Cinema Hype

If you’re already present on the internet—and if you’re not, you must be wired in via the Matrix, so congratulations on that—you may already know this: Star Trek has taken over the internet. Sure, there are other fandoms and other crazes circulating on, I guess, some tiny corner of the information superhighway (the corner owned by the Man, obviously), but currently, the Trekkies have pretty much staked their claim. This kind of upsurge in an already thriving fandom, of course, can only lead to a dark yet often hilarious corner of the human psyche.

And so today, I present Fun Star Trek Things I’ve Found on the Internet.

You’re welcome.

- This is only funny if you know that, on Heroes, Zachary Quinto (new Spock) plays a dude named Sylar. So now you know. And…you’re laughing, right?

- Top Ten Real-Life Star Trek Inventions

- Star Trek for breakfast! I don’t know. Shouldn’t the “live long and prosper” ones be whole wheat or something?

- Fans choose the best starter episodes for new Trekkie catch-up

- Star Trek recipes for your next themed dinner party!

- The thing you didn’t know you needed: Meerkat Star Trek officer dolls on Etsy. Looks like they’re sold out for now—well, sure—but that maybe she’s making more for all of your summer gifting needs.

Youtube is, of course, a special kind of repository for Trekkish fun, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up a few of the many, many Trek-themed videos out there. This doesn’t even scratch the surface, but hey, maybe you don’t really want to go beneath the surface, and with good reason.

This is amazing: Cribs, Spock-style, from an old G4 TV spot.

Awesome, disturbing, or both? And why? This must connect with some primal part of the brain. I don’t know.

Okay, not so much created by fandom as pointed out by fandom, but we’ve got Star Trek vs. Star Wars via Fanboys:

Side note: If I could alter Fabio, my VW Golf, to honk like a wookiee, I probably would. I’d probably use my horn more, too. A la my old Driver’s Ed teacher: “Daaaaaainjah, mah deah child. Dainjah!”

Hee, DJ Spock:

This could go on forever. Seriously. You think forty years of fandom plus a sudden and violent sci-fi revival isn’t going to generate some weird crap? Google is your friend here, but should you require more Trek-related (and, by way of warning, consistently NSFW, or possibly NSF lots of people) time-wasting fun, you might start with startrek_ontd. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you. (Really. Consider yourself warned.)

Star Trek, fandom, Star Trek Youtube, Zachary Quinto, Heroes, William Shatner, Spock, Captain Kirk

When it comes down to it, Up is kind of controversial, as family movies go. It is, after all, mostly about an elderly gentleman whose wife has just passed away. And, yeah, there’s an eager little kid and a house buoyed by balloons and a trip to South America, but it’s hard to escape the Life Lesson mixed in with the fun: sometimes, moving on is hard. Wouldn’t kids–or, rather, people in general–rather chill with reanimated toys? Or talking bugs? What about a lost fish kid and his freaked-out fish dad? Yes. Yes, most of us probably would prefer to spend two hours with a cute but solitary robot than with a grieving old man. Up mostly makes it work anyway, but the results come across—pardon the pun—a bit on the heavy side.

The story of Carl Fredricksen–with his wife, Ellie, and without her–plays out in ways that are both unusually beautiful and surprisingly standard. The very best parts of the movie have no dialogue at all (perhaps this is something Pixar does unusually well, a la Wall-E?); small segments of the old man’s story are narrated almost entirely by Michael Giacchino’s excellent and sensitive score. But then, it’s also a standard crotchety-old-man-learns-to-live-via-obnoxious-whippersnapper story, which is where we get both the fun and a bit of the predictability. Although Carl learns to care for his stowaway, Russell, we never exactly see why, other than the fact that Carl would be a huge jerk if he didn’t let the kid in a little. Maybe Russell doesn’t need a ton of backstory–we see who he is immediately, with his almost-complete Wilderness Explorer sash and his eager-beaver attitude–but there’s no real, discrete moment of bonding for the two of them, so that the formula of the movie isn’t quite fulfilled in the characters.

This is not to say that Up isn’t touching, or fun, or appropriate for families, or anything else. It’s a bit more adult than some other Pixar movies, and it speaks gently but honestly about death, but it’s still a good time, including an adventure plot that you don’t see much of in the trailers. The Pixar crew continues to show off their smart sense of humor and impeccable comic timing in a way that should appeal to all ages—the non-human characters are especially good for comic relief. Furthermore, the scenes in the flying house are gorgeous and wonderfully creative, and likely to give more than one kid ideas (parents: keep an eye on your handy-dandy helium canisters!). Much of the story doesn’t actually take place in the house, but hey, the wilderness of South America ain’t bad either, as adventure settings go. Even the villain–voiced by Christopher Plummer, one of the only celebrity voices in the film–is fun in a vintage-y, mustache-twirling kind of way. So, despite the heavy subject matter, there’s plenty of fun to be had. It’s a balance: if you’re looking for a thoughtful movie that everybody in the family will like, Up should make everybody laugh (and maybe spark some conversation on the way home).

