It’s no surprise that movies can find success is vulgar, offensive humor. In fact, Sacha Baron Cohen’s previous exploits in this subgenre prove that audiences do love a good poop joke. With “The Dictator,” the vile, gross-out humor comes second to genuine political parody centered around jokes that, until now, have been too taboo for even Cohen himself.
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“What to Expect When You’re Expecting” is a “Valentine’s Day” take on impending parenthood. Assorted couples cope with pregnancies, planned and unplanned, adoption and the epic change that is coming to their lives.It’s wafer-thin, but it has plenty of laughs.
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Anna Faris gave heart to the raunchy "Scary Movie" franchise, supplied girl-next-door va-voom as "The House Bunny" and won a Stoney Award from High Times magazine for her tour de force performance in the stoner comedy "Smiley Face." Even now, playing the feminist-vegan manager of an organic food co-op in Sacha Baron Cohen's "The Dictator," she's a grungy pixie in overalls and armpit hair.
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Vampire movies are subject to the rules set by general consensus. The basic lore involves blood, sunlight and wooden stakes but the mythos changes with every interpretation. Most filmmakers can get away with new additions to the vampire ideology, so long as they remain interesting and consistent. Alas, “Dark Shadows” has neither.
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“The Avengers” is very much a universe film. Not just in the way it’s a fully realized comic book world populated by three-dimensional characters. “The Avengers” succeeds in creating a shared, continuity-driven reality that is connected by its varying conflicts to make an authentic world, and it does so with a movie-release tactic that has never been tried before. The fact that the movie is great, is really just icing on the cake.
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When “The Avengers” arrives in theaters on Friday it will represent an unprecedented Hollywood experiment — can the narrative threads from four film franchises come together to form a unified tapestry in a fifth, all-star franchise? The great thrill the movie offers is a sky full of iconic characters, but the danger is that without a story that can handle their combined weight, the movie will never get off the ground.
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Like a delectable meal that goes on too long, “The Five-Year Engagement” continues past gratification to overindulgence. It’s a very good movie. If a tough editor trimmed it from 124 minutes to 90, it would be wonderful. One of the main reasons why Judd Apatow has become a brand name in entertainment is that he produces movies that are very, very funny while featuring characters that resemble regular human beings.
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Rule No. 1: If you love Jason Statham and his brand of neck-stomping, head-busting killin’ skills, then you’re probably going to like his latest blast of movie mayhem, “Safe.” Rule No. 2: If you don’t like Statham, and your idea of a brutal takedown is a witty riposte on “Downton Abbey,” then steer a wide berth around any theater showing “Safe.” But, if you fall somewhere in the middle — appreciative of Statham’s talents at pounding and pummelling but feel some of his more recent movies like “Transporter 3” and “The Mechanic” left something to be desired — then “Safe” is more of a mixed bag full of the same ol’, same ol’.
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The image of Edgar Allan Poe passed down to us is that of a dour, pale and morbid drunkard, a poet haunted by lovers who died in his arms. But he was also a playful wordsmith, an eviscerating critic, a man fascinated by cryptography (codes) and fond of dissections. That’s the Poe of “The Raven,” a fanciful, witty and suspenseful revision of Poe’s last days that is more entertaining than it has any right to be. Poe wore his hair a little long, and a mustache. But John Cusack gives America’s first great suffering artist an intellectual’s (or pseudo-intellectual’s) goatee, a cape and a lot of swagger, a cross between Lord Byron and Sherlock Holmes.
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Freeway, the lovable stray dog at the center of this very teary comedy, “Darling Companion” has lost its way. Even the marquee ensemble anchored by Diane Keaton, Dianne Wiest, Kevin Kline and Richard Jenkins is not enough to rescue this motley mutt of a movie. Maybe it’s a case of emotions getting the better of filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan. “Darling Companion” is close to his heart, inspired by Mac, the dog he and wife Meg rescued from a Los Angeles shelter who was lost during a trip to the Rockies. For three weeks they stayed and searched — and if the film is any indication, they fought and reconnected while trying to find Mac.
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For each decade there is a particular brand of children’s entertainment that will be fondly remembered later in life. The movies and cartoons that are coming out will someday be the subject of nostalgia, giving this generation’s youth something new to latch onto. Regardless of the quality of the film, “Pirates! Band of Misfits” will be someone’s childhood memory.
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Aardman Entertainment is best known for its incomparable use of stop-motion animation, one of cinema’s oldest and most respected techniques. As one of Aardman’s co-founders, director Peter Lord worked on features such as “Chicken Run” and had a hand in the creation of Wallace and Gromit. Now Aardman and co. are releasing a new comedy, “Pirates! Band of Misfits” a piratical adventure starring Hugh Grant, Salma Hayek and Martin Freeman. College Times spoke with Lord, director and master animator for “Pirates!”, to discuss the passion and process of making clay dolls come to life.
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“The Lucky One” is the edgiest-ever film adaptation of the writings of Nicholas Sparks. Which isn’t saying much. Yeah, it has the violence of war, and the heat of near-sex. And profanity! Don’t forget the profanity! But it still has the romance novelist’s favorite tropes — most of them, anyway. There’s a coastal setting where two emotionally damaged people meet, people who might be made whole again, if only they can reveal their deep, dark hurt and find love. Beth (Taylor Schilling) is a willowy and gorgeous single mom running a kennel with her speak-her-mind/ state-the-obvious grandma (Blythe Danner).
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A humorous self-help relationship book becomes an amusing and often biting take on the war between the sexes with “Think Like a Man,” based on comic polymath Steve Harvey’s “Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man.” Funny people in funny situations deliver funny lines with, thanks to director Tim (“Barbershop”) Story, zippy timing in this somewhat overlong but still hilarious romp through the world of “Players,” “Mama’s Boys” and “90-Day-Rule Girls.” The script, by the guys who gave us the equally smart and sassy “Friends With Benefits,” follows four women with man problems and four guys who are the “types” creating those problems.
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Bob Marley packed a lot of living into his 36 years. Hit records, international concert success, 11 kids by seven different women, a face stenciled on more T-shirts than Che Guevara – it was as if he knew he didn’t have much time so he got an early start and lived at a sprint, despite the laid-back image his music and lifestyle portrayed. He’s been dead for three decades, but one of the founding fathers of reggae music remains an icon whose fame transcended music just as Marley transcended the odd confluence of geography, religion, patois and poverty that created him.
