Even before the movie begins, as the New Line logo is still coalescing on a dark screen, a man speaks on the soundtrack. He’s talking about reincarnation and about what he would do if his wife, named Anna, were to die and return as a bird insisting it was indeed…
“Whadyawant, motherfuck?” They’re the first words Charles Bukowski speaks in John Dullaghan’s documentary about the poet and novelist, famous for his writing and infamous for his drinking and brawling and screwing. The audience member, either the acolyte or just the curious stranger, might respond, “To hear your story, Hank, that’s…
How does Mike Leigh do it? The years pass; film fashions come and go; Hollywood churns its commercial pap. Careers sparkle; others fizz; whom the gods would destroy, they first make famous. Meanwhile, over in England, Leigh makes his films, tracking the intricacies of the lower-class family with the patience…
Whatever else can be said about Tarnation–and there is plenty to say–there is no denying this: It is a very brave movie. Rarely is the subject of a documentary willing to lay himself bare before the camera, exposing his very consciousness to the audience, and it’s still more uncommon for…
Let’s just get the term out of the way up front. The term is “fag hag”–and a thousand pardons, sensitive readers, but there is no PC equivalent. This new film, Stage Beauty, is an absolute fag-hag fiesta. Beneath its historical leanings and classic veneer, it’s utterly gaga for girls who…
The Grudge bears the imprimatur of Sam Raimi but, alas, neither his sense of fun nor his smarts. The wunderkind director behind the Spider-Man and Evil Dead franchises has followed in the path of Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver with their Dark Castle releases, launching his own lucrative spook factory,…
A parody of Gerry Anderson marionette shows (such as Thunderbirds and Joe 90), Jerry Bruckheimer action movies and the ’80s cartoon-toy line M.A.S.K. , Team America: World Police boils down all those ingredients to their essences, starting with the theme song “Americaaa… Fuck yeah!” (scored like Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone”…
Outside Tinseltown, not everyone may be aware of the Hollywood Forever cemetery, which specializes in memorializing lives via a process the franchise owners call “LifeStories.” The century-old former Hollywood Memorial Park, retooled for the new millennium, presents carefully edited video montages of the lives of celebrities (from Rudolph Valentino to…
It would be so easy to titter and scoff at Shall We Dance?, a Miramaxed-out version of the 1996 Japanese film of the same name, which told of a bored businessman who is reinvigorated after a few dozen sessions of dance lessons. This version, with its cast of glow-in-the-dark movie…
Most film festivals–at least ones not in Toronto, Manhattan, Cannes or Park City, Utah–have no rhyme or reason to their schedules, no more than a street-corner proselytizer does to his ramblings. They’re subject to the fancies of a small group of programmers and the whims of distributors pushing new product;…
There are at least three movies contained within the covers of H.G. Bissinger’s best-selling 1990 non-fiction book Friday Night Lights. One is concerned with the socioeconomic life of a small West Texas town built on the wobbly foundations of oil and racism and the out-of-whack worship of a high school…
Maybe it’s the mark of a great film that it can affect an audience member even when he sleeps through the entire thing. Such was the case with my father at a recent preview of David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees, a philosophy lecture masquerading as a comedy in which…
Before he made Primer for some $7,000, Dallas software engineer-turned-writer-director-actor-editor Shane Carruth had no idea how to make a movie, and some who see his on-the-cheap creation will argue he still doesn’t, while others will lavish upon it hearty praise reserved for visionaries who leap from the shadows to the…
Revolutionary idolatry is an odd business. Just ask unruly pop singer Stew, of the unruly pop group the Negro Problem. On his Naked Dutch Painter album, the melodic rebel dares to challenge a sacred image. “Don’t you wish there was, like, another picture of Ché Guevara?” he inquires. “Like, one…
Shark Tale is an animated film, though after you see it you might wonder whether the term is intended as oxymoronic. Put simply, it has no life in it at all. Not even the kids roped into an afternoon preview screening seemed terribly interested. Perhaps they’ve grown tired of computer-made…
If you aren’t familiar with Bishop T.D. Jakes, it could only mean you’re white or, like much of the entertainment industry and American media, generally clueless about the lives of this country’s tens of millions of evangelical Christians. To black Americans, Jakes is an icon–a preaching, teaching, entrepreneurial dynamo. Known…
Here’s a message for all you single, horny, hot-blooded, heterosexual males out there: It’s time to break out the champagne. Wait, scratch that, make it Jack Daniel’s–lonely single guys seldom have use for champagne. There’s big news to tell, fellas: In When Will I Be Loved, Neve Campbell has ditched…
In this year of political movies, in which agendas serve as plots, comes the unlikeliest candidate of them all, The Forgotten, in which the climactic moment hinges on the belief that a child’s life begins at conception and not in the delivery room. To explain any further would reveal too…
The very best thing about A Dirty Shame, a giddy sex farce from John Waters, is the credits. What’s not to love about a list of characters that includes “Sylvia Stickles,” “Marge the Neuter,” “Fat Fuck Frank,” “Cow Patty” and “Tire Lick Boy”? The soundtrack, too, bears comic fruit, with…
Fortune smiles on groovy egregiousness. In the case of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the filmmakers’ investment in their weird visions is wildly unorthodox, but the payoff is oddly satisfying. The movie features myriad killer robots, raucous underwater dogfights and Laurence Olivier’s best work since he died 15…
Essayist. Playwright. Radio personality. Librettist. Actor. Novelist. Now, with Bright Young Things, the inimitable British wit Stephen Fry debuts as feature screenwriter and director. Best known here in the colonies either as Jeeves (opposite Hugh Laurie) in Jeeves and Wooster, or as Peter in Peter’s Friends, or possibly as Oscar…
Hey, have you heard about that new Danish film that just came out? Distributed by Lars von Trier’s Zentropa Entertainments, has the same star as one of the Dogme ’95 movies and features a dysfunctional family full of people who yell at each other? Wait…don’t run away! It’s a good…
