- without hyperbole -- that it is one of the funniest comedies of the 1990s.

It may not have the household name recognition of some of the decade's other hits, but most of those who've seen it tend to break out in a grin upon hearing the title. And, frequently, quote some of the great lines from it. "You said mutilated!" "Please."

If you haven't seen this screwball comedy/road trip in which a neurotic adopted New Yorker (Ben Stiller) is driven to find his birth parents before he can name the baby his wife (Patricia Arquette) has just delivered, which turns into an epic multi-city journey involving an ever-growing party of fellow travelers (Tea Leoni, Josh Brolin, Richard Jenkins), then you need to go do that as soon as possible.

But please don't judge the video by its cover.

As we were watching my copy of Flirting With Disaster this past weekend while out of town with friends, I couldn't help but notice how ridiculously cheesy the DVD cover is -- and how poorly it advertises the product you're truly getting here. (See Exhibit A above).

Seeming more like a video cover from the late 1980s than the late 1990s, the Flirting With Disaster DVD cover seems fixated on making this movie primarily about extramarital temptation, when that's only one of the myriad funny things going on here. Other ways this cover is hilariously simplistic: 1) The characters are literally cut out from the space in which they were photographed, then pasted on a white background, while none of the poses they strike here are actually in the movie; 2) Tea Leoni's character is made to appear like some vampish femme fatale, when she's really just a flustered divorcee in over her head, trying to document the reunion between a grown adopted child and his birth parents as part of a study she's conducting. Another thing: I don't have any idea when that picture of Ben Stiller was taken, but it seems at least five years younger than how Stiller actually looks in the movie.

You flip over the DVD and it doesn't get much better. The pictures are better -- they're at least actual scenes from the movie. Stiller tries to get a video camera unhooked from Leoni's dress, revealing stockings and some thigh; Stiller is attacked by one mistaken birth father (David Patrick Kelly); Mary Tyler Moore lifts her shirt to reveal the perkiness of her sixtysomething breasts (concealed by a bra, naturally). But the two pictures featuring female undergarments seem designed primarily to support this ridiculous "critigasm" in the upper quadrant: "A sexy, laugh riot!" - PBS Flicks. Not only do I not think that's a particularly apt way to summarize the movie -- while it's very funny, its sexiness quotient is not as high as advertised -- but I also quibble with the grammar. If you are going to call something a "laugh riot" -- a dubious phrase if there ever was one -- the least you can do is treat it as a compound noun. Therefore, it would be "a sexy laugh riot" rather than "a sexy, laugh riot." You see, "sexy" tells us what kind of laugh riot it is, not what kind of riot it is.

Anyway.

I suppose Flirting With Disaster is not materially different from any number of movies that use advertising to trick you into expecting a different movie than you actually get. I discussed one of the most criminal cases of that here. And I suppose getting a product that's better than advertised is a lot better than getting a product that's worse than advertised.

But there was just something about that cheesy cover that made me have to write about it ...

No body

The Megan Fox Empire took a major hit this weekend when Jennifer's Body, the heavily marketed high school horror featuring Fox as a demon in the body of a jailbait goddess, stumbled in at a disappointing fifth in the weekend box office, tallying just $6.8 million.

This placed it behind all three of the weekend's other major debuts -- Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs ($30.1), The Informant! ($10.5) and Love Happens ($8.46) -- as well as behind week #2 of I Can Do Bad All By Myself ($10.1). If you consider that most movies make at least twice as much in their first weekend as their second, and the pattern tends to continue downward like that from there, it suggests Jennifer's Body will be lucky to approach $20 million. Fifteen million is more realistic.

Wow, what a definitive judgment on the public's oversaturation with Megan Fox.

Many of us tended to think that Fox herself was a significant driving force in the gargantuan ($401 million to date) box office haul of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. But take out the transformers and Shia LaBeouf, and Fox herself brings in less than $7 million on opening weekend.

It's not like this is Fox's first failure to put asses in the seats. Fox also appeared in last year's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which (justifiably) amassed a piddly $3 million in ticket sales. But there, she shared the poster with Simon Pegg, Jeff Bridges and Kirsten Dunst. Plus, none of the ads featured her kissing another girl in underwear that tightly hugged her frame.

That's right, with Jennifer's Body, they made Fox as sexual as they could -- as well as making a film in the ever-reliable horror genre -- and still made only $6.8 million on opening weekend.

How could this be?

The only explanation is that anyone who doesn't have posters of Fox on their walls is tired of her relentless overexposure. You can't visit an entertainment site on the web without some story about some innocuous thing she said. Not everything Fox has said is innocuous, mind you -- she tends to put her foot in her mouth, or even intentionally say controversial things just to get more attention. But the point is, she doesn't need it. Even the innocuous things are excuses to put up another startling picture of her in a startling outfit at some premiere.

Because Megan Fox is startling, objectively. There are few starlets who have come along who so clearly represent the heterosexual male's agreed upon definition of female beauty. So much so, in fact, that Fox seems to belong most appropriately in a movie like this Friday's Surrogates, which is full of robots who look like humans. Because Megan Fox is some kind of indomitable robot of hotness, with which you can't reason, isn't she? She doesn't seem human.

