Shrekked!

The big green ogre of ludicrously overpriced 3D movies has struck again. Schuker's lead in the Journal: "For the first time, a major Hollywood film will hit the $20 threshold at the box office, as movie-theater owners test the public's ability to absorb ever higher ticket prices. Several theaters will charge $20 per adult ticket to IMAX showings of the animated 3-D family film Shrek Forever After, the fourth Shrek installment from DreamWorks Animation. The theaters include the AMC theater in Manhattan's Kips Bay neighborhood, AMC Loews 34, AMC Loews Lincoln Square and AMC Empire 42nd Street."

I'll give the Lincoln Square venue a pass--it's the only legitimate IMAX screen in Manhattan, with the towering mega-story screen and vertigo-inducing seats. You always pay a premium for that unique experience, if not this much of one. But the rest, hell no. They're faux IMAX presentations.

$20 is a nosebleed price...but my tatty Brooklyn multiplex is hardly a bargain, either, with 3D tickets for Shrek's latest adventure costing $16.50 (a $4 surcharge) and a "mere" $13 for kids and seniors. Outrageous. I remember just a few years back when Ed Koch was railing against $10.50 movies, and look where we are now, thanks to a wheezing technology that once experienced adds little to the show.

So don't pay to see it in 3D. Don't pay to see anything in 3D. Do as I do, and don't return your rental glasses next time. You paid $4 for them for maybe two hours of use, I figure they're yours. Bring them to your next 3D movie...but buy a regular-priced ticket for another movie, and just walk into the 3D one. No one checks tickets, and the same pair of glasses works for any 3D movie.

Or just stop this madness and go see Shrek in regular 2D, which is still possible to do. Hey, I love Shrek, I really do...and I hate to see him tricked out by his corporate masters. Out-hustle the hustlers. You owe it to yourself and your family to leave some food on the table, like Shrek does.

Update: It's just a big mistake, says AMC, retreating. Tickets are $17-$19, practically a bargain, right? Feel good about that.

Beasts at BAM

How old does a kid have to be for a dad to take her to a dinosaur movie on the big screen? Older than 20 months, I imagine. So my young-at-heart self will have to sit out the Brooklyn Academy of Music's pocket retrospective dedicated to the work of Brooklyn artist Charles R. Knight, which begins tonight. Knight's murals of prehistoric flora and fauna were a major influence on master animator Ray Harryhausen, as seen in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and One Million Years B.C.; they also gave Harryhausen's mentor, Willis O'Brien, inspiration for The Lost World and King Kong. The latter has a late show on Sunday; maybe I'll check it out (Kong is one of those movies that can be watched annually, as a ritual to cinema greatness). How dino-crazed was I? So much so that I never really cared about Welch in a bikini loincloth when B.C. turned up on ABC's 4:30 Movie.

I, Pod

I'm not in the habit of listening to podcasts but when I read that this week's Popdose-inspired one was going to be about the just-reviewed Iron Man 2 I decided to listen. Sure enough fellow contributor Rob Smith and the radio show host name-checked me, which I found gratifying. Now, I could actually be on the show, but I don't think listeners want to hear a toddler squalling in the background. So I take what logrolling I can get. Just one thing: I love Ishiro Honda's strange fantasia Attack of the Mushroom People (1964), though it has no blondes.

All a-Twitter

I'm dissatisfied with blogging of late. Nothing wrong with it, but I go days at a stretch without posting, which depresses me. Not much I can do about that for now: My little handful requires plenty of daddy time (gladly given) before she's off to bed, at which time I night-shift freelance work, etc., which leaves little time for blogging. So, a week after telling at least two friends that I considered Twitter "retarded" and "for 16-year-old girls," I'm tweeting, as 10SecondRule. My feed is badged here. The reason is to burn off the surface gist of posts I might write, and if anyone asks for more I'll follow up. Thus far I'm a little retarded at it, but I haven't launched jihads against my enemies, as 16-year-old girls are wont to do. Not yet, anyway. So feel free to follow me around and we'll see where this leads.

Popdose: On #2s

The cast and director of the cellar-dwelling cult hit Troll 2 come out of hiding for a new documentary, Best Worst Movie (pictured), by one of their own, as Iron Man 2 blasts off into the boxoffice stratosphere.

