Critical Thought »

Why recast the relatively small role of a doctor in a thriller? Michael Mann's Manhunter was an excellent thriller, featuring Brian Cox in a small role as the imprisoned, chillingly cold cannibal Dr. Hannibal Lecktor. When the time came to adapt another one of Thomas Harris' bestsellers, Jonathan Demme went in a different direction, casting Anthony Hopkins as the good doctor. The character's family name was restored (Lecter, not Lecktor) and a whole new set of tics and tricks were placed on display. Hopkins may have been the only actor alive who could have hammed it up to such extreme levels and yet, somehow, made Lector creepy rather than campy, unnerving rather than unbelievable. For his memorable efforts in The Silence of the Lambs, Hopkins won an Academy Award.

Recasting villains is a tricky business. Everyone needs to love, identify with, and cheer the hero or heroine, but if the villain doesn't provide the requisite level of opposition, the picture runs the risk of becoming unbalanced, leaving a gaping hole that cannot be filled in with special effects. And if an actor has established the character in the public's mind, it's difficult for anyone else to measure up.

So Dylan Walsh has an advantage in The Stepfather, which opens tomorrow. Terry O'Quinn originated the title role in the 1987 original, and was a truly memorable monster. Yet the film is not steeped in the public consciousness to a high degree, and O'Quinn has become much better known from playing John Locke in Lost. Walsh's fame, such as it is, comes from the lesser-seen TV series Nip/Tuck. Walsh has a shot of creating his own distinct brand of villain.

It all started in Venice in 1932 – the world's first film festival. Then other festivals began popping up for a variety of reasons, some political, given the growingly fascist government in Italy: Cannes in 1946, Edinburgh in 1947, Berlin in 1951, and so on, until the present day, when a journalist can spend a decent portion of the year (and salary) covering Sundance, the Toronto Film Festival, Telluride, South by Southwest, Fantastic Fest, New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, CineVegas, and, more recently, San Diego Comic-Con, just to name as a few, as well as the aforementioned international festivals if they're really lucky.

As time has passed, the fests have become more than venues for movie buyers and sellers to haggle over movies or arbiters of taste in the finest of arthouse flicks. Along the way, critics and journalists have gotten into the festival circuit, which is a win-win for the movies and the writers; small films get the buzz that's sometimes a good push for them to get picked up by distributors, and the writers get access to films before they get hot, making them tastemakers and generally ahead of the curve when it comes to Oscar season, film trends, and insider-y scoops that can only occur when you find yourself sharing an elevator with a Weinstein. Festivals can be great litmus tests for movies that take forever to get picked up – you can pretty much guarantee they're gonna be a stinker by the time they arrive in theaters for a weekend and disappear after that.

Thirty years ago, a political crisis and two movie stars inspired thousands of young people to pursue a career in journalism. Now that the profession may be dying, is it foolish to hope that an economic crisis and three movie stars could revive interest?

Opening tomorrow, Kevin Macdonald's State of Play stars Russell Crowe as a world-weary reporter investigating a murder in which his old friend, politician Ben Affleck, may have been involved. Rachel McAdams also stars as an up-and-coming blogger. Obviously, that's a very different kind of movie than Alan Pakula's All the President's Men, which starred Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who helped uncover the full extent of the Watergate conspiracy in the 1970s. In the wake of that movie, The Atlantic commented: "Today's generation of young Americans is flocking to journalism schools in unprecedented numbers ... the extraordinary popularity of 'communications' has been attributed to 'the Woodstein Phenomenon,' the effect of the Woodward and Bernstein feat of exposing and unseating the Nixon gang in the White House."

Ever since, there has been no shortage of qualified journalists; the problem is that jobs for journalists are drying up faster than a water hole in the Sahara. Without getting into a discussion of why the newspaper and magazine industries are dying, my questions are:

• Will anyone look beyond the murder thriller trappings of State of Play?
• Will it cause anyone to think about why good, solid investigative journalism is still so important -- in part, to hold elected officials, government workers, and corporate executives accountable for their actions?
• Will anyone be prompted to come up with viable solutions to sustain and support a valuable profession before it's gone forever?