But that's also kind of the problem with her as an actress. Seeming human is hugely important to being loved as an actor or actress, and being able to endure in the industry beyond your "flash in the pan" stage. Even if you don't have huge amounts of talent -- which Fox does not -- you can keep going with some talent and plenty of beauty, as long as you are also sympathetic. But Fox is not sympathetic in the least. Even if she could pull off sympathetic -- though none of her roles have really asked her to -- she's too imposingly beautiful to even qualify. No one can feel sorry for a person with such ridiculous physical attributes.

And now it also appears that Fox has grossly miscalculated her own staying power in the movie biz. Sure, she has plenty of projects still lined up. But she also turned down what would have probably been her most high-profile project, the title role in the long-gestating big screen version of Wonder Woman. I don't know why she turned it down -- I can't be bothered to look it up -- but there would have been a virtual guarantee that she would have filled theaters on opening weekend, as panting fanboys stumbled over each other to see her in that tight-fitting outfit. My guess is she turned it down for reasons similar to why Vin Diesel turned down some of the roles that would have kept his career from entering a permanent rut -- he thought he was too good for them. Rather, now, it seems like Wonder Woman is too good for Fox. If they want that character to usher in a franchise, they need an actress with a lot more soul. Or, any soul at all.

The latest I've heard about Fox is that she is one of the final contenders for the title role in the remake of Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy. (Along with Angelina Jolie, appropriately). If they want that one to open big, the producers might want to look at what Fox did with Jennifer's Body this weekend.

There's no doubt it will be quite some time before Megan Fox ceases to be ubiquitous. For those who drool over her, that's a good thing.

For the rest of us, well ... it now appears we won't have to wait forever for this flash in the pan to disappear.

Spoilers to follow (in a different post)

I've had my blog for almost nine months now, and I am considering making a change.

Not a radical change, mind you. But as I reflect on the things I've been writing about, I realize that I have not been writing about film as much as I originally thought I would.

Huh?

I haven't been writing about film? What the hell have I been doing, then?

Well, you may have noticed an inordinate number of posts about things tangential to the films themselves. Titles. Movie posters. Trailers. Patterns in career choices by actors and directors. Granted, if it's a movie I haven't seen yet, that's all I have to go on. And I feel firmly that I want this blog to have the function of discussing upcoming releases. Gives the blog more currency than if I am just telling you about watching Freddy Got Fingered or The Pride of the Yankees.

But another important component of this blog should be discussing the content of films -- especially films most of us have seen. Discussing theories about how characters are similar in a director's body of work. Talking about whether a third act in a certain movie is a cop out. Debating the effectiveness of a particular plot twist.

So why don't I do it?

One word: Spoilers.

You see, as a critic, one of my cardinal guiding principles is to keep from revealing spoilers. In one sense, a film review can be viewed as one giant spoiler -- by saying whether a movie is good or bad, you're helping people decide whether or not to see it. A negative review of a film you're excited to see can be the ultimate way of "spoiling" it. I have friends who don't even want to know whether I like a movie a lot, or just a little, because they don't want their viewing to be biased. Depending on the movie, I sometimes do the same.

But more commonly, we consider spoilers to be information revealed about a movie that prevents it from being viewed from the perspective the filmmaker intended. We all know what a spoiler is -- I don't need to tell you that you'd watch The Crying Game much differently if you knew from the start that the chick was a dude.

And so, as a critic, it's my job to make sure you don't know that. And it can be hard, because sometimes, a twist plays a crucial role in whether a movie is worth recommending or not. Sometimes you have to talk yourself in circles, use abstractions, to kind of half-indicate there is a twist, without saying it out loud. Even the simple fact that there is a twist -- regardless of what that twist may be -- is usually spoiler enough. It causes a viewer to be suspicious of anything that's presented to them in a straightforward way, and renders the eventual reveal of the twist anticlimactic. Far too many critics are careless about how they talk about spoilers -- you don't even have to say what the spoiler is to ruin it.

I've taken this informal critics' code with me to this blog. I've tried to make this blog a safe zone, where you did not have to worry about landmines of unwanted information. Some like-minded publications have taken to issuing warnings, either in the body of the piece (Warning! Spoilers to follow!), or as a banner above the piece (Warning! This piece contains spoilers!). There can be nothing more frustrating than reading a piece that fails to include one of these warnings when it's direly needed. You're reading along, minding your own business, not expecting anything juicy to pop up and bite you, and Wham! You find out Darth Vader was Luke's father.

So why can't I use these warnings in this blog? After all, I am a critic -- it's possible you might like to know what I actually think about the movies I see.

A perfect example came recently when I saw District 9. Whereas numerous critics were rhapsodizing about how it was the most important piece of science fiction filmmaking since Star Wars, I felt quite differently about it. In fact, although I give the film a thumbs up overall, I have a litany of complaints about it that make it a close call. What better place to air these out than my blog?

Except I was worried about spoilers. I was worried about ambushing you, my readers, with commentary/plot reveals that you didn't want. And perhaps, on some level, I was worried about you skipping the piece and forgetting to come back to it once you'd seen District 9. Which is patently ridiculous, when you think about it. The surest way for you not to read a piece of my writing is for me not to write it.

And why should I care if you read all my posts, anyway? If you are reading even some of my posts, you are doing better than 95% of my personal acquaintances. (Hey, blogs just aren't for everybody).

And so begins a new venture:

Actual film criticism appearing on this film critic's blog.

Don't know when the first piece will appear, don't know what it will be about. But the monkey is off my back.

And now it's on yours. Get ready to be spoiled.