For weeks after Heath Ledger’s body was found in an apartment in New York City in 2008, curious folks would come into the store in SoHo where I worked and ask, “Do you know where Heath’s building is?” Of course I knew where it was; everyone who worked or lived…
We’ve entered an age in which people have no idea how old they are. Fifty-year-olds lament, “I still feel 30 in my mind,” and sometimes dress like it. Some 30-year-olds may cling to the destructive habits of their 20s, but plenty more march dutifully into full-on family-and-career-building mode, perhaps acting…
Art may not be more important than human lives. But on the list of things that mean something to human lives, across centuries, it ranks pretty high. That’s what’s so compelling about the story of the Monuments Men, a group of people from 13 nations who volunteered to protect cultural…
Consider the Lego, the toy of contradiction. With one — well, with hundreds of them — you can build anything: houses, airplanes, house-airplanes. You can even build something that will change the world, as Larry Page and Sergey Brin did in 1996 when they housed the server for their new…
How retrograde are many of the core tenets of the Disney princess? Consider this: My daughter owns a book called Snow White’s Secret, in which Disney’s royal archetype reveals her devilish hidden life: When the Dwarfs are working at the mine, she sneaks into their cottage and joyfully cleans the…
Greetings from the 64th annual Berlin Film Festival, where it’s a surprisingly balmy 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit). The weather here may not be business as usual, but the festival looks promising — the competition includes films by Alain Resnais, Lou Ye, Yoji Yamada, and Claudia Llosa (whose odd…
“Goodbye Facebook, goodbye iPhone — Hello Saint Vladimir’s,” groans dropout Rose Hathaway (Zoey Deutch) when she and her best friend, Lissa (Lucy Fry), are dragged back to the titular school they ditched when they ran away to live normal-ish lives in Portland. Despite their year outside the gates, human culture…
The big news out of the Berlin Film Festival earlier today was that Shia LaBeouf, here to promote Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Volume 1, behaved like an ass on the red carpet at the movie’s premiere last night. He showed up in a proper tuxedo, but also with a paper…
***** Just go watch it, OK?…
We’ve been closely tracking the trajectory of Halt and Catch Fire, a forthcoming AMC drama set during the 1980s PC boom in Dallas. It was co-created by a Plano native, Chris Cantwell, and is being produced by some of the folks behind Breaking Bad. Hopes, ours and critics’, are high…
Quentin Tarantino named Big, Bad Wolves his favorite movie of the year. Certainly this film’s quiet, playful treatment of torture and its excessively bloody denouement is in the Tarantino vein. But Wolves derives its rampant ick factor from darker, less self-aware sensibilities than Tarantino. After debuting on the festival circuit…
Early this month, we learned that Guy Fieri was casting for the second season of his new TV show, and we realized we forgot something: Guy has a new TV show! Guy has a new TV show much of the time, but it’s not like us to simply ignore a…
Films, like most epic art projects, can get intense. For local movie writer and director Joe Scott, his latest project, Serendipity Moon, is no exception. From the Indiegogo page Scott launched to help fund the flick, to reaching out to his friends at Dallas Comedy House to take starring roles,…
Though Jason Reitman’s name is on the poster, it’s impossible to believe that the sardonic boy wonder of Juno, Thank You for Smoking and Young Adult would direct this stilted romance between a divorcée and a dreamboat escaped convict. Labor Day is so self-conscious and phony, it must be the…
Who says award-season winners have to be epic? If you’re looking for an alternative to the lengthy features vying for recognition and box-office glory, ShortsHD and Magnolia Pictures have on offer the full slate of 2014 Oscar-nominated short films. Divided into three categories (documentary, animation, live action), each featuring five…
While our ingenues scurry toward teen best sellers and David O. Russell flicks, here’s the next generation of talented leading men swaggering into a dude-bro Sex and the City. At night, best friends played by Zac Efron, Miles Teller, and Michael B. Jordan — aka the player, the goof, and…
A favorite pastime of critics and serious filmgoers, perhaps the most idiotic and fruitless one, is to complain about how bad the movies have gotten. The complaint is meaningless, because no matter how “bad” the movies get, there are always actors. There’s no such thing as a golden age of…
With so many Academy Award nominees currently in theaters, it’s natural for your competitive side to activate. But there’s still a month before you don an old prom dress, eat a shrimp ring and watch the Oscars — that’s plenty of time. Be decadent this week: Treat yourself to eight…
Let’s start with the ending: the closing credits disclaimer that insists that none of the lead actors in Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac filmed penetrative sex. If there is real sex in the movie, and it sure looks like there is, it must have been done by one of the eight…
The Sundance InstituteEvery Sundance there’s a crowd-pleaser, and most years it’s got one degree of separation from the Little Miss Sunshine crew. But the most delightful flick of the 2014 fest is an unconventional documentary with no plot, no dialogue, and nothing but party. Living Stars, a fleet 63-minute film…
Vanessa Hudgens was 17 when High School Musical made her famous, the tail end of a generation of Mouseketeers that included her contemporaries Zac Efron, Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez, and her elders Justin Timberlake, Hilary Duff, Britney Spears, Keri Russell, Christina Aguilera, Shia LaBeouf and Ryan Gosling. If you’re…
There are four good things we can say about I, Frankenstein, another muscles-and-rubble comic book adaptation just un-terrible enough not to alienate its core audience, yet never consistently grand or surprising enough to win over anyone else. First, Aaron Eckhart brings it, scowling like a champ beneath his jigsawed scar…
