Finally, a Wookiee-centric Star Wars vehicle that could get some actual laughs. Anyone who’s actually sat through The Star Wars Holiday Special should welcome a report by The Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision blog that Fanboys director Kyle Newman is developing Chewie , a spec script by Evan Susser and Van Robichaux that is reportedly a tongue-in-cheek look at the making of Star Wars through the eyes of Peter Mayhew, the seven-foot-three-inch hospital worker who donned a fur suit and became one of the most memorable sci-fi/fantasy sidekicks of all time. In December, Deadline reported that Chewie was near the top of film executive Franklin Leonard’s 2011 Black List of hot unproduced screenplays. The script follows Mayhew as he tries to balance a career as a hospital worker while chasing his Hollywood dreams. Mayhew recently tweeted that he’s working with Newman on Chewie and Heat Vision reports that the Fanboys filmmaker acquired the gentle giant’s life rights to advance the project. Newman’s involvement bodes well for the project given that Star Wars creator George Lucas put his stamp of approval on Fanboys , which enabled the director to use the official sound effects. Let’s hope Lucas gives Chewie the thumbs up, too, since, a movie about Chewbacca that would not be permitted to use his official yowl — an amalgamation of bear growls “with a dash of walrus, dog, and lion thrown in,” according to Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt — would be sad indeed. A scene or two involving Mayhew’s involvement in the much-ridiculed Star Wars Holiday Special , which centered around the Wookiee Christmas equivalent, Life Day, would be an added bonus, but, if Lucas does become involved, we won’t be surprised if the subject is avoided. Lucas once deemed the 1978 CBS Television special a “travesty. [ Heat Vision ] Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Yes, there is a triple-breasted hooker in Len Wiseman’s Total Recall remake. If you happened to have missed the news posts and Comic-Con appearances (it was a lot of publicity for a three-line role), please rest assured that a futuristic working girl does indeed flaunt her unusually augmented bosom for Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell), just as in the Arnold Schwarzenegger original. It’s one of the few callbacks to the hallucinatory nature of Paul Verhoeven’s wild-eyed, schlocky, terribly fun 1990 blockbuster, few other qualities of which this redo shares. The two films have the same underlying bone structure, sure, but this new Total Recall is made of more serious, more humorless stuff. It looks simultaneously lavish and interchangeable in its explosions and shoot-em-ups with a dozen other recent action movies, and in its sci-fi stylings with a dozen others in the genre. Instead of Earth and Mars, this Total Recall world is split between the United Federation of Britain and the country formerly known as Australia, now called the Colony. (Reportedly the two were originally Euroamerica and New Shanghai, but in the spirit of the rest of the film any potential political commentary seems to have been neutered.) Most of the world has been rendered uninhabitable by warfare, and the remaining population clusters in and threatens to overrun these two cities, which are joined by a giant transportation device that travels through the center of the Earth and is called The Fall. The Fall, half space shuttle and half commuter rail, is the film’s most interesting idea, uniting the oppressive UFB and its head of state Cohaagen (Bryan Cranston) with the have-nots in the Colony — as many of the latter, including our hero, travel to the more industrialized nation each morning to serve as cheap labor. Quaid shares an all-concrete studio in the Colony with his wife Lori (Kate Beckinsale), who like him heads out via The Fall to work every day. She’s in emergency services, he’s at a factory that makes the synthetic soldiers that serve as the UFB’s army. Quaid’s been having recurring dreams of a woman (Jessica Biel) trying to rescue him from a scientific facility. Exhausted by the grind of his day-to-day life, entranced by these nighttime visions in which, as he says, it “feels like I’m doing something important,” he stops by Rekall, a service that implants artificial memories of adventures that are practically like having done the real thing. He asks to be given the experiences of being a secret agent, which doesn’t go so well, because he may have actually been a spy in a past that’s been wiped from his mind. This Total Recall does away with the wonderfully queasy ambiguity of the 1990 film, in which we’re never sure if Quaid is a badass involved in a rebel conspiracy to decide the fate of the world or if he’s just a regular schmuck who’s become too fond of and given himself over to the illusion he purchased for himself as a bit of escapism. We never really doubt that Farrell’s Quaid/double-agent Hauser is experiencing a legit reality even when another character tries to convince him otherwise — there’s no sense, even when the trouble begins, that what happened at Rekall was anything but what we saw on screen, complete with an