Cinematic Method

Award-winning movie podcast. Every Monday we look ahead to the weekend's upcoming films. Capping listener-ship at 1 million, so act fast.

[cinematicmethod-blog-blog]

Elsewhere in horses:

A ranch was used a front by a drug cartel for money laundering purposes. The ranch was raided, the owners arrested. They left the ranch and its 450 horses to their son, who has been doing a bad job taking care of the horses. The horses have started to die. Now they're being sold off by the government to go live in better places.

A Canadian horse was disqualified, controversially, from the Olympic Equestrian competition for a sensitive spot on its leg. The real news here is that “horsemanship” is a word. Emphasis mine.

It is just blind application of a rule. It lacks judgment and horsemanship. The horse has one small nick on one coronet band. He could have got it anywhere. The horse is sound.

A horse died at a polo match in the Hamptons.

“The horse suddenly dropped,” a spy told us. “Luckily the rider managed to jump off, and was OK. Everyone was very upset. What happened can be dangerous, and it’s lucky no one was hurt.”

Other than the horse, I assume they meant to say. Also, a spy? I'm not sure if that's a polo thing or a New York Post thing. Are polo spectators called spies? Are people not allowed to watch polo, so anyone who sees it is spying?

Opie, a horse stolen ten years ago, has been found thanks to the Internet. His new name is WarBonnet, but I’ll still think of him as Opie.

The Romney’s own a horse that competed in dressage at the Olympics. Owning a dressage horse isn’t great optics. If you’re running for president, and you own a horse, it had better be a ranch horse, and it had better be a terrible dancer. Mitt did his best to distance himself from the horse in an interview with Brian Williams.

I have to tell you. This is Ann's sport. I'm not even sure which day the sport goes on. She will get the chance to see it, I will not — be — watching — the event. I hope — her horse does well.

[cinematicmethod-blog-blog]

David Duchovny plays a character called “Goat Man” in the upcoming film Goats. A real life Goat Man has been haunting the news recently.  The long and short of it is it turns out the man who was spotted in Utah dressed as a goat and mingling with wild mountain goats was just a hunter who was trying out his suit in advance of goat hunting season. But before they figured that out, this happened:

A few days after the spotting, state wildlife authorities received an anonymous call from an “agitated man” who simply said, “Leave goat man alone. He’s done nothing wrong.”

[cinematicmethod-blog-blog]

We Women Warriors is a documentary about the indigenous groups being threatened by ongoing violence in Columbia. The protagonists are three women committed to non-violent resistance. I don’t know much about the conflict in Columbia, so I did a little reading to get a sense of what’s going on. I apologize for how poorly it went. I’m going to say that the shifting tenses and devolution from sentences into chopped phrases was for legitimate style reasons.

1948. Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a populist leader, was assassinated. He was running for president on the Liberal Party ticket. He was popular among low-income Columbians. His critics considered him a demagogue.  The man who assassinated him was murdered by a mob. It’s unclear why he did it or why who may have been behind getting him to do it. He had a lot of political opponents--Communists, Conservatives, and, if I’m understanding the politics correctly, some of the more old-school members of his party--and, also, as generally happens in cases like this, and is not totally unreasonable, as it were, theories of the CIA’s involvement have been thrown around (Operation Pantomime). Some believe he was assassinated as part of a USSR plot involving Fidel Castro. Some believe the guy who allegedly murdered Gaitan didn’t murder him, that he was just paid to stand nearby holding a revolver while somebody else shot him. The point is we’re all over the place here.  A riot (El Bogotazo) followed and several thousand people died. People tried to storm the palace of President Ospina. Bogota was in chaos.

1948-1958: There was a ten-year period of violence (La Violencia) between paramilitary forces of the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 people died. A lot of the fighting took place in rural areas. In ‘54, amnesty was declared for those who had, and were, participating in the violence, which stemmed it some, and they appeared to have the lid back on in 1958 after a unity government was formed.

