When Jodie Foster accompanied her latest directorial effort, The Beaver, to its world premiere at Austin’s South by Southwest festival in March, there was ample reason for the two-time Oscar winner to be apprehensive about her film’s reception. The story of a depressed, middle-age man who begins communicating only through a beaver puppet was already a hard sell because of its tricky tone, and it didn’t help matters when tapes of star Mel Gibson’s shocking private phone calls went very public last summer.
Archive for April, 2011
The One Movie You Should See This Week (4/28/11)
Published April 28, 2011 Uncategorized Leave a CommentTags: andrew osborne, Dylan Dog, Fast Five, Prom
by Andrew Osborne
FAST FIVE
Exhibit A that 2011 has been a pretty weak movie year so far: I’m actually kinda psyched for the latest Fast and Furious sequel, in all its bootylicious car porn glory. This time around, Vin Diesel and the gang are in Rio for some kind of heist, and Dwayne “Don’t Call Me The Rock” Johnson is on hand for macho, mano-a-mano bullet-head fisticuffs as a snarly federal agent who gets to bark the line, “…we find ‘em, we take ‘em back, and above all else we don’t ever, EVER let them get into cars.” Yeah, good luck with that, Agent Hobbs.
Roland Joffé’s There Be Dragons is clearly intended as grand narrative filmmaking in the classical tradition of Hollywood’s great epics, the kind of immersive, cast-of-thousands David Lean-esque spectacle they just don’t make anymore. The gap between the writer-director’s obvious ambition and actual execution is almost moving: from its baldly overwritten dialogue to its claustrophobically stingy use of locations, Dragons is underdone in every way.
When Russia needs sitcoms, it looks to the U.S.A. for material, and as confirmed by the success of overseas adaptations of The Nanny and Who’s the Boss?, crap translates. Exporting Raymond details Everybody Loves Raymond creator Philip Rosenthal’s odyssey attempting to bring his beloved series to Moscow, a process fraught with predictable culture-clash frictions that Rosenthal’s nonfiction film depicts but rarely investigates.
“We’re Good American People” (Switzerland)
Published April 25, 2011 Uncategorized Leave a CommentTags: Scott Von Doviak recaps The Amazing Race
by Scott Von Doviak
Happy Easter, everybody! I celebrated in the traditional manner handed down through the generations in my family—by eating a huge pot of fondue. Mmm…so much cheesy goodness, especially after an hour or so when it gets all congealed and lumpy. Hey, it’s not for everyone, but it beats hunting for Easter eggs in my book.
Actually, an Easter egg hunt might have proven more competitive and entertaining than the tasks our Amazing Race teams participated in this week.
Lifeless as entertainment and incoherent as ideology, Atlas Shrugged: Part I is less a film than an invitation to the 9 million Tea Party members to prove their hunger for explicitly conservative entertainment. Yet even the most driven ideologue will be hard-pressed to enjoy this visibly threadbare enterprise, in which railroad maven Dagney Taggert (Taylor Schilling) teams up with steel man/man of steel Henry Rearden (Grant Bowler) to stand up for the oppressed free market and big business. With interest already firmly limited to Ayn Rand fans and Tea Party acolytes, the stiff production will have a hard time getting enough of the faithful to attend.
The One Movie You Should See This Week (4/21/11)
Published April 21, 2011 Uncategorized Leave a Commentby Scott Von Doviak
Regardless of what the calendar says, the summer movie season kicks off next week with the release of the latest Fast and the Furious sequel. Unfortunately, that means this weekend is a bit of a dead zone at the multiplex. Your prestige release is this adaptation of the best-selling historical novel by Sara Gruen about love among the circus folk circa the Great Depression, starring Reese Witherspoon and that sparkly vampire Robert Pattinson.
The Most Beautiful Fraud: The Critics Are Raving About Atlas Shrugged!
Published April 20, 2011 Uncategorized Leave a Commentby Leonard Pierce
Because I guess we’ve exhausted all of our other entertainment options, somebody has gone ahead and made a movie of Atlas Shrugged. The troubled production has finally arrived in cineplexes, and while it’s not the big-budget blockbuster Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie extravaganza we were once promised, I’m sure it’s a wonderful film, if for no other reason than it’s based on the objective, reader-chosen greatest novel of the 20th century. Right?
Obliquely charting the terror, loneliness, and liberation of navigating a cold, callous grown-up world, St. Nick follows nameless brother and sister runaways (played by real-life siblings Tucker and Savanna Sears) who take up impermanent residence in an empty Texas house. David Lowery’s debut feature is long on silence and laden with a mood of oppressive dread, which, like the ever-stormy sky, hovers around its young protagonists, he 12 and she eight, as they take refuge in their ramshackle new abode, the boy stringing up a hanging-log trap against intruders and collecting twigs for wood-stove kindling while the girl draws with crayons found in the same dumpster where they scavenge for food.
Wasted Words Show 104 – Paul Rudd On A Unicycle
Published April 15, 2011 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
by Leonard Pierce
I am one of the guests (along with Shek Baker, Olivia Todd, RJ White, andTony Zaret) on a brand-new episode of Wasted Words, America’s favorite drunken podcast, and this one may be one of my all-time favorites. We discuss jazz, the hats of the First World War, self-delusion, American Idol, the terrible burden of having five things to do, and many other subjects, and we finally isolate what an attractive person has to do in order to no longer be considered a viable candidate for sexual partnership — a little something called the “Paul Rudd on a Unicycle” Factor. Listen in, won’t you? You shan’t regret it.
