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Movie Trailers – Movies Blog

MTV: As we can see from the recent trailer, the stop-motion animated film (in theaters November 13) is a unique mix of kiddie-fare breeziness (it’s based on a classic Roald Dahl children’s book), indie-minded filmmaking (“Rushmore” writer/director Wes Anderson is in charge) and star-powered vocal chops (including Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman). As our weeklong Fall Movie Preview continues, Jason Schwartzman pays us a visit to explain why “Mr. Fox” makes him want to cry. MORE

BY JEFF DEENEY TODAY I SAW  a white kid, maybe 12, with dirty blond hair cropped short, pedaling an adult size tricycle with a wooden box between the rear wheels up D Street towards Indiana Avenue. Attached to the back of the graffiti tagged wooden box was a fifteen inch stereo speaker that blared rap music loud enough to shake my windshield. The face of a car stereo was mounted to the front of the box so he could reach down to adjust the volume or skip tracks while coasting along. There was asubwoofer inside the box nestled in a tangle of wires that linked the whole thing together. The speaker itself was vibrating, rattling the wooden box as the rapper Scarface said to everyone in a two block radius, “I murder by numbers nigga, one, two, three, darin’ any motherfucker to come test me, ya standin in the jungle nigga.”

The boy pulled to the curb near Indiana Avenue and I pulled in behind him, pulling my van up to his rear wheel as the Latin kids who sling dope on that corner swarmed him, looking his bike over like it was a shiny Escalade right off the showroom floor. The white kid was brimming with pride but kept his face hard and blank as he cranked the volume to a deafening blast, clearly showing off for his friends. He cut the volume as I walked past and they all turned to stare uncertainly, like most corner kids do when they see me approaching. I noticed the white boy had a string ofKanji characters tattooed along the inside of his left forearm, despite the fact that he barely stood higher than my waist.

“Did you make that?” I asked him, pointing at the box.

He looked at me like he was going to tell me to go fuck myself but gave me a straight answer.

“Yeah, my cousin helped me, he built the box but I did everything else.”

“That’s cool. I like that,” I said, but this time got ignored so I walked on. Behind me the music started to blare again, its throbbing bass beating on my back.

When I left D Street to head back to the office I saw the same kid cruising down Kensington Avenue just north of Somerset. I pulled up next to him, took my foot off the gas and coasted at his speed. When he finally looked over and saw me smiling at him he smiled back. It was a wide, confident smile, like he knew he was coolest thing happening inKensington today. I laughed and so did he. He stood up and pedaled hard, veering off onto Boudinot Street, every head on the Avenue turning in his deafening wake.

AFTERWORD:  The afterwords for previous Best of Today I Saw selections have been focused on whatever serious social issue underlied the original narrative, that I felt could benefit from the extra years of experience and insights I’ve gained working in the field since.  But there’s no larger message here, aside from this:  Ride on, Awesome Tattooed Twelve-Year-Old Kenzo Kid, ride on.

DAILY MAIL: Detectives began digging up the gardens of kidnapper Phillip Garrido and his next-door neighbour yesterday amid fears that they are dealing with a serial killer. Possible links are being examined between up to ten murdered prostitutes and the monster who kept Jaycee Lee Dugard in a back-garden prison for 18 years. Police believe Garrido might also have killed 15-year-old schoolgirl Lisa Norrell, whose body was discovered in 1998 dumped in a remote industrial area close to where he used to work. MORE

DAILY MAIL: After work each night, builder Mike Rogers liked to sit on his porch in Antioch, recover from the sweltering heat of the day and relax. But not when ‘Creepy Phil’ was having one of his strange parties. The next-door neighbour was a wild-eyed ‘crazy’ with tents in his garden, odd male guests and a penchant for making the deadly drug crystal meth using household utensils. And, we now know, the kidnapper of Jaycee Lee Dugard. [...] For with FBI agents now digging-up Creepy Phil’s backyard and exploring his neighbour’s property, Mr Rogers shudders at the memory of the sounds he heard when it was ‘party time’ next door. Mr Rogers says ‘perverts’ in the area were regularly invited over by Garrido for sex, beer and drug parties and that the Garrido home was, in effect, being used as a brothel. He watched groups of men arriving at the house on hot summer nights. They carried crates of beer. Mainly of Mexican appearance, they lit bonfires, played music and shouted and laughed late into the night. They also took it in turns to enter a tent erected amid the junk in Garrido’s backyard. ‘I saw them entering the tent one by one,’ he says. ‘I saw them bobbing up and down and I thought, “My God, there is something sexual going on in there”. MORE

