Stunning.  Final impression.

I'll get to the movie that closed the 14th Annual Newport Beach Film Festival on Thursday night but first let me tell you what really impressed me: it was that my guests were knocked out by the ending festivities at the Regency Lido Theater.

Scott McMenamin (VicePresident of Sales) and Alejandro Seri (IMDB) (Educational Marketing Director) from Final Draft (yes, that Final Draft) came down from L.A. to enjoy the festivities that started with a D.J. saying "Hit It!" as the sun went down and was still going strong when I left around 1:00am.

Festival CEO Gregg Schwenk (who also teaches locally) and his staff and volunteers are to be congratulated on this year's festival in general which, as I've mentioned in a previous article, was smooth and impressive.  But Gregg and his people also know how to throw a party as was evidenced by the mouth-dropping, stunned look by my guests as they arrived at Lido Village.

Scott, in his role as VP of Sales for Final Draft, has been to the film festival at Cannes and Sundance several times and Alejandro has traveled the world for the company that produces the seminal writing tool of all professional screenwriters. Both said they were "blown away" by the closing night ceremonies which featured a dozen or so food vendors, adult drink vendors, and a sound/light system that had to have awakened the dolphins in the bay.  I felt like I was at a really expensive rave and from the reactions of not only the people around us but Scott and Alejandro, that feeling was shared.

Can a one-liner become an entire movie?  The short answer is, no.   The audience only laughs once.  That’s the biggest flaw in Zack Birnbaum’s directorial debut, “And Now A Word From Our Sponsor,” which was screened for only the second time before a live audience yesterday at the Newport Beach film festival.

The film has dramatic, heartfelt moments which are salvaged mainly by good acting on the park of Parker Posey who plays Karen Hillridge, a hospital charity administrator whose relationship with her daughter Megan (Allie MacDonald) is strained by the loss of the family’s patriarch two years prior.

The story opens with heavy weight advertising icon Adan Kundle collapsing in front of a bank of televisions in an electronics store.  He awakens in a hospital, alert and functional, but he speaks only in advertising slogans.  When Adan opens the tray covering his hospital breakfast and sees a dry piece of toast and a single, hard boiled egg he remarks, “How do you handle a hungry man?”

Newport Beach Film Festival, 2013

Alive and thriving.  I'm sure that's the message the Newport Beach Film Festival would love to hear shouted from the rooftops of The O.C.  After a few dicey years with administration woes, venue problems, and less-than-wonderful film offerings, I found the festival this year to be robust and packed with films that mean something both critically and commercially.

Having expanded to The Triangle, the renovated Triangle Square in Costa Mesa, the buzz there where I picked up my press pass was incredible.  The festival initially went there out of desperation last year because The Islands Theater in Newport Beach was undergoing a renovation and they needed a venue with a multiplex and some food options that was at least close to Newport Beach.  This year, The Islands is back but The Triangle is also in its glory after several new shops and food places have transformed it into a truly great entertainment destination.

I was only able to attend my first event this year on Sunday and I chose to go to one of my favorite theaters, The Regency Lido, which is a single-venue theater with an actual balcony.  The Lido is such a grand, old girl, the outside looking like a throwback to the days when theaters were edifices and not strip malls, but inside she's spanking new with a new screen, digital sound and digital projection that made the screenings pop.

Beside being my favorite venue to see anything, there were two other reasons I started my festival tour at The Lido:  One, OCC (Orange Coast College) was doing its student films there, followed by the 25th Anniversary of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," and two, Regency theater manager Lorenzo Porricelli.  

Larry is old school.  He makes you feel a part of any event even if if you're just walking around.  When I arrived, he was passing out programs for the showing of the student films like some carny barker.  He personally greeted dozens of people, many of whom he knew and who knew him.  If the NBFF put him in charge of the whole show, this dynamic force of nature would probably  increase attendance by 75% on his own!  

When Vivian Brechner (Toni Alexander), a female version of Donald Bren, decides to develop a Casino in the tiny town of Fountain Springs, she must bulldoze their bowling alley which is the, "Only thing we’ve got" scream the fifty-two residents of this California desert backwater.

Brechner's dispatches her son, Alexander, (Tyler Strateman) to do her dirty work, and the town’s mayor, Dawson Dinwitty (Gary Austin) springs into action with the city council, which consists of one man, also the town’s bowling instructor, George Pandick, (Andrew Dickler).

Both men must vote in favor of the new Casino, so Brechner tries to buy Dinwitty’s vote by wining, dining, and cajoling him from her office in Fashion Island and the Big Canyon golf course.

Meanwhile, Alexander gets drunk with the “twin” sons of Fountain Bowl’s owner, Herman Pritzoff (Eric Halsz) and agrees to a bowling contest with a prize of $250,000, enough money for the Pritzoff’s to buy the land and save their bowling alley.