explanation for why the treatment might have triggered buried memories. It’s a shame, because that aspect of the first film allowed it to follow a typical movie arc while also carrying a pointed critique of it — how appealing, to learn you’ve actually always been one of the most important people in the world, that everything depends on you! Who wouldn’t find that more seductive than just being another working stiff filed away in a giant apartment block, even if choosing to believe it meant possibly abandoning the real world and demonizing your wife at the same time? As that wife, Beckinsale’s entertainingly indestructible and glowery, striding like a Terminator with an immaculate blowout down countless hallways while wielding a gun, and chasing Quaid over rooftops and along balconies after her cover as an enemy agent is blown (“I give good wife,” she sneers). Farrell and Biel are perfectly serviceable in uninspiring roles, while Cranston tries gamely to look like he could be the equal of Farrell in a brawl and Bill Nighy appears briefly as rebellion leader Matthias. The film flickers from fight scene to chase scene and back again, rarely pausing after the introduction for a quiet moment. Wiseman’s an adequate director of action, but only one or two of these sequences rise out from the ruckus of automatic machine fire — the standout involves The Fall and how gravity on the transport shifts when it passes through the Earth’s core. And while the sets and art direction are striking, with their multi-tiered urban landscapes, they also look familiar. The UFB is just a sleek, Minority Report future intent on taking advantage of the messily (and more Asian) Blade Runner esque future of the Colony. The synthetics are Star Wars battle droids by way of Tron . The floating car chase is awfully Fifth Element. This is a less cartoonish sci-fi vision, but to what end? The twists and turns of this convoluted tale of a guy who was bad but who may be able to reinvent himself as a better person thanks to having his brain scrubbed is fundamentally goofy, and it takes place in world that swarms with people but that only seems to have a handful of actual characters (when an important, dangerous attack takes place, Cohaagen of course heads it up in person, the way all world leaders do). These are elements that make sense when there’s a fair possibility the story might be all the protagonist’s indulgent delusion, but seem clumsy without it. Total Recall is an indifferent mean of whiling away two hours of your summer — but at least, unlike Quaid, you’ll be in no danger of getting lost in it. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Wanted: one hardy strain of dinosaur DNA and an endless supply of lawyers who don’t mind using outhouses. Gawker.com picked up a report from Australia’s Sunshine Coast Daily that local billionaire Clive Palmer is in “deep discussion” with the scientists who cloned Dolly the Sheep about producing a real, live dinosaur that he could house at an ambitious resort he’s developing in Coolum, in the state of Queensland. Palmer, who looks like he was cloned from the DNA of John Candy and Sir Richard Attenborough — he played Jurassic Park founder John Hammond in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film adaption of Michael Crichton’s novel — also reportedly wants to build a fully functional replica of the Titanic, which suggests to me that this guy is just looking for trouble. I should also note that Queensland does not need an actual dangerous-ass dinosaur running loose since it is already home to a staggering array of deadly and venomous creatures i ncluding the Blue Ring Octopus, the Funnel Web and Red Back spiders, the Saltwater Crocodile and Taipan and Brown snakes. Palmer has yet to verify this claim, but is reportedly expected to hold a press conference on Friday. Stay tuned. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Here comes the cinephile debate of the day: After polling 846 film experts, BFI’s Sight & Sound declared Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to be the #1 greatest film of all time, topping Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane , Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story , and classics from Renoir, Murnau, Kubrick, and more of your favorite all-timers. It’s a triumph long in coming for the Hitchcock pic, which only first made Sight & Sound’s once-a-decade list in 1982 and has been working its way up the ranks of critical opinion since. Does the 2012 poll finally have it right? Culled from Top Ten lists from 846 critics, academics, writers, and programmers, Sight & Sound’s GOAT survey is at its widest to date. The full ten: The Critics’ Top 10 Greatest Films of All Time 1. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958) 2. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) 3. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953) 4. La Règle du jeu (Renoir, 1939) 5. Sunrise: a Song for Two Humans (Murnau, 1927) 6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) 7. The Searchers (Ford, 1956) 8. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) 9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1927) 10. 