Kate mail

"The U.S. Postal Service immortalized one of America’s true cinematic treasures—the only recipient of four Academy Awards for Best Actress—on what would have been her 103rd birthday, May 12. The stamp issued today pays tribute to Katharine Houghton Hepburn, known to many as simply “Kate,” a great actress whose almost 50-year career made her an icon of the silver screen and a trailblazer for independent, progressive women."

The release says Hepburn is the 16th inductee in its "Legends of Hollywood" series. 16th? I would have thought Top 10 for sure, certainly before Lucille Ball (No. 7). Anyway, I'd love to get a Kate in the mail, so send me a letter.

RIP Frank Frazetta

Arbogast on Film said it best. And Ian McDowell at the Mobius forum posted this terrific gallery of images. I still have some of those Creepy and Eerie magazines in my parents' basement; I bought the reprints based on those fantastic covers.

RIP Lena Horne

Some time ago I stopped memorializing artists with whom I had no "personal" connection. Horne is something of an exception to this rule, in that I only recently became acquainted with her work. Growing up she only appeared in one film that I saw (on cable), 1978's The Wiz, where she gives an earnest, gauzy performance as Glinda (it would be her last screen role), appeared on TV, and had a Broadway hit that was before my time as a theatergoer. Not much to go on. Now I realize what a hard climb it was for her, and I can fathom why aspects of her multifaceted career seem unrealized as she went from striver to living legend without sinking in as deeply as other performers. I'm better acquainted with her music, I appreciated her steadying personality in an uneven but interesting Richard Widmark Western, Death of a Gunfighter (1969), and I've seen her two best films, from 1943, Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky. She's incredibly sexy and delightful in each, a major presence...and such was America in the pre-civil rights era that her gifts could not easily be capitalized on. She opened doors that let others through, a huge accomplishment not easily achieved. But I'm not sure we got to know her as well as we might have.

Broadway: The 2009-2010 season ends

Sondheim on Sondheim looms large over a rundown on seven shows that concluded the theater year, including The Addams Family, Denzel Washington and Viola Davis in Fences, and Green Day onstage in American Idiot.

Popdose: Michael Caine is Harry Brown

Old, but gold. The 78-year-old actor is gunning for justice as a complete print of the 83-year-old sci-fi landmark Metropolis is released.

Bloody entertaining

I went to to the Public last night and caught up with Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, the bawdy, raunchy, nutso, etc. rock-and-roll history lesson that's evidently triggered a minor sensation, given that a fair amount of repeat groupies were in the audience. (Or maybe it was an audience of historians, happy to see one of our nation builders enshrined in the pop culture vortex.) Shows like this are hard to sustain for a full 90 minutes, but this one crosses the finish line without too much gasping and panting, thanks to a game-for-anything cast that knows exactly how long to stretch a joke, a book that offers genuinely funny situations worth stretching, and very catchy music. (The book, by Alex Timbers, and music, by Michael Friedman, are up for Drama Desk awards.) I particularly loved Donyale Werle's design, which transforms the Newman into a redneck paradise, full of small stuffed animals, KFC boxes, and all kinds of Southern bric-a-brac. It's as cheap as the jokes (lots of gags at the expense of the, umm, "effete" Martin Van Buren and James Monroe) and as effective. The show plays through June 27.

Tonys nominations announced

Drama Desks yesterday, Tony nominations today. Fela! and the La Cage aux Folles revival had the biggest hauls, 11 nominations apiece. The chatters erupt. La Cage nominees Douglas Hodge and Kelsey Grammer try to stay above the fray.

RIP Lynn Redgrave

So sad this morning to read of the passing of the actress, after a valiant fight against breast cancer and atop recent family misfortunes. Despite her fair share of accolades she never quite had the same career as her sister Vanessa, but she was always more likable--and I have to say a better stage actress, much less inclined to dominate or impress. (I enjoyed her Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest at BAM, was delighted by her Drama Desk-winning turn in Alan Bennett's Talking Heads, and last saw her Off Broadway in a religious drama, Grace.) That unpretentious quality sustained her through everything from Shakespeare to The Happy Hooker, and she left an indelible mark in Swinging Sixties culture in Georgy Girl. Her other Oscar nomination came for the marvelous Gods and Monsters, as the thickly accented housekeeper (pictured), a figure that bridges the fact and fiction of James Whale's life. (She spent some time bridging the fact and fiction of her family's life, too, enacting episodes from its storied history onstage in several plays, including the Tony-nominated Shakespeare Round My Father.)

