Thursday, March 4, 2010

Megan Fox not game for one-night stands

Megan Fox says the idea of one-night stands makes her sick and that she has slept with just two men.

Apart from her current boyfriend, actor Brian Austin Green, the 23-year-old beauty says she's only been with her childhood boyfriend.

"I've only been with two men my entire life. My childhood sweetheart and Brian. I can never have sex with someone that I don't love, ever. The idea makes me sick. I've never even come close to having a one-night stand," she said.

Fox blames herself for the way the media portray her as a man eater.

"My biggest regret is that I've assisted the media in making me into a cartoon character. I don't regret what has happened to me but I regret the way I have dealt with it," she said.

Fox says she's currently leading a quiet life with boyfriend Green and help raise his son Kassius, 8, which she says media tends to overlook.

"I am a stepmother to the fullest extent. I have looked after Kassius since he was three and he has no memory of life without me. For some reason, no one wants to look at me that way."

The Crazies

If there's anything I've learned over the years from furious horror-movie buffs posting on message boards, it's that you can't call just any film about dead-eyed, flesh-hungry humanoid predators a zombie movie. 28 Days Later? Forgive me, but when I saw it, I thought it was a zombie movie. I mean, it wasn't a romantic comedy. It wasn't a Scandinavian bank-heist thriller. The ghoulish men and women who were infected by the ''rage'' virus and immediately came after the uninfected did, to my untrained eye, look a lot like the lurching-corpse predators I remember from Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and the 1979 Italian classic Zombi 2. But no: the monsters — am I allowed to call them that? — in 28 Days Later weren't, technically speaking, the living dead. They didn't die before they became monstrous; they simply...transitioned.


In that light, I'm a little unsure of whether to say that the walking catatonic angry humanoids in The Crazies are zombies. I guess I'd say that they aren't, though they're certainly zombie-esque: blank-faced, possessed, and out for blood. Like the mysterious attackers in George A. Romero's original 1973 version of The Crazies, they're the result of exposure to toxic chemicals. The biggest difference between the two movies — and we're cued to it early on — is that the creation of the...uh, zombie-type creatures in Romero's film was due to an accidental calamity. In the remake (excuse me, reinvention), there are enigmatic controlling forces at work.

Here's what I can say for sure about the humanoid attackers in the new version of The Crazies: They're not very interesting. As in, I don't care how this premise has been dressed up, we've seen it a jillion times before. As always, there's a ''political'' message: Attempting to escape, our heroes, a married small-town sheriff and physician (Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell), run smack into a makeshift military compound where everyone wears gas masks and white bio-hazard suits, and lo and behold, the cure is worse than the disease, the fascist government crackdown is more threatening than the whatever-they-are-since-they're-not-zombies, and so on and so forth.

The director, Breck Eisner, is a veteran of TV commercials, and visually he certainly understands what he's doing. He knows just how to unsettle you with a vicious, gouging knife fight, or an ingeniously timed shot of our heroes' car getting blown to smithereens by a military helicopter, or Olyphant and Mitchell sneaking around an abandoned diner in the apocalyptic finale, trying to avoid those last zombie stragglers. I know, I know: They're not zombies. By the time this movie is over, though, you may feel like one yourself.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

The Ghost Writer

he Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski's first feature in four years, has its own spectre to contend with. What the world knows about the 76-year-old filmmaker — that he's currently under house arrest in Switzerland, still embroiled in his ugly 1977 U.S. case involving sex with a then-13-year-old girl — hovers like a phantom over every frame of this satisfying, melancholy political suspense story. The disturbing information can't be ignored. But neither ought it distract viewers from a well-made, sleekly retaliatory, pleasurably paranoid tale in praise of enterprising (and also brave) investigative journalists and in condemnation of political skulduggery in general and right-wing Anglo-American collusion in particular. British best-selling author Robert Harris wrote the novel; Harris and Polanski penned the adapted screenplay with a feel for a contemporary movie audience sick to death of headlines about U.S. involvement in covert torture operations.


