How Do You Know

Have you ever watched the deleted scenes on a DVD? Usually, instead of saying “hey, great, more movie!” you end up thinking “that didn’t quite work.  I can see why they cut that out.”

The new film from the talented James L. Brooks, How Do You Know, feels a lot like watching those deleted scenes. It’s g0t a lot of recognizable actors somewhat oddly mixed. Owen Wilson does a great job at his part, a baseball player whose simplicity serves him well. Reese Witherspoon is solidly invested into her character’s viewpoint. Paul Rudd plays the Paul Rudd bit, which has worked quite well at time but doesn’t serve him here… and leaves the central romance with no chemistry. No surprises are asked of Jack Nicholson, and none are delivered. In the smaller parts, Tony Shalhoub fulfills the needs of a  standard character type, but Mark Linn Baker fails.

At times I wanted to compare it to a puppet show version of a Brooks movie, or simply a first draft, but I’ve decided that the DVD extras thing fits best, it’s a knock that I’ve not tried before, and I’m sticking with it.

Victory is mine

So I’m standing there thinking “am I really going to buy 8 more boxes of Frosted Flakes?” ’cause you see, I’ve got I think eight boxes of Frosted Flakes in my cupboard already, and we don’t really eat Frosted Flakes, I’m going to take them and give them away to friends. Kellogg’s has been running this Toy Story 3-linked promotion, with codes from three specially-marked boxes you get a $5 gift certificate for the concession stand at certain theaters (including one local one), for 6 codes you get a free pass to any Disney movie, and I’ve been glutting up on these, because if you find the boxes on sale and have a coupon, you can actually get three codes for close to $5, sometimes even less than $5, and since I go to the movies anyway, it’s like the cereal is not only free, they’re paying you to take it. Rice Krispies, Cocoa Krispies, Bite-Sized Frosted Mini-Wheats, we’ve been glomming them up. These are how my family saw Toy Story 3 and snacked while we did so. But the promotion is near its end, and there are fewer and fewer boxes bearing the codes on the shelves.

BUT there I was at Albertson’s (which gets an apostrophe, unlike Ralphs), and there’s a big list of Kellogg’s products @ $2.50 apiece, or $1.50 if you buy 8. And they’ve got plenty of Frosted Flakes with the code, and I’ve got a $1.25-off-three-boxes-of-Kellogg’s coupon, so for $10.75 I’d have 8 codes…. that’s $10 worth of concession cash (I don’t know of any Disney movies coming up in the near future that I’d want to see) and two codes left over, which is only useful if I buy something else before the code promo runs out entirely, so I’m risking being out 75 cents of value for eight boxes of cereal that I really don’t need. But then I think, what if I only get 6 boxes of the Frosted Flakes and meet the 8 item requirement by buying some cookies, which might be useful, so it’s like I’d be getting two packages of cookies for 75 cents total, and that’s a deal, might even be profitable if I have any cookie coupons (I don’t, alas)… so I head over to the cookie aisle and there are Keebler Fudge Stripe Cookies, they’re on the list of items… and one of them has a blurb on the side for a free movie ticket for five tokens! So I dig through the pile and there are exactly 5 packets of Fudge Stripes, an eminently edible cookie, bearing the token. So booya, for $10.75 I’m getting three boxes of useless Frosted Flakes, five packages of at least semi-useful Fudge Stripes, $5 in concession cash, and an any-time, any-studio movie pass that you gotta rank as being worth at least $10.

I don’t exercise pointless consumerism. I consume to win!

John Hughes, RIP

Movie writer/director John Hughes has passed away.

I’m of the right age for his films to have hit at about the right time. The Breakfast Club is by far the important one to me. It may seem obvious, but it works. Still works, it seems, having talked to people decades younger than myself who have watched it. Stuff like Ferris Beuhler and Planes, Tranes, and Automobiles have strong value, of course, and much entertainment in some of the films he put together for other directors – Home Alone, Pretty in Pink, and so forth. But in the end, it’s The Breakfast Club that justifies it all, creatively.

I’d find myself thinking about Hughes from time to time, because he was gone from the scene. Hadn’t done a new produced screenplay in quite some time. I wondered if he just decided to get off the spinning wheel, or if perhaps he had early Alzheimers or some other debilitation that kept him out of the game. Certainly, a loss. I doubt Hollywood just dumped him. I mean, he may not have always had hits, but one Home Alone makes up for a lot of Baby’s Day Outs and Career Opportunitieses.

I also wondered when folks would be smart enough to do a stage version of The Breakfast Club. It seems too obvious. Simplest thing in the world to stage — really, it’s one set, a small cast. Plenty of bases for musical numbers, if you want to do a musical of it. And the audience for whom it’s iconic is now of the age to afford Broadway prices. Also, it would have a long life in local theater.

The death isn’t an art tragedy. He wasn’t producing, to the best of my knowledge. But…

Well, he was 59 when he died. Young to die, but not monstrously young. Still… if I die at that age, my new son will be fatherless at age 15. It’s hard not to see things in that context this week.

Shame on 'em

I’m at the Licensing International Expo. Whichever studio is making it has a huge poster for the new movie based on Brian Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim comics (which are very good, BTW. Read them.) The thing is at least 30 feet tall, I’d say. A great big Brian Lee O’Malley image fills the image area, and beneath that there are dozens of credits of people linked to the film.

