Kong is Long
The long expected announcement of Peter Jackson's latest effort came through with the word from Universal Home Entertainment coming that King Kong will receive two DVD releases for the extended director's cut.
A three disc version of the film with a longer running time and several features will be coming with a suggested retail price of $34.98. At the same time, a collector's box will be available for $79.98. More details on extras and what exactly comes in that gift set will likely start popping up soon. Both versions will arrive on November 14th.
Pretty, tough women
The hot trend in movie heroines is not the damsel in distress. It's the damsel who causes distress.
Today's top actresses, such as Angelina Jolie, Keira Knightley, Jennifer Garner, Jessica Alba and Jessica Biel, have cultivated reputations as tomboy sex symbols, women with delicate features who can disarm a tough guy equally as well with a sultry look or a kick to the throat.
They are playing James Bond-type roles that would have gone to men 10 years ago, producer Todd Garner says. Casting a woman helps reverse the Hollywood axiom about what makes an exciting hero: Men want to be him, and women want to sleep with him.
"It's just flipped around: Guys want to sleep with her, and women want to be her," he says.
This new generation of tough babes follows in the bootprints left by Alien's Sigourney Weaver and The Terminator's Linda Hamilton Even Naomi Watts as the blonde who captures King Kong's heart in last year's Peter Jackson remake was more of a firecracker than the original's Fay Wray or even Jessica Lange in the 1976 version.
Hollywood is learning that a neo-feminist hero showcasing beauty, brawn, brains and seductiveness can appeal to both genders for different reasons.
Uma Thurman, who had her biggest hits as the volatile gangster's moll in Pulp Fiction and the vengeance-seeking Bride of the Kill Bill movies, is again testing the limits of male moviegoer masochism with the comedy My Super Ex-Girlfriend, opening Friday.
Thurman plays superhero G-Girl, who makes love to her regular-guy boyfriend (Luke Wilson) while flying over Manhattan and saves him when he falls from the Statue of Liberty.
But she also hurls a live great white shark through his apartment window when she's angry.
"There's nothing coy about some of these characters," Thurman says. "They're not simpering, soft-moaning creatures. They're kind of dynamic. And can't you be dynamic and sexy?"
The joke in the movie is that Wilson's character is much more infatuated with G-Girl when she's the intense, miraculously strong, invulnerable superhero and less interested in her secret identity as a mousy, emotionally needy art dealer.
"We've all been through it," Thurman says. "When somebody's really attractive and great but they suffocate you and need you much more than you're comfortable being needed, it's too much. You're not interested. And as soon as you're not interested, they desperately want you. And as soon as they desperately want you, they become kind of unappealing."
The male fantasy explained
My Super Ex-Girlfriend is the reverse of last summer's hit Mr. & Mrs. Smith, in which Jolie and Brad Pitt were a married couple tired of each other's blandness until each discovers the other is a covert assassin. The volatility brings them together. In Ex-Girlfriend, the volatility is part of the initial appeal, and the neediness when she loses that strength is part of the joke.
Playboy magazine editorial director Christopher Napolitano says fearsome beauty is a male fantasy. "It's an exciting thought for a guy to know that a sexy woman can turn on a dime and offer more than he can handle," he says. "They like the idea of being challenged. On the physical level, that's what men understand, while an emotional challenge might weary them in some way. It's mysterious in some way."
Kate Bosworth's Lois Lane in Superman Returns was slammed by some critics for being in constant need of rescue, with little of Margot Kidder's bravado from the Christopher Reeve era. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote that Lois "has lost her dash and pizazz."
Producers see fiery heroines as potentially win-win. It's a way to appeal to both men, tempted by the dangerous sex symbol, and women, who like the concept of an empowered babe.
"Movies reflect modern culture, and these films take female empowerment to the extreme," says Sanford Panitch, production chief at New Regency Productions, which made Smith and Ex-Girlfriend.
"I don't think women want to see a mousy, submissive persona being dramatized in a movie. That's not what women are."
