Wilnervision!

Writing for Metro, I’ve trained myself to work at a certain word limit — 300 words, 350 at the most.

If a piece goes over, I pare it back to the appropriate length, usually by ripping out all my favorite lines, which often get folded into my posts here.

Therefore, I am loving the new Sympatico/MSN gig, which allows me the freedom to riff at length. And sometimes I get a little carried away.

For example I didn’t intend to write 2600 words about the various “Die Hard” clones … it just sort of happened, you know?

But now that it’s out there, you might as well enjoy it …

I’m in the middle of renovation hell — did you know that little shutoff valve for a bathroom sink can be hidden so well not even four grown adults will be able to find it? — so this week’s movie roundup will be brief.

Fortunately, there aren’t that many new movies …

“Evening“: Susan Minot’s novel becomes a simpering, borderline unwatchable Woman’s Picture thanks to the combined idiocy of screenwriter Michael Cunningham, who seems compelled to force the same gay-martyr character into everything he touches, and director Lajos Koltai, who demonstrates the same dull literalism he brought to his profanely beautiful Holocaust drama “Fateless”. As for the exceptional cast (Redgrave! Streep! Close! Atkins! Danes! Collette! Um, another Redgrave! Another Streep!), this was probably a chance to spend a few weeks in one another’s company, enjoying some lovely craft services and bed-and-breakfast accommodations. The movie is just the unfortunate byproduct of their working vacation.

“Let’s All Hate Toronto“: That cutesy provocateur thing Albert Nerenberg did with “Stupidity” and “Escape to Canada” is getting a little tired now, as evidenced in this repetitive and way too long cross-country trek to explore the rest of the country’s resentment and loathing of what is clearly the best city on the continent. Honestly, I think they’re only ticked off because they don’t live here themselves.

“Red Road“: Shot in a murky DV verite, pushing ever closer into the mind of its broken heroine, Andrea Arnold’s minimalist character study about a Glaswegian CCTV minder who becomes obsessed with a man she glimpses on one of her screens is a grim, powerful debut. Not quite the stuff of a summer blockbuster, I know, but it’s a great antidote for blockbuster fatigue.

“Ratatouille“: Brad Bird and Pixar follow “The Incredibles” with another beautifully realized animated adventure, this one revolving around a rat who finds a way to realize his forbidden dream of becoming a chef. It’s not quite the perfect construction that “The Incredibles” was, but it’s marvelous all the same, and I figure we have about six days before Bill O’Reilly and the other right-wing nut jobs attack it for its subtle alternative-lifestyle allegory.

“Sicko”: Speaking of cutesy provocateurs, Michael Moore returns with his latest hot-button documentary, and this one — about the perfect disgrace America’s private health-care system has become — is built around an argument that simply can’t be contradicated, with wrenching examples of people abandoned to their illnesses by their insurance companies, either through bureaucratic indifference or intentional malfeasance. I just wish he could have eased off on the yokel stuff, and maybe provide a little more context to the international segments. Like, say, who Tommy Douglas was, and why Canadians thank him for their health care in the film. I mean, he’s Jack Bauer’s grandfather — it’s not like Americans wouldn’t get that joke.

Plumber’s coming, with the building plans … keep your fingers crossed.

When spoken in a heavy German accent, the phrase “We phoned ahead” sounds an awful lot like “We found a head”.

It wasn’t just me. The receptionist was kind of freaked out, too.

You can’t keep a good franchise down. And while the quality of the “Die Hard” films has varied, I am really quite delighted to report that “Live Free or Die Hard” is a worthy entry in the series.

I was kinda dreading it, to be honest. The twelve-year gap since “Die Hard with a Vengeance”, the fact that “Die Hard 2″ is really pretty awful, the appointment of “Underworld” director Len Wiseman to the center seat … and beyond all that, if one believes that 9/11 changed everything, can you honestly get away with another movie where John McClane fights “terrorists”?

Well, that’s the neat thing about the series: It’s barely connected to the real world at all, except through Bruce Willis’ marvelous everyman quality. The “Die Hard” series speaks to the dream of every teenager who’s sat through an outsized action movie and wondered how he would perform in a similar situation.

He’s better written than most of us, but John McClane is a regular guy … a regular guy with remarkable stamina and a high pain tolerance, but still.

And in this post-9/11 era, I think it’s worth pointing out that the Evil Terrorists once again turn out to be staging their attack in order to divert attention from their true capitalist aims; the orchestrated assaults in the “Die Hard” films are never political, always mercenary.

Interesting, innit?

Plus, shit blows up. A lot. I guess that’s why they hired Wiseman.

My latest Sympatico/MSN DVD column is up now, saluting Craig Brewer’s “Black Snake Moan”.

Yes, Samuel L. Jackson is playing a crazed bluesman who sorta-kinda abducts an even more crazed young woman. Yes, Christina Ricci spends a lot of time in a state of undress. Yes, there are crazy plot turns that still somehow make emotional sense.

But here is the thing: Sam Jackson sings “Stackolee”, and any film where Sam Jackson sings “Stackolee” is an instant cult classic.

If only he’d brought his guitar along on that plane ride …

So, yeah, “Evan Almighty” came in at number one over the weekend, but its $32.1 million gross can only be read as disappointing given the high scores set over the last few weeks by certain other megasequels, and the sheer volume of hype that preceded this particular picture.

Yay.

