jarhead Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers dips below the 400-screen mark this week (362 to be precise). It seems to me that the response to this film has been polite, but not particularly enthusiastic, and so it should be interesting to ponder it a bit further.

When I reviewed this film over a month ago, I found it useful to consider the last time Eastwood directed a war film, which was exactly 20 years ago: Heartbreak Ridge. The two films couldn't be more different. Heartbreak Ridge is a gung-ho tale about a tough-as-nails soldier (Eastwood) who drinks and smokes and disobeys orders, snarling at those wimps that want to do everything by the book. Flags of Our Fathers also questions the official, by-the-book record of things, but does it in a more thoughtful, more mature manner. It's clear that Eastwood has grown up.

But at the same time, I find that the two films are very much products of their times. Heartbreak Ridge appeared right in the thick of the Rambo/Reagan years -- a simple time, when it felt good to kick some butt and raise a cheer. Flags of Our Fathers appears in a rather more complex time. On the one hand, it wants to criticize the fruitless, stupid nature of war, but on the other hand it doesn't want to appear unpatriotic or to criticize those who have nobly given of themselves to defend our country. This attempting to bridge the gap by pleasing both sides has frankly crippled most war films from the past ten years. Now a war film comes tightly wound, terrified and exceedingly serious. Even a silly action movie like The Guardian (332 screens), based on the Coast Guard, has strangled itself before it has a chance to breathe.

• Breaking News - Hong Kong action director Johnny To delivers this watchable Woo-alike about a police force that loses the support of the public when a robbery goes bad and is covered by a local news program. The set pieces are pretty tight, even if the drama and the statement To tries to make about the power and responsibility of the media doesn't fully come through.
• Free Enterprise: Special Edition - A self-effacing turn akin to Marlon Brando's in The Freshman and Pauly Shore's in Pauly Shore Is Dead is William Shatner, sending up the cult of personality that has followed him since the original Star Trek series ended its five year mission two years early in 1969. When fanboys Rafer Wiegel and Eric McCormack meet their boyhood idol, he is far from the super-cool man for all seasons they have long worshiped. He's bent on staging a one-man musical version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a great running joke that culminates in the brilliant payoff that is the Shatner/The Rated R rap duet, "No Tears For Caesar". Writer-director Robert Meyer Burnett has created a love letter, not just to Trek, but to anyone who has ever loved anything with fanatical passion, and this long-overdue 2-disc treatment gives it the respect it was not afforded when it was first released in 1999. Check out the Pop-Up Video style trivia track, which annotates the geekery, new special effects, the making-of feature Where No Man Has Gone Before, and the unaired TV pilot, Café Fantastique, which features the real fans who inspired this smart, hardy-har-har trek. A sequel, My Big Fat Geek Wedding, has been listed on the IMDB for nearly 3 years now, and Mindfire Entertainment's website features a rudimentary mention of it, though no firm details are available as yet.
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: Special Edition - Death, and the gloomy heft that comes with it, visits Hogwarts in the fourth and most satisfying installment in the ongoing series so far. When an evil thought vanquished literally rears its ugly head again, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermoine (Emma Watson) team up to expose it. Like the overwhelmingly dark Revenge Of The Sith, this is the first to bear the PG-13 rating (for "sequences of fantasy violence and frightening images"), though its decidedly down ending makes it feel more like The Empire Strikes Back. It is not unreasonable to expect studio Warner Brothers to keep their three leads on through Harry Potter and the As-Yet-Unwritten-and-Untitled Year 7 Story. This, of course, is despite the fact that they will be in their early 20's by then, but let us not forget that at least one of the 90210 kids was practically eligible for Social Security by the end of that run. Even at 157 minutes, the book has still been truncated, but it is doubly encouraging to know that kids will know what is missing and will sit still for that long in order to be able to go on smartly about it. The second disc is chock-full-o' extra goodies, and is available in full- and widescreen editions. A single disc version is also available.

That other Jake Gyllenhaal movie, Jarhead, has somewhat unexpectedly faded into the background as awards season peaks (though it spent last weekend at the top of the British box office, so at least people are still seeing it). Universal this week is trying to correct our collective amnesia by revealing the details of a pretty nice pair of DVD releases, due out on March 7.

Though of course there is a two disc "collector's edition" coming (more on that in a second), even the single-disc version is cool enough to labeled "special," and it really is packed with features. The single disc includes a pair of commentaries (one by director Sam Mendes, and the other by the film's writers) as well as deleted scenes and new interviews, both of which also offer optional commentary tracks. The collector's edition, meanwhile, shares all the features of the single-disc release, but also includes a disc full of additional, very vague extras. If you know what "Jarhead diaries" and "Semper Fi: Life After The Corps" are, perhaps you'll be excited by their presence, and thrilled by the fact that both include introductions by people like Mendes, and the real Anthony Swofford. If, however, you're like me and are suspicious of paying a lot for features that could be pretty much anything, it might be wise to save money and just get the cheaper SE.

With an absurd amount of "best of" lists floating around the internet this week, there haven't been many that focus solely on movie trailers. In fact, I searched around a bit and couldn't find one. It's somewhat sad because studios and filmmakers rely so heavily on trailers to convince people to see their movie that, when it comes time to honor the year that was, these poor suckers are kicked to the curb like an old toy or a half-eaten slice of pizza.

So, in an attempt to highlight some of what we here at Cinematical think were the best trailers of 2005, I've gone and put together a unique year-end top ten list. Keep in mind, this list has nothing to do with the way the actual movie turned out, good or bad. This "best of" list is all about the trailers. The visuals. The music. The action. The emotions. The giddy feeling of anticipation that one can only get after their first peek at a blockbuster release. From epic to indie. From funny to sad. From January to December. Folks, we're looking at the best of 2005 on this week's Trailer Park...