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The Film Habit #29 - November 24, 2004 The Film Habit shows up a day earlier, and should I be able to stave off my constant addiction to procrastination, perhaps it will now become a more permanent Wednesday fixture. With The Weekend Blend become a regular must do for me on Thursday night, it’s been killing me to get both this and that up and ready all in one evening. A shift to Wednesday will help, but whether I’ll actually get it done on Wednesday in a non-holiday week I leave to the unseen powers of fate, aka Whoopi Goldberg.
For most of you, CB isn’t a place you’ll be visiting much until Monday when the feasting settles down and you return to the mundane world of internet surfing. Personally I think Cinema Blend goes pretty well with Stove Top Stuffing though, so I’ll be here putting together my Alexander review tomorrow and keeping things fresh for you non-Americans who don’t get all horny for honey hams. God Save the Queen, Emperor, or minor petty dictator, whichever applies to your particular nation. me with your favorite Thanksgiving Dish! People Do Win!  It’s awards voting season which means folks like Focus Features are out pushing their movies to potential people of influence to garner votes. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a couple of years ago that I’m one of those people. Seriously, who cares about my paltry Dallas Fort Worth Film Critics Association vote? Someone must, since my mailbox is full of awards screeners which I can watch as god intended… wearing only socks. My DFWFCA ballot isn’t due for a month, so between now and then I’m being flooded with screeners of Oscar bait flicks arriving daily in my mailbox. Some of them I’ve seen, some of them I haven’t. Rather than write reviews of movies that may not be relevant or may have already been covered by someone else on the site, as I work my way through the ever growing stack I’ll try to drop in here and tell you what’s good and what isn’t from the pack. This week things got going with screeners of Kinsey, Sideways, and The Door in the Floor.
I was especially delighted to get a copy of Sideways, since even though our newbie writer Stefanie has already turned in a fantastic review for the site, I love Paul Giamatti and hated the thought of missing anything he’s in. Much to my dismay, I’ll be missing it anyway, since the screener disc they sent me was blank. Someone forgot to hit the “record” button.  But the arrival of Kinsey quickly washed away my Sideways dismay, Neeson trumps Giamatti any day. Sending me this one to look at pays off for Fox. Kinsey is one of the best movies of the year. It’s adult, frank, and sometimes brutally honest. Neeson’s work as Alfred Kinsey is nothing short of spectacular and unless the Oscar voters out there have gotten too puritanical to see past the end of their noses he’ll be getting some heavy awards consideration. You see the movie is about sex, the only thing more controversial than movies about beating Jesus. Shame too, since sex is a lot more fun. The film starts out with Kinsey staring at Gall Wasps though, and could have bogged down and lost the audience right there, had director Bill Condon not had the good sense to intersperse that section of the movie with black and white flash forwards in which Kinsey and his staff prepare their infamous sex survey. Doing so sets the tone for the film, prepares the audience for the heavier stuff which is to come, and provides a fair amount of plot-moving comedy relief to break up Kinsey’s early life obsession with bug mating habits. This isn’t a movie with an agenda; it isn’t trying to tear apart the moral fiber of our society anymore than Kinsey himself was. Like Kinsey, the picture is simply trying to tell the truth. In doing so it creates a dramatic masterpiece with Kinsey as a sympathetic, flawed, damaged genius obsessively trying to open a resistant world’s eyes to reality. In doing so the man helped people. It’s dismaying to see so many still trying to stick their heads in the sand today, or worse force all of us to stick our heads in the sand right along with them.
 The Door in the Floor on the other hand wasn’t nearly so much of a treat. Jeff Bridges is one of my favorite living actors, and as a bonus he gets extra geek love from me for being the only guy on the set of Tron who actually understood what the movie was about. That having been said, I’m not sure what he was thinking here. It’s as if “The Dude” was thrust into the most fucked up family life ever and tries to ignore it by banging mothers and daughters under the guise of artistry. The Door in the Floor is bizarre crap that bothers very little with things like common sense or reason as its characters run around behaving pretty inconsistently. The whole film is just one big excuse for Kim Basinger to have sex with minors while Jeff Bridges wanders around aimlessly in a dirty, oversized version of Jackie Chan’s ass kicking kung fu robe in Drunken Master 2. In as much as Kinsey handles topics of non-traditional sex right, Door in the Floor gets it all wrong. Also, Kim Basinger seems to have lost the ability to act… if she ever had it. That at least is open to debate.
me to complain about my brutal honesty regarding freebies. E-Mail Bombs  Guided by the spirit of the small Asian woman to your left (who I really need to replace with something more snazzy), I answer reader mail. It’s new, it’s innovative, and no doubt this idea will be ripped off by thousands of copycats, like that hack David Letterman. your comments to have them read on the… er answered here. Let’s see what you folks have to say this week: Susan:clerks is gonna be red hot Josh: Hi Susan. Might I recommend 1994? Annmarie: Hi! I was so excited to see that I had won this DVD! But I haven't received it yet...would you let me know the status? When can I expect it? I'd love to give it as a gift for Christmas! Thanks! I love your site! Josh: Take take take! What more do you people want from me? I work and slave and drain every bit of creative energy out of myself day after day after day (and trust me there isn’t much to go around) and what thanks do I get? Gimme free DVDs! Well I can’t blame you. Unfortunately the DVDs come directly from the distributor to you and they can be pretty slow about these things. It’s on its way, don’t worry. Can’t promise it’ll be there before Christmas, but it will show up. Be patient and thanks for the kind words. Hiram: I wanted to tell you how much I appreciate New Line Cinema forbidding you from reviewing the film [Blade: Trinity] until its release. It's the most honest piece of information that they have given me about their movie: it is pure crap. Why else would they not want people who provide information to the entire world writing about it? They know it is crappy and now I know it is crappy so they just saved me $10. Josh: I love your root beer man! It’s the best. The fact that New Line is keeping us from reviewing their film until day of release could indeed mean that they are trying to hide the film. However, what is more often the case is simply that movie studios hate and fear internet sites. They don’t trust us, don’t understand us, and so they try to crush us. It’s rather silly, since these days people go to sites like this for their movie info more than they do some lame local newspaper or god forbid… Entertainment Weekly. That’s just the it way works. No doubt you’ll see plenty of Blade: Trinity reviews in print, in fact I’ve even seen a few on the web… though those are mostly from people who are just going to take the risk of garnering New Line’s ire. We already got on their bad side once after we ran a POSITIVE review of Elf last year before the film’s release date, so we’re taking it easy around the suits at New Line Cinema for awhile. Cliff: Thought you might get a kick out of this...from: here. Josh: You have accurately depicted my greatest fear. No, not being hit by a death train filled with freaky looking CGI zombie children (though that does rank right up there). The other one. Hey! Do you like writing for mildly successful movie websites with no guarantee that you’ll ever be paid? Are you over 18? You’re in luck. CinemaBlend.com is looking for writers just like you. If you think you can capture the signature Cinema Blend style as a DVD critic and/or BNN reporter send me an with a few samples and we’ll talk. |
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