Now here’s a proper celebration of Roger Ebert’s life. Tilda Swinton , dressed like David Bowie and channeling Ellen DeGeneres rouses 1,500 people at Ebertfest in Champaign, IL to shake their money makers to Barry White’s “My First, My Last, My Everything” at the Virginia Theater on April 20. (That’s Ebert’s widow Chaz introducing the actress.) The film festival, which is organized by the College of Media at the University of Illinois where Ebert was an alumnus paid tribute to its namesake, who succumbed to cancer on April 4. When he was alive, his prose danced just like Swinton. Ebertfest 2013 Dance Along from Ebertfest on Vimeo . More on Roger Ebert: Roger Ebert’s Death (1942-2013): Forefather Of Movie Blogging Passes Away Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
The teenage years can, don’t we all know, be an alienating experience, even when you don’t have an actual alien trapped inside your body. But such is the fate of the spirited young heroine of The Host , who finds that talking to boys and stuff is a whole lot harder when your soul is being sucked by one of the space invaders slowly wiping humankind from the face of the planet. This extravagantly silly but undeniably entertaining sci-fi soap opera — the latest adapted from the work of Mormon YA-lit phenom Stephenie Meyer — should prove shrewd distaff counterprogramming to G.I. Joe: Retaliation , posting solid (if less-than- Twilight -sized) numbers at home and other points throughout the galaxy. With The Walking Dead slaying ’em on the smallscreen, Warm Bodie s still haunting a few multiplexes and Oblivion just around the bend, there seem to be few surer bets in Hollywood these days than tales of an Earth imperiled by some alien/zombie/enviro apocalypse and the hardy band of survivors trying to preserve their humanity. In this latest variation, ETs that look like fuzzy, phosphorescent amoebas enter their human “hosts” through slits in the back of the neck, bonding with them like the similar-minded occupiers from Invasion of the Body Snatchers , a submissive demeanor and a telltale ring of bright blue light in the eyes signaling that the transformation is complete. By the time we pick up the story, most of the damage has been done, but the news isn’t all bad: These unfailingly well-mannered aliens have, an opening narration informs us, brought “honesty, courtesy and kindness” to our often cruel society. For unexplained reasons, they also seem to have leeched all the color from the world, dressing from head to toe in lab-tech couture and driving about in a fleet of reflective silver Lotus Elises. But humans, it turns out, aren’t so keen on this whole soul-sharing idea. So some of them have gone on the run, like Melanie ( Saoirse Ronan ), a bayou girl from the great, tax-incentive state of Louisiana, with a heart-tugging kid brother (Chandler Canterbury) and hunky rebel boyfriend ( Max Irons) in tow. In the film’s early moments, Melanie is captured by a team of “Seekers,” who implant her with one of their own kind, a millennia-old shapeshifter called Wanderer, whose job is to search Melanie’s memories for evidence of other human dissidents. Only, as Wanderer soon discovers, Melanie is still very much alive in there, too, struggling for control over her mind and body. Director Andrew Niccol (who also adapted Meyer’s novel) dramatizes this by having Melanie speak telepathically to Wanderer, who in turn responds with spoken dialogue — which, for a while, gives The Host the strange tenor of a 1950s women’s psychodrama crossed with a 1980s body-switching comedy: The Snake Pit meets All of Me . It all might have seemed even more ridiculous than it sounds were it not for the deeply resourceful Ronan, who has, ever since Atonement , has projected that slightly alien quality of children with a poise and wisdom well beyond their years. Here, trapped in what seems like an unplayable role, she not only creates two separate and distinct personalities for Melanie and Wanderer, but injects the entire film with a much-needed level of plausible reality. When Melanie proves too resistant, the Seekers’ queen bee (Diane Kruger) proposes ejecting Wanderer and taking over the job herself. At which point both alien and host — who have started to become rather fond of one another — make a break for it, heading west in search of the human underground. Figuratively speaking, this is a road Niccol has traveled many times. Dystopian neo-futures, plasticine pseudo-realities and class-war allegories are his stock-in-trade, from 1997’s Gattaca to 2011’s In Time to his original script for The Truman Show . It has been a career of generally diminishing returns, though Niccol remains a proficient technician, and The Host is never less than a muscular exercise in style, immeasurably enhanced by Roberto Schaefer’s widescreen lensing of the New Mexico desert, where Melanie/Wanderer finally finds brother, boyfriend, uncle (William Hurt, looking like a dour Pa Kettle) and the rest of the human resistance living in a series of interconnected caves. Here, The Host morphs into yet another genre hybrid, suggesting one of those old frontier Westerns in which some group of noble homesteaders steeled themselves against imminent attack from Indians or greedy cattle barons; surely this is among the least likely movies ever to include an extended crop-harvesting scene. But it’s clear that, as in the Twiligh t series, the real crisis here is a young woman’s sexual awakening — make that a young woman and a very old alien’s respective sexual awakenings. “You can touch me. I don’t want you to stop,” Melanie instructs Irons’ Jared in one heavy-petting flashback, but all subsequent efforts to make it past first base are curtailed by Melanie’s fury at seeing Wanderer (now