One final note: If you or anybody you know are afraid of dogs, you may want to skip this one; a vengeful (but articulate!) pack of guard dogs plays a pretty big role here, and seemed traumatic to a couple of kids in my screening.

Up, Pixar, Christopher Plummer, Michael Giacchino, Wall-E, Finding Nemo, Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, animated movies, animated, movie reviews

Well, I had to win sometime, right? You readers have been on a roll lately, but I’ve been looking for the lines—the boundaries of “too hard” and “too easy”—and it looks like I found one. Check!

Nobody guessed that this quotation:

“‘What do you think, man? You think it makes me look tough?’
‘I think it makes you look different.’
‘What’d you mean, “different”?’
‘Well, you got a hole in your mouth.’”

…was from The Outsiders, the 1983 brat-pack take on S.E. Hinton’s classic 1967 gang novel. Who has two thumbs and doesn’t have to write a cheer this week? This girl!

So let’s move on, shall we?

The Rules

I will post a quotation from a movie. The first person to comment with the character, actor, and film that contains this quotation gets a special eyelash batting and a tailor-made Cinema Hype cheer, which might actually rhyme, even if it doesn’t make any sense.

The Deadline

If somebody guesses correctly, the prize cheer goes up as soon as possible. If nobody gets it right, I’m off the hook cheer-wise, and the next quotation is posted on Friday (…or not, like this week, but Friday is the norm) (Actually, this is proving to be the case less and less often. We’ll say I’ll shoot for sometime around the weekend. Friday, Sunday, Monday…something around there.)

The Quotation

“‘I crashed into electrical towers, and my star charts were erased. I need the ones in your head to complete my mission.’
‘So you need ME and my INFERIOR brain to fly that thing?’
‘Correction, I need the SUPERIOR information in your INFERIOR brain to fly this… thing.’”

Think you know the answer? Leave it in the comments.

Quotation Sensation, movie quote game, movie quotes, The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton, brat pack

You want to be an internet rock star, don’t you?

And maybe get the love of your life?

What if you could do both? FOX thinks you can: to promote their new post-high-school romantic comedy I Love You, Beth Cooper, they’re running a contest: make your own confessional video, upload it to their site, and see whether you end up in one of the TV spots they’ll be making. You might. In any case, Hayden Panettiere did it, and she’s a movie rock star OFF the internet! See? It worked for her! Confess your crush via internet video today!

(P.S. It’s less anonymous than Post Secret and less enormously public than . So there’s that.)

I Love You Beth Cooper, contests

The first trailers for the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movie are out, and…hmmm. Either Ritchie and Co. don’t get it, or the trailer guys want us to think they don’t.

It’s not that I have a problem with action movies, or with action comedies, or with literary characters being nudged in the action-ish direction*. Heaven knows I love a good horse-and-buggy chase as much as the next girl, and even Holmes’s boxing badassery comes straight out of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Anything Holmes should be a bit of a nail-biter—the man eventually gets pushed off a waterfall and then mysteriously re-animates, for goodness’ sake!

But it just seems like what we see here misses the point, a bit. Not that Robert Downey, Jr. can’t pull off thrilling heroics—see: Iron Man, etc.—but his particular skill set lines up with the role of Holmes in so many other brilliant ways that running and jumping out of (or into?) harm’s way doesn’t seem like the best use of his time. Turn up the sardonic dialogue! Let us see the deep-seated pain lingering behind the constant stream of sarcasm! Don’t they know him at ALL?

I think—I hope—that Ritchie and the writers know all of this. The dialogue we do hear is appropriately snarky; some of the details of the trailer (boxing, opium use, Watson) are straight-up Doyle canon. And so I’m tentatively calling this trailer a marketing ploy, an attempt to convince us that “you’ve never seen a Holmes like this before!” (when, in fact, we’ve all seen basically all possible Holmeses before in one pop culture context or another, but whatever). Ritchie’s rendition may have more thrills and spills than your average Victorian detective story—he does have a thing for a certain kind of lo-fi action—but I tentatively expect enough content sandwiched in to make it not just exciting, but good. Or maybe I’m just naive. Hope springs eternal, right? And if not, dude, I totally know Madonna and will sic her on you. Don’t think I won’t.