Thurman said one woman she spoke with wished that G-Girl had remained a dynamo.
"She was bemoaning it on some political level. 'Gosh, she was great, but does she have to be such a cloying (brat)?' " Thurman says. "But would it be funny if she was a superhero who was invulnerable and fabulous?"
Characters such as Jolie's Mrs. Smith, Garner's Alias spy, Evangeline Lilly's outlaw castaway on Lost and Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean (who gets more sword fighting time in the new hit sequel) strike a nerve with guys because they clearly don't need the men in their lives, but they still want them maybe.
Thurman and director Quentin Tarantino pushed that dynamic even further in Kill Bill Vols. I and II. Her bloodthirsty Bride didn't want any man, having lost her fianc้ in an attempt to kill her, but guys from the characters she preyed on to the male moviegoers who flocked to the theaters couldn't get enough.
She played the ultimate game of hard to get and enforced it with the tip of a sword. Nothing Freudian there, Thurman jokes.
With the Bride, "there is something steely. She was not asexual at all, there was something quite sensual about her, but there was complete disinterest, a complete alternate focus. You see it in male characters so often, but in a dynamic athletic woman in the prime of the character's strength, it's a different thing entirely."
Sometimes, just sexy isn't enough
Not all action babes are a hit. Garner's Elektra and Halle Berry's Catwoman flopped, but most believe that's because the characters and stories were as thin as the barely-there superhero costumes.
Producer Garner says a film has to deliver more than skin to get men and women into the theater. The sexy character also has to be fun, smart, maybe even mean. He's now working on a sci-fi thriller called Next, which stars Julianne Moore as an FBI agent hunting a psychic (Nicolas Cage) whom she thinks can help fight terrorism.
"She's very tough, very by-any-means-necessary," Garner says. "She's gorgeous and sexy and intelligent and there's a moral ambiguity to (her).
"It's not just physical. It's very appealing to have someone who is your equal and above you, in movies and in life, and these heroes have that."
Thurman wanted her costumes to be more conservative than the usual superhero garb. "You think of supergirls, and they're letting it all hang out, promoting a very male vision of sexuality."
So instead of fluorescent, skintight spandex that is "pushed up and strapped up and huggy," Thurman chose dark colors, pleated skirts, big belts and tank tops.
"I really wanted there to be something sexy, but very athletic and very confident. A woman dressing for herself," Thurman says.
For every teenager who shows up to gawk at a scantily clad female hero, a character who comes off as trashy or exploitive turns off many other moviegoers and redirects couples looking for a date movie they both can enjoy. Emphasizing both sexuality and strength "helps you tell a story that broadens the demographic," Garner says.
Similarly, writer/director Neil Marshall toned down the jiggle factor for his horror thriller The Descent, opening Aug. 4. The movie features female spelunkers who get trapped in an ancient cave and discover predatory subterranean creatures.
"They're all physically attractive, but we didn't have them in wet T-shirts running around," Marshall says. "Instead they're strong and independent, and for certain people, myself included, that is very appealing."
Shauna Macdonald, who stars in The Descent, says: "It's not that men are finding stronger women sexy. I just think women are getting stronger."
Macdonald says her role model for the performance was Weaver in the Alien movies. "She was extremely tough and very sexy. She had cropped hair and was sweating and covered in snot and dirt and fighting a big alien and she still looked good."
McCready Beats DUI Rap
Mindy McCready won't be staying the night in jail--and she's got some new song fodder to boot.
The oft-troubled country singer was found not guilty Wednesday of a DUI charge stemming from a May 2005 arrest, although a Nashville jury did convict her of driving with a suspended license.
McCready, 30, was pulled over last spring for speeding and refused to take a breath test after police smelled alcohol. Kenneth Dixon, the arresting officer, testified Monday that the "If I Don't Stay the Night" artist had been wobbly on her feet and that her eyes were watery and bloodshot that night.
