Cinema Hype

If you’re in charge of the soundtrack for 500 Days of Summer, you’d better make it good. Because, for one, the main characters meet in an elevator and talk about the Smiths (this is closely related to my own dream of meeting my perfect man at the public library, when we both want to read the only copy of The New Yorker; he compromises and takes Vanity Fair instead, because he’s nice). Plus, the female lead is Zooey Deschanel, who is no slouch, musically–she’s the “she” half of She & Him and also supports M. Ward on his own records. In a pinch, Deschanel could even call in her own fiance, the king of the heartfelt 21st-century hipster love song, Postal Service/Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard. I bet he could come up with a killer sountrack, stat.

I’m just saying: start with these ingredients, and people are going to expect something good. Here’s the track listing, with samples from Youtube (of varying visual quality, but they all sound fine), where available, for your listening pleasure:

1. A Story of Boy Meets Girl - Mychael Danna and Rob Simonsen
2. Us - Regina Spektor
3. There Is A Light That Never Goes Out - The Smiths
4. Bad Kids - Black Lips
5. Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want - The Smiths
6. There Goes The Fear - Doves
7. You Make My Dreams - Hall & Oates
8. Sweet Disposition - The Temper Trap
9. Quelqu’un M’a Dit - Carla Bruni
10. Mushaboom - Feist
11. Hero - Regina Spektor
12. Bookends - Simon & Garfunkel
13. Vagabond - Wolfmother
14. She’s Got You High - Mumm-Ra
15. Here Comes Your Man - Meaghan Smith
16. Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want - She & Him

It’s a good soundtrack–deliberately and pleasantly eclectic, roughly devided between rock, midtempo indie pop, and the kind of miscellaneous, familiar-ish older music that comes with cultural baggage intact. It’s not too studied in its indie-ness, but exposes a few lesser-known bands; it rocks out, but shouldn’t put too many people off; it’s a little bit retro, but in a good way. It’s good summer music. And, interestingly, it would be an excellent companion album to another strong summer soundtrack, Alexi Murdoch’s work on for Away We Go.

If nothing else, there’s that cover of “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” to look forward to.

Oh, and, uh, the movie. That, too.

500 Days of Summer, Zooey Deschanel, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Joseph Gordon Levitt, summer movies, soundtracks, movie soundtracks, Mychael Danna and Rob Simonsen, Regina Spektor, The Smiths, Black Lips, Doves, Hall & Oates, The Temper Trap, Carla Bruni, Feist, Simon and Garfunkel, Wolfmother, Mumm-Ra, Meaghan Smith, She & Him, She and Him, M. Ward, Ben Gibbard, Death Cab for Cutie, The Postal Service, Alexi Murdoch, Away We Go

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

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

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

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

I think that, somewhere in our quietly keen little hearts, we geeks knew this was coming. Sure, Hollywood loves its musclebound heroes and its shoot-em-ups. The big guys rule the roost. It’s like high school in a John Hughes movie. But we must have known that we’d have our day, and I think May 22 is that day.

You guys, it’s a movie! About the Smithsonian!

On some level, my inner geek is deeply, deeply gratified by this very concept. I never saw the first Night at the Museum, though it was by all accounts fun and charming. But I love the Smithsonian and basically everything it stands for (…with the possible exception of the Museum of Natural History, which is full of dead things that we could see, alive, at the National Zoo). If I have my story straight, this movie’s like spending a day at the museums without all that walking around. All those dioramas! All those fact-filled plaques! Also, uh, I hear the exhibits come alive, which, again, maybe not the best thing in the case of the Natural History. Just saying.

Not that DC in the summer is lacking for tourists (Friendly note to all those well-meaning, disoriented tourists: Please do not stop at the bottom of the Metro escalators! Thank you!), but I think the world needs to hear this. Forget the amusement park; come see the protozoa instead! Besides, you may as well get used to it. After this, the geeks will be your overlords anyway.

Night at the Museum, Night at the Museum 2, Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian, Smithsonian, geek movies

The new trailer for Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen debuted last week, and it looks like it’ll be playing before Star Trek starting this weekend. Much of the cast and crew from the first Transformers has returned for the sequel, including action-movie heavy-hitter Michael Bay, master of the disorientingly close-up action shot.

Here’s the trailer:

So…let me get this straight. In the new Transformers movie, Shia LaBoeuf is Chuck Bartowski?

Let’s see: Sam (LaBoeuf) encounters an ordinary object, apparently planted in his path by some higher entity. Against his will and almost without his knowledge, said object provides top-secret information to his brain. When presented with certain sensory stimuli, his brain accesses the related information provided—one might say “uploaded”—to his head. Shall we call these episodes “flashes”? The bad guys want what’s in his mind; hijinks and misadventures ensue. I suppose Megan Fox is supposed to be Sarah in this scenario; wouldn’t it be so much cooler if, all this time, Sam’s biker-chick girlfriend has been reporting to the CIA? (Or is that just me?) (Also, Sarah Walker could totally take Mikaela Banes, just so you know.) Will the role of Crazy Scott Bakula here be played by John Turturro?

I could go on like this all day.

(…OMG, who plays Captain Awesome?)

Truthfully, though, this looks like fun; I’m especially taken with the shot on the ocean floor, assuming that alien automotive robots have mastered anti-rusting technology. Because, really, THAT would be disappointing.

Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen comes out June 24.