Guess what name appears nowhere on this humungous poster?

Yup, it’s Brian Lee O’Malley.

This weekend's movies: UP

Critics are recommending you go see the new animated film UP, but only if see it forwards. Cause if you see it backwards, it’s P-U!

Context, people, context

I stumbled across this respected-author New York Times blog in which they were discussing “Why do animated films use such famous voices?” It’s built around Coraline, and the author says “I have to believe that there are a group of voice actors and books-on-tape readers who don’t have the faces to be movie stars but have great voices.”

To which I respond — wha-hunh? The stars of Coraline are Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, and John Hodgman. In what universe is Teri Hatcher a movie star, if you don’t count Coraline? In what universe does John Hodgman have the face of a movie star?

This blog must’ve been written from the land of the other mother.

Oscar notes 1

• Remember my comment about not having seen this year’s Oscar films? Well, animation is the big exception. Not only had I seen all three of the nominees (Bolt, Kung-Fu Panda, Wall-E), but I saw all of the movies they ran during the montage (those three, Tales of Despereaux, Horton Hears a Who, Space Chimps, Madagascar 2 and even Star Wars Clone Wars, the one for which I didn’t have the excuse of going with wee Allison.)
• The choice of Tina Fey and Steve Martin to give the writing awards makes me happy, not just because they’re two people I like who work well together, but because they are both quite respectable writers.
• There was some talk about them building a storyline into the show to keep people interested. I don’t know what they consider to be a storyline; it overall seems like a basic, kinda bland Oscars.

uncomforting reassurance

I just saw an ad for… my gosh, I was laughing so hard I missed the title. It’s some Nick Cage end-of-days movie. Real over-the-top disaster stuff, with a strong sense of cliche. But it ended with a scene where Cage is huddled in some corner with his young son.

SON: Are we gonna die?

CAGE: I will never let that happen.

The definition of a failure-bound protagonist: one whose successful show of power depends on he and his son never dying.

The other other other Miracle on 34th Street

I’m a big fan of the 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street - perhaps surprisingly so, considering how much I’m in accord with the beliefs that the mother holds toward the beginning of the film. So when I saw a DVD of Miracle on 34th Street for sale at the 99 cent store for their now-standard desperation price of 99.99 cents (that’s an awful lot of effort to up your prices 1%!), I had to give it an extra look. A great and popular film like that isn’t that likely to end up on those shelves there, particularly in a cheap package. It’s not a public domain film. The manufacturer was one I’d bought cheap animation disks from before, but they seemed like a legit company; I didn’t think it was a knock off. Taking a closer look at it… a run time of 47 minutes? And wait, what’s this cast? I would’ve noticed immediately if it were either of the color remakes (the 1990s workmanlike John Hughes remake, or the gawdawful drained-of-all-magic 1970s telefilm.) But… that cast, that’s not the Miracle cast. No Natalie Wood. And Hans Conreid is listed!

So naturally, I invested the dollar (they don’t give you back that hundredth of a penny, the cheapskates!)

There is a slight changed title (It’s “The Miracle on 34th Street”; the original had no “The”). a couple of altered scenes, and a few stray changed lines (“Macy’s sending other people to other stores?” – which has to be a messed up line delivery – and “The district attorney’s Repulican” come to mind) to the degree that my memories can note, but for the most part it’s just the original edited down for length. The result feels a bit like a speed-through reading of a play, but overall is acceptable, except when contrasted with the original. The story is good enough that it survives the lost of the comfortable building of the reality of the work. And the couple of plot changes (such as the mom suggesting to the post office how they might clear out some of their dead letters) are, though not necessary, defensible and not significantly destructive (in contrast to the 1973 attempt.

Doing a bit of research, it turns out this was a 1955 TV adaptation (as I expected from its length), which was presented as an episode of The 20th Century-Fox Hour. This was actually one of two hourlong TV versions of the 1950s; the 1959 version stars Ed Wynn in the Kringle role.

This isn’t a must-see and certainly not a replacement for the 1947 film, but it’s an interesting curiosity for the Miracle fans out there. It was worth my 99.99 cents, and they can keep the change! (The disk is even padded out with a bonus cartoons;: a washed-out print of an English redubbing of a short by Soviet animation house Soyuzmultfilm

Punching up the auction

I was just browsing through some charity auctions on eBay, offering up celebrity encounters, walk-on film roles, and so forth. An I came across:

Round Of Golf w/ Sugar Ray Leonard Plus Signed Gloves

…and I couldn’t help thinking I’d much rather bid on a round of boxing with Jack Nicklaus.

I think the thing that’ll be the biggest of their current auctions isn’t Sugar Ray, isn’t the Spider-Man 4 walk on. It’s the set visit and walk-on role for the new Judd Apatow Adam Sandler film. But the thing that gives it its true value isn’t in the headline, it’s in the smaller print. “Have Judd review your comedy script and offer notes.” They’re presenting that as if its of about the same amount of interest as the autographed Pineapple Express poster… but for some folks of likely undue optimism, it’ll be worth it to get their comedy script in front of the current king of the comedy producers, with the hope that he’ll say “this is so brilliant, I’ll produce it immediately.” And for those a mite more realistic in their hopes, just being able to shop their script around saying that it’s had Judd’s input, that’s gotta be worth a few thou.