Have you ever dismissed a movie as an unmitigated piece of junk, and then seen it a second time and thought, "That wasn't so bad"? Xan Brooks in The Guardian raises the question: "Who's at fault if a film fails on a first viewing and succeeds on the second? The viewer, the film-maker, or the tangled, criss-crossing dialogue between the two?"

He notes the turn-around he experienced with the Chilean drama Tony Manero, which is due for US release shortly. and admits that he is "nagged by the suspicion that there may be many other films in need of hasty reappraisal." The influential film critic Pauline Kael famously said she never watched a movie more than once, but Newsweek film critic Joe Morgenstern completed changed his mind about Bonnie and Clyde after describing it as a "squalid shoot-em-up for the moron trade." His mea culpa read in part: "I am sorry to say I consider that review grossly unfair and regrettably inaccurate."

I'm not suggesting that every bad movie will suddenly blossom into a classic with a second viewing. Our own Scott Weinberg recently watched Howard the Duck again, and that sucker is still a "$40 million dollar poop-nugget." On the other hand, my estimation of the original Friday the 13th rose with a recent reviewing, and Peter Bogdanovich's films have been rising in stock for me lately after falling through the floor for a period of my critical life.

What about you? Have repeat viewings changed your mind, perhaps after a period of years, either for good or for bad? Are you now convinced that Citizen Kane isn't so bad after all, or ready to give Watchmen a second chance when it hits DVD?

Leave it to Roger Ebert to compare the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics to the Nazi propaganda doc Triumph of the Will. In a blog entry, Ebert wrote in part: "The closest sight I have seen to Friday night's spectacle, and I mean this objectively, not with disrespect, is the sight of all those Germans marching wave upon wave before Hitler in 'Triumph of the Will.'"

In context, Ebert was addressing the "astonishing" $300 million show featuring "thousands of painstakingly drilled performers" who had spent "four months in rehearsal. Eight hours a day." His fascinating article includes thoughts on the opening ceremony, the challenge for any nation to ever equal the ceremony, much less surpass it in spectacle, the individual vs. the collective, and China's capitalist leanings.

At heart, of course, Ebert is a film critic, and he notes the direction of Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern, House of Flying Daggers) and the costumes designed by Eiko Ishioka (Mishima, The Fall). Triumph of the Will may still be fresh in his mind as a point of comparison because he wrote extensively about it again in June as one of his "Great Movies."

I played sports before movies lured me to the dark side, so when I was younger I related to the Olympics as a budding athlete. That was a long time ago, but I did watch a little Olympic badminton * and cycling before heading out to see movies this weekend. Have the Olympics distracted you from movie watching?

* UPDATE: Spelling corrected and link added. Thanks to ML for the gently-worded comment.

Film critics are often criticized themselves for being the wrong audience for a movie they've panned. Whether it's old white guys who aren't the right audience for a Tyler Perry movie or old white guys who can't appreciate a "chick flick," the subjectivity of certain reviewers is sometimes even called out for being too racist, sexist or otherwise prejudiced. We saw a high level of apparent chauvinism going on recently with the release of Sex and the City, and now it's happening again with Mamma Mia! Last Friday, in her his review, New York Sun critic Grady Hendrix* noted that Mamma, "has been getting generally good reviews, but it's also been getting trashed by some critics who all have one thing in common: They're men." And the claim has now been escalated by Liz Smith, who quotes Hendrix in the Page Six section of today's New York Post.

Despite my half-belief that Hendrix has a point about some male critics, I didn't want her his claim to go unchecked. Especially because her his review went out on the same day that most newspaper reviews went out. Meaning, how could she have known the true demographics of all negative and positive reactions? Going through all the Mamma Mia! reviews sampled on Rotten Tomatoes, here is what I discovered:

The second edition of the AFI Dallas International Film Festival gets underway Thursday night. Among the dozens of films premiering for local audiences, Stuart Gordon's Stuck, inspired by real-life events that transpired in nearby Fort Worth, stands out like a sore thumb to me. The film received some good reviews when it premiered in Toronto last fall; our own Scott Weinberg called it "more of a twisted thriller than an out-and-out horror movie ... [with] a sly and simple streak of social commentary." But my interest lies in issues beyond the film itself. Namely, can fictional depictions of real-life stories affect people like secondhand smoke?

