Amy's Robot

This is what Jerry Garcia looked like in 1967 at age 25. He had just recently started the Grateful Dead (a name the whole band hated) and he was a big fan of Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and bluegrass.

It's this period of Garcia's life that a new biopic will focus on. Spout is suggesting some actors to play him, but their ideas all sound like the later-era Jerry Garcia, the heroin addict and egg cream fiend. They're talking about Philip Seymour Hoffman, Vincent D'Onofrio, or Paul Giamatti. I love all those actors, but we need someone young, hairy, and maybe a little doughy-faced to play Jerry when he looked like this:

So here are a few ideas: Jeremy Sisto. He's got the hair, he'd have no trouble growing a big beard, and look at that smile:

Here's another one: Danny Masterson, from That 70s Show. Put a few pounds on him and he's just about perfect. Plus, everyone already associates him with being a stoner.

Then there's the obvious choice: Seth Rogen. The man is the real hirsute frizzed-out deal, and is clearly no stranger to Cheetos. But his range is pretty limited: I'm guessing the first half-hour or so of the movie might involve some scenes where Jerry Garcia is not high, and it's hard to imagine Seth Rogen pulling that off.

Please add other ideas in the comments.

Forbidden Planet from 1956 is one of the most entertaining sci-fi classics out there, even for a not very committed sci-fi fan like me. In the story based on The Tempest, a young Leslie Nielsen leads a mission to a distant planet inhabited only by the sweet-faced Anne Francis and her father, and lovable sidekick Robby the Robot. The movie also had the first all-electronic movie soundtrack, and this was years before the first Moog synthesizer came out.

So now there's going to be a remake, which hopefully will hang onto some of the endearing qualities of the original, or at least include a Leslie Nielsen cameo. The remake is being written by J. Michael Straczynski, a man who I think formed my childhood concept of what sci-fi/fiction is: he wrote for He-Man, She-Ra, and the 80's version of the Twilight Zone. (He also created Babylon 5, which I wasn't into.) And he did the screenplay for the Wachowski Brothers-produced Ninja Assassin, which comes out next year and looks OK.

But: more important. J. Michael Straczynski also wrote the screenplay for the movie version of Max Brooks' World War Z! The book is a really fun read, a surprisingly well thought-out and thorough collection of oral accounts of the great zombie war that engulfs the globe in the near future.

Here's a review of the leaked World War Z screenplay, with some excerpts. Looks like the movie will stick with the current fast-zombie trend, and attach all sorts of criticism of government corruption and consumer culture to the zombie metaphor--the reviewer calls it "a George Romero wet dream."

Ugly people--ew!

The Times has an article in today's Style section that makes a half-hearted attempt to document a trend in average-looking or ugly people getting more attention in movies and TV. Here's the thesis statement:

So maybe social scientists momentarily care that ugly people don't get the attention, admiration, or money that beautiful people get, but, as it turns out, no one else does. Cosmetic surgery is a $13 billion industry, beauty and makeover shows are all over the TV, and the gajillions of magazines, ads, and movies out there confirm that we're only interested in looking at beautiful people.

The article even notes that America Ferrera, who plays Ugly Betty, is actually really gorgeous.

Which brings us to an aspect of this ugliness non-phenomenon that's more interesting: the article only addresses beauty vs. ugliness in women. The only reference to a male creature in the whole article is Shrek who, as an ogre, is by definition ugly.

The highest paid actors are good-looking guys like Johnny Depp, Will Smith, and Leonardo DiCaprio, but we've also got Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, and James Gandolfini to play the regular shlubby dudes whose characters are supposed to be average-looking.

On the other hand, when a female character is supposed to be regular-looking or kind of ugly, we tend to get beautiful women disfigured by ugly makeup and clothes: Nicole Kidman in a fake nose, Renee Zellweger plus 30 pounds, or Charlize up there in ugly-person makeup and fake crooked teeth. Or America Ferrera in her Ugly Betty red glasses and braces.

So here's the legitimate trend: prosthetic makeup is likely to be a solid career field forever.

Some interesting trailers out today:

• Notorious, the biopic about Biggie Smalls, starring Angela Bassett as his long-suffering mother, and unknowns as Biggie and Lil Kim. [IMDb]
• My Bloody Valentine 3D. A sequel to the 1981 horror movie about a vengeful coal miner. In 3D! The trailer shows actual pickaxes and balls of flame bursting out of the screen right at a movie audience wearing 3D glasses, in case you need to be reminded of how cool 3D is. They don't seem to be making any effort to tie the movie in with the band MBV's tour last month. And how about the soundtrack? "Glider" is perfect for a gruesome slasher scene! [IMDb]
• Underworld: Rise of the Lycans. I watched this whole trailer thinking, "Wow, Kate Beckinsale is almost completely unrecognizable in this!" before realizing she isn't in it. Poor man's Kate Beckinsale Rhona Mitra is the star of this one. A few months ago she starred in something called Doomsday, which I recently saw on my list of movies I've watched this year, and had to go look it up to remember what it was. [IMDb]

While everyone's waiting for those sexy teenage vampires in Twilight, there's a much weirder looking movie coming out this Friday: preteen Swedish vampires (that hopefully will not be especially sexy) in Let The Right One In.

