This looks familiar.

Don’t find it too surprising that Helen Mirren signed on for National Treasure: Book of Secrets. The gal probably suffered, as we all did, from Queen
overload by the time this opportunity for a little follow-up fun
presented itself. And she no doubt was hoodwinked, as many of us were,
by the notables peppering the cast of 2004’s rather stupid original.
Jon Voight. Harvey Keitel. And Nicolas Cage – well, he once was an
interesting actor who chose solid films, and the plots of this series
are driven by American history, so perhaps this is a higher-minded
blockbuster, his atonement for Next?

Oh,
Helen. You can at least be proud that you look fabulous as Emily, a
University of Maryland professor and mother to Ben Gates (Cage),
treasure hunter, hair dyer, trivia-spewing piece of cardboard. Voight
is Ben’s father – doddering, awkward – and whereas the first hunt was
spurred by generations of Gates family conspiring and code-breaking,
this one has something to do with a smear campaign against Ben’s
great-great-granddaddy, whom one Mitch Wilkinson (Ed Harris – yep, the
same, only trying on a Southern-by-way-of-Brooklyn accent) accused of
being involved in the Lincoln assassination. But Ben’s new goal isn’t
just PR-oriented: It has something to do with a lost city of gold,
though by the time all the requisite clues are solved, lives are
risked, and romances rekindled, the connection is tenuous at best.

Ultimately,
Book of Secrets – oh yes! a tres hush-hush presidential tome of all our
country’s dirty laundry is also involved – is an embarrassingly
by-the-numbers rehash of the first National Treasure, lighter on the
swirly, emotion-cuing music but still well-trafficked in ridiculous
feats and worse dialogue. Diane Kruger is back to help class up the
joint as documents expert/love interest Abigail; so too, unfortunately,
is Justin Bartha as Ben’s sidekick Riley, who’s as WAH-wah irritating
as brilliant-but-bumbling sidekicks come.

I
won’t be unfair – there’s one cool set-piece, a floating floor that
requires the hunters to do a balancing act to keep them from falling to
their deaths. But I won’t lie, either – they each could have slipped
and screamed ’til the thud, and I probably would have found it more
thrilling than any of the Mission: Impossible ripoffs that came before
it.

copyright 2007 letsnotlisten.com

Thank you, Judd, thank you very much.

Recent disasters such as Date Movie and Epic Movie
strongly suggested that parody is dead. Perhaps devolution’s to blame:
After all, it’s been a long time since the heydays of Mel Brooks and
Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker. Maybe Mother Nature decided that this
particular talent gene was so increasingly underused, humans really
didn’t need it anymore.

But here’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Who knew that Judd Apatow, the newly anointed master of sex comedies, also spoke jive? Apatow co-wrote Walk Hard with director Jake Kasdan (who negotiated some fine, if little-seen, satire of his own with this year’s The TV Set),
with John C. Reilly starring as Cox. For years Reilly was best known as
"that guy"—he spent the early part of his career doing character work
in dramas until he got the chance to upstage Will Ferrell in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.
Casting Reilly as a comedic lead in a hugely anticipated holiday opener
may have seemed like a risk, but doubters need only glance at Reilly’s
goofy mug on the film’s poster to get that this was an inspired choice.

Walk Hard is a sendup of the musician biopic in general, but mostly it sews together the scenes and storylines of Ray and Walk the Line.
It begins as Cox is about to give his final performance, with a young
producer trying to rush the singer, whom he finds facing a wall with
arm outstretched and head down. "Give him a minute, son," says Cox’s
bandmate, Sam (Tim Meadows). "Dewey Cox needs to think about his entire life
before he plays." Indeed, there’s a lot to think about: Young Dewey
(Conner Rayburn) wasn’t as gifted as his brother when it came to music
but decided to dedicate his life to it anyway after accidentally
slicing little Nate (Chip Hormess) in half in 1946. He later causes a
riot at his Alabama high school with a gentle pop song, "Take My Hand."
("You know whose got hands?" a preacher yells. "The devil!")
Eventually, Dewey becomes a janitor at an all-black nightclub and gets
his break when the headliner (The Office’s Craig Robinson) is sick.

One
performance of "(Mama) You Got to Love Your Negro Man" later, and Dewey
is hip-thrusting his way to stardom, complete with the attendant drugs,
sex, and desperate late-stage career reinventions. This life might have
been tough for Dewey—at one point, he cries, "Goddammit, this is a dark
fuckin’ period!" while jackhammering a blonde—but Walk Hard delivers a pretty steady stream of fine moments. The humor gets naughty, but in general it’s more Simpsons than Superbad. Anyone who was rightfully appalled at August Rush,
the recent film about a musical prodigy, for instance, will laugh their
asses off when Dewey becomes a blues virtuoso the first time he picks
up a guitar, with Sam Jackson’s Black Snake Moan voice coming out of Dewey’s baby face.