Not that I’m rejoicing in any potential tarnishment to Steve Carell’s still-rising star, but the fact that audiences found something better to do with their time than see this terrible, terrible film is cheering to me. It’s not so great that so many of them evidently went to see “1408” instead, but what are you gonna do.

For lack of anything else that’s interesting or new, I suggest you check out Jay Pinkerton’s ranking of The Best Movie Batmans over at Cracked.com — it’s turning out to be a pretty entertaining site, like the bratty kid brother of The Onion AV Club.

Incidentally, David Campbell, proprietor of the engaging comics blog Dave’s Long Box, is another of Cracked’s contributors; his latest is a consideration of The Seven Most Underrated Movie Henchmen, and he makes some interesting choices.

There are books to be written about the wrongness of “Evan Almighty“, which was clearly conceived as another Jim Carrey vehicle and sloppily reconfigured to star Steve Carell’s secondary character when Carrey (rightly) passed.

I’ve been kicking this around for about a week now — longer, surely, than Tom Shadyac and Steve Odekerk did — and the evidence is all there.

First of all, there’s the way the sequel tries to overlook the fact that Carell’s character, Evan Baxter, was kind of a dick in “Bruce Almighty”. His rival reporter was the closest thing the first film had to a villain, and his spastic comeuppance at Carrey’s mystical hands was its comedic highlight.

Well, guess what? The asshole thing turns out to have been nothing more than Evan’s professional face. The guy turns out to be a fine, upstanding Christian, married to the lovely and supportive Lauren Graham, with three cookie-cutter boys at home. And when Evan starts his new job as a United States Congressman, he’s almost boyishly excited … more like Carrey’s Bruce Nolan, really, than the back-stabbing, supercilious Evan Baxter we remember.

(more…)

I return to pwning Metro’s movie coverage today, reviewing all six of the week’s new releases. (Chris is on vacation; he’ll be back next week for Michael Moore’s “Sicko”, which is just as well because its press screenings are lined up against other movies I have to see, dammit.)

And how are this week’s offerings? Well …

“Eagle vs. Shark“: A bunch of New Zealanders try to remake “Napoleon Dynamite” in their own vernacular, and the result is this muddled, posturing indie. It might have made a great short film — the trailer’s a hoot — but at feature length, it’s a crushing misfire.

“Evan Almighty“: Speaking of crushing misfires, there’s this utterly unnecessary sequel, a pandering mess of animal gags, overblown CGI and desperate, uninspired improvisation. It’s being heavily marketed to Christians, which reveals the low regard in which Hollywood holds people of faith. Or, you know, everybody.

“1408“: In the latest Stephen King rehash, a skeptical John Cusack checks into an eeeeevil hotel room and is tormented, more or less in real time, by various horrible visions and unpleasantries. It starts out well, but devolves into silliness and pointless reversals; I wonder what it was like before they changed the ending.

“Gracie“: Davis Guggenheim follows “An Inconvenient Truth” with the safest project imaginable: A gauzy, inspirational sports picture based on the adolescence of his wife Elisabeth Shue, who — we are told — defied incredible odds to play on a boy’s soccer team. To quote Mark Peranson’s single greatest line of film criticism: “Big deal, she rides the whale.”

“Killer of Sheep“: I’ve been hearing about the brilliance of Charles Burnett’s vanished 1977 debut for a good two decades now, and I can’t imagine any film could live up to that level of acclaim … let alone the movie that this is. Not bad, by any means, but not exactly one of the greatest movies ever made.

“A Mighty Heart“: Angelina Jolie reclaims her title as one of the most interesting actors around — which she’s kind of let slip in recent years, let’s be honest — with a terrific turn as Mariane Pearl, widow of Daniel, in Michael Winterbottom’s curiously bloodless reconstruction of their story.

What? You want more? Well, there’s my latest Sympatico/MSN piece, a breakdown of all the places where terrible things have happened to people in the movies. I have to say, this gig is turning out to be a lot of fun.

… it’s a 15-hour DSL outage, returning your faithful correspondent to the horrible world of dial-up.

The bright side was that after two and a half years, I’ve finally figured out how to receive e-mail on my Treo — up till now I was only able to send, which sort of defeats the whole purpose of the thing — so I wasn’t totally at sea. And hey, it could have been worse — my home could have flooded or something.

The dark side was that I HAD NO FRACKING INTERNET ACCESS FOR FIFTEEN HOURS. That does very bad things to a man’s mind. It’s like that scene in “Event Horizon” where Sam Neill explains what that alternate dimension was like — you eventually have no choice but to go insane, because it’s comforting.

And you miss stuff when you’re offline — like, apparently, the high-def DVD format war kicking up a couple of notches in the wake of Blockbuster’s decision to go exclusively with Blu-ray in its rental expansion.

DVD File puts it all together nicely here, with individual studio reps commenting on the state of the war … and then Variety delivers what could be HD-DVD’s death blow in a rather elegant manner. Love the flourish about shoes dropping.

Anyway, it’s a deadline Thursday. Back to work …

I’ve got a new DVD column up, but it’s about “Miss Potter” and the whole boutique-biopic thing, so, meh. Nothing you haven’t already heard, I’m sure.

Much more fun to put together was this special bonus Sympatico/MSN piece about environmental disaster movies — the perfect read for a day on which it really does feel like the planet is trying to smother us.

Enjoy …