The story is about a 12 year-old boy living in suburban Stockholm in the early '80's who gets bullied at school. The he's faced with a moral dilemma: should a boy kill a known vampire if that vampire is gruesomely killing all the little bastards who beat him up every day? The vampire in question is a sad-faced 12 year-old girl, and they kinda like each other. She's like an externalized form of Sissy Spacek's apocalyptic telekinetic skills in Carrie.

Here's a fantastic short clip from the movie that plays on that "you have to invite vampires in before they can come into your house" rule that we all learned from The Lost Boys.

The NY Times has a very sweet, sad clip, too.

If you only saw these clips, you'd probably think Let The Right One In is a little wistful movie about how lonely it is to be a vampire tween. But check out the trailer: knives, gore, blazing infernos, and a little girl killing people with her bare hands! It's pretty great.

There's a glowing quote from Guillermo del Toro in there. There are talks of an American remake already--he would be ideal to do it. But in reality, it looks like we're going to get J.J. Abrams' production company doing the remake, with the guy who did Cloverfield directing. Will they be able to resist casting 20 year olds and turning it into an especially gory episode of "Felicity"?

The author of the original book seems to be a Morrissey fan: the title was taken from the similarly-titled Morrissey song, and there's another Morrissey quote (from "Last Of The Famous International Playboys") as an epigraph. So there should be some dark, funny stuff in there, too.

It opens on Friday at the Angelika.

In a Time Out NY story on his new movie Rachel Getting Married, Jonathan Demme said, sort of incredibly, that the script by Jenny Lumet and the chance to work with Anne Hathaway were the only things that got him to take a break from making documentaries to do a fictional movie. I was surprised when I read that last week, but after watching the movie this weekend, I see what he meant.

This is Jenny Lumet's first screenplay, and it deals with subject matter that is almost impossible to make palatable. Privileged people complaining about their oh-so-difficult lives and alternating between emotionally manipulating each other and screaming at each other-- it's hard to make that stuff anything other than grating.

Jonathan Demme has enough experience to wind through a minefield of drug addiction, co-dependency, and self-pity, set against a backdrop of a rich family having a big multi-culti party that involves white people wearing saris and dancing to samba, and still end up with characters that the audience can relate to. Somehow it all works. It also helps that the characters have been through a lot that we don't learn about right away.

Another potentially tricky aspect of the movie is how it deals with race. There are layers of harmonious, maybe idealistic, racial blending in the movie that don't feel forced at all, which may be helped by Jenny Lumet's own multiracial background (her father is famous director Sidney Lumet, and her mother is Gail Lumet Buckley, a black writer and daugher of Lena Horne.) Sidney Lumet hasn't done anything as good as his stuff from the 70's and 80's, but Jonathan Demme can still make a great movie, which is good, since things were looking pretty bleak around The Truth About Charlie.

The best parts were the long, rambling, Robert Altman-like ensemble scenes, like the scene at the rehearsal dinner where it seems like every single character has a toast to make, but it was so authentic I could have watched it roll on all night. All of the actors are great, especially Anna Deveare Smith, who also does a lot of stuff on Broadway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Debra Winger, and Anne Hathaway. The girl's got chops.

The music is great, too. All the music in the movie is diegetic, a ten dollar word I learned just for this movie which means that we only hear music that the characters can also hear. Luckily, because the movie takes place around a wedding, there's loads of music that the characters and the audience all get to hear, including a surprise performance by my old teenage favorite Robyn Hitchcock, (also the subject of Demme's Storefront Hitchcock concert movie) doing his song "America" with the wedding band [photo]. Tunde Adebimpe, the singer from TV On The Radio, plays the groom, and has a really nice musical interlude.

Rachel Getting Married is only playing at 9 theaters now, but it made over $30,000 per screen, which is about what the first Spider-Man made when it debuted. At the Regal theater at Union Square, the line to get into the theater looked like Iron Man's opening weekend. It'll probably do well, which is good for Jonathan Demme. Did you know he's directed 7 different actors in performances that were nominated for Oscars, and 4 who won? He's probably going to get a couple more in this one.

After a fun, goofy summer of some good blockbusters (Tropic Thunder, Wall-E) and a few wonderful weird little movies (Hamlet 2, The Edge of Heaven), the fall season seems to be off to a slow start. Some of the movies I've been most interested in all year are out now, but nothing has created much of a sensation.

Choke sounds bloodless and dull. Miracle at St. Anna unfortunately seems a little corny and stodgy, two words that I don't think could be used to describe any other Spike Lee movie.

This week we've got three movies coming out that at one point sounded potentially great, but are getting so-so reviews.

Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist: Charming but trivial according to A.O. Scott. Wired says it's a movie for teens and aging hipsters, and advises "If you've got more ZZ Top and Doobie Brothers on your playlist than Fleet Foxes, Death Cab or Vampire Weekend, you might want to consider a different picture." The usually generous Roger Ebert says it "doesn't bring much to the party."

