It’s been a while since Woody Allen really piqued my interest, and to be honest I’m not sure he’s done it here, but… he’s done something. There’s a certain “just crazy enough to work” feature to all his best films, and even if I’m not completely convinced that I want to see You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, I’m curiously moved to want to want to see it.
The Last Song, a treacly affair that is virtually unwatchable outside its target demographic (which is about 5 years younger than the film thinks it is), is the next great bit of glorious banality for both Nicholas Sparks and Miley Cyrus. Sparks, who really likes himself, aims at a somewhat younger crowd this time around, apparently in the hopes of proving that the laughably nonsensical appeals to a more diverse age range than was previously believed.
Bringing together a cast designed to target a wide, generationally-appropriate viewers, Galt Niederhoffer’s The Romantics is hitting theaters soon, and the semi-pseudo-indie film looks as though it may deliver.
If you tried to sell me the premise for The Switch, you wouldn’t have a lot of luck. Even after telling me that Jason Bateman was going to be in it, as he’s a personal favorite, you’d probably have to tough time of it. But, something about this quirky bit of nonsense is becoming more and more convincing.
I’m not one to talk up a movie more than once, especially when there isn’t any pressing reason to do so, but I was playing around with some images, and find myself moved to throw out another mention of Easy A.
The McKay/Ferrell collection will eventually sell a lot of DVDs (or mindchips, or whatever), and The Other Guys is going to occupy interesting territory in that set.
There is a very odd feel to the remake of the awesome bit of cult ridiculousness that is Clash of the Titans, and it seems to stem, curiously, from some kind of insecurity on the part of director Louis Leterrier.
Capitalizing on the sequel release, Cats & Dogs hits on Blu-Ray, and the family-friendly lark looks better than ever… to children of the right ages.
The past several years have seen a resurgence in interest in the Film Noir genre, not just in recreations via a host of films, but in the classics that started it all.
Few films have sparked as much odd controversy as Kevin Smith’s Cop Out, especially considering the overall merits and theory of the movie. Hitting theaters on the back of some less than stellar reviews, one of recent memories strangest firestorms
Having written reviews for over a decade now, I have by this point been asked to explain myself more times than I could possibly count. Of course, these are often rhetorical inquiries… sometimes they aren’t even phrased as inquiries at all.
For me, the most interesting documentaries involve some sort of accident of fate. When the end result of a documentary, whatever it’s about, is pretty much what the filmmaker envisioned at the start, I’m not interested. You may end up with something great, and certainly something worth the time, but it’s never as brilliant an adventure, or (for me) as entertaining in terms of the world of filmcraft.
Winnebago Man doesn’t quite have the scope of accident that something like Capturing the Friedmans brings forward, but there is a certain twist that turns things into an entirely different film. That twist adds the oddity that probably kept director Ben Steinbauer interested enough to bother with a complete film.
The focus is on Jack Rebney, in case you don’t know him as Winnebago Man (or The Angriest Man on Earth), one of the earliest viral video legends. Even before the internet offered a medium for sharing such things, Rebney was being passed around via VHS tape, even popping up such places as The Show With No Name which featured YouTube hits before there was any such thing as YouTube.
Some apps get their value by glitz and wow, but the ones that actually get used on a regular basis simply do work. Usually, pretty simple work too, but in an incredibly convenient way. Such is the case with Movies Now (or MoviesNow, or MoviesNow HD), an app for iPhone and iPad that has been getting a lot of attention recently.
It’s so simple in fact, that it largely defies description. It’s an App that will tell you what movies are playing near you, and though there are a few intricacies to the way it works, that’s about it. Rather powerful in its simplicity, the app will list movies by title, by theater, and working from the title, by time. Want to see a movie now? Here you go.
You can also buy your tickets right from the App, if the theater works with Movietickets.com.
M. Night Shyamalan has been running against the wind since The Sixth Sense made a splash, and your career begins to really look bleak when the last thing critics were nice to came out a decade ago. After a string of films hoping to keep the “snappy, twist ending” effort alive, The Last Airbender may seem an odd, brilliant, and/or stupid choice, but whatever the expectations, the result may spin Shyamalan’s career into a twist ending of its own.
