Culture Surfing

HELP ME, JESUS: Tom Hanks (center) watches his credibility fall in Angels & Demons.

GENRE: Scavenger hunt disguised as a Hollywood thriller

THE PITCH: In Rome, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and young physicist Vittoria Vetra (Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer) race the clock during a papal election, a hostage crisis, and the countdown until a stolen speck of antimatter could wipe out Vatican City.

MONEY SHOTS: A tracking shot inside the Large Hadron Collider echoes one of those zippy through-the-engine shots from The Fast and the Furious. To escape a death trap, Langdon tips a huge bookcase against a shatterproof glass wall like Indiana Jones, with amusingly anticlimactic results. A big scene near the finish involves St. Peter’s Square, a sci-fi explosion, and an unintentionally humorous parachute mishap.

BEST LINE: “Ah, Professor Langdon. What a relief — the symbologist is here,” sneers the Swiss Guard commander (Stellan Skarsgård).

Continue reading “Hollywood Product: Angels & Demons“

(Photo © 2009 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.)

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HANG TIME: Russell (left) and Carl Fredricksen from Up

The stereotypical summer movie aspires to be a simple pleasure, and usually gets it half right. Simplicity is the stock-in-trade of Hollywood tentpole films. Even a full sentence may be too long to sum up a summer blockbuster’s premise: Ideally, it fits into a tagline, a Tweet or an icon.

Regardless of which movie you see, where you see a film offers its own delights. Several of the summer biggies will be in 3-D (including Pixar’s Up), a few will have IMAX versions, and many will play at the summertime’s quintessential venue, the Starlight Six Drive-In. Doubtless a few of the season’s hits will screen at the Fox Theatre Summer Film Festival, the titles of which are to be announced.

Screen on the Green continues this year at Centennial Olympic Park, and with the exception of Oscar-nominated Dreamgirls (June 4), it’s devoted to 1980s flashbacks, including Back to the Future (May 28); Field of Dreams (June 11) and Home Alone (June 18) — which, granted, came out in 1990 but was made in the 1980s. For June 25, audiences can vote for one of three 1980s films: Big, Ghostbusters and The Princess Bride. (I’d vote for Ghostbusters, but would bet on The Princess Bride.)

The summer movies of ‘09 may make the Screen on the Green lineup two decades from now. Apart from the already released X-Men Origins: Wolverine, this summer’s light on the joy of superheroes. Here’s a guide to the most-hyped releases to come, along with the simple pleasures they’re shooting for.

Angels & Demons (May 15)
THE JOY OF: sleek, empty eurothrillers; saying naughty things about the Catholic Church
IN OTHER WORDS: Tom Hanks and director Ron Howard reunite for the follow-up to The Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown published the novel Angels & Demons first, but the new film still follows Hanks as globe-trotting, conspiracy-unraveling symbologist Robert Langdon, who journeys to Rome to uncover a mystery involving the Vatican, the Illuminati and, uh, antimatter. (Note to self: Google the word “symbologist.”)

Continue reading “Summer movies simplify cinema”

(Photo ©Disney/Pixar)

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TOM FOOLERY: Go forth and multiply, Dan Brown.

Did you hear the world stop yesterday, when, for a moment, the moon and the sun were both eclipsed by a giant ray of angels singing “Hallelujah!”, but remixed to sound something akin to Madonna’s “Ray Of Light?”

If you didn’t, then you obviously missed the announcement of what will, in fact, save the sinking ship that is the publishing industry:

Ladies and gentlemen, Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code (you know, the book about Jesus gettin’ it on with Tom Hanks, or something, I don’t know I never read it) finally finished his new novel.

From GalleyCat:

After years of delay and anticipation, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group will release Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol” this September with an initial print run of five million copies.
(Emphasis added. Russ note: Folks, that’s a LOT of books. Starving children in Africa will each be able to have their very own first edition first printing.)

The new novel is a follow-up to the “The Da Vinci Code,” the bestselling adventure that sold 81 million copies worldwide.

The novel, which will be available for purchase at your local airport bookstore, grocery store and probably McDonalds on Sept. 15, will likely continue in Brown’s legacy of “speculative thriller” by focusing on the year 2012, “the much ballyhooed Mayan date for the end of the world.”

Already on Twitter, the topic of conversation among publishing industry types is what sort of bookstore tidal wave will be unleashed around the magic 9/15 publication date for the book your uncle won’t be able to stop bothering you to read. As of right now, one of the only authors brave enough to take Brown’s release date on with her own work is Joyce Carol Oates.

That’s a cage match I’d pay good money to see. (My money’d be on Oates. I hear she’s feisty.)

(Photo by Simon Mein/Columbia Pictures)

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