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With a wealth of informative TV wildlife programming already in the marketplace, Disneynature faces a Darwinian dilemma. How can the studio’s zoology unit create films that will put paying audiences in theaters? In “Chimpanzee,” the strategy is clear: Make dramas, not documentaries. With its emphasis on entertainment rather than edification, the film occupies a warm-and-fuzzy middle ground between “The Jungle Book” and Animal Planet. The new nature film follows a baby chimp named Oscar and his clan, observing them as they forage, use tools, play games, and care for one another.
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Director Drew Goddard and writer Joss Whedon have always had a hand in defining geek culture. Whedon, responsible for creating “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Firefly,” is set to direct this year’s “The Avengers,” a huge comic book endeavor. Meanwhile, Goddard has also worked on “Buffy,” as well as writing for shows like “Lost,” “Alias” and the monster flick “Cloverfield.” Safe to say, these two have the pedigree to deliver a crowd-pleasing genre film. And they do with wit and style.
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Judged solely on the punch/kick quality of its genre, “The Raid: Redemption” stands out by providing excellent choreography and ultra-realistic violence. The story is simple. Twenty elite SWAT cops are tasked with taking out a drug lord. The drug lord rules over a slum apartment building that he rents out to thugs and criminals who want to lay low. Rookie cop Rama (Iko Uwais) tags along and kicks all sorts of ass. As expected, acting and storyline fall second to how well the fights are handled and in this respect, “The Raid” is aces.
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Ah, 2079! It was the best of times, it was the worst of times — at least in the dark, futuristic world of “Lockout’s” criminal justice system. If an offender is convicted of a heinous crime against society, he can be sent to a floating space prison, frozen like a popsicle and carved up like a lab rat. On the bright side, security at the prison is spectacularly lax. There are worse tradeoffs. Going to see “Lockout” is the same deal; it’s a good news/bad news-but-mostly-bad news sort of movie.
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“Bully” is a moving but somewhat myopic take on America’s newly anointed favorite childhood problem — schoolyard bullying. With emotional testimonials and candidly damning school and school bus video evidence, it’s a movie pitched as more than a mere movie — a cause, and a righteous one at that. Lee Hirsch’s documentary visits the the parents of bullied children who killed themselves in Georgia and Oklahoma. It follows a bullied boy in Sioux City, Iowa, a Mississippi girl who brought a gun on the bus with her to fight those bullying her, and an ostracized gay teen in rural Oklahoma.
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“American Reunion” is a slow and sad, crude and cruel, tame and timid return to the scene of the crime against pastry. No, they don’t joke about how this all takes place an unlucky 13 years later. But life hasn’t run according to plan for the lads — Jim (Jason Biggs), Oz (Chris Klein), Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) or Stifler (Seann William Scott). But mostly, watching folks in this age range get tanked and make bad decisions isn’t nostalgic. It’s just sad. Just like a real reunion, in other words.
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“Wrath of the Titans,” the sequel to 2010’s “Clash of the Titans,” is a hollow shell of a film that, while boasting spectacular visual effects, is lacking in practically everything else. Perseus (Sam Worthington), following his defeat of the Kraken and refusal of an offer to join the gods, has sought out a peaceful life in order to raise his son, Helius (John Bell).
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The Rape of Nanking, the 1937 rape and murder rampage by Japanese troops, comes so vividly to life in “The Flowers of War” that you wish the great Chinese director Zhang Yimou had a better movie to put in front of it. The cliche-riddled story of a cynical American (Christian Bale) ennobled by the task of rescuing helpless convent schoolgirls is an epic eye-roller.
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When everything in a movie is an effect, they cease to be “special.” So limiting effects to the basics, especially in a horror movie, especially one as lean and primal as “Intruders,” is how you make them truly “special” again — special and genuinely chilling.
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Despite the hype and its unfortunate comparisons to another super popular teen-friendly series of books, “The Hunger Games” succeeds in standing out among its contemporaries in both the young adult and science fiction genres.
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It’s always fun when the screenwriter has to shoehorn the title of the movie into the script. “Get Shorty” is an example of the best way to do it, since most other times the title as a line of dialogue comes off a bit stiff. “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” has its title as a line of dialogue probably about a hundred times.
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Joining wizards and vampires in the arena of tween book-to-film franchises, “The Hunger Games” is preparing to make a killer debut at the box office this Friday. The hype for the movie already has the tween and adult fan base in a tizzy. Add to that the appeal of the young Hollywood cast, and you have what actor Liam Hemsworth calls “a whirlwind.” The hunky Hemsworth took a moment from being bombarded by screaming fans to chat about playing Gale, bonding with the cast and being a part of “The Hunger Games.”
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Ed Helms understands the difference between having a goatee for the right and the wrong reasons. Not only does Helms know his facial hair, but he also knows how to steal a scene. The funny man is known best for his roles as Dr. Stu Price, the toothless singing wonder in “The Hangover,” and as the bumbling, but lovable Andy Bernard from NBC’s “The Office.” His latest movie, “Jeff Who Lives at Home,” shows a different side of Helms, one that audiences might not be expecting.
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Against fake backdrops and riding pretend horses, sporting a perm and Western getup and speaking only Spanish, Will Ferrell plays yet another memorable character as humble rancher Armando Alvarez in the ridiculous-on-purpose “Casa de mi Padre.”
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It was a simpler time, when Johnny Depp was new to Tiger Beat, when hair metal still ruled the airwaves and when Fox was an infant TV network with a bare handful of series — “The Simpsons,” “America’s Most Wanted” and this silly cop confection called “21 Jump Street.” Now, that teen-friendly cop show has been updated and unleashed in the post “Hangover” era — when no joke is out of bounds, no language is too profane, no riff on drugs or sex is too extreme.
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“Jeff, Who Lives at Home” could be just another quirky, abrasive and unconventional relationship comedy from the Duplass Brothers, the fellows who gave us “The Puffy Chair” and last year’s “Cyrus.” It starts with the assertion — by Jeff (Jason Segel), the title character — that “everyone and everything is interconnected in this universe.”
