A movie can be highly imperfect, stilted, or implausible in all sorts of ways — and still be everything you go to the movies for. The Canyons, Paul Schrader’s contemplation of moral decay in Hollywood, is that kind of picture, in some places so crazy-silly that you want to laugh…
All you need for a movie are two guys and two guns. Unless that movie is 2 Guns, in which case you probably need a good deal more. The problem with so many current action movies, this one included, is that once you’ve seen one, you can’t help feeling you’ve…
Alain Resnais’s You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet seems to make its high-concept setup clear the very moment it begins. After its cartoonish credits sweep through a thick bank of CG fog, we’re greeted by a catalog of the director’s regulars seen in cross-fades as they’re invited to a deceased friend’s…
Grouchy Smurf may change his tune and transform himself into “Positive Smurf” in The Smurfs 2, but Raja Gosnell’s insufferably frantic and goofy sequel isn’t apt to motivate similar conversions from those who detested his original 2011 live-action/CG hybrid. Gosnell’s follow-up is something of a nature-vs.-nurture tale focused on the…
The lauded “Golden Age” of television just makes Vince Gilligan sad. Let’s get specific: “The sadness for me at the heart of it is that television now makes stories for grown-ups that Hollywood movies don’t allow filmmakers to make,” the Breaking Bad creator/writer/director/producer said Sunday at New York’s Museum of…
Porn re-inserts itself into the arthouse with this week’s The Canyons, co-starring adult industry stud James Deen, and next week’s Lovelace, a biopic of the Deep Throat star–two highly publicized releases that reconfirm the hopelessness of going hardcore in mainstream movies. Whether it’s works that inject un-simulated sex into their…
Here’s something you would think we could all agree on: Rigid parts of the body probably shouldn’t go slack. But try asking a SeaWorld spokesperson about the drooping dorsal fins on so many of the park chain’s performing male orca, about that mighty spike that in the wild juts above…
File under Reasons to Love the Internet: Matt Damon went on Univision morning show Despierta América this week to promote his film Elysium, and the hosts made him play charades. And as if the language barrier weren’t enough of a challenge, they made him hold an adorable chihuahua dressed in…
Shout!FactoryThe cast of FridaysWhether you love it or hate it these days, it’s still tough to compete against Saturday Night Live. Although the show certainly has seen much better and much funnier days, you still can’t knock it off its perch after all these years. The powers that be that…
Journalism is a tough gig these days. Publications are losing money, and many are scaling back or even closing altogether. Many of the best and brightest have bailed into fields like public relations, corporate communications, and videography. You can hardly blame them. Everybody’s gotta eat. For many, new media is…
If you’re a fan of the retro drive-in movie theater experience but not a fan of long drives to Broward County or the semi-slimy ambiance of the Swap Shop, we have good news: A new drive-in, authentic all the way down to the vintage car speakers, is slated to open…
Last night’s opening scene with Dexter and Debra in a sort of “couples” therapy session with Vogel after their near-death experience was kind of ironic; it might be the closest Deb will get to living out last season’s fantasies of getting all romantic with Dex. But alas, the session is…
Like first sex, writer/director Maggie Carey’s debut feature, The To Do List, is quick and messy, fitfully pleasurable, full of promise, but not quite adept at getting everyone off. It’s an impossibly huge deal yet also a modest achievement, something we have to go through but will no doubt be…
Fruitvale Station Makes a Man of a Martyr
All that Canadian farmer Craig Morrison (James Cromwell), age 87, wants to do is build a little house, on his own land, without having to ask anyone’s permission. In this pitch-perfect, deeply affecting film, writer-director Michael McGowan tells the true story of what happened when Craig’s determination to build an…
Your end-times fantasy most likely says a lot about you. Adherents to the Left Behind eschatology must at some level relish the notion of everyone who doesn’t believe what they believe facing holy wrath, and what eco-conscious citizen of the Earth hasn’t thought, uncharitably, of how satisfying it will be…
In actual life, bureaucratic systems are the only workable state-citizen interface we’ve developed that can handle the sheer multitude of smelly, cranky humanity. In comedies, filmmakers often render the infinite and otherworldly in the mundane, human terms of bureaucracy, with all the waiting rooms, Muzak, and impossible regulatory complexities that…
More Than Honey: The Incredible Lightness of Bees
Michael Winterbottom brings a light, breezy touch to The Look of Love, a biopic of London’s notorious nudie-club mogul Paul Raymond (Steve Coogan), whose Raymond Revue Bar and Men Only smut mag helped make him, by 2008, Britain’s richest man. Unfortunately, Winterbottom only lightly enlivens what turns out to be…
In actual life, bureaucratic systems are the only workable state-citizen interface we’ve developed that can handle the sheer bulk of smelly, cranky humanity. In comedies, filmmakers often render the infinite and otherworldly in the mundane, human terms of bureaucracy, with all the waiting rooms, Muzak, and impossible regulatory complexities that…
As summer comic-book blockbusters go, The Wolverine is not as elephantine as it could have been. It’s more, well, wolverine–bony, loping, a little shaggy–and, blessedly, director James Mangold doesn’t get bogged down in mythology. You don’t need to diagram the convoluted relationships between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s X-Men characters…
“I kept thinking she was the ugly duckling who was going to turn into a swan,” a fortyish loudmouth complained as the crowd trudged out of a preview screening of The To Do List. “But she was an ugly duckling all the way through!” He was talking to two women…
