Send your movie questions to FlickChick.
Question: Why isn't Owen Wilson's name in the credits of Night at the Museum? Is he ashamed of being in it? — Sue
FlickChick: Owen Wilson is a good friend of Ben Stiller, star of Night at the Museum. He agreed to do an unbilled cameo in his friend's film. Actors will often go uncredited when they're doing a tiny part, because there's no way that can get the billing they would normally be accorded. (For a quick overview of the politics of billing, please check out this FlickChick column
from 2005.) In any event, during test screenings Wilson's character — a miniature cowboy — tested so well with audiences that the filmmakers went back and scraped together enough footage to expand his part into a real role. The absence of credit has nothing to do with shame or embarrassment — the average actor has neither anyway.
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Question: I can't believe I found your site — it's great. Here's my question: I saw a preview of Mr. Brooks, which looks really good. I would love to read the book before I see the movie, but I can't find anything on the author. Can you help? I would be ever so grateful. — A Movie Fan
FlickChick: A serial-killer thriller starring Kevin Costner as the titular Mr. Brooks, a mild-mannered businessman, husband and father with a murderous "alter ego" named Marshall (William Hurt), the film is scheduled to open in June 2007 and isn't based on a book. It's an original screenplay by veteran writing team Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon. Their list of previous credits is less than impressive — the best original script on it is John Carpenter's Starman, and that was in 1984, although some people like 1987's Made in Heaven. Still, you never know.
The film also features Demi Moore as the detective hunting the anonymous killer and Dane Cook as Brooks' neighbor, who figures out what's going on and tries to blackmail him in a manner described in the advance press materials as "unusual and disturbing."
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Question: You are my last hope for finding an older thriller — one from maybe 15 years ago. All I remember is it's about some crazy religious guy building an ark somewhere in the mountains and decorating it with teens he’s abducted. There’s a detective after him, which endangers the detective’s dirt-bike-driving son, who’s trying to save a girl shortly before the ark is going to be launched and destroyed. Does this trigger some memories? Thanks in advance. — Anna.
FlickChick: I have a vague memory that might just be of the film you're looking for. It's called Slaughter of the Innocents (1994) and was written and directed by James Glickenhaus, who had a brief heyday as an independent writer-producer-director in the 1980s. Scott Glenn plays an FBI profiler convinced that the wrong man has just been executed for a string of serial murders. He and his son, a teenage computer whiz (played by Glickenhaus' own son, Jesse Cameron-Glickenhaus) hunt down the real killer, who's holed up in Utah with an ark filled with mummified animals and murder victims.
Send your movie questions to FlickChick.
Question: I really enjoyed your [DVD Tuesday] piece on Dario Argento and Suspiria — such an underrated gem. I love its cinematography and use of color and style. Have you seen all of his films? I’ve seen all but Four Flies on Grey Velvet. He’s also in production for The Third Mother, the last in the trilogy beginning with Suspiria and Inferno. — Matt
FlickChick: I have seen all Dario Argento's films, including Five Days of Milan/Le Cinque Giornate (1973) and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1972), which remains inexplicably unavailable on DVD. I hunted them all down when I was writing my masters thesis, which later became the book Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento.
I'm psyched for Mother of Tears (formerly "The Third Mother"), the long-awaited film in Argento's "Three Mothers" trilogy, which was inspired by the essay "Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow" by visionary writer Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859). De Quincey is, of course, best known as the author of The Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), which goes a long way to explain both his hallucinatory imagination and why Argento is a fan.
In short, the three mothers, who are also sisters, are malevolent but seductive forces, each of whom holds sway over a particular city (this is a fusion of De Quincey and Argento, by the way). Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs, is based in Frieberg, Germany (Suspiria, 1977), Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness, is based in New York (Inferno, 1980), and Mater Lachrymarum, the Mother of Tears (who was glimpsed briefly in Inferno), is based in Rome. Mother of Tears started shooting in 2006, and there's already at least one clip online.
It stars Asia Argento — her first film with her father since 1998's Phantom of the Opera — Massimo Sarchielli, Philippe Leroy and Udo Kier (who had a small role in Suspiria as a priest!). The script is by Argento and the American screenwriting team Adam Gierasch and Jace Anderson, whose credits include the remake of The Toolbox Murders (2003) and Derailed (2002, the one with Jean-Claude Van Damme, not the one with Clive Owen and Vincent Cassel). The plot supposedly involves an art student (Argento) who opens an ancient urn and unleashes a plague of witches on the Eternal City, and Gierasch has been quoted as saying, "It’s fast-paced, and more violent than you can shake a stick at.... There are a lot, and I mean a lot, of murders!" That doesn't sound so great to me, since what I love about the best of Argento's films is their vivid atmosphere and dream-like logic (which isn't to say that they don't also have a lot of murders). But I reserve judgment and hold out hope that Mother of Tears will represent a return to form.
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