I bet that jacket is super noisy.

Well friends, it’s an absolutely crazy time for new DVDs.  With both Christmas and New Year’s Day falling on Tuesdays, the whole Tuesday release schedule has been messed up. We’ve got a ton of movies coming out today, but there’s also a handful coming out this Friday, but don’t worry because I’m covering all of them.  Besides Total Recall and the latest Clint Eastwood flick (as an actor if not director), we’ve got flicks with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Richard Gere.  We’ve got Channing Tatum and Matthew McConaughey’s ass.  There’s the latest Resident Evil flick, that movie about college singing groups, and so much more.  There’s sleepwalkers and motocross bikers and paralyzed guitarists.  We’ve even got  evil robots and the latest flick from Spike Lee!

The DVDs:
Total Recall
Trouble With The Curve
Premium Rush -available Friday, 12/21
Arbitrage -available Friday, 12/21
Killer Joe -available Friday, 12/21
10 Years
Resident Evil: Retribution -available Friday, 12/21
Pitch Perfect
Liberal Arts
The Good Doctor
Sleepwalk With Me
Red Hook Summer -available Friday, 12/21
Diary Of A Wimpy Kid: Dog Days
Bro’
Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet
Forced To Fight
Fred & Vinnie
The Frozen
The New Republic
Android Insurrection

Streaming: Check out your choices here.

Holy cow, that’s a lot of movies hitting DVD this week. But wait, there’s more! Three flicks have decided to buck the trend of coming out when people are actually shopping, so here’s a quick breakdown of the three movies coming out in the next two weeks as well:  The people behind the abysmally reviewed Bradley Cooper flick, The Words, have tried to bury it by releasing it on Monday, December 24.  They are right to do it, and we should honor their desire to have their movie forgotten.  Instead of seeing that,  hold out for another week until Monday, December 31st.  New Year’s Eve sees the release of Looper. I thought it was great, and Vince’s review gave it an ‘A-’.  If that isn’t your cup of tea, Cosmopolis comes out on New Year’s Day. Vince’s review gave it a ‘C’, but it’s from David Cronenberg, who is awesome, so who gives a f*ck what Vince says?  He hates everything, Looper excluded. If your New Year’s resolution is to watch less DVDs, click on that streaming link above to go straight to your Netflix resolution loophole, but to be honest, you’ve chosen a very strange resolution, and you could still read about the DVDs, even if you never plan on watching them.  Hell, I don’t plan on watching most of them either. Read the rest of this entry »

Brooooooooood!

R-Pattz ponders existence and sh*t

The heads exploding in Scanners. The compound-fracture forearm splintering in The Fly. The guy with his jaw blown off, the rough sex on the stairs in a History of Violence. When I think David Cronenberg, I think of the visceral – lurid, memorable scenes of glorified sex and gore. As you might expect of a guy who once filmed James Spader having sex with a vulva-like scar on Rosanna Arquette’s leg (Crash, 1996), Cronenberg is fascinated by the human body, and he excels at shooting it. Dialog? Not so much. Remember the parts of History of Violence without the sex or the violence that felt like a weird, stilted after-school special? The last thing you want to see him do is make a movie that’s ninety-five percent people standing around and talking, which is what Cosmopolis is. There are isolated moments of genius, but they’re like Easter Island isolated. Yeah, geography, bitch, what.

Based on the Don DeLillo novel of the same name, Cosmopolis is a shaggy dog story centering around Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), a billionaire asset manager on a trip across Manhattan in his limo to get a haircut on the same day that the president comes to town and sparks an anti-capitalist riot by rat-toting anarchists. There are a couple short, action-ish sequences that were nice (the rat-toting anarchists, mainly), but for the most part, it’s a game of musical chairs, with Robert Pattinson sitting in different places talking to different people, about, like, the nature of existence and stuff. “Dude, like what does it all mean or whatever?”

