While the first trailer for James Bond pic Skyfall won’t hit until next week (!), official site 007.com has a treat in the form of a teaser poster for the November release. And while there’s precious little to glean from the black and white composition, there’s something surprisingly compelling in the simplicity of Daniel Craig , front and center, striding towards us from inside the Bond gun barrel . The juxtaposition of what looks like a drainage tunnel with Craig’s dapper, Tom Ford-tailored coolness gives us the sense that he’s unafraid to walk into the world’s dirtiest, grimiest underbelly in his fancy lad haberdashery. What’s more: He’s not shooting at us in the classic Bond gun barrel scenario, which traditionally envisioned the suave spy aiming and firing at the camera; look at his placement and you see he is the bullet. By my count this is the first of the Craig Bond flicks to use the iconic gun barrel motif in its poster designs; some form of it was employed here and there in the Bond films of Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan, though not so much in the artwork of the golden era of Bond (i.e. the Connery-Moore years). That said, this 1980 German re-release poster from the O.G. Bond pic Dr. No utilized what you might consider a variant of the gun barrel motif. (Side note: Is there another gun in Connery’s pocket or is he happy to see us?) Skyfall hits theaters November 9. [via 007.com ]
Some days you just need to see, as SCTV’s Farm Film Report guys Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok used to put it, stuff blowed up real good. If you’re having one of those days, Peter Berg’s Battleship is as good a choice as any. Beyond that, you should know a few things going in: Battleship is allegedly based on the Hasbro game of the same name, but never in the film is the line “You sunk my battleship!” uttered, so don’t expect a refund. Also, one of the invading aliens – spoiler, sorry! – looks a little like the guy from that ’90s Swedish band Stakka Bo . Now you’re ready for Battleship . Or maybe you’re not. Actually, the picture is perhaps not quite as painful as you might be expecting, though probably not as enjoyable, either. Plotwise, it’s as reasonably well-executed as these messes generally are. Actor-director Berg has made a few not wholly uninteresting films in the past ( Hancock , The Kingdom ), and while it’s easy enough to compare Battleship cavalierly with a Michael Bay movie, Berg does have a few more brain cells to work with, and here and there in Battleship they twinkle admirably. Also, the picture features a not entirely soulless specimen of beefcake, Taylor Kitsch, veteran of the TV show Friday Night Lights (which was created by Berg, adapted from the movie of the same name, which he directed). Kitsch wasn’t half-bad in the unjustly maligned John Carter , which only proves that we prefer to blast aliens to oblivion rather than land inexplicably on their planets and fall in love with their princesses. What that says about us as a people I prefer not to contemplate. Kitsch is quite winning in Battleship , a believable human presence in the midst of lots of metal stuff getting blasted to smithereens. His character is a young ne’er-do-well named Alex Hopper who, in one of the movie’s early scenes, scores a burrito for a good-looking (and hungry) blonde after the local watering hole has closed its kitchen. That blonde, played by Brooklyn Decker, also happens to be the daughter of stern bigwig Admiral Shane (played, with convincing stoniness, by Liam Neeson). And when Alex is forced by his more responsible brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgård) to join the Navy – Stone hopes it’ll straighten his goofball brother out – Alex of course runs afoul of Admiral Shane. All of this is before alien forces from an Earth-a-like planet called Planet G send their well-armed minions to wreak death and destruction, focusing chiefly on Hawaii, where they hope to take over a state-of-the-art interplanetary communications outpost. Dizzy yet? Just wait until the big graphite Planet G thingie lands in the ocean just off Hawaii, where Alex’s ship is engaged in some fun-for-all, low-risk naval maneuvers. Alex actually boards the thingie as Petty Officer Cora “Weps” Raikes (Rihanna) looks on, training a big gun on it just in case. It’s not giving too much away to tell you that massive kabooms ensue – among the weapons in the alien arsenal are flaming rondelles that saw through metal as if it were chunks of butter – to the point where the explosions become an abstraction: There are so many of them they begin to mean nothing. Have I mentioned the subplot in which a veteran with two prosthetic legs — played by Gregory D. Gadson, a real-life soldier and double amputee — reclaims his lost pride? Gadson brings a great deal of conviction to the role, and Berg uses his metal limbs as a great punchline to an alien-related joke. Other supporting players don’t fare as well: Rihanna has the face of a tough little streetcat, appealing and self-reliant, but the movie gives her very little to do (other than hold that big gun). The finest section of Battleship may be the last 20 minutes, the point at which the movie’s title begins to make some semblance of sense. It’s at that point that a real-life World War II-era ship, the U.S.S. Missouri , stationed at Pearl Harbor, is pressed into action against the alien forces. The hotshot young soldiers do not, of course, know how to work the thing — it’s all analog, and they’re digital as heck. Luckily, there are a bunch of geezer vets on hand, and they’re thrilled to have a chance to spring to action. The last section of Battleship is sort of like Antiques Roadshow meets Armageddon , albeit with way too much of the latter and not nearly enough of the former. But at least it brings a low-tech, human touch to a picture whose special effects, skillful as they are, are so excessive that after a while they just stop registering. Early in the film, a character makes a distinction between a battleship and a destroyer. A destroyer is designed to “dish it out like the Terminator.” Battleships, on the other hand, are “dinosaurs.” It’s funny that Battleship is ostensibly based on such a supremely simple, elegant and satisfying board game. As movies go, it’s really more of a destroyer. It’s entertainment as punishment, or perhaps the other way around. Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Dustin Lance Black spoke of his conservative Mormon upbringing when he won the 2009 Oscar for best original screenplay for Milk , and traces of that childhood are all over his most recent directorial effort Virginia , a garbled coming-of-age story and portrait of a mentally ill mother. The titular character, played by a blonde Jennifer Connelly, suffers from traumatic onset schizophrenia — she’s a fey, childlike woman who lives alone with her protective teenage son Emmett (Harrison Gilbertson) and has been carrying on a decades-long affair with the town sheriff Dick Tipton (Ed Harris), a devout Mormon who’s married with kids. The beautiful, unstable Virginia grew up in foster care and has been treated badly by men all her life, and her relationship with the sheriff may be the kindest and most stable she’s had, but it’s also a secret (though everyone in their Virginia beach town seems to know about it). That is a problem when he decides to run for state senate and his crazy mistress becomes a potential liability — his need to break things off on top of a diagnosis of lung cancer she decides to ignore unbalances Virginia and sets a string of events in motion that lead to dramatic scene promised in the film’s introduction. The film tends to treat Virginia like a tragic heroine of a vintage melodrama, uncomfortably romanticizing her mental fragility right from that opening scene, which irises out on her being carried from a house surrounded by policemen. “It wasn’t just me, everybody I know in town wants out,” she intones in one of her dueling voiceovers with her son, outlining her longing to head somewhere new — to get a fresh start in San Francisco, a plan she talks about but seems unsure how to make headway on. It’s one of the many themes the film raises and then lets drift away for a while — Virginia is so scattershot it feels like it’s a vehicle created to loosely hold a group of ideas rather than function as anything coherent. Take Emmett’s romance with Jessie (Emma Roberts), Sheriff Tipton’s daughter and the only girl who’s nice to him. Jessie’s forbidden to him not just due to her religious convictions and their class differences, but because she might be his half-sister — who exactly fathered Emmett remains a mystery. But a biology class lesson about detached earlobes is enough to have him convinced they’re in the clear, and after that it’s dropped in favor of their talking about religion, which also then fades away. Virginia sublimates the lung cancer she refuses to acknowledge into a hysterical pregnancy (after an aside that suggests Tipton couldn’t impregnate her in the first place because he keeps his temple garments on when dallying with her, getting his jollies through non-nudity requiring means). He pays her off, anyway, using campaign money, until he stops with apparently little consequence. Black recut his film after a poorly received premiere at the 2010 Toronto Film Festival, where it went out under the title What’s Wrong With Virginia . Having not seen the initial cut, I can’t speak to its coherence, but if this represents a clarification, it must have been muddy indeed. Tonally, the film goes from lushly fanciful, with its twinkling score and shots of the waterfront amusement part at night, to campy, with Virginia stuffing clothes down her pantyhose to fake a belly bump in order to inform everyone in town she’s bearing Sheriff Tipton’s baby. It’s unhurried enough to have the feel of a 45 that’s being played at 33 1/3 rpm, drowsing without giving a sense of how much time is passing. Tipton is a hypocrite who does some awful things as the film goes on (“This life is a grain of sand in time and it’s the next life that counts — then we’ll all be together,” he says to Virginia when he ends things with her, a line lifted from Black’s own childhood and a truly shit, sanctimonious thing to say to someone you’re abandoning). The film’s other glances toward Mormonism, including a visit from two young missionaries, are more kitschy, seemingly there more to make it clear that Tipton’s not representative of the entire religion than for any particular purpose. Faith becomes another of the film’s unemulsified ingredients. Virginia does feature a strong performance from Connelly, who’s vulnerable and appealing while still being genuinely and alarmingly unpredictable. It cuts through some of the film’s milky portrayal of the character as a beautiful martyr — Virginia shows that she’s smarter than many think, and that she does have some agency and awareness, tucked away in her airy house full of colored glass bottles. With its imagery of amusement park rides and idle seasonal jobs, Atlantic City weddings and thwarted small-town robberies, Virginia is like a box full of someone’s long ago summer vacation keepsakes: pretty, but representative of memories and meaning no one else will be able to grasp. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