It should be noted that turning Nickelodeon‘s hit, animated adventure into a live-action film is a task that is doomed from the start, and the project is really rather similar to David Lynch‘s Dune. Success isn’t actually a live option, the question is really how worthwhile your failure will be. Others may have produced a much more enjoyable product, but turning 500 minutes of a brilliant, but often silly, cartoon into a feature-length film wasn’t going to happen.
For filmmakers that are actual serious about their craft, third installments have a unique blend of difficulties. That’s why, when you weed out the nonsense and popcorn efforts, there really aren’t that many of them around. Pixar is unquestionably a studio that takes their fun seriously, but the trifecta is a treacherous hill to climb. Toy Story 3 is a fun film, and it’s sure to be a favorite among the younger crowd, but the majority of its power for anyone else is all too comparable to the sentiment Andy has looking through his toy box as he prepares to head off to college.
There is perhaps a strange mixture of Pixar‘s apparent effort to grow up (Up and Wall-E as prime examples), and this story’s focus on Andy doing just that. Eventually becoming almost sub-textually self-referential, we revisit old things in our chests with Andy, and while we may say things like, “Aww… Woody!” and reminisce about some great times, that doesn’t mean we want to play with them.
It’s a pretty safe bet that you think you know Showgirls (assuming that you can solidly separate it from Striptease in your mind… a lot of people can’t), but whichever set of thoughts you have about the 1995, Paul Verhoeven/Elizabeth Berkley vehicle, you probably don’t know it as well as you think.
Whether you think of it as simply one of the worst movies ever made, or a camp classic that is not so much bad as it is awesomely bad, it’s safe to say that few have put the requisite energy into exploring the movie the way it deserves.
You may even be savvy enough to think of the film as one of recent memories greatest career killers. Leaving off the actors, writer Joe Eszterhas and director Paul Verhoeven were laid flat by the film’s release. Eszterhas was coming off Flashdance, Jagged Edge, Music Box, and Basic Instinct. Jade was already in the works, and apart from Telling Lies in America, he didn’t manage much else until 2006′s Basic Instinct 2. Verhoeven, putting together a pretty good name for himself (at least in receipts) with RoboCop, Total Recall, and Basic Instinct, managed Starship Troopers post Showgirls, and that’s about all she wrote.
Whatever the case, David Schmader’s commentary found on this 15th Anniversary release is titled, “The Greatest Movie Ever Made,” and you probably don’t yet know that he’s absolutely right about the designation.
We’re all familiar with the idea that movies require us to suspend disbelief to one degree or another, and when the trailer and synopsis for something like The Book of Eli gets us in the door, we have a pretty good idea where we are. As the first few minutes roll by in something like The Road Warrior, The Matrix, or maybe even A Boy and His Dog, certain things clue us in to the fact that we aren’t meant to ask all the trickier questions.
Even so, things have to at least make sense within the framework created, and we aren’t demanding too much when we ask for at least a watchable plausibility. Resting squarely on the shelf next to The Road Warrior, The Book of Eli can legitimately throw off much serious analysis, but it plays at the gates of the ludicrous during most its run with an overly examined premise that is laughable at best.
This culminates in a final twist that will leave you searching for a camp in a way few movies have ever managed.
Charlie Chan is one of the few super sleuths who haven’t gotten much press recently. New television and film treatments, even going back several years, feature a lot of the greats, but Chan isn’t among them.
Though Hollywood is leaving the master of wise one-liners to fade into obscurity, you can now relive some of the classic moments of the Chinese-American detective with the release of the Charlie Chan Collection, part of the TCM Spotlight series.
It would be tough to choose among the dozens of Chan films when putting together a set, but the four we have here make for a nice collection, even if they are overly close to each other in terms of release date for a true sampling of the variety. Sidney Toler gave the film series its legs, and we get three of his latest films, including the last he starred in. You’ve also got the passing of the torch film which hands the role to Roland Winters.