'''Vanessa was the one expected to be the great actress,'' Lynn Redgrave told The Associated Press in 1999. ''It was always, 'Corin's the brain, Vanessa the shining star, oh, and then there's Lynn.''' Nice to have known you, Lynn.

Drama Desk nominations announced

Leading the pack: the revival of Ragtime and The Scottsboro Boys (pictured). Scanning the list, I would have liked to have seen the two lead actors and The Pride itself nominated; easily the most riveting drama of the season past. Still, a lot of worthy work awarded or in contention this year: kudos especially to the casts of Circle Mirror Transformation and The Temperamentals, John Douglas Thompson in The Emperor Jones, Terri White in Finian's Rainbow, and Yank!. I would like to see the Projection and Video category, which I helped inaugurate, return in some form, and do think that if puppets can be on the same line as set design so too could be projection and video. But I'm not a nominator, and I'm no longer a board member...and I see there are a few shows that I can't recall off the top of my head and will have to look up, proof that the committee has cast a typically wide net.

Popdose: Kick-Ass and more

Did you miss me? Well, I'm back, with reviews of Kick-Ass, Clash of the Titans (pictured), and the Korean import The Good, The Bad, The Weird, plus an observation about The Proposal, starring you-know-who.

RIP Dorothy Provine

The AP, the Times, etc. will file the nuts and bolts but this is a far more satisfying obituary of the charming actress, who pretty much left show business in her 30s. How nice of the community theater players to stop by and cheer her up in her final days. She was so nice (and so sexy) in movies like Good Neighbor Sam and Who's Minding the Mint? you want to know that she passed with a smile on her face. She could be rowdy, though the pose is uncharacteristic of her film work; I'd like to see her pre-Bonnie and Clyde Bonnie Parker, and she's fun vamping it up in a Johnny Mercer/Henry Mancini musical number in The Great Race. But I'm surely not alone in remembering her most vividly as the oasis of calm among the comedians in It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, the one who discovers the "Big W," then watches as its riches slip away (and is spared the final slapstick indignities). "It was a nice dream, if only for a couple of minutes," she says wistfully to Spencer Tracy. Lovely moment, lovely performer.

Doctor Hamlet

David Tennant's acclaimed RSC portrayal of Hamlet gets the PBS Great Performances treatment tomorrow night as 8pm (EST, in New York). Confusing the matter of to be or not to be for the Tenth Doctor is Captain Picard...I mean, Patrick Stewart. While the play has been contemporized there is no truth to the rumor that Daleks and the Borg co-star.

(While we had our ups and downs with Tennant's madcap-ish portrayal of the Doctor we are two thumbs up, two episodes in, regarding the Eleventh Doctor, Matt Smith. The young actor has really silenced the skeptics with a neatly balanced performance and Karen Gillan makes a winning traveling companion. With Dalek and Weeping Angels programs scheduled for the next three weeks Doctor Who is definitely in.)

A tangled web

How the programming grid on my Time Warner box describes Vincente Minnelli's The Cobweb (1955), which airs tomorrow afternoon on TCM: "Psychiatric clinic director (Richard Widmark) handles crisis over new curtains." Yeah, that'll put butts on couches.

Thompy comes home

I don't often write about community topics, but my world-famous "stash spot" was rocked by a dognapping a couple of weeks ago, one that was publicized on various local blogs, TV shows, and newspapers. I wasn't expecting a happy ending, but sure enough a miracle occurred, and Thompy was located in Red Hook this morning. (The bastard who stole him, still roaming the streets, sold him to an unsuspecting family; a microchip implant proved his ownership.) Two things to note: watch your dogs, and never bet against Brooklynites who unite for the common good.

Aliens among us

Overpraise can hurt a playwright's career as surely as bad reviews, or no reviews at all. So I'm feeling a little protective of Annie Baker this morning. Yes, her new play, The Aliens, is good. But anyone who dashes off to the Rattlestick to see it based on Charles Isherwood's New York Times rave this morning is likely to come away unfulfilled. "At the risk of appearing hyperbolic, I’ll go so far as to say there is something distinctly Chekhovian in the way her writing accrues weight and meaning simply through compassionate, truthful observation," Isherwood writes--and, yes, it's risky.