Attorney Lee Dryer had argued that his client, who was driving a friend's car when she was arrested, had actually been performing a good deed, giving a friend who was too drunk to drive a ride home from the nightclub the two had been at. Dryer also said that the sobriety test McCready was forced to take wasn't given properly and that the songstress had removed her shoes and found it hard to walk steadily in her supposedly too-long pants.
Jurors were apparently swayed by police video of the arrest, which was screened during the three-day trial.
In addition to avoiding the most serious charge against her, McCready escaped a contempt charge she was threatened with after arriving in court 10 minutes late Monday for the start of the trial.
Outside court McCready told reporters that she might use her personal troubles as the basis for new music in an attempt to jumpstart her stalled career. "This is one step in getting past a lot things," she added.
Those "things" include two suicide attempts in 2005--with one occurring while she was pregnant with her ex-boyfriend's child--and a pending $3 million lawsuit against said ex, aspiring country singer Billy McKnight, who beat her up two days after her arrest on suspicion of drunk driving. He has since pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and was sentenced to 30 days in jail.
On a happier note, McCready gave birth to their son, Zander Ryan McCready, on Mar. 25.
McCready is also supposed to attend a hearing later this year to determine whether she violated her probation by leaving Tennessee without permission. She was on probation in the first place after pleading guilty in August 2004 to using a fake prescription to buy OxyContin.
Kevin Smith Gets Critical
Kevin Smith is giving a big thumbs-down to ABC's Good Morning America's mustachioed movie reviewer, Joel Siegel, after the latter reportedly stormed out of a New York press screening of Clerks II, upset about its lewd content.
According to the New York Post, Siegel stood up about 40 minutes into a preview showing earlier this week disgusted by a scene in which the characters conduct a frank discussion about hiring a woman to get down and dirty with a donkey for a party. The newpaper said Siegel loudly proclaimed, "Time to go!" to his fellow media types and then stomped toward the exits.
"First movie I've walked out of in 30 [expletive] years!" the Post quotes him saying of the sequel, which follows the continuing misadventures of two convenient store slackers 10 years after audiences discovered them in the 1994 indie sensation Clerks.
"It was so foul and mean and repulsive. I finally realized I could not say anything positive," he said to the Post. "I wasn't ready for this kind of smut...I hope he doesn't make any more movies."
And with that Smith, who wrote and directed Clerks II and reprises his role as Silent Bob, became anything but quiet on his blog at SilentBobSpeaks.com, unleashing an expletive-filled rant over Siegel's remarks.
"As Paul Thomas Anderson once said of the man, getting a bad review from Siegel is like a badge of honor," Smith writes, adding that he was as "delighted by this news as I was with the eight-minute standing ovation Clerks II received" at the Cannes Film Festival.
Smith says he doesn't blame Siegel for feeling "revolted" by the donkey show--the Associated Press, for example, said of the scene in question, "Smith leaps brazenly into the abyss...It goes too far for too long and Smith just does not know when to rein it in (if you'll pardon the pun)"--but the filmmaker takes exception to Siegel making a "big stink about walking out" and disrupting the screening of other members of the press.
"How about a little common f--king courtesy?," Smith writes. "Never mind the fact that when you're paid to watch movies for a living and the only tasks required of you are to a) sit through said movies and b) write your thoughts about them before your deadline, walking out before a movie's over is pretty unprofessional."
He concludes by saying that he really, truly doesn't hate Siegel and was happy to learn the critic survived a recent bout with cancer, but still labeled his behavior "unconscionable" and "unethical."
Siegel was unavailable for comment Wednesday.
Siegel's antics aside, early reviews for the sequel, which opens Friday, have been wildly mixed. The review aggregating site RottenTomatoes.com gives the film a 63 percent "fresh" rating based on eight reviews, five of which were positive and three "rotten."
Here a quick recap of some of the early notices.
- "Politically incorrect raspberries and the umpteenth appearance of Jay and Silent Bob aside, a gentle feeling of nostalgia pervades this hit-or-miss sequel, which relocates the gang to the ninth circle of fast-food restaurant hell," writes Justin Chang in Daily Variety. "Clerks cultists will need no kicks in the groin to step up to the counter for this second go-round."
