Film: Best Review EVER -- Old Guy Finds Decline of Everything in The Dark Knight

By Noah Mallin

Was it only last week that Christopher Nolan's latest batflick The Dark Knight was riding high at 100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes? Well, the rest of the reviews are in and the bat has been knocked down to 92% -- hey wait, that's still pretty darn good. But Armond White of The New York Press is determined to blame the decline of western civilization, nay, the end of the universe as we know it, on Heath Ledger's last full performance. Seriously, his review says more about him than about the flick.

Choice bits? Coming right up:
"After announcing his new comics interpretation with 2005’s oppressively grim Batman Begins, Nolan continues the intellectual squalor popularized in his pseudo-existential hit Memento. Appealing to adolescent jadedness and boredom, Nolan revamps millionaire Bruce Wayne’s transformation into the crime-fighter Batman (played by indie-zombie Christian Bale), by making him a twisted icon, what the kids call 'sick.'"

Ah yes, the kids come in for quite a drubbing at the hands of White.

"Ever since Frank Miller’s 1986 graphic-novel reinvention, The Dark Knight Returns, pop consumers have rejected traditional moral verities as corny. That might be the ultimate capitalist deception.

A bleak Batman entraps us in a commercial mechanism, not art."

Holy commies Batman! Of course by crapping all over Batman Begins, Memento, The Dark Knight Returns and even There Will be Blood White actually overplays his hand and makes me want to see the freaking thing anyhow. Damn you capitalist lackeys!

Film News: Another Cool Trailer -- "The Wackness" Shows No Slackness

By Noah Mallin

Those of you who have caught Drake and Josh on Nickleodeon know that the duo is composed of teen girl-bait guitar playing singer Drake Bell and goofy lunk Josh Peck. Turns out Peck has lost a ton of weight and also grown some impressive acting muscles opposite Ben Kingsley judging by his new impossible-to-market film The Wackness. Flick is set in mid-90s NYC and features drug dealing, head-shrinking, and an Olsen twin. Check out the trailer:

Film News: Coen Brothers Get Goofy Again For "Burn After Reading"

By Noah Mallin

Fresh from the trailer bakery is the new one from the Coen Brothers, and it shows them reverting back to screwball form after the existentialist noir of Oscar winner No Country For Old Men. Burn After Reading stars Brad Pitt, Coen vets George Clooney and Frances McDormand, and John Malkovich in a cloak and dagger caper. Judging from the trailer it looks like a winner...

Film: Heston Dies -- Officially OK to Pry Gun From His Hands Now

An Appreciation by Noah Mallin

Actor, Civil Rights activist and former President of the National Rifle Association Charlton Heston has died at the age of 84. Heston's greatest stardom was in the 1960s and 1970s when he starred in films like Planet of The Apes and Earthquake.

Heston's political views, once liberal and pro gun control, morphed as his career cooled in the late 70s and he became a die-hard conservative opposing abortion and gun control.

Heston started in film in a silent production of Peer Gynt at the age of 16 done in 1941 by Northwestern University. His official debut was as Antony is a low-budget Chicago set Julius Caeser in 1950. It was his performance in Cecil B. DeMille's Academy Award winning The Greatest Show on Earth that made him a star.

In DeMille's final film The Ten Commandments (1956) he was a memorable Moses, competing with a bravura red sea parting and a ridiculous performance by Edward G. Robinson.

In 1958 came Orson Welles' brilliant Touch of Evil with Heston playing a Mexican born lawman south of the border with new wife Janet Leigh and stuck in Welles sinister web. Heston brings verve to his role as a paragon of straight-arrow justice in Welles dark depraved world.

He won an Oscar in 1959 for Ben-Hur an epic set at the time of Jesus and featuring the now famous chariot race. Ben-Hur became known later for it's homosexual subtext set forth by co-screenwriter Gore Vidal, and which Heston vehemently denied. Still he gives a riveting performance in a big overstuffed epic, something that would become a specialty for him in films like Antony Mann's El Cid (1962) and as John the Baptist in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).

Planet of the Apes in 1968 took Heston to a new pinnacle of fame in one of his best films as an astronaut who lands on the titular simian world. The film was massively successful and Heston helped sell the inverted racial allegory with a particularly bullheaded performance.

1971 saw him starring in The Omegaman a film based on the same Richard Matheson source as Will Smith's recent film I Am Legend but done in a very different way (think albinos with afros). His last great sci-fi-er was Soylent Green as a detective in a dystopian world uncovering a major conspiracy -- it's now best known for his plaintive wailed discovery of what the ubiquitous food source Soylent Green is actually made of.

Heston benefited from the disaster craze of the 70s in Skyjacked, Airport '75 and Earthquake. Though he would continue to work well into the 90s in films like Wayne's World 2 and True Lies he had become a celebrity first and foremost.

He also had a short run on TV's Dynasty and starred in knockoff soap The Colbys, which had a brief life.

