News: Universal Just Not That Into Hasbro

We’ve talked before about Hasbro’s plans to make movies out of every last toy property they have, no matter how ridiculous. They’ve been successful with Transformers at Paramount, and Universal is still producing the next G.I. Joe movie and the increasingly-silly-looking Battleship, but it’s starting to look as though Universal, at least, is perhaps no longer so enamored with the idea of trying to make viable movies out of board games and toys.

They’ve dropped Stretch Armstrong, which has since been picked up by Relativity Media, though it’s lost both its star (Taylor Lautner) and its director (Rob Letterman) in the process. Even less fortunate, being dropped but not (yet) picked up by any studio, are Monopoly, Magic: the Gathering, Ouija (as mentioned before back in October), and the new Clue.

Honestly, the only surprise here is that Stretch Armstrong is still alive as a project. None of these have sounded like great ideas — though Magic has had storylines worked into its game for years, none of them have been better than D-grade fantasy, and Hollywood doesn’t like to take chances on anything less than A-grade in that genre — and as I stated previously, they already did Clue as well as they possibly could. There’s nowhere for them to go there. All that said, this is a fun train wreck to watch, and any of these movies that get made are sure to be awesomely awful.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

Chuck Barris. Songwriter who penned “Palisades Park”. Producer of The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game. Hit-man for the CIA. Host of The Gong Show. Wait, back up one….

In a 1984 memoir, Chuck Barris purported to have worked for the CIA as an assassin. He claimed at the time that it wasn’t true, and he was just trying to make a point, but the 2002 feature film Confessions of a Dangerous Mind takes the concept and runs with it. It tells a fictionalized account of his life, changing some names, taking the assassin story at face value, and building a story around that. On the one hand, it’s a bit unbelievable that the CIA would have an assassin that became so high-profile and kept using him. On the other hand, given that this is the man who was essentially the godfather of the “reality TV” genre, maybe it’s not so far-fetched; killing people isn’t that much worse than what he was already doing.

Post-Mortem: Chuck

After five seasons, Chuck is over. There was doubt at the end of every season as to whether it would get renewed for the next one or not, and at the end of the fourth season, the creators — Chris Fedak and Josh Schwartz — decided to make the fifth one the final one for certain, so that they could end it on their own terms. Not counting one-season wonders, it’s been a long time since a show has ended that I’ve watched from the very first episode all the way to the end — even with 24 I missed the first two or three hours.

So, as the first show to conclude since the start of my blogging, Chuck gets the distinction of being the first show to get not just a season Post-Mortem, but a full series Post-Mortem. I’ll go over what I loved, what I didn’t like, what changed over the years and what went right and wrong with each individual season. Obviously, there will be spoilers. If you haven’t seen the finale, go back to your DVR and watch it. If you haven’t seen the series… well, go buy or rent the boxed sets, wait for the fifth season, watch it, and come back. It’s worth it. And comments are always welcome, even months later. For the rest of you, keep reading.

News: Jones, Gilliam, Cleese, Palin, Idle… and Williams?

From Variety comes an interesting report for fans of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It seems a new film, Absolutely Anything is re-uniting the surviving cast. Terry Jones is directing the film, which is a Live-action/CGI science-fiction comedy about aliens who give an inept Earthman unlimited power. Mike Medavoy (producer of Black Swan) is the producer on the film. Terry Gilliam, John Cleese, and Michael Palin have already signed on to the film, and Jones and Medavoy are trying to get Eric Idle to sign on as well. If he does, all five surviving Pythons will be involved in the film, which would be the first feature collaboration for the troupe since 1983′s Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (The Wind in the Willows, later retitled Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, came close in 1996, but Gilliam appears to have had no role in it.) Also attached to the film is American comedian Robin Williams, who will be voicing a talking dog and possibly playing one of the live roles as well.

Personally, I’m intrigued by this. I like Robin Williams when he is working in a good movie, and I trust Terry Jones to deliver on that front. Plus, if anybody knows how to properly corral a manic comedian, it’s a guy who worked with several manic comedians for several years. The plot might be a little thin, but that might just be because very little of it has been revealed yet.

I suspect there isn’t much chance of this being an “OK” film. Given the people involved, it’s likely to be either brilliant, or one of the most spectacular train wrecks in cinematic history. Either way, it should be interesting to watch.

The Fugitive

There are a lot of movies out there that take an old television series and adapt their characters and basic premise into a feature film. There aren’t a lot of good ones, however. But 1993′s The Fugitive, directed by Andrew Davis and starring Harrison Ford, is one of the exceptions to the rule.

Part of this is due to the quality performances of the actors, and the director and his crew. But part of it is probably also due to the nature of the story. The Fugitive, as a TV series, had a certain need to pad out its basic plot with a lot of incidental events. As a movie, the central plot can become the sole plot, allowing for a tighter focus and a story that moves at a fast clip. Though the movie is just a little over two hours long, it feels like a much shorter film due to its pace.