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963) Somewhere out there, Kim Novak is raising her fist in victory while William Friedkin – who told Movieline Citizen Kane set the bar for cinematic greatness so high, trying to match it is what keeps him going – is probably shaking his damn head. Meanwhile, 358 filmmakers were polled for a separate director’s choice, yielding some interesting differences in opinion: The Directors’ Top 10 Greatest Films of All Time 1. Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953) 2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) and Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) (tie) 4. 8 ½ (Fellini, 1963) 5. Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1980) 6. Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979) 7. The Godfather (Coppola, 1972) and Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958) (tie) 9. Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1974) 10. Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948) It’s interesting to note the divide between critics’ and filmmakers’ ranking of Vertigo , which is a more populist-romantic choice in ways than Citizen Kane ; perhaps unsurprisingly, the directors’ list is much more auteur-heavy in its leanings. But let’s open this up to discussion: Is Vertigo really the best film of all time? (Is it even the best Hitchcock of all time?) Have at it in the comments below! Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Some Moviegoers were said to be hesitant to attend The Dark Knight Rises , but a number of people apparently made the trek over the weekend. The final installment in the Batman trilogy directed by Christopher Nolan grossed over $64 million over the weekend, landing atop the box office for a second week. Another holdover, Ice Age: Continental Drift took second over the weekend, grossing a cool $13.3 million. 1. The Dark Knight Rises Gross: $64,075,000 (Cume: $289,086,000) Screens: 4,404 (PSA: $14,549) Weeks: 2 (Change: – 60%) IMAX cashed in at $9 million over the weekend for a North American total of $38 million. The feature grossed $122.1 million overseas. 2. Ice Age: Continental Drift (3-D, Animated) Gross: $13,300,000 (Cume: $114,847,214) Screens: 3,869 (PSA: $3,438) Weeks: 3 (Change: -35%) Perhaps not a shocker, this is the top choice for families. 3. The Watch Gross: $13 million Screens: 3,168 (PSA: $4,104) New The Fox comedy only appealed to some moviegoers in its first weekend outing. 4. Step Up: Revolution (3-D) Gross: $11.8 million Screens: 2,567 (PSA: $4,597) New Also a so-so opening at best for this newcomer. With a production budget of $33 million this title has a ways to go to break even. 5. Ted Gross: $7,353,150 (Cume: $193,618,750) Screens: 3,129 (PSA: $2,350) Weeks: 5 (Change: – 27%) The R-rated comedy continues to attract crowds well into its release. 6. The Amazing Spider-Man (3-D) Gross: $6.8 million (Cume: $242,053,000) Screens: 3,160 (PSA: $2,152) Weeks: 4 (Change: – 38%) 7. Brave (3-D, Animated) Gross: $4,237,000 (Cume: $217,261,000) Screens: 2,551 (PSA: $1,661) Weeks: 6 (Change: -30%) 8. Magic Mike Gross: $2.58 million (Cume: $107,587,000) Screens: 2,075 (PSA: $1,243) Weeks: 5 (Change: – 40%) 9. Savages Gross: $1,753,360 (Cume: $43,898,930) Screens: 1,414 (PSA: $1,240) Weeks: 4 (Change: – 48%) 10. Moonrise Kingdom Gross: $1,387,359 (Cume: $38,396,927) Screens: 853 (PSA: $1,626) Weeks: 10 (Change: – 24%) The Wes Anderson-directed feature has had strong staying power and one of the summer’s strongest specialty releases.
Suburban America has its share of Oranges . Orange County, CA, probably the richest and best known of the lot (there are of course fellow O.C. namesakes in New York and Florida) has had its hare in the spotlight with the original Real Housewives , not to mention that teen/young-adult primetime soap The O.C. and who could forget MTV’s Laguna Beach . But watch, out, there’s a new Orange grabbing the spotlight, and it even grabbed O.C. star Adam Brody who plays the successful son of a couple living in a leafy neighborhood in West Orange, NJ. The Oranges promises to take a bite out of the upper middle-class intrigue market. But Brody appears to be incidental in the block scandal taking place on – you might have guessed, Orange Drive. The quick plot goes something like this: Two dads are morning jog-BFFs who live across the street from each other. One daughter comes come for a holiday after breaking up with her boyfriend. Instead of going for the neighbor’s good looking age-appropriate son (that would be Brody) she takes a liking for the dad – a big uh-oh! And even a bigger problem, the neighbor’s dad goes for it… Here’s the official synopsis and trailer below : David and Paige Walling (Hugh Laurie, Catherine Keener) and Terry and Cathy Ostroff (Oliver Platt, Allison Janney) are best friends and neighbors living on Orange Drive in suburban New Jersey. Their comfortable existence goes awry when prodigal daughter Nina Ostroff (Leighton Meester), newly broken up with her fiancé Ethan (Sam Rosen), returns home for Thanksgiving after a five-year absence. Rather than developing an interest in the successful son of her neighbors, Toby Walling (Adam Brody), which would please both families, it’s her parents’ best friend David who captures Nina’s attention. When the connection between Nina and David becomes undeniable, everyone’s lives are thrown into upheaval, particularly Vanessa Walling’s (Alia Shawkat), Nina’s childhood best friend. It’s not long before the ramifications of the affair begin to work on all of the family members in unexpected and hilarious ways, leading everyone to reawaken to their lives, reassess what it means to be happy, and realize that sometimes what looks like a disaster turns out to be the thing we need.
