Weekend Movie Forecast: <em>Morning Glory</em> Vs. <em>Unstoppable</em> - Photo Gallery

<p>It's kind of fun and a little sad to be around long enough to see where famous aging celebrities are put. We're not talking about some A-List nursing home (though that would be the best reality TV show ever), but the roles that these once highly-demanded stars are given as we watch them slowly die on the big screen. Now Diane Keaton has already settled into her autumn persona, a kind of hip grandmother who acts as a vehicle for the romantic desires of the post-menopause crowd in films such as <em>Something's Gotta Give</em>. Harrison Ford on the other hand, has had some problems finding the right character to play for the remainder of his career. He's tried the doctor thing, but no one wants to see that, and he's getting a little too old to be walking around with a whip, so that leaves only one more role: crotchety old man! </p><p></p> If you think about it, it's the role he's been building up to his entire career. In his younger, more youthful years that sass and gruff charm made him a man's man and rugged hunk for the ladies. Now that he's older, that same stoicism has aged into a cranky old man, and it should fit him like a glove. Coming out today is the light newsroom comedy <em>Morning Glory</em> and it'll give audiences a chance to see the curmudgeon in action. Plot: Rachel McAdams looks good and attempts to balance a love life and produce a morning talk show with two washed up actors. Delightful!<p></p>Reviews have been typical for your light comedy fare, with David Fear from <a href="http://newyork.timeout.com/arts-culture/film/579117/morning-glory">Time Out New York</a> saying: "Cast as a go-getter revamping a failing morning TV show, McAdams gives us one great scene: Having a million requests thrown at her during an editorial meeting, she methodically fires back answers, capping it off by sacking the office perv. It’s a winning mocha-swirl moment of motormouth and backbone. After that, we simply get 90 minutes of skin-of-the-teeth desperation and sweat-gland panic.<p></p>"Such as: How does one cast Harrison Ford as a Mike Wallace–ish hard-ass and Diane Keaton as a Katie Couric clone, yet totally fail to generate any comic chemistry? Or expect an oddly bland Patrick Wilson to genuinely compete with McAdams’s true amore, her job? Or suggest that veteran muckrakers should lighten up while also positing that the infotainment news world requires more journalistic rigor—and not see that as contradictory? This charmless movie thinks it can soft-sell its date-night love story and its media meta-jabs without people feeling they’ve been bamboozled on either count. "

<p>Now THIS is what cinema has been missing. We're not talking some CG action movie like <em>Avatar</em>, we need a real '80s-90s style action movie. One that relies entirely on the actors, stuntmen, director, editor, and explosion expert. Once CG gets involved then you're throwing nerds into the mix, and you know what that means...a watered down testosterone film. Now <em>The Expendables</em> might have overdone it a little, but today maybe <em>Unstoppable</em> will save our pansy-asses from movies that look like video games. Plot: An unmanned runaway train is carrying a cargo of toxic chemicals. An engineer and his conductor find themselves in a race against time. That's all you need, that and Denzel and an <em>unstoppable</em> train.</p><p></p>Reviews have actually been pretty good for an action movie, with Roger Ebert from <a href="http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20101110/REVIEWS/101119995/1023">Chicago Sun Times</a> saying: "The movie is as relentless as the train, slowly gathering momentum before a relentless final hour of continuous suspense. In terms of sheer craftsmanship, this is a superb film.<p></p>"The photography and sound here are very effective in establishing that a train is an enormously heavy thing, and once in motion wants to continue. We knew that. But Scott all but crushes us with the weight of the juggernaut. We are spellbound. And we sure hope those little kids are saved. "

