Farewell, Ben Silverman. I have no doubt that whatever business venture you and Barry Diller are cooking up will be, if not successful, something that will generate a great deal of conversation. At the candler blog, we don’t usually get into the muck and dirt of Hollywood biz talk, so let’s change that for a brief moment.

Yesterday, Mr. Silverman announced his resignation as co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and NBC Universal TV Studios, a job he has had only two years. His is an interesting story, the center of which isn’t even the NBC gig at all, but a company called Reville Productions. Founded in 2002 by Mr. Silverman, the company has spawned some serious money-makers for a number of networks. Some big hits include “Ugly Betty”, “The Tudors”, and “The Biggest Loser”. In a very short amount of time he managed to produce hit after hit, garnering Emmys and prestige along the way.

But it was a short-run midseason replacement that aired in 2005 that set Mr. Silverman apart as a power-producer. “The Office” wasn’t an instant hit when it went on the air, but after the smashing success of The 40-Year Old Virgin that summer, star Steve Carell became an instant household name. America wanted more of him and Silverman had his ace in the hole. Read on…

There are many kinds of war films. Those that celebrate the heroism of men and women who rise to the occasion and those that examine the absurd event that is conflict; those that glorify the gory action on the ground and those that question the human event in its bloodiest hour. The Hurt Locker manages, quite impressively, to check off all of the above and then some. It is a heart-stopping thriller set amidst the modern quagmire that is Baghdad that never lingers long enough to feel preachy yet manages to suspend you in moments of extreme tension for what seems like eternity. In other words, it’s a bad ass good time.

Director Kathryn Bigelow, probably most well known for the 1991 surf action film Point Break, decided to stem the intellectual deconstruction of the war in Iraq that has hampered most recent attempts to bring the conflict to the big screen. Instead, she has no bones about making a first rate action thriller. The opening scene alone, in which a radio controlled robot breaks just before it can detonate an IED, is worth the price of popcorn. If you can’t handle it straight away, leave the theater.

In need of a new Bomb Tech on their team, Sergeant JT Sanborn and Specialist Owen Eldridge find themselves under the command of Staff Sergeant William James. James is a reckless cowboy who rarely lets the others in on his half-cocked plans as they traverse Iraq in search of bombs. The relationship that the three form is complicated to say the least. In Sanborn we find a rationalist who offers us a moral grounding. Eldridge is more complex, a man-child thrown into the war probably trying to prove his strength.

But the most interesting character is certainly Sergeant James, played with boyish bravado by Jeremy Renner. Acting as if he is an army of one, James always seems to come out in one piece no matter how stupid his plans seem to be. As soon as we feel we know him and understand his motivation, he goes and does something even crazier. Not quite a patriot nor a mercenary, his character slowly unravels and we begin to see an incredibly strong deconstruction of modern masculinity. I don’t want to get into the details because it is the little things in this movie that become shocking to you as it progresses.

Ms. Bigelow has done what many of Hollywood’s biggest guns have failed to do: make an interesting film about Iraq that people will actually watch. Steering clear of political statements, she has crafted a solid character study amidst the most important international issue our nation is embroiled in. It’s the Iraq movie we have been waiting for, but we hardly notice that fact as we wipe the sweat from our brow and stand up from the edge of our seat.

The folks at Pixar are an eclectic group. Over the years they have moved on from their roles as technological pioneers to animation revolutionaries of sorts, trying to boldly bring the form back into maturity after it has long been relegated to the stuff of Saturday morning television. It is no surprise then that Up does everything in its power to subvert our preconceived notions of the animated film. The main character is neither young nor cuddly, the themes are complex and layered, and death is a very real possibility in the world of the film. Still, this is a Disney film so it hits most of the marketable requirements.

Up is the story of Carl Fredrickson, and elderly widower who decides to float his house to South America, fulfilling a wish he and his late wife have shared since childhood. After takeoff, a young boy scout named Russell is discovered as a stowaway and becomes Carl’s unwanted sidekick. The team makes it to their destination, running into some new friends: Kevin, a giant bird with a knack for trickery, and Doug, a cheerful dog equipped with a collar that allows him to speak. These new visitors set up a mad-cap adventure for the two city-dwellers, and we are invited along for the ride. Read on…

Still grabbed from Hulu.com

I just wanted to take a little (more) time to talk about the new “Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien”. As you know, the television landscape is rapidly changing. Fewer people are tuning into scheduled broadcasts and more are watching them online, on DVR or Tivo. So it seems that the best thing that anyone can do is to breath new life into one of television’s aging strongholds.

I remember when the whole late night débâcle went down in the early 1990s. Initially, I was devastated that David Letterman was replaced by a nobody. Who was this Conan, and could he really fill the hilarious shoes of his predecessor on Late Night. Worse than that, oy, Johnny Carson was replaced by Jay…JAY! Even as a youngster I didn’t think he was funny. It was a shame because Johnny had built such an incredible home for America at 11:30.

Moving on…

The joke ended up being on me. Letterman moved to CBS with a hilarious new show while Conan slowly built one of the smartest shows on television. Much of “Late Night’s” appeal under his tutelage was not only his charisma, but a grab bag of memorable characters and sketches. From the long-running “In the Year 2000″ to Triumph the Insult Comic Dog to the claymation episode, the Conan show has been a hotbed for creative release. This shouldn’t be a surprise from a guy who penned some of the greatest Simpsons episodes in the early years of the show.