Searching For Sugar Man , which tells the improbable story of how a singer-songwriter named Sixto Rodriguez rose, fell, and found superstardom in what amounts to a parallel universe, is an elegy in several keys. One is clear and familiar: Upon his excited discovery by a noted producer, the music business circa 1969 ate Rodriguez for breakfast, and a talent still acknowledged by his peers went to waste. The second is more personal, and although Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul leaves a distinct and ultimately frustrating berth around the man at the center of his documentary, it becomes poignantly clear that an abbreviated resume and a family to feed didn’t keep Rodriguez from living an artist’s life. And then, perhaps most resonant and abstract, there is the film’s charting of the confluence of circumstances that can create a legend and shape lives – a confluence whose particularities are less and less possible in an information-glutted age. Sugar Man opens with much but fleeting stylistic fanfare. Over a blend of vivid landscapes, a steady-cam tour of bleak and snowy Detroit, moody recreations of key scenes and a neat effect that moves from image to illustration and back, various players (beginning with a Cape Town record-store owner called “Sugar”) recount the film’s heavily fragmented story of a mysterious musician out of Detroit who, South African legend has it, staged “probably the most grotesque suicide in rock history.” Why “South African legend,” you might ask, and the answer is what takes Sugar Man ’s story from sad but common to extraordinary. In many ways that story belongs to the men who stand in for what was apparently a solid chunk of the South African populace in the 1970s, when apartheid was in full swing and the country was under totalitarian rule. A hilarious origin story has an American girl bringing a single Rodriguez album into the country, patient zero-style, with bootlegs and label requests proliferating from there. With sizable cuts from Rodriguez’s two studio albums of Dylan-esque folk rock accompanying them, those men (musicians and music fans) describe how songs like “I Wonder” and “Anti-establishment Blues” sparked something – a glimmer of rebellion, the comfort of fellow feeling – in them. Elsewhere referred to as an “inner city poet,” if Rodriguez’s lyrics lack a certain prosody they are written squarely and straightforwardly in the protest tradition of the time. A grassroots process that had to sidestep censors and a heavily restricted media helped foment a folk hero in the public’s imagination. Rodriguez, we are told, is bigger than Elvis in South Africa, and certainly bigger than the Rolling Stones. His sonorous tenor is sweet but strong and pleasingly clear – somewhere between Cat Stevens and Neil Diamond. Even so, the truth is that, though skilled and even singular, of the songs we hear nothing astonishes or even comes close; a couple sound too dated to be great. But then we’re not supposed to be evaluating his music for signs of greatness, not really. Perhaps under different circumstances, like the ones in South Africa, he might sound different; he would be different. Much discussed is the lack of personal details that fueled the Rodriguez enigma; his mystery was part of what made him great. Bendjelloul upholds that idea, whether he likes it or not, after a rambling exposition of how a couple of amateur Cape Town sleuths finally tracked the very much alive Rodriguez down. Mexican by birth and extremely reticent by nature, Rodriguez is an uneasy interview; we learn more about him just watching his delicate form move down a snow-laden sidewalk like an exotic but flightless, black-coated bird trapped in a crummily ordinary world. Interviews with his three daughters are sweet but a little unsatisfying, and in its final third – which details his triumphant arrival in South Africa and introduction to an adoring audience of twenty thousand – Sugar Man falters. Various threads of the story (including the rather major question of how an estimated half a million records sold resulted in zero royalties) are left to fray. It isn’t clear that the director recognized the most prominent among them: Bendjelloul is enamored not with the deeply organic nature but the novelty of this “instant” success story. And yet Sugar Man is most interesting when it touches on the conditions that combined to draw a cult hero out of some decent music and a generously enabled, imagination-firing mystique. I imagine even the wise and thoughtful Rodriguez himself would insist that more than one man’s third act justice, this is a story about time and a swiftly vanishing context. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