<p>Movies about marriages are a particular kind of monster. Now there are many of us who aren't married, so that kind of cuts down on the number of interested viewers to begin with, then those people who are married don't necessarily want to waste their one "date night" seeing a film about how awful marriage can be. So the target audience for films such as <em>Helena from the Wedding</em> would probably be progressive, liberated, film students going on dates. This film follows newlyweds Alex and Alice (how obnoxious is that) as they throw a dinner party on New Years Eve. The night goes awry when Alice's friend brings along the young, beautiful Helena and things get a little real.</p><p></p>Reviews have been mixed with Jeannette Catsoulis from <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/movies/12helena.html?ref=movies">The New York Times</a> saying: "Plumbing yuppie fears may not be your first choice of an evening’s entertainment, but <em>Helena From the Wedding</em> has a little more to offer than many films of its type. Among its achievements is the kind of comfortable, shaded acting we expect from seasoned professionals and a script (by the director, Joseph Infantolino) that almost scarily captures the cadences of whining white privilege.<p></p>"As everyone eats, drinks, snorts cocaine and stares down 40, Stephen Kazmierski’s camera negotiates the cabin’s cozy interior and icy exterior with unhurried calm. The film’s gender conflicts are hardly new — guys fret over roads not traveled, and women worry about dwindling attractiveness — but the performers know how to sell them."

<p>Opening this weekend is the re-release of Todd Haynes's startlingly transgressive film <em>Poison</em>. Originally made in 1991, <em>Poison</em> is three interwoven tales inspired by the writings of Jean Genet entitled "Hero," "Horror," and "Homo," culminating in a devastating climax. “Hero,” shot in mock TV-documentary style, tells a bizarre story of suburban patricide and a miraculous flight from justice; “Horror,” filmed like a delirious ’50s B-movie melodrama, is a gothic tale of a mad sex experiment which unleashes a disfiguring plague; while “Homo” explores the obsessive sexual relationship between two prison inmates. Haynes is one of the most interesting filmmakers around and it should be a real treat to see one of his earlier films (that is until Mattel gets off their high horse and releases his amazing <em>Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story</em>).</p><p></p>Reviews have been great with Joshua Rothkopf from <a href="http://newyork.timeout.com/arts-culture/film/579289/poison">Time Out New York</a> saying: "Let’s set the stage: It’s nearly 20 years ago, when the Utah/U.S. Film Festival—only recently rechristened Sundance—was well under way, and Todd Haynes’s seething 1991 drama jockeyed alongside the likes of Richard Linklater’s <em>Slacker</em> and Hal Hartley’s <em>Trust</em>. More than anything, <em>Poison</em> represents a moment just before independent cinema became 'indie': skinny-tied, quipstery and cute.<p></p>"Hopefully, a young person would see Poison today, get ruffled by it and know that it represented a battle worth fighting. So much more than a signpost of New Queer Cinema, the movie is an invitation to be bold, to be artistic, to be defiant."

<p>Winner of last year's SXSW festival and future indie darling (hate that phrase) <em>Tiny Furniture</em> comes out today, and it's sure to please the mumblecore aficionados out there. The film follows 22-year-old Aura, who is returning to her artist mother's TriBeCa loft (we know), after getting a film theory degree from an artsy Midwestern college (yeah...), and being dumped by her boyfriend who's going to find himself at Burning Man (really too much). She ends up finding out that her trainwreck of a friend never left home and the two decide to get a job at a restaurant down the street where they can talk about how much it sucks being an aimless twentysomething (albeit white ones who live in lofts in TriBeCa).</p><p></p>Reviews have been generally very positive with the exception of one or two absolutely scathing ones, and a somewhat positive one coming from Noel Murray at <a href="http://www.avclub.com/articles/tiny-furniture,47582/">The A.V. Club</a> who says: "Lena Dunham’s <em>Tiny Furniture</em> is a rare movie that’s actually about modern life, so why does it feel like it was made by people who just landed on Earth two weeks ago? <em>Tiny Furniture</em> offers a 21st-century, East Coast spin on <em>The Graduate</em>, but with comedy-writer-ish dialogue and a mannered style that never fully gels.<p></p>"The result is a movie that plays like pages ripped at random from a smart screenwriter’s notebook, then reproduced verbatim by a cast and crew that doesn’t know what the pages are supposed to mean, let alone how to assemble them into what we humans call a 'story.'"