known simply as “Wanda”) making out with her boyfriend, to say nothing of Wanda’s own blossoming affection for the equally strapping Ian (Jake Abel). Meyer is undeniably canny at using genre to address the age-old struggles of adolescence, but at just over two hours, even The Host ’s air of guilty pleasure eventually subsides. In the final stretch, the movie devolves into a protracted series of mini-climaxes before finally creaking across the finish line. All of which will mean little to the core audience of Twihards jonesing for a Meyer fix, now that Edward and Bella have ridden off into the celluloid sunset. Can there be room in this crazy, mixed-up world for man, woman and alien? The Host might have been more effective if we had to tune in next week to find out. Follow Movieline on Twitter . More on The Host : ”The Host’ Premiere In NYC: VIPs Reveal Their Favorite Celeb Parasites (Brad! Angelina! Tony Danza?) ‘The Host’ Contest: Channel Your Inner Parasite & Win A Nifty Prize Pack
Submitted for your approval: Exhibit A in the argument that a good song can make a mediocre trailer much more engrossing than it actually is. The word-of-mouth on the Adam Wingard -directed You’re Nex t is pretty strong, but, shorn of its music, this trailer doesn’t break any new ground. In fact, it reminds me a bit too much of the trailer for the 2008 home-invasion thriller, The Strangers , with Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman . (Same shit, different masks, you could say.) Happily, the first thing that gets cued up before the body count starts growing is Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” a beautiful, romantic tune (reportedly about his relationship with the woman who would become his first wife, Bettye Kronstadt) with an unsettling subtext. Although the line isn’t actually heard in the trailer, near the end of the song, Reed repeatedly sings the ominous line, “You’re going to reap just what you sow.” Since I seem to be quoting the New Testament a lot today, the lyric refers to a line from Galatians: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” The Perfect Soundtrack Even if you don’t know that and don’t pay close attention to the lyrics, Reed laces his performance of the song with the melancholy darkness of that line, and it ends up being the perfect soundtrack to the sequence of events unfolding in the You’re Next trailer: the snuggly, warm feeling of the family reunion gives way to horror and the barest of hints that the invaders in animal masks are going to reap what they sow. Give the music supervisor a cookie full of arsenic. Now, can somebody point me to a trailer that uses an excerpt from “Street Hassle” as its soundtrack? Click here to view the embedded video.
“Directing a movie is not that much different than producing albums. It’s working with talent and guiding them,” says Jim Akin, who makes his directorial debut at 7 p.m. Pacific Time on Thursday with the premiere of After The Triumph of Your Birth at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica, California. Akin is better known as the husband and bass player for singer/songwriter Maria McKee, formerly of the alt-country band Lone Justice. She co-produced the movie and co-wrote its score with Akin, and though Martin Scorsese once directed her in Robbie Robertson’s “Somewhere Down The Crazy River” music video, she counts this as her first real acting role. What’s the movie about? That’s a tough question, Akin told me. “I’ve tried about a dozen times to come up with an answer, and I can’t do it,” he said. So, he asked his wife to do it for him. “It’s been called a road movie on foot,” said McKee. “It’s been called a tone poem. My Irish friends said it was Joycean — a man’s philosophical journey. And during his sojourning, he meets a number of surreal characters along the way.” Judging from the trailer, which is posted below, David Lynch and tough-guy poet Charles Bukowski are also influences, particularly when the protagonist is heard in voiceover saying: “I was a bystander doing a death waltz through the shit parade of suicide highway.” “I like the idea of a man working through his existence and his identity and his place in life, and trying to make peace with that,” Akin finally volunteered. That man is McKee’s drummer Tom Dunne, whose story arc takes him from the desert to the ocean on foot. The characters whose paths he crosses are local actors and friends of Akin and McKee who, the first-time filmmaker said, “wanted to be part of the experience.” Akin said that their generosity was one of the factors that enabled him to make the picture for the hard-to-believe sum of $550. “I did the writing, the shooting and the sound, the locations and the editing,” he explained. “Maria worked with me on the score.” Akin added that he kept the production costs minimal because “I didn’t want to borrow money or risk money because then I would feel more free about my ideas.” McKee, who plays a musician in After the Triumph of Your Birth calls the role “my first non-singing job in front of the camera,” although she does perform “One True Love,” which Akin wrote, at a piano, and an a cappella prayer. (She also sings on the soundtrack, on which Akin also appears as his recording alter ego, The Shootist.) People have been trying to get me to act since I was 16,” McKee said. “But I never wanted to be an actress per se because I wanted control over the material. My relationship with Jim is ideal. We were able to work together and shape the material in an intimate way.” After the premiere at the Aero, McKee and Akin will treat guests to a musical performance. If you can’t make it, the movie will be available on DVD and Blu-Ray disc on Sept. 18. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