1960: The military of the unity government began attacking, at the urging of the United States, rural peasant with Communist sympathies. Probably, my instincts are telling me it could be argued, not our finest moment. This went on for several years. The peasants organized guerrilla groups, which later became FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia), one of the groups of combatants featured in the documentary. The government and the CIA organized counter-guerrilla groups. This continued for a long time.

1974: The fighting moves to the city. There was some election fraud and urban guerrilla groups formed. Simmers on and simmers off throughout the decade.

1984: Things had calmed down a bit, the Conservative government offered a cease fire. FARC accepted, but the EIN (another militant group similar to FARC) didn’t negotiate. Some militants had kind of become allied with drug lords, who were doing quite well for themselves through all of this, but they had also kind of not allied themselves with them; for instance, there was a lot of kidnapping and murdering going on, as, if movies have taught us anything, can become the case when drug lords are involved. The drug lords are also bribing and murdering public officials.

1985: Any semblance of what had been a cease-fire is called off. At this point, I’m not clear about what was happening. There are too many guerrilla groups to keep track of in my head. FARC, EIN, M-19. So just three, really, I guess. But in terms of who’s allied with who and why, your guess is as good as mine. FARC stays in peace talks. M-19 does not. Palaces are getting stormed, judges are being held hostage, the guys who are supposed to have been negotiating never actually disarmed. It’s chaos. And I’m not talking about the violence--I’m sure that was chaotic too--I’m just talking about the web of guerrilla groups. Are they fighting for land? Control of the drug trade? Communism? This primer on the Columbian armed conflict isn’t turning out to be helpful at all. I’m just going to phone the rest in.

1990’s: Cease-fires are broken, there are disagreements as to whether cease-fires were actually broken, Pablo Escobar is involved now, there’s a big assasination, and M-19 folks are in the peace process now. FARC steps up their armed-ness and they’re very much involved with coca farmers now.

2000’s: Murders, kidnappings, severe human rights violations. Massacres upon massacres upon massacres. Groups are officially labeled as terrorists. Colombian military goes after them hard with support from the United States. FARC started to lose momentum, so they had a plan called “Rebirth”--land mines, snipers, and bombing in cities.

2010 to Now: Now there are neo-paramilitary groups. They’re controlling large swathes of rural areas. They dress in civilian clothes and attack Colombian security personnel. The government continues to go after them.

And this is the mess these brave women of We Women Warriors find themselves in the middle of.

[cinematicmethod-blog-blog]

Today in History

These things happened on this day in history. They are accompanied by the movies you should watch today in celebration, remembrance, tribute, mourning, or whatever the appropriate manner of watching it may be–it’s up to you. I can’t make these types of decisions for you.

On August 6, 1890, William Kemmler became the first person executed in an electric chair. He was convicted of murdering his wife with a hatchet. His attorney appealed his sentence, arguing that death by electrocution constituted cruel and unusual punishment. George Westinghouse, one of the men behind the alternating current (AC), the type of electricity used in the chair,  agreed. Thomas Edison, though, did not. And according to Wikipedia, many believe it was because Edison, a proponent of direct current (DC), wanted AC current to get some bad publicity. Well played, Edison. The execution did not go all that smoothly.

Movie to watch: Shocker (1989), directed by Wes Craven, starring Peter Berg. By all accounts, this movie it terrible. But so is the electric chair.

On August 6, 1926, Gertrude “Queen of Waves” Ederle swam across the English Channel. She was the first woman to do so.  On Trudy’s (she went by Trudy) first attempt at swimming the channel, she was disqualified after she was rescued when she stopped swimming and floated there face down in the water. Trudy was furious, as she claimed that she was just resting. If nothing else, it’s a strange way to rest. If she had planned on resting in that fashion, she should have at least given everyone a heads up before hand. The conversation would have gone  something like this:

Trudy: Oh guys, if I’m feeling tired, I’m going to rest by floating face down in the water.

Other person: What?

