Wicked 'Step Brothers' and 'The Wackness'

It has been a pretty funny week at the movies, and fun when it wasn't.

I'm sure that by 6 a.m. this morning someone somewhere canceled my temporary bragging rights of having seen The Dark Knight twice. Those sold-out midnight shows were backed up with 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. screenings in some markets (not ours that I'm aware of, but enlighten me, please).

It's nice to see such fervor for an excellent movie, as opposed to the similar rushes for Pirates 3: Dead Man's Chest and Spider-man 3. I'm hoping TDK takes away Spidey's opening weekend record of $151-million, just to again prove art, commerce and mainstream moviegoers truly can co-exist.

Those two TDK screenings were followed by three others. You can read about Pineapple Express elsewhere on this blog.

The stoner humor in PE plus the stoner dramedy of this morning's show, The Wackness, means Princess Di should've stashed more potato chips and Fruit Roll-Ups for me while she's in Fort Myers fishing with her girlfriends (at least, that's the story she tells me). This is the first week I've ever gotten cotton-mouth from sitting in theaters.

The Wackness features three terrific performances by Ben Kingsley (of course), Olivia Thirlby (which I might have guessed after Juno) and Josh Peck (who woulda thunk it, except Daly since he watches Nickelodeon).

Peck plays a just-graduated teen in 1994 Manhattan who supports his struggling, argumentative family by selling pot out of an ice cream cart. One of the best customers is his shrink (Kingsley), an old hippie with his own family problems. Thirlby his the doc's stepdaughter, whom Peck crushes on and she appreciates the gesture.

Writer-director Jonathan Levine re-creates Guliani-era New York with great skill and a dynamite soundtrack spotlighting Notorious B.I.G. and A Tribe Called Quest for Peck's character, and David Bowie and Donovan for Kingsley's. The movie drags a bit in the second half but has a Garden State/The Graduate coming-of-age vibe that I enjoyed. The Wackness opens Aug. 1, and it's mostly dopeness.

Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly could use some the mind-altering substances used in The Wackness because those boys just ain't right in their heads. Their second collaboration after Talladega Nights, Step Brothers, confirms they're two peas in the same twisted pod.

Step Brothers is a one-joke comedy that somehow sustains itself for almost two hours. Ferrell and Reilly play 40-year-olds still living with their respective single parents, forced to co-exist when the parents (Mary Steenburgen, Richard Jenkins) get hitched. Not many comedians could carry off acting like spoiled 12-year-olds, and these guys almost don't.

When the angle starts getting stale, Ferrell and Reilly are capable of saying or doing anything obscene to hold your attention. Step Brothers opens July 25.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get ready to tape something for the 11 p.m. news on Ch. 10 regarding the Dark Knight phenomenon occurring. Then I'm hightailing it to New Port Richey to meet T-Bone, who invited me to help park cars at the 30th reunion of a Gulf High class that graduated four years after me.

Not a hard job; we're sitting in a golf cart for an hour or two, drinking beer and waving at cars. Then we'll hit the party inside, at the riverfront home of a guy who was an usher at my first wedding, something that neither of us bring up anymore. Nice warmup for Saturday night's Rays game at the Trop, followed by an M.C. Hammer concert, then Sunday by an Ybor City shindig at Columbia Restaurant for a local film production I'll tell you about later.

You know, you really can't touch this.

Pleading the Fifth on Pineapple Express

I refuse to testify how hilarious Pineapple Express often can be, on the grounds that it may tend to incriminate me.

Well, not me but everyone I've witnessed smoking copious amounts of hi-grade marijuana at rock concerts, family reunions and piano recitals. Those folks will think Pineapple Express is a documentary.

Seth Rogen's reefer madness movie doesn't open until Aug. 8. Columbia Pictures provided an early screening last night, probably expecting short-term memories to lapse so people who attended will buy tickets later.

Even if you've never partaken of heathen weed, Pineapple Express can provide a contact high. Rogen plays Dale Denton, a usually-stoned process server who dates a high school student and witnesses a murder committed by a police officer (Rosie Perez) and a drug dealer (Gary Cole). Frightened for his life, Dale seeks pot, protection and munchies from his cannabis contact, Saul Silver (scary funny James Franco). Things get messy, with a third wheel (Danny McBride, The Foot Fist Way). breaking out big guns and bad attitude.

Pineapple Express -- the title refers to a potent strain of Hawaiian pot -- is basically Cheech & Chong & Brad Pitt's True Romance character meet Lethal Weapon, oh, let's say 3. It's entirely based on shock comedy, from explicit language to ears being shot off. It gets a bit tiring in the second half; the stream-of-consciousness humor goes from stoned inspiration to those mumbles just before someone nods off.

