I’ll admit straightaway that my take on Tim Burton’s show at MoMa is biased for two reasons. One was the crowd. I’ve been regularly attending the museum’s openings a couple years now, but have never seen the rank-and-file turn out like they did on Wednesday night. There were 20 times as many people as there were for say, Monet’s Water Lilies, and the long wait in a blue-lit corridor (which doubled as some hideous fiend’s esophagus) eventually lulled me into thinking I was waiting for something far more Space Mountain than museum exhibition. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing -- I like Space Mountain -- but after all the jostling with strangers, I expected an exhilarating ride.

Cellphones can put screenwriters in a bind when it comes to horror and suspense. No sooner does Jason Voorhees dismember one measly kid than fourteen others have simultaneously called the cops and Twittered about their still-in-progress near-death experience. Since no one thus armed is ever truly alone, helpless, and at the mercy of whatever terrible thing lives in the woods, writers have to fake it. The kids have just gone “too deep” into the forest. There’s a storm. Their phones have been variously mislaid, submerged, smashed. The same bits (or is “excuses” more apt?) have been so overworked that they feel de rigeur in certain kinds of genre filmmaking. Rich Juzwiak over at VH-1 is hip to this. He’s made an hilarious, exhaustive, and what I can’t help but think was a fairly labor-intensive clip reel of such moments. After the jump.

I’m eating crow today, having previously stated how bored I’ve become with Oscar speculation and now having another go at it. I guess I’m a slave to every new development, and the latest is that Jeff Bridges is suddenly getting talked about quite a lot as a Best Actor contender for his role in Crazy Heart. In what looks to be a cross between The Wrestler and Tender Mercies, Bridges plays Bad Blake, an self-destructive country & western singer trying to get his life back on track. The Dude’s already been nominated four times but never clinched it -- something of an asset considering the Academy likes to give Oscars for careers (Russell Crowe, Tommy Lee Jones) just as much as individual performances. Trailer after the jump.

I don’t normally put a lot of faith in the collective judgments rendered by Rotten Tomatoes. There’s too much of a “majority rules” vibe, which I think is antithetical to the point of criticism, and I can’t stand the way it’s become a shorthand (especially on Wikipedia) for talking about how a film was received. All that said, I couldn’t resist a stroll through their new list of the 100 worst-rated films of the aughts. It’s a delightful tour of Cineplex dreck that in most cases my job (happily) did not oblige me to see, although I’m a little bit amazed at what took some of the top spots.

Jeffrey Wells claims that there are two types of Edward Woodward fans: "the kind that automatically say "Equalizer!" when they hear his name and the kind that speak in respectful hushed tones of his performances in Breaker Morant (my personal favorite) and the original The Wicker Man.” Whether you’re a Luddite or a lofty, the sidelong point to be drawn from this ornery little dualism is that Edward Woodward did a bit of something for everybody. Unusually versatile, he succeeded as a stage actor, a pop crooner (12 albums) and character actor in films. And yes, he was also a classic TV mug who did a bang-up job with flinty types. He died today at 79. An embarrassment of riches after the jump.

What is it about the old opening up a can of whoop-ass on the young? For those who didn’t get enough “senior empowerment” from Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, now Michael Caine has stepped into the ring with what basically looks to be the rough, English equivalent. Harry Brown opened on 350 screens in the UK last weekend, and the Samuel Goldwyn Company has just picked up the film for stateside distribution. In it, Caine plays the titular hero, a former Marine out for blood after his best friend is killed by a gang of marauding neighborhood thugs. The trailer (after the jump) limns his transition from Geritol to gun play, and makes it clear that Matlock has officially left the building.

It’s old news that big-name celebrities who’d never lend their image to a television commercial in the states suffer few compunctions about doing so for the Japanese market. I’ve never quite gotten what’s so ignoble about shilling for the man here at home, especially since the idea of a Hollywood talent not wanting to be considered a sellout is laughably paradoxical, but nevertheless the trend continues with only rare exceptions. The latest to go Nipponese is Inglourious Basterds director Quentin Tarantino, who’s signed on to pitch for mobile carrier Softbank.

The trailer for the forthcoming Clash of the Titans remake is out today, and it looks, well, like a lot of the teaser trailers for films in the action/adventure vein: fast, expensive, and out of control. There’s a great deal of camera movement, lots of heroic leaping, and no shortage of giant CGI scorpions, but that’s about it. You actually have to pause on a nanosecond-long cut just to make out Liam Neeson as Zeus, and there are only two spoken lines of dialog: "One day, somebody is going to have make a stand. One day, somebody got to say enough."

So much has already been written about how the newly expanded Best Picture category will be filled this year that I’ve begun to grow bored with it. Blog after blog after blog has been devoted to speculation ranging from the obvious (A Serious Man should make the list!) to the wildly untenable (Anvil! The Story of Anvil should make the list!). Given this trend, it seems like nothing short of a miracle that I’ve read nary a word about Jim Sheridan’s new movie Brothers. It’s slated for a December 4 release, is Academy-friendly in any number of ways, and looks like it could even earn Tobey Maguire his first acting nod. Trailer after the jump.

I’ll admit straightaway that the claim made in this post’s title is speculative -- I have no interest in seeing The Box -- but it’s an educated guess just the same. Mountebank director Richard Kelly’s latest is based on a trite, shopworn premise that many will be familiar with either from Richard Matheson’s original short story, the Twilight Zone episode (entitled “Button, Button”) that it inspired, or, if you’re like me, from some random kid at summer camp. Push this button, somebody somewhere will die, and you’ll receive a million dollars. It’s an abecedarian morality play, and very thin stuff to try to stretch out over 90-plus minutes. Kelly’s high-gloss Cameron Diaz starrer didn’t exactly set the box office on fire either, debuting at sixth place with a disappointing $7.8 million against its $25 million dollar budget. Ironically, there’s yet another adaptation of the self-same story that’s managing to do quite well online.