PREVIOUSLY:  MONSTER’S BLOG: Man Who Kidnapped Girl For 18 Years, And Fathered Two Children With Her, Blogged

MyFOXPhoenix: A Phoenix-area pastor has started to draw protesters to his congregation after he delivered a sermon titled, “Why I Hate Barack Obama,” and told his parishioners that he prays for President Obama’s death. Pastor Steven Anderson stood by his sermon in an interview with MyFOXPhoenix, which reports that the pastor continues to encourage his parishioners to join him in praying for the president’s death. “I hope that God strikes Barack Obama with brain cancer so he can die like Ted Kennedy and I hope it happens today,” he told MyFOXPhoenix on Sunday. He called his message “spiritual warfare” and said he does not condone killing. MORE

DAN DELUCA: Throughout, she wore a headset microphone and consistently moved her mouth in time with the never all-that-expressive vocals that were pumped through the sound system. Probably, she was actually singing over pre-recorded tracks that removed any possibility of an aural mishap. [...] Spears fans were deliriously happy to be in the same room with one of the biggest brand-name superstars in the world, and the object of their affection worked hard enough to put on a properly sensory-overloaded show, with a stage that shot off smoke jets and lit up in a burning ring of fire as Brit floated above it, as if in a hot air balloon. The evening ended in a cascade of sparkling fireworks and de rigeur confetti falling from the sky. [...] But if Spears came across as a much more professional entertainer than you might want to give her credit for, she was never in danger of connecting with her audience in any sort of seriously human way. The images of her up on screen always seemed more real than the actual Britney on stage, even when she was standing right there in front of you, in the flesh. MORE

BY PHILLYGRRL It’s surprisingly easy to resent the homeless man who uses the bench at your bus stop as a bed. Especially if you’re carrying three textbooks that weigh five pounds a piece and are waiting for a bus that comes once an hour. Last Thursday, as I waited for the 44 to come by at 13th and Market, I found the bench occupied by three elderly men – two black, one white – who were engrossed in a deep conversation when I came by. I stood for a minute before one man nudged the other who nudged the other and before I knew it, they had all moved over to clear a seat for me.

The one closest to me asks “Where you go to school, girl?”

I tell him.

“Temple, huh?” He thinks for a second and then slaps his knee. “That’s where Bill Cosby went at. That’s where Bill Cosby went, y’all.” The other two men nod. The white one chews on a cigarette. “Aren’t they raising your tuition? Isn’t Harrisburg raising your tuition?” I shrug my shoulders. He nods sympathetically.

“So, whatcha studying girl?” asks the one in the middle. “Show me your book.”

I show him my book. It’s a thick red casebook. He squints and tries to read the title, then gives up.

“Hmm, law, huh? You go girl. Don’t stop studying.” he says. Then he points to the statue of William Penn atop City Hall. “This is one of the most corrupt cities in America, girl. Don’t ‘cha forget that when you’re finished studyin.’”

We’re quiet. The night air is cool. A man walks across Market, holding a small child in his arms. She is asleep and has small pink ribbons braided in her hair.

“Now that’s a fine damn shame,” says the man beside me. “See that man with the baby? She oughta be in bed, that’s a crime there.”

The four of us shake our heads and murmur.

“What bus are you waiting for?” asks the man beside me. I tell him. He knows the schedule to the minute.

“Which bus are you waiting for?” I ask him.

“Aw, we don’t wait for no bus,” he says. “We just like sitting out here, enjoying the breeze.”