D.O.A. (1950)

What’s stranger: a man walking into the homicide department of a police station and declaring that he himself is a murder victim, or that they already expected him? Both are shown in the first few minutes of Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A., which has Edmond O’Brien starring as the victim, Frank Bigelow. The film is told in flashback, as Frank relates his story to the homicide detectives. Parting from his girlfriend/secretary Paula (Pamela Britton) for a week’s vacation, Frank starts suffering mild stomach pains after a night’s partying. When he checks into a hospital’s emergency room, he can’t believe what he’s hearing, and goes to get a second opinion. The second doctor confirms: He’s ingested a lethal amount of “luminous toxin” (most likely radium, though it isn’t specified), and his body has already absorbed it into his system. He has a few days, a week at most, to live, though he is in reasonably good health for the immediate future.

With only a few days, and almost nothing to go on, Frank dedicates himself to finding his killer.

The I Inside

Caught this one on Encore Suspense tonight. A 2004 film, The I Inside was directed by Roland Suso Richter, and is apparently his first English-language film. It looks like it had some film festival debuts, but was otherwise not granted a theatrical release, going straight to video.

The film is of the “mind screw” variety of suspense movies, starring Ryan Phillippe as Simon Cable, a man who awakens in a hospital in 2002 after nearly dying from an accidental poisoning. His doctor, Jeremy Newman (Stephen Rea) runs him through some standard tests, and they discover that Simon has lost the last two years of his memories. He doesn’t remember the death of his brother, Peter (Robert Sean Leonard), and has no recollection of his wife, Anna (Piper Perabo). He’s equally confused about the presence of another woman, Clair (Sarah Polley) who seems to have much more affection for him than his wife does.

Sin City

There were a lot of reasons I was reluctant to watch this movie. I have never been a fan of Frank Miller; while it’s become fashionable in recent years to mock the comic book writer for his gloriously inept All Star Batman and Robin, I felt that his signature work, The Dark Knight Returns was also ridiculously bad, and it just took the rest of the fandom twenty years to catch up. I read a few of his Sin City graphic novels, on recommendation, and was thoroughly unimpressed. They struck me as an attempt at noir stylings without a comprehension of the writing skills that went into classic noir works. I’ll grant his use of contrast was great, but I was otherwise left with a sense that this is a comic book writer and artist who is poor at writing plots, incompetent at writing dialogue, and not particularly good at drawing either.

So why, then, would I watch the 2005 movie based on those works, especially when the two novels I’d read were among the plots the movie is based on? For starters, it has a ton of people in it. Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Benicio Del Toro, Rutger Hauer, and many, many others. And Robert Rodriguez was the primary director, and he’s been all right on other works (Quentin Tarantino is also credited with directing one scene, and Miller has co-director credit). It did well at the box office, though that’s not always a solid indicator (Frank Miller’s 300 was similarly successful, and was terrible.) It also had critical success; Roger Ebert gave it four stars, and it’s at 78% on RottenTomatoes.com. And every so often someone would recommend it, and I’d demur, and they’d act like I was judging it unfairly. Personally, I think having read the stories was a fair way to pre-judge it, but hey; maybe it translated better to film than its original medium. At least if I watched it nobody could remotely claim I didn’t have an informed opinion on it. Plus, you know, it was available to watch free, so all I was risking was my time.

Sometimes risks pay off, sometimes they do not.

The Sting

Directed by George Roy Hill, 1973′s The Sting re-teamed Paul Newman and Robert Redford, who had previously starred together in 1969′s classic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It would go on to win seven Oscars (and three more nominations), including Best Picture and Best Director.

The Sting is a tale of the con, and the con artists at the crux of it are Redford and Newman. Redford plays Johnny Hooker, a small-time grifter who is good at taking people for their money but bad at holding onto it. When he and his mentor Luther (Robert Earl Jones) grift the wrong person, Johnny finds himself on the bad side of mob boss Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw). Luther is killed, and Hooker is on the run, seeking out the one man who may be able to get him some measure of revenge against Lonnegan: Henry Gondorff (Newman), master of the big con, and friend of Luther’s. Together the two start scheming on how to take Lonnegan for all he has. Once Hooker and Gondorff meet, the film breaks into several acts, each named after part of the con, and their machinations take up the whole of the film. I’ll not spoil it here.

News: No more Lucas blockbusters?

According to interviews, George Lucas plans on stepping away from directing big-budget blockbuster movies after the release of Red Tails, claiming that he is “retiring… moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff” and has accomplished everything he wanted to do as a filmmaker.

It’s kind of funny, in that on the one hand, you never really expect to hear a director just say “that’s it, I’m done” (and the article does hint that he may continue to work on smaller-budget films.) On the other hand, this is George Lucas, and really, most of us only know him for a handful of films to begin with. He wasn’t super-prolific as a director, and even as a producer, it’s still mostly Star Wars and Indiana Jones (he may still be on board for IJ 5, incidentally.) If he hadn’t made an announcement at all, and just quietly went away, would any of us have really noticed?