Trudy: Face down. Like I would if I had drowned.

OP: Well, no. Don’t do that.

Trudy: I’m going to though. So don’t rescue me.

OP: Doesn’t even seem like a good way to rest.

Trudy: That’s how I’m going to do it.

OP:  I might even go so far as to say it seems like a terrible way to rest.

Trudy: No.

OP: You won’t be able to breathe.

Trudy: I don’t care.

OP: You’re putting me in a real tough spot here, Trudy. A real tough spot.

A year later, she successfully completed the swim in 14 hours and 39 minutes. When she returned home, she became a vaudeville performer.

Movie to watch: Swim Girl, Swim (1927). Trudy stars in it, playing herself. You might have a hard time finding it.

On August 6, 1945, we dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. You should be familiar with this.

Movie to watch: I don’t have a movie for this one. Ronald Bergan notes the reticence of American cinema to address Hiroshima:

The only references that American cinema, commercial or otherwise, has made to Hiroshima have been oblique. During the cold war, MGM produced Above and Beyond (1952), based on the experiences of Colonel Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb. The film makes the oft-repeated argument that the bombing was justified because it contributed to the ending of the second world war, yet it seemed more concerned with the effects it had on the pilot’s relationship with his wife.

… But nowhere in American cinema do we see one victim of the bomb, one burning corpse, one person dying of radiation, one deformed child.

[cinematicmethod-blog-blog]

"The Grey" is probably a movie about Liam Neeson experiencing and expressing with varying degrees of subtly, a range of emotions that includes, but is not necessarily limited to, sadness, anger, fear, despair, and emptiness. 

[cinematicmethod-blog-blog]

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is an IMF agent—the Impossible Mission Force, not the International Monetary Fund. The International Monetary Fund is “an intergovernmental organization that promotes international economic cooperation, focusing in particular on policies that have an impact on the exchange rate and the balance of payments.” The Impossible Mission Force (the Impossible Missions Force in pre-Tom Cruise incarnations) is a fictional spy agency. I hope that cleared up any confusion.

[cinematicmethod-blog-blog]

Important things we learned from celebrities on Twitter today.

[cinematicmethod-blog-blog]

Gay Eagle, The Movie

I haven’t quite fleshed out where this movie is going to go, but I know I want it to have a gay bald eagle in it. He should come from a very conservative family that refuses to accept him for who he is. Even his friends refuse to accept him at first, until they realize that they should judge him on his ability to catch rodents and build nests and NOT on what gender of bald eagle he wants to have sex with. It will be an uplifting, triumphant tale of an entire generation coming of age.

This movie will obviously be controversial but not for the reasons you might expect. Other than the first ten minutes or so, there won’t really be anymore references to the eagle’s sexuality because we’ve progressed as society to a place where eagles are just eagles–no need for labels.

What will be so controversial about this movie is the language. The language in it is going to be absolutely brutal. These bald eagles are going to say some of the nastiest things you’ve ever heard–and not in reference to gay eagle’s sexuality or anything like that. Everything they say is going to be peppered with really graphic, creative expletives. By the end of the movie, it won’t even be a story about a gay bald eagle at all; it will just be long exchanges of eagles swearing at each other, basically for no reason.

A note about the production of the film:

This is going to be live action–not animated. Animation is difficult, so I think the better plan is to round up a bunch of bald eagles, put them in an extremely large cage and just start rolling. You’d have to figure that if you keep them in there long enough they’ll group up and do something resembling talking. I’m thinking if we get like a hundred bald eagles, somewhere between five or ten of them will be gay. Then we just chose the one that seems the gayest and make him the lead.

In calling around to zoos, I’ve been warned that if I were somehow able to round up a hundred bald eagles–which, incidentally, they’ve told me is something they are not willing to help me do as it’s “incredibly illegal”–and put them all into the cage for what I’m estimating will be close to six months of principal photography, they will almost certainly start trying to kill each other because bald eagles are extremely territorial.