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On a random day several years ago, Will Ferrell had an idea: it would be funny to make a Spanish language comedy. Fast-forward and his funny idea is now his latest movie, “Casa de mi Padre,” a romantic action adventure set in Mexico and entirely en Espagñol.
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“John Carter” will ask audiences to ignore the science in favor of the fiction. Those that can do so will enjoy an entertaining flick comparable to the sci-fi greats. The movie is based on the 1912 Edgar Rice Burroughs novel “A Princess of Mars” and details the life of confederate soldier John Carter, here played by “Friday Night Lights” star Taylor Kitsch.
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The best and worst aspect of "Friends with Kids"is its strict refusal to follow the traditional romantic comedy tropes it's trying to eschew and then cling to them when it looks like things might be getting serious. The nugget of special-ness is hidden in here, buried under decades of familiarity, history, comedy expectations and a three-act structure.
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A modern re-telling of Shakespeare's plays using the original dialogue is nigh impossible. Directors either choose to focus on style, as in Baz Luhramm's colorful "Romeo + Juliet," or substance, as in Michael Almereyda's subdued "Hamlet." Ralph Fiennes successfully tackles both: Shakespeare's language as it originally appeared under the umbrella of a war movie, easily stacked alongside "The Hurt Locker." There is intensity to "Coriolanus." It has nothing to do with the bloodshed, battle scenes or RPGs.
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Theodor Seuss Geisel, also known as Dr. Seuss, is perhaps one of the most celebrated writers of all time. Most kids of the 20th century have heard of the Grinch, "Green Eggs and Ham" or the Cat known for wearing a hat. The Lorax, on the other hand, isn't a brand that everyone knows. Created in 1971, late in Seuss' career, "The Lorax" was an environmental call to arms. It was dark and depressing in its indictment of logging practices. It's Seuss' most mature work despite the rhyming and cute characters.
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"Project X" is a mediocre party movie from first-time director Nima Nourizadeh that tries to be offensive and groundbreaking at the same time, but in the end ultimately fails at achieving both. The movie follows the journey of three self-declared losers Thomas (Thomas Mann), Costa (Oliver Cooper) and JB (Jonathan Daniel Brown) who, in an attempt to raise their high school status, plan on throwing one of the most legendary parties of all time.
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"Bullhead" is an intense, shattering film, a confident and accomplished, punch-in-the-gut debut by Belgian writer-director Michael R. Roskam that starts out like a thriller and turns into a disturbing tragedy in an unlikely and unexpected key. "Bullhead," one of the five contenders for this year's Oscar for foreign-language film, gets much of its ferocity, and its unlooked-for tragic implications, from the compelling performance of Matthias Schoenaerts as Jacky, its troubled protagonist.
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David Wain's "Wanderlust" achieves a tricky balance: It has enough laugh-out-loud moments that it wins you over, even though the movie as a whole doesn't add up. Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston (who first teamed up 13 years ago for "The Object of My Affection") play George and Linda, a married pair of stressed-out Manhattanites who, after George loses his job, travel south to Atlanta hoping to make a fresh start. Staying with George's brother-from-hell (Ken Marino) doesn't work out, but the two find an unexpected alternative: Elysium, a commune (or, as the residents call it, an "intentional community") where rent is cheap and love is free.
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Rachel Prieur and her brother Ryan were captivated by a radio commercial flooding the airwaves in Dallas. It offered children a shot at stardom — maybe even a part on a Disney show — and all they had to do was show up for an audition. The teenagers begged their parents to take them. Crammed into a hotel ballroom with 200 other children, they took turns reading short monologues in front of a judge. All his children got, he said, was disappointment.
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Of all the bad horror / fantasy / sci-fi / action pictures Nicolas Cage has cranked out over the last decade, "Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance" is the Nic Cagiest. A goofy, gonzo thrill ride, "Vengeance" is a bad movie sequel so bad it's good — a bad movie that's almost a great bad movie. It's still a profoundly silly mash-up of comic book and quasi-religious "prophecy" about a motorcyclist who sold his soul to the devil, who transforms into a flaming avenger hurtling out of hell when the need arises. But this time around, Cage and everybody else on board are in on the joke.
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Presumably, there are more depressing prospects in the world than watching Reese Witherspoon once again jut her chin forward and screw her face up in concentration to play yet another control freak in desperate need of a rakish man to loosen her up. For now, though, I'm hard-pressed to think of any.
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Mickey Prohaska, the smooth-talking, ethically challenged insurance salesman played by Gregg Kinnear in "Thin Ice," could well have wandered through the hotel hallways at the annual convention that figured pivotally in last year's "Cedar Rapids." Mickey would have been one of the guys in the lounge, trying to nab new clients with a huckster's gusto. And he would have been one of the guys who brings a drunkenly obliging woman back to his room, never mind the marriage back home in Wisconsin.
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VICE and Project X are bringing the second leg of their multi-city Party Legends College Tour and concert series to Tempe, following the first leg of the tour featuring rapper Machine Gun Kelly. The tour includes an exclusive screening of upcoming film Project X (from the producers of The Hangover and Old School), with after party and performances by Pusha T and DJ Jesse Marco.The screening will be held Sunday, February 19. Pusha T's afterparty will follow the screening at the ClubHouse, 1320 E. Broadway Road in Tempe.
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In "Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance," Nicolas Cage punches Satan. He punches Satan in THE FACE. Playing Ghost Rider, Cage also saves a little boy and helps people and does some other heroic stuff. But no matter what he does, the character will never be as beloved as Batman and Superman. Ghost Rider doesn't get cheering crowds or parades.
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"The Vow" is like a Nicholas Sparks novel with a dash of wit, a hint of edge and a smidgen less sap. It's a romance in "The Notebook" tradition — "inspired by true events" and scripted by committee. But as such concoctions go, it's not half bad. Not that there aren't bad, insipid things about it. Start with the narration, and the narrator, Leo, played by Channing Tatum with as much lovesick charm as he can muster. Leo blathers on about "moments of impact" that "turn our lives upside down" and "define who we are." The movie he introduces with that assertion doesn't have much to do with "moments," though. It just sounded good. Well, maybe coming out of someone else's mouth.
