Wilnervision!

This is fascinating: The New Haven Advocate reports that a master’s student at Southern Connecticut State University has proven, scientifically, that supporters of George W. Bush — and the Republican party in general — are, well, insane.

I wonder whether Fox News will even acknowledge the story. See, if they don’t report on it, then they’re doing that crazy thing where you deny reality … but of course, if they do report on it, then they’re acknowledging they might have a problem.

Nah, they won’t bring it up. Not while they’re fighting both the War on the War on Christmas and the War on Talking Penguins, surely …

Engadget reports that Sony’s set-top Blu-ray player is finally shipping. Not bad, really; after all, the thing was only supposed to be available six months ago.

Of course, the $1299.99 pricetag is a bit annoying, when one considers that a PlayStation 3 lists for about half that … but good luck trying to find a PS3. Especially since the early availability estimate of 400,000 units for North America turned out to be kind of, well, overstated.

Still. The player’s finally available, claiming its rightful space on the shelf alongside Blu-ray units from Samsung, Panasonic, Philips and Pioneer. Which is encouraging, I guess, given that HD-DVD is still a single-manufacturer format … and that single manufacturer is having a little trouble with its second-generation players.

Did you know the Philips player was available exclusively at Wal-Mart, by the way? I didn’t. But then, nobody tells me anything.

“Happy Feet” dominated the Thanksgiving box-office, easily beating “Casino Royale” for the second time and outpacing the new crop of pictures by a considerable percentage.Gross over the holiday: $51.5 million. Cumulative: $100.1 mil.

Holy flippered crap.

I was sure word-of-mouth would kill it. Critical response has been wildly mixed. At the Sunday morning sneak I attended, small children were alternately bored and wailing; their parents were puzzled — to say the least — by the story’s darker turns. And the ending is a freakshow.

But people are going. Maybe its mushy message — about being yourself, even if that self is a tap-dancing penguin who gets exiled from his troop and reinvents himself as a kind of misfit messiah, ultimately saving the waterfowl of the Antarctic through the magic of dance — is genuinely connecting with audiences. Or maybe it’s just surfing the aggregate buzz from “March of the Penguins” and “An Inconvenient Truth”.

Beats the hell out of me. But even if I can’t understand what people see in his movie, I can still be very happy for George Miller. He’s told the story he wanted to tell, and somehow convinced a thousand or so CG artists to realize his vision. That kind of artistic will deserves to be celebrated.

Even if it’s being celebrated by penguins singing Queen at the top of their lungs.

The Guardian has posted the transcript of Mark Kermode’s excellent, wide-ranging interview with writer-director Guillermo del Toro at the National Film Theatre, following a screening of del Toro’s marvelous “Pan’s Labyrinth”.

Click here for Part One; here’s Part Two.

Spoiler warning: While del Toro doesn’t give away too many specifics about “Pan’s Labyrinth”, he does discuss its themes in a manner that does give away some of the story. But if you saw it at the Toronto film festival, click away.

Also, while he doesn’t mention it in this interview, “Hellboy 2″ will have robots in it. This alone guarantees its magnificence.

Salon.com has published this piece by Allen Barra, in which the author revisits Ian Fleming’s 007 novels (non-subscribers can read it after watching a short ad).

The article isn’t what it could be — largely because Barra, after dismissing Fleming as “a writer of genre fiction”, seems more interested in discussing the response to the books than the books themselves — but it did remind me of last year’s cinematic assignment, in which my wife and I thought it would be a good idea to pass the sluggish winter evenings by watching the Bond films in chronological order.

It took us almost a year to get through them all, largely because they aren’t very good. We stalled out for several months after “The Spy Who Loved Me”, because I knew “Moonraker” would have to be next. And “Licence to Kill”? It’s even worse than you remember.

(Hey, look, I’m doing that “after the jump” thing!)

(more…)

Remember when the Friday after Thanksgiving was quiet, because all the big guns had opened on the Wednesday?

Yeah, I remember that, too. Sure was nice.

“Bobby“: Emilio Estevez means well, he really does, but he just isn’t a very good director. Never has been. And casting himself opposite Demi Moore — out of the 20 or so other roles he might have played — induces some really painful “Wisdom” flashbacks.

“The History Boys“: It’s a filmed play, so it’s static, stagey and awkwardly theatrical when it most needs to be cinematic. (Also, the subject matter kind of reads over here as “Dead Poets Society, with a Reach-Around”.) But Richard Griffiths is marvelous; if you’ve only seen him in the “Harry Potter” movies, you have no idea what he can do with a well-placed adjective.

“Old Joy“: It’s a deliberately tiny movie about two guys and a dog who go on an overnight camping trip, and yet it’s the biggest experience of the bunch. It’s only playing for a week at the Bloor Cinema; you really should make the time.

“Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny“: Yes, it’s the same joke that’s been driving the band all along, but it’s a joke that still works. JB and KG continue to bluster impressively, the songs are terrific, and John C. Reilly owns the role of Sasquatch.

“Volver“: After openly loathing “Talk to Her”, and having been more intellectually impressed than emotionally engaged by the stylistic gamesmanship of “Bad Education”, I am indeed impressed to see Pedro Almodovar tell a story about people whose motivations and feelings are recognizably human. And Penelope Cruz is as good as you’ve heard.

Not much going on this weekend. Kinda feeling like I should see “The Fountain” again, though.

Tony Scott’s “Deja Vu” is not the best thing he’s ever done, but it’s the best thing he’s done in a long time, insofar as you can watch it without thinking you’re about to have a seizure.

Not that Scott has abandoned his fixation on mixed-media cross-cutting, which first surfaced in “Enemy of the State” and “Spy Game”, but bloomed so fully — and so pointlessly — in “Man on Fire” and “Domino”; it’s just that all the manic stimulation finds an appropriate subject in this jangled time-travel picture.

Imagine “Back to the Future” as directed by the Oliver Stone of “Natural Born Killers” and “Nixon”, and with a chronological span of about four days instead of 30 years.

Oh, and the role of Doc Brown is played by Adam Goldberg, and Jim Caviezel is the Libyans. It makes as much sense as anything else in the picture.

Also opening today, but as yet unposted to finally available on the Metro review page:

“Deck the Halls“: It feels like someone dropped Matthew Broderick and Danny DeVito into the Steve Martin and Eugene Levy roles written for an unused “Cheaper By the Dozen” Christmas sequel. I hope the catering was good.

“The Fountain“: Darren Aronofsky creates a melancholy sci-fi epic, as elegant in its construction as “Pi” and “Requiem for a Dream” were ragged. Unfairly beaten down during the film festival, probably because of the trippy sap-suckling sequence. Yes, it overreaches, but it’s still quite moving.

UPDATE: Links to the other reviews are now live.

Here’s a funny thing: I wasn’t surprised in the least to learn that Robert Altman has died.

Maybe it’s that he’s been in notoriously ill health for so long, or that his last film, “A Prairie Home Companion”, was so suffused with a sense of mortality, but I kind of had a feeling this was coming. And this way, he goes out on a good movie instead of another Altmanesque failure.

Plenty of critics will step forward to defend Altman as an American master. I’m not one of them; he was a wildly inconsistent and self-indulgent filmmaker, and if he didn’t have a solid script behind him, his vaunted improvisational technique with actors could result in some dreadful films.

Consider the 1970s films Fox released earlier this year: Yes, “M*A*S*H” is as good (and as topical) as it ever was, and “A Wedding” has its moments … but who’d want to revisit “Quintet” or “A Perfect Couple”?

But that’s how it worked. Yes, we got “Nashville”, “The Company” and “Vincent and Theo”; we also got “Beyond Therapy”, “Pret-a-Porter” and “Cookie’s Fortune”. The bad ones were really bad, but the good ones were worth it, mostly. (I’m sorry, but I still think “Gosford Park” stops dead when Stephen Fry turns up.)

So there we are. A consistently inconsistent director makes a movie about death, and dies. There’s poetry in that, surely.

And I suddenly have a hankering to watch “The Gingerbread Man”.

Okay, so Metro is posting my reviews, but they’re no longer putting them up on the website’s Movies section. (It’s not just me, either; Rick’s stuff went sideways last weekend as well.)

You can find them by searching the site for the movie title, or you can let me do it for you:

“Casino Royale”

“Fast Food Nation”

“For Your Consideration”

“A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints”

“Let’s Go to Prison”

And there’ll be more tomorrow …

UPDATE: Whoops. Turns out Metro’s just created a separate subpage in the Entertainment section for reviews. Link bar updated accordingly.

Final numbers have yet to be released, but “Happy Feet” appears to have beaten “Casino Royale” at the North American box-office.

Wow.

Not that a $40.6 million take for Bond 21 is in any way a bad thing, but the thought that “Happy Feet” could beat it (with an estimated $42.3 million) is a real shock.

Sure, it’s half an hour shorter and on a bajillion screens, and sure, Warner promoted the snot out of it … but, really? Word of mouth didn’t start to cripple it by Sunday morning?

Oh, and in entirely unrelated news, the Academy has announced its short list of contenders for the Best Documentary Feature award. The list of 15 titles includes such shoo-ins as “An Inconvenient Truth”, “Deliver Us from Evil” and “Dixie Chicks: Shut Up & Sing“, as well as a quartet of Iraq titles and the heavily-buzzed “Blindsight”, which naturally I managed to miss at TIFF.

“Jesus Camp” is in there, too. I still can’t believe nobody’s releasing it in Canada, what with the Ted Haggard controversy and all. Doesn’t Odeon have the domestic rights to Magnolia’s films?