Rachel Getting Married: This one could be really good. It's directed by Jonathan Demme, shot on hand-held DV, and stars Rosemarie DeWitt, who was great on "Mad Men" last season. Hopefully Anne Hathaway's performance as an attention-hogging drug addict teeters on the edge of being irritating and self-indulgent without falling over. Slate likes it; A.O. Scott thinks it barely avoids melodrama and sentimentality--which means that it might actually be a big sloshy melodramatic mess, especially since he also describes Anne Hathaway's bangs as looking very Louise Brooks-ish, though she doesn't have bangs at all in the trailer. Gawker says it's "absolutely terrible".

Then there's How To Lose Friends & Alienate People, which I had been really looking forward to. Manohla Dargis says it's "crushingly unfunny and slopped together". Ouch. AV Club calls it "cheap and ugly". Roger Ebert is pretty much alone in thinking it's a hoot, and says Simon Pegg was born to play Toby Young, the British writer whose spectacular failure at Vanity Fair is the basis of the book and movie.

The AV Club has their annual Oscar-O-Meter up. There's some movies up there that look good, like Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, W., Synecdoche, New York, and hopefully Milk (it's pretty much impossible to predict if Gus Van Sant's movies will be great or terrible these days.) So things should be picking up soon.

One of the books I read in high school English was The Grapes of Wrath, which we read for its social commentary on the Great Depression-era exploitation of desperate people and their struggle to maintain some dignity as they fight to survive. Mostly what I remember about that book is being grossed-out by the last scene in which Rosasharn breastfeeds a dying old man. That one scene probably prolonged millions of teenagers' feelings of confusion and revulsion over their adolescent bodily development for many months or years.

But one other scene I remember is where Pa Joad, the patriarch of the Joad family that we follow on their journey to find work out west, is confronted by a man who explains the harsh economic truth behind the myth of plentiful jobs in California that all the people in the migrant camp have been clinging to.

From the screenplay based on the book:

Today, AP describes our current economic situation as "the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression". In another article, they describe modern-day Joad families setting up tent cities in western towns where people have come expecting to find jobs. Except that instead of looking for fruit picking jobs in California, they're looking for casino jobs in Reno:

The article also refers to growing tent cities in Santa Barbara, Fresno, Portland, Seattle, Chattanooga, San Diego, and Columbus.

When I think of the most memorable actors and characters of the Coen Brothers' movies, I usually think of the men. There are guys they use again and again, like John Goodman, Steve Buscemi and John Turturro, and those genius one-offs like Jeff Bridges as Jeffrey Lebowski, Billy Bob Thornton in The Man Who Wasn't There, or Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men. Spout made a really great list of 10 supporting Coen Brothers actors that often get overlooked, since it's often the supporting characters that give their movies their distinctive bizarre and unsettling style.

But what about the ladies? Just about all of their movies feature a bunch of male leads with only one main female character. In 4 movies now they've gone with their best gal Frances McDormand (Joel Coen's wife) and twice they've used Holly Hunter (in O Brother Where Art Thou? and Raising Arizona.)

Coen Brothers women mostly conform to a type: they're tough as nails (if they aren't at the beginning of the movie, they definitely are by the end), often inscrutable and distant, and their no-nonsense exterior either masks a soft and tender interior (like Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Hudsucker Proxy, Holly Hunter and Frances McDormand as sweet but gutsy cops in Raising Arizona and Fargo) or amplifies a genuinely manipulative and selfish nature (Tilda Swinton in Burn After Reading or Frances McDormand in The Man Who Wasn't There.)

Others, like Julianne Moore in The Big Lebowski, Marcia Gay Harden in Miller's Crossing, and Judy Davis in Barton Fink are also mysteriously sexy and remote, sometimes with a whiff of treachery. I can only think of one real casting misstep: Catherine Zeta-Jones in Intolerable Cruelty, which just didn't work.

One partial exception is Kelly Macdonald as the wife in No Country For Old Men--one of the few movies the Coen Brothers adapted from someone else's story. She has a small role, and lacks the grit of most Coen Brothers women, but in her final big showdown with soft-spoken psychopath Javier Bardem she shows an unshakable resolve and inner strength, and ends up kind of serving as the moral anchor of the whole movie [video].

Anyway, in their current movie Burn After Reading, there are actually two female leads, both of which are pretty ridiculous and insensitive people. Frances McDormand is a selfish but harmless woman who can't see anything beyond her own needs, though her chronic loneliness and moments of real joy in finding connections with other people makes her a bit sympathetic. Tilda Swinton, on the other hand, is an icy, cruel bitch on wheels, which makes the reveal of what her profession is towards the end of the movie the single funniest moment in the whole thing.

Burn After Reading has gotten a lot of lukewarm or negative reviews, largely from critics who compare it to the more serious variety of Coen Brothers movies like No Country. I loved No Country as much as anyone, but you've got to remember that at least half of their movies are goofy screwball comedies in which bumbling but lovable characters wildly chase after the things they desperately want, which they almost always fail to achieve. Three times in Burn After Reading different characters say "This isn't fun and games," by which I think the Coen Brothers are reassuring us that this IS all fun and games. In his review, one of the most positive ones I've seen, Roger Ebert notes that the plot doesn't matter at all--the strengths of the movie are the dialogue and the characters, both of which are as good as ever. It's inconsequential, but that doesn't mean it's not worth seeing.