On this we agree: Baker is a good playwright. Her Body Awareness was an unexpected delight when I encountered it at Atlantic Stage 2 a couple of seasons back (I went primarily because the somewhat MIA JoBeth Williams popped up in it) and Circle Mirror Transformation was a justified sensation at Playwrights Horizons last season. The Aliens is something of a pullback from those plays, putting me more in mind of of one of Richard Linklater's indie films. The focus here is on three men; more to the point, three guys, one adolescent, Evan (Dane DeHaan, pictured at left), and two adolescent of the overgrown variety (Erin Gann, center, as Jasper, and Michael Chernus, right, as K J). They meet in the backyard of the Vermont coffeehouse where Evan works and Jasper and K J loaf. Not a lot happens, at least, not initially--and the play flirts with a distinctly un-Chekhovian tedium as Evan can barely get a word out as the self-proclaimed "geniuses" in his midst talk about Charles Bukowski, play music (they were in a group called The Aliens, or maybe The Frogmen, or maybe something else), and bait him.

I was however confident that Baker, working once more with Circle Mirror director Sam Gold, was purposefully drawing us into something more purposeful, and I wasn't wrong. By the end of the first act, Evan has made his bones and is part of the group, as the three steer clear of an uncool Fourth of July celebration; in the second, the dynamic has changed dramatically, in a way that's not easily comprehended but that Baker makes comprehensible (yes, there's a crater-sized spoiler that I'm laboring to conceal). A show that was doodling along suddenly, forcefully grows up. The first act is about how cool it is for a young person to be accepted by older, worldwise friends, no matter that we may think of them as, well, losers; the second is about how to cope with the rupture of that bond, and the difficulty of moving on. Worthy subjects, movingly enacted (Chernus has a great Falstaff in him) and richly designed in an intimate space (Bart Fasbender's audio suggests quite a fireworks display, one that can't help but to shake the characters from their usual disdain)--but we do such a low-key work a disservice by loving it out of proportion. I mean, hey, what are trying to do here, drive Baker to movies and TV? Let's keep her to ourselves for a while.

Green Night

And I was there as Green Day took to the stage at the St. James last night to perform a couple of songs following American Idiot, the musical based on their album. It seems they're often there enjoying the show but this was the first time they'd become a part of it. The contrast between the show and the live performance was fascinating--if you think the show is loud, you ain't heard nothing yet--but they didn't upstage the adaptation, and rather complemented the piece with their own particular dynamism. That's star Spring Awakening Tony winner John Gallagher, Jr., a guy born to suffer in contemporary rock musicals, behaving himself in a relatively quiet moment from the production. Top that, Barbara Cook, I say, as I downshift into traditional musical theater mode for tonight's performance of Sondheim on Sondheim.

RIP Dede Allen

See a little of what made the film editor great. It's hard to believe she went without an Oscar despite her innovations, but the work, as always endures. Would there have been a golden era in 60s and 70s without her leading the way in the editing room, establishing its particular rhythms and idiosyncrasies? Her influence over her time is the mark of enduring greatness. Coincidentally, I just finished reading Mark Harris' superb "Pictures at a Revolution," which quite thrillingly tells the whole story of how Bonnie and Clyde, her signature credit, came to be. And there was so much else. What a resume--Odds Against Tomorrow. The Hustler (the first time an editor received sole credit for a film). Little Big Man. Serpico. Dog Day Afternoon (Oscar nomination). Night Moves. Slap Shot. Reds (Oscar nomination). The Breakfast Club. Wonder Boys (Oscar nomination). There are other key credits than those; indeed, more facets to her trail-blazing career than that particular skill. But her work on some of my favorite, generation-defining movies is what generations to come will remember.

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Shows: Frank, Tony, and the Boys

Come Fly Away with Sinatra, Lend Me a Tenor, and The Scottsboro Boys as I pick it up again after spring break. Tenor stars Justin Bartha and Tony Shalhoub approximate how I feel to be back after a week on the Florida coast.

Stop the presses

Last year's political thriller State of Play was pretty much an elegy to newspapers, and to a certain kind of fast-talking, deadline-driven movie. Film Forum relives the days of ink-stained wretches with "The Newspaper Picture," a month-long extra that begins on Apr. 9. Kicking off with Billy Wilder's caustic Ace in the Hole (1951), the series encompasses all kinds of headline-grabbers, including the early color horror film Mystery of the Wax Museum (1934), Samuel Fuller's excellent Park Row (1952) and Shock Corridor (1963), and two movies vying with Dr. Strangelove as most revived, All the President's Men (1976) and Sweet Smell of Success (1957). A special section is devoted to the films of the garrulous Lee Tracy, who turbo-charged every movie he was ever in, burnt out scandalously, then came back with a last, Oscar-nominated hurrah in The Best Man (1964). Hard at work on the five star final is Dana Andrews in Fritz Lang's While the City Sleeps (1956).

