You can hear the people sing — really hear them — in the long-gestating screen version of that Broadway juggernaut Les Misérables. Countering the standard practice of having the actors in a film musical lip-synch their songs to prerecorded tracks, director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) insisted that all of…
Sadly, country songwriters stand as nearly the only entertainers in our popular culture who craft memorable art on the subject of marriage, the state in which just less than half of Americans spend the majority of their lives. A few years back, Brad Paisley, one of Nashville’s best, wrote and…
In his 2005 novel One Shot, writer Lee Child lays out nine rules for surviving a five-against-one alley fight, a challenge his hero, the ex-Army cop Jack Reacher, is about to face. These include “Be on your feet and ready.” “Identify the ringleader.” “Don’t break the furniture.” Rule number nine…
Once comic actors reach a particular career stage, they often choose one of two paths: A) They stop being funny and start being all Hallmark heartwarming, i.e., by growing a beard and playing a psychiatrist. B) They accept unambitious, work-for-hire roles in mass-market family comedies about some combination of dogs,…
Set in East Germany in 1980, Christian Petzold’s superb Barbara is a transfixing Cold War thriller made even more vivid by its subtle overlay of the golden-era “woman’s picture,” the woman in question being Dr. Barbara Wolff, brilliantly played by Nina Hoss in her fifth film with the writer-director. Yet…
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone to watch Jacques Audiard’s outrageous melodrama Rust and Bone without laughing. Loosely adapted from two works in Craig Davidson’s 2005 short story collection of the same name, Rust and Bone finds Audiard returning to the overdetermined characters and swift…
There’s traffic from Silver Lake. That’s why Kristen Stewart and Garrett Hedlund, the stars of On the Road, are late to the Benedict Room of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. We’re as psychically far from Jack Kerouac’s Beat gospel as you can get: fidgeting under crystal chandeliers in…
Quentin Tarantino has been Googling himself, and it’s starting to become a problem. The filmmaker, whose eighth feature, Django Unchained, opens on Christmas Day, is famously an analog evangelist: He writes his scripts in longhand; he bans cell phones from his sets and hasn’t had one of his own in…
A couple weeks back we told you that comedy rainmaker Judd Apatow was in Dallas to promote his fourth directorial effort, This is 40, a sort-of spin-off of 2007’s Knocked Up. As part of that press tour, Apatow — who also directed 40-Year-Old Virgin and Funny People — spent one…
There wasn’t a single reference to the Connecticut shootings on this weekend’s holiday edition of Saturday Night Live, but there didn’t need to be. The show’s cold open — usually reserved for luke-warm political sketches — said it all. Watch it above, and see a few of the other sketches…
Gay-male weepies have left a long trail of tears, stretching back to the sobbing, self-loathing queens of The Boys in the Band and including high-prestige pictures like Philadelphia (1993) and Brokeback Mountain (2005). The genre, most prominent during the first decade of the AIDS pandemic, has used melodrama to bid…
It’s dispiriting that a film about the romantic life of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who cultivated a small coterie of mistresses, should exhibit so little interest in what so engaged its hero: the women’s individual hearts and minds. Instead, Hyde Park on Hudson quickly introduces us (and FDR) to the president’s…
David Chase looks like he wants to whack somebody. Not just anybody, mind you, but the middle-age guy with the bad dye job a few tables away from us in the Library Bar of the Regency Hotel. “Hiya!” bellows the dye job into his phone. “I’m sittin’ here watchin’ the…
The story of how Wake in Fright came to circulation is a fittingly strange one. It debuted at Cannes in 1971, then had a limited run through America (under the name “Outback”) and its native Australia. But after that, it vanished. Martin Scorsese was at that Cannes screening, and called…
With Peter Jackson’s return to Middle Earth hitting theaters next week (read our review of it here), here are som Hobbit-themed things happening around Big D. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy Marathon Saturday, December 8th & Sunday, December 9th Both Cinemark and AMC Theatres are hosting day-long marathons of…
There’s a moment of realization in the Apatow-produced television series Freaks and Geeks where young, gangly Sam Weir realizes he hates his popular cheerleader girlfriend. They’re sitting in a movie theater, she’s heavily primped and wearing an angora sweater. He’s nervously attempting to find common ground by sharing his favorite…
The Hobbit Gets Neither There Nor Back Again
Welcome back to Middle-Earth. It has been nearly a decade since writer-director Peter Jackson last set foot on J.R.R. Tolkien’s hallowed ground, signing off on a spectacular trilogy of films adapted from the British author’s Lord of the Rings novels. There were box office billions and well-earned Oscars aplenty and…
When living in Miami, I was surrounded. Every South Beach bodega window displays look the same, outfitted with grotesquely (read: AMAZING) tacky odes to Tony Montana. Rifles, framed “art,” and joint rollers branded with His Image face the streets — a city’s twisted welcome to out-of-towners. Since Scarface is turning…
It’s the movie that inspired a thousand lazy dick jokes and provided pop-culture context for the mounds of cocaine on many an American dresser: Scarface, Brian DePalma’s classic about a Cuban refugee who makes it big in America. It was released on December 9, 1983, and in honor of its…
D Magazine announced yesterday that it will team up with the local TV station KTXD and rebrand it D-TV. The new station will continue to broadcast KTXD’s current offerings, including the news show The Texas Daily and the lifestyle show Texas Living, which will be renamed D Living. It will…
Early in Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock (played by Sir Anthony Hopkins) walks the red carpet at the premiere of his 1959 chase film, North by Northwest. “You’re 60 years old!” shouts a reporter to the corpulent master of suspense, then nearing his 40th year of filmmaking. “Shouldn’t you quit while you’re…
An adaptation of George V. Higgins’ 1974 novel Cogan’s Trade, Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly anatomizes a self-policing underground economy of junkies, killers and administrators to indict a present-day mainstream world by suggesting that the criminal satellite economy and the “straight” superstructure are functionally the same. Dominik’s last film, the…