Less of a performer than he is a writer, Conan is now entering this new space without changing much, it seems. Watching last night’s first episode, the only thing different from his old show was the color palette. The dark backgrounds are gone, making way for brighter colors. This almost feels like daytime television it’s so bright. But it’s still the same variety show it has been for decades.

The worriers who think that Conan won’t be able to work at 11:30 are nuts. He is going to do great, not only based on his first show but based on logic. He has grown and adapted over the years. He came from behind as the dark horse of late night television and has weathered many storms over the years. He’s not only going to do great, he’ll move the show in a more positive, more hilarious direction.

I think we are looking at the next king of late night here; a new Johnny Carson. I believe that Conan will probably do this show into his old age just as Mr. Carson did. Maybe I’m wrong, or maybe I’m just greedy, because Conan is damn funny. I’ll be inviting him into my home until there is no more broadcast television or he goes off the air, whichever comes first.

This evening, Conan O’Brien starts his new job as host of “The Tonight Show”. The late night host enters the 11:30 arena with much fanfare and only a tad bit of drama. His predecessor, Jay Leno, will now be his lead-in at 10:00 this fall; his critics don’t believe his brand of humor is accessible to the middle of the country, and on top of that he has the weight of one of the most revered jobs in television resting on his shoulders.

But whatever struggles he may be having, whatever growing pains may be occurring in the late night landscape, it cannot be compared to the mess that occured the last time there was a transition in this space almost tow decades ago. That affair is best illustrated in the 1996 HBO Original Movie The Late Shift. Read on…

The candler blog is based in New York City and is still in it’s first year, so when I went to the airport to buy my ticket to the French Riviera but could only hand them the lint in my pockets, I was rebuffed and sent back to my Manhattan abode. So yeah, I’m not at Cannes reporting on the biggest film news in the world, but we certainly can get some work done at a safe distance, no? Let’s gather some of the noise and make a little story about it. With me? Here goes…

Last week, the latest film from the ineffable Lars Von Trier, Antichrist, screened at the 62^nd Cannes Film Festival, apparently causing the international film community to synchronously blush and squirm on the edge their seats. The internets are aflutter with talk about how great/sexy/violent/evil/awful/awesome the movie is. Is anyone surprised that Mr. Von Trier is once again a polarizing figure in cinema? What were you expecting?

An original member of the Scandinavian Dogme 95 collective, Lars Von Trier is one of the group’s most illustrious ex-pats. He made a real impact in the U.S. with his video musical Dancer in the Dark, starring Björk and Catherine Deneuve. After recieving  flack for making a film critiquing North American lifestyles (Dancer takes place in Canada) without ever having visited the continent, the director responded defiantly with Dogville, a grandiose experiment set in 1930s America. For some reason, every time you come close to pinpointing exactly what kind of filmmaker Mr. Von Trier is, he eludes you, sidestepping any label and making something completely unexpected.

I don’t want to talk about his newest film or the headier work mentioned above. I want to talk about Lars Von Trier, the unabashed trickster. Read on…

Sitting down to consider an entire series of X-Men (X-People?) Origins films, I am reminded of Chaucer, the Middle English scribe whose death kept him from completing nearly 100 promised stories in The Canterbury Tales. With any luck, I’ll be long dead before anyone tries to make another installment in this franchise with the same foolhardy bravado that director Gavin Hood and his team have brought to X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

The film opens with a hint of promise in northwestern Canada in 1845. A sickly young James Logan, who is to become our Wolverine, accidentally kills his biological father (who had just killed his adopted father!) with his newly discovered retractable bone claws and runs off to the woods. There, another boy, Victor, who we just learned is in fact James’s brother, is waiting. They run off together, promising never to separate and to never go back.

As it turns out, Victor is a mutant just like James. He will grow up to become who X-heads will recognize as Sabretooth, though filmgoers will never know that as he is never bestowed a fabulous nom de guerre as our hunky Logan is (Wolverine, rawr). Since their main power is the ability to cheat death, they live on through history, though oddly, United States history. For whatever reason, these two mutant Canucks fight in every major U.S. war of the last two centuries. This confusion is compounded by the question: if they are immortal, why did they choose to stay thirty-five forever? Normally I might gloss over these niggles, but this is an origin story after all; these are the questions we need answers to. Read on…

A solid if unoriginal indie flick with moving performances and a tight, quirky script is what I had hoped to see at the movies. Instead, I saw Sunshine Cleaning, which plays like an idea trying desperately hard to find a story.

The film follows Rose Lorkowski, played by Amy Adams, a down on her luck single mother in Albuquerque who makes ends meat by cleaning houses. Rose’s sister, Norah, is a former punk-kid who never grew up, can’t hold down a job, and lives with their idiosyncratic father, played with respectable charm by Alan Arkin. When Rose’s police officer boyfriend, who is married, tells her how much money there is to be made in cleaning up messy crime scenes, a lightbulb goes off and the tiny glint of a plot begins to form. Of course, the two sisters start a business cleaning up crime scenes while dealing with their own emotional hangups. Read on…