<p>Also opening today is the documentary <em>Cool It</em> which follows Bjorn Lomborg, the author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist," as he takes on the issue of climate change and the science and technology that can help us in the future. We're not sure how many of you are progressive enough to actually go to the movies for this, but for the rest of us it'll be a nice doc to watch off Netflix streaming in a few months.</p><p></p>Reviews have been alright, with Nicolas Rapold from <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-11-10/film/enemy-of-climate-consensus-gets-a-soapbox-in-cool-it/">The Village Voice</a> saying: "The nitty-gritty science of global warming is tough enough to evaluate without the sort of hard-sell Ondi Timoner pushes on behalf of her subject, Bjørn Lomborg. Author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and the movie's eponymous source book, the Danish adjunct professor of statistics became, over the past decade, a thorn in the side of the environmentalist consensus on climate meltdown.<p></p>"Even if Lomborg has a good case to make, it's short-changed by the film's selective centerpiece: Yale lecture footage in which he responds to the movie <em>An Inconvenient Truth</em> (complete with a hilarious cutaway to one audience member's the-man's-got-a-point-there nod). Timoner does present a colorful cast of supportive scientists and scores a funny dig at green-cause indoctrination with a classroom of schoolkids with cute British accents fretting over Dad's toaster usage."

<p>This should be interesting: this weekend at <a href="http://www.filmforum.org/films/bruceconner.html">Film Forum</a> is the showcase <em>Bruce Conner: The Art of Montage</em>. Bruce Conner presupposed the music video and then basically went on to invent it. His first film <em>A Movie</em> was an assemblage of found videos and newsreels, edited along to Respighi's sprightly "Pines of Rome." He went on to assemble strange videos such as <em>Cosmic Ray</em> which was a bunch of found footage edited with naked gyrating women and set to Ray Charles' "What'd I Say." The showcase includes most of his shorts and should be a great time out.</p><p></p> Manohla Dargis from <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/12/movies/12conn.html?_r=1">The Times</a> says: "Bruce Conner's ecstatic films — fabricated from bits of old documentaries and educational reels, from mass-cultural snips and snails and recycled movie tales — were at once salvage projects and assertions of individuality in an increasingly anonymous age. In their modest way (modesty, in this case, being less a virtue than a worldview), they were acts of resistance, an aesthetic rejoinder to a world drowning in its own image. Just as important, they are generally a blast — witty, exuberant, despairing, engaged, apocalyptic."

<p>Also opening today is the documentary <em>Disco and Atomic War</em>. This is one of the best types of documentaries, one that creates a portrait of a small town, country, or moment in a specific time and place. This doc explores the nation of Estonia in the '80s, still firmly in the grip of the Soviet Union, and how all influence of the West was kept out. That is until neighboring country Finland invented a huge new television antenna that broadcast western signals in all directions—including directly into the heart of the Talinn, the capital of Estonia, when cultural craziness ensued.</p><p></p>Reviews have been fairly positive, with Karina Longworth from <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-11-10/film/how-southfork-brought-down-the-soviets-in-disco-and-atomic-war/">The Voice</a> who said: "With tongues partially in cheek, director Jaak Kilmi and screenwriter Kiur Aarma, who grew up in the same neighborhood of Tallinn, Estonia, in the '80s, lay out the case that Cold War Soviet rule of their country was fatally eroded by Western pop culture, in the form of Finnish television broadcasts that drifted across the border.<p></p>"Narrating in deadpan English and weaving together incredible footage from Soviet archives and unmarked re-creations that almost pass for real home movies, Kilmi and Aarma detail their boyhood obsessions with the illegal airwaves, the seduction of entire families by disco dance shows and <em>Dallas</em> reruns, and the increasingly absurd, ultimately futile lengths taken by the Soviet state to maintain some semblance of control over the viewing habits (and thus, the hearts and minds) of the body politic."