Seeing Red

Alfred Molina is Mark Rothko in John Logan's new bioplay, at the Golden fresh from the West End.

Popdose: Ben Stiller in Greenberg

The actor achieves a career high as a low-as-he-can-go misanthrope in the new film from Squid and the Whale writer-director Noah Baumbach.

Popdose: Lad movies

Boys will be boys, as cult heroes The Boondock Saints return, and Sherlock Holmes gets some action, too.

For Godzilla's sake...

Get it right this time, guys. It's the least you can do for the Big G, and my 900th post. Don't screw it up as royally as you did in 1998, with a movie and monster so poor Toho spoofed the whole thing in 2004's Godzilla: Final Wars. With that studio giving Godzilla a rest it's incumbent that you do the following:

1) Use the original character with the original look;
2) Don't waste time on some half-assed origins story;
3) Don't use a comic/romantic relief interest who's never heard from again;
4) Don't use any romance, period. Some comedy, OK;
5) If Nineties perpetrators Roland Emmerich and/or Dean Devlin show up with "advice," show them the door, or better the window;
6) Bring in Rodan, Mothra, etc., from the get-go. Give Godzilla an opponent, something to be Godzilla against.
7) Just let me write the damn thing. Maybe direct it, And star in it, too. I'm big and tall...who needs CGI, just put me in the suit and let's rock.

Popdose: Michael Sheen, United and Undead

Hollywood's go-to Brit at the moment basks in the boxoffice glow of The Twilight Saga: New Moon, then finds redemption in the homegrown Damned United.

24 no more

After eight seasons the clock's run out on an old favorite, which perfected itself in its Emmy-winning fifth season and inevitably wore down like an old watch, with the show losing altitude after a disappointing Season Six. It's been more of a habit since then, though it can still surprise me; revealing Battlestar Galactica veteran Katee Sackhoff as a bad guy on Monday should keep the plot boiling through the May 24 series ender.

Memo to Fox: Keep Sutherland and the delightful Mary Jane Rajskub and get the movie out in two years max, none of this X-Files sequel footdragging. The clock is definitely ticking on audience interest.

How to milk your dragon

"Higher Prices Make Box-Office Debut: Tickets Get Costlier as Movie Chains Seek to Capitalize on Consumers' Willingness to Pay More for 3-D" is the headline of this morning's excellent Wall Street Journal story about the costly craze. The story is behind a paywall (oh, the irony!) but the bottom line is that in the absence of any consumer backlash the sky's the limit on those irritating surcharges for 3D and those damn glasses. Think $2, $3 or even $4 is a bit rich? "The exhibitors are trying to push the needle on ticket prices and see where it ends up," says Dan Fellman, Warner Bros.' president of domestic distribution. "So far charging a $3 or $4 premium has had no effect on consumers whatsoever, so I'm in favor of this experiment to raise prices even more. There may be additional revenue to earn here." And to hell with goodwill, as prices on regular old 2D movies also go up by an average of 4% beginning this weekend, as the latest CGI cartoon prepares to slay families with the 3D price gouge.

Thumbs down, permanently

An era ends. It ended me for at least a decade ago, when Siskel died (before that, actually, as the show became hard to find in New York). When Ebert left that should have been it, but it limped on. And now after 35 years in some form or another the show's over, and another standard-bearer of old media criticism (one hotly contested by the old guard until it became an institution of sorts) is extinct.

But fond memories I have of watching Sneak Previews as a teen, on my old black-and-white TV on PBS. I learned a lot, took note of movies I should see, or wished I could see, and treasured the "Dog of the Week," a feature that ended when the grindhouses and drive-ins that played them went toes-up. I now know that some of those dogs weren't so bad. But the show helped develop my faculties, and I'm glad to have shared the aisle seat with Siskel and Ebert.