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Early on in the derivative but fairly absorbing blur titled "Safe House," set in Cape Town, South Africa, Denzel Washington's Tobin Frost, a spy in from the cold, is brought to a Central Intelligence Agency safe house so that he can be asked a few questions about the super-secret intel he has in his possession. Wordlessly, Washington sits in a chair, as a supporting player (Robert Patrick) prepares for the waterboarding, and in one five-second progression Washington smiles, drops his head, lifts it back up — and his face has morphed into that of a man who has killed and will be killing again very soon.
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Cast and crew err on the side of silly in "Journey 2: The Mysterious Island," the amusingly childish sequel to that unlikely 2008 hit "Journey to the Center of the Earth." They've rendered Jules Verne's novel into a jokey lark, with broad, corny wisecracks, comic sidekicks and everybody riffing on the ginormous lizards, humungous spiders and the like. For those who have forgotten the conceit, the idea here is that while "most consider" the stories of 19th century novelist Jules Verne "works of science fiction, Vernians know otherwise."
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Although they're just co-stars in the new tear-jerker romance "The Vow," if you didn't know any better it'd be easy to think Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams are an old married couple. The actors laugh at each others jokes, finish each other's sentences and compliment each other like a couple who have been together longer than the weeks it takes to make a movie. That chemistry helps sell the story of a woman who emerges from a coma with no memory of her marriage. It's up to her husband to find a way to restore those memories. "This film says that love can survive a lot," McAdams says.
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As the boy wizard in a billion-dollar movie franchise, Daniel Radcliffe grew up before our eyes. But a decade after entering Hogwarts, the actor, now 22, has graduated from Harry Potter to adult roles. Most notably, he starred in a stage production of "Equus" in his native London and New York for which he flashed his physique. Soon he'll begin work on "Kill Your Darlings," a true-life murder story in which he co-stars as poet Allen Ginsberg. And he's promoting the Gothic horror movie "The Woman in Black," which opens Friday.
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Let's hope the Space Needle has a decent agent. The Seattle landmark has practically a starring role in "Chronicle," a sci-fi / horror tale of three teenage boys who learn that they have telekinetic powers. Never mind that the movie was primarily shot in Cape Town, South Africa, with a few scenes done in Vancouver, B.C. — "Chronicle" takes place in a weirdly computer-generated Seattle, with the Needle looming above the action like a vulture observing its prey.
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Much as I like the "Paranormal Activity" pictures for their unfashionable minimalism and quaintly Victorian lack of gore, it's nice to get back to something like "The Woman in Black" — not authentic Victoriana, exactly (Susan Hill's novel was published in 1983), and certainly not afraid of a little muck and blood, but fully invested in the spirit and spirits of that era. The film, a handsome nerve-jangler co-produced under the storied Hammer horror banner, amps up the scares without turning them into something completely stupid. Success!
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The title isn't an exaggeration. It was something of a "Big Miracle," the way the plight of a family of gray whales, stranded under the Alaska ice, captivated the country and forced oil men and environmentalists, natives and Cold War foes to team up back in the waning days of the Reagan administration. And it's no small miracle that the story of that nearly forgotten moment makes for a delightful family movie. Political cynicism, media opportunism, dogmatic native "tradition," corporate greed and environmentalist stubbornness are each, in turn, dashed against this sunny Ken ("License to Wed") Kwapis confection.
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At the start of "A Separation," an Iranian couple appears before a judge to request a divorce. Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moadi) have irreconcilable differences: She wants to move abroad before their exit visas expire for the sake of their daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi). He is unwilling to relocate because his father is ill with Alzheimer's and cannot take care of himself. But Simin would rather break up their marriage than stay put, because she doesn't want her child to grow up under what she calls "these circumstances."
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"Red Tails" never takes off. The subject matter — the trials and triumphs of the first ever all-black U.S. Army Air Corps fighter group, nicknamed the Tuskegee Airmen — is new. Yet the film has no story to tell that Hollywood hasn't told before. It's derivative of other World War II movies and entirely mechanical in its appeal. Emphatically mainstream in style and substance, it honors those exceptional fliers but denies viewers a challenging portrait of our own history.
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A bright, socially awkward boy tries to make sense of 9/11 and find some closure with the father he lost on what he calls "the worst day" in "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close." The film, based on a Jonathan Safran Foer novel, is a sometimes tearful remembrance of that day and the lives it ended or forever disrupted. And while it flirts with the preciousness that comes withFoer novels ("Everything is Illuminated"), it is engrossing and emotional in ways no other 9/11 drama has managed.
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His voice is deep, sonorous, rumbling with quiet gravitas. Few actors are as readily recognizable by their vocal cords as Max von Sydow, the great Swedish actor who arrived on the international scene in 1957, as a knight who encounters Death – and plays chess with him – in Ingmar Bergman's classic, "The Seventh Seal." Von Sydow would make 10 more films with Bergman ("Without him, I would certainly not have been here today," he said). And he would make his mark in big commercial films, playing a sly assassin in "Three Days of the Condor," Jesus Christ in "The Greatest Story Ever Told," and a demon-chasing priest in "The Exorcist."
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Gina Carano has a face that can hold a Hollywood closeup and a fist that can hold your nose until it comes clean off. And that's cool. Steven Soderbergh cast this mixed martial arts star / model in "Haywire" and surrounded her with experienced actors because he wanted to see an action movie starring a woman who could credibly beat the living daylights out of legions of guys who got in her way. No "Bourne" or "Bond" quick cuts and shaky cameras to hide the speed of the punches, the athleticism of the brawlers.
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It's been one year since Gina Carano fired a gun, but you wouldn't know it watching her shoot one. The former mixed martial arts champion, who makes her feature film debut in the Steven Soderbergh action movie "Haywire," is engaged in lively target practice with Aaron Cohen, an ex-Israeli special ops fighter who served as her tactical training coach on the film. Everything from Carano's crouched stance to the steely glint in her dark-brown eyes suggests that firing 9-millimeter pistols at close range is second nature to this 29-year-old extreme athlete.
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hat "tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme" returns to the screen, now in 3-D. But "Beauty and the Beast," the greatest animated film ever made and one of the screen's great musicals, hardly needs this sort of sprucing up. A timeless French fairytale about a cruel young man cursed to live as a beast in his enchanted home if he cannot change and be worthy of another's love, it features sparkling wit, lovely songs, stunning animation, terrific vocal performances by Paige O'Hara and Robby Benson as the leads, and just enough Disney cute to earn that over-used label "masterpiece."
