Review: Depp & Tonto (and The Lone Ranger, Too)

This review was originally published in my weekly column at Towleroad

If Hollywood has its own wild wild west, a mythic frontier to tame, it is undoubtedly a time rather than a place: Next Summer. And the one after that. Release dates famously come before screenplays and the studios start laying down their tracks to get there: concept, screenplay, pre-production, casting, filming, editing, promotion, release though not usually quite in that sensible artistic order. Budgets often balloon on the way to the imagined gold at the end of the line. Or silver, as is the case with the name of a certain iconic horse, and the coveted metal driving the plot and the literal train tracks in the new version of THE LONE RANGER.

Hollywood hasn't revived this particular franchise in over 30 years, for what one assumes are three reasons: westerns have been notoriously difficult sells for modern mainstream audiences; the last time they attempted this franchise, it failed; and the Tonto character opens you up to charges of racism and cultural insensitivity in modern times. But if anyone could revive this dead franchise and skirt these issues, the thinking went, wouldn't it be director Gore Verbinski and his masses-beloved star Johnny Depp (rumored to have some sort of Cherokee heritage, and adopted into the Comanche Nation last year) who together did the impossible 10 years ago in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, making a well reviewed, Oscar-nominated, mega-blockbuster out of a famous amusement park ride while also navigating another even more notoriously pricey and difficult to sell outmoded genre: the pirate movie!

The director and star aren't so lucky this time around. [more]

Click to read more ...

Stage Door: Snow White's Final Humiliation in "WS"

I'm not sure that "stage door", our live theater series, is the right place for a video installation but since it's only "live" in NYC, here goes... 

If Snow White were a real Princess rather than a fictional one, you'd have to consider her corpse thoroughly exhumed by now. From the 75th anniversary of Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) which we celebrated right here through the release of three new filmed incarnations of the princess (Snow White and the Huntsman, Mirror Mirror and, the best of them, Spain's silent feature Blancanieves) and even a Broadway show Vanya and Sonia and Sasha and Spike which uses her costume (on Sigourney Weaver) as plot device and laugh generator, Snow White just isn't getting any sleep these days. She must be exhausted. But sleep deprivation might just be preferrable to the nightmare she's experiencing on Park Avenue right about now...

Elyse Poppers as "White, Snow" and Paul McCarthy as "Walt Paul" in WS

Read on if you can handle NSFW riffs on fairy tales...

Click to read more ...

How Many Biopics is Liz Going To Get?

Late last year Lindsay Lohan did her best Elizabeth Taylor for Liz & Dick on Lifetime though by all accounts her best wasn't very good. Now BBC is getting in on the action with the far more respectable Helena Bonham Carter as the movie star of movie stars. This will be Helena's most challenging role in a good long while, don't you think? [More after the jump...]

Helena as Liz & Liz as Liz; she did love her caftans!

Click to read more ...

Randomness: Wolverine and The Railway Bling Ring

Here's a collection of items that I couldn't be arsed* to talk about separately so I'm grouping them together. Join the conversation in the comments.

What is this?

It's the Pinoy poster for Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring. I hate the font and I have no idea why they've redressed Emma Watson in trashy whore drag (she does not wear this in the movie) but I love the idea of designer labels sharing billing with the stars. That's more than a little clever. Do you like? [Thanks to Ipe for bringing this to my attention]

Here's the latest promotional image from The Wolverine.

Post Man of Steel it is suddenly tremendously weird that Wolverine has less body hair than Superman, though he's still much veinier. Given my love for Hugh Jackman you'd think I'd be looking forward to this movie but it's literally the superhero movie of 2013 that I've thought the least about which I blame fully on the terribleness of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. If this one is only twice as good it will still be bad so they'd better step it way way up. 

Remember that long stretch of time in 2012 when my podcast mates started claiming that I had made up the existence of Quartet with Maggie Smith? That the movie did not, in fact, exist. Well it finally opened proving me right and even though it was quite bad it was a minor hit (Maggie's renewed drawing power) but each year there's a movie like it that feels half imagined. Here's the latest promotional image from the stealth Railway Man which may or may not exist given its lack of distributor or release date and the full calendar of its stars.

I hate that hair on Nicole Kidman but given all the greatness she's delivered lately via ad campaigns, on red carpets, in The Paperboy and on my freaking telephone, we will follow her anywhere... yes, even into frumpy hair and possibly dull "supportive spouse" roles. 

Chris Pratt Rebooted

Rebootcamped more like...

#GOTG No beer for six months. My brother made me post this. http://t.co/EFFkNFiWSD

— chris pratt (@prattprattpratt) July 7, 2013

We first sorta noticed this transformation through mounds of military fabric in the jolly Christmas release Zero Dark Thirty. But look at this. Even his face is transformed

I have had two beers in my entire life and I have never looked like this. Nathaniel wept.