As soon as Robert Pattinson opened his mouth I knew I was in for a long movie. Part of the problem is the source material. I haven’t read Cosmopolis, but I’m otherwise familiar with Don DeLillo, and one DeLillo hallmark is dialog that’s stylized to the point that it’s almost Shakespearean, in that exists unto itself moreso than the physical world. His characters converse in existential, hyper-verbose, hyper-articulate, disconnected circle-speak – think Beckett, or Joseph Heller, or Flannery O’Connor. His dialog never seems intended to convey the way real people actually speak, it’s more a tool to present elaborately braided paradox. That’s not a knock on it, it’s smart, but polarizing, overwrought mostly in a good way. But that DeLillo’s scenes are built in your mind and often don’t seem to involve recognizable people presents some obvious problems for actors trying to present this believably, burdened as they are by their basic real peoplehood. I don’t know if DeLillo’s fetishized doubletalk ever works in a visual medium like film, but I can tell you that Robert Pattinson sure as hell isn’t up to it, at least not without better direction than this. I don’t doubt for a second that it’s hard to play a detached character, but R-Patts (who I haven’t minded in other stuff) never gets past high school theater club “hard boiled.” Squint, purse lips, furrow brow, squint some more, can you squint harder? Try anyway, repeat.

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Yes. Even better than Iron Eagle 2.

Opening Everywhere: The Expendables 2, ParaNorman, Sparkle, Cosmopolis

FilmDrunk Suggests: The Expendables 2. It’s the greatest sequel in movie history. In fact, there’s not even a point in having a Weekend Movie Guide because you should already know to go see this.

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Cronenberg, with a Chris Nolan fanboy.

David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis opens this week, and he’s currently making the rounds promoting it. When NextMovie interviewed Cronenberg, they asked him about The Dark Knight Rises, because why not? Opinions about The Dark Knight Rises are like smelly buttholes, or so the saying goes. Anyway, it turns out the Videodrome director is not a fan.

The chance of Cronenberg taking on a superhero movie is somewhere between zero and nothing, according to his interview with NextMovie.

“A superhero movie, by definition, you know, it’s comic book. It’s for kids. It’s adolescent in its core,” explains Cronenberg. “That has always been its appeal, and I think people who are saying ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ is, you know, supreme cinema art, I don’t think they know what the f**k they’re talking about.”

“It’s for a little kids! I’m not interested in that! I want to film a guy who has a car crash fetish, who wants to have sex with his girlfriend’s open wound!” …You know, that’s why I like David Cronenberg. The man knows what he likes.

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"Deal vith it."

While most of us are waiting patiently for the release of Twilight: Breaking Wind Dawn Pt. 2 on November 16, Robert Pattinson’s career beyond the sparkly fangs continues on August 7 with the very poorly received Bel Ami, and on August 17 with the much more anticipated Cosmopolis.

Directed by the excellent David Cronenberg, whose frat name had to have been Bronenberg, Cosmopolis is a delicious fruity drink futuristic science fiction tale that is ripped from today’s headlines. It sort of has an Occupy Wall Street meets The Jetsons feel to it.

Here’s the summary from Rotten Tomatoes…

New York City, not-too-distant-future: Eric Packer, a 28 year-old finance golden boy dreaming of living in a civilization ahead of this one, watches a dark shadow cast over the firmament of the Wall Street galaxy, of which he is the uncontested king. As he is chauffeured across midtown Manhattan to get a haircut at his father’s old barber, his anxious eyes are glued to the yuan’s exchange rate: it is mounting against all expectations, destroying Eric’s bet against it. Eric Packer is losing his empire with every tick of the clock. Meanwhile, an eruption of wild activity unfolds in the city’s streets. Petrified as the threats of the real world infringe upon his cloud of virtual convictions, his paranoia intensifies during the course of his 24-hour cross-town odyssey. Packer starts to piece together clues that lead him to a most terrifying secret…

I cut off the last line of that summary, because what the hell, people? What happened to the time when we used to leave a film’s trailer – after the jump – up to the imagination until people actually paid money to see it? Sure, there is probably a ton of exciting plot points in between him being a billionaire and the terrifying secret, but this movie looks pretty good and I’d like to see it. Secret means don’t tell people, jerks. Damn it, this makes me angry.

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