With a great script and South Park-­worthy
songs supporting him—try to get "Let’s Duet," a June & Johnny spoof
with Jenna Fischer, out of your head—Reilly could have gone through the
motions and still gotten laughs. But he’s brilliant in Cox’s various
periods, from slick-haired teenybopper (Reilly plays a 14-year-old, an
apparent nod to Kevin Spacey’s misguided self-casting in Beyond the Sea) to Cash-esque country star to curly-haired, logorrheic Bob Dylan (easily outdoing Cate Blanchett’s ballyhooed I’m Not There
turn). The supporting cast deftly handles the silliness as well,
especially Raymond J. Barry as Cox’s dad and Kristen Wiig as his
harried first wife, and, in one of the movie’s best scenes, cameos by
Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Jason Schwartzman, and Justin Long as…the
Beatles. Turns out that parody wasn’t dead after all. It just went
through a dark fuckin’ period.

I don’t have a clever caption. (Not that the Walk Hard one is clever.)
This just looks cool.

Loose shorts: The ultimate key to fertility.

The 16-year-old title character of Juno pees on three sticks
before accepting that she’s pregnant “for shizz.” Juno is no slutty
cheerleader or latchkey kid who doesn’t know better. Instead, she’s a
wise-beyond-her-years tomboy whose defining characteristics are a love
of ’70s punk, a limp ponytail, and gallons of Gilmore Girls–speed
sassback. And the ’tude has her a bit conflicted about her babydaddy
crush, a meek, Tic Tac–addicted track-clubber from whom no parent would
think to shield his or her daughter.

Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) reacts to the situation by trying to hang
herself with a licorice whip, then calls her best friend, Leah (Olivia
Thirlby), to sardonically announce that she’s a suicide risk. Really,
though, hers is a low-boil panic as they discuss the seemingly only
reasonable option, abortion. The next day, Juno waits outside the house
of her not-really-a-boyfriend, Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera), to let
him know, saying that she’s planning to “nip it in the bud, before it
gets worse. Because they were talking about in health class how
pregnancy can often lead to…an infant.” Paulie, standing in nerdy
runner’s short-shorts and a headband, agrees to her plan, though he
looks too shell-shocked and terrified to have fully absorbed the news.

Neither Juno the character nor Juno the film is perfect, but last year’s Little Miss Sunshine
explosion indicates that Little Miss Expecting will be—correction, will
continue to be—slobbered over anyway. There are plenty of fine reasons
for that, chief among them Diablo Cody’s debut script. It’s
hyperstylized in parts, yes—Cody, an instant “it” writer who already
has several other projects in production, admits that she invents her
own slang in the film. But her Minnesota-set screenplay also offers a
sweet, unpredictable story and a heroine who’s a smarter and more
admirable role model than the common sort of movie teen who, say,
discovers her inner beauty with the help of a lot of makeup or becomes
self-confident after tripping into a dreamboat’s arms.

Juno heads to an abortion clinic as planned, only slightly deterred
by a picketing Asian classmate who chants, “All babies want to get
borned” and tells Juno that her fetus probably already has fingernails.
While filling out the requisite paperwork, fingernails are suddenly all
Juno can see. So she bolts, complaining to Leah that the receptionist
was weird, the magazines had water stains, and that maybe she could
give the baby away “to someone who totally needs it, like a woman with
a bum ovary, or a couple of nice lesbos.” Leah, who’s a cheerleader but
one who prefers bearded professors to chiseled jocks, suggests they
search the Penny Saver. And that’s where Juno finds Vanessa
and Mark (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman), a barren
upper-middle-class couple who live in a nearby wealthy suburb. Vanessa
is an A-type whose wardrobe is as crisp and immaculate as her huge,
spacious home. She’s pleasant enough, but Juno really bonds with Mark,
a professional composer whose inner child is still too preoccupied with
thoughts of rock stardom to be ready to take on a real baby. A closed
adoption is arranged.

Director Jason Reitman repeats the same approach to levity that he used in 2005’s Thank You for Smoking;
for instance, he’ll occasionally interrupt the narrative with
surrealistic visuals to illustrate Juno’s voiceover. His only misstep,
and it’s just a quibble, is adding preciousness, particularly with the
quivering-animation opening credits and a soundtrack that goes a bit
too often to the Moldy Peaches’ simple, nearly spoken-word odes to love
and friendship and, probably, puppies. Sometimes the tunes feel just
right, but combined with the film’s already hipper-than-thou base
aesthetic, the package teeters on cloying.