This is why I have a contingency plan: I’ll have a few screenwriters on retainer to quickly draft up a script for a battle sequence should the eagles start attacking each other. Maybe this would even make it a better movie. Of course, the worst thing that could happen would be for the gay eagle, my lead actor, to die in the fighting. It’s supposed to be a triumphant movie, not a tragedy, and certainly not a movie where a gay eagle gets murdered by a bunch of other eagles. I’d hate to have to have some voice-over narration at the end of the movie saying that the gay eagle had been killed not because he was gay but because he had been locked in a large cage with ninety-nine other wild bald eagles.

[cinematicmethod-blog-blog]

Taylor Lautner is this Week’s Falling Star

I generally do a regular feature for the site known as “Rising Stars,” profiling a young, up and coming actor or actress who I believe will be or at least deserves to be famous in the relatively near future. However, the introduction to my recent Brad Pitt piece has caused some uproar from those people who, like myself, were incredibly offended by the idea that Taylor Lautner was anywhere in the vicinity of Brad Pitt in the acting department. As a form of catharsis, we mocked Lautner again in a celebrity gossip piece, but dammit all if that just didn’t seem good enough. No, we need an entire post dedicated to why Taylor Lautner sucks as an actor, and if you ask me he isn’t a very good werewolf either. So as much as it pains me to refer to him as a star, here it is, our first (and hopefully last) installment of falling stars: The incomparable Mr. Taylor Lautner.

When evaluating an actor or actress, one need only look at their acting resume. Sure, even the greatest of performers have a few blemishes, and after all this is a job and sometimes a brother just has to get paid.That said, Lautner has done 6 films to date, an admittedly small body of work, but all six were absolute garbage, and in most cases he was the worst part of these awful films. Let’s look at them one by one, and believe it or not, I am starting with the best.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse

50% on RottenTomatoes - That’s right, this is the best (according to rottentomatoes) movie that Lautner has been in. Inexplicably, I have seen this movie more than once (but never sober) and I can tell you that it is total refuse. I don’t like to distinguish between the Twilight movies, because they are all so very bad and so very similar. However, this is considered the best probably because there is a little more action than previous installments. But again I want to emphasize that this is a terrible movie, despite being at the top of the list.

Twilight

49% on RottenTomatoes - Saying that this is my favorite of the Twilight movies is kind of like saying I have a favorite kind of cancer, and to be fair it is the only one of the movies I have seen sober (I was on an airplane, and I began to drink heavily immediately thereafter in a failed attempt to erase the movie from my brain).  But I suppose I prefer this one to the others because it is a bit more subtle, and mostly because there is a lot less Taylor. Plus he has long hair and looks like some sort of pig-faced uruk-hai, which is fun to laugh at.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon

27% on RottenTomatoes - You might be noticing that Lautner’s three best movies are from the Twilightseries. That is a bad sign. A bad, bad sign. Truth be told I don’t even remember what this movie is about. And who really cares. But I am pretty sure it is where the whole “Team Jacob vs. Team Edward” nonsense started up, so screw this movie.

The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lava Girl in 3-D

20% on RottenTomatoes - If someone approaches you and says, ‘Would you like to play Sharkboy?” the proper protocol is to politely shake your head and walk away. It doesn’t matter if it is Robert Rodriguez or a psychotic person aimlessly wandering the street (in my opinion there is very little difference between the two). You never want to play Sharkboy, regardless of the movie, play, or strange pseudosexual roleplaying game that might be going on. You especially don’t want to play Sharkboy in 3D.Lautner’s only defense is that this was before he was famous, and in that case you take any role you can get. But still not Sharkboy. Never Sharkboy.