Big deal(s)

Alarm in the blogosphere as the Great Satan, Michael Bay, announces that John Malkovich and Frances McDormand have sold their souls to him and will co-star in the next Transformers movie. As if these two laureled thespians, neither an A-lister (and one, Malkovich, a Madoff victim) are expected to live in monasteries...and as if they haven't grabbed a paycheck or two already. No one takes a vow of poverty to work in Hollywood. As I said, "The shorter and more interesting list is, which actors never 'sell out'? It may begin and end with Daniel Day-Lewis." Others have been suggested. The norm, though, is that integrity and Megatron go hand-in-hand in showbiz. And, another shocker--Transformers 2 was hardly the worst movie I saw last year.

Plays: I'm Walken here

The ghoulish comedian (which is pretty much what he is these days) returns to Broadway in Martin McDonagh's A Behanding in Spokane, while other good ensemble casts lose their cool in the drama When the Rain Stops Falling and The Pride. (Praise, too, for the New Group revival of Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind, which closed on Saturday. Shepard himself found the piece "rickety" but its fine cast, ably directed by Ethan Hawke, found some life in it. Interestingly, for a piece that deals with some painful themes, there was no "adult language" in it at all. The absence of profanity is more startling than its presence.)

Popdose: Wonderlands

Down rabbit holes with Alice in Wonderland, Matt Damon in Green Zone, and a new inmate in the prison-set melodrama A Prophet (un Prophète), an Oscar nominee from France.

Popdose: Up in the Air on DVD

Oscar nominees George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, and Anna Kendrick give Jason Reitman's observant comedy a lift as it takes off on DVD.

RIP VCR Plus +

I remember how excited I was when these codes started appearing in the paper and TV Guide about 20 years ago. VCR Plus + was the old media version of the DVR, just pop in the code and be done with all that programming bother. Now TV Guide is dead, newspapers are dying, and the VCR is a relic; I still have a small box of tapes, and a player, neither of which have seen any use in years. The P.C. Richard & Son near me is still selling VCRs, for $40, which seems an unrealistic price point at this late date. But if you're going to buy one now and live off the grid with it I doubt you'll need sissy stuff like programming codes.

Popdose: Revanche on DVD

The Criterion Collection does justice to a Foreign Language Oscar nominee from last year.

The full Monty

OK, not a complete retrospective, but tonight BAM kicks off an excellent career overview of Montgomery Clift with The Heiress (1949), one of my favorite films. And the hits featuring the handsome, sensitive, wounded actor keep coming, including Red River (1948), A Place in the Sun (1951), From Here to Eternity (1953, pictured), Wild River (1960), The Misfits (1960), and John Huston's little-seen Freud (1962), his final noteworthy credit. My wife and I looked for his grave within Prospect Park's Friends Quaker Cemetery, a lovely, wild spot that is occasionally open for tours. We didn't find it, but this presentation, not too far away from his final resting place, is apt tribute to a remarkable, influential talent.

Down with 3D surcharges

I saw Alice in Wonderland last night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which now has a 3D screen. I'm hoping they'll find some better use for it other than the mostly dull Alice (retrospective programming perhaps? Would love to see Flesh for Frankenstein in comin' at ya form again). As a BAM member I paid $8 for the film-but there's no break on the $3 rental surcharge on the glasses, the standard price here in New York (I think it was $2 or $2.50 when I saw Avatar in Baltimore).

Off with its head, I say. It's all the same Real 3D process so one size fits all, whether you're seeing Avatar or Alice or Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs or Coraline. And the only movies that really benefit from 3D at all are the ones conceived with the process in mind from the get-go, like Avatar or the surprisingly promising Tron Legacy, due at Christmas. Many of the rest, like Alice and the Clash of the Titans redo, are converted afterwards, for a few unremarkable, fall-down-the-rabbit-hole cheap thrills. Nothing to see here, folks--so why pony up the extra dough? Families coughing up an extra $2 or $3 per member must fume at this something-for-not-much deal. Enough ire from ticket buyers and the 3D "revolution" (already a bit of a snooze) will be stopped dead in its tracks.

I recommend seeing the 2D versions of the non-event ones. Trust me, Alice gains little in the format. Re; 3D, until the studios drop the surcharge (which they'll be loathe to do given the golden eggs it's yielding) the work-around is to hang onto your glasses the next time you see a 3D movie, pay to see a different, surcharge-less movie when it's time to see another, and sneak into the 3D auditorium with your purloined specs. I don't condone this kind of sneaky behavior but the 3D surcharging is a ripoff in any dimension.

Popdose: Smackdown with Tony Jaa

You'll get a kick--and a punch, and a crushed windpipe--out of Thailand's martial arts sensation as he goes back to the beginning with Ong Bak.