Juno ultimately rescues itself from too-cool damnation,
though. The cast is terrifically understated: Page follows her
breakthrough performance in 2005’s Hard Candy with another
impressive turn, delivering even Cody’s cleverest one-liners naturally
and, above all, making you believe that a teen who references Soupy
Sales in 2007 could actually exist. Cera pretty much re-creates his
George-Michael Bluth character from Arrested Development, but
this docile naiveté is exactly what’s called for, and Garner has never
been more radiant or subtle; a moment in which Vanessa tries to feel
the baby kicking is a marvel of expression. Allison Janney and J.K.
Simmons are wryly entertaining as Juno’s father and stepmom as well.

But even a great ensemble wouldn’t be able to save a faulty script,
and Cody is careful to make sure that, for instance, Juno doesn’t
always say the right thing (in one case, a too-quick, unthinking retort
is downright cruel) and that the story goes in directions you can’t
guess from the opening chapters. Juno’s buzz will likely become tiring
in the coming months, but there’s no denying that the film itself is
remarkably fresh.

Yes, Mrs. Henrietta Smith from Dayton, I was terribly good in this, wasn’t I?

Atonement is about a tattletale, a precocious, imaginative
kid who says the darnedest thing: “I saw him. I saw him with my own
eyes.” But this 13-year-old girl, Briony, isn’t merely singing on her
big brother for taking a puff on his friend’s cigarette. She’s flinging
a rape accusation at the housekeeper’s choirboy son, Robbie, who has
ambitions bigger than his humble background. Robbie is also the lover
of Briony’s sister, and he’s just declared his feelings for her. Briony
likes the young man, too. But she did not see him commit the crime with
her own eyes.

Based on Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel, Atonement opens in 1935
England, and the picture of privilege and dark polished wood it offers
in the first chapter is immediately captivating. Director Joe Wright,
who nailed the look and feel of Pride & Prejudice (if
nothing else) in his 2005 adaptation, introduces us to Briony (Saoirse
Ronan) with the clack of a typewriter providing the soundtrack as she
finishes her first play. Briony stares intently—we’ll soon learn that’s
pretty much her standard expression—as she types out “The End,” then
speed-walks through her halls of her glorious home with the ramrod
posture of a headmistress—in contrast to the femininity of her loose
white dress—to show her mother the manuscript. Briony then consults
with her older sister, Cecilia (Keira Knightley), on the lawn
(impossible expanse, stunning green) before returning inside (high
ceilings, creamy, flower-patterned décor that’s repeated in the
characters’ clothes) to cast her cousins, including hopeless 9-year-old
twin boys who, though bratty, still use words like “amenable.” Ahhhh, you think.

Briony is tart-tongued and beyond her years, but she doesn’t quite
understand the world as thoroughly as she believes she does. She
doesn’t know, for instance, what she’s spying through a window when she
watches an encounter between Cecilia and Robbie (James McAvoy), which
ends with Cecilia diving into and then emerging from a fountain, her
wet, light-colored dress leaving little to the imagination. It’s hard
to tell if the two are being antagonistic. But Briony knows a bad word
when she sees it: When Robbie mistakenly has the girl deliver the wrong
apology letter to Cecilia—a jokey confessional, dashed off during a
bout of writer’s block—Briony deduces from his lurid vocabulary that
he’s a “sex maniac.” Cecilia, though shocked at the letter herself,
isn’t quite as concerned, though, and the couple end up consummating
their crush quite spontaneously in the family library, Cecilia pinned
against the wall. Which, yes, Briony also witnesses. So when, after
dinner, the sisters’ 15-year-old cousin, Lola (Juno Temple), is
attacked on the dark grounds, naturally Briony points the finger at
Robbie. Lola goes along.

Though there’s already drama aplenty by then—which Wright nicely
highlights by employing tiny time shifts to repeat scenes from
different perspectives—Atonement is really about what happens
after the accusation. Robbie gets sent off to jail and then war, while
Cecilia becomes a nurse. They see each other sporadically, but the
magic of that night in the library is lost, along with any sense of
their previously genteel life. Robbie didn’t do it, and Briony—whether
immediately or after a time, it’s not clear—knows it but is too
cowardly to speak up. Instead, she, too, becomes a nurse when she turns
18, scrubbing bedpans and sitting with dying soldiers as acts of
penance while she solicits the couple’s forgiveness through letters.

This is Briony’s story, so it’s not surprising that Atonement
lags during its middle chapters, when the focus shifts to Robbie’s
ordeals. The scenes are intended to drive home how horribly the girl’s
mistake cost him, but paradoxically, they’re among the film’s dullest
despite being visually inventive. The script places him, for example,
at the Dunkirk evacuation of 1940, and Wright takes a long, single pan
of a beach teeming with half-crazy soldiers, ships with tattered sails,
and general chaos to capture the terrors of Robbie’s new reality. But
the shift is too sudden, and we’ve had little time to get to know
Robbie by this point. As the camera whirls on and on and on, you’re
more likely to yawn instead of cry. Cecilia, too, is mostly an
afterthought, and though Knightley’s wrenlike features make her
acceptable decoration for a period piece, her calls to “act” aren’t
quite as believable. (The fault, though, likely falls more heavily on
Wright’s shoulders, who directed Knightley’s Elizabeth Bennett to
appallingly uncharacteristic giggliness in Pride & Prejudice.)

Briony is played by three actresses—Ronan at 13, Romola Garai at 18,
and Vanessa Redgrave as a senior—and all are enchanting. (Ronan in
particular has a remarkably self-possessed, haunted quality that would
be impressive for any newcomer, not to mention one her age.) Garai’s
contribution is thankless, though, because of the wan scripting of the
film’s middle section: Composer Dario Marianelli offers the urgent
music of a thriller, but Briony’s guilt—expressed mainly by a camera
trained on Garai’s sullen face—just isn’t all that gripping. Redgrave’s
appearance, though, reawakens the film, both because of the actress’
exquisite ability with subtle emotion and a plot turn that reframes
much of what you’ve just watched. For both the character and the
filmmakers, atonement is achieved.

A little late, but this IMDB blurb on Wesley Snipes made me so angry:

Snipes: "I’m a Victim of Racism"

Final hurdle: Now looks too cool for such projects

Now, I’m no Lord of the Rings freak. (For the record, yes, I concede the trilogy’s excellence. But Frodo and medieval gayness is not for me.)

But even I’m excited about this piece of news:

Los Angeles, CA (Tuesday, December 18,
2007) Academy
Award-winning filmmaker Peter Jackson; Harry Sloan, Chairman and CEO,
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (MGM); Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne,
Co-Chairmen and Co-CEOs of New Line Cinema have jointly announced today that
they have entered into the following series of agreements:

 
*      
MGM and New Line will co-finance and co-distribute two films, “The
Hobbit” and a sequel to “The Hobbit.”  New Line will
distribute in North America and MGM will
distribute internationally.

 
*      
Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh will serve as Executive Producers of two films
based on “The Hobbit.”  New Line will manage the production of
the films, which will be shot simultaneously.

*       Peter Jackson and New Line
have settled all litigation relating to the “Lord of the Rings”
(LOTR) Trilogy.
 
Said Peter Jackson,
“I’m very pleased that we’ve been able to put our differences
behind us, so that we may begin a new chapter with our old friends at New
Line.  ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is a legacy we proudly share
with Bob and Michael, and together, we share that legacy with millions of loyal
fans all over the world.  We are delighted to continue our journey through
Middle Earth.  I also want to thank Harry Sloan and our new friends at MGM
for helping us find the common ground necessary to continue that
journey.”

 
“Peter Jackson has proven
himself as the filmmaker who can bring the extraordinary imagination of Tolkien
to life and we full heartedly agree with the fans worldwide who know he should
be making ‘The Hobbit,’” said Sloan, MGM’s Chairman and
CEO.  "Now that we are all in agreement on ‘The Hobbit,’ we can focus
on assembling the production team that will capture this phenomenal tale on
film."

 
Bob Shaye, New Line Co-Chairman and
Co-CEO comments, “We are very pleased we have been able to resolve our
differences, and that Peter and Fran will be actively and creatively involved
with ‘The Hobbit’ movies.  We know they will bring the same
passion, care and talent to these films that they so ably accomplished with
‘The Lord of the Rings’ Trilogy.”

 
“Peter is a visionary
filmmaker, and he broke new ground with ‘The Lord of the
Rings,’” notes Michael Lynne, New Line Co-Chairman and
Co-CEO.  “We’re delighted he’s back for ‘The
Hobbit’ films and that the Tolkien saga will continue with his
imprint.   We greatly appreciate the efforts of Harry Sloan, who has
been instrumental in helping us reach our new accord.”

 
The two “Hobbit” films
– “The Hobbit” and its sequel – are scheduled to be
shot simultaneously, with pre-production beginning as soon as possible.
Principal photography is tentatively set for a 2009 start, with the intention
of “The Hobbit” release slated for 2010 and its sequel the
following year, in 2011.

 
The Oscar-winning,
critically-acclaimed LOTR Trilogy grossed nearly $3 billion worldwide at the
box-office.  In 2003, “Return of the King” swept the Academy
Awards, winning all of the eleven categories in which it was nominated,
including Best Picture – the first ever Best Picture win for a fantasy
film.  The Trilogy’s production was also unprecedented at the time.

 
For more information about
“The Hobbit” films, please visit www.TheHobbitBlog.com.