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From the moment her name and the subject of her next film were announced, you knew Meryl Streep's performance as/ impersonation of Margaret Thatcher had Oscar written all over it. And true to form, the Academy might as well emboss her name on the statuette now. It's an uncanny turn by the screen's greatest actress, an acting job with towering bombast and marvelous subtlety. She nailed the look, the tone, the speech patterns, the little snap of the head of the imperious British prime minister. Bloody brilliant.
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"Joyful Noise," sort of a "Glee!"-meets-gospel music choral competition musical, makes a pleasant enough racket. A cheerful, not-quite-off-color crowd-pleaser that rarely breaks formula, it's the big screen equivalent of a sloppy smooch from your over-affectionate aunt over the holidays. You grimace. You stand there and take it. And you don't let anybody see you grin afterward. Writer-director Todd Graff, who specializes in this sort of cheerful, campy musical ("Bandslam," "Camp") lured Dolly Parton back from the surgically altered wilderness and paired her with Queen Latifah. They play two big belters with competing visions of how their integrated, uplifting small-town church choir can win the big Joyful Noise choir contest.
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At its soulful heart, "Pariah" is a stinging street-smart story of an African-American teen's struggle to come of age and come out – to the father who still calls her "daddy's little girl" and the mother who quotes the Bible and buys her pink frills. This emotionally ragged, slightly rough-around-the-edges indie starts in a packed lesbian dance club. Alike (Adepero Oduye), barely looking 17, cornrows tucked under a baseball cap, has bashful eyes, downcast as she takes in the scene. This is where she thinks she wants to be, but she's a long way from feeling at ease in these surroundings.
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In the new film "Pariah," Adepero Oduye plays Alike, a 17-year-old African-American girl in New York struggling to reconcile her identity as a lesbian and an emerging writer with the expectations of her conservative parents and her outspoken best friend. The role required much of the young actress, as Alike experiences plenty of emotional tumult navigating the complex terrain of coming of age. Perhaps the most outwardly remarkable aspect of Oduye's performance, however, is that she's nearly twice as old as the character she plays.
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Angelina Jolie's debut film as a writer-director has a cause, vivid characters and a compelling story. An ill-fated romance between Muslim and Serb set against the backdrop of the Bosnian civil war, "In the Land of Blood and Honey" is so involving you may find yourself shouting at the screen for the Muslim heroine (Zana Marjanovic) to make a break for it, abandon her Serb soldier lover (Goran Kostic) and save herself.
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Angelina Jolie is dressed in elegant black, her arms bare, the Roman-numeral tattoos, the Arabic tattoos, prominent on her thin, sinewy arms. It is a quiet Sunday, the week before the Hollywood Foreign Press Association selected "In the Land of Blood and Honey" as one of its five Golden Globe contenders in the foreign-language category. And Jolie, holding court at New York City's Waldorf Astoria, is here to talk about said film. It's her first screenplay. It's her first time as a director. And it's hard stuff.
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Picking the best films of any year is like picking the best ice cream. Moods change and opinions will always differ. However, the following represents the most shocking, entertaining, challenging and moving films of 2011. True, not every movie is in it to win it this awards season, but they're all worth checking out.
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The signature action scene in the soon-to-be-released "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows," unfolds in a fusillade in a forest, as high-speed cameras zooming at 70 mph capture ammunition ripping through trees and flesh in real time. It's the type of mayhem, initially so intense that the film faced an R rating, that you would find only in a movie directed by Guy Ritchie. Until two years ago, Ritchie was known only to a select cinema buff crowd for his stylish, low-budget British gangster movies
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Wolfgang Mozart had an older sister, a prodigy who lived, breathed and inhabited music as naturally and completely as he did and won plaudits from the crowned heads of Europe in the1760s. Director René Féret's "Mozart's Sister" looks at the family's life from the point of view of that sister, Maria Anna, called Nannerl, and asks what might have been had she, too, been a boy. It opens in 1763, with the Mozarts – Leopold, the controlling, stingy father (Marc Barbé); devoted mother Anna Maria (Delphine Chuillot); Nannerl (the luminous Marie Féret, the director's daughter) and Wolfgang (David Moreau), loving siblings and co-conspirators — on their three-year grand tour of Europe.
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"London Boulevard," starring Colin Farrell and Keira Knightley, is a pitch-black thriller with ruthless drug bosses and relentless paparazzi sharing bad guy billing. Would that the movie were pitch-perfect as well. It's clear that writer-director William Monahan, in adapting the Ken Bruen novel, had strong feelings about the almost inescapable grip of both the criminal underworld and modern celebrity culture. But in trying to take a bite out of crime and another out of fame, he's ended up with more than he can chew for his first time in the director's chair.
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The dysfunctional-family-gathering movie is a tricky thing to pull off – the family members need to be sufficiently messed up as to create interesting drama, but not so unbearable that we can't stand to be in the room with them. "Another Happy Day," the debut feature of writer/director Sam Levinson, dances on both sides of that line. At its center is Lynn (Ellen Barkin) a stressed-out mother of four: two adult children with her first husband Paul (Thomas Haden Church), two teens with her second husband Lee (JeffreyDeMunn).
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Comic book crossovers have always been a big deal – with studios pushing out at least two major films every year. By spreading out a single story among every major comic line in their library, publishers can sell an epic tale, telling readers, "Hey! All these heroes and villains are involved, so it must be important." That, in a way, is the hook for "New Year's Eve." Not the script, story or characters – even though the film balances comedy and drama as well as any major film this year. "New Year's Eve" relishes in the thought that they have over two dozen major stars popping up in the film.
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Shaking, sweating and swooning are par for the course among the passionate young fans of the "Twilight" series. But reports that a scene in "Breaking Dawn" has been sparking seizures in theaters nationwide has epilepsy experts on the alert and parents thinking twice about letting their kids see the movie. Officials at the Maryland-based Epilepsy Foundation issued a warning this week to their 11,000 Facebook fans to beware of the film.
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If you look up the word "annoy" in the dictionary, you will find: "to bother or irritate; to behave in an annoying manner." There is no truth to the rumor that Kim Kardashian's photo is included with the definition — at least not in my dictionary. The Kardashian meal ticket is a regular feature on my annual "Most Annoying Celebrities" list, and I won't keep you in suspense. She's right up at the top again.