*Okay, I might have a problem with literary characters being nudged in the action-ish direction. It depends on the literary character and the degree to which light sabres are involved. What can I say? I’m a purist.

Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes trailer, Sherlock Holmes Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Watson, Guy Ritchie

Well, Night at the Museum 2 was the best Ben Stiller movie I’ve seen in awhile*. To be honest, I still haven’t seen the first Museum movie, so that puts our us on really good terms back in, what, Meet the Fockers? Dodgeball? This, though…this is fun, and strangely inspiring. This is the kind of movie that everybody can get into, and more or less for the same reasons.

The best thing about this movie is that it knows what the audience wants: if you’re going to make a movie about the Smithsonian coming to life—if you’re going to take on a setting that rich, detailed, and dear to people’s hearts—you’d better make sure you’re making good use of what’s there. If there’s heavy lifting, character-wise, there had also better be something awesome going on that can only happen when the Smithsonian’s collection comes to life, including a) a giant balloon dog tottering around, b) a giant squid chilling in Abe Lincoln’s reflecting pool, or c) a small army of Einstein bobbleheads instilling pi (to ten digits!) into an entire generation of children. Got it? They do. There’s always something happening—more than one thing, usually—and that’s the way it should be.

This is a family film, and by “family” they actually mean “family,” not “kids and their required chaperones who are considering ‘going to the bathroom’ and sneaking into Terminator Salvation instead.” In general, it doesn’t feel like content written for kids—in part because it wasn’t. Director Shawn Levy encouraged the cast to improvise, which they clearly did; edited together (the scripted, the improvised, and the could-go-either-way), the movie comes off much like a bunch of grown-up comedians just messing around, albeit cleanly. At the same time, it’s not cynical, or even very pop-culturized (with the exception of one Jonas Brothers cameo, on which history will look back in judgment), as kids’ movies can sometimes be. Instead, it offers a message that may seem more obvious to the kids in the audience than to the adults (and which the adults need to hear more anyway): do what you love. (Also, physical excercise.)

In making all of this happen, the enormous and enormously talented cast—a lot of places must have been a lot less funny when all of these people gathered to make the movie—is consistently great, and they’re great together, which contributes to the “everybody’s having a good time here!” vibe. The standouts would have to be Steve Coogan as the brave, British, and terrifically loyal Octavius (BFFs with Owen Wilson’s cowboy Jedediah Smith, obviously) and Bill Hader as the possibly-too-close-to-home General George A. Custer (”We’re Americans! We don’t plan; we do!”). Amy Adams is outnumbered in terms of gender and comic reputation, but persists in making a difficult and potentially obnoxious dialogue style seem charming, and may well inspire a generation of young Earhart fans.

So give it a shot. If you liked the first one, you’ll like this. If you’re a child, you’ll like this. If you’re a nerd, you’ll really like this. If you like things that are funny, you’ll like this. And if you don’t, well, maybe something less funny, nerdy, and endearing, there’s always Terminator.

* Possibly excluding Tropic Thunder, which is, I believe, sort of a different thing. On the other hand, I think I really did enjoy this more.

** FYI, the Smithsonian’s coverage of the movie is pretty great. Nice job, Smithsonian!

Night at the Museum, Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian, Night at the Museum 2, Ben Stiller, Amy Adams, Steve Coogan, Bill Hader, Shawn Levy, Jeff Koons, balloon dog, Tropic Thunder, Smithsonian

Today would have been Jimmy Stewart’s 100th birthday.

I know somebody that thinks all (female) Cary Grant fans are mistaken: Women think they love Grant, she says, but they really love Stewart. Stewart was the kind of guy you’d bring home to your parents. I don’t know that a girl can’t keep a place in her heart for both—it’s all kind of a moot point now, after all—but over the years, I’ve gotten to see what my friend meant. Watch enough Jimmy Stewart movies and you’re bound to fall at least a little bit in love, or at least in like. Is there anybody you’d rather have spying on you with his binoculars? I didn’t think so.

In celebration of Jimmy Stewart and his lovability, I present, for your consideration, five of his best movies*:

You Can’t Take It With You (1938): Stewart’s first (of several) collaborations with Frank Capra, who outdoes himself in the areas of gentle humor and small-scale human drama. Also: Stewart is the best bewildered boyfriend a girl could want.