The Watch (nee Neighborhood Watch ) truncated its title to avoid conjuring the February killing of Trayvon Martin and its plot contains no major similarities to the teen’s controversial death. But in the wake of the Aurora, Colorado mass shooting — which may have spawned at least one would-be copycat thwarted today in Maryland — some of the violence-based laughs in the Ben Stiller-Vince Vaughn comedy might hit too close to home for some moviegoers. The comedy, about a suburban schmoe (Stiller) who starts a Neighborhood Watch gang after the murder of a friend, invokes the cultural conversation about violence that has been stirred anew by recent events. “There weren’t walkouts at my particular screening, but in a moment where Jonah Hill’s military-obsessed character Franklin threatens a group of teenagers with a pocket knife, muttering that he’ll ‘kill each and everyone of [them],’ the cringes reached audible levels,” writes Hollywood.com’s Matt Patches , noting audible discomfort among moviegoers at a screening he attended. Like the Columbine shooters and last week’s Aurora gunman, Hill’s character is a young white male with a violent streak on the fringe of society, who has a cache of firearms, including a semi-automatic rifle, stashed at home and is all too eager to use them again. Violent impulses mixed with societal frustrations are given a target when the Watch is called into action to battle their enemies — in this case, extraterrestrial aliens. “Franklin’s entire persona is eerily similar to those that have lashed out in the past: he’s a high school drop out, reject of the police academy, and object of bullying by the socially normal people around him,” Patches continues. “He wants to serve justice, but he’s inherently violent. Hill plays Frankin for comedy, and in another moment in history the act would be hysterical, but in the wake of tragedy it’s simply uncomfortable.” “[When] we see bloodshed early on in The Watch , it stings more than it amuses,” writes Salt Lake Tribune critic Sean P. Means in his review of the film. Hill’s character goes from comic relief to a figure that “instead makes us wince.” Over at the Huffington Post, writer Jonathan Kim echoes the uneasy sentiment. The problem isn’t that violent movies cause violent behavior, he says, but that America’s gun-happy culture is so often reflected in its media. “If American entertainment is seen as too violent, I see that as a reflection of our gun- and military-worshipping culture, not the cause of it,” Kim offers . “And if people copy the violence they see in movies, the problem is not the movies, but people who can’t tell fantasy from reality, and the ease with which our gun laws allow those people to arm themselves to the teeth. The Watch is obviously fiction, but sadly, when unstable people can buy such powerful weapons, we need to do more than just hope that they’ll only be aimed at bad guys and aliens.” Ultimately most critics seem to agree that The Watch hardly earns the attention or scrutiny it may receive from Aurora parallels; it’s currently at a dismal 13 percent at Rotten Tomatoes , while Movieline’s Michelle Orange called it slight and ephemeral entertainment. But beyond that, I’d give writers Seth Rogen, Jared Stern, and Evan Goldberg enough credit to have purposefully written Hill’s character as a commentary on the kind of gun-loving disaffected young man that could, under other circumstances, follow a much darker path. Raw and shaken sensibilities didn’t stop audiences from attending The Dark Knight Rises last weekend, but tracking approaching this weekend was flagging. As the national conversation about guns and violence and film rages on — and with most fans having already seen the event film — are audiences less enthusiastic to flock to theaters, post- TDKR ? And if they do go to the multiplex for the latest Ben Stiller comedy, are they prepared to process shades of Aurora’s gunman in Jonah Hill’s angry, armed loner-turned-hero? Just be warned: If you’re going to the movies this weekend looking for escape from the real world, The Watch may hit closer to home than you anticipated. Then again, if Ben Stiller and Co. can inspire discussions about violence and gun control in America amid the broad guffaws, penis jokes, and one-liners, that might be a good thing for all involved. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Daniel Craig was at Her Majesty’s Service for the opening ceremony of the London Olympics. The James Bond franchise’s latest 007 appeared with Queen Elizabeth and her Corgis in a pre-recorded skit that had the secret agent and the queen meeting in Buckingham Palace. London’s Mail Online reports that the Queen told Craig, “Good evening, Mr. Bond,” before accompanying him on a helicopter ride to Olympic Stadium with the secret agent at the aircraft’s controls. The film then gave way to real life as their stunt doubles sailed into Olympic Stadium beneath Union Jack chutes, eliciting gasps from the crowd. After touchdown, the real Queen, her hair strategically mussed, then reappeared to take her place in the royal box. Although, sadly, no Rage-virus-infected zombies showed up to spike the adrenaline levels of the gathered athletes, the ceremony’s director Danny Boyle didn’t completely ignore his darker instincts for the presentation, which was entitled Isles of Wonder . The Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang put in an appearance and Harry Potter baddie Lord Voldemort menaced in the form of a giant inflatable that was reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s The Wall concert tour. Fortunately, a small army of approximately 30 Mary Poppinses swooped down into the stadium on umbrellas to save the day. That’s a weird act for the athletes to follow. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter.
