Anyone familiar with Kenny Scharf’s work won’t be surprised to learn that the Pop Surrealist, painter of Jetsons and Flintstones characters, psychedelic space adventures and cool mutant creatures, has created an animated cartoon. Scharf’s half-hour The Groovenians premieres November 10 on the Cartoon Network and will be previewed at a…
Listen up, retards: Killing time is over. Melt down your weapons, now, forever. Wouldn’t it be nice if that sentiment echoed around the world? Well, certainly it does, every day, but weapons have a nasty tendency of drowning out sensible words. For this reason — now more than ever –…
If you’re a fan of the baseball cap-wearin’, Nader-votin’, muckrakin’, best-sellin’, corporation-confrontin’ son of a gun known as Michael Moore, all you need to know about his latest film, Bowling for Columbine, is that it’s more of the same. You know, the mix of easy humor, attempts (some successful, most…
Punch-Drunk Love is a Paul Thomas Anderson film — Paul Thomas Anderson of Magnolia and Boogie Nights fame. It is also an Adam Sandler film — Adam Sandler of Little Nicky and Wedding Singer fame. In terms of story, it has far more in common with Sandler’s previous work than…
You ever notice those people? You know, the so-called “stand-up comedians”? Who are those people? What’s the deal with them? And what does that mean, anyway, “stand-up”? I mean, it’s not like we’re gonna think they’re sitting down unless they tell us otherwise!Yes, a decade or so later, it’s easy…
I might as well just come out and say it: Spirited Away is the best movie I’ve seen all year. Though it would be a masterpiece in any language, Hayao Miyazaki’s animated spectacular (and Japan’s highest-grossing film ever) is being released by Disney simultaneously in two versions — one in…
Much like a psychic, a cinema critic must look through a movie and see the other side. In the case of the new thriller The Ring — a remake of the 1998 Japanese hit Ringu — the formative forces swim into focus without effort. There’s a DreamWorks boardroom, some executives…
Roger Avary’s screenplay for The Rules of Attraction is a remarkable work of literature: the disassembly and reconstruction of an impenetrable book by Bret Easton Ellis; a simplification and amplification of the 1987 novel’s attack on the bored, beautiful, and wealthy; a streamlined and mainlined version of a story originally…
The legend of director Werner Herzog goes something like this: Raised in a remote mountain village in the Black Forest of Germany, the young director-to-be lived with no television or telephone and had few lines of communication to the world outside. At age fourteen he began traveling long distances by…
Brad Silberling’s instincts are right about half the time, which means that, depending upon your point of view, his films are either half-empty or half-full. His last picture, 1998’s City of Angels, an American remake of Wim Wenders’s poetic Wings of Desire, tried to marry European art-house cinema with mainstream…
The catering company that provided sustenance to the cast and crew of Just a Kiss, the feature directorial debut of actor Fisher Stevens, is named Cecil B. Demeals. It’s one small detail in a list of credits that appears after most casual moviegoers have walked out of the theater. So…
Where is the dividing line between romantic devotion and psychotic obsession? How can you know whether your romance is Titanic … or Fatal Attraction? Veteran Spanish writer-director Vicente Aranda (Lovers) uses the story of Queen Joan “the Mad” (1479-1555) — daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, mother of Charles I of…
Twenty years after the rise of gangsta rap, its rebellious legacy is hollow, at least in the U.S. Once the voice of youthful defiance, American hip-hop now espouses a slickly marketed bling-bling message. The original agitators, if not dead, are now soft and fat, spouting songs about hot booty, pricey…
So there’s no confusion, the star of Sweet Home Alabama is Reese Witherspoon, who graces the film’s poster in full-body pout and appears on the press kit in closeup mug-shot smirk; any closer, and we’d shoot up her nostrils and exit through her pores. Of course there’s a great deal…
Among the more preposterous rumors spread by Harry Knowles, whose Ain’t It Cool News movie-biz-gossip Website garners undue attention from studios too craven to do their own thinking, was one from the year’s beginning: Terrence Malick, Knowles “reported,” was working on an adaptation of The Catcher in the Rye for…
Although his name sounds like an inventory notebook for candy bars, Heath Ledger is presently overcoming this confusion — as well as the plight of the pretty boy — to become one of contemporary cinema’s more vital actors. In The Four Feathers — as in The Patriot, A Knight’s Tale,…
For those with any kind of pop cultural memory, it’s more than a little surprising to see Ice Cube in a movie like Barbershop. Not because it’s a light comedy — Friday was too, and that was certainly in character. What’s odd about Barbershop is its seeming embrace of positions…
Sweet Sauerkraut “I’m not compulsive; I’m precise,” insists Martha Klein, the accomplished but rigidly self-contained heroine at the center of this enormously appealing German romantic comedy-drama called Mostly Martha. The head chef at an upscale Hamburg restaurant, Martha (Martina Gedeck) is so focused and dour that she doesn’t even recognize…
What’s the movie world coming to? Time was, if you wanted flash, dash, and empty-headed excitement you looked for them in the latest Hollywood bonbon, not in those sober, slow-paced films from Europe. Yet here comes Nadie conoce a nadie, a stylish Spanish thriller that pays deliberate homage to Hollywood…
Iranian films that make it to American shores generally fall into two categories: sensitive dramas featuring young children, à la The White Balloon and Children of Heaven, or pointed political statements about the plight of women, such as The Circle and The Day I Became a Woman. Secret Ballot is…
Like Clint Eastwood, Robert De Niro is one of those guys who can make just about any material inherently enjoyable. Also like Clint, he will sometimes make you wish he’d pick roles that are a little more challenging. His recent record of relatively disposable films speaks for itself: tough-yet-sensitive cop…
Naked alien goddesses, with big tits and bouffant hair, frolicking in the sun on Super-8 film. Buxom harlots smothering men to death with their breasts and slashing one another. Sordid kisses in wood-paneled rooms and toupéed men spanking creamy virgins on shaggy rugs. Ashtrays, closeups of ashtrays, weird velvet paintings…
