26 01 2002
The new movie trailers are up on the Apple QuickTime site. They usually show up every Friday to coincide with their release in the theatres. Here’s what’s new.
Dana Carvey is back in a starring role as a Roberto Benigni-esque Master Of Disguise. His exceptional talent has been missed since he had to take several years out of the limelight due to frequent heart problems, so I’m glad to see that he’s back. Unfortunately, Dana appears too old now to play in a movie that looks like little more than a collection of stupid slapstick comedy akin to your typical Warner Brothers live-action movie. My hope is that this will be a launch for the next stage in his career rather than the phasing out of it. This one will be in theatres May 31, 2002, and in the “Previously viewed” video bin at Blockbuster by June 31, 2002.
The Time Machine has finally moved past the last of it’s release delays (hopefully). The movie was directed by Gore Verbinski (Mouse Hunt - bleah) and Simon Wells who is the great-grandson of H.G. Wells - the author of the namesake novel. Gee, I wonder if he got the job on merit alone? This incarnation of the film looks pretty sweet. Taking from the trailer, it would seem that there is a heavy dependancy on computer graphics in film - an ongoing theme for big-budget films that would rather spend money on WOWing the audience than a decent script. This is another film that was hit by the events of September 11. Given that there was part of a scene where a chunk of Earth’s Moon falls to earth and crushes New York, they had to remove it. Sometimes chunks of Moon can be mistaken as a commercial airplane. Assuming no more release-date changes, this one will be in theatres March 8, 2002.
There’s also the newest Video-Game-To-Big-Screen adaptation, Resident Evil. “Now better than ever with sexy Milla Jovovich!” The following is the plot outline from the IMDB webpage, and acurately describes the full depth of the film. A special military unit fights a powerful, out-of-control supercomputer and hundreds of scientists who have mutated into flesh-eating creatures after a laboratory accident. Taking from the trailer, it seems to be Return of the Living Dead meets the 3D artists. This one starts March 15, 2002.
Waking Up In Reno. Billy Bob Thornton. Patrick Swayze. Jokes about wife-swapping and a multitude of redneck jokes. I’m not going to waste 90 minutes of my life watching this film. I’m not even going to waste five minutes writing about it. Waste your own time when it finishes it’s limited release and comes to a theatre near you February 22, 2002. Yeehaw.
Adding to the long list of modernizations of Shakespeare plays, MacBeth is the most recent to be bastardized. This newest schlock matches the Scottish Play with the current love of the 1970’s. Countless high school students will be spelling MacBeth incorrectly for years to come, as Scotland, PA uses “McBeth” as the spelling for the characters. The reasoning is that “McBeth” takes over his father’s restaurant and turns it into a fast-food franchise. Even from the trailer, it’s obvious that this movie is taking shots at McDonald’s. While the storyline uses Shakespeare’s MacBeth as a model, the characters only seem to speak in iambic pentameter when they’re high. Ethan Hawke did it with “Hamlet”. Even “Romeo + Juliet” managed to modernize the environment without changing the dialogue. If you can get Leonardo Decaprio to do Shakespeare, then modernizing MacBeth would be a cinch. Apparently they didn’t care. This seems to me to be a blatent act of plagarism rather than an homage to the Scottish Play. This one’s out in limited theatres now, and lets hope it stays there.