But you can count on its core audience embracing Pineapple Express, and imitating its crudest gags, like constructing a crucifix-shaped joint, or hitchhiking with one's thumb suggestively protruding from a pants zipper, or... hey, man, does that popcorn have butter on it?
 

48 Hour Film Project returns

This weekend, dozens of Tampa Bay's ambitious filmmakers -- and you know who you are -- will partake in a terrific creativity exercise, and maybe jump-start a career or two.

The 48 Hour Film Project is a national contest allowing teams of filmmakers to create a short film in randomly selected categories... with a 48-hour deadline. I wrote about the marathon endeavor and some of the participants last year. Some excerpts from the news release:

"Before the contest begins, each team will get a character, a prop, a line of dialogue and a genre, all to include in their movie. The winning team will be invited to attend the Filmapalooza Awards weekend, held in March (in a city to be announced) and will go on to participate in the second round competition. The contest concludes with a big-screen debut at Channelside Cinemas (on Wednesday, July 23)

"Teams will meet at Limey’s Pub, 1492 4th Street N. in St. Petersburg, before the 48 Hour Film Project begins. Filmmakers will then hit the streets of Tampa Bay to begin filming."

Fun time, fun people, and a fascinating endurance test. Check out my story from last year for a taste.

The Dark Knight: Superheroic Shakespeare

I'm pleased to announce that everything extraordinary you're heard, read, speculated and prayed for regarding The Dark Knight is absolutely true. This isn't only the greatest comic book movie ever, and one of the top-10 or so action flicks, it's the Academy Awards' ticket to engaging a moviegoing public believing the Oscars don't speak for their tastes, and caring less about the show each year.

That's right. I'm guessing The Dark Knight will be a best picture finalist next spring. And academy voters don't need to worry about compromising their high-falutin' standards. Director/co-writer Christopher Nolan crafted a ruthless epic of adrenaline -- which the academy typically stashes in technical categories -- and labyrinthine morality and ethics no less complex and compelling as The Departed and No Country for Old Men. The Dark Knight deserves mention in such Oscar-winning company.

A more mature take on a pop culture fantasy is impossible, unless you get bogged down in the hero's psychology, as Nolan did in Batman Begins. Now that the origins stuff is handled (again), The Dark Knight begins with a diabolically timed bank heist, popping the seal on a 24-pack of whoopass to come. The action is mostly hand-to-hand (or club or whatever's handy), except for a few vehicular assaults that are obviously old-school destruction, not that CG stuff.

Characters who are familiar now get right down to business: Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) with his Hamlet angst, divided between his bruising alter ego, a romance blocked by a worthy rival (with a delicious subtext possibly making its completion the end of the Caped Crusader), and empty starlet-hopping to keep up appearances.

Meanwhile, a maze of money laundering crooks, corrupt law officials and Gotham Cityites who aren't sure if Batman's needed anymore create opportunities for cold-blooded double crosses, copycat Batmen, a cameo by an old Bat-nemesis and a few more of those wonderful toys.

And I haven't even gotten to the best part.

The Joker is, indeed, wild in The Dark Knight, embodied by a truly terrifying performance by the late Heath Ledger. A self-described "agent of chaos," this Joker is a supersonic psycho making Javier Bardem's killer in No Country for Old Men seem like a rational kind of guy. Ledger goes all the way with catastrophic malevolence,  with none of the clownish aspects Jack Nicholson previously brought to the role.

His jokes -- like a disappearing pencil trick you won't believe and won't want to try -- are deadly serious.

"Whatever doesn't kill you simply makes you stranger," Joker says early on. Ledger's death in January of an accidental prescription drug overdose makes his delivery of lines like that even eerier. But not in an exploitative way. His demise informs the role of a criminal with no regard for anyone's life, especially his own. Ledger's death simply makes the Joker stranger.

I fully expect him to get a posthumous Oscar nomination for this, and it won't be a sympathy thing. Along with Bardem's Chigurh, Robert De Niro's Max Cady and Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter, we now have one helluva Mount Rushmore of mayhem.

Andy Kaufman meets WALL-E

I'm so happy that I didn't have this job in 1981 when Heartbeeps was released (or escaped, as the old joke goes). I might not have the will to go on.

Heartbeeps is one of those scorching Hollywood mistakes that I'd never seen, until it popped up on the TV program guide and I figured that's why God created TiVo. I always loved Andy Kaufman's dada humor, and Bernadette Peters was always a kewpie-doll fantasy. Watching them play futuristic (actually 2005, but that was the future back then) robots in love can't be too bad, right?

Wrong. Heartbeeps is as inept as filmmaking gets, with static direction, pointless "jokes," saccharine allegories to marriage, and special effects too cheesy for a movie costing $10-million a generation ago (probably five times that much in today's money).  So bad that it actually opened at Christmas -- traditionally one of the busiest times at theaters -- and only sold a half-million dollars in tickets opening weekend. After $2-million in sales, Heartbeeps was mercifully put to sleep.