It is then that I notice the bags stuffed under the bench. I look at the men. They’re unshaven, unwashed. Their nails are overgrown and dirty. I recognize the man at the end, he’s usually the one sleeping on this bench. My bus comes. They all smile and wave goodbye. The one at the end hollers out, “Stay safe, study hard.” I wave back.

[Photo by ldandersen]

INQUIRER: An iron-wrought railing gave way from the ivy-covered brick fire tower about 3 a.m. today as a 25-year-old man who lived in an apartment one floor below and a female friend were leaning on it, authorities said. The man was pronounced dead at the scene and the woman was taken to Hahnemann Hospital, police said. Directly below the fire tower is a narrow alley and a fence enclosing the back of a spa next door. The man’s identitiy was being withheld pending notification of next of kin. The woman was not identified because she was in critical condition, police said. The apartments are located above Monk’s Cafe, 264 S. 16th Street. Scott Mulderig, chief of the city’s Emergency Services & Abatement Unit, said all 13 tenants will be moved elsewhere and the bar will be closed until the owner corrects structural problems and code violations. MORE

ALSO: Police are investigating a home invasion in which a man and a woman were duct-taped and fatally shot in West Philadelphia. The victims, a couple in their 20s, had been duct-taped and shot execution style.

NBC: Celebrity disk-jockey DJ AM was found dead in SoHo today, sources told NBC New York. He was 36 years old. The body of DJ AM, also known as Adam Goldstein, was found on the seventh floor of an apartment building at 215 Lafayette Street, law-enforcement sources said. Goldstein, along with drummer Travis Barker, barely escaped death in a small plane crash in South Carolina on Sept. 19, 2008. That incident left him badly burned, but four others died in the accident. The details of his demise are still unclear, but police sources said investigators are looking into the possibility of a drug overdose, as drug paraphernalia was found near his body. Goldstein, originally from Philadelphia, was briefly engaged to reality TV star Nicole Richie in 2005. He threw out the first pitch for a Mets game on August 23rd, and his last Twitter post on Aug. 25 said “New York, New York big City of dreams, but everything in new york ain’t always what it seems.” MORE

YOUR TANGO: Over the years, he’d survived two other near-death experiences (first, at age 24, when the gun he tried to kill himself with jammed; and second, when he, along with Travis Barker, survived a plane crash that killed four others last year). He also successfully (or so it seemed) kicked his addictions to food and drugs, dropping over one hundred pounds with the help of gastric bypass surgery and giving up booze and crack for Red Bull and water. But despite cleaning up his act and surviving the seemingly unsurvivable, Goldstein still battled his demons. On his website, he admitted to struggling with survivor’s guilt after the plane crash. And according to a friend, he was suffering from severe hearthache after his recent breakup with model Hayley Wood. MORE

PEOPLE: Goldstein, 36, had recently wrapped an upcoming show for MTV, Gone Too Far, on which he helped other addicts find a way to end their dependence. MORE

DIPLO: Dj am was the first guy that was a big deal that believed in me, and gave me props

TAKING WOODSTOCK (2009, directed by Ang Lee, 110 minutes, U.S.)

BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC

The legacy of the Woodstock concert continues to be a point of contention 40 years later.  The counter-cultural revolution embodied by the Three Days of Peace & Music has become conservative shorthand for “the excesses of the 60′s” (a phrase even Obama has been known to use), a point-of-view perhaps best exemplified cinematically by the film Forrest Gump, where all the characters who seek self-knowledge in the sixties and seventies are struck down by insanity and disease.  The new film by director Ang Lee attempts to reclaim the meaning of Woodstock and celebrate the loosening of societal mores that the era brought about.  Telling the story through the eyes of Elliot Teichberg, the head of the Bethel Chamber of Commerce who originally granted the permit for the festival, director Lee seeks to get to the meaning of Woodstock without recreating the concert.  It’s winning strategy, posing to the idea that the ephemeral creation of a counter-culture city in the middle of the Catskills was more ground-breaking than the concert itself. 