The Shop Around the Corner (1940): Before there was Tom, there was James, fighting/flirting it out with Margaret Sullavan. Who should be more excited to be share the role? Unclear.

The Philadelphia Story (1940): Never is Stewart gawkier, dorkier, or more handsome than as Macauley “Mike” Connor, literary snob turned journalist out to destroy the bourgeoisie. If you don’t love him by the end of the movie, well…you’re probably distracted by Cary Grant (or, to be fair, Katharine Hepburn). We won’t judge, but you’re missing out.

Harvey (1950): Warning: This movie is sadder than you think. But Stewart is wonderful in it—gentle, funny, and exactly the kind of guy an invisible six-foot rabbit would choose to pal around with. I would.

Rear Window (1955): Stewart solves a murder from his wheelchair (he’s recovering from a broken leg) without even leaving the house! EAT THAT, MACGYVER.

Happy birthday, Jimmy. Thanks for being so cool.

* This list includes neither It’s A Wonderful Life nor any of Stewart’s westerns. But these are my favorites. So there! You can sing “Buffalo Girl” to yourself, if it’ll make you feel better.

Jimmy Stewart, James Stewart, You Can’t Take It With You, Frank Capra, The Philadelphia Story, The Shop Around the Corner, Rear Window, Harvey, Alfred Hitchcock

[A note to regular CH readers: I feel silly specifying that this post is not a work of fiction. But, well, it bears mentioning.]

Comedians like Robin Williams and Ricky Gervais have probably played some big, cold rooms in their careers. You know—places where their own jokes echo back to them, or maybe just swallow the sound completely. But their most recent venue gives new meaning to the term “dead audience”: as part of a comedy dream-team cast, they’re bringing comedy and adventure to the Smithsonian Institution in Friday’s release, Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian.

The movie, which was filmed partly in the Smithsonian museums and partly in other locations, moves the Night at the Museum franchise to one of the world’s largest and most diversified museum complexes—19 museums in all—and includes a correspondingly huge cast of characters, both new and familiar from the first film.

Making a comedy about museums—places bursting with our history, our culture, and our national psychoses—clearly has its own specific set of ups and downs. For one, with culturally significant and familiar characters, there’s always something for actors to sink their teeth into, and for audiences to take away. “All of these characters are not only important; they also all symbolize big ideas,” said director Shawn Levy of historical figures like Teddy Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart. On the other hand, for Americans, this is…well, it’s our stuff. There’s a fine line between having fun with history and reprising Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Lincoln: “Candygram!”). “Lincoln was hard—you want to not diminish him, but you want to be funny,” said Hank Azaria, who arrived on set to play one role and ended up with three. Levy asked him to record placeholder tracks for Abraham Lincoln and the Auguste Rodin sculpture The Thinker, intending to hire other actors later—but liked Azaria’s versions so much that they made it into the movie.

And another thing: there’s something abut comedians en masse that makes things…shall we say unpredictable? “[Comedy is] all about the team around you,” said Amy Adams, who joined the cast to play Amelia Earhart, and found herself in the middle of what one might call a pretty good team: Williams, Gervais, Azaria, Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Christopher Guest, Steve Coogan, and Bill Hader all appear in the movie, along with a handful of other comedians. According to Levy, improvisation was part of the process of making the movie, as the written script meshed with the actors’ ideas in the moment. In fact, said Levy, one of the most difficult parts of putting the film together was incorporating the improvised footage into the final product without making, essentially, the kids’ version of the Ring cycle.

So how, exactly, does one go about asking one of the largest museums in the world for permission to come in and play with all of their stuff? Very nicely. “For starters…you say, ‘we won’t break anything,’” said Levy. “I think it helped immensely that our first movie was well-known enough that people knew—the Smithsonian knew before I even met with them that we would treat the institution respectfully, and with humor and wit, and definite reverence, as well.”

Of course, the benefits of having the Smithsonian name on a Night at the Museum movie aren’t just for the movie; Secretary of the Smithsonian Wayne Clough is rumored to have looked positively on associating the movie with the museums as a way to attract patrons who might not have visited otherwise. And if the New York Museum of Natural History’s experience is anything typical, the Smithsonian can indeed expect to see some new faces in the coming months. “The first movie actually increased attendance at the New York museum by, I’m told, close to twenty percent,” says Levy. “I think anything that could catalyze interest in these institutions is a good thing.”

Night at the Museum 2 opens in theaters this Friday.

