Feeds
This year’s only about two-thirds over, but here’s hoping no movie yet to be released will be as soul-sucking as a witless farce that felt like three years in a hard labor camp. Not even the presence of rom-com queen Jennifer Aniston could rescue this dud from the doldrums of Adam Sandler’s overbearingly stupid brand of comedy, which makes that kid in your second-grade class who made farts with his armpits seem like George Bernard Shaw by comparison.
Are you fed up with 3-D movies? Sick of paying extra to wear glasses (or an pair of glasses) to watch a film? Tired of movies that are too dark, or were obviously post-converted to 3-D, resulting in a headache-inducing mess?
How can you distinguish the 1981 comedy “Arthur” from its similarly titled remake, opening in theaters Friday? Well, the easy answer is that the original is hilarious and sweet, and the new one is leaden and charmless. But if you want the full details, here’s a complete breakdown:
A word of warning to the millennial generation: One day, decades from now, someone’s going to make a comedy set in the early 2010s, and it will feature a ridiculous mash-up of conflicting trends — a flash mob of Lady Gaga lookalikes bedecked in Silly Bandz lip-synching to Justin Bieber’s “Baby” at an Apple Store where throngs are lined up to buy the new iPad 5.0.
Literature has long provided psychologists and therapists with metaphors for examining bad relationship choices.
Let’s be honest — the Golden Globes are a splashy TV show featuring A-list celebrities working the red carpet, hitting the champagne and happily pretending that praise from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is something they’ve dreamed of their entire lives. For the evening’s film-related awards, however, the Globes mean something else entirely.
A few months back, some predicted that James Cameron, he of the infamous “king of the world” Oscar speech for “Titanic,” might be headed for a big public embarrassment upon the release of “Avatar.” Surely, according to some, Cameron’s pricey and long-awaited follow-up to his record-breaking, 11-time Oscar-winning romance upon the seas could only lead to disaster.
If the last 10 years of Robert Downey, Jr.’s life were a movie, nobody would believe it. An Oscar nominee for 1992’s “Chaplin,” Downey’s drug use over the rest of the decade got worse and worse until finally, in 1999, a judge sentenced him to a three-year sentence in the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison. Released after one year, Downey continued to relapse until early 2001, when he finally took rehab seriously.
Two-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis is the star and protagonist of the new musical “Nine,” but you almost have to squint to make him out in the film’s pre-release hype. The selling point of the movie, it would appear, is the presence of its scintillating and high-profile cast of women, five of whom are Oscar winners themselves.
Before attacking the film version of “Gone with the Wind” for its racial and gender politics, it bears noting that almost as much time has lapsed between today and the film’s original release as had lapsed between that original release and the end of the Civil War. And it can be argued that American society underwent greater changes between 1939 and 2009 than it did between 1865 and 1939.
As we head into Oscar season, “Precious” is the kind of movie that’s going to draw praise from many quarters while forming the basis for a lot of political and sociological arguments.
“The Men Who Stare at Goats” makes comedic hay out of an apparently true effort by the U.S. Army to develop psychic super-soldiers who would conquer the enemy with their minds instead of guns. But while Jon Ronson’s non-fiction book on the subject is probably quite the page-turner, this satirical screen adaptation veers so wildly in tone and temperament that it rarely delivers as either a comedy or a timely satire.
Could someone please keep Jim Carrey and director Robert Zemeckis away from cherished holiday classics? We’ve already had to endure Carrey mugging it up as the Grinch while Zemeckis turned “The Polar Express” into a bloated and freaky-looking theme park attraction, and now these two have gone and put the stink on Charles Dickens’ beloved “A Christmas Carol.”
In post-studio Hollywood, any number of leading men have seen their career trajectory go south after a series of bad choices — and those choices almost always involved picking projects that paid well but were utter drivel.
Many of the musicians and craftsmen interviewed in “This Is It” talk about Michael Jackson’s perfectionism, so it begs the question: Would Michael Jackson have wanted this movie of rehearsal footage to be seen by mass audiences?
“Napoleon Dynamite” director Jared Hess has once again dived to the bottom of the bins at Goodwill to make the costumes and décor of his new comedy, “Gentlemen Broncos,” as eye-assaultingly unpleasant as possible.
When it was announced that Hilary Swank would be starring as Amelia Earhart in the new biopic “Amelia,” Oscar-watchers everywhere thought to themselves, “Well, of .” Swank, after all, took home Best Actress Oscars for two films — 1999’s “Boys Don’t Cry” and 2004’s “Million Dollar Baby” — that required her to cut her hair, wear pants and communicate photogenic anguish.
Given my somewhat idiosyncratic taste in family films, I should probably start this review with a disclaimer — if you thought I was crazy for championing “Meet the Robinsons” and “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium,” then I’m probably never going to convince you that “Astro Boy” is a delightfully funny and poignant family film that’s not afraid to address adult themes.
The great women of the 20th century deserve better than what they’ve been getting from 21st century female filmmakers.
Blending a sardonic sense of humor with a healthy dose of things that go bump in the night, “Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant” is a mostly entertaining horror-comedy that introduces us to a world which, with any luck, we’ll get to know better over the course of a few more movies.
With his controversial new film “Antichrist,” is writer-director Lars von Trier suggesting that women commit evil acts because they have so often been wrongly accused of witchcraft and devilry over the centuries? Might he be implying that women actually deserve all that bad press?
Lacking both sense and sensibility, “Law Abiding Citizen” tries to be a man-against-the-system drama, but the movie can’t decide whether the audience is supposed to root for the man, the system, both or neither.
In an era when most mainstream films seem to have originated as TV shows, old movies or even action figures and board games, it’s no surprise that beloved children’s books are considered ripe for big-screen adaptations.
There’s so very much to like about Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers’ adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s beloved book “Where the Wild Things Are” — it fleshes out the original’s themes brilliantly, it’s lovely to look at and listen to — but it winds up being a well-crafted vehicle that never soars. While many of the individual filmmaking choices are intelligent, the finished product lacks that spark of magic that marks a classic.
Yes, yes, there are only seven basic stories, and there’s nothing new under the sun, ob-la-di, ob-la-dah, I get it. Authors and playwrights and filmmakers take familiar characters and situations and use them to tell new and different stories, because it’s all been done before.
Log In | Register