Transformers 2, Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, Transformers, Shia LaBoeuf, Chuck Bartowski, Sarah Walker, Megan Fox, Michael Bay, John Turturro, Scott Bakula, Chuck

I’ve sort of wanted to be BFFs with comedian/actor/woman-about-town Charlyne Yi for awhile now. You might remember her one-episode stint as Grace Park, Kenneth’s Jerry Maguire-misquoting love, on an old episode of 30 Rock (I tried to find an embeddable video of this, as it’s one of my favorite 30R moments ever, but was foiled by the weak-but-apparently-not-that-weak copyright law on the internets); she also pals around with Judd Apatow’s pack (”Apatown,” apparently) and turns up in the odd movie. Now her own movie, Paper Heart, has won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance, and is due out in August. It’s almost too coyly cute to be believed:

Doesn’t it look adorable, and yet also infuriatingly cute? The question here may be phrased in terms of another hipster touchstone movie: will Paper Hearts be like the first ten minutes of Juno (i.e. unwatchably twee) or like the last hour and a half (honest and funny and kind of a heartbreaker)? Alternatively, which will wear out first: Michael Cera’s charm or his penchant for playing awkwardly lovable young men? (You’d think we’d be getting towards the end of that particular rope, but the facts indicate otherwise.) I bet it also has a killer soundtrack.

Paper Heart is a “hybrid documentary”—not a mockumentary, but a mix of fiction and documentary. One assumes that the road-trip footage, and maybe the parts with her friends/crew, are the unscripted part, and that the Yi/Cera storyline (they play themselves) came with at least some forethought, though it’s hard to tell where that particular line sits—which is probably the point. Either way, I’m excited to see more of Yi’s work out there. And, hey, I still want to hang out. Even if you don’t like hair-braiding and boy-story-telling, I’m always up for a good script-polishing session! Call me!

Charlyne Yi, Paper Heart, Michael Cera, Sundance, Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, hipster movies, Juno

There’s some new footage out from Quentin Tarantino’s new movie, Inglourious Basterds, due out this August:

I’m having a hard time putting labels—I believe we call them “adjectives”—on this film, no matter how many bits and pieces I see. Phrases like “anti-Nazi gorefest” spring to mind, but then that doesn’t sound like much fun, does it? I expect it to be funny—even if Tarantino’s not exactly out for good clean fun, it seems very much like Brad Pitt is having a field day with that underbite—but “comedy” doesn’t quite ring true, either. “Drama”? Not exactly. More like “Tarantinesque,” which sort of embodies all of the above by definition.

Tarantinesque. I like it. I also feel that Tarantino himself would enjoy having “-esque” attached to his name. Well done, everybody.

It’s also possible that I just like hearing Pitt say “Nat-sies.”

Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds, Brad Pitt, Inglourious Basterds footage

AHA! You thought you could get rid of me, but I just keep coming back. Yeah.

Okay. Maybe not. If you didn’t think you could get rid of me, I appreciate that. I wish I could say that I was off doing something exciting, or at least had planned a little blog vacation, but unless taxes and mild sleep deprivation count as something exciting, I’m going to have to disappoint.

So let’s have some catch-up time, shall we? Just a few things on my mind?

- It appears that Zac Efron has a movie coming out this weekend, which keeps confusing me when I see the TV spots and think, “You guys. HSM3 came out last fall! You can stop with the commercials!” Only recently did I discover that it’s a whole separate movie. Allegedly.

- I mostly find Efron sort of off-putting—something about his attempts to seem sexual while actually coming across completely asexual—but I do like him in the remake of Hairspray. Gotta give props for his rocking out, complete with knee-slide, on “Ladies’ Choice.” On a semi-related note, with two minutes and a proper pair of scissors, I could get his hair out of his face, once and for all. (I also say things like, “Get off my lawn!”)

- Just to be clear, the 2007 Hairspray is a movie I keep coming back to on account of its general delightfulness. I love everybody in it and everything about it, and every single one of you should see it. Amanda Bynes and the super-hot Elijah Kelley, in particular, make me happy when skies are gray. Like so:

- Did you hear that the Coen brothers are supposedly adapting Michael Chabon’s hardboiled Jewish-Alaskan detective novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union? It’s just too perfect: the Coens’ particular brand of brutality mixed with humor should hit all the high points beautifully. It’s awhile off, but nothing bad ever came of ridiculously high expectations, right?

- While I sort of loathe Russell Crowe on a personal level—to the point where I often skip his movies, even though I get that he’s super-talented—I am excited about State of Play, which comes out this weekend. We could use something exciting in this sad little spring lull. That, and I like the idea that Helen Mirren hangs out in my neighborhood (fictionally). Very exciting!

- Speaking of Mirren, check out the cast on her upcoming adaptation of The Tempest (Mirren plays a gender-switched version of Prospero)! The Tempest has always been my least favorite of Shakespeare’s plays, but I might be tempted to show up for this.

Nice talking to you all. See you tomorrow. Promise.

Zac Efron, 17 Again, Hairspray, High School Musical, Amanda Bynes, Elijah Kelley, Coen brothers, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon, Russell Crowe, State of Play, Helen Mirren, The Tempest

Well.

So that’s over.

Is it all right if we all just breathe a collective sigh of relief? This year’s Oscar season felt, among all the glamor and the drama and the fun of choosing picks, like a long drawn-out brawl and much ado about nothing. It seems like most people were surprisingly happy with the ceremony itself—not a harsh word against Hugh Jackman all day—and that’s more than the Academy has said for itself in awhile. Kudos, all; now shall we all take a vacation?

Or just look at what’s coming up instead? Here’s the montage of upcoming releases they played at the end of the ceremony (nice touch, Academy!):

I almost don’t want to ruin this by talking about it. There’ll be plenty of time for dissection later. For now, just sit back, relax, and take a look at all of the good things to come. I think we’ve all earned it.

Oscars, Academy Awards, 2009 releases, new movies 2009, 2009 clip reel