A member of SEAL Team Six discovers that bin Laden’s pubes were left everywhere in that house.

It’s a big week for DVD releases as a bunch of the holiday season heavy hitters are now available for your home viewing pleasure.  Today sees the release of both The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey as well as Zero Dark Thirty, and in a few days both Les Misérables and This Is 40 come out as well. But wait, there’s more:  We’ve also got movies starring Lizzy Caplan, Luke Wilson, Parker Posey, and Haley Joel Osment.  We’ve got bachelorettes and shadow people, and also legless whale trainers and kickboxers. We’ve even got rust and bone.  All that and some cartoon lesbians as well!

The DVDs:
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Zero Dark Thirty
Les Misérables
This Is 40
Bachelorette
Straight A’s
Price Check
Sassy Pants
Rust And Bone
The Girl
The Other Son
Hellgate
Shadow People
Adventures In Appletown
23 Minutes To Sunrise
Strange Frame

Streaming: check out your choices here.

I know you’re intrigued by the legless whale trainer, so continue reading to find out which movie has her. You might as well; you’re already going to in search of those cartoon lesbians.  On the other hand, if you insist that you only see movies with real, live, two-legged straight women, you can always just click the link for the streaming picks, but to be honest, most of the DVDs have straight, legged (and straight-legged) women in them as well, so it would still be your loss. Read the rest of this entry »

Today in awards shows too numerous to keep track of, Argo wrapped up the last of the guild awards, taking home a WGA for screenwriting, after previously taking top honors in the PGA, DGA, and SAG, which all sound like complex euphemisms for handjobs to me. In a symbolic way, I suppose they are. I don’t like to brag, but the first line of the second paragraph of my Argo review was “this movie is going to clean up come awards season,” and I had Oscar in the headline. Basically, I’m the odds-on favorite to take home a Golden Toldja at this year’s bloggies, held in Harry Knowles’ boat shed.

Original Screenplay
Flight – John Gatins (Paramount Pictures)
Looper – Rian Johnson (TriStar Pictures)
The Master – Paul Thomas Anderson (The Weinstein Company)
Moonrise Kingdom – Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola (Focus Features)
Zero Dark Thirty – Mark Boal (Columbia Pictures) – WINNER

Adapted Screenplay
Argo – Chris Terrio (Warner Bros. Pictures) – WINNER
Life of Pi – David Magee (20th Century Fox)
Lincoln – Tony Kushner (DreamWorks Pictures)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower – Stephen Chbosky (Summit Entertainment)
Silver Linings Playbook – David O Russell (The Weinstein Company)

Documentary
The Central Park Five – Sarah Burns, David McMahon and Ken Burns (Sundance Selects)
The Invisible War – Kirby Dick (Cinedigm Entertainment Group)
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God – Alex Gibney (HBO Films)
Searching for Sugar Man – Malik Bendejelloul (Sony Pictures Classics) – WINNER
We Are Legion – Brian Knappenberger (Cinetic Media)
West of Memphis – Amy J. Berg and Billy McMillin (Sony Pictures Classics)

Searching for Sugar Man is similarly dominating the documentary category, adding a WGA to its Critic’s Choice Award, BAFTA, and Golden Globe.

But to be fair, you have to question the judgment of any organization that nominated Flight and Perks of Being a Wallflower for writing awards. Denzel’s already-cheesy, you-knew-this-was-coming turning point relied on his hardly believable and never-before-referenced need to honor a dead chick, and the way the film communicated to the audience that its protagonist had learned a lesson was to have him give a big speech about the lesson he learned. A lesson that could’ve been any speech at an AA meeting. It was one of the more clumsily-written movies of the year. Even Argo, which I mostly liked, had a tacked-on, overly dramatic ending that felt like someone taking a real, already-compelling story and trying to Hollywood-ify it. And no nominations for Tarantino or Magic Mike or The Sessions? Ar-go f*ck yourself.

TV awards below:

Read the rest of this entry »

Esquire has a big feature on the SEAL who shot Osama Bin Laden, headlined “The Man Who Killed Osama bin Laden… Is Screwed,” and if that doesn’t make you want to read it, nothing I can say is going to. It’s a great (and necessary) read, but for our purposes, the section on the actual Bin Laden killing is of interest. One of the main thrusts of criticism in my Zero Dark Thirty review was that it didn’t show a single discussion about whether the Bin Laden mission was a kill mission, and that no one ever even used a euphemism for killing when they were talking about it ahead of time. I thought it was weak that they just left that out. Since I pride myself on admitting it when I’m wrong, I can admit that I was at least half wrong about that, at least as it pertained to the SEALs. As it pertained to the SEALs, the way the shooter tells it, the mission went down just as the movie depicted:

Everybody wanted him dead, but nobody wanted to say, Hey, you’re going to kill this guy. It was just sort of understood that’s what we wanted to do.

Here’s a longer passage:

There was bin Laden standing there. He had his hands on a woman’s shoulders, pushing her ahead, not exactly toward me but by me, in the direction of the hallway commotion. It was his youngest wife, Amal.
He looked confused. And way taller than I was expecting. He had a cap on and didn’t appear to be hit. I can’t tell you 100 percent, but he was standing and moving. He was holding her in front of him. Maybe as a shield, I don’t know.

