Cinematical

Clockwise from upper left: Splinterheads, Ghost World, An Education, House of the Devil.

Opening. Amiable and pleasant, Splinterheads revolves around a romance between Justin (Thomas Middleditch), an aimless small town dreamer, and Galaxy (Rachael Taylor), a gorgeous grifter who (literally) bumps into him at a gas station. She's more interested in separating him from his money than getting to know the lunkhead within, while he quickly decides that he's met the love of his life -- or, even better, a reason to leave his upstate New York world behind and start living for himself instead of his mother and grandfather.

Brent Sersen (Blackballed) is a better director than writer; the characters hold few surprises and the plot's trajectory threatens to die of old age before it reaches its pre-ordained conclusion. Still, he takes advantage of a visiting carnival and the grifter's obsession with geocaching, a variation on treasure hunting, to string together several lyrical interludes and enough laughs to deserve a recommendation. Dean Winters, Lea Thompson, and Christopher McDonald provide reliable support. Splinterheads opens in New York on Friday and expands to other cities the following week; check the official site for theaters and showtimes. Also opening in New York the same day: Collapse, Chris Smith's latest doc (more from last week and the exclusive poster debut).

On-Demand / Online Viewing. Terry Zwigoff's adaptation of Daniel Clowes' graphic novel Ghost World departs from the source material quite abruptly, but still remains faithful to the dark spirit of loneliness that haunts the characters. Thora Birch, Scarlett Johannson, and Steve Buscemi star. It's now available on FilmBuff, Cinetic's cable on-demand channel; check local listings to watch this essential indie at home.

After the jump: Who educated the devil?

We live in a time when war movies based on toys (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra) are better received by the public than those that have a basis in truth (The Hurt Locker). G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, out on DVD and Blu-ray today, dances around its origins as military action figures by positioning its heroes as an elite unit, more like well-armed spies than anything resembling common soldiers. The aim appears to be similar, though: provide heroic figures that inspire others to follow in their footsteps.

Back in the 80s, movies that could be mistaken for recruitment propaganda became surprisingly common. The film industry, which had firmly resisted anything related directly to the Vietnam War while it was being waged, became schizophrenic in the 80s, releasing anti-war and pro-war flicks side by side into theaters. Here are seven key films, listed chronologically, that helped shape the public's perception of the military during that decade.

Private Benjamin (1980)
Nancy Meyers began here, co-writing and co-producing the tale of Judy Benjamin (Goldie Hawn), a bride who wears black after her husband (Albert Brooks) dies on their wedding night. A spoiled woman-child, Judy enlists in the armed forces; basic training toughens her up as she realizes she can deal with the rigors of military life. As a budding feminist, she still had miles to go to learn that she didn't need a man or the military to be all she could be; as a poster child for plucky women in the armed forces, Private Benjamin was a positive-reinforcement milestone.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
Here's my problem with the picture: a furiously-filmed chase through the streets of Paris should be spectacular and thrilling. Instead, it's incoherent, routine, even disappointing. Director Stephen Sommers (The Mummy, Van Helsing) turns in another by-the-numbers action spectacle, this time starring Dennis Quaid, Channing Tatum, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Marlon Wayans, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. There are better ways to waste your time and money. Skip it. Also on Blu-ray.

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The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
Tony Scott's remake is a higher-grade disappointment, coming achingly close to delivering an unqualified success. Derailed by John Travolta's unrepentant scenery-chewing, which goes far beyond the bounds of bad taste, and an unhealthy preoccupation with explaining everything, the film motors along reasonably well, fashioning a paranoid tale of post-9/11 terror and ticking time bomb suspense. Denzel Washington is eminently watchable, and James Gandolfini has a good turn as the Mayor of NYC. Recommended with reservations. Rent it. Also on Blu-ray.

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I Love You, Beth Cooper
As I wrote in my review, Larry Doyle's very funny book has been transformed into a dreadfully boring movie. Hayden Panettiere and Paul Rust are miscast as a rule-breaking dream girl and the boy who loves her from afar, respectively. The spend a night together that seems endless. Chris Columbus directed, without distinction. Skip it. Also on Blu-ray.

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Also out: Aliens in the Attic.

Indies on DVD, more Blu-ray picks, and Collector's Corner -- after the jump!

