VT: Where Red and Blue Share a Marquee

The outcome of today's presidential election, whatever it may be, is going to make some folks angry. So it's nice to know there's one place where Red and Blue America can still get along: the movie house.

Well, at least in Burlington. Making up the showtimes, I happened to notice that Merrill's Roxy Cinemas is going to start showing Fireproof, a Christian-themed, Kirk-Cameron-starring drama that has already grossed over $26 million, pretty amazing given its niche market and $500K budget.

I wondered when this tale of a fireman who has to overcome his addiction to Internet porn and learn to respect his wife — Promise Keeper style — would make it to the liberal-secularist wasteland of our state, or if it ever would. (It was released back in September.) But I never dreamed it would show at the same theater as Religulous, Bill Maher's highly irreverent take on the whole phenomenon of theism. Roxy owner Merrill Jarvis III has already shown a taste for controversy — he programmed the conservative doc Expelled and the Michael Moore satire An American Carol alongside the Roxy's usual, more left-slanting arthouse fare. The Roxy and Montpelier's Capitol are the only theaters showing Fireproof in north-central Vermont.

Whether churches and individuals will buy enough tickets to make Kirk's Christian opus a hit in B'ton is anyone's guess. Here's an amusing — if no doubt godless and biased — review.

Vermont International Film Fest Preview

Last summer someone sent me an email with a link to a New York Times piece about indie films people could check out if they were sick of blockbusters. He wanted to know why none of these movies had come to Burlington. Well, as it happens, several of them had played at Merrill's Roxy or the Palace 9 or the Savoy, just not for more than a week or so.

We're a small market, and theater owners (I'm assuming) can't afford to keep art films around for weeks in the hopes they'll find an audience eventually. I always know what movies are coming to town — because I write our showtimes — and you can too, if you check out our Clips page in the paper. (It's got blurbs and running times and everything!) But there's no at-a-glance equivalent online.

So I thought maybe I'd blog about some cool movies coming. Most of these are part of the Vermont International Film Festival, which, regrettably, coincides with our Vermont 3.0 conference on Saturday. But there are plenty of chances to catch them before and after you hear about all the exciting tech jobs VT has to offer...

The fest opened last night with Trouble the Water, which will start a regular run at the Palace 9 next week, and it's a doc worth seeing. Kim Rivers Roberts (pictured) is an aspiring hip-hop diva who turned amateur videographer right before Hurricane Katrina hit her Ninth Ward neighborhood. Only about 15 minutes of her three or so hours of footage are in the movie, but the whole thing is worth seeing. Roberts and her husband are larger-than-life personalities, compelling on their own. It's an up-close portrait of a neighborhood hit by disaster that you can't get from news footage.

For All You ABBA Lovers Out There

Taking a break from Kevin's excellent convention coverage to alert you to some important pop culture news. All you folks who love Mamma Mia! and wanted to sing along in the theater but didn't dare... well, now you can. Starting Friday, the Majestic 10 in Williston is showing a "special edition" of the Meryl Streep musical with lyrics on the screen, karaoke style.

This is being released nation-wide, no doubt due to popular demand. The title of this piece sums up how I personally feel about the Mamma Mia! phenomenon. However, I do hope local fans will show up, because there's nothing sadder than an ABBA sing-along with only three drunk people in the front row belting out "Dancing Queen."

Next up, a special edition of The Dark Knight for people who want to recite the Joker's lines, Rocky Horror-style? Or one for folks who want to partake of a certain thematically relevant substance while watching Pineapple Express? Er, maybe not.

Click here for showtimes.

New Teaser Trailer for Oliver Stone's "W"

Here's the first trailer for Oliver Stone's controversial bio-pic about George W. Bush, due out this fall.

I haven't been following this movie that closely — I just don't think I can sit through another liberal tale of woe about how Bush has ruined the country. I mean, I go to the movies to escape.

But after watching this, I'm curious, mainly because this trailer made me root for him. I think it was supposed to make him look dumb, but I thought it made him look kinda cool. Maybe that's just my "I-have-a-newborn-at-home" sleep deprivation talking.

It's eerie how all of the actors resemble the real-life characters they're playing. The dude made up to look like Karl Rove is especially creepy.

M. Night Shyamalama-Ding Dong

I went to see The Happening last night. What a huge load of crap. For the love of all that is sacred to you, please don't waste your precious time & money on such a big, stinky fart of a film. It was so bad, that when the credits came up I vowed — out loud — to never return to a movie theater.

The acting throughout the film was stunningly bad. I'd have to say that the best performance was carried off by Marky Mark's nostrils. All I could wonder was how much he and that Zooey chick got paid for such a walk in the park.

Everyone in the audience laughed out loud a bunch of times during the movie and I'm still not really sure if it was meant to be funny or not. Thank goodness though, because the laugh factor was the film's only saving grace. The scene where a woman is watching a video on her cell phone of a guy having his arms ripped off by lions in a zoo made me practically wet myself. Ab-so-lutely hilarious. An hour or so after the movie, my buddy and I were still cracking up about how horrible the film was, so It was practically worth the $16.50 we spent.

Sure, it seems possible that plants can communicate with each other. Maybe even produce some neurotoxin that could make people loopy. But I doubt that plants can summon the wind when they need to spread said neurotoxin.