For me, it was a snapshot of a target ID, definitely him. Even in our kill houses where we train, there are targets with his face on them. This was repetition and muscle memory. That’s him, boom, done.
I thought in that first instant how skinny he was, how tall and how short his beard was, all at once. He was wearing one of those white hats, but he had, like, an almost shaved head. Like a crew cut. I remember all that registering. I was amazed how tall he was, taller than all of us, and it didn’t seem like he would be, because all those guys were always smaller than you think.

I’m just looking at him from right here [he moves his hand out from his face about ten inches]. He’s got a gun on a shelf right there, the short AK he’s famous for. And he’s moving forward. I don’t know if she’s got a vest and she’s being pushed to martyr them both. He’s got a gun within reach. He’s a threat. I need to get a head shot so he won’t have a chance to clack himself off [blow himself up].

Read the rest of this entry »

“Just relax and let the laziness take you, I learned this from the Happy Madison guys.”

Not surprisingly, Zero Dark Thirty waterboarded surfed a wave of good and bad publicity that’s been building for months to a $24 million gross for the weekend. Analysts say an eventual gross near $100 million is a possibility, though Sony shouldn’t start patting themselves on the back just yet, considering that other Navy SEAL movie, with no famous actors, directors, awards or acclaim, actually out-opened Zero Dark last February, with $24.5 million.

Meanwhile, remember the trailer for that Wayans spoof that we’ve been bombarded with all they way through the holiday season? The one with jokes such as “fart,” “that kitchen has a lot of pots,” “the psychic is a gay,” and “Yeah, I kicked you in yo ghost balls!”? That one? Yeah, that one made $18.8 million dollars. I don’t even know anymore, man.

In second place, A Haunted House grossed an estimated $18.8 million from 2,160 locations (which translated to a higher per-theater average than Zero Dark Thirty). [!!! -Ed.] That’s the best start for a spoof movie since 2006′s Date Movie ($19.1 million), though it’s generally in line with Epic Movie ($18.6 million) and Meet the Spartans ($18.5 million) as well. Using these as comparable titles, A Haunted House should ultimately wind up with between $35 and $40 million, making this a solid early-year performer for distributor Open Road Entertainment.

The audience was 58 percent female, 48 percent African American, and 30 percent Latino, and they gave the movie a weak “B-” CinemaScore. [BoxOfficeMojo]

That’s right, even a self-selecting group that thought seeing A Haunted House was a good idea, based on all the fart beds and ghost balls, even those people thought it was just so-so. Let us remember, Kevin James’ Here Comes the Boom received an A cinemascore. Simply stunning. If you want to make lots of money writing comedy, just remember two things: never self-edit, and never spend more than 30 seconds writing a joke.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s impossible to review Zero Dark Thirty without having to infiltrate a room full of political lasers like Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment (much nicer metaphor than a mine field, isn’t it?). But you invite that when your movie screams “THIS IS TRUE” at the beginning, like Zero Dark Thirty does in its opening “real events” title card. You can’t just forgive everything in the guise of “but it’s a movie!” when the movie is so clearly telling you that it’s fact. Thus, whether Zero Dark Thirty correctly depicts torture isn’t nitpicking, it’s relevant. So is it “pro-torture,” as John McCain, Dianne Feinstein, and others have alleged? Mark Bowden, who wrote a book about the search for Bin Laden, says it’s not. Alex Gibney, who directed a movie about torture, doesn’t quite say Zero Dark Thirty is pro torture, but says it’s irresponsible.

To make a long story short and an answer predictable, they’re both right. Zero Dark Thirty is not immoral because it depicts torture as it was (something that happened, a context, a small part of the story but not a major player) without taking a particular stance. But it is a little amoral that it doesn’t seem to take any stance. It even omits key events to keep from having to. From an artistic standpoint, it doesn’t seem particularly concerned with humans. It feels like an attempt to create suspense with no soul. Bowden’s rule of thumb for dramatizing a true story responsibly is that you can invent, but you have to “color inside the lines” of the truth. That is, you create fictions within the unknowns without altering the shape of the facts. Zero Dark Thirty mostly does that, but it also omits big chunks of them (we’ll get to that). Artistically, another problem is, who is Jessica Chastain’s character? I watched the whole movie and I still know nothing about her. Zero Dark Thirty invents a character with no apparent personality to tell a story the broad strokes of which we already know. How does that help? It even makes the movie dull at times, like a dry and talky procedural. The lady next to me was snoring loudly.

The Hurt Locker, for all the massive liberties it takes with actual military tactics, had a compelling protagonist and a clear perspective. “War is a drug.” What’s Zero Dark Thirty‘s perspective? Redheads are smart? Incorrectly or not, people jumped to “torture is good” because there’s a vacuum of anything else.

Gibney says ZDT is wrong because it doesn’t use its opportunity to argue against torture:

Read the rest of this entry »