You know how in most romantic comedies, the best friends are nearly always more interesting than the actual leads we’re supposed to care about? The Break-Up doesn’t play that game. Vince Vaughn is the focus and the primary source of entertainment, which is all the more impressive when you consider…
There was a time when people moaned whenever Hollywood would remake–and thus suck the life out of–a classic movie. These days, Hollywood just sucks the life out of movies that weren’t that great in the first place. Ah, progress. Well, June 6, 2006, is upon us, which means it’s time…
About 10 minutes into Michael Cuesta’s 12 and Holding, the following thought came to mind: Not afraid to put children in harm’s way. Twenty minutes later, not afraid was replaced with compelled. As he did in L.I.E. , which introduced child molestation into a fetid tale of adolescent obliteration, Cuesta…
Will & Grace: Series Finale (Lions Gate) The way this got hustled to shelves, mere days after Will Truman and Grace Adler said their mushy farewells, you’d think this were some classic adios — another M*A*S*H or Cheers wrap-up. Alas, it was just another Very Special Episode of a show…
When kids of all ages discuss comic books and superheroes, there is inevitably one question that comes up time and again: If that one guy and that other guy had a fight, who would win? Comics companies occasionally indulge these debates with special issues pitting Thing against Hulk or Wolverine…
Trotted out like ol’ Trigger whenever there’s a movie with saddles and six-shooters, the term “revisionist Western” would surely be a cliché if there were enough Westerns to warrant its use more than every few years. Fact is, any movie in a genre as depressingly out-to-pasture as the Western is…
There are lots of ways to grow up. The method offered by Somersault is to do something awful and then flee from it. This dreamy, sexy and rather chilly coming-of-age story from Australia captures a teenager’s attempt to escape her past, to build something new atop the rubble of what…
The impassioned new documentary Sir! No Sir! never mentions the words “Iraq” or “Afghanistan.” It doesn’t have to. Unseen and unremarked-upon, those bloody venues nonetheless inhabit the entire 84 minutes of David Zeiger’s film like some deadly, creeping virus for which there’s no cure. Zeiger’s actual subject, which he says…
Boston Legal: Season One (Fox) David E. Kelley’s latest legal drama is nothing more than a TV show about TV shows; hence the casting of Captain Kirk and Murphy Brown, with guest shots by Diane Chambers, Golden Girl Rose Nylund, and Alex Keaton. It’s like a Nick at Night mash-up,…
Ejiofor plays Simon, aka Lola, a flamboyant drag queen who gets to sing show tunes, issue snappy putdowns, and look fabulous. (He is not, he explains, a transvestite, because while drag queens look good in a dress, trannies “look like Boris Yeltsin in lipstick.”) Lola is also nursing some deep…
If some religious extremists in India had gotten their way, the gorgeous fury of Deepa Mehta’s Water never would have reached the screen. As it is, these self-appointed censors shut down the production for years by staging demonstrations, torching Mehta’s sets and threatening her life. Eventually, the filmmaker moved her…
Winter Passing (Fox) Try this, should you be inclined to rent this downer from writer-director Adam Rapp: Skip from chapter to chapter and see whether they all dont begin with exactly the same image, accompanied by exactly the same sound. There is always someone (usually Zooey Deschanel as a would-be…
The Old West has vanished, John Wayne is dead, and–this just in–the two most famous ranch hands in America are gay. But there would be no point in telling any of that to Harlan Fairfax Carruthers, the deceptively charming protagonist of Down in the Valley. Like the anachronistic cowboy Kirk…
At this late date, it’s hard to tell one digitally rendered talking animal from another. Madagascar blends into Ice Age looks like A Shark’s Tale sounds like Shrek might as well be A Bug’s Life turns into Antz feels like Chicken Little could be Over the Hedge, which is really…
You know it’s hard out here for a screenwriter. You’ve got a surefire hit on your hands–an adaptation of the runaway best-seller The Da Vinci Code–and yet it’s all about talking and solving cryptic riddles, which isn’t exactly suited to the visual medium. It’s also a book that depends on…
Art School Confidential is very much like every movie pilfered from the Saturday Night Live playbook, in which the slight giggles of a four-minute sketch are wrung into two-hour yawns. The work upon which it’s based is a four-page excerpt from a 14-year-old comic book called Eightball, written and drawn…
Our anemic movie industry recycles so relentlessly that even our complaints about such plasticized repackaging comes off as recycled product of its own, offered primarily to draw the line between concerned aging cinephiles and the target consumers who don’t care a whit. But still, we’ve become a culture not merely…
Fateless (THINKFilm) I’ve no patience for the Holocaust docudrama — didn’t even see Schindler’s List till years after its 1993 release, to my parents’ everlasting shame. And so it was I avoided Lajos Koltai’s acclaimed adaptation of Imre Kertész’ Nobel Prize-winning autobiographic novel; are we not already gorged on the…
Let’s say you’re a teenage boy dying of cancer. A well-known charity dedicated to helping people like you offers to make your fondest wish come true–so long as it’s something realistic, as opposed to, say, finding a cure for cancer. Would you choose a VIP pass to Disneyland…or a visit…
Coming closer even than Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers to resembling the Chinese cover art for an Iron Butterfly album, Chen Kaige’s The Promise is psychedelia extremis. Hardly a minute of it passes without a concentrated dose of digital frou-frou and lavish cartoon-poetic imagery: floating ocean goddesses, flying swordsmen,…
The most important thing to know about the new movie Hoot, adapted from the children’s book by Carl Hiaasen, is that it’s co-produced by Jimmy Buffett, who also appears in a small role and provides new music for the soundtrack. Middle-aged drunks and boat owners might possibly rejoice at the…
Mission: Impossible III finds Tom Cruise downplaying the world’s single greatest piece of action music in deference to an Age of Fear vibe that’s a lot more grueling than rousing. Seems Lalo Schifrin’s adrenaline-pumping “dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum” is now as dated as the Cold War from which it sprang; maybe the star-producer…