Valentine’s Day

17% on RottenTomatoes - I have seen this movie (twice) and I have seen Cheaper by the Dozen 2 (more than twice) and I can tell you that this is worse, despite the rottentomatoes scores by which this list is ordered. This is the worst movie of 2010, one of the worst of all time, and the hardest blow an innocent holiday has taken in as long as I can remember. Lautner is only the second worst Taylor in the film (the worst being Swift), but unfortunately he is also the second worst actor. The second worst actor in one of the most painful films I have ever had the misfortune of seeing.

Cheaper by the Dozen 2

7% on RottenTomatoes - He was young and not in it that much, so this might be the performance for which he is least culpable. So congrats, Taylor, this one really sucked too but it mostly wasn’t your fault!

So there you have it, an acting resume with which you would be lucky to land a role in a commercial for a local used car dealership. But instead, Taylor gets cast as the star of the upcoming film Abduction, which looks to be a lobotomized version of The Bourne Identity for twelve year olds of less than average intelligence. And in 2013, God help us, he will be playing Stretch Armstrong in the Stretch Armstrong movie. A movie based on a toy that was fairly popular 15 years ago. Let’s just pray thatAbduction loses money, so that once the Twilight series reaches its merciful conclusion we never again have to witness the ignominy to acting, the skid mark on the underpants of Hollywood that is Mr. Taylor Lautner, this week’s falling star.

Author’s Note: I would like to mention that I do still admire Mr. Lautner’s abdominal muscles.

[cinematicmethod-blog-blog]

RottenTomatoes.com has a dedicated page for every movie under the sun. Each page includes details such as stars of the film, budget, box office gross, and reviews. The reviews are the main draw for the website, the cash cow if you will. The purpose of this explanation is that Taylor Lautner’s newest movie, Abduction, seems to be at the center of quite a phenomenon: a polar difference of opinion between critics and audience.

  As the picture above indicates, something is undeniably amiss. Critics across the nation think that this movie is one of the worst they have seen. A 4% rating puts Abduction shoulder to shoulder with other 2011 movies like The Roommate (4%) and Big Momma: Like Father, Like Son (5%). Meanwhile, the audience is loving Taylor’s newest effort. A 77% from the audience is quite an endorsement. Quality movies like Hanna, The Debt, and Cedar Rapids have all received lower audience ratings this year. The obvious conclusion is that critics don’t properly value abdominal muscles when they give their ratings.

Taylor Lautner has roughly 12 distinct abdominal muscles. Each seems to be worth about 6.1 Audience Happy Points in the eyes of sexually charged tweens with internet access. The following is a patented formula from Cinematic Method, do not redistribute it without our express written consent:

(Audience Rating) – (TomatoMeter) = (How much critics overlook abs)

77 – 4 = 73 (Critics overlooked Taylor Lautner’s abs to a level of 73, we will call this the “Why-Is-The-Audience-So-Stupid-Coefficient“)

(Why-Is-The-Audience-So-Stupid-Coefficient) / (The Number of Abs Taylor Lautner Possesses) = (Number of Audience Happy Points)

73 / 12 = 6.1 (If I hear someone tell me this is not an exact figure, I’m going to lose my mind and begin spitting at them until they agree with me. That’s how I win all my battles of wit).

As you can see, our Why-Is-The-Audience-So-Stupid-Coefficient for Abduction is one of the highest any of us could ever dream. 100 is technically the highest possible score since all critics could give the movie a negative review and all of the audience could give the movie a positive review, but realistically, this 73 is close to the top. Why are the critics so out of touch with what makes the audience happy? Do they not understand that every time they catch a glimpse of a single Taylor Lautner ab they should be roughly 6.1 percent happier? Maybe they were focused too much on his giraffe neck?

I think the lesson here is that we are all trying, in vain, to objectively look at movies and judge whether or not they are worth the precious time and money of the public. We are all trying, and the preteen girls are ruining everything for us. I don’t know what could possibly stop the juggernaut that is tween fanhood, but if they’re banding together for 15,000 ratings on this film, I’m afraid rottentomatoes.com will explode from Happy Points soon after the release of Breaking Dawn.

