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Jenni Miller

Jenni Miller

Jenni Miller has been writing for fun and profit since the age of six and can be found bathing in the glow of the silver screen, playing video games, inhaling books, and examining pop culture with a savvy, feminist eye. She writes for Film.com, BUST Magazine, Hollywood.com, and a variety of other publications.

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Max Winkler on Younger Men, Older Women, Heartbreak and 'Ceremony'

By Jenni Miller (Subscribe to Jenni Miller's posts), Posted Mar 11th 2011 5:30PM
Filed under: Celebrity Interviews, Cinematical


Max Winkler has been sitting in a room doing phone interviews all morning, and so the 28-year-old writer/director politely apologizes for standing for some of our interview. He's full of energy and dressed all in white, so I have to sometimes squint to see him as he moves around the conference table. Voted one of Paper magazine's Beautiful People of 2010, Winkler is charming, highly intelligent and, without a doubt, frigging adorable. If his feature-length debut, 'Ceremony,' is any indication, he's also a writer and director to keep a close eye on in the years ahead.

In 'Ceremony,' Michael Angarano plays Sam, a 22-year-old who is full of enough smooth-talking faux swagger that he convinces his neurotic best friend Marshall (Reece Thompson) to take him on a weekend getaway. What Marshall doesn't know is that their destination is just down the beach from Zoe's (Sam's ex-girlfriend) house; what neither of them knows is that it's the weekend of her wedding to her longtime beau, Whit, a pretentious British filmmaker played by Lee Pace.

Much to everyone's surprise, Whit invites the guys to stay with them for the whole weekend, including the wedding. As Sam schemes to win back Zoe (Uma Thurman), he and Marshall party at Whit's Gatsby-esque mansion among eccentric and kind of icky rich people. It's a smart and sweet movie beautifully shot in Long Island, N.Y., that indie film lovers should most definitely seek out. 'Ceremony' premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and is playing South by Southwest; it is currently available via VOD and will open in theaters on April 8.
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'Red Riding Hood' Review: A Flailing Fairy Tale

By Jenni Miller (Subscribe to Jenni Miller's posts), Posted Mar 11th 2011 10:30AM
Filed under: Reviews, Horror, Cinematical


The classic story of Little Red Riding Hood has taken on many forms and tones over the years, from the finger-wagging moralism of Charles Perrault to the feminist reinterpretation by Angela Carter in her short story "The Company of Wolves." Catherine Hardwicke's 'Red Riding Hood' is the latest film to feature our fresh-faced heroine and her basket full of goodies. Unlike the screen adaptation of Carter's story by Neil Jordan and even more radical takes on the tale like 'Freeway,' 'Valerie and Her Week of Wonders' and 'Hard Candy,' 'Red Riding Hood' stays firmly in the tween fantasy camp where high Ren Faire drama is the order of the day.

In this iteration of the tale, our cape-wearing heroine is Valerie (Amanda Seyfried), whose village of Daggerthorn is terrorized by a werewolf every full moon. When the beast takes Valerie's older sister as a midnight snack, the villagers call on the notorious werewolf-killer Father Solomon (Gary Oldman) to root out the beast. However, along with his torture devices and heavily armed soldiers, Solomon brings a growing sense of paranoia and fear to the village as he explains to them that the werewolf is probably walking among them as a normal human when it isn't that time of the month.
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How Ratings and Trailers Mislead You -- And What to Do About It

By Jenni Miller (Subscribe to Jenni Miller's posts), Posted Mar 3rd 2011 9:20AM
Filed under: Cinematical

In this age of MPAA hypocrisy and marketing campaigns that tweak trailers for tone, you don't always get what you pay for at the movies -- or what you expect.

The MPAA saw fit to warn audiences that the PG-13 horror movie 'The Roommate' contains teen partying -- that social menace -- but not animal abuse, a move so cavalier in a movie so devoid of dimension that hardened horror lover (and friend to felines) Scott Weinberg walked out in a fury. As he wrote in his piece, Memo to the MPAA: Animal Cruelty Isn't Kids' Stuff, "In 'Roommate,' the kitten is sacrificed in stupidly mercenary fashion simply because the film has no humans worth caring about. Classy, eh?" A ratings system that punishes honest depictions of human sexuality with harsh ratings and lets kitty-killers slide isn't one I'd turn to for guidance, and it's unfortunate that many do, only because there's not a better system in place.

Audiences are also being misled by marketing campaigns that cherry-pick scenes with a certain tone that, woven together into a trailer, lead the viewer to believe they're off to see a feel-good flick or an average thriller when that's not what they're in for at all.