Elliot is in his mid-thirties (although as played by actor/comedian Demetri Martin, you would guess he’s a decade younger), a closeted gay man who tasted freedom while briefly living in New York City but has had to give it up to take care of his Jewish immigrant parents’ dilapidated motel in the Catskills.  With the family business on its way to foreclosure, Elliot sees the opportunity to save his parent’s business by granting a permit to the Woodstock Ventures.  With the festival scheduled to begin in mere weeks, Dimitri contacts the promoters and before you know it, Woodstock’s hippie angel, promoter Michale Lang, has descended from the heavens via helicopter with a large bag of cash. From that moment on Elliot and the irate citizens of Bethel, New York are forced to deal with the crush of a half-million long-haired freaky young people descending on their county like a touring cast of Hair.

Adapted from Elliot Tiber’s memoir by Lee’s longtime collaborator James Schamus, Taking Woodstock is told with the type of literary attention to detail Ang Lee brings to all his work (a distinction somewhat obscured by Taking Woodstock‘s superficial trailer).  Lee is just as thoughtful in recreating un-hip small town life as he is at presenting the wild fashions of the hippie tribe.  Too many recreations of the late ’60′s center themselves in the world of the young counter-culture; by setting this story in small town America, Lee gives us the context to see what the counter-culture was rebelling against, as well as its allure for people ambivalent about embracing its lifestyle.

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The father of Bonnie Sweeten, a Pennsylvania woman who faked her own abduction and fled to Disney World flipped out after her sentencing yesterday and sent two cameramen to the hospital.

NEWS10 SACRAMENTO: News10 has found the blog of Phillip Garrido [pictured, above], one of the suspects in the 1991 abduction of Jaycee Dugard. He calls it “Voices Revealed” and you can click here to read it . On the blog Garrido has posts covering different facets of religion: from his ability to speak in tongues to explaining why people hear voices in their head. MORE

CBS NEWS:  According to a Thursday press conference by California law enforcement officials, Jaycee Lee Dugard, who was kidnapped at the age of 11 in 1991, has been kept in a rudimentary shed in the backyard of her captors for the last 18 years and forced to bear two children at the hands of Phillip Garrido, a registered sex offender on lifetime federal parole. According to El Dorado County Under Sherriff Fred Kollar, Nancy Garrido was with her husband, Philip Garrido, 58, when he kidnapped Dugard while the girl was waiting for a school bus in 1991. Since then the girl has been forced to live in a “backyard within a backyard” that was accessible only through a series of tarps and sheds, which were erected to make Dugard and her children both unseen and unheard, said Kollar. None of the structures were visible from neighbors’ houses, which were not more than a few feet away. MORE

KCRA: In a telephone interview with KCRA 3, Garrido urged people to wait for more details about what took place at the house. “You are going to be completely impressed,” he said. “It’s a disgusting thing that took place with me at the beginning. But I turned my life completely around and to be able to understand that, you have to start there…What’s kept me busy the last several years is I’ve completely turned my life around,” Garrido told KCRA 3. “And you’re going to find the most powerful story coming from the witness, the victim — you wait. If you take this a step at a time, you’re going to fall over backwards and in the end, you’re going to find the most powerful heart-warming story.” MORE

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE: Ron Garrido said his brother’s wife, Nancy Garrido, who was also arrested, was “a robot” under her husband’s control. “She would do anything he asked her to,” said Ron Garrido, a former electrician and retired supervisor at the East Contra Costa Irrigation District. “I told my wife, ‘It’s no different from Manson and those girls.’ She was under his control.” The brothers grew up in Brentwood with their parents, Manuel and Pat Garrido. Their childhood was relatively unremarkable, he said, until Phillip Garrido began acting out, using LSD and dealing drugs. MORE

RELATED: More Details On The Dugard Case

BY DAVE ALLEN Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right, these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. That’s why every week, PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you. We pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer you towards the gooey center. Why? Because we love you!