Night at the Museum 2, Night at the Museum, Ben Stiller, Amy Adams, Owen Wilson, Shawn Levy, Ricky Gervais, Robin Williams, Hank Azaria, Wayne Clough, Smithsonian, Christopher Guest, Steve Coogan, Bill Hader

So, hey! Welcome to summer! Bang bang! Kiss kiss! (Or is that backwards?) Have you overloaded on shallow eye-candy fun yet (…before Memorial Day, but hey, it’s possible)? Need a little post-Apocalyptic memento mori for this fine May morning? Well, here: the first trailer for The Road is out.

I’m just going to come out and state the obvious: somebody’s stacking the Oscar deck here. Let’s see:

The novel of The Road (about a father and son [and possibly mother?] trying to survive after the wiping out of most of the human race) won the Pulitzer Prize, and the last Cormac McCarthy adaptation worked out pretty well. Viggo Mortensen, while not widely known for his clear-headed and easygoing nature, seems to make the method thing work for him (prediction: it will soon come out that he “borrowed” a small child and they lived together in his car for six months, eschewing showers, technology, and gun-control laws, all in the name of research), and his nomination for the Russian mob film Eastern Promises didn’t turn into an actual statuette. Charlize Theron’s already won Best Actress, for Monster, and may get the chance to double up, this time with her own face. The only unknown quantities here are screenwriter Joe Penhall and director John Hillcoat, both Australians relatively unknown in the States.

Of course, these things don’t always work out as planned—if there were an actual equation for popular success and/or Oscar domination, well, a whole lot of colossally bad movies would just be twinkles in various writers’ eyes. Remember Rendition? The Fountain? And those aren’t even that new. Clearly, good source material + good actors + Oscar track record does not = actual quality. And is it me, or is the post-Apocalyptic genre a little extra-susceptible to this sort of situation? Maybe the director’s vision just doesn’t jibe for us; maybe we just can’t or don’t want to see our neighborhoods reduced to piles of smoking rubble (though that seems unlikely, given the number of post-Apocalyptic movies that actually get made). Maybe the starkness of the setting just makes any residual silliness that much more evident. It’s hard to say.

Until further notice, though, I’m going to hang a little awards-show hope on this one. Bring on the rubble!

The Road, TheRoad, Road, Cormac McCarthy, Viggo Mortensen, The Road trailer, trailer, Charlize Theron, post-apocalyptic, post-apocalypse, science fiction, Pulitzer Prize

Well, I should have known: as reader Heather said, “If you want to confuse a Trekkie, try a quote from #5. Nobody ever watches that one. Not more than once.” To think: I was so close. Curses! Foiled again!

Anyway, I lose. Reader/Star Trek aficionado Erik buzzed in on last week’s quotation, correctly tying this quotation:

“‘Permission to speak freely, sir?’
‘Granted.’
‘I do not believe this was a fair test of my command abilities.’
‘And why not?’
‘Because… there was no way to win.’
‘A no-win situation is a possibility every commander may face. Has that never occurred to you?’
‘No, sir, it has not.’
‘And how we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life, wouldn’t you say?’
‘As I indicated, Admiral, that thought had not occurred to me.’
‘Well, now you have something new to think about. Carry on.’”

to Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. Also, I feel that I would be remiss if I did not inform the non-Trekkies out there that this scene plays out between William Shatner and one Kirstie Alley. Do the Trekkies not think that’s funny? Because…that’s funny.

So, kudos to Erik and his Trek knowledge! Your cheer, sir:

You got the quote at full warp speed!
You know your sci-fi films indeed!
But do you count it in your creed?
Either way, we love your breed!

And now for a new QS to kick off the weekend:

The Rules

I will post a quotation from a movie. The first person to comment with the character, actor, and film that contains this quotation gets a special eyelash batting and a tailor-made Cinema Hype cheer, which might actually rhyme, even if it doesn’t make any sense.

The Deadline

If somebody guesses correctly, the prize cheer goes up as soon as possible. If nobody gets it right, I’m off the hook cheer-wise, and the next quotation is posted on Friday (…or not, like this week, but Friday is the norm) (Actually, this is proving to be the case less and less often. We’ll say I’ll shoot for sometime around the weekend. Friday, Sunday, Monday…something around there.)

The Quotation

“‘What do you think, man? You think it makes me look tough?’
‘I think it makes you look different.’
‘What’d you mean, “different”?’
‘Well, you got a hole in your mouth.’”

Think you’ve got it? Leave it in the comments.