This plot engine runs out of gas quickly because the second act has no real narrative. Instead random characters and events are mixed and matched in a way that makes we wonder if a real movie might have been left on the cutting room floor (or if nothing at all was left on that floor.)

The result is a film filled with a lot of “shtick” that is sometimes funny, but more often tired and jaded.  You end up feeling like you watched a very long, Saturday Night Live skit, and that’s probably because writer, producer, director Cherie Kerr is founder of the Orange County Crazies comedy-improvisation troupe.

How do say Occam’s Razor in French?

If you don’t know what that means in English, I’ll give you the simplest of definitions:  It’s the simplest of solutions.

Occam’s Razor is a principle of parsimony and economy.  It compels problem solvers to employ the easiest, most rational, reasonable solution.

The “problem” or premise of “Fly Me to the Moon” is this:

Isabelle, a beautiful, young, Parisian bride-to-be, played deftly by Diane Kruger (Inglorious Basterds), must somehow beat a family curse wherein first marriages end in disaster and the second is destined for eternal bliss.

Isabelle’s eleventh-hour solution to this “problem” is to marry a shill in Denmark and divorce him the same day, thus beating the curse and living happily ever after with her young, dentist fiancé, Pierre (Robert Plagnol).

When the shill is a no show, Isabelle latches onto a hapless travel writer, Jean-Yves played with great comic rhythm by Danny Boon (Welcome To The Sticks).  Jean-Yves is en-route from Paris to Kenya via Copenhagen.  That travel routing sums up the fictional world created by Director Pascal Chaumeil (Heartbreaker) in this film: screwball.

When Isabelle buys a first class ticket to Kenya at the last minute so she can convince Jean-Yves to marry her, it’s hard to ask yourself why she doesn’t stay in Denmark, find another, local schmuck and pay him the money to complete her “perfect plan.”

But then there’s no movie.  And in my view the basic premise or “log line” of a movie is something you know in advance.  So if you’re of a mind to say, “A curse on first marriages? How silly.  Running off to Denmark to create a paper marriage.  That’s a perfect plan?  How ridiculous.” Then don’t go into the theater in first place.

“The essence of how Pixar started was in let’s figure it out and try something different.” – Jerome Ranft, Pixar Animation Studios

Blood.  In amazing amounts and frequency.  

That's one of the lasting impressions of this movie penned by Matthew Sand and J. Michael Straczynski, produced by Joel Silver, and the Wachowskis, and directed by James McTeigue.

Starring Korean pop star Rain, this story of a ninja turned against his adopted martial family (Ozunu clan) and actively working to stop his fellow ninjas from committing assassination for 100 pounds of gold (a holdover from ancient times) this movie starts in massive amounts of blood, decapitation and amputation, and ends in rivers of blood, decapitation and amputation with a lot of the same in-between.  

Video game.    That's your second thought and impression. With all the good and bad that engenders.

Ultra-violent and dark.  In all ways including a lot of barely-seen fights that are too dark to appreciate properly, and hand-held cameras that jerk the action from one black shadow to another.

And then finally, well-executed and impressive in spots with fight scenes every bit as good as anything ever filmed.

Rain, the lead actor, would remind you of an Asian version Justin Bieber.  A huge pop star in Korea, like Bieber he seems too slight and ethereal to play an assassin.  But even as preternaturally beautiful as he is for a man, underneath that slight-looking frame he is buffed and cut to within a microslice of human body perfection.  This and his real martial arts training allows him to be totally believable as Raizo, who as a young boy is kidnapped and brutally trained to be the best of the best in ninja assassination.  

No one would confuse "The Octagon" with say, "The Godfather."  It is what it is.  A "B-movie" from the 80's starring a martial-artist turned actor.  It features decent action, some decent themes and a horrible voice over that supposedly conveys the main character's internal thoughts.

It's too easy to dismiss these films as being just expired, stinky cheese - relics of a film milieu that we have hopefully left behind us as we move into the brave new worlds of Uncanny Valley CGI and 3D over-the-top actioneers that look like giant, gorgeously executed video games.

Of course, there are those die-hard fans who see no disconnect in these films and rabidly declare them as revolutionary - which to some extent they were.  At the time, there wasn't anything like "The Octagon" gracing American movie screens and big action was nascent at best in any form let alone martial arts.  

I try not to go to either end of the spectrum.  I do laugh inadvertently at the bad dialog, plot devices or action but I also realize that it was 30+ years ago and these movies are going to look creaky no matter what, even as they were also creating legends like Chuck Norris. I mean, put any 1980 Buick on the screen and you're suddenly wondering how anything that big ever functioned (the term 'bulgemobile' comes to mind.)  Nevermind that the fashion, haircuts, and insanely tight pants they all wore including our hero, Mr. Chuck Norris, looks like something from a bad porn film.  As expressed, it is what it is.