Anyway, their next movie is called A Serious Man (that oughta make the No Country For Old Men-loving sourpusses happy.) It doesn't use any of their regular actors, and some of the cast have only worked in Minnesota theater--including leading lady Sari Lennick. I'm going out on a limb here and predicting that she plays a ballsy lady who doesn't take any crap. The movie also stars character actor Richard Kind and Broadway star Michael Stuhlbarg.

Roger Ebert evaluates the candidates for president and vice president through the lens that matters most to him: What are their favorite movies?

Examining their Facebook pages, he comes up with the following responses:

John McCain: Viva Zapata!, Letters From Iwo Jima, and Some Like It Hot.

Barack Obama: Casablanca, Godfather I and II, Lawrence of Arabia, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Joe Biden: no response.

Sarah Palin: no response.

Well! Ebert is very disappointed by the VP candidates' failure to appreciate the importance of sharing their taste in movies with voters. He also believes that no campaign aides selected these movies for the candidates, but that they reflect the true views of the candidates themselves: "Something as important as choosing your favorite movie, you don't delegate that to underlings." He might be giving them too much credit on that, but let's hope he's right.

Obama's choices strike me as very safe and impersonal (come on, The Godfather?) but One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is pretty interesting. He clearly likes movies about one man standing up to an oppressive regime or bureaucracy.

McCain has some easy choices too, though I was glad to see he had the guts to include a comedy. But he blows it out of the water in a recent EW interview, which Ebert references, in which he more fully explains his Viva Zapata! choice. McCain's a bit of a film buff:

But Ebert says that Bill Clinton has them both beat, based on an interview he did with him in 1999. It's a pretty incredible conversation: Clinton can really talk movies.

Today's Ebert column offers another look at Sarah Palin, who he calls The American Idol candidate. People like her because they think she's just like them, he says, which is exactly why Ebert doesn't like her: "I don't want a vice president who is darned near good enough. I want a vice president who is better, wiser, well-traveled, has met world leaders, who three months ago had an opinion on Iraq."

Humboldt County is coming out in a couple of weeks, and looks like it should be good. People who saw it at SXSW have said pretty much what you could say based on watching the trailer: it looks like a less Zach Braffy Garden State but with a weirder/better cast, and seems to has a good soundtrack. Here's the official site.

About the cast: the main non-Zach Braff guy with an overbearing father who is successful on the surface but dead on the inside is played by a relative unknown--Jeremy Strong. He was in The Happening earlier this year, but hopefully no one saw him in it.

The mysterious, free-spirited girl is played by Fairuza Balk, who you probably remember from movies that came out many years ago, like The Craft and American History X. Her character's name is Bogart-- oh, haha, like "don't Fairuza Balk me".

Lately she hasn't been working much, but check this out--she appears to be turning into character actor Christine Baranski (who has been in a million movies including Cruel Intentions and Mamma Mia.) You can really see it in the Humboldt County trailer.

Fairuza is also going to be in the Werner Herzog's inscrutable "don't call it a remake" version of Bad Lieutenant.

Humboldt County also features good old Peter Bogdanovich, who still shows up in stuff every so often. He's now directing a movie that looks interesting: The Broken Code, about scientist Rosalind Franklin whose x-rays were instrumental in Watson and Crick discovering the double helix structure of DNA.

Yesterday we lost the unbelievably popular voiceover artist Don LaFontaine, who died of complications related to a collapsed lung, ending a 40 year career that produced many thousands of trailers and ads.

Unfortunately, this means that your window of opportunity to get him to record your outgoing voicemail message has now closed. He says he got lots of requests from people to do their voicemail; in the short, funny interview below, he says if he had time, he would often do it.

"In a world where Adam Slutsky is not available..."

He sounded like a hardworking guy who was very proud of his gigantic body of work:

A few other things about LaFontaine, from his bio: he got his start as an audio engineer in NY, then started producing movie ads years before he recorded any voiceovers himself. He was also a big "Arrested Development" fan.

Two movies come out today that I've been waiting to see: Hamlet 2 and The House Bunny. Both of them got pretty lukewarm reviews, but hey, so did Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder, and those were still worth seeing. These two new ones have at least a few things going for them.

Critics are saying that Hamlet 2 is badly structured, uneven, and a lot of the jokes fall flat. But OK, look: it's got Steve Coogan, Catherine Keener, David Arquette, and Amy Poehler as an ACLU lawyer named Cricket Feldstein. And my old favorite Elisabeth Shue. It can't be all bad, right?

A.O. Scott would have been the best Times reviewer, but instead we got Stephen Holden, who as usual spends most of his review recounting the plot. David Edelstein doesn't love it, but says Steve Coogan is riveting, and the movie "gets points for weirdness." Kenneth Turan over at the LA Times says "the hits are so dead-on that the misses don't seem to matter." Good enough for me.

