Julia Roberts actually shot Dennis Lee’s Fireflies in the Garden back in 2007, around the same time as Charlie Wilson’s War, but after playing a few film festivals and opening in various territories overseas in 2008, it sat on the shelf until earlier this week, when an unnamed distributor decided to give it a US release in October. It’s one of Julia Roberts’ more complicated schemes to appear more youthful.

To an outsider, the Taylors are the very picture of the successful American family: Charles (Willem Dafoe) is a tenured professor on track to become university president, son Michael (Ryan Reynolds) is a prolific and well-known romance novelist, daughter Ryne (Shannon Lucio) is poised to enter a prestigious law school, and on the day we are introduced to them, matriarch Lisa (Julia Roberts) will graduate from college-decades after leaving to raise her children. But when a serious accident interrupts the celebration, the far more nuanced reality of this Midwestern family’s history and relationships come to light.
The film also stars Emily Watson, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hayden Panettiere and Shannon Lucio. |via LiveforFilms|

Julia Roberts smiles, Ryan Reynolds gets beardy, and Emily Watson still looks like a sad bird. Luckily, I could watch Willem Dafoe yell at little kids all day. Hey, it’s too bad the distributor never ‘lost’ Eat Pray Love, am I right? And is it just me, or does Fireflies in the Garden sound like a euphemism for venereal disease? If I wanted Fireflies in the Garden, I’d take a dip in Bob Evans’ jacuzzi. And how come they never name hurricanes after sistas? Thanks, folks, tip your servers. Hey, what’s up with airline food? (*bass run, farts ‘Yankee Doodle’*)

I wish I could tell you that Martin Campbell fought the good fight, and actually attempted to make a good movie.  I wish I could tell you that.  But Hollywood is no fairy tale world.  Sometimes a director is able to fight off a bad movie idea. Sometimes not.

You get the sense that a lot of people thought, “Green Lantern? Sure, that sounds like a perfectly reasonable title for a movie, I could see that on lunchboxes and underwear.” And things sort of went on like that, with everyone mildly agreeing that it seemed like a movie someone should make, but no one being particularly excited to make it.   There are a lot of problems with Green Lantern, not the least of which being a climactic scene in which Ryan Reynolds conjures a giant Hot Wheels track out of magic green fog jizz from space, but I think you could trace most of them back to the fact that it’s just vague.  It’s all forgettable broad strokes with no specificity, more like someone half-assing a superhero mad lib.  “Okay, so the hero wears a spandex… blank, and he has to stop the villain, …blank, from stealing the world’s… blank.”  A few of the blanks they didn’t even bother filling in.

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Got Milk’s latest print ad shows Ryan Reynolds in skin-tight spandex with a post-money shot milk mustache, just as he often appears in my prison fantasies GRRR, FOOTBALL! It blows my mind every time I take the time to think about it that “Got Milk” has proven itself one of the most enduring advertising slogans of all time, and that’s to say nothing of the fact that we have Michael Bay to thank for it all.

Meanwhile, The Green Lantern also released a new trailer, which you can watch below. This one does a more thorough job explaining the Green Lantern mythology to the people who’ve never read the comic books, i.e. 99.9% of the population.  It revolves around having your entire existence validated by a ring, so girls should love it (the ones who go to Kate Hudson movies, anyway). The spot also has plenty of new footage from the film, and boy, is there any shot in this movie that isn’t at least 60% CGI?  Not that this would ever happen, but say for the sake of argument that Green Lantern won an Oscar, I think the director and producers should have to sit there and clap while 15 Koreans chugging Red Bull collect the trophy.  It’s only fair.

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Thor opens this weekend, but today Green Lantern dropped a new trailer, almost as if to say, “WE SEE YOUR SKARSGÅRD AND RAISE YOU SARSGAARD.” It opens June 17th, and I know I’ve been sh*t talking this project from the beginning, but as more of the FX works gets done, it’s gradually starting to seem less bland.  Basically, an alien comes down from space and gives Ryan Reynolds a promise ring.  Ryan Reynolds pledges allegiance to a lantern and then gets sucked into space where a big alien with a black guy’s voice beats him up.  Then he comes back to Earth to make out with Blake Lively and it’s awesome because they’re the most ridiculously good-looking couple of all time.  Somewhere along the line, Stellan Sarsgaard gets into Mr. Burns’s nerve tonic and it turns him into Joss Whedon, and Ryan Reynolds has to use his powers to keep him from making more adaptations of Buffy.  Something like that.

Everyone likes poster art, right?  I used to post individual posters throughout the week, but that seemed messy, so now I save them up and stick them in one handy place, every Monday afternoon.  CONSIDER YOURSELF SLIDESHOW’D.

Green Lantern. All the Green Lantern poster art has seemed boring to me so far, but maybe that’s just because the source material seems boring.  Either way, it almost seems like they’re trying to sell this as an animated movie.  The only part of this that isn’t completely animated is like 60% of Ryan Reynolds’ face, and he’s cartoonishly handsome as it is. I agree with the ladies, these posters need more shirtless Ryan Reynolds.  It’s not like superhero movies aren’t blatantly homoerotic anyway.

(*pulls pistol from holster, fires flag reading “MARRY ME, RYAN”*)

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