If you can find a film with a higher “Why-Is-The-Audience-So-Stupid-Coefficient” let us know, we’re intrigued to see what you can come up with. So far, Boondock Saints is the only higher score we can find at 76 (93 – 17 = 76). We’re not as sure abdominal muscles have anything to do with that discrepancy.

[cinematicmethod-blog-blog]

I watched the first Human Centipede movie and it was terrible. But after you watch it, you can go around telling people that you saw it and can be the life of the party! This movie doesn’t really look like it’s gonna make any tremendous strides towards the Academy Awards, but it will probably be just as much of a talking piece. In theaters 10/7.

[cinematicmethod-blog-blog]

This movie looks like it is really trying to revamp the whole Three Musketeers operation. Explosions. Flying boats. Milla Jovovich. 3D! It looks like it is going to big, loud, and all over the place. Let’s hope Orlando Bloom and Christoph Waltz can carry it enough to make it fun. In theaters 10/21.

[cinematicmethod-blog-blog]

There aren’t any big name actors that fully draw me to this movie but it interests me that they are releasing a prequel to a movie from close to 30 years ago. It looks fairly scary and full of action. John Carpenter didn’t have a hand in this movie though so I imagine it’ll march to its own tune. In theaters 10/14.

[cinematicmethod-blog-blog]

Gerard Butler has done me wrong in the past, but this seems to be a little different role than we’re used to from him. There’s a couple action moments but it’s really just about a guy trying to do good. Marc Forster, the director, has made some really solid movies in the past as well. In theater 9/23.

[cinematicmethod-blog-blog]

Daniel Craig is one of my favorite actors out there right now. This movie seems like it could be something like Shutter Island except the twist in Shutter becomes the premise of Dream House. The trailer had a good balance of creepiness and mystery so I’m looking forward to this one. In theaters 9/30

[cinematicmethod-blog-blog]

"How to Get Fired from a Movie Theater"

There will inevitably come a point when you tire of working at the movie theater, so you would need to behave in ways that hasten your firing. Critics of these tips will likely ask: Why wouldn’t you just quit? I’m a little insulted by the question. There is nothing worse than a quitter. If you want to read an article about quitting or giving up or surrendering, then go find some other article to read and don’t come back to CinematicMethod ever again. This is a website for winners, not cowards.

So here are some steps you can take to get fired. Some of them will work more quickly than others, but all of them will work:

Refuse to sell tickets to any woman who is without “a male chaperone.”

Season all of the popcorn with your custom home-spice: a cumin, mint, and tarragon blend.

Let Gypsies live in a theater for twenty-eight days, allowing them to earn tenant rights and sparking a long legal battle that the theater will ultimately lose. Make sure they know it’s okay if they want to build appropriately sized fires.

Ride to work on a horse and tether it to a railing next to the ticket booth. Whip it mercilessly if it becomes unruly.

Greet patrons by telling them that the theater is haunted. Throughout their movie make ghoul noises, and then near the end sneak up behind them, grab their shoulders, neck, and face and shout “WHEN YOU DISTURB THE BONES OF A SAINT YOU DIE BY THE HANDS OF A DEMON!”

Install a showerhead in the restroom so that you can wash off the stink from when you went swamp-hunting during your lunch break. Clean and salt your alligator meat on the lobby floor and dry it near where you tethered your horse, which you will likely need to begin whipping mercilessly because it will get spooked by the alligator head that you’ll be wearing as a hat.

Organize an “Investigative Committee” to search the theater complex, tearing through walls and uprooting suspicious patches of tile when necessary because you think there might be something to the this-theater-is-haunted rumor you started after all, and you can’t be too careful when dealing the bones of Saints.

[cinematicmethod-blog-blog]

Michael Shannon has already wowed me with Revolutionary Road and Boardwalk Empire, and this movie looks like it really lets him shine. I love movies where the main character slowly slips into insanity, so this is right my alley. It’s also nice to see Jessica Chastain getting some more play. In theaters 9/30.