It looks like there's only one reason to see The House Bunny: Anna Faris. The intensity of critical love she gets for this movie is almost at post-Lost in Translation Bill Murray levels. Sure, the movie is a rehashed Legally Blonde (same writers and everything) but she's got the knack for playing the goofy smart-dumb hot girl who will do anything for a laugh. "All hail, Anna Faris, fake bimbo par excellence", from the Times. And the folks at IFC wrote a gushing piece about how great she is. Thank God this role went to someone really funny and not Kirsten Dunst.

Dana Stevens at Slate stresses that the movie is about as empowering to women as "My Super Sweet 16", but is glad to see enough funny material for Faris to "hint at a well of anarchic, defiantly ungirly humor that her career thus far has barely begun to tap." And, for what it's worth, Kurt Loder loves it, and swears it's hilarious even though it's formulaic. There have already been a few letdowns in this year's big summer comedies, so we need it.

Anna Faris co-stars with Seth Rogen in a comedy called Observe and Report next year, so it looks like the big time is about to be hit.

Isaac Hayes was unexpectedly killed by a treadmill yesterday, after having some recent health problems. The NY Times obituary says his music "defined the glories and excesses of soul" through his early years as a songwriter and musician at Stax Records in Memphis.

Cushie and I happened to visit the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis a few months ago, and it was one of the best music history experiences of my life. Before he did "Theme from Shaft" and became a celebrity in his own right, Isaac Hayes wrote around 200 songs from the Stax catalog with his partner David Porter, including Sam and Dave's "Hold on, I'm Comin'" and "Soul Man", and played keyboards with Otis Redding , Booker T and the MG's, and pretty much everybody else on Stax as a session musician.

Also in the Stax Museum is Isaac Hayes' car, a blue 1972 Cadillac Eldorado, which was lined with fur, had a bar that popped out of the dashboard, and because he was a man undaunted by the technological limitations of his time, he had a small black and white TV sort of wedged awkwardly into the area below the radio between the two front seats. The car was taken by the IRS in 1977 when Hayes had some financial problems.

In a good VH1 interview from a few years ago he talked about his fearless and distinctive sense of style, which sounds more like a celebrity from this decade with an army of personal stylists on staff than a southern black man starting out in the early 60's:

Here's a video clip of Isaac Hayes making his dramatic entrance at the Wattstax concert in LA in 1972. Pink tights, black and white fur boots, and gold chains. He is so awesome:

Hayes seemed to move effortlessly from one important moment in pop culture to another for his entire life. After helping to create soul music in the 60's and defining himself as a symbol of black pride during the 70's, he moved onto TV and movies in the 80's. He was in Escape From New York, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, and showed up on "The A-Team" and "Miami Vice". In the 90's came "South Park" and, of course, Scientology. It would have been only a matter of time before he did a song with Kanye.

Incredibly, Hayes had just finished making a movie called Soul Men with Samuel L. Jackson and good old Bernie Mac, who also died this weekend. Hang in there, Samuel L.

LA Times also has a very lengthy and in-depth obituary. Reports of the number of kids he has varies from "several" in the LA Times to 6 on IMDb to 12 in the NY Times. There's a good, if not very well organized bio on his website.

Pineapple Express comes out today. Just like Superbad came out a few months after Knocked Up last summer, this one looks like it's going to be the weirder follow-up to the mainstream hit (Forgetting Sarah Marshall) that came out in the spring. Dirtier jokes, fewer female characters, and a lot more weed.

Most reviews say the same thing: it's great when it's just James Franco and Seth Rogen sitting around talking smack, then goes off track when it turns into a big heavy action movie in the last half hour. Here's Manohla's NY Times review, the Slate review, Edelstein at NY Mag (he calls it "empty and formulaic" but likes it anyway.) The Daily News reviewer recommends you just go back and watch old episodes of "Freaks and Geeks". Roger Ebert stands apart--he pretty much loves the whole thing. But he gave 3 stars to The Mummy 3, so.

Seth Rogen was the big revelation from The 40 Year Old Virgin two years ago--I think the major discovery of Pineapple Express is going to be Danny McBride, the third guy in the movie posters. The director, David Gordon Green, brought him along from an earlier smaller movie he did, All the Real Girls, and the critics like him a lot. Dana Stevens says "he should be commanding his own goofy franchise in a matter of months," and Manohla says he "steals the show".

McBride is also in Tropic Thunder, which comes out in a week and is going to be huuuge. This guy will be hosting SNL by this time next year. Here are two interviews with him about each movie and an upcoming HBO show that he wrote and stars in. He's beside himself with excitement over his growing fame--he says the two new movies are "both so fucking awesome". Heh. I think I'm convinced.

Loads of notable movies come out today. Unfortunately, the reviews for the big ones that I've been looking forward to (X-Files, Step Brothers, Baghead, American Teen, Brideshead Revisited) aren't all that good. The Times hardly likes anything this week, but a few other reviewers come through with positive words.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe. Manohla at the Times is unimpressed: "Baggy, draggy, oddly timed and strangely off the mark." Roger Ebert likes the way it explores morality and the complex choices Mulder and Scully have to make, and notes positively that there are no explosions or CGI. His review gives away a LOT of the plot though, so don't read it if you want to be surprised.

