Review: Up In The Air

by Nick Schager

Amiable and innocuous, Up in the Air offers a disingenuously smooth flight over choppy waters and rugged terrain. Based on Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel, Jason Reitman’s follow-up to Juno has timeliness on its side, focused as it is on the plight of a man, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), who fires other companies’ employees for a living. A terminator in a designer suit, Ryan spends the majority of his time travelling from one regional office building to another, an airport-hotel-airport existence – in which airline miles are acquired as status symbols – that he doesn’t lament but in fact adores.

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Review: Serious Moonlight

by Scott Von Doviak

It’s easy to root for Cheryl Hines, particularly for Curb Your Enthusiasm fans who’ve long appreciated her sanity as the long-suffering wife of the show’s fictionalized Larry David. It’s even easier to root for a first-time director whose primary goal is honoring a friend’s screenwriting effort, as Hines does here in bringing her late Waitress co-star Adrienne Shelly’s script to fruition. But all the rooting in the world can’t transform Serious Moonlight into a first-rate black comedy.

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Wasted Words Show 52 – How Bad Was It?

Leonard Pierce stops by to talk about Time magazine’s having recently named the last decade the worst in the last hundred years. Also- nuclear dread, unlimited booze on cruise ships, survivalists, NYC bars busted for serving Wisconsin beers, LA’s death wish and ever so much more.

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Class of ‘99

by Phil Nugent

In a recent New York Times article on the tenth anniversary of Fight Club, Dennis Lim compared the volatile mixed responses that greeted the movie back then with its cult-classic status now. But even at the time, Fight Club was part of an American movie scene that, after a largely somnolent twenty years or so, suddenly seemed to be at full boil. 1999 isn’t far enough away to inspire a lot of nostalgia. But I didn’t know any hardcore movie lovers then who didn’t feel that something exciting was going on, behind the newsmagazine covers and box-office reports celebrating the return of the Star Wars franchise and the get-rich-quick scheme that was The Blair Witch Project. If you need a reminder of why it felt unusual, you need only think back on what we’ve seen so far of 2009. But whither the Class of ‘99 themselves? What have they done in the ten years since? The answers, as you might expect, are all over the road:

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The TONY Top 50 Movies of the Decade

by Nick Schager, et al.

37. THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (2001)
Encapsulating both Wes Anderson’s idiosyncratically mannered style and his unjustly underrated humanism, this Salingeresque storybook of familial genius and dysfunction stands as his most majestic film. Led by Gene Hackman’s regally flawed patriarch and electrified by bountiful pop songs, it’s a dreamy tapestry of misery, regret and joy.

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The Five Sexiest Apocalypse Movies

by Phil Nugent

We know what you’re thinking. No, “sexy” might not be the first adjective that most people would attach to the end of the world. And yet, while there’s definitely something about the apocalypse that’s a bummer, especially if you’ve been saving up coupons, it has its fun side, too. The collapse of civilization does give you a chance to throw caution to the winds, go for broke, explore your uninhibited side — and, in the case of The Road, John Hillcoat’s film adaptation of the novel by Cormac McCarthy, reflect that if you have to be cast into a wasteland to fend for yourself, it can’t hurt to have Viggo Mortensen’s cheekbones. By now, there’s a sizable movie history of apocalyptic visions, and we can definitely say that some of them are easier on the eyes than others.

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Nick Schager Reviews The Princess & The Frog

n act of revitalization as much as continuation, The Princess and the Frog seeks to breathe fresh life into both a moribund 2D animation field crushed under CG’s foot and a Princess brand that’s lucrative at the cash register but hasn’t made substantial big-screen noise since 1991’s Beauty and the Beast. Little Mermaid heavy-hitters Ron Clements and Jon Musker have been brought in to energize Disney’s latest royal saga while also carrying on—after Princess stepsisters Pocahontas and Mulan—the franchise’s “recent” trend of multiculturalism, here epitomized by the first African-American tiara-wearer Tiana (Anika Noni Rose).

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Hayden Childs’ Music Library: J.S. Bach to John Cage

Johann Sebastian Bach – from The Complete Works (date unknown): The Art Of The Fugue, Sechs kleine Präludien, Suite In F flat Major, Präludium & Fuge in A minor, Fuge in C Major, Präludium & Fuge in G Major, Präludium & Fughetta in D minor, Präludium & Fuge in E minor, Suite in A minor, Präludium & Fuge in F Major, Menuet in C minor, Menuet in E flat Major, Präludium & Fuge in A minor. Performed by Menno van Delft or Jan Belder on harpsichord. I’m always up for The Art of the Fugue, but I think I prefer a performance on piano or organ (a la the Glenn Gould performance in my collection) better than harpsichord. These represent about three discs of that megazillion-disc set that came out a few years back.

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Review: The Road

by Scott Von Doviak

Timing is everything, especially when it comes to the end of the world as we know it. It’s not The Road’s fault it arrives in theaters a mere two weeks after Roland Emmerich turned the apocalypse into the world’s biggest amusement-park ride; in fact, John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was originally due in theaters a year ago. Hillcoat’s film would have been a hard sell regardless of its release date, but it’s especially difficult to imagine moviegoers carving time into their Thanksgiving weekend for two solid hours of gray, grim despair.

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Nick Schager Reviews Old Dogs

o wretched that it should be unceremoniously put down (preferably via prolonged Marley & Me-style lethal injection), Old Dogs is a series of sub-sitcom sequences designed to destroy any affection once felt for John Travolta and Robin Williams. Walt Becker’s follow-up to Wild Hogs begins with one of those awful picture montages in which its stars’ young faces have been ineptly photoshopped onto other people’s bodies. That, alas, is the high point of this mind-boggling endeavor about sports marketers and best friends Dan (Williams) and Charlie (Travolta), whose lives are thrown into disarray when Dan discovers that a one-night fling seven years ago resulted in two kids and that circumstances—namely, their mom (Kelly Preston) having to spend two weeks in prison for political protesting—now dictate that he care for them.

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