Film: Filmmaker and Blacklist Survivor Jules Dassin Dies at 96

An Appreciation by Noah Mallin

These last few weeks have been something of a deathwatch at Planet of Sound with great masters going left and right. Now, just a week after one of his great leading men died, writer, actor and director Jules Dassin has gone.

That leading man was Richard Widmark, indelibly brilliant in Night and The City, Dassin's bleak London-set noir and the last film he would make before his blacklisted exile in Paris.

His first feature film, Nazi Agent in 1942 was an unusually fast-paced potboiler for staid MGM. Despite the silliness of it's twin switching Nazi tricking plot it's anti-fascist stance was consistent with the views Dassin would espouse for the rest of his life.

In 1947 he made the searing prison drama Brute Force starring Burt Lancaster. Though some of the themes are laid on a bit thick (this must be the most innocent group of prisoners ever) the harsh contrast between the unhinged prison administrators and the desperate prisoners is memorable, as are the stellar performances and Moody cinematography.

The Naked City, made the following year, was a groundbreaking police procedural and a classic of American cinema. Before the postwar period studio films were usually setbound, with a modicum of location shooting added for flavor. Dassin used real New York settings exclusively for Naked City, which effected a documentary like realism that revolutionized the industry. The city itself became a character with the intricate plot allowing a peek into the lives of New Yorkers of every stripe. The exciting climax on the Williamsburg Bridge is justifiably celebrated as a great moment in film.

The follow-up, Thieves Highway, was a gritty drama of gangsters and revenge, with a nasty Lee J. Cobb as a crooked trucker and Richard Conte as the man seeking revenge on him while getting pulled into the muck himself. Prefiguring in some ways the themes of both On The Waterfront and Francis Coppola's Godfather films, its stature has grown over the years.

His last pre-blacklist film, 1950's Night and The City, may also be his best. Richard Widmark gives a tricky morally ambiguous performance as small time hood Harry Fabian -- a man determined to wrest a bigger slice of the pie only to find himself as a main ingredient in it. The extreme bleakness of the film turned off mainstream audiences but stimulated filmmakers like Martin Scorsese who would apply some of that noir bite to 70s classics like Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. A tremendously influential and watchable film.

Dassin was named by fellow director Edward Dmytryk as having joined the Communist party in the 1930s during testimony in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Dassin could see that his career had been torpedoed and he faced the prospect of worse punishment by fleeing to France despite only speaking a smattering of the language.

France was beginning to experience a homegrown crop of directors like Godard that were influenced heavily by the noir staples turned out by Hollywood directors like Dassin, whom they considered to be autuers. Dassin would return to filmmaking before long, making his comeback with Rififi ( Du Rififi Chez les Hommes in its native title ) in 1955. A meaty heist film with a bravura nearly silent robbery as its centerpiece, it echoes many of the notes of hopelessness and dread that appeared in Night and The City. Again, the influence on future filmmakers like Scorsese, Sidney Lumet and Quentin Tarantino is unmistakable in its frank violence and fatalist themes.

He Who Must Die (1957) teamed him with his future wife Melina Mercouri and was cited by Dassin as his favorite of his own works. A complicated tale of power and morality set in Turkish occupied Crete, the story of an authority-defying priest who causes a town to take sides must have hit home for the exiled Dassin.

The audacious Never on Sunday was a massive international hit. Dassin cast himself as an enthusiast of Greek culture who travels there in hopes of pinpointing why the luster of the ancients seems to be lacking in its present-day citizens. Fetching Mercouri plays the no-nonsense prostitute that he fixates on as the object of his educational efforts. The Pygmalion inspired comedy was a tour-de-force for Mercouri.

Dassin and Mercouri

Dassin continued his lighter touch with a wryly subtle parody of his own Rififi in 1964. Topkapi had several touches that were tongue-in-cheek set-ups of the earlier film and starred Mercuri again (as was becoming customary) along with Peter Ustinov who would win an Oscar as one of the heisters.

Dassin and Mercori were exiled from his wife's country of Greece where they both served as thorns in the side of the fascist military junta. His 1974 film The Rehearsal dramatized the uprising of students against the military but the junta lost power at the same time as the film's release. They both returned to Greece for good.

Mercouri died in 1994 but her name lived on not just in film but in the foundation Dassin ran and which became a driving force for the return of Greek antiquities.

Clips:
The closing sequence for The Naked City:



Dassin and Mercouri in Never on Sunday:

Film: Actor Richard Widmark Dies

An appreciation by Noah Mallin

Richard Widmark was the paradoxical nice guy offscreen who played bigots (No Way Out, with Sidney Poitier), right-wing nutjobs (The Bedford Incident as a submarine commander on the brink of starting World War III) and a chilling giggling psychopath (in his breakthrough role in Kiss of Death.)

