Saturday, May 12, 2012 at 1:00AM Trying to catch up here so herewith, a quartet of big groups of male actors committing daring crimes/heroics in two minutes flat so that you can see the best parts* of the movies for free.
*that's how it works, right?
We'll break Argo, Expendables 2, Lawless and Ganster Squad down into quick threes via our infallible Yes No Maybe So™ system after the jump.
Monday, August 29, 2011 at 7:51PM Last night while Lady Gaga was living through an entire MTV VMA evening as "Jo Calderone" her male alter ego, I began to wonder if she could ever transfer to the big screen? In the past I'd always dismissed the notion but I think she pulled off that bit of theater last night. At the very least she sure is committed. And doesn't it seem that every major pop star eventually tries the silver screen. Britney Spears, who was also honored last night, did. Remember Crossroads? She didn't. For every Cher or Justin Timberlake who make a real honest go of it, there are dozens and dozens of musicians that fail at it or do okay but move on any way and their efforts are, generally speaking, quickly forgotten.
Which got me to thinking about Shanghai Surprise, which opened 25 years ago on this very day. No joke!
Madonna and Sean Penn, the early years
...though many thought the movie was.
Shanghai Surprise was Sean Penn and Madonna's first and last film together and it premiered just a year after the media explosion that was their wedding and subsequent volatile marriage. I haven't seen Shanghai Surprise since the 80s and the only thing I remembered about it before I took a wee peek today was that Madonna played a missionary who at one point just stripped into a white slip and seduced Sean Penn.
As missionaries do.
The reason Madonna was never much of an actress is that she was always too aware of the camera. It's a bit of an irony, since great film acting is all about an actor's relationship with the camera, but they really can't show that they're aware of it unless they're wildly talented and doing so on purpose. Otherwise, the audience just gets uncomfortable.
God Nathaniel, why are you reminding people of a rare failure?!
Still, for all of Shanghai Surprise's badness, whenever two colossal careers meet in some disastrous way that's recorded for posterity, it's kind of fun to witness / remember. Take the moment Madonna first sees Sean Penn above. She is prim and proper and he is a totally drunk, half naked man who's screaming at people in Chinese.
Madonna's only had a couple of lines before this, all of them entirely wooden. But when she stares at him in disgust and confusion, it's hard not to feel a bit sympathy as soon as you are also staring at him. Penn was already, by 1986, an acclaimed and wildly confident actor.
And he's ACTING enough for both of them, trust.
Look at that. [Displaying tattoo] He didn't even finish the nipples on my little sweetheart!"
Have you ever seen Shanghai Surprise? Do you ever think about which pop stars could make it as actors?
10|25|50|75|100, Madonna, Sean Penn, Shanghai Surprise Wednesday, August 24, 2011 at 1:45PM 
Gabby Sidibe snapped by Terry Richardson on 08/23/11 at the Our Idiot Brother premiereSome Came Running "The Trouble With Movie Stars" the distraction of stardom in The Tree of Life and other films.
Funny or Die Dave Franco in "Go F*ck Yourself". (I know he's James Franco's brother but he looks to me like the offspring of James Franco f*cking James Marsden.#amiright?)
Awards Daily has some words about Oscar's history with black actresses. This topic is about 200 times as complicated as anyone will ever claim it is but I am horrified to realize that there are still people trying to say that Gabby Sidibe just played herself in Precious. Anyone who has spent more than two seconds watching her on a talk show versus seeing her in Precious would have to be braindead to not notice the difference. Night and day.
Boston Wesley Morris on The Help. I sometimes feel like a fanboy when reading Morris's reviews . He's just great: anecdotal when it benefits the piece, funny without congratulating himself for it, and critical without being mean-spirited; his scalpel is sharp, his hand steady and he never accidentally lops off the joy of movies, while carving a fine point.
New York Times tennis rivalries and Andy Samberg portraying them. Fun!
Form is Void "5 from Dorothy Parker"
Cineuropa Joachim Trier's Oslo August 31st up for another prize. It seems more and more certain that this will have to be Norway's Oscar submission.
Film Drunk choice quotes from Ryan Gosling's Esquire profile.
Look, Helen Mirren arrives at the premiere of The Debt
I'm guessing she makes grown women half her age weep. Look at that bod! She is 66 years old.
Finally... I don't know how I keep missing the big stories but I didn't even know about the eastern Earthquake yesterday until after the fact when people kept asking me if I felt it? Felt what? This is what I tweeted about it.
Speaking of... so then I find it that everyone is talking about Ryan Gosling breaking up a fight here in NYC and I didn't know about that either. I'm in a fog!
Monday, August 22, 2011 at 6:40PM 
In Contention has an important addendum to the misleading 'Sean Penn hates The Tree of Life' stories circulating the net.
The Daily Beast It's recently come to my attention that Drew Droege (of "Chloë Sevigny" drag fame) has written musings about playing Chloë and meeting the real icon. She did not throw a drink in his face but kissed him and laughed. Love that.
Little White Lies has an interview with Conan's Jason Momoa in which the actor offers to scare the shit out of the reporter by doing the Haka.