16

Not my worst Oscar showing (that may have been last year's 14) but far from my best--when will we have another Return of the King-type sweep? The big categories were locked-and-loaded and had been for months (oh, Sandra!); I fell down on the shorts, cinematography, adapted screenplay, foreign film, etc. Serves me right looking to The House Next Door for guidance to fill in my blanks. Oh, well. There's a broken wrist for every handprint outside Grauman's Chinese, or something. Oscar season fatigue seems to have extended to the show itself, a listless affair--and those mawkish actors' tributes to their peers (plus that intro to the Top 10) have got to go (the Brits must find them excruciating in the extreme). With nothing pithy or insightful to say, I say, "Next!"

My Oscar ballot

"Let's shoot this fucker!"--Oscar winner Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi in 1994's Ed Wood

PICTURE: The Hurt Locker
ACTOR: Jeff Bridges
ACTRESS: Sandra Bullock
SUPPORTING ACTOR: Christoph Waltz
SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Mo'Nique
DIRECTOR: Kathryn Bigelow
ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Up in the Air
ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Inglourious Basterds
ANIMATED FEATURE: Up
FOREIGN LANGUAGE: The White Ribbon
FILM EDITING: The Hurt Locker
ORIGINAL SONG: "The Weary Kind"
ORIGINAL SCORE: Up
CINEMATOGRAPHY: The Hurt Locker
ART DIRECTION: Avatar
COSTUME DESIGN: The Young Victoria
SOUND MIXING: Avatar
SOUND EDITING: The Hurt Locker
VISUAL EFFECTS: Avatar
MAKEUP: Star Trek
DOCUMENTARY: The Cove
DOCUMENTARY SHORT: China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province
ANIMATED SHORT: A Matter of Loaf and Death
LIVE ACTION SHORT: Instead of Abracadabra

TCM, incidentally, is counter-punching the kudosfest by airing the glass-mountain-of-success camp classic The Oscar (1966) tonight at 8pm. "I hope the Oscar keeps you warm on cold nights!"

Popdose: Sandra Bullock revisited

Rebooting and revisiting a three-year-old blog post as my crush object prepares her Oscar speech. "I'd like to thank Bob Cashill at Between Productions..."

The Spring issue of Cineaste, online and on sale

The season starts early with a bumper crop of web-exclusive articles and other Spring issue content, including an overview of repertory film programming today, a tour of Cinecitta, book reviews of titles dedicated to Psycho and Singin' in the Rain, a review of the controversial Chinese film City of Life and Death, and much, much more.

Film Forum's Fleming fest

I enjoyed reading Michael Sragow's Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master last summer, and now it's inspired a Film Forum retrospective of his work, which runs through March 18. Among other speakers Sragow himself will be on hand for some of the screenings, including the highly entertaining Red Dust (1932, pictured), which will be shown tonight and tomorrow. A number of these films haven't made it to DVD yet, and seeing them on the big screen is a treat. Of particular interest is a double bill of the Spencer Tracy-starrers Test Pilot (1938) and A Guy Named Joe (1943); I hadn't seen the former until I'd read the book, and the biography informed a rewarding re-viewing of Joe, which I'd never particularly liked.

Though Sragow makes a convincing case for Fleming's ultimate ownership of 1939's Gone with the Wind and The Wizard if Oz, two troubled productions that landed in his lap, it won't settle auteurist arguments over the matter. I have a hunch, too, that readers will be disappointed with Fleming's miscast, unsuited-to-MGM Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), which Sragow waxes about. The series concludes with Fleming's other challenged credit with lover Ingrid Bergman, 1948's Joan of Arc, his last film before his premature death. But there's a lot here to hooray-for-Hollywood about.

New York Theater News: The Miracle Worker

The story of Annie Sullivan (played by Tony nominee Alison Pill) and Helen Keller (Little Miss Sunshine Oscar nominee Abigail Breslin) returns in a 50th anniversary season production, reviewed here.

On TCM: Heaven's Gate

It's a little late to celebrate, but TCM's "31 Days of Oscars" salute contained what I believe was its first telecast of Michael Cimino's reviled, now rehabilitated, Heaven's Gate. True, it came in the dead of the evening, and "Classic" is sometimes a bit of a stretch given what the channel airs, but there it was, proudly enshrined in a pantheon of sorts. Its Art Direction-Set Decoration nomination, incidentally, was awarded on the basis of the short version that was given a tiny release in 1981, a few months after Cimino's preferred version tanked. But TCM, and other channels, and the home video market, have long since embraced the long version--as has critical opinion. It's an uneven, indulgent, puzzling, but genuinely rewarding vision if you give it a chance, and TCM should give it many chances.

