Off the Shelf
I was stunned to learn, after I’d seen the film, that The Great Raid had been sitting on a shelf at Miramax for a couple of years, wallowing in that movie purgatory that may be a level of Hollywood Hades higher than “development hell,” but still, it’s not a pleasant place to be: When a studio declines to release a completed film, that’s the honchos saying that they don’t want to throw good money after bad, that they believe that despite an already enormous investment in the production of the film, it’s still not worth the additional dough to promote it, create a couple thousand prints, and ship those prints out to theaters around the country. (One might imagine that experienced corporate executives would presumably know their own business well enough that they could tell before a film went into production that the combination of a crappy script, a lousy director, and an untalented cast might possibly result in an unreleasable film, but that’s another issue entirely.)
Miramax may have been correct to withhold The Great Raid, because it’s done poorly at the box office since its release a few weeks ago, though we’ll never know whether that’s a result of anemic promotion. (I think it’s quite a good film, but then, my tastes are frequently at odds with those of the general moviegoing public.) But there’s something of a fire sale going on at Miramax right now, as the famous (or infamous) Weinstein brothers exit and corporate overlord Disney wipes their slate clean before the new folks take over. And so Underclassman, a Weinstein project that has been sitting on a shelf for two years, is quietly inflicted upon us, ignominiously dropped into the entertainment no-
Cannon (Shall We Dance?) plays Tracy Stokes, the world’s most inept cop, who is assigned to go undercover at a high school — shades of 21 Jump Street… very dim and dismal shades — where something or other Very Bad is going on. All the other students there, like Varsity King Shawn Ashmore (X2: X-Men United), look like they’ve been able to drink legally for years, so Cannon fits right in, even to the point of being able to hit on the impossibly hot Spanish teacher (Roselyn Sanchez) without her going, “Ewww, you’re supposed to be, like, 17, plus you’re the charisma-
The less than rockbottom rating I’m grudgingly conceding to this flick are out of pure pity for Ashmore; Sanchez; Colin Firth-
And as if this were not insult enough, we also have A Sound of Thunder, also surreptitiously slipped into theaters over the holiday weekend, which has been on a shelf at Warner Bros. for three — count ’em — years. Hilariously, the word is that the delay in releasing this film — the three-
Thunder is based on a Ray Bradbury story — and we can only hope he somehow has no idea this is the case — about a group of adventurers from the year 2055 on a time safari to the Cretaceous to bag a dinosaur who inadvertently change the future; it’s the whole butterfly-
Or you could just laugh at it: at the ridiculous expository dialogue, at the idea that the year 2055 has seen the development of takeout plant fertilizer delivered directly to your door, at the Department of Temporal Regulation agents with their navy-
Underclassman
viewed at a private screening with an audience of critics
rated PG-13 for violence, sexual references, drug material and some teen drinking
official site | IMDB
A Sound of Thunder
viewed at a semipublic screening with an audience of critics and ordinary moviegoers
official site | IMDB