But there are a few things about Heartbeeps making it must-see junk, many involving "Philco," a baby robot built by Kaufman and Peters.

Look at this photo of Philco and notice the resemblance to WALL-E, currently boring children in theaters nationwide. The resemblance is even stronger when Philco is clanking through a massive junkyard that also could've "inspired" Pixar's animation crew. I know it's fashionable to say WALL-E is a dead ringer for Number Five from Short Circuit, but the physical and aural similarities (not to mention the lagging fun factor) shared with Philco are remarkable.

Hmmmm...

Even more jaw-dropping: the voice (actually just beeps and boops) for Philco was provided by... get this!... the late Jerry Garcia, guitarist and lead head for the Grateful Dead. You can look it up.

Furthermore, the musical score was composed by none other than John Williams, and the late Stan Winston (Jurassic Park, Aliens) earned his first Oscar nomination for making Kaufman and Peters look like the Eveready family a decade before the battery commercials.

Toss in an embarrassing role for former Oscar nominee Randy Quaid, a smart part in a dumb orange jumpsuit for a young Christopher Guest and Borscht Belt comedian Jack Carter voicing a creepy robot named Catskill, and you have a lot of talent floundering for your non-pleasure. I think the movie can only be found in the fine print of their resumes.

Check it out, if you dare. Now I'm getting ready to (hopefully, probably) rinse the bad taste from my mouth and the sting from my eyes with a screening of The Dark Knight. Check back later today for some first impressions.

Mamma Mia! Is there anything Meryl Streep can't do?

Never liked ABBA that much, except for Dancing Queen and that was because of this Greenwich, Conn. deb I was dating at a Kansas college. She was one of only two females in the place who didn't look like goat herders. The other was from California, dating a football teammate who later became one of the goons cornering Crocodile Dundee in an alley, learning what a real knife looks like.

But that's another story.

Thought of that deb tonight while watching Mamma Mia! (but don't tell Princess Di). The movie was more fun, in an Across the Universe kind of scatter-shot way. The Broadway musical, and now the movie, isn't an organically conceived musical, like Sweeney Todd or Chicago, with songs created to serve a story planned before the first note was struck.

Like last year's Beatles cine-jukebox, Mamma Mia! strings together pop hits in whatever order a simplistic plot demands. Meryl Streep's daughter is getting married and wants to meet her father. But Meryl was a bit of a slut -- her word, not mine -- in days and nights gone by. Any of three men (Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgard) could be the father. The daughter secretly invites them all to the Greek island where she lives with Mom.

Harmonies ensue.

Practically against your will, ABBA's impossibly peppy melodies, ravishing locales and a cast who can mostly sing but are interesting when they can't (I'm looking at you, 007), Mamma Mia turns out to be a lot of fun. The string-along structure isn't as much of a deficit as one might think, with a few clever assignments of puppy love ditties to mature women.

Mix Grease with Sex and the City (with a dash of Under the Tuscan Sun) and you have Mamma Mia!

The key is Streep, who I knew as an exemplary singer from A Prairie Home Companion. Those were live performances by characters who performed. Mamma Mia! is lip-synched, which Streep precisely achieves (like everything else in her career) yet convincingly spontaneous in appearance. Unlike the divas in Dreamgirls, she pushes her performance beyond the recording studio.

Just one number -- a late rendition of the achingly romantic The Winner Takes It All -- now rates among my favorite musical scenes, if only for Streep's closing hand gesture, something so simple and casual that it could be a reflex, yet so perfect that she must have concentrated to make it so. I'm not sure if there's anything she can't do on screen. But I know nobody could do it better.

Free passes to see The Dark Knight

Got your attention, didn't I?

Well, kiddies, in the immortal words of Lili Von Schtupp: "It's twue, it's twue!"

If you want to see The Dark Knight for freesies -- in IMAX, no less -- meet the nice folks from tbt* in front of Lucky Dill restaurant, corner of Central Avenue and Third Street in downtown St. Pete on Monday, July 14, at 11 a.m. They will be handing out passes good for two admissions to a Tuesday July 15 night screening at Muvico Baywalk 20.

Don't be greedy. We're doing you a favor here, in gratitude for your devotion to all things Times.

Don't get there early and jam up the sidewalk during lunch rush. No purchase necessary to get a pass, but those Lucky Dill sandwiches are pretty darn good.

Standing up for Red Dawn

You guys know I've always stuck it (in the 80's) to Steve Spears for his boundless admiration for the 1984 movie Red Dawn.

Now comes an intruder to the party who can't hold a candle to psycho-Soviet troops yet demands to be addressed with swift retaliation.

Today's page 2A had a Red Dawn-related item from our gossipy The Jizz -- oops -- The Juice. (Sorry, I was thinking about Max Rebo's brand of Star Wars swing music, or perhaps a birding technique, or maybe a characteristic impression left by an animal or plant. Where's your head at?)