Walking out of The Watch , Saturday Night Live writer Akiva Schaffer’s garrulous but indistinctive directing debut, a young woman in front of me complained to her friend. “What do you even say about that?” he’d asked. “I have no idea,” she said. She only had to write up a list of the movie’s pros and cons, and even then she could think of but one item for the former column. It’s not that The Watch is terrible – it’s not not terrible, but there are sufficient diversions and more punitive ways to spend your evening – but that it’s one of those smoke bomb comedies that seems to disappear even while you’re watching, leaving no trace of itself behind. A studio gumbo of proven quantities – here’s Vince Vaughn doing his flirty, towel-snapping thing, Ben Stiller playing a tightly wound Citizen Costco, um, rabid aliens, beer- and pot-sealed enshrinement of male bonding – The Watch leaves very little to say because, despite the near-constant jabber, it says, and aspires to, so very little. There is a concept, of course, and it’s high enough to track with those non-native Apatowians (Seth Rogen co-wrote the script with Jared Stern and his longtime writing partner Evan Goldberg) sadly unable to keep up with the movie’s urban thesaurus worth of masturbation references. Home team-loving Evan (Stiller) is what Max Fischer might be like if he grew up to manage a Costco and moved to Middle America. Trying to prop up his flagging self-image with extra credit community work, Evan is also trying (and failing) to have a child with his adorable wife (Rosemarie DeWitt). When his overnight security guard is found in a pile of viscera and green goo, Evan responds the only way he knows how: By deputizing himself as the leader of yet another organization, a neighborhood watch. I saw the trailer for The Watch back when it was still called Neighborhood Watch , just as the February murder of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin by a patrolling neighborhood watch volunteer was coming to national attention. No doubt a couple of 20 th Century Fox executives had a couple of sleepless nights, wondering if their lewd little genre mash-up would be found guilty by association. They did what studios do in these dismally self-interested situations – a shell game currently being played by Warner Bros. with their Gangster Squad , whose release has been postponed until next year in the wake of the Aurora shootings: They changed the title. It’s all about optics and the bottom line, and between those two imperatives less and less to do with (moral and other kinds of) substance in storytelling and image making seems to survive. With the exception of the character of Franklin (Jonah Hill), one of Evan’s three compatriots (including Vaughn’s bored dad and Richard Ayoade as a deceptively well-bred Brit looking to blend in), and a funny scene in which Stiller and Vaughn vie to get the last bullet into an alien corpse, The Watch is too clearly about cartoon battles and puerile riffing to inspire queasiness. Police Academy reject Franklin is keen to whip some neighborhood ass; he slings a blade around, refers to their club as a “militia,” and has an arsenal of automatic weapons hidden under his childhood bed. He’s really a pussycat, of course, and when it falls on the quartet to save their town from alien invasion (Will Forte is brilliant as usual playing one of the town’s handful of ineffectual cops; a creepy Billy Crudup is also welcome in a small part) and a divide forms between the two alpha males, Stiller and Vaughn vie for his loyalty. The Watch received an R-rating, which mostly means that the usual complement of dick jokes have room to flower into a full-blown penile fixation – to grow taller, bloom fatter, scatter more potent seeds, etc, etc. Some of it’s funny; most of it’s a flat-out grind. (Least clever is the movie’s nod to its own preoccupation with everything phallic and fluid; like I tell my landlord, acknowledging the problem is not the same as fixing it.) Back in March, the Watch trailer preceded a showing of 21 Jump Street , a movie that should not have worked if ever a movie were doomed from the start (or by its title), and yet it restored my faith in the studio comedy; side by side the two movies are a study in the difference between inspired silliness and what is merely and persistently slight. The Watch is in wide release Friday. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