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If you can't wait for your winter depression to kick in, race to "Melancholia," the latest avalanche of artistic angst from Lars von Trier. This one makes "Schindler's List" look like "High School Musical." I say this not to mock, but in a tone of thunderstruck awe. No moviemaker I know creates psychodramas so hard to watch and difficult to forget. If we esteem Sylvia Plath, Vincent van Gogh and Samuel Beckett, Von Trier deserves our attention, too.
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Kirsten Dunst has a confession to make. When Lars Von Trier contacted her — first by e-mail, then by Skype — about a part in his new film, "Melancholia," she said yes, immediately. "But it was funny," Dunst recalls, "because when Lars offered me the movie, I wasn't completely sure which character he wanted me to play. There are two girls. And I was like, ‘I'd love to do it! I'd love to do it!' "And I remember getting off the phone and thinking which one? Who am I? Justine or Claire?"
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Unlike most girls her age, Shailene Woodley will be spending her 20th birthday on a red carpet in Los Angeles next to George Clooney. Best known for her role as Amy Juergens on ABC Family's "The Secret Life of the American Teenager," Woodley has put her TV persona on the back-burner to play Clooney's troubled daughter in "The Descendants." It's a change of pace that reveals a new direction for her career, to be sure, but the experience impacted her even more personally, Woodley said.
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Emotional distress really shines through when set in a tropical paradise. "The Descendants" follows the unfortunate events in the life of Hawaiian native Matt King, played by George Clooney. Matt has dedicated his life to his job so severely that it comes as a shock to him when he has no idea how to be a father. A self-confessed "back-up parent," Matt finds himself having to deal with his two daughters all on his own after his wife is left in a coma due to a boating accident.
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The big screen revival of The Muppets, cleverly titled "The Muppets," is a generally charming exercise in nostalgia. The musical comedy whimsically and often cleverly revisits the characters, their shtick and the TV show and movies that made them most famous. British TV director James Bobin, a veteran of the wonderfully dry musical comedy series "Flight of the Conchords," and world's biggest Muppet fan Jason Segel have concocted a wistful walk down memory lane that's about, well, a walk down memory lane for The Muppets.
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Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" is a children's film for grownups – grown up film buffs. It's a charming and quite gorgeous exercise in the few corners of the medium where the Oscar-winning filmmaker has next to no experience – children's stories, comedy and 3-D. And even though it is too long and the master has yet to develop much of a comic touch, this adaptation of Brian Selznick's "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" is a stunning exercise in 3-D and a delightful celebration of Scorsese's lifelong love of the movies – something he, like Hugo, developed on childhood.
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Known widely for his work in British television and theater, director Simon Curtis makes his first foray into filmmaking with "My Week with Marilyn." Based on the diary kept by third assistant director Colin Clark, a detailed account of making Marilyn Monroe's "The Prince and the Showgirl," "My Week with Marilyn" combines an honest love story with the analysis of celebrity and Marilyn Monroe, herself. Simon Curtis chatted with College Times by phone to discuss all things Marilyn.
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As its core, "My Week with Marilyn" is a love story. It's simple, sweet and devoid of cynicism. It also gives one of the best looks at Marilyn Monroe of any film. Set in 1956, Marilyn (Michelle Williams) travels to London to star in and produce "The Prince and the Showgirl," a stage play adaptation and romantic comedy. Directed by and co-starring theater legend Sir Lawrence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh), the film was intended to earn Olivier the star power to return to movies and Monroe the credibility as a serious actress.
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Should you be looking for a feel-good film this weekend, you can't do much better than Constance Marks' sweet documentary "Being Elmo," about the man behind that helium-voiced "Sesame Street" monster, furry red Elmo. Kevin Clash, a quiet puppeteer from Baltimore, has been the voice and movement of Elmo since the early ‘80s. "Kevin comes alive through Elmo," says Clash's mother in the film, and it's true. Watching him manipulate the puppet for adoring children, a kindness and joy shines through. Clash always seems to be smiling when being Elmo, even though he knows he's not on camera.
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"We Were Here" shows that a situation you think you know can be something you haven't known at all. That is the surprise, and the power, of this unexpected film. An extraordinarily moving examination of how the AIDS epidemic both devastated and transformed San Francisco's gay community, this clear-eyed and soulful documentary brings us inside the contagion in a way that is so intimate, so personal, you feel like you're hearing about these catastrophic events for the first time.
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It breaks my heart to tell you that "Breaking Dawn" is broken. The movie that's carved out of the first half of the last book of Stephenie Meyer's vampires-in-love series, starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and TaylorLautner, is weighted down by more than its title, to say nothing of the expectations. For the record, it's called "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1," as if 5 billion insanely attentive Twihards wouldn't be able to find it.
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Let me start off by saying my kids claim to have loved "Happy Feet Two." My wife said, "I liked it," too, as we left the theater. Me? I did not. "Happy Feet 2" does not quite earn that special place in my heart reserved for "Alvin and the Chipmunks 2: The Squeakquel" – the absolutely worst children's movie I have seen in my seven years of parenthood – and to be fair, it's not even close.
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With the release of "Breaking Dawn — Part 1," Pattinson knows that the whirlwind surrounding him and his cast mates is about to peak. then subside. He says he's relishing the end, and he's taking it all in: the attention, the career boost and the way his peers have coped with the sudden fame of a film series whose fans are nothing if not fanatical.
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It's surprising the movie is so bad. It comes from Mark Canton and Gianni Nunnari, producers of the spirited "300," and was directed by the visionary Tarsem Singh. The difference is that both "300," based on the work of Frank Miller, and Singh's past movies, such as the magnificent "The Fall," had strong stories. This script has all the depth of a manhole cover.
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Among the famous people who make cameo appearances in the new Adam Sandler comedy "Jack and Jill": Johnny Depp, John McEnroe, David Spade, Shaquille O'Neal, Drew Carrey, Christie Brinkley, Michael Irvin, Regis Philbin, Dana Carvey and even Subway guy Jared Fogle. Total number of laughs all this amassed star power generates: One.
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Love is a many splendored thing, and yet cinema gets a lot of flack for misrepresenting the dynamics of capital-T true love. "Like Crazy"avoids making truth claims, choosing instead to favor the ambiguous facets of cupid's game. Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones play "star-crossed" lovers who spend seven years working through a long-distance relationship.