Serious Film "Bridesmaids stands alone" in 2011's box office charts.
Movie|Line remembers Kristen Wiig's supporting bit in Adventureland
Cinema Blend is Germany next for world traveller Woody Allen's filmography? P.S. Did you hear that Judy Davis joined the cast of his current Rome picture? (Yay)
Oooh... new posters for Martha Marcy May Marlene from EW.
Misterioso!
Do you like? John Hawkes eyes peering out on the one to the left are spooking me! Remember how intense his stare was in Winter's Bone? I haven't tried it but those are actual working QR codes on the movie poster -- should take you right to the trailer if you have a QR scanning app on your phone.
Brad Pitt still has magic hair in his late 40s. The shirt is by Alexander McQueen.Scott Feinberg discovers a funny irony in the Drive press notes.
Today Movies on the funny women breakthrough of this, 'The Summer of Raunch'
Fandor gets the great South Korean film Poetry tomorrow, so make sure to watch it. This is a sampling of reviews. I was quite honored to be named a "standout" review, and keeping such fine company.
Michael Musto predicts the Tony nominees for Best Actress in a musical a year in advance. We'd say that's too early but then we'd be huge hypocrites (hello, Oscar fanaticism)
New York Magazine on Brad Pitt's Moneyball pitch. He's comparing his character arc, or lack of one (hmm....interesting) to 70s films, explaining that it's a drama about process and his character challenging the way things have always been done.
I thought of The Conversation: How do you tap a phone? Or Thief, with Jimmy Caan: How do you crack a safe? And I saw in it a guy who had an obsessive quality like Popeye Doyle.
I don’t really like big character-arc epiphanies. What I most loved about those seventies films is that the characters were the same at the end as at the beginning. It was the world around them that had shifted."
Monday, June 20, 2011 at 5:30PM This weekend I was collecting tweets about things people have overheard at their screenings of Terrence Malick's mysterious artful epic The Tree of Life.
I kicked things off with two stories from my screening. The first was two very old ladies teetering out of the theater arm-in-arm.
Some of that was very moving... but most of it was very boring.
Next came a bored middle aged husband and his angry loud wife...
Wife: I couldn't wait for that to be over.
Husband: It was...long.
Wife: It was a DAY long. I couldn't take one more symbol, metaphor or paradox.
Mikhael joined my "overheard" enthusiasm, submitting the following from his screening:
Woody Allen look-a-like to his wife: So tell me what that was all about?
Will Holston heard this:
Old Lady Yelling: CAN ANYONE TELL ME WHAT THAT WAS ABOUT?
Jake Cole saw a hipster in a fedora with a Che t-shirt who was above it all.
It's not as smart as it thinks it is.
And finally Erin had a very boisterous crowd so I think she wins. She heard the following random snippets, all of them utterly hilarious if you've seen the movie.
There's no acting!
Are we in the right film?
Are those sunflowers?
[during last ten minutes] Is that SEAN PENN?!
None of these comments surprise me and all of them delight me because The Tree of Life is so meditative and personal and open to interpretation that anyone can probably feel anything while they're watching it. I imagine that people who don't like their mind to wander, to fill in, to have associative adventures both scary and peaceful and god-knows-what-else during a screening probably become utterly unhinged. I like that feeling in a movie theater but I was unnerved a couple of times by the barrage of things I was feeling and the distinct impression that the film wasn't trying to make me feel them exactly and maybe the film wasn't even responsible for me feeling them... which was both exciting and annoying.
I haven't talked about the movie at all here because i missed the first wave or critical discussion (I have yet to read even one review) and was totally shy thereafter. I mostly enjoyed it but for its repetitive preciousness about prayers to God and the Sean Penn sequences. But I think in some key ways it's the most inaccessible thing I've seen in theaters since Matthew Barney's 10 hour Cremaster cycle (which I was gaga for) so I'm perversely enjoying that some unsuspecting moviegoers are tricked into seeing it by Malick's reputation and the twin towers of stardom that are PITT and PENN.
To be frank I adamantly believe that Sean Penn was a financial compromise the movie shouldn't have made. This part, which should only be a vessel to provide the visual passing of time, needed a complete unknown. His star presence kept taking me out of the movie -- 'Why is this big star Brad Pitt's angry son all grown up?' -- because Penn didn't have enough of a character to play to justify an "actor" playing it. Every other cast member seemed to have been utterly absorbed into the film like they were just appendages or organs powered by its brain, blood and nervous system. Brad Pitt in particular was fantastically convincing and period specific as the frustrated father. Unlike Penn I never felt like I was seeing "Brad Pitt". I'll assume you've read a hundred times by now that the child performances were sensational examples of the kind of "naturalism" that most movies don't ever attempt. One scene in particular with the two eldest boys in tall grass, one of them crying, totally unnerved and upset me and it's my strongest memory of the movie. Well, aside from the bravura creation sequence. Those briefly glimpsed dinosaurs had more soul than any screen dinosaurs ever, yes?
YOUR TURN. Sorry it took me so long to say anything. How unruly was your audience and how conflicted was your own response to the year's most challenging movie to see regular release thus far?
