Forgetting Sarah Marshall: Let’s go to: Hawaii!
Where we’ll: Get over the hot Veronica Mars girl!
And while we’re there, don’t forget to: Do it with Mila Kunis!
Chapter 27: Let’s go to: New York City!
Where we’ll: Kill John Lennon!
While we’re there, don’t forget to: Gain 60 lbs. for a movie that never gets a theatrical release! (In your face, Jared Leto!)
Iron Man: Let’s go to: Iraq!
Where we’ll: Try out our new cluster missile!
While we’re there, don’t forget to: Become a lovable, alcoholic superhero — but only for pretend. Now put on a tank top and get ready to go back to prison, ’cause those guns are sure to violate your probation!

Also on DVD this week: Taxi to the Dark Side, CSNY: Deja Vu, Jellyfish, Kenny, Lou Reed’s Berlin, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, The Unforeseen, Beaufort, and Bigger, Stronger, Faster.

A full length trailer for Oliver Stone’s highly anticipated presidential biopic W. came out last week, and though I was already excited about this dynastic political acid trip of a movie, I can now officially say that I’m in it for more than just the novelty. This thing looks balls out crazy, and though the trailer is littered with SNL-esque snorts and one-liners, it also gives the impression of showcasing Stone’s refined skill for combining satire with subtext.

But I’m not gonna lie, the novelty’s still there. Josh Brolin’s transformation from dark-horse heartthrob to silver-spoon chomping idiot boy-prince is still something to boggle at, especially considering that Brolin’s last turn in No Country for Old Men seemed just as out of left field. Come to think of it, all of Brolin’s major appearances seem to come out of nowhere. Every single time he seems to pop up with a totally different kind of project, sporting a totally new brand of smoldering hotness, and making people go “Hey…isn’t that James Brolin’s kid?” as though he’d disappeared since Goonies.

So here’s a little cheat sheet to take you through all the major hotness incarnations that Brolin has visited over the years. And yes, that includes W. His chameleon like transformation into the 43rd president may be impressive and, indeed this picture does capture Dubya’s weird turtley quality, but there are distinct moments in that trailer when even with his white hair and terrified expression, the camera can’t help grabbing onto old JB’s rugged, chiseled features in a way that makes Bush seem kind of…well, hot. To understand the bemusing effect that this juxtaposition will surely have on your brain, just look back to that Screaming George picture at the top of the page.

In her classic tome From Reverence to Rape, longtime Village Voice critic Molly Haskell reflects on the deliberate way in which many films of classic Hollywood gave greater contours to the dramatic outlines of our daily lives and emotional experiences. She suggests that they often created a heightened artificiality – an emotional magnification that many viewers naturally warmed to as a product of self-identification or - more commonly - self-aspiration. In this context, glossy depictions of romantic love naturally took first place by default.

Those observations come to mind while watching Nights in Rodanthe, an unabashedly contrived, but not entirely unsuccessful Hollywood romance from director George C. Wolfe, scripted by John Romano and Ann Peacock, and adapted from the bestseller by Nicholas Sparks.

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On Friday, September 26, Paul Newman passed away at the age of 83. Because there are not enough superlatives to describe the man’s influence on movies, acting, and philanthropy, we propose this week-long Newman Film Festival you can have in your very own home. Each night includes a themed double feature, and an appropriate food choice from the Newman’s Own line of products.

Day 1 – Western Night
What to Watch: The Left Handed Gun & Hud

Newman played rogues better than just about anyone in the history of movies, but there were rare times when he played out and out bad guys. These two westerns, though very different in style, showcase this side of Newman’s talent.

What to Eat: Newman’s Own Organic Microwave Popcorn

Because a traditional genre like the western deserves the traditional movie treat.

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Despite Spike Lee’s carefully cultivated reputation as a firebrand and provocateur, his films have always betrayed the heart of a classicist. Directing Miracle at St. Anna, the biggest budgeted mainstream movie yet about the experiences of African-American soldiers in World War II, doesn’t phase the audacious Lee in the slightest; he opens the film in 1983 with the main character watching John Wayne in The Longest Day and responding to the Duke’s outsized American-ness with quiet pride (the flip side of Public Enemy’s assault on him in “Fight the Power”). Lee addresses the ghosts of both American movies and American history throughout the film’s 2 hour and 40 minute running time, but what makes the movie work is his commitment to traditional notions of story and character. Miracle at St. Anna is the opposite of a polemic, it’s a generous, old-fashioned entertainment.

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It should probably be noted up front that Choke is not a movie for the squeamish, the faint of heart, the easily embarrassed, or virtually anyone who isn’t game for watching modern life’s ugliest and most sexually explicit truths projected unapologetically on screen. But then, a viewer with such an uncomfortably modest predisposition should probably know better than to sit down and watch a movie like Choke in the first place. For the rest of us, the nastiness only adds to the appeal.

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Some films are like giant murals - vast canvases full of life’s greatest tragedies and triumphs. The Lucky Ones is the opposite of that, a finely-observed, gentle work where the slightest shifts in behavior indicate the characters’ complex inner-lives. The movie opens with T.K. Poole (Michael Pena) on patrol in Iraq, bragging about his bedroom skills. An explosion injures him, and soon he is sent home for thirty days. On the flight back he meets two other soldiers also headed home: guitar toting Colee Dunn (Rachel McAdams), a nineteen year old also on 30 day leave; and Fred Cheaver (Tim Robbins) a middle-age man on his way home after finishing his service once and for all. Thanks to a blackout, and some unexpected domestic troubles, the three end up traveling across the USA together for a while.

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D.J. Caruso is the kind of director that can really make a movie lover long for some vintage Brian DePalma. At least DePalma ripped off Hitchcock with some visual flair and conceptual perversity, with Caruso it’s all just so much inelegant, cold, incoherent excess. Watching Eagle Eye, it’s as if some second-rate Michael Bay wannabe got it into his head that he was suddenly the “Master of Suspense.” On the day of his brother’s funeral, a man returns home to find his apartment overloaded with high-tech weaponry and all the makings for a massive bomb: his telephone rings, an unidentified female voice issues an ominous warning, and the chase is on. It’s the kind of story on which Hitchcock built his career, and it may have actually been enjoyable had Caruso and company taken the care to inject it with a shot of personality, or had the director kept his camera focused on the action so some real tension could be built. An early car chase through the streets of Chicago has to be one of the most sloppy, carelessly frenzied joy rides ever taken on film. Like everything else in Eagle Eye it succeeds in keeping the viewer disoriented, but having your head rattled because the director decided not to lock down the camera and having your nerves wracked from the twists and turns of solid storytelling are two different reactions entirely: they may both leave us shaken, but only one leaves us truly satisfied.

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