The first mistake is the title. Fans of the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories about the interplanetary adventures of a Civil War era hero may find John Carter sufficient to get them to theaters. But when you’ve spent, by most estimates, $250 million to make a movie, you need to get more than the fanboys into the seats, and the title John Carter of Mars is much more likely to do that.
Amazingly, that quarter of a billion dollar budget didn’t even include 3D: the film was converted after production, which boggles the imagination. I saw it in the 2D version, so I can’t speak to the quality of the 3D for which you will be asked to pay a few extra dollars when buying your ticket. On the other hand, I’ve never seen a film converted to 3D in which the results were remotely as good as one that was designed in the process.
Leave it to the Disney corporation to cut corners in all the wrong places.
I should admit right off the bat that I’ve never read any of Burroughs’ John Carter stories, or for that matter anything else he ever wrote. Nor am I much of a fan of fantasy and sci-fi in general. Yet even at that, there were few minutes in the two and one-quarter hours of John Carter that didn’t feel recycled, primarily from Star Wars and Avatar.
(A little research tells me that the John Carter stories were an inspiration for James Cameron’s sci-fi fantasy. Fans may see it as an act of circular homage; everyone else is just going to think, been here, done this.)
The plot, crammed full of stuff that Disney presumably plans to flesh out in sequels, involves warring groups on Mars, watched over and egged on by bald immortals in grey robes. How John Carter (I can only hope the initials are coincidental) arrives here is too vague to recount, but he proves a powerful warrior because the lesser gravity of Mars gives him extra strength and the ability to leap long distances, an effect that looks rather silly by the 14th or 15th time he does it.
Are the special effects spectacular? I suppose, but when are they ever not these days? All that takes is money. But giant spaceships, enormous crowds of ornery aliens, bridges that seem to rise a mile in the air, have pretty much lost their power to awe us. The audience that first saw a train coming at the camera more than a hundred years ago may have ducked the first time they saw it, but by the following year they probably yawned.
That the effects are minutely detailed is more impressive, and probably the main contribution of director Andrew Stanton, making his life-action debut after helming the Pixar productions Finding Nemo and Wall-E. He is unfortunately less successful at getting persuasive performances from flesh and blood performers, few of them as there are. As Carter, Taylor Kitsch (I will not comment on the last name) vaguely resembles a buff Johnny Depp but has the emotive power of Keanu Reeves. As the Martian princess who fires his spirit and (surely I’m not giving away anything here) wins his heart, Lynn Collins is a bit older than your standard sci-fi heroine and manages to maintain her dignity in a series of outfits that will erase all fanboy memories of Carrie Fisher in The Empire Strikes Back. Ciaran Hinds as the besieged king and Bryan Cranston as an army officer in Custer drag (in a frame story that takes a half hour preventing the story from digging in its heels) are on hand to collect paychecks; fans of Willem Dafoe, Samantha Morton, Thomas Haden Church should note that only their voices are used.

—M. Faust

If you’re going to be checking out the Buffalo Screams film festival—and if you’re a horror fan, why wouldn’t you?—don’t wait until the weekend. It opens today, and among the open night films is Absentia, one of the most unsettling horror films I’ve ever seen. The last time a movie got to me like this one did was when I first saw The Birds at age 8. The less you know the better, but if you don’t want to just take my word for it, check out the trailer.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEpk6mcunsE

If you’re type who wants the ultimate technological experience every time you go to the movies, you can add D-BOX to IMAX, RealD, Dolby and the other list of terms you search for. You won’t have to do much looking—it’s only available at one local theater, the newly renovated Flix Theaters in Lancaster.
D-BOX motion code uses a motion generating system to send signals to theater seats synchronized to the action on the movie screen. In other words, your seat moves along with whatever you’re watching.
Hosting a demonstration of the newly installed seats, D-BOX representative David Amato downplayed comparisons to theme parks, even as two of the three sample clips he showed had effects mimicking a roller coaster. Admitting that the demo version wanted to show the extremes of what the system can do, he pointed out that D-BOX’s technicians were capable of programming movements as subtle as 20 milliliters—half the width of a human hair. Their programmers come primarily from musical backgrounds, and work with the filmmakers from the dailies in order to have enough time to make the thousands of movement cues needed by the time a film arrives in theaters. A single D-BOX film takes between 300 and 600 hours of labor. The goal is to add texture to sound and image as a way of more fully immersing the viewer in the film experience.
Bear in mind that the state of the art isn’t cheap: a D-BOX seat will cost you an extra $8 on top of the standard ticket charge, so if it’s a 3D film you can be looking at nearly $20 per seat.
For those of you who would rather watch movies at home, you can get always get a home D-BOX system installed—at $11,000 per seat. (That’s the equivalent of 550 $20 tickets.)
The D-BOX house is one of many upgrades being performed at Flix, which looks like it will be Western New York’s most state-of-the-art moviehouse when it is completed in the next month or so. Partially completed, the screens now open for business are as flawless as anything I’ve seen in Los Angeles or Toronto.