The ''ghost'' of the title — who's never actually given a name — is a reputable author (thoughtfully played by Ewan McGregor) hired to write the memoirs of controversial former British prime minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan, cast to a T). Feel free to read allusions to Tony Blair in Lang's situation, since as a journalist, Harris was once close to the ex-PM. Certainly Olivia Williams (An Education), as Lang's powerful wife, has more than a touch of Cherie Blair's forthrightness in her. McGregor actually plays a replacement ghost, since a previously hired scribe has died, found drowned in a suspicious accident in the waters between Lang's secluded beach home on Martha's Vineyard and the Massachusetts mainland as the story opens.

Polanski and Harris do a jolly good job of letting the circles of untrustworthy characters (including Kim Cattrall, blouse tucked in as Lang's protective assistant, and Tom 
 Wilkinson as a secretive Harvard prof) ripple outward, like rings from a stone thrown into water. Indeed, water figures everywhere — it's forever raining, and the Ghost rides a bike through sad puddles. Meanwhile, at the shoreline, a severely modern, concrete bunker of a beach house filmed on German location tries to distract us from the evident fact that we're really not on Martha's Vineyard. After all, the director, a wanted man in the U.S., can't set foot there.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief


For those who haven't read the hit Percy Jackson books, here's a crib sheet for that humdinger of a title: Teenage Percy (Lerman) discovers he's actually a powerful demigod; the Olympians are the feisty deities of Greek mythology (including Percy's absentee dad, Poseidon); and the lightning thief is the unknown bandit who has stolen Zeus' thunderbolt, dooming the entire world — unless young Percy can find it. Punctuated by painful dialogue and high-camp celeb cameos (notably Uma Thurman as a vampy Medusa), the ensuing quest has all the CGI sorcery of a Harry Potter pic, but none of the magic.

Monday, March 1, 2010

The Wolfman (Movie Review)

Remember ground fog? That smoky, thick dry ice stuff that used to swirl through black-and-white Hollywood forests and graveyards? The Wolfman, a remake of the cheesy-spooky 1941 Universal horror classic, has enough ground fog to make you feel like you're trapped in… well, a rather ancient horror movie. For a good stretch, I thought ground fog was about all the film was going to offer — that, and a lot of very solemn, borderline deadly scenes in which Lawrence Talbot, the prodigal heir played by Benicio Del Toro, returns to the castle of his father, Sir John, embodied by Anthony Hopkins in that blustery style Hopkins always uses when it looks as if he's trying to wake the scenery.


Directed by Joe Johnston (Jurassic Park III), The Wolfman starts off in a fairly stilted manner. It looks a bit too much like a borrowed backlot gothic funhouse, and Emily Blunt, as the love interest (the former fiancée of Del Toro's brother), stands around and pouts without having enough to do. Then something curious happens. After Del Toro's Lawrence gets bitten by a werewolf and turns into one himself, he's accused of insanity and packed off to a Victorian mental institution. There, he's subjected to such unfair treatment that we start rooting for him to sprout hair and fangs and show his captors a bit of the beast within. Nothing makes a Wolfman movie work quite like getting you on the Wolfman's side.

Del Toro, who looks a bit sunk in torpor during the first part of the movie, comes alive once he gets a taste of blood. The transformation scenes, generally the best part of any werewolf film, were dreamed up by the venerable make-up magician Rick Baker, and they feature lots of twisting, straining fingers and limbs and dripping lupine incisors. Nothing, in other words, that we haven't seen before. (Baker did this sort of thing just as well almost 30 years ago in An American Werewolf in London.) They're still fun though, and Del Toro, with his melancholy-brute features, endows this raging beast with some of the ''Why me?'' poignance you may remember from Lon Chaney Jr.'s performance in the original. Lawrence, you see, has no desire to be a werewolf. He doesn't get off on the power of the dark side; he just wants to be free of it. And that lends The Wolfman, hokey and uneven though it is, the kind of authentic emotional hook that too many horror movies today don't have.