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…
Part of the renascent body-count action industry, Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning mere existence might shock many Americans. “There are four Universal Soldier movies?” those shocked Americans would say. They might also be taken aback by the bracing violence that marks the film from stem to stern: the gangland-style execution…
Safe to say AMC knows a little something about pulling off a period drama. So we have high hopes for a pilot recently ordered by the ambitious cable network — especially since it’s set in Dallas, and double-especially since it was written by a native son. The show is called…
The Daily Show with Jon StewartGet More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on FacebookSo. Good. After four great years, Dallas-raised writer/comedian Wyatt Cenac has announced that he’ll be leaving his position as correspondent on The Daily Show. His final report will coincide with the last…
Every year Hollywood cranks them out — saccharine remakes of A Christmas Carol or It’s a Wonderful Life, with minor plot tweaks and overused actors. They’ve ruined the dial, filling it with cinema’s version of re-gifting. Meanwhile, original movies that were great the first few hundred times play on a…
Tweens, shut-ins, cat ladies and frustrated housewives too timid for 50 Shade of Grey entered their final throes of Twilight-related delirium last week. Apparently, not all vampires live forever. As fans search for another fantasy franchise to fill the emotional void, the rest of us see simply the end of…
“I can’t think of a more pathetic situation for an actor than to do a film and not connect to it,” Irrfan Khan says. “And I pray to God that I never face that situation.” Khan might not be one of the most prominent stars in Bollywood, especially not when…
A stacked-deck theological inquiry filtered through a Titanic-by-way-of–Slumdog Millionaire narrative, Life of Pi manages occasional spiritual wonder through its 3-D visuals but otherwise sinks like a stone. It’s no shock that Ang Lee brings to his high seas adventure graceful and refined aesthetics devoid of any unique signature or pressing…
Silver Linings Playbook, which stars Bradley Cooper as a manic-depressive man-child attempting to get his life back together after a breakdown, won the Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and subsequently shot to the top of most Oscar prognosticators’ Best Picture short list. The film’s pre-release…
America has had its national traumas — its Antietams and Pearl Harbors and 9/11s — but what we haven’t faced since the Battle of New Orleans is a proper ground invasion, a shooting war with a foreign occupying army. Rather than accept this as good fortune, the absence of this…
Joe Wright’s dust-blowing new adaptation of Anna Karenina faces a towering mountain of precedent: not only the greatest novel by the man Nabokov called “the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction,” but the whole checkered history of Leo Tolstoy at the movies. A visit to Tolstoy’s imdb.com page gives the…