Norris' movie career took off with his villainous appearance in Bruce Lee's "Way Of The Dragon."  Lee liked to pit two different styles against each other and in Way it's basically Korean/American-style karate vs Chinese Kung Fu.  The opponents couldn't have looked any different with the slight (but ripped) Lee rocking his black Chinese button-up outfit and the burly, red-haired (and hairy!) Norris in a traditional white gi.  After the epic nine minute battle, Norris is defeated and Lee heads away, dusting his black jacket off as if it was another day at the office and not this incredible fight to the death.  The scene furthered Lee's legend and created a new one in Norris.

I hadn't seen "Man On The Moon" (the biopic about performance comedian Andy Kaufman) and when it popped up on my Netflix streaming queue I wanted to give it a screening.  

I had known about Andy Kaufman from his early days on "SNL" and "Taxi." To me, he had those two bright moments and the rest of his shtick left me varying degrees of uninvolved.  I'm not alone.  People tended to disagree about Kaufman's "genius" - some adored him, some were, uh...varying degrees of uninvolved.

And that can be a real problem in a film, especially when a good deal of the film is about his comedic stylings.  Stylings that worked and didn't work.  Yeah, we get to understand him a bit more through the story but honestly, there were sections that I really wanted to fast forward through.  But I'm really glad I didn't.

Played by the rubber-faced comic (but also serious actor when given the right material) Jim Carrey interprets Kaufman with energy and sincerity.  It's almost as if the real Kaufman had been given a second chance to say to the world: "This is what I was really doing - isn't this funny?"  Yes and no would be my answer.  There was a balanced approach to the storytelling with a lot of the scenes involving people and situations where Kaufman's gags went over as wildly successful but also those that hurt or bored or confused people.  But I already knew a lot of this.  I never felt all that close to understanding why Kaufman or Bob Zmuda, his off-times collaborator, thought a lot of this was funny or even amusing.  I get that he wanted to push boundaries - but why?  I was hoping the film would tell me, that's why I watched it.  What I didn't anticipate is that even with explanation, I still felt like Kaufman was not all that entertaining and I had to watch a great deal of his stuff that I never liked.

Okay, so all that aside, as I mentioned, the danger is that if you don't pursue more insight, push the film, if you don't intrigue your audience in a way that really gets them anticipating answers or actually answers all these questions, you're gonna end up with a film that's just so-so.  That was me going into the last act.  And I thought it was going to be the entire experience of the film.

Until the ending.

PARAMOUNT PICTURES ROCK CINEMACON!

LOOK OUT SUMMER – GREAT STORIES, GREAT PLOTS, GREAT MOVIES!

 April 17, 2013 Las Vegas, NV. The annual movie industry smorgasbord of film, stars, studios, directors, producers, and popcorn makers, aka, CinemaCon, the most widely attended event of its kind in the world, is in high gear in Las Vegas at Caesar’s Palace, and movie studios have shared product reels, stars, and their films for the upcoming summer that have rocked the thousands of attendees, with universal acknowledgement that the bar has been raised and quality writing and directing was the order of the day.

 Summer 2013 will be like no other before it. 

 Paramount Studios kicked off the event with stars Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson speaking to the audiences at the Caesar’s Palace Coliseum before screening their upcoming film, “Pain and Gain.” The film is directed by Michael Bey, of “Transformer” fame, and is an enormous switch from big action tentpole pictures he is known for making.

The film, Bey said, has been in his head for years, and he wanted to make a smaller picture, and smaller it was, with a pricetag of only $25 million, but the film is a tour de force of black humor and screenwriting that creates a new genre of film. Wahlberg and Johnson are trainers at a gym who kidnap a member to hold him hostage, but this film goes where no film has gone before.  Hilarious is not an effectual description for this story, it is damn outrageously effective in drawing laughs, none of which are cheap momentary laughs, but a part of a perfect story and done with lines and acting what would have made the Marx Brothers proud. This script about a pack of guys with less than a full deck of gray matter is quality, and Wahlberg and Johnson are a new dynamic duo that could surely see further adventures.

Bey also made the announcement that the next “Transformers” will feature Wahlberg in the lead and be what he feels is the best of the series. Bey said the story and script are far beyond the ones done in the past.

But Paramount didn’t stop there.  They have some of the biggest pictures of summer coming to the screen, including “Star Trek – Into Darkness,” which moves the bar beyond simple sci-fi, and brings the story and character arcs to boldly seek out and find places we couldn’t have thought or dreamed of going. It is a film that is both entertainment and a perfect display of great screenwriting, with twists, turns, and more awesome action than Magic Mountain.