Quotation Sensation, movie quote game, movie quotes, Star Trek, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, Wrath of Khan, William Shatner, Kirstie Alley

I can’t believe we haven’t talked yet about the trailer for Julie and Julia yet. It’s been out for, what, two weeks? Three weeks? Where have I been? The land of negligence, apparently. Here’s the trailer:

I really, really want to like this movie. I like the book, possibly more than it really deserves. I like the trailer, though I balk a bit at the cutesification of it, what with the pop music and the cutie husband and all (the husband in the book is what you’d probably call a mensch, but maybe not a hottie; menschhood is apparently not good enough for your everyday casting director). And I know how these things go: I’m going to chalk all of this up to the whims of the marketing department and not to writer/director Nora Ephron. Ephron’s had her share of stinkers in the past few years (Hanging Up, Bewitched), but somehow I trust her here. I have to believe that she’s working off of passion, and that we’ll see a little bit of that onscreen. (We’d better.)

I was, at one time, ambivalent about the casting of Amy Adams as Julie Powell; this trailer assuages some of my fears. To some extent, Adams will always be adorable, but here she’s not written as adorable, which is key—Powell herself is decidedly un-cutesy. The scene on the kitchen floor (”There’s STUFF ALL OVER THE FLOOR!”) indicates that all may indeed be well here; since Powell spends much of the book having freakouts of various scales and proportions, the collapsing and the moaning are pretty important. Also, the non-Disney-princess haircut doesn’t hurt.

And, to be honest, I hadn’t thought much about Meryl Streep as Julia Child; Julia is by far the lesser presence in the book (as far as direct “screentime” goes), and anyway, she’s Meryl Streep. What, you think she can’t pull of Julia Child? But now that I see her, it’s all lovely. She’s got the voice and the wonderful blowsiness of Child, but it’s more than that. From what we see here, I think she’s got a bit of Julia’s soul. I can appreciate that.

So…carry on, Julie and Julia. I’m ready when you are.

Julie and Julia, Julie/Julia, Julie Powell, Meryl Streep, Julia Child, trailers, Nora Ephron

Have you seen the trailer for the Adam Sandler/Seth Rogen movie Funny People?

It looks pretty good, if maybe a bit generic: an up-and-coming stand-up comedian (Rogen) befriends and is fostered by his own favorite veteran comedian (Sandler) , only to find out that his hero of dying of cancer. The cast is fun (I’m particularly taken by Eric Bana as the much-mocked Australian husband), and all indications point to a touching and uplifting ending to complement the obligatory raunchiness. Pure Judd Apatow.

The most interesting part of this trailer, though, isn’t even in the movie: it’s the card that reads “the third film from Judd Apatow, director of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up.”

The reason they’re pointing this out is that Apatow’s name has, for better or for worse, become synonymous with a certain brand of comedy—raunchy geek humor, usually about boys (overgrown or otherwise), usually involving Rogen or Jonah Hill or both. Funny People is Apatow’s third time directing, but his seventh writing and fifteenth producing credit in the last five years (not including TV projects and awards shows). Some of the movies he’s produced have been good, and some of them have been bad, but they all came out in a short period of time and they all had his name on them; at this point, he seems to take the blame even for copycat movies that he didn’t even make. In this trailer, somebody is trying to indicate that this is one of the good Apatow movies. We’re not talking Step Brothers, here.

There’s always been speculation about whether Apatow’s success will last, at least at this kind of breakneck pace. The guy’s got to sleep sometime, right? At this point, it’s probably fair to say that, were he never to make another movie, his influence is here to stay—enough imitators have cropped up to make the Apatow-style comedy a mark of the times. But the fact that somebody felt the need to point out that Funny People isn’t “just another Apatow movie” isn’t totally toothless; while he’s clearly working hard and enjoying his own success (i.e. being famous and making more movies), there’s also a sense that being “just another Apatow movie” might be a bad thing. Are we getting sick of him? Should he have been more selective with the movies he put his name on? Or is he wise to associate himself with as many people and projects in Hollywood as possible?

Readers, what do you think?

Judd Apatow, Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Funny People, Jonah Hill, Eric Bana, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Step Brothers

Heyyyy, so apparently deliciously sweet breakfast foods really do make everything better; reader Stephanie won last week’s pancake-themed Quotation Sensation without even breaking a sweat. Or, I don’t know, melting butter. Whatever. In any case, the quotation was:

“‘Hell, [character name], you could just eat nothing but pancakes if you wanted.’
‘What is wrong with you? Hey, I don’t want to eat nothing but pancakes. I want to live! I mean, who in their right mind, in a choice between pancakes and living, chooses pancakes?’
‘[Character name], if you pause to think, you’d realize that that answer is inextricably contingent upon the type of life being led…and, of course, the quality of the pancakes.’”

and Stephanie correctly identified it as being from Stranger Than Fiction. An extra bravo to Stephanie for nailing what I thought might have been a winner for me due to a) lack of fame and b) lack of context. Well done! Your cheer:

Chocolate chip or berry-topped,
you movie knowledge get you props!
Syrup’s sweet and oh so sticky,
but to this quote, you’re just as tricky!