<p>Opening today is the film <em>Con Artist</em> which follows a rock-star of the art world who, after getting major fame, is on the lookout for some major love (hey, we didn't write this, it's a documentary).</p><p></p>Reviews have been positive (all two of them), with Stephen Holden from the <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/movies/12con.html?ref=movies">The New York Times</a> saying: "Mr. Kostabi, along with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, seized the 1980s moment when the East Village art market was hot and rode it to fame and fortune. At the peak of his glory, Mr. Kostabi ran a Warhol-like operation, Kostabi World, that churned out thousands of paintings conceived and executed by a factory of minimally paid assistants. In 1988, according to the movie, he sold 1,500 paintings valued from $12,000 to $50,000 a canvas.<p></p>"The movie’s superficial explanation of his insatiable drive for celebrity ascribes it to the ostracizing of his family of Estonian immigrants in Whittier, Calif., where he grew up. Even in his prime Mr. Kostabi exhibited a certain cheeky bravado. He was never a glamorous charmer like Basquiat, his fellow art star who was also the subject of a recent documentary. The undeniable charisma Mr. Kostabi exuded in the 1980s seems to have faded."

<p>Finally getting its New York premiere (it came out in 1972) is Jack Christies' would-have-been cult classic <em>Voulez-vous coucher avec God?</em> The film stars Tuli Kupferberg as God, and it just gets weirder from there. The basic premise is an angel messes up and spends the rest of the 69 minutes trying to cover it up. It's not really a movie to read about, you just need to see it.</p><p></p>J. Hoberman from <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-11-10/film/tuli-kupferberg-is-god-and-a-shoulda-been-cult-hit-finally-gets-its-ny-premiere/">The Voice</a> says: "As strenuously druggy, anarchic, and blasphemous as it is, this 1972 feature might have been one of the many post–<em>El Topo</em> movies auditioned as a midnight attraction by the old Elgin Theater and might even have caught on. Instead, it's having its belated local premiere this Sunday as part of Anthology's tribute to Kupferberg, beat poet, Fugs founder, and Voice contributor (mainly in the form of letters to the editor).<p></p>"Slapdash, but not badly made, this exercise in Yippie vaudeville employs Claymation and television, as well as a bevy of naked houris, to hold one's attention—although it does fall apart midway. End title delivered as a moon notwithstanding, the climactic gross-out is the mouse omelet prepared for George—a repast that only serves to burnish the genius of John Waters, whose <em>Pink Flamingos</em> (the movie in which Divine eats dog shit) was the Elgin's midnight attraction for 48 weeks, from late winter 1973 to January 1974."

<p>Playing this weekend at <a href="http://www.landmarktheatres.com/Market/NewYork/NewYork_frameset.htm">Landmark Theater</a>, Sunshine at Midnight proudly presents the cult horror film <em>Doctor Butcher M.D.</em>. A flesh-eating cult appears to be flourishing in New York City, and in an attempt to find the origin of its activities, investigator Peter Chandler (Ian McCullough) and Dr. Lori Ridgeway (Alexandra Cole) travel to a remote island, where they are quickly captured by a band of murderous cannibals—and an insane scientist who claims to be a doctor (Donald O'Brien). Chandler finds out first-hand about the "doctor's" unspeakable experiments, while Dr. Ridgeway plays a starring role in the native tribe's equally horrific rituals. The film is basically the American version of <em>Zombie Holocaust</em> and is a great gross out film to see with friends when you have nothing better to do.</p>

<em>I can hear you whisperin' children, so I know you're down there. I can feel myself gettin' awful mad. I'm out of patience children. I'm coming to find you now. </em><p></p>One of the absolute classic films of all time is being shown tonight at the <a href="http://www.ifccenter.com/films/the-night-of-the-hunter/">The IFC Center</a>: <em>The Night of the Hunter</em> is possibly one of the creepiest Hollywood films ever made and showcases one of Robert Mitchum best performances. We know the film is coming out soon on Criterion DVD and Blu-ray, but you really need to do yourself a favor and see it on the big screen. It's on at 11:50 tonight, so get your ass to the IFC Center.