Magic City, Starz Drama Set and Shot in Miami, Is Canceled

It’s time to say goodbye to the Miramar Playa. Magic City, the Starz television drama created by native Miamian Mitch Glazer, will end after its second season, the network announced yesterday. This Friday’s season finale will mark its final episode. See also: – Miami-Made Magic City Glams Up Miami Film…

Lohan Makes The Canyons Vital, Messy, and Alive

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…

2 Guns Is Every Movie You’ve Seen

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…

The Smurfs 2 Is Insufferably Frantic and Goofy

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…

Mainstream Movie Porn Sucks: How Real Sex in Real Movies Is a Real Distraction

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…

Blackfish Traces a Performing Orca’s History of Violence

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…

Fridays: A Look Back at L.A.’s Answer to Saturday Night Live

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…

Boutique Drive-In Movie Theater to Open in Wynwood

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…

The To Do List Has Fun With a Woman Losing Her Virginity

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…

Still Mine Is Pitch-Perfect and Deeply Affecting

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…

The Wall: Film or Illustrated Audiobook?

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…

R.I.P.D.: The Afterlife Is Bland

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…

The Look of Love: A Cautionary Tale of Coke-Fueled Orgies

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…