Word: hollywoodized
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Among Hollywood's money men, German film producer Bernd Eichinger is known as the guy who signs the checks for big budget crowd-pleasers like Resident Evil and The Fantastic Four. In Germany, he's better known for his reputation as a maverick, a troublemaker known for partying and the occasional barroom brawl. A tall rail of a man with graying hair and a raspy smoker's voice, Eichinger stunned moviegoers everywhere with Downfall, the 2004 Oscar nominee that focused in shocking detail on the final days of Hitler and his cohorts in the tight quarters...
Ever since gold miners first scraped their fortunes out of the hills of Northern California, America's most populous state has been a land of titanic dreams. These days, though, it's a place with big problems. Its $42-billion budget deficit would make an out-of-control Hollywood director blush - and bankrupt a small nation. Its schools are failing, air quality is worsening, and unemployment neared 10% as of December. The only thing larger than its litany of woes is the roster of political celebrities who are testing the waters for a run for governor in 2010, when term...
...sure is that it's the first big Hollywood-style project from the director of Run Lola Run, the cunning micro-melodrama in which the same events are played in three variations and the entertained viewer is in and out in 76 minutes. If Tykwer's use of pixelated photos, split screens and cartooning in Lola gets you thinking that The International will offer a fizzily anarchic reimagination of the thriller genre, fuhggedaboutit. Running or stumbling a full two hours, this is a medium-IQ sample of spy dystopia - dour, sit-throughable and generically entertaining...
...reason is that Academy members are a tad older than the target audience for action-adventures, however elegantly crafted. It's not that Hollywood folk don't get these films; after all, they made 'em. It's that they don't think the grand-scale technical skill lavished on a Dark Knight or an Iron Man is as honorable as the spectacle of two guys talking--as long as one of them is Richard Nixon...
...Academy slog, as in the best old romances, there is a redemption angle. If Slumdog wins, the Hollywood establishment will have rewarded a foreign film, partly in Hindi, with no familiar faces, just a snazzy mixture of art and heart--and a movie that the audience, not the Academy, made into a hit. Isn't that worth tuning...