The shadowy Veit Harlan

There are certain movies that cultures would just as soon forget. In America it's Disney's Song of the South; in Europe it's Veit Harlan's outraging Jew Suss (1940), which is today banned from exhibition on the continent. I saw a few clips in a German history class I took in college and was startled at how blatantly anti-Semitic the film was. But this product of Goebbels' propaganda machine was a hit in this day, sympathetically reviewed by, of all people, then-critic Michelangelo Antonioni. Then again, from a distance, we revere Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, for its filmmaking if not its message.

Still, the cruder Jew Suss is harder to rationalize. While anti-Semitism remains a vexing problem we know longer have to live with the film--but the family of its director, Veit Harlan (pictured), does. Opening today at Film Forum in New York Felix Moeller's Harlan--In the Shadow of Jew Suss is pedestrian filmmaking, the documentary equivalent to Harlan's own stodgy, sentimental pictures, which are shown in excerpts. But Moeller gets into a fascinating subject, one that tantalized Stanley Kubrick, who married Harlan's niece Christiane, who does talking head duty here. How does a family deal with a legacy of shame that persists on the cultural record?

For Thomas, Harlan's son, the answer is relentless activism, and criticism of his father, which antagonizes his family. They prefer to view the matter in perspective. His grandchildren, while aware of the taint, can't quite wrap their heads around the troubling legacy their grandfather's "creaky old movie" represents as a museum showcases his work, safely under glass. No one is entirely satisfied with Harlan's "just following orders" self-defense, or that he fell out with his patron, Goebbels, over the editing of the epic Kolberg (1945), which was the basis for the patriotic film-within-the-film in Inglourious Basterds (the poverty and violence that Harlan wanted to leave in, a fact on the ground for German audience members as the war effort collapsed, Goebbels ordered sanitized). But these served him well enough through two controversial war crimes trials (he was acquitted both times) and allowed him to make more movies, in his same flat, fussy style. Harlan retired to an aerie on the island of Capri, where he's buried. The juxtaposition of its beauty and his notoriety is most startling contrast Moeller offers as his family muddles on.

On TCM: Not a Dream adaptation

TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" unearthed the flat-footed 1966 version of Norman Mailer's high-strung An American Dream, a nominee for Best Song (Johnny Mandel's "A Time for Love"). I suspect the writer was singing the blues over how this one turned out, a film that needed the nervous urgency of a John Frankenheimer but instead got a director of TV shows (Robert Gist) to shepherd a cast of TV familiars, or soon-to-be TV familiars (Stuart Whitman, Barry Sullivan, Lloyd Nolan, Murray Hamilton, Warren Stevens, J.D. Cannon, Paul Mantee, and in smaller parts Harold Gould and George Takei), on TV production value sets--it's like a more posh 70s TV movie, or an impoverished Ross Hunter or Joseph E. Levine feature. Whitman is an anti-cop, anti-mob TV pundit who lets his shrewish heiress wife (the underrated Eleanor Parker, vivid as always) plunge to her death following a brawl on their penthouse balcony, with staging that reminded me of the final fight in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (and, it must be said, a memorably awful, though bloodless, finish 30 floors down). This puts the cops and the mob on his tail, with Janet Leigh (with cropped platinum blonde hair) as a former flame who now flickers for the Cosa Nostra. The effect, with most of the actors leadenly intoning hard-boiled dialogue, is more like The Oscar than Mailer--but that has its own appeal, and if the beautiful letterboxed (1.85:1) print shown turns up in the Warner Archive (it was a WB release) I'd consider it. Trivia for Hammer fans: This was the first of the two films the lovely Susan Denberg appeared in, the other being Frankenstein Created Woman.

And what do you know...two days after posting this on the Mobius Home Video Forum it did turn up in the Warner Archive. Still considering it, but love the noir porn box art, under its original title, featuring Parker. Was it really exhibited somewhere as See You In Hell Darling? Was the retitling Mailer's idea?

Popdose: Shutter Island and The Ghost Writer

In turbulent times for film culture, Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski show that old masters still have something to teach.