Take 'The Company Men,' for instance, with Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper. It's a drama about upper middle class business execs who are left floundering after they're all laid off. The knee-jerk reaction is, "Whatever, white dudes who make a lot of money lose their jobs and can't find new ones and have to cancel their membership to the country club -- wah!" The reality portrayed in the movie is actually quite moving and intense, with a nugget of hope held out at the end as a sort of peace offering. However, you'd be hard-pressed to guess that from the trailer's more light-hearted touch.
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'Drive Angry 3D' Review: Loud, Crude and All Over the Map

By Jenni Miller (Subscribe to Jenni Miller's posts), Posted Feb 25th 2011 10:00AM
Filed under: Reviews, New Releases, Cinematical
Drive Angry


In 'Drive Angry 3D,' Nicolas Cage plays Milton, a father so guilt-ridden over his daughter's cult-related death that he finagles his way out of hell to save his granddaughter from a grisly Satanic sacrifice. Given this set-up, it's strange that Cage flies his freak flag at half-mast for this task; his demeanor here recalls older action favorites like 'Con Air' more than the cracked-out 'Bad Lieutenant' or the unintentionally hilarious 'Wicker Man.' Maybe that's because there's just so much nuttiness to go around already in 'Drive Angry 3D.' Even with Cage's voltage on low, writer Todd Farmer and writer/director Patrick Lussier serve up an endless parade of action-packed weirdness, from a mid-coitus gunfights to balletic, fiery car crashes.

At the beginning of our tale, Milton -- John Milton, obviously -- meets a long-legged Southern girl named Piper (Amber Heard) who curses like a sailor and throws punches like a windmill. She wants out of town, and he wants a ride, so together they burn rubber across state lines trying to find the cult leader and his cronies before it's prime baby-sacrificing time. In turn, they're being pursued by The Accountant, a dapper fellow played by the essential William Fichtner; it's his job to keep tabs on the residents of Hell and, in this case, bring 'em home when one accidentally gets loose.
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Upcoming Fairy-Tale Flicks and Why Movies Are Getting Grimm

By Jenni Miller (Subscribe to Jenni Miller's posts), Posted Feb 17th 2011 12:15PM
Filed under: New Releases, Horror, Cinematical
Hanna


At first glance, 'Hanna' and 'Red Riding Hood' don't seem to have much in common other than a spring release date and young, blond stars. 'Hanna' is about a teen (Saoirse Ronan) raised in the forest by her father, a former CIA officer who drills her on fighting and hunting techniques and teaches her multiple languages, warning her to be ready for anything at any time, even when she's asleep. As it turns out, she's being groomed to become the ultimate assassin for a dangerous mission that will take her across Europe. 'Red Riding Hood' is a gothic period piece that takes that fairy-tale classic about the Big Bad Wolf and adds in a love triangle with Red (Amanda Seyfried) in the middle, as well as a dose of sexy paranoia thanks to a wolf-hunter/priest played by Gary Oldman.

Dig deeper, however, and both tap into a primal coming-of-age anxiety that is at the heart of so many fairy tales. 'Red' might be more obvious about its source, but there are many reasons why the trailer for 'Hanna' begins with that old saw, "Once upon a time ..." The unrestrained power of a teen girl can be terrifying, even if she's not trained to kill, and the search for one's true identity and whom to trust is at the heart of both 'Red' and 'Hanna.'
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Romantic or Creepy? Happy Valentine's Day From Marlon Brando

By Jenni Miller (Subscribe to Jenni Miller's posts), Posted Feb 14th 2011 2:15PM
Filed under: Cinematical


Those flights from New York to London sure do get tiresome, and after a few drinks in first class, what's left to do except write love letters to the flight attendant? Over at Letters of Note, an amazing online archive of scanned letters, memos and notes by famous folks, you can see for yourself a strange missive from Marlon Brando himself way back in 1966. According to the site, Brando wrote this letter during the flight and handed it to the flight attendant as he was leaving the plane.

Brando was already a mega–movie star from his '50s films like 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and 'On the Waterfront,' but the '60s were a little more uneven for him. While filming 'Mutiny on the Bounty' in Tahiti, he bought the island of Tetiaroa and later married his co-star, the much younger Tarita Teriipia in 1962. It wasn't until 1972's 'The Godfather' that Brando really got his groove back.
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'Justin Bieber: Never Say Never' Review: It Might Make You a Belieber

By Jenni Miller (Subscribe to Jenni Miller's posts), Posted Feb 10th 2011 9:00PM
Filed under: Documentaries, Reviews, New Releases, Cinematical


With 'Justin Bieber: Never Say Never,' Jon Chu has cooked up an ultra-slick biopic packed with enough concert moments, awww-inducing baby footage and behind-the-scenes details that even the most Bieber-averse will come away with a newfound respect for the tireless young pop star.

A few weeks ago, New York Times writer and editor Neil Genzlinger wrote a scathing review called "The Problem With Memoirs," suggesting that our memoir-saturated landscape was full of people who were encouraged to share their otherwise unremarkable lives (in his opinion) when they'd do best to either shut up or start a blog. In Genzlinger's opinion, "There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occur­rences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment."

This wasn't a popular editorial, to say the least, especially among writers, and one could cop this attitude towards many biopics out there, if one were so inclined. I myself copped that 'tude towards news of Justin Bieber's biopic last August, writing, "That's right, that Canadian dreamboat who was born in 1994 and isn't even old enough to buy cigarettes? His life story is begging to be told, and soon all your Bieb-tastic questions will be answered ... IN THREE DIMENSIONS."

I was wrong.
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