I've been excited about American Teen since it was playing at Sundance, and it still sounds pretty good despite lukewarm reviews from A.O. Scott, who thinks it feels weirdly contrived, and NY Mag's David Edelstein, who says it just reinforces everything you assume to be true about the stereotypical teen types when going in. Yeah, well, I'm seeing it anyway.

Baghead looks like a sort of goofy indie parody of people-getting-stabbed-in-the-woods horror movies that's also a little bit scary. The Times' Stephen Holden seems to like the strained relationships between the 4 characters OK, but as he often does, he mostly just describes the plot and style without quite saying if it's good or bad. David Edelstein decides that "fumblecore" is a better name for the genre than "mumblecore", and confirms that the gentle satire of horror movies is actually scary in itself. This one I will definitely see.

Step Brothers. Everybody already knows exactly what this Farrell-Reilly-Apatow movie is like, and for the most part they already hate it. Like Manohla Dargis, whose review is scorchingly disdainful: "Dudes, I understand: You have penises. You’re nice and sort of blobby and you don’t look like Tom Cruise, but you’re real men. Hot-blooded, anatomically correct men, and no one should ever forget it, least of all the ladies that you can’t stop talking dirty about and hope one day to marry because, well, that’s the kind of good, hot-blooded, anatomically correct guys you are."

Ebert really lets rip, linking the movie's gross-out humor and general vulgarity to the moral degradation of our society. His disgust is pretty intense: "Sometimes I think I am living in a nightmare. All about me, standards are collapsing, manners are evaporating, people show no respect for themselves. I am not a moralistic nut. I'm proud of the X-rated movie I once wrote. I like vulgarity if it's funny or serves a purpose. But what is going on here?"

Over at the Washington Post, Stephen Hunter finds depths of nuance and an "undertow of melancholy" in the characters and thinks the crude jokes are a riot. So who knows.

Brideshead Revisited. Everyone agrees: it's stuffy and insincere and not as good as the BBC version from the 80's. (A.O. Scott: "tedious, confused and banal.")

The movies that sound really good are the little ones. The Order of Myths is a documentary about the all-white and all-black Mardi Gras celebrations in Mobile, AL, by the same woman who did the Townes Van Zandt doc a few years ago. Manohla and Davy E. both love it.

But I can't seem to get excited about Man on Wire, a documentary about the French guy who tightrope-walked between the Twin Towers in the 70's that everybody says is good.

MTV has joined with Fox Television to do a remake of every high school Drama Club geek's favorite midnight movie, Rocky Horror Picture Show. I guess it will be for TV?

OK, it's not very cool to admit that I have been to a few of these screenings, complete with a shadow cast in front of the screen, props, and a theater full of assistant stage managers singing along to "Time Warp". A long time ago. But I agree with some of the very indignant Wired commenters that this will be a tough remake to pull off without enraging a lot of devoted fans.

So let's think about recasting. The cast for a Rocky Horror remake needs to be energetic and funny and able to camp it up and dance in heels and fishnets. And ideally also sing.

Here's what I've got:

Dr. Frank-N-Furter. Tim Curry was in the original. I want to see Alan Cumming, who could generate the appropriate level of drag flamboyance (as he demonstrated in the Lincoln Center production of The Bacchae recently.) Or maybe, and I know I'm going out on a limb here, Robert Downey, Jr. He's gotten himself together now, but I think he's still just unhinged enough to make it work.

Brad, the Eagle Scout do-gooder waiting to be corrupted. Barry Bostwick in the original, who later went onto "Spin City" and the forthcoming Hannah Montana movie. I think this would be perfect for Chris Klein, who needs a good comeback. Or how about this one: Justin Timberlake! He was great in Southland Tales and Black Snake Moan and has no problem with campy choreography. I'd love to see him in drag.

Janet. A very young Susan Sarandon in the original, which is still hard to believe. I'd like to see Amy Adams in the remake. She's really funny, so she'll be good at the blushing, nice-girl part at the start of the movie, and I bet she can vamp it up for the slutty transformation.

Riff Raff. Richard O'Brien in the original. We need someone who can play a sort of weirdly sexy creepy ghoul from outer space. I'm going for Rhys Ifans, or, even better, Seth Green.

Magenta. Patricia Quinn in the original, who I definitely haven't seen in anything else she's done since RHPS. We need a scary/sexy alien for this one. How about either Asia Argento, who is terrifying and hot, or maybe Pink, who is mostly just terrifying.

Eddie. It was good old Meat Loaf in the original. Kid Rock could do a good job as a crazy undead rockabilly lobotomy victim, but I think an aging, puffy, crinkly Sebastian Bach might be good too.

Columbia. Nell Campbell in the original, whose career has not taken off since. Best choice is Scarlett Johansson. I've really lost faith in her movie choices lately, but I bet she's still good in comedies, and would look great in a gold-sequined tap dancing outfit.