ON THE COVER

CP: Christianity, in its crusty and off-the-grid and welcoming and more progressive forms, have been all over the weeklies in recent months. Finally, something that’s good for the Jews: a look at the city’s Lubavitchers, the bearded, hard-core proselytizers of Judaism. Andrew Thompson’s piece captures the heart and Semitic soul of Philly’s Lubavitch leader, Menachem Schmidt, and the sect’s Crown Heights, Brooklyn-based top dog, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, while respectfully – but probingly – peeking into the its traditions.

There is no milestone Schmidt can point to, but he stopped being Matt and became Menachem. And while Matt belonged in New Jersey, Menachem would go wherever the Rebbe told him. During his life, Schneerson spent much of his time making executive orders, deciding which emissary, or sliach, would go where and start what institution, and the framework for Chabad today — if not most of its synagogues and outreach centers — are fulfillments of direct dictation.

Schmidt traveled to the University of San Diego to run the school’s Chabad house there for a few months to act as a substitute director. When the time came to move, Schmidt sent Schneerson a letter asking where to go.

“He said, ‘Interest yourself in Philadelphia,’” says Schmidt.

“Do you know why he said that?” I ask.

“Because he’s the Rebbe.”

His first task was to create the Chabad House at the University of Pennsylvania, which he still runs. He needed a place to live within walking distance of Penn because he couldn’t drive there on Shabbos, so he picked a row home around Ninth and Catharine — about a one-and-a-half-hour walk away.

“And then I found South Street and fell in love,” he says.

I like the piece, and not just because Schmidt is a fellow Syracuse grad. He had the chutzpah to make South Street, that clogged artery of commercialism, his home turf for Chabad evangelism, and Thompson tops the unearthing of that nugget by portraying Chabad’s deep roots in Philly and the fervor of Schmidt’s boss, Rabbi Avrohom Shemtov. Thompson’s take, pleasantly free of disdain for its subjects, is open-ended, though, in much the same way that so many beliefs, whatever their governing system, are un-pin-down-able.

PW: The advent of Michael Vick has thrown the problem of dogfighting in Philadelphia into a much starker light. It’s more widespread than many of us might ever have known, and Mike Newell investigates the city’s poor track record of bringing animalistic offenders to justice.

According to the Humane Society of the United States, Pennsylvania’s dogfighting 
statute ranks among the strictest in the nation. It’s a third degree felony punishable by up to seven years–but that’s just on paper. A review of court records shows that even Philly’s worst dogfighters usually get slaps on the wrists, or even just probation.

PSPCA Humane Officer Tara Loller couldn’t stand it if the man on trial today, Anthony Clark, became the next Philly dogfighter to enjoy a light sentence. As the people inside the courtroom waited for the day’s proceedings to begin, Loller sat on a bench in the hall and sighed.

“Wasting time … ” she said…

The 37-year-old Clark has a criminal history for rape and attempted murder. Those cases did not result in convictions. On the night of his latest arrest he was busted selling crack from his porch. When police went inside, they found five chained-up and caged pit bulls in his squalid basement.

Two of the dogs were near death. As responding officer, Loller photographed the injured dogs during their hours of grueling emergency surgery. The pictures of the broken dogs were in a folder on her lap. She was looking forward to showing them to Clark.

The whole thing is similarly well-researched and sharply drawn. Court proceedings, rap sheets, and backyards with canine carcasses buried in them all make for nicely-set scenes that are quietly devastating when taken in total, and the takeaway about both the righteousness and reputation of the city’s courts is profound. This guy used to write for CP, right? Is there some kind of Philly freelance free-agent market I don’t know about? Either way, a tremendous pick-up for PW.

INSIDE THE BOOK

CP: Push Lidge over the ledge. The trashpile that ate Port Richmond. Pissed Jeans: more than just ruined menswear. Be still my heart: bacon-flavored ice cream.

PW: A liquid diet? I’ll try it. Museum security guards: first line of defense in the culture wars. Some killer rhymes, but I don’t think Ms. Angelou would be amused. Jean therapy: Trying to live up to the hype.

WINNER: There’s a lot to like this week, but I’m most pleased to finally see an article on religion in the city that doesn’t piss on its practitioners. CP takes the title this week.