Wooooo! Go, Stephanie!

And to kick off a new week, we’ll have a new quotation.

The Rules

I will post a quotation from a movie. The first person to comment with the character, actor, and film that contains this quotation gets a special eyelash batting and a tailor-made Cinema Hype cheer, which might actually rhyme, even if it doesn’t make any sense.

The Deadline

If somebody guesses correctly, the prize cheer goes up as soon as possible. If nobody gets it right, I’m off the hook cheer-wise, and the next quotation is posted on Friday (…or not, like this week, but Friday is the norm) (Actually, this is proving to be the case less and less often. We’ll say I’ll shoot for sometime around the weekend. Friday, Sunday, Monday…something around there.)

The Quotation

“‘Permission to speak freely, sir?’
‘Granted.’
‘I do not believe this was a fair test of my command abilities.’
‘And why not?’
‘Because… there was no way to win.’
‘A no-win situation is a possibility every commander may face. Has that never occurred to you?’
‘No, sir, it has not.’
‘And how we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life, wouldn’t you say?’
‘As I indicated, Admiral, that thought had not occurred to me.’
‘Well, now you have something new to think about. Carry on.’”

Think you’ve got it? Leave it in the comments.

Quotation Sensation, movie quote game, movie quotes, Stranger Than Fiction, pancakes

So apparently, if you make Tom Hanks grow his hair out, and you send him off to solve crimes in Europe, he turns into kind of a jerk where the ladies are concerned.

Angels and Demons, the sequel to The Da Vinci Code, comes out this Friday. Hanks reprises his role as Robert Langdon; he’s the only returning cast member from the first movie. Fine. It’s a different city; it’s theoretically a different mystery; everybody in the first one died anyway. But why is there a different woman (Ayelet Zurer) hanging around this time? Did things not work out for Bob and Sophie (Audrey Tautou) after their epic hand-holding in…what was it, Scotland? What happened? Do they hang out every once in awhile? Or are they just Facebook friends? If there was some kind of drama that went down, I want to know about it.

Sadly (I think?), Hanks is not alone in his fictional flakiness, and it’s not just Angels and Demons (which probably has bigger fish to fry anyway in terms of its ability to simultaneously bore, provoke, and annoy). This happens all the time: sequels get made; previously crucial relationships evaporate; we never hear from the poor original love interests again. And it makes me CRAZY.

Take the grand marshal of this kind of behavior, one Bond, James Bond. My feelings on this are clearly ridiculous. He’s a womanizer. He womanizes. It’s his job. And I tell myself that it’s all because his true love, Vesper Lynde, died a tragic death, causing him to jump from woman to woman in search of regained happiness. (Somehow, I’m soothed by that tiny fragment of psychological truth in the Bond series’s sea of shallowness; this probably says far more about me than about anything in the Bond universe.) But in the back of my mind, every time I watch a Bond movie, there’s a little red flag: Yeah, you love this girl now; you risk your life to save her this time; but we know how it goes. You’re not learning anything her. You’re not going to change.

The abandoned love interest bothers me because it nearly always runs counter to what we’re led to believe in the first movie, whatever it is: two people meet; they live through some incredibly intense experience together (speaking mostly to the action/adventure genre, where sequels are most common); we think that they’ve been changed, and often that they’ve found true love in this other person, the one person who got them through everything. At the very least, we think that they’ll be bonded forever by the day they fought off the aliens, or survived the volcanic eruption, or saved a busload of orphans from greedy and murderous mobsters. If we don’t believe that what they’ve been through is a big deal, well, what’s the point? Why tell the story at all? And so, when we’re reunited with some hero or heroine and find that the connection from the previous movie didn’t stick, I start second-guessing the importance of the story and the strength of the hero’s character.

In most cases, I’d be happy with an explanation. Nothing long or super-detailed; just, “I loved her, but she died, and now I’m back fighting crime and pursuing hot women despite, or because of, my broken heart,” or “Yeah, I don’t know what happened with the two of us, but I guess people do crazy things under the influence of adrenaline,” or “I’m hugely manipulative.” Whatever. I just want to know why things didn’t work out, you know? For the sake of closure?