Then Brian Cox can play old Dr. Scott in the wheelchair.

What about Rocky? The blonde sexbot hunk of chiseled beef? Either some nameless gay porn star could do it (the original Rocky didn't have much of a legitimate career, either) or a prettyboy heartthrob, like Chace Crawford from Gossip Girl. Is he hunky enough?

If you think of Matthew McConaughey as a celebrity product, he's one of the most consistently branded and immediately recognizable products on the planet. In most photos, he is a) on a beach, b) in shorts, c) holding a surfboard, d) wearing a do-rag, e) drunk, or most often f) a combination of at least 3 of these.

Matthew McConaughey is his own logo, and it looks like this:

or maybe like this:

Since Matthew McConaughey's branding is so consistent, it becomes easy to predict the details of new business ventures he's getting into. For example, if you hear that Matthew McConaughey has started a record label, what genre would you guess his first artist is in?

That's right: Reggae! The first single is "Here Comes Da Train" by Mishka.

Here's another one: What do you think his upcoming movie that he stars in and produced might be about?

Yes: surfing! Surfer Dude comes out later this year. It's also features Woody Harrelson and Willie Nelson and is about a surfer on a mystical journey. So actually, if your guess had been "smoking weed" you also would have been right.

From the IMDb message board for Surfer Dude:

See what I mean? The man is a rigorously disciplined marketing genius.

UPDATE: I just noticed that the director of Surfer Dude is S.R. Bindler, whose only other movie is maybe the greatest documentary ever made, Hands on a Hard Body. So yes, it will be awesome. It looks like Bindler and Matthew McConaughey were in high school together in Texas.

The Times has a lot of especially good stuff today:

• A response from Rep. Charles Rangel about his 4 rent-stabilized apartments in a luxury building, which the Times exposed this morning. He fails to explain why he gets to have all 4 when one is the legal limit, and pretty much just comes right out and says that Harlem should be glad he still lives there.
• A piece on the Bronx Zoo visitors trapped in a broken-down tram, and their newfound sympathy for the animals they were there to see: "I can understand what animals feel,” one woman said. "You have no say in what happens to you. You lose all control."
• Amazingly in-depth piece on wooden roller coasters in Pennsylvania, which have a "different psychology of fear" than steel ones. (I agree--they're scarier.)
• Positive comments from New Yorkers about the city's plan to use two lanes of Broadway between Times Square and 34 St as a pedestrian park. Opening in August!
• New debate over who wrote the Serenity Prayer--a Protestant theologian? Aristotle? St. Francis?
• Obama gets in trouble for saying Americans should learn other languages; McCain gets in trouble for saying Social Security is "a disgrace."
• A court interpreter for Spanish-speakers wrote an essay saying that many immigrant defendants don't understand the charges brought against them or their legal rights.
• A.O. Scott tries to avoid thrill-ride comparisons in his review of Journey to the Center of the Earth. He fails. But he does note that one of the coolest uses of 3-D in the movie is when Brendan Fraser spits into the sink while brushing his teeth.

A new service called PopTok allows users to insert video one-liners of movies into instant messages and email. Creator Illi Edry describes the inspiration for his service:

Of course, it's this mentality that led to the whole world repeating "You're so money!" and "Yeah baby!" over and over again in 1997, but I see his point. (Damn, my references are old. I just can't think of any annoying catchphrases from Iron Man.)

The service is being tested now, but they say they already have 2,000 snippets licensed from studios that you can drag into your IM conversations. Neat!

The site offers a few examples of their available clips, which are mostly famous 2-3 second bits from movies like Austin Powers, American Psycho, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Borat, Scarface, some Bugs Bunny, and a Kanye video.

I thought I'd suggest a few clips I'd like to see:

• "It places the lotion in the basket" from Silence of the Lambs
• "I think men are wonderful", Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story
• "We thought you was a toad" from O Brother, Where Art Thou?
• "Shut shut shut shut up", scary Philip Seymour Hoffman in Punch-Drunk Love
• "Is that an alcoholic beverage? Is it for me?" from the highly-quotable The Philadelphia Story
• "Don't Speak", Dianne Wiest from Bullets Over Broadway
• "You're too much trouble. Get some therapy." from Tootsie
• Anything that either Teri Garr or Bill Murray says in Tootsie. It's a one-liner goldmine.

Suggestions?

Today the Times examines the recreation of 70's era Times Square on W. 38th St, for a movie called All Good Things. The movie is about (or at least "inspired by") the story of Robert Durst (crazy oldest son of the prominent real estate family) and his first wife Kathleen who, along with just about everybody else in Mr. Durst's life, is presumed to have died under very mysterious circumstances.

The movie is directed by Andrew Jarecki, who did the excellent documentary Capturing the Friedmans, another story about a cryptically messed-up family. Kirsten Dunst plays the long-lost and similarly-named Kathleen Durst, who vanished in 1982 after 10 years of marriage to Robert. Ryan Gosling also stars, and I'm guessing/hoping that he plays Durst. If you thought his delusional, tic-y loner in Lars and the Real Girl was a little unnerving, wait till you see him shaving his eyebrows and doing primal scream therapy.

