Is there only room for one It guy from Britain?

Dave Chapelle once said that there's only room for one black comedian and that was Chris Rock before he came along. I'm just using this as an example, but it seems like public attention really only stays glued to one British guy at a time.

Jude Law was that guy from 99-04 with Talented Mr Ripley,

Paul Bettany with his 2 collaborations with Russell Crowe (ABM and M&C) and his career beginning to go solo with Dogville and Wimbledon gave him a run for his money.

Some people were pegging Orlando Bloom a successor in the hype for Elizabethtown and Kingdom of Heaven but he panned out.

Then it was Clive Owen with his GG win in Closer and then going on to star in (I believe) Domino and Children of Men.

Then Daniel Craig with James Bond in Casino Royale and picking up a pretty busy schedule over the next couple years with the sequel and Defiance.

Now it looks like Colin Firth with A Single Man and King's Speech. I originally was curious to know what might have happened if Bettany, Law, and Owen might have even been denied the starring Oscar-bait role for The King's Speech because they weren't hot in the now before finding out that that's exactly what happened. The film's production crew was considering Paul Bettany but the studio vetoed it because he wasn't as much of a star. Theory validated!

This, of course, is absurd. Not that long ago, Bettany had the second largest role in a Best Picture nominee (Master and Commander, 2003), had a prominent role in a Best Picture winner (A Beautiful Mind, 2001), and was tapped to become a star of his own in Wimbledeon. Meanwhile, Colin Firth was pretty much placed in movies to make Hugh Grant look more attractive to ladies (to be fair, this observation was first made on Saturday Night Live).

Dogville Review (2003)

I just watched Dogville for the first time and it was an interesting experience:

So first order of business:

Dogville stars Nicole Kidman in a compelling story about a woman on the run from a mysterious dangerous man, who seeks refuge in a small mountain town in Colorado. Paul Bettany, the town's self-appointed moral leader, decides that his pet project will be to convince the town to take her in and see to it that she's safe. Things work out for a while but beging a slippery slope downhill as the captors step up their search and the town demands more from their refugee in exchange for her safety.

It's a compelling story, but a couple things distract from the story. The main thing that take away from the story is that due to a possible traumatic falling out with a set designer in his early childhood, Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier seems to have an unhealthy antagonism towards the idea of using sets or props in films. A little backstory: A while ago, Lars von Trier actually coauthored a rediculous and elitest manifesto, called Dogme 95, which insisted most films sucked because, god forbid, they use lighting, sets, props, and soundstages to artificialize film with illusions. While one can argue that Hollywood is going a little CGI-crazy these days, it surprisingly achieves the same effect of visual disinterest in the viewer when you decide to forego sets and props entirely. In essence, what Von Trier has is a stageplay that's been captured on film and it stands out as little more because he's not taking advantage of the medium he's using. There are many ways to use props and stage design to achieve varying degrees of abstract or realistic design and most of those options are better than using none of them at all.

I can see one benefit to this set-up: It enforces a thematic riff that that people are aware of each other's abusive behaviors and don't do anything about it. The passivity of the town in one scene where Nicole Kidman's character is raped has some power to it, although we supposedly believe that there's a stand-in for a closed doorwat in the way. Ultimately, however, what this comes down to is Von Trier's adherence to his own manifesto (which he didn't stick to entirely) is shooting himself in the foot.

The other complication is some of the things Lars von Trier has said in interviews in which he disclosed that his title for this trilogy of his (I'm not sure whether the third part has come out yet, but Bryce Dalls Howard starred in Part II) is the U.S.A. trilogy, which is a very bold statement that can be taken in a lot of negative ways. Some have made references to 9/11 although I'm not in the "everything has to do with 9/11" camp. This is made all the more controversial by the fact that he's never even set foot in the United States, so it ends up being his very misguided judgement of the American people as a group who will abuse, enslave, rape, and dehumanize any visitor that comes to their town.

Da Vinci Code

Critics so far are giving Da Vinci code mixed reviews but when you're making a film based on a book that apparently has sold more copies than any book since the Bible (as Roger Ebert notes: "good thing it had a different ending") the expectations are going to be hard to live up to. The other mistake critics are making is that they're judging the film along the lines of how controversial it is, and are lampooning the usually middle-of-the-road Ron Howard for once again playing it too safe. That makes no sense to me: a movie has to have picketers at its premiere to be considered successful? The fact is that Howard is in a damned-if-you-do damned-if-you-don't situation with the material and he skirted the controversy smartly by just focusing on making a good movie and even if by sticking to the book he won't get the credit for the great story, that's still exactly what he did.

For those of you that didn't read the book, The Da Vinci Code is an intelligent thriller that starts out with a murder at an art museum in France, and a Harvard professor of symbology, Robert Langdon (Hanks) is called upon to help decipher the victim's dying message. Making their way into the story at intersecting points and building up the suspense level are a French cryptologist and granddaughter of the victim, a police chief with a vendetta (Reno), a bishop who heads a controversial sect of Christianity (Molina), a murderous albino monk (Bettany) and an obsessive British aristocrat (McKellan). The story is filled with cliffhangers and surprises at every turn and the film pretty much follows that same pace, being careful not to cut out too much of the interesting tidbits that made the book so interesting in the first place. The story's genius, after all, comes from playing with familiar historical events suggesting they didn't happen exactly the way we thought they did.

For those of you who have read the book, don't worry, it's not by any means an exact copy of the book. Things are cut and moved around and at least a couple of key elements are changed for the better. For example, Bezu Fache, the policeman, is a member of Opus Dei in the film, which makes for more sensible character motives, and Robert Langdon is a religious man which makes for a slightly more open-ended approach to the religious controvoursey. What really makes the movie work, however, is the casting. Audrey Tatou, Paul Bettany, and Ian McKellan are all vastly underrated actors who give Tom Hanks great support and enhance the movie. McKellan's devious scholar seems to comes straight out of an Indiana Jones movie, and Paul Bettany makes Silas the albino monk sufficiently scary but surprisingly human at the same time.

My friend has a review at:
http://zerogrizzly.blogspot.com/