So, Tom, if you want us to believe in what you’re doing, I think you’ve got some explaining to do. We’ll wait.

Angels and Demons, Angels & Demons, Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ayelet Zurer, James Bond, sequels, sequels with new love interests, rants

In the run-up to the new Star Trek movie, I can only imagine some of the studio notes that must have gone out to director J.J. Abrams and writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. “Hey, guys, please create the biggest and best story installment for the largest, pickiest, and most enthusiastic fandom of all time. Should update the franchise for a new generation, restore faith in the film series for the oldsters, and erase decades of mockery. Must be emotionally resonant while also including epic explosions and flying debris. Many millions of dollars and the future of a pop-culture icon, not to mention your own careers, rest on your creatively endowed shoulders. No pressure, though!” It’s daunting, picking up the Star Trek mantle. Lots of people, including the Bad Robot team themselves, care deeply about this movie. They needn’t have worried: Star Trek is a shot in the arm for the series, both past and future.

This Star Trek is Star Trek for everybody: generalized enough for the uninitiated, and canon enough (and also meta enough—this generation of Trekkies has a healthy sense of irony) that it should satisfy all but the most die-hard and least humor-inclined fans. In a sense, it’s a look at the Star Trek series that could only have come from this particular generation. These guys are Trek geeks. They love the series and the movies with a love that is not even a little bit ironic. But they’re also able to see it through 40 years of creative distance and to appreciate it as an indelible part of the culture—which is why we get genuine Trek love as well as lines like “Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a physicist!” It’s an entirely appropriate approach—affection mixed with unpretentious—especially considering how many adaptations of old TV stray either towards extreme seriousness or total camp, and fail completely in the process.

And then…oh, right. The movie. Abrams and the Bad Robot team were a good choice for this story, considering the joy they take in setting up difficult emotional dynamics and then promptly blowing up everything in sight. Here, they set up the characters right off the block (the sequence with a pre-adolescent James Kirk and his stepfather’s convertible is especially fun), followed by family angst (an Abrams specialty) and lots of stirring moments involving spaceships and warp speed. But it all hangs together: nothing is wasted, and nothing is “just for fun.” The budding friendship between Kirk and Spock is especially good, and will probably be lots of people’s favorite story element—everybody likes a good “rivals become friends” story, no? It’s possible that a few of the key character scenes could have been more emotionally robust, or more clearly illustrated, but they get the job done and are probably more touchy-feely than most of what the Trek franchise has seen in the past. And in any case, how does one set up an emotional arc for an emotion-averse half-Vulcan with family issues? So maybe they get a pass on that one.

The Bad Robot team also gets a pretty good leg-up from a uniformly strong cast, from leads down to relatively small supporting roles (Simon Pegg as Scottie; Karl Urban as Bones; John Cho as Sulu; Zoe Saldana as Uhura). The real find here, the person most likely to break out (…more) from this movie, is Zachary Quinto (as Spock; you may know him as Sylar from Heroes). He’s practically perfect in every way–this guy’s got focus, and watching him become more and more Spock-like in the face of everybody else’s freakouts is a total joy. A lot rides on him: if audiences detect even a hint of cheese, or irony, or non-commitment on Spock’s person, they will begin to take the movie less seriously. Quinto is spot-on, and so it’s not a problem. (It is awkward, however, to discover that Leonard Nimoy is kind of embarrassing during his scenes. How does Quinto out-Spock Spock?). While Quinto will probably receive lots of buzz, props should also go to Chris Pine as James Kirk. it’s tempting to think that, even without William Shatner’s dorkifying influence, James T. Kirk just isn’t capable of being a true badass hero, but Pine is plenty charismatic enough to carry the role and make us believe in Kirk. With any luck, Pine will be able to translate this success into other roles—the last thing he needs is to be Captain Kirk for the rest of his life. We already have one of those, after all.

If you are not a Star Trek fan, my advice is this: Go. Go with an open mind, and enjoy yourself, and maybe you’ll see what all the fuss is about. Maybe you’ll become a Trekkie after all. And if you ARE a Star Trek fan, well, you should go, too (like I could stop you). Go with an open mind, and enjoy yourself, and maybe you’ll see what the new generation (not to say the Next Generation) sees in your favorite fandom.

Either way—I’m sorry, but it’s got to be said—live long, and…you know.

Star Trek, Star Trek 2009, Star Trek movie, JJ Abrams, J.J. Abrams, Bad Robot, Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Zachary Quinto, Chris Pine, James T. Kirk, Captain Kirk, Spock, John Cho, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, Karl Urban