You can read lots more about Robert Durst's epically strange and dangerous life in a very thorough bio. Highlights include Asperger's syndrome, witnessing his mother's suicide, almost certainly killing 3 people and dismembering 1, living as a not-very-convincing woman, and stealing a chicken salad sandwich.

The Times post goes into detail about how much Times Square has changed, and the regret that many New Yorkers feel for the transformation of the gross but thrilling area into a mall.

Earlier: Robert Durst is a free man, getting back into real estate

This afternoon, Turkey plays Germany in a semi-final game of the Euro Cup. I really love the added political drama of international sports when one country plays its own former colony, like when Senegal trounced France in the very first game of the 2002 World Cup. Games like that don't happen much in the Euro Cup, but the long and mostly exploitative relationship between Turkey and Germany means this game is going to be a good one to watch, even if Turkey doesn't have the greatest chance of winning.

I happened to go see Fatih Akin's great new movie The Edge of Heaven last night at Film Forum, and it's all about messy interactions between Turks and Germans. His earlier movie, Head-On from 2005, was incredibly good; this one deals with some of the same difficulties of the Turkish population living in Germany, but gets into even better stuff about parents and children, the things people will do to try to take care of each other, and the unlikely connections that can form between people from different worlds. It was fantastic, but way too complicated for a brief summary.

The Edge of Heaven's original title in German translates to On the Other Side, which is better. Here are a few glowing reviews, from A.O. Scott, Roger Ebert, and the Guardian.

(One note about the cast--the most famous actor in the movie is Hannah Schygulla, who was in a bunch of Fassbinder movies in the '70's, and played the title role in The Marriage of Maria Braun. She's still awesome.)

Germany's Ulrich Schnauss also played a free concert at the World Financial Center last night--I caught most of it. Now I just gotta get some stuffed eggplant and shish kebab and get ready to watch Turkey face Germany starting at 2:45.

In case you're interested, here's some background on the Turkish population in Germany. The short version: Germany invited Turks to come into the country after WWII because they needed cheap labor. Loads of Turks came over, and today make up the largest minority population in Germany, but weren't given citizenship. Most children of immigrants aren't citizens either. So today, there are millions of Turks in Germany, many of whom are 3rd generation residents and may have never been to Turkey, but aren't citizens. It sucks.

Starting in 2000, Germany allowed children of foreigners born in Germany the possibility of citizenship, so maybe things are changing.

UPDATE: Germany won, barely. They pulled out a winning goal in the last minute of the game, plus the whole world missed Turkey's surprise last goal because of satellite broadcasting problems. Bleegh.

VH1 started its newest installment of the "I Love The..." series last night with "I Love the New Millennium", a show that looks back fondly on the decade that we're still in.

Message boards on VH1 and IMDb are full of "Are you kidding me?" and "What's next? 'I Love 45 minutes Ago'?" comments, but personally, I have no problem with a nostalgia show about just a few years ago. I don't feel especially nostalgic for when I was 9 or when I was 16. I feel nostalgic for when I was 27.

The 2000 and 2001 shows were on last night; 2002 and 2003 play back to back tonight. There were a few obvious segments in last night's episodes that didn't exactly capture the zeitgeist of years past because nothing has changed since then (remember the iPod? and when people downloaded music off the internet?) But there were a few bits that really did feel like a return to a not-so-distant long-lost era:

• Failed football experiments: XFL, Dennis Miller hosting Monday Night Football
• Dude, Where's My Car?
• Kelly Ripa's debut
• Sisqo

Many of the hosts of the old shows are back, with the deadpan Michael Ian Black delivering a solid half of the commentary. Dee Snyder is back, squeezing this new show in between episodes of "Rock the Cradle" and "100 Most Metal Moments", as is the most inexplicable of the regular VH1 commentators, Luis Guzman. The guy does 4-6 movies a year and still has time for this crap? He does a good job though. Also back are two members of The Donnas.

New commentators include Toofer and Josh from "30 Rock". Maybe they did this show during the writers' strike?

A few things from our current decade that I already feel nostalgic about:

• Canceled TV: "The Job" and "The Lone Gunmen"
• Low Culture (a highlight or two)
• Fametracker
• Common and Kanye on "Chappelle's Show" doing "The Food" live [video] (to be honest, the first time I saw this clip from the show was just a few days ago, but the pre-Jamie Foxx Kanye wearing a Kanye West t-shirt and blazer, with Dave Chappelle raising his fist in the studio/kitchen was instant wistfulness.)

Reprise opened in limited release about a month ago. It's by a first-time Norwegian director and stars young actors unknown in the US, so it isn't going to draw any viewers from Kung Fu Panda, but it's one of the better movies I've seen so far this year.

It can be tricky to make a movie about young, idealistic artists prone to immaturity and mental illness, because these characters tend to be pretentious, self-indulgent, and irritating (see The Doors, The Basketball Diaries, Glitter.) Reprise follows two longtime friends in their early 20's whose young writing careers diverge when one becomes an instant success. I think it (mostly) succeeds because equal time is spent watching these gu