- "Smith finds himself back at the top of his game, especially after his most recent offerings," says the Associated Press' Christy Lemire. "Clerks II goes disastrously awry in the third act--almost irreparably so--but before that, when the insults are flowing and the graphic banter is crackling, the film frequently achieves a rhythm that's hilariously infectious."
- Arnold Blumberg of Now Playing magazine praises Clerks II as a "pleasant, affectionate look back at the characters that gave [Smith] his start, and a somewhat moving portrait of present-day thirtysomethings trying to make sense of their place in the world."
- "Here's hoping that Clerks II, Smith's most hilarious, emotionally honest and poetic (yes, poetic) film will be immediately recognized as the great movie that it is," opines Kevin LaForest of the Montreal Film Journal.
- Then there's Village Voice critic Robert Wilonsky who calls the film "little more than a recycling effort. If the footage weren't in color this time and if the actors reprising their roles were a little thinner, you'd swear this outing was cobbled together from outtakes." But, he predicts, "the fans will eat it up."
- Sean Burns of the Philadelphia Weekly pans the follow-up as "lacking the grubby authenticity of its predecessor, the movie feels clueless and out of touch. Sometimes you can't go home again."
Burn, Hollywood, Burn (DVDs, That Is)
Imagine. As of today you are able to burn a movie on your PC without worrying about it turning into a federal case.
The movie-download site CinemaNow has unveiled a new service that allows customers who buy films online to make a copy on disc that can be watched on TV sets via a standard-issue DVD player.
Studios and online distributors see the ability to watch movies on television--as opposed to a PC screen--as a key to making legal downloads a viable business model. Until now, however, studios were wary about permitting DVD-burning of downloaded films because copy-protection schemes weren't reliable.
"Today, our customers will experience a true innovation in home entertainment: the ability to obtain a DVD in the comfort of their living room," says Curt Marvis, CEO of CinemaNow.
The new service, a joint venture between CinemaNow and Disney, Sony, MGM, Universal and Lions Gate, features an initial offering of more than 100 big-name Hollywood flicks, including Barbershop, Charlie's Angles: Full Throttle, About a Boy, Scent of a Woman, Backdraft, Resident Evil: Apocalypse and Agent Cody Banks.
Customers must first download CinemaNow's Windows-only burning software (Mac fans are out of luck--at least for now, but more on that later) and then fork over $9 a pop for older titles to $15 for the fresher ones. The downloads include nearly all the bells and whistles of a DVD, including 5.1 digital surround sound, featurettes, commentary tracks and other bonus materials.
Marvis says the average download time will be about three hours--approximately the length of one Lords of the Rings installment.
One caveat: CinemaNow says that because the video is highly compressed to expedite downloading, the burned discs won't be as high-quality as commercial DVDs. But according to one studio executive, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
"We see the additive to the packaged media business, because functionally, retail can't carry every title," Benjamin S. Feingold, president of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment tells the Los Angeles Times. "I think that's good. If you can access My Beautiful Laundrette--that's the classic example of a picture at some point you'll be able to instantly download and make a copy for yourself. That's pro-consumer."
The same technology also prevents customers from burning more than one duplicate--a "feature" added to assuage piracy-shy studios that some pundits say is decidedly not pro-consumer.
CinemaNow will still offer rental downloads for $1.99 each.
The debut of CinemaNow's "Burn to DVD" service comes two days after rival MovieLink, which is jointly owned by Paramount, Universal, Warner Bros. and Sony, announced its intention to launch a similar online service by the middle of next year.
Meanwhile, speculation continues to mount that Apple's iTunes Music Store will soon be offering movie downloads, with an announcement coming as soon as the company's Worldwide Developers Conference next month.
According to the rumor site ThinkSecret.com, Apple has sealed deals with Universal, Disney, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. to make the studios' films downloadable to Macs and iPods.
However, iTunes will reportedly be more akin to the rental model, with the downloaded film viewable for a certain period before before "turning off." Apple declined to comment on the report.