… then spend 60 seconds watching this trailer. It’s the movie bargain of the year.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_mttcOpj6s&feature=youtu.be

Wanna start a fight? Walk up to three Buffalonians and say, “So, what do you guys think about Vincent Gallo?” But whether your reaction is “Love him,” “Hate him,” or “WTF is with that guy?!?” you have to hand this to the Buffalo-born actor: He has never gone Hollywood.

Last year he was named Best Actor at the prestigious Venice Film Festival for his wordless performance in Essential Killing. He plays a Taliban prisoner who is captured in Afghanistan and transported to a military base in Poland. Escaping his captors in a desolate are, he struggles to survive and make his way back home through a land about which he knows nothing.
Essential Killing was directed by the veteran filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski, a one-time protégé of Roman Polanski who is undergoing a revival of interest with the DVD release of his 1970s films The Shout and Deep End. The Venice festival awarded him the Grand Jury Prize.
Essential Killing with have its local premiere at the Buffalo International Film Festival. There will be one screening only, at 9 pm on October 18th at the Screening Room in Williamsville. Seating is limited, so you might want to purchase tickets in advance at http://buffalofilmfest.com

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0CR2N4xbfQ

The title of this new drama isn’t entirely inappropriate: as the story goes on, the heroine of the story does indeed attempt to make public the misdeeds of her employer, in this case a military contractor working for the United Nations in Bosnia. But the impact of that pales next to the bulk of this fact-based film about human trafficking, a bland term for the lucrative practice of forcing women into sexual slavery.

Rachel Weisz stars as Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraska policewoman who in 1999 accepted a job with Democra Services, a private contractor providing peacekeeping services in Bosnia. (We can presumably credit lawyers, or the fear of them, for the mix of fact and fiction here; Bolkovac is a real person, but the company that employed her was DynCorp International, which has objected to her version of the story.) She discovers that a local bar is holding as prisoners girls used as prostitutes. When she finds that the raid she observed only led to the girls being returned to their keepers, she is compelled to investigate further. She learns that not only are workers for the diplomatic and peacekeeping forces patrons of these brothels, but that some of them are helping to protect the men running them. And the further up the line she gets, he more she finds that everyone would just prefer to turn a blind eye to the whole ugly mess.

You’re not likely to come out of The Whistleblower feeling good about the world, unless you can take solace from the knowledge that at least some people are trying to expose evil in the world. That’s scant comfort after this demonstration of how responsibility for an unthinkable and unbearable situation gets diffused the further those with the power to do something about it are removed from it. (A typical reaction: “This is Bosnia—these people specialize in fucked up.”) Weisz is excellent despite being saddled with an uncomfortable American accent. First time director Larysa Kondracki tries to keep the film from being too horrible to watch (she claims she toned things down from some of what the real Kathryn Bolkovac reported in her book), and if the film occasionally falls into melodramatics, it’s hard to see how a story like this could have been told otherwise.

—M. Faust

If you saw the 1996 documentary Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, you have never forgotten the story of how three Arkansas teenagers were unjustly accused and convicted of three horrifying murders simply because they were fans of heavy metal music. Today, after 18 years, all three were freed from jail, where they had been held under conditions that I still hate even to think about. You can read more about it here.

Starting today and running through August 22, you can get a free e-copy of Personal Demons, the occult detective novel by Buffalo writer (and occasional Artvoice contributor) Gregory Lamberson. The story introduces Jake Helman, an ex-cop hoping to redeem himself and reclaim his life after battling a cocaine habit, and was popular enough to spawn a series of Helman’s supernatural adventures. Publisher Medallion Press is giving the first book away in anticipation of the new Jake Helman book, Cosmic Forces, which will be published on October 1.
It’s available from all online retailers who sell it, including Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, and Kobo Books.com, as well as Medallion’s own website.

Love him or hate him (or maybe you’re just mystified by him), but you can’t argue that he’s one of a kind. Happy 50th birthday to actor, musician, performance artist and general provocateur, Buffalo’s own Vincent Gallo. He was named Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for his most recent film, Essential Killing, directed by Jerzy Skolimowski (Moonlighting, The Shout), which has reportedly been called the “best film of the year” by Jack Nicholson. (I hedge because the source is in Polish—if you’re fluent check it out and tell me if he was misquoted.) It has been picked up by a US distributor, which is not the case for his last self-directed film, Promises Written In Water. Gallo will next appear in an Italian remake of The Legend Of Kaspar Hauser (not in the title role).

Because a lot of people tend to overlook his sense of humor, here’s a clip from Emir Kusturica’s Arizona Dream, which was barely released in the US despite a cast led by Johnny Depp, Faye Dunaway, Lili Taylor and Jerry Lewis. Even if you did see it, the US version deleted this scene of Gallo doing his impersonation of Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_EwXv6zV9A

Here’s the trailer for Essential Killing:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0CR2N4xbfQ&feature=related

And finally, a fan-cam of Gallo jamming with Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ John Frusciante:

‪httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHLPjIKM5yU&feature=related‬

Director of too many classic films to count, from 12 Angry Men through Fail-Safe, The Pawnbroker, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Serpico, Network, Dog Day Afternoon, Murder on the Orient Express, Prince of the City, The Verdict, Daniel, Family Business and his last film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, for which I interviewed him in 2007.