If this neurotoxin causes people to be paralyzed for a few seconds (the extras looked like really crappy live mannequins in an 80s mall window), then mumble some weird crap and then not be able to walk forward for a few steps, how can they figure out such intricate ways of killing themselves such as turning on an industrial lawn mower and causing it to go in a semi circle so you have enough time to lay down in front of it and get mowed to bits?

Everybody's seen the red Jeep smashing into the tree on the commercials for this stinkbomb. What you don't see is that the driver and one of the back seat passengers go flying through the windshield on impact. However, John Leguizamo's character, who was sitting in the passenger's seat with no seat belt, walks out unscathed. Of course, then he sits on the ground by the Jeep and finds some glass to slice his wrists.

My companion put it best when he said that The Happening "didn't seem to be a movie at all — nothing happened."

With God on Our Side

Markos Kounalakis, president of The Washington Monthly magazine, has directed a short-film adaptation of Mark Twain's "The War Prayer," a searing indictment of the toxic mix of religion and patriotism, written in 1905. It's definitely worth 14 minutes, 21 seconds of your time.

The illustrations, by the animator Akis Dimitrakopoulos, are haunting. Actor/activist Peter Coyote narrates, with the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti taking over as the mysterious visitor, "come from the throne — bearing a message from Almighty God!"

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts.

Amen.

Johnny Law

If you know me, you know that one of my favorite movies is Barbarella. I'm very sad today because I just found out that John Phillip Law, who played the hunky, blind angel Pygar in the movie, passed away on Tuesday at the age of 70.

I'm even sadder to say that there's a remake in the works for 2009 with Rose McGowan in the lead role and... get a load of this... Shania Twain as the Black Queen. Good, sweet Lord. Anita Pallenberg was the original Black Queen. She's around 64 now, but I would put my money on her in a no-holds-barred streetfight with Shania.

That's one movie I will surely avoid for fear of it causing me to slice open a vein.

Enough with the freakin' remakes already.

Scary 'Men In Black' Police Movie Premiere

Wand-searches, threatening announcements and surveillance with night vision goggles — are we talking about the security surrounding the upcoming Olympics in China? Nope. Just the local premiere of a kung fu epic at the Majestic.

Blogger Bill Simmon attended last night's screening of the Forbidden Kingdom. Apparently, cellphones were forbidden by the besuited agents of Lion's Gate Films. See, the movie isn't actually being released until April 18. So they apparently wand-searched all audience members to make sure no one was carrying a camera phone. And that's not all...

Okay, so now that the scary Lion's Gate men have personally checked every single person in the auditorium with an electronic wand for a recording device (and even phones w/o recording devices - lest I phone in a play-by-play to a sketch artist, I suppose), we can just get on with enjoying our film, right?  Wrong. We were then presented a lengthy and punitive-sounding statement by one of the Men in Black that threatened us with prosecution "to the full extent of the law" should we attempt to record any portion of the film we'd been invited to see. And then, after checking us each individually for cameras and reading us the riot act in no uncertain terms, the Lion's Gate gestapo literally stared at the audience from the front of the auditorium throughout the entire film, sometimes using night vision goggles (I'm not kidding) and sometimes just with their cold, dead eyes.

So how was the movie? Bill's assesment: "fun, if a bit formulaic."

...and it was still hot.

I was raised by two people who both possess masters degrees in Education. As a result, I was read to constantly as a wee one. And as a result, I read constantly as a big one. Read to your kids, folks.

I had a lot of favorite books. But in my family, Where the Wild Things Are holds a special place in my sisters' and my hearts. My older sister used to make my mother read it to her every night, and my mother only stopped when her three year old started having violent dreams about giant monsters. Which makes sense, because that's what the book is about. It's about fear, and fear is only real if it's really scary. The world outside your house is scary. We teach children to fear things (crossing the road, strangers, the dark) to keep them safe. As a result, if you want keep your little one safe, you have to teach them fear.  And that's what I've always loved about WtWTA. Max looks his fears square in the face and says "STOP!" He faces his fears, and he rules over them as a result. It's a lesson I think some of us grown ups can benefit from.

Which is why this post, from LVHRD, makes me sad.

Because it made kids cry, Warner Bros has decided that Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are needs to be taken back to the drawing board, not only to be re-shot but possibly re-written as well, without Dave Eggers.

First of all, I was unaware that a live-action movie was being shot at all. Secondly: WTF? Ok, I suppose if it makes children burst into tears, it's probably not working as intended. But I want to see that version! And if they take Spike Jonze, possibly one of the delightfully strangest directors out there, off this project, I'll cry. If they put Tim Burton on it, I'll cry really loud. I might stomp my feet. It won't be pretty.

sidenote: next time you're flipping through your copy of WtWTA, note the design genius of Sendak — the pictures start out small, and gradually get bigger and bigger until the Wild Rumpus, where they encompass the entire page in a full-bleed illustration. Then when the Wild Rumpus stops, they begin to get smaller and smaller until the final page, which is text-only and reads  "and it was still hot."  Good design makes me happy. 

Why do animals make for such good allegories?

This video, posted by a young climate activist, has nothing to do with anything, really.

But I like it, mostly. It reminds me of the story Pamela did last summer about domesticated chipmunks. (See also Eva's chippy video)