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Only a truly hopeless romantic could have created what director Drake Doremus did in "Like Crazy," a documentary-style film that follows the long-distance relationship between 20-something lovers Anna (Felicity Jones) and Jacob (Anton Yelchin) over the span of seven years. The strengths of the film come from focusing on the gray areas of the emotion that conquers all and only allowing the subtlest of gestures to express it. These make the film cruelly realistic, yet irresistible.
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For nearly five decades, J. Edgar Hoover was the face of law enforcement in the U.S., but to most Americans, the longtime Federal Bureau of Investigations director remains an enigma. "J. Edgar," directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Hoover, chronicles the FBI founder's controversial tenure as a hunter of gangsters and a collector of secrets and explores his mystery-shrouded private life, defined by a devoted relationship to his colleague Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer).
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Having dazzled us with romances, comedies, woman-centric dramas and mysteries, Spain's master filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar now gives us a deliriously perverse "Frankenstein" for the 21st century. "The Skin I Live In" builds on what he already has achieved, exploring uncharted, deeply transgressive territory through the lens of a prestige horror movie. Time and again this mad masterwork has you thinking, "Oh no, they wouldn't dare go there." And then it goes several steps further.
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In magic acts, and in movie thrillers, it's called "the reveal," that "wow" moment when some secret that's key to understanding what happened before is unmasked. In the movies, big "reveals" are usually in the third act. But in "The Double," an espionage thriller starring Richard Gere and Topher Grace, a pretty big reveal comes not near the end, and not at the very beginning, in the style of the old TV show "Colombo," allowing us to watch one character hunt down the fellow we know is his quarry.
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Elizabeth Olsen, the younger sister of the famed Olsen twins, plays Martha, a 20-something woman who has just broken free of her ties to an abusive cult in upstate New York. She goes to live with her older sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson), and her new husband Ted (Hugh Dancy). Olsen shines in this sometimes depressing film.
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You want a sneak peak at the wedding? Clips from the honeymoon? A look at some of the trailers? Here you go.
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John Cho wants to set the record straight. That is not his penis. "It's Bobby Lee's," he says jokingly. Kal Penn, sitting next to him at a table at the swanky Club Bar at Phoenix's Ritz-Carlton, laughs. Cho is referring to a segment in his and Penn's latest film – the spoof-laden, third installment in the Harold & Kumar series, "A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas."
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When "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" was released in 2004, it became a sleeper hit that morphed into a stoner classic. It wasn't merely because the jokes hit. It was because of what the film aimed to do. Seven years later, stars John Cho and Kal Penn make their return to the big screen as Harold Lee and Kumar Patel in the series' third installment, "A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas," and they make it triumphantly.
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"Welcome to the 7 p.m. screening of the ‘The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence),'" a staffer calls out over a packed house. "If you have to vomit or feel you're about to lose your bodily functions, bathrooms are behind me. There's a man and a woman's bathroom. Don't crowd up; we can all wait."
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DreamWorks' cunning casting of the silky Spaniard Antonio Banderas as a swashbuckling Puss in Boots pays off, brilliantly, in "Puss in Boots," a star vehicle for the nursery rhyme kitty cat from the "Shrek" movies. Thanks to Banderas and his Corinthian-leather purr and writers who know how to use it, "Puss" is the best animated film of 2011.
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Roland Emmerich's "Anonymous" is a generally sober-minded legitimizing of a couple of the Elizabethan Era's most fervently held conspiracy theories – that Elizabeth I, far from being a Virgin Queen, had a child or children, and that the commoner William Shakespeare could not have written the glorious plays which are attributed to him.
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The Oscar race seems to be caught up in the leader-of-the-pack syndrome. The New York Film Critics Circle last week pulled a Florida, inching the date for its annual award selection for best films of the year to the front of the critics heap, in similar fashion to the Sunshine State's move to shift its Republican primary ahead of the rest.
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The bottom line on any horror picture is clear cut and simple. How many times does it raise the hair on the back of your neck? How often do you jump? And how much fretting do you do about where you kept that night light you put away years ago? "Paranormal Activity 3? manages a couple of hair-raising moments, a couple of legitimate jolts and some funny cheap ones.
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There's something about the combination of crime, crazy and cops specific to small-town Texas that is irresistible to filmmakers. Indulging the urge to scratch that sleazy underbelly has produced everything from classic to camp. The new crime thriller "Texas Killing Fields" is certainly shooting to join that crowd but misfires too many times to make the cut.
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Whatever your relationship (ardent, platonic, nonexistent) to the Alexander Dumas story about Athos, Porthos, Aramis and the lionhearted musketeer intern, D'Artagnan, there's a word for the latest screen edition of "The Three Musketeers": whatthehell? It exists for its digital airborne sailing vessels and deadly retro-futuristic flamethrowers.
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"Weekend" presents 48 hours in the lives of two gay men who are almost immediately attracted to each other, then have to figure out what that means in the complex tapestry of their individual situations. It's an observational film that offers generous satisfactions, but there are challenges along the way.
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There's not a lot of free time when you're as busy an actor as Logan Lerman. He's only 19, but he already has been in 14 movies. When he gets a free minute, Lerman likes to watch old movies. He got to combine work and pleasure for his new role as D'Artagnan in the latest sword-swinging take on "The Three Musketeers," based on the Alexandre Dumas novel.
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With the launch Tuesday of video game "Batman: Arkham City," a sequel to 2009 hit "Arkham Asylum" that lets players control the Caped Crusader, the studio's Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment unit has one of the best-reviewed and most anticipated titles of the year. It's expected to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.
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In the 25 years since he started making movies with Pedro Almodovar, Antonio Banderas says one thing hasn't changed: The iconoclastic director is still leadingBanderas toward the edge of the creative abyss. And he is still diving in. "Basically what you have to do with Pedro Almodovar is take a leap of faith as an actor," Banderas said recently.
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That classic "creature feature" "The Thing" earns its third treatment with a film that's so enthralled with its actual "thing" that it forgets to be scary or suspenseful. A decent cast and a pristine glacial setting are wasted on a movie of alien transmutations and alien dissections that lacks urgency, or even a sense that's its very cold in Antarctica.