Here's a different way of thinking about well-known movies: imagine each one is a stop on a subway line! Designed by David Honnorat and posted at Vodkaster, the cinematic subway map is based on the top 250 movies as voted by IMDb users on June 19 (which, I suppose, is why The Hangover made it). Honnorat created 16 different imaginary subway lines, including "Universally Acclaimed Masterpiece," "Political drama," "Drama about tolerance," "Dark and weird drama," and other, more traditional categories, and then placed each film on one of the lines. He asked: "How would you go from Alien to North by Northwest without crossing The Godfather: Part II? Which station have you not visited yet?"

The placement of movies on the map can be amusing (Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction side by side with Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America on the gangster line) as well as bizarre yet strangely fitting (Se7en sitting at the intersection of Vertigo, Rashomon, Nosferatu, and Let the Right One In). Click through to see the big map and roll around a bit. Like all subway maps, it's confusing at first but starts to make more sense as you follow the lines from station to station. What's your favorite cinematic subway line?

[ via Geek Tyrant ]

To misquote Jessica Rabbit: "Sequels to beloved animated / live-action classics aren't all bad. They're just motion-captured that way." As our own Elisabeth Rabbit Rappe reported earlier this year, Robert Zemeckis has been thinking about a sequel to 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And now the sequel is moving forward toward reality. Zemeckis told MTV News that "a script is in development" for a sequel, and original writers Peter S. Seaman and Jeffrey Price are involved.

Way back when, Seaman and Price adapted Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, a novel by Gary K. Wolff. The hard-boiled mystery drew upon the history of the Los Angeles transit system and provided a strong framework for a dazzling mixture of traditional cell animation and live-action period footage. Wolff wrote a sequel, Who P-P-P-Plugged Roger Rabbit?, and other follow-up ideas have been discussed over the years, but Zemeckis says he wasn't involved in any of them.

Of course, any sequel script would need to be very, very good on its own merits to have any hope of living up to the original. In view of Zemeckis' fascination, nay, obsession with performance capture digital tools, I share Elisbeth's fear that a new Roger Rabbit will be "a dead-eyed motion capture and not a lovable toon." The original was a mystery, a comedy, and a thriller, but it was the idea of brightly-colored cartoons living side by side with humans in a mundane real world that gave the film its distinctive flavor. Whose performances will be computer-animated in the sequel -- humans, 'toons, or both?

When was the last time you were genuinely surprised at your local multiplex? Maybe it was the unexpected qualities of a movie that you'd formed preconceptions about -- which were then pleasantly upended. Or perhaps it was the simple fact that a little-heralded independent picture was actually playing at your local bijou, the one with 18 screens, of which 14 always seem to be filled with predictable Hollywood product.

From Scott Weinberg's Sundance review, I knew that Good Hair, directed by Jeff Stilson, would be educational. From Eugene Novikov's box office report, I knew that it opened at 176 theaters three weeks ago. (It expanded two weeks ago and again on Friday.) But I was still quite surprised that it was playing at my local 18-screen bijou, which had somehow escaped my notice until I was recently binging on a (progressively disappointing) horror triple-feature. With horror DVDs stacked up at home waiting to be watched over the weekend, I decided that a well-regarded documentary might be just the thing to cleanse my palette. So I was in just the right mood to kick back and be surprised.

As expected, co-producer and co-scripter Chris Rock is a wry narrator and on-camera guide. What caught me off guard was how funny the interview subjects are! When I first read Scott's review months ago, I latched on to his opening line: "I now know more about black womens' hair than any middle-class Jewish guy ever has" and unfairly categorized it mentally as 'good for you, not necessary to see in a theater.' While I wish that the theater had been packed, I laughed out loud frequently nonetheless.

What's happened to all the great movie nudity lately? Billy Crudup started the year off with a bang, so to speak, with his big blue penis in Watchmen, and Marcus Nispel's Friday the 13th reboot featured sweaty sex and generous amounts of naked female flesh, but the summer and fall seasons have been curiosly bereft of talked-about sex scenes or body parts. Jessica Biel's bravely-bared breasts and backside in Powder Blue went direct to video, Hayden Panetierre nonchalantly limited her exposure to 'side boobage' in I Love You, Beth Cooper, and Megan Fox decided to keep her nipples to herself in the proudly feminist relationship drama ('cause it sure wasn't horror) Jennifer's Body.

In my youth, movies educated me about the wonderful diversity of naked bodies. Today, television and the Internet have stolen much of the thunder once claimed exclusively by the theatrical experience. (Case in point: Susan Sarandon's daughter, Eva Amurri, just made a big splash by going topless in Californication.) No wonder Terminator: Salvation director McG teased the audience at WonderCon earlier this year, bringing actress Moon Bloodgood up on stage and asking: "Who wants to see Moon's boobs in the picture?" She later said: "I'm a woman, I have boobs, it's a beautiful shot." As anyone who saw the movie in a theater knows, though, her toplessness was cut, reportedly as part of Warner Bros.' effort to secure a PG-13 rating.