Kiss of Death was his first film, and for many the impression it left was indelible. Like Javier Bardem this year in No Country For Old Men the depiction of implacable malevolence onscreen led to an Academy award nomination for Supporting Actor. The same role netted him an apt Most Promising Newcomer Golden Globe for 1948.

In 1950 he starred in Jules Dassin's ultra-gritty noir Night and The City, as dark and ambiguous a film as American cinema would create pre- 1970s. Widmark is outstanding as a man trapped by his own relentless scheming -- both grotesque and sympathetic.

The same year also found him starring in Elia Kazan's groundbreaking Panic in The Streets, one of the new breed of postwar Hollywood films shot entirely on location, in this case New Orleans. Widmark slots in to Kazan's vaunted realist style here as the driven scientist rushing to protect a major city from a potential plague.

Widmark joined Director Sam Fuller for the noir classic Pickup on South Street in 1953. Widmark is punchy as an amoral pickpocket who finds himself in possession of government secrets. An apolitical man surrounded by ruthless communist agents and capitalist both ruthless and non, he threads the needle of Fuller's tight suspenseful masterpiece.

In 1966 Widmark helped instigate the theme of John Ford's last western Cheyenne Autumn, an unusual film for Ford that turned the tables on the plight of Native Americans in the 1880s. Widmark starred as the conflicted military man sent to battle peaceful tribes.

Two years later he starred as the title character with Henry Fonda in Madigan, a top notch police procedural that spawned a TV series in the early 70s also starring Widmark.

In 1974 he starred along with a stellar cast in Sidney Lumet's version of Murder on The Orient Express. Widmark played Ratchett, the man whose murder sets the central mystery of the film.

His last film was 1991's True Colors playing a patriarchal Senator alongside James Spader and John Cusack.

Widmark was 93.

Clips (as always hit refresh in your browser if they show as unavailable):

Widmark on 50's guessing-gameshow What's My Line:

The trailer for Night and The City:



Here's a bit of his freaky-deaky nominated perf from Kiss of Death:

Film: New Line Gets the Axe From WB

New Line, the former independent film studio founded 40 years ago by Bob Shaye, is being shuttered by corporate parent Warner Bros. The New Line label will still be used and its current slate of films will be released but it will no longer function as a separate entity.

New Line started off distributing off the shelf films and midnight movie fare by pioneering auteurs like John Waters. The 80s saw them scoring with genre fare like the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. Their biggest triumph came with Peter Jackson's ambitious Lord of The Rings trilogy which grossed billions worldwide. Shaye would subsequently have a very public falling-out with Jackson over profit reporting that grew to entangle the possible Hobbit prequel.

Movie News: Make it An All Apatow Summer -- Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Hey it's those two guys...and they're in Hawaii!

Judd Apatow has about 20 bajillion films coming out including Pineapple Express at the end of the Summer and Forgetting Sarah Marshall at the beginning in May. As you'll see from the trailer, Marshall (which coincidentally stars Apatow's former Freaks and Geek-ster Marshall from How I Met Your Mother) looks pretty darn good. Behold!

Film: OK Yeah, I'm Stoked For The New Indiana Jones Flick

Paramount Pictures has issued a new trailer for Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull and it looks pretty damn good. Best of all is that Harrison Ford looks properly aged, like a good leather jacket. In other words, not juiced up like human growth hormone spokesperson Sly Stallone. View it for yourself:

Film News: Adopting Chinese Babies Is So Totally Hard! Step Off Juno!

Juno: "I had no idea Chinese adoption was so easy -- and so callous! Screw your American baby!"

Because we are fast becoming a nation of oversensitive ninnies (apologies to all the ninnies out there) who can't take a pimp joke, the SFGate online reports that some people are getting bent out of shape by the film Juno . Well, more specifically one bit of dialogue from the lead character:

"You shoulda gone to China. You know, 'cause I hear they give away babies like free iPods. You know, they pretty much just put them in those T-shirt guns and shoot them out at sporting events."

Apparently they don't do that in China and any suggestion to the contrary is misleading, and hurtful maybe. Per the article:

"I know some people will say 'lighten up,' but that's not the point," Seh says. "The trailer is misleading" about the complexities of adopting infants from China.
"It's not only hurtful, but harmful," she says.

Ok gotcha. Also, despite what you saw in King Kong, do not mark down on your history test that Jack Black brought a giant ape back to New York in the 1930s where it commenced to go on a rampage. Because that's wrong. And hurtful.

Film News: John Alvin, Leading Poster Artist, Dead at 59

John Alvin, one of the great latter-day poster artists, has died of a heart attack at age 59. Alvin's big break was the poster for Mel Brooks' 1974 western satire Blazing Saddles. He would continue to do brilliant work for Brooks as well as for Steven Spielberg for whom he did the iconic posters for both E.T. and Empire of The Sun as well as the Star Wars series for George Lucas and the Lord of The Rings films.

Here are some of his best: