Cinematical

Something funny happened at our local press screening for The Hurt Locker this week, and not in the film itself, which is decidedly not funny. The trailer attached to the film was for Sorority Row (pictured), a dumb-looking I Know What You Did Last Summer knock-off in which college students are harassed by a person they thought they'd killed. It was incongruous to see a cheesy horror flick advertised in front of The Hurt Locker, a complex action drama that many critics consider one of the year's best films. It was like screening There Will Be Blood with a trailer for Land of the Lost in front of it.

The reason for it, of course, is that The Hurt Locker and Sorority Row both have the same distributor, Summit Entertainment. When you go to the movies, some of the trailers are just whatever's in rotation, but one or two are usually from the same studio as the film you're watching, sent out with prints of that film with explicit instructions that they be attached. Big distributors (Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, etc.) usually have plenty of upcoming products and can choose trailers that target the same general demographic as the movie they're paired with. But Summit is small -- all they had to choose from was Sorority Row and The Twilight Saga: New Moon. (A Sorority Row trailer in front of New Moon -- now that would make sense.)

So I understand why this particular trailer came with this movie. But it was still a funny juxtaposition. I can't imagine anyone wanting to see both Sorority Row AND The Hurt Locker. Has anyone else ever noticed this phenomenon? If you've seen The Hurt Locker in theaters, was this trailer in front of it, or was it just for the critics' benefit? What other strange combinations of trailers and features have you noticed?

After the jump, the Sorority Row trailer, so you'll know what I'm talking about.

Karl Malden, an Oscar- and Emmy-winning actor and former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, died of natural causes today in Los Angeles at the age of 97. His long life and successful career were virtually free of scandal or controversy, and as an actor he was by all accounts a consummate professional. He and his wife, Mona, who survives him, were married for 70 years, which might literally be a show-business record.

Malden was born Mladen George Sekulovich in Chicago, the son of a Serbian father and Czech mother. He changed his name for obvious reasons when he went into acting (after working alongside his father in the steel mills), but often found a way for someone to mention the name "Sekulovich" in his films, as a tribute to his roots. He appeared in 21 Broadway productions between 1937 and 1957, including the premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947. He and several other cast members from the show, including Marlon Brando, reprised their roles for the 1951 film version, and Malden won an Oscar for best supporting actor. He was later nominated for On the Waterfront, in which he also appeared with Brando. Overall, he appeared in some 50 films, 19 in the 1960s alone.

In the 1970s, he earned four Emmy nominations as the star of The Streets of San Francisco, where he played an experienced cop working with rookie Michael Douglas. Malden also appeared in American Express TV commercials throughout the '70s ("Don't leave home without it"), an oft-parodied but long-remembered campaign that worked because of his familiar, trustworthy face. His bulbous nose, perhaps the most recognizable thing about him, was the result of sports injuries in his youth, and Malden joked about it frequently. He later won an Emmy for his work in the 1984 miniseries Fatal Vision.

In all the hullabaloo over the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' decision to increase the Best Picture Oscar nominees from five to 10 next year, something else has gotten lost in the shuffle: They tinkered with the Best Song category, too. And the new rules mean that there could be a year with no Best Song category at all!

Here's how it works (with thanks to The Hollywood Reporter for some of the details). During the nomination process, the 233 members of the Academy's music branch rate each eligible song on a scale of 1 to 10. The five songs with the top average scores get the actual nomination, with 8.25 as the cutoff. If only three or four songs rate 8.25 or higher, that's all the nominations there are. But the question has always been: What if fewer than three songs get an average score of 8.25? So far, it hasn't come up, although you can see that it almost did last year, when there were only three nominees in the category. That means those were the only three songs that rated 8.25 or higher -- sorry, fans of Bruce Springsteen's "The Wrestler."

The Academy has now answered this loophole very simply. If two or more songs score higher than 8.25, then everything's cool. If only one song scores high enough, then that song and whatever the next highest scorer was will be the two lone nominees (and no one will know which had the lower score, because of course that would influence the voting). And if no songs score above 8.25? Then the category is scrapped that year.

Trailers have been part of the movie-going experience for almost a century, dating back to when they were shown after the feature (hence "trailers"), not before. Today, many people cite the coming attractions as one of their favorite things about going to the movies, and what's not to like? A trailer often has every single good thing about a movie, condensed into 2 1/2 minutes. That saves you a lot of time.

The scholars at IFC.com have compiled their list of the 50 greatest trailers of all time, presented in the very popular one-item-per-page format that all Internet users love. Great trailers aren't necessarily for great movies. In fact, a lot of these selections are for bad movies. It's the trailers that are good. And what constitutes "good"? IFC says, "Ultimately, we decided that the best trailers are those that most effectively combine art and commerce, and that sell and entertain with equal skill." Amen to that.

I'll be a spoiler and tell you their choices for the top five: Jerry Seinfeld's Comedian at #5, Miracle on 34th Street at #4, followed by Cloverfield, Psycho, and, in the top spot -- the best trailer of all time -- Alien. What do we make of the fact that the top three (in IFC's estimation) are for thrillers? And what did they leave off the list?

We've got the Alien trailer from YouTube after the jump, where no one can hear you scream.

Farrah Fawcett, one of the original Charlie's Angels cast members and the best-selling pinup girl in history, died this morning in Santa Monica, Calif, three years after being diagnosed with cancer. Actor Ryan O'Neal, with whom she'd had an on-again/off-again relationship for nearly 30 years, was at her side. Fawcett was 62.

The Corpus Christi native and University of Texas at Austin alumnus had become relatively famous in the early 1970s doing modeling and guest spots on various TV shows, but it was her role as one of the three sexy crime fighters in Charlie's Angels, in 1976, that made her a superstar. The iconic poster of her in a red swimsuit sold 12 million copies -- the most ever for a poster -- and adorned teenage boys' bedrooms all across America. When she appeared mostly nude in Playboy in 1995, at age 48, it became the magazine's bestselling issue of the 1990s.

She left Charlie's Angels after a year to pursue a movie career that never materialized, but she earned critical respect and Emmy nominations in made-for-TV movies throughout the 1980s, including The Burning Bed and Poor Little Rich Girl: The Barbara Hutton Story. Her theatrical films included Logan's Run, The Cannonball Run, The Apostle, and Dr. T and the Women. Her last role was in the 2004 comedy The Cookout.

Fawcett and O'Neal have a son, Redmond, born in 1985.

[Via: Associated Press and Variety.]

As 2009 approaches its halfway mark, it's a good time to reflect on the cinematic themes we've seen represented so far. Given the current economy, it's no surprise that banks and financiers have been villainized in movies such as Drag Me to Hell and The International. Perhaps we're tired of babies, too, as infants have been harmed or endangered for comic effect in Dance Flick and The Hangover. But the most prevalent theme in all of Hollywood this year? Vomit. Chunky, steamy vomit.

I don't know if so many movies with puke scenes have ever appeared in one year. And I'm not talking about where a character is seen discreetly from behind, kneeling over a toilet and ralphing, with no barf actually visible. That sort of thing is relatively common. No, I'm talking about scenes where we actually see the vomit as it's spewed from the person's mouth, graphically and in color. That's a lot rarer. Yet so far in 2009 it's happened in Adventureland, The Haunting in Connecticut, Drag Me to Hell, Observe and Report, The Hangover, Year One, and My Sister's Keeper. And wow, the first four of those seven all played at South By Southwest. Fixated much, SXSW programmers??

The causes of the chundering vary from film to film. In My Sister's Keeper and The Haunting in Connecticut, it's cancer-stricken teenagers suffering from nausea. Year One has its heroes afflicted with motion sickness (eating the poop didn't bother them at all), and I believe that's what makes an amusement-park customer hurl in Adventureland, too. Drag Me to Hell has a woman (possibly a hallucination) vomiting maggots on somebody. In the other movies, it's good ol' drunkenness or hungoverness.

Is the Toronto International Film Festival upon us already? I still have poutine stains on my shirt from last time! Yes, the 2009 fest is less than three months away, and TIFF has just announced the first batch of films that will play. All 24 will be making their North American premieres, so unless you've been to the festivals at Cannes, Venice, or Berlin, it's unlikely that you've seen any of them. Exciting!

In the "Masters" category are films by three directors who qualify for that distinction. Portugal's Manoel de Oliveira -- who is 100 years old (!) and has made 50 films, most of them in the last two decades -- has a new one called Eccentricities of a Blond-Haired Girl, about a man enchanted by a woman he sees from his window. Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad), the 87-year-old Frenchman who got a lifetime achievement at Cannes this year, has Les Herbes Folles (The Wild Grass), a romantic adventure that begins with a lost wallet. And Hirokazu Koreeda, a Japanese spring chicken at 48, will present Air Doll, about a sex doll that becomes a real person -- Lars and the Real Girl meets Pinocchio? Koreeda made the haunting Nobody Knows a few years ago, so I'm onboard for whatever this Air Doll thing is.

The other 21 films announced today are from filmmakers ranging from the old and venerable to the new and enthusiastic. They span, the globe, too, representing countries you expect to see at international film festivals (France, Germany, Italy, etc.) as well as some with much smaller film industries, including Kazakhstan, Colombia, Malaysia, and Uruguay. The complete list of films and their descriptions is in TIFF's press release, as is information about buying passes. The festival runs Sept. 10-19. We'll see you there, right?

You know things are bad in Hollywood when a production gets shut down just three days before it's supposed to start filming -- and when the production in question stars Brad Pitt and is directed by Steven Soderbergh. The last three movies those guys made together all had the word Ocean's in the title. What gives?

Well, according to Variety, Columbia Pictures chair Amy Pascal found the latest script revisions for Moneyball so different from what she'd originally greenlighted that she pulled the plug on Friday. Filming was supposed to start in Phoenix on Monday. This is the equivalent of canceling a flight while the plane is accelerating down the runway. Those script revisions must have really been something. Maybe Soderbergh had decided to turn it into a four-hour biography of Pancho Villa.

Moneyball is based on a nonfiction book that uses the 2002 Oakland A's baseball team as a case study for examining how less wealthy teams can compete with richer ones (like the Yankees) by hiring players whose statistics in certain areas -- but not the ones usually considered, like batting averages and RBIs -- indicate they'll perform well. Yes, it's a book about statistics. You can see why a movie would be a hard sell to begin with. But the book was a bestseller, appealing to baseball fans (who tend to love statistics) and readers who enjoy a good underdog story. Pitt was to play A's manager Billy Beane, whose theories about which players would be most valuable went against conventional wisdom but were ultimately vindicated.

Stop me if you've heard this one before. A womanizing cad doesn't believe in true love, even though he makes his living writing novels about it. He sleeps with one beautiful woman after another, never getting attached, always pleased when the women leave before he wakes up in the morning. But his whole world is turned upside-down when, out of nowhere, he actually falls in love with one of them.

Yes, it's the ol' "education of a douchebag" story, going by the title Mercy this time around and starring Scott Caan, who also wrote the screenplay. (It's actually his third script; he directed the other two himself, and the first, Dallas 362, won the jury prize at CineVegas in 2003.) One is tempted to find autobiographical elements in Caan's swaggering character, especially since his real-life father, James Caan, plays his dad in the movie, but I don't know if that's accurate. But it might be the more charitable interpretation, since without a personal connection there's no reason to tell a story this generic.

It's at the release party for his third novel that Johnny Ryan (Scott Caan) meets Mercy (Wendy Glenn), a gorgeous, slender brunette who, unlike most heterosexual women (or so we're led to understand), is not instantly bowled over by Johnny's smooth cocky charm. Nor, it turns out, does she like his writing. This wouldn't normally bother Johnny -- he prefers women who can barely read anyway -- but in this case it's troubling because she's a New York Times book critic. Now with two reasons to pursue her (the usual one, and her negative opinion of his work), Johnny redoubles his efforts to get close to her.

The Twitters were abuzz a few nights ago, when the CineVegas Film Festival hosted an event at the Sapphire Gentlemen's Club and people saw Jack Nicholson there. It seemed reasonable. Nicholson's old pal Dennis Hopper is the fest's honorary chair, so it was plausible that Jack would be in town. No one had a problem believing he'd turn up at a strip club, either.

But it wasn't him. It was a guy who looks a lot like him, a guy whose shtick seems to be dressing and grooming himself to look like Nicholson and hanging around CineVegas. He's been everywhere: at festival headquarters, at the post-screening parties, in the theater lobby, everywhere. He really does bear a striking resemblance to Nicholson, at least until you look closely. Then you realize the suit is kind of shabby, the hair is unkempt, and the general air is that of Homeless Guy, not Jack Nicholson. Who knew the line between Nicholson and Hobo was so thin?

Turns out his name is Norman Deesing, an actor who appears in a CineVegas documentary called Youth Knows No Pain, about plastic surgery. When he's not dressing up as Nicholson, he looks only vaguely like him, and doesn't resemble a bum at all. Again, it's alarming to realize that you could see the real Nicholson and mistake him for a vagrant. Do you suppose that ever happens to Jack? Like maybe he shows up at the VIP entrance for a Lakers game, and the security guard says, "Hey, buddy, the free scraps of food are around back, in the alley. Oh! I beg your pardon, Mr. Nicholson!"