The unrated director's cut is due out on DVD and Blu-ray on December 1, and the deleted scene has, apparently, hit the Internet (watch it after the jump). The verdict?

When I closed my eyes and pictured the greatest villain costumes in sci-fi movies, I was surprised how often hair -- and headpieces -- come into play. That makes sense for those of us who are not costume purists because we're thinking of the character as a whole, and in movies we're very often looking at close-ups of villains. We want to get up close and personal, to study the sneer, to examine the evil eyes, to absorb the dismissive scowl, to observe the raised eyebrows.

Isn't it the whole package that sells a character as a villain? The actor makes all the difference in the world, no matter if he's buried under a ton of makeup or becomes nearly unrecognizable, but the costume plays an important role. In honor of all those who will sally forth this weekend in costumes that are good, bad, and ugly, we salute the designers of the top ten (plus a couple of bonus selections) greatest villain costumes in sci-fi movies, and the actors who wear them.

The Emperor Ming (Flash Gordon)

It takes a truly evil villain to pull off this particular outfit. Arrayed in varying shades of deep red and gold, Ming (the always game Max von Sydow) threatens to steal the show when those eyebrows are raised. Somehow Ming looks both sartorially forward-thinking -- what is that raised cowl doing back there except to frame his bald head -- and ridiculously, gloriously silly.

Read the rest over at SciFi Squad

Indie Roundup, your weekly dose of what's happening (slightly) outside the mainstream.

Deals. Via our friends at indieWIRE, we learn that Brian Baugh's faith-based To Save a Life will be released by Samuel Goldwyn Films in January 2010. The film follows an "all-American teen" boy dealing with the aftermath of a friend's death. Cross-cultural romantic drama Cairo Time, starring Patricia Clarkson, will hit theaters and on-demand home viewing systems sometime in the new year, courtesy of IFC Films. Bradley Rust Gray's The Exploding Girl will open in early 2010 through Oscilloscope Laboratories. Zoe Kazan stars as a young college woman dealing with conflicting romantic feelings while home in New York for spring break.

Online / On Demand Viewing. Two recommendations this week, both for titles that are newly available through Amazon's VOD service. Susan Seidelman's Smithereens is a quintessentially New York picture and a fiercely independent experience from a time when indies were few and far between. It's a blast of fresh air about Wren (Susan Berman), a rough-talking young woman, and her travails through the seedier side of life as she tries to make something of herself. It's essential viewing, especially if you've been disappointed by one too many slick faux-indies. Musician Richard Hell is great, too.

Much less essential, but no less vital viewing, is Arlene Nelson's Naked States, which trails along as Spencer Tunick engineers massive works of art composed by live, naked human flesh. Tunick is a fascinating photographer / hustler, and so are the people who decide to bare all for the sake of art.

Activity of a different kind, Chilean cleaning, and AFI Fest -- after the jump!

I'm sure Peter Sarsgaard didn't intend to make a horror movie that would provoke gales of unintentional laughter. Yet in a key, emotionally-wrought scene near the end of Orphan -- out on DVD today and, perversely enough, worth a rental -- that's exactly what happens; by that point, the film's determination to take itself way too seriously has worn down the viewer, and its lunatic premise collapses upon itself. Sarsgaard bravely goes down with the ship, as does Vera Farmiga, two talented actors that were better than their material.

How do good actors end up in bad movies? The same way some of us end up in jobs we hate: (1) It sounded better than it turned out; (2) Gotta pay the bills. Sometimes they liven up the movie (The Devil's Advocate wouldn't be nearly as much fun without Al Pacino's self-parodying scenery-chewing) and sometimes they look befuddled that they ended up in such a turkey (Robert Downey, Jr. in Gothika, Zooey Deschanel in The Happening). We salute those who gave it their best shot, and ask the rest: what were you thinking?

1. Jon Voight in Anaconda
Intentionally cheesy or merely undone by cheap CGI? This tale of a film crew seeking to document a mysterious tribe of Amazonian natives is a rather tepid and poorly-executed horror adventure until Voight lends it a jolt of electricity as a jungle guide with an accent that's never been heard before. While decent actors like Eric Stoltz and Owen Wilson look like they're ready to cash their paychecks and go home, the Academy Award-winning Voight nearly saves the picture with his larger-than-life theatrics. That's entertainment!