Anyway, The Juice reported a remake is in the works. While I'll agree that's a bad idea, I take exception to the description of Red Dawn's original cast (Charlie Sheen, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Jennifer Grey) as "an unbelievably amazing cast of unfulfilled promises." (The Juice did give Patrick Swayze a backhanded compliment, though. I expected some kind of cancer gag.)

I submit that collectively starring in some of Hollywood's most memorable movies (Platoon, Wall Street, Back to the Future, Dirty Dancing, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Outsiders and E.T.) not to mention, in Sheen's case, headlining the top TV comedy today, is more than most actors can brag about. Definitely more than any gossip blogger.

Can't wait for Spears' response to this cyber-sacrilege of his favorite flick. But I've got his back.

WOLVERINES!

Meet Dave and say 'bye to Eddie

I'm not sure why Eddie Murphy went wrong. I can pin down the when (Another 48 Hrs.), the where (Santa Monica Blvd. where he picked up that tranny hooker) and the how (easy money).

But there should be more to tearing down a legacy than greed, sex and falling back on good will from other movies. Especially when you start out so unique, so much of the past and present that you look like a lock for the future. That's what Murphy was, when he created comedy as if he were the second coming of Richard Pryor before Pryor was dead.

Murphy was a stand-up storyteller whose routines on race, sexual relations and backyard barbeques gone bad (among other universal catastrophes) were carefully crafted with intense intent to make audiences laugh, of course, but also to make them think a bit while they caught their breath. A switch to movies was inevitable with his energetic charisma but, hey, even Robin Williams still tries now and then.

Thinking has nothing to do with Meet Dave, which could be a sequel to The Adventures of Pluto Nash. We all know what that means, even those who haven't seen it. To those readers: Your corneas thank you.

Meet Dave confirms Murphy's supposed artistic (as opposed to financial) comeback with Dreamgirls as a fluke. The ink wasn't dry on his framed Academy Award nomination certificate before Norbit showed up to worry anyone pulling for him to win. That could be chalked up to bad timing, a paycheck long ago cashed.

Walking out of the Kodak Theater shortly after Alan Arkin's name was pulled from the envelope wasn't a good move but Meet Dave is worse. It's a comedy so lazy that Murphy doesn't bother slathering on the latex makeup or fat suit. He only plays two roles, who both look the same although one is slightly more interested in the proceedings than the other.

Murphy plays a spaceship. Read that again and tell me if you think anything after that opening pitch will be good. He does silly walks, silly voices and silly seriousness when called upon. There is nothing in Meet Dave reminding me of the Eddie Murphy I loved years ago, except his face.

I heard Murphy say on the Today show that he's thinking about giving up movies. After Beverly Hills Cop 4, of course. And a remake of The Incredible Shrinking Man, which is an interesting title under the circumstances. And maybe anything else he can be coaxed into being paid for. Then he'll go back to the stage, but by then I wonder if he'll just be another Joe Piscopo.

Journey to the Center of Princess Di's Mind

So, I'm sitting with Princess Di, looking at the garden I gave her because she went to Italy without me (long story, but I'm dealing with it).

For some reason we're discussing Journey to the Center of the Earth, which we saw last night in 3-D and apparently can't leave behind.

So, we started with the yo-yo that Brendan Fraser passes on to his snotty nephew because the kid brought it with a box of stuff that causes the movie. The kid lays down his PSP to try this quaint toy, and Fraser informs him that yo-yos were once used as weapons. The kid flicks it into the lens a few times to make wearing those nerdy 3-D glasses -- some tech geek's revenge for a locker-stuffing -- somewhat worthwhile.

"Where was the yo-yo scene," Princess Di asks, "when the kid uses the yo-yo to bonk the dinosaur, or something?"

Of course it isn't there. Neither is a follow-up scene to several things that get attention and don't mean anything later. The obligatory chick, who's a mountain guide by trade, mentions two energy bars she packed but nobody eats them and the kid eats some kind of prehistoric gruel when he's starving.

Di wants to know why she didn't get caught with crumbs on her lips, a lesson for two dudes who took dibs on her affections on first sight.

Then Di mentions the dinosaur, who apparently had roughage before dripping lime-green goo on the kid's head, while chasing him for a meal.

"What is this creature eating?  Guacamole?," Di says, with foolproof logic for an illogical movie ostensibly based on science.

"How does he know he'll like the kid's taste? No humans have been down there in centuries except the one who got away in the prologue, so how does he know they taste good?"

I won't even get into her comments about the vaginal-looking plants that are man-eaters (get it?) or the weird father-brother-son-daughter vibe throughout.

But that's why Di is the right side of my brain. And why I wish she could be available for discussions before deadline.