The biggest movie news of the last week, in my humble opinion, is that Warner Home Video will be releasing a 14 disc box set of the original Superman series that will include a "reconstituted" cut of Superman II. For those that don't know, the first two films were originally being shot back-to-back by Richard Donner, but as shooting fell behind schedule he was forced to put aside any stuff for the second film and finish the first. Once the first film was done and released he was fired by the Salkinds and replaced with Richard Lester. Supposedly Donner had shot about 70% of the sequel but only 40% of the footage he shot was used (Brando shot scenes that are being used in the upcoming Superman Returns).
Now, Donner supposedly isn't yet involved in the project and it most likely won't be out until Superman Returns hits DVD around Christmas (which would explain 14 discs...Superman, Superman II, Superman III, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Supergirl and Superman Returns is the only way to get that many in one box with plenty of extras for each film), but this is very exciting new. This is one instance where the terms "Director's Cut" and "Special Edition" will actually have meaning.
Meanwhile, the Oscar nominations have left me rather "blah". Most likely because life has turned me in different directions this past year and I haven't seen most of what got nominated and won't have the opportunity until they hit video anyway.
Now...on to this week's reviews:
The problem with a film like Flightplan is that it really has only two options to follow once the plot is in motion. Jodie Foster stars as a woman who boards one of those currently non-existant super airplanes that seats 500 with her daughter. Both fall asleep and three hours into the flight her daughter goes missing and she starts to panic and throw out all these theories as she gets everyone on the plane into a panic as well. So we're left with the only two options. Let's call option A The Twilight Zone Option in which we find out she never had a kid on the plane to begin with because the child died or was never born or some other reason. Let's call option B The Die Hard on a Plane Option in which it turns out someone's really taken her child and now she's got to turn into an action hero to get the daughter back.
So you see...there's very little suspense and by the time both options have played themselves out you realize you could have spent an hour and 40 minutes doing almost anything else.
Speaking of wastes of time...The Man is one of those films that was probably thought up by studio executives during a late night pot party soon after they graduated from business school and wrongly got promoted to run the damn place. It's one of those "wouldn't it be funny if we made a buddy cop film with Samuel L. Jackson and Eugene Levy?" type of comments you make at 3am when stoned. But when the buzz wears off you realize it wouldn't be funny. My question is why didn't the actors know better? Heck...why didn't I? To give the film some credit, it does have a rather funny recurring fart joke for what that's worth.
Lastly we come to My Big Fat Independent Movie. This film is a spoof on the order of Scary Movie or Not Another Teen Movie or even the upcoming Date Movie. Heck...just having the word Movie in the title makes it funny, right?
The film starts off very promising with a very funny parody of Memento and then quickly throws in a bizarre mish-mosh of plot pieces from Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Amelie, The Good Girl, Swingers and Pi for what makes a very funny first 30 minutes. Then it slows down as it pretty much tries to move this plot forward while still tossing around even more references to Sex, Lies and Videotape, Mulholland Drive and Run, Lola, Run before ending with the funniest (and largest) Mexican standoff ever put to film.
It's funnier than most films in this "genre", but at the end of the day it doesn't add up to much beyond 80 minutes of diversion and an "updated" version of the just as funny Plump Fiction released in 1997.
Be seeing you.