One evening in the fall of 2001, twenty-something nurse's aide Chante Mallard partied at a club, drank some alcohol, split a tab of Ecstasy, smoked some marijuana, left the club, accepted a ride from a friend, picked up her car at her friend's apartment, and climbed into her gold Chevrolet Cavalier. A few minutes later, she hit a man on a dimly-lit highway. She was a mile and a half from her house in southeast Fort Worth, Texas.

Gregory Glenn Biggs flew into her windshield head-first. Mallard headed home. Badly injured, bleeding profusely and stuck in the cracked windshield, the hapless Biggs pleaded for help. Mallard pulled into her garage, got out of her car, closed the garage door, and went to bed. Biggs died.

Some enterprising journalist at today's Manhattan junket for The Other Boleyn Girl decided to pull Natalie Portman's chain on issues of women in film, and well ... she has a lot to say on that subject. I'll let her take over. "I've recently been getting frustrated. [turns to Scarlett Johansson] I don't know if you've had this experience, but we're probably seeing a lot of the same variety of what's out there, but I mean the number of roles for strippers or prostitutes -- or the opposite -- which, is like, 'She's the moral center of the film! She's the pure one. She's the one that makes the man realize who he should be', you know? That sort of dichotomy exists so strongly, it's like the virgin/whore thing evident to the greatest extent. So that's really been bothering me. Sort of finding a character who is complicated, like the women in this film, is very, very exciting. Also, I love comedies so much, but any kind of comedy the girl's like 'in fashion' or she's really into clothes, or like, she just wants to get married. Those are not values that I care to jump on the bandwagon of. I'd love to do a comedy. I'd love to do a romantic comedy, but you don't find something where the woman has, like, a real job.... so yeah, it is frustrating, but I also don't want to bitch about it."

Portman was much more circumspect when asked what we could see from her next on the big screen. She did say that she's already completed her work on the heavy romance-triangle drama Brothers -- wow, that was fast -- but said nothing about any future projects, like the Francis Lawrence martial arts fantasy she had been linked with a while back, or anything else. And I was nice enough to spare her the question about when she'll do a sequel to The Professional -- she gets that one at every junket.

You could go batty trying to figure out why Oscar voters like what they like -- these are the rocket scientists who thought Crash was Best Picture material, as opposed to say, a candidate for the worst movie of that year -- so it was only with mild bemusement that I greeted the Academy's decision this year to snub Atonement director Joe Wright, who deserved a Best Director nomination for every reason you can possibly summon. A few reasons: 1) He managed the extraordinary challenge of taking a piece of dense, modern literature and turning it into a compelling drama and a romance that works as a movie without dumbing down the material. 2) He's a talented, 'every shot counts' style of director, who labors over his shot selections and has the visual acumen of a Stanley Kubrick. 3) He deserved a nomination for his last film and got snubbed that time too.

The Guardian recently got its own elaborate set visit to Wright's upcoming movie The Soloist, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx, and the topic of Wright's snub was on everyone's mind. Downey, in particular, was ready to open up about it, saying that "it's a f**king crime Joe wasn't nominated. He's the goods, man, he really is." When Wright was asked directly about it, he responded "Well, out here it's all they bloody talk about, so yes for twelve hours or so I was gutted because everyone seemed so angry about it on my behalf. Then I just looked around and thought: What am I even thinking? I'm making a movie in Hollywood with these amazing actors I'd only ever seen sitting there in my cinema seat like a mad fan -- and they seem excited to work with me for some reason." A pretty classy response.

The snub talk is only one part of a huge and interesting set visit report that includes new details about The Soloist and a lot of funny stuff with Robert Downey, Jr. Here's a sample, to leave you with -- Downey talking about his working relationship with Wright: "First day, I said 'Listen Joe, just don't f**k with me and we'll be okay.' But the whole point is that we're supposed to f**k with each other and he did f**k with me -- for some reason he got under my skin and f**k, it worked."