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In 1984, Janet Maslin of theNew York Times wrote that "Footloose"had a "none-too-ingenuous simplicity and a tendency to overexploit." Maslin also wrote that the movie wasn't meant to be watched closely but instead to just be a fun movie for teenagers. So, did Craig Brewer's remake of the cult classic achieve a higher level of cinema cred? In many ways, yes.
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Although the 1984 film "Footloose"wasn't necessarily embraced by the critics of its time, the movie managed to become a cult classic alongside other flicks about teenage empowerment. It goes without saying that director and co-writer Craig Brewer ("Hustle and Flow" and "Black Snake Moan") and his cast had big shoes to fill with this year's remake.
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If you're hoping that the new documentary "Sarah Palin: You Betcha!" has at least a little of the humor and bite of Michael Moore's stinging "Roger&Me," you'll be sorely disappointed. Instead, the latest collaboration from longtime British documentarians Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill is suffering from a bad case of freezer burn from start to finish.
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Gus Van Sant's "Restless" is predicated on an old movie truism — the quirkiest romances begin at funerals. That's where Enoch (Henry Hopper) meets Annabel (Mia Wasikowska). He's a morbidly curious funeral-crashing teenager who lives in a rundown mansion and wears black clothes from another era.
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"The Ides of March," George Clooney's latest civics lesson as actor and director, is a down and dirty politics-behind-closed-doors tale. It's about a campaign professional (Ryan Gosling) letting his idealism get in the way of his professionalism. And it's about disillusionment, ugly pragmatism and back-room deals in this mass media/social media/no secrets age.
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"Real Steel" is "Transformers" meets "The Champ," a cute, occasionally sentimental father-son bonding picture with Rock'Em Sock'Em boxing robots as its backdrop. And if that doesn't scare you off, by all means, read on. It is science-fiction and it does star Hugh Jackman. And there's a little more beneath the surface than just the crowd-pleasing fights.
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Born in northern China and raised in Beijing, Sally Liu came of age in the 1990s and dreamed of becoming a filmmaker. With the world's most populous nation swelling with thousands of new cinemas, big-budget productions proliferating and box-office grosses multiplying, the movies in China aren't just glamorous, they're a serious growth industry.
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The label long ago coined for those who can act, sing and dance was "triple threat." But there aren't many of those folks working in the movies these days. Hugh Jackman is one. And whenever he gets nostalgic for Hollywood's "Golden Age" when triple threats walked the soundstages, he thinks of China.
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Bad timing allowed "What's Your Number?," a mildly raunchy romantic comedy about a woman lamenting her sexual history as she resolves to finally save herself for Mr. Right, to come out mere months after the too-similar "Bridesmaids." And bad timing is evident on the screen, as well, as this comedy struggles to find a tone, footing or momentum.
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Writer Stephen Kendrick and writer-director-actor Alex Kendrick have mastered building suspense, hiding surprises, action beats (chases, shootouts) and even humor, and that makes their latest faith-based drama a cut and many, many edits above "Fireproof" in simple movie terms. Still, the sophomore jinx isn't avoided.
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Set in Iran but shot in Lebanon, for obvious reasons, the coming-of-age drama "Circumstance" stars two photogenic and expressive marvels, Nikohl Boosheri and Sarah Kazemy, as teenage friends and lovers living under the thumb of an oppressive regime. Modern-day Tehran comes alive, despite stilted pacing and plotting.
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"Machine Gun Preacher," starring Gerard Butler, is the kind of movie that makes audience members want to get up and join the fight. The film, based on the life of Sam Childers, tells the story of one man who created an orphanage in Southern Sudan to aid those children who lost their families because of rebel attacks.
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As frightening as the word is, you don't put "cancer" in a movie's title if you want people to come see it. Thus, the serio-comic "I'm With Cancer" was renamed "50/50." Those are our hero's odds of surviving the malignancy that he's just found on his back. The story is loosely based on the experience Will Reiser, who wrote the film.
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If you're ticked off at Netflix because of its recent price increases and service changes, the good news is you've got plenty of options for streaming video. The bad news is that none offers exactly what you get from Netflix. Netflix's streaming video service has won plenty of fans and subscribers in recent years, but recent changes have some miffed.
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Former California governor, four-time Mr. Universe and big box-office draw Arnold Schwarzenegger is set to publish a memoir with Simon and Schuster, the publisher announced Thursday. The book is tentatively titled "Total Recall" – and despite the double-entendre on one of his best films, "I'll Be Back" might be even more appropriate.
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It takes a special skill to make a film feel as soft and light as a summer breeze, and yet that is what French director Jean Becker accomplishes with "My Afternoons With Margueritte," a glimpse into the everyday of two ordinary lives. This little gem is all about the nature of chance encounters and how they can change us in unexpected ways.
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It takes all of five minutes for Taylor Lautner to lose his shirt in "Abduction" — and about 10 more before the film becomes so awful that the uncontrollable laughter bursts forth. Lautner, who shot to superstardom virtually overnight playing the werewolf Jacob in the "Twilight" series, was paid a whopping $7.5 million to star in this generic action picture.
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The story of how Winter, a New Smyrna Beach, Flordia, dolphin, lost her tail and became the star attraction of the Clearwater Aquarium becomes an adorable kids' film in "Dolphin Tale." No, this isn't how it really happened. But director Charles Martin Smith ("Air Bud") wrings plenty of heartfelt tears and a few laughs out of this fictionalized account.
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"Killer Elite" is a guy's movie and makes no bones about it. It's an old-school straight-no-chaser action picture about an ex-CIA agent who hunts down assorted troopers from the British Special Forces to save an American agent from a vengeful Arab. The film's pits Jason Statham against Clive Owen, Britain's top action stars.
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The long-delayed film is an adaptation of "Moneyball," a highly-acclaimed but largely plot-less book about general manager Billy Beane's attempt to thwart major league baseball's big budget teams in the early 2000s by running his shoestring Oakland A's with an emphasis on statistical analysis and an eye for bargain-bin players.
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Lautner has spent the past four years as Jacob in the "Twilight Saga," enjoying and enduring the adulations of millions thanks to these high-school vampire blockbusters. But with the series winding down, Lautner was ready to take his first starring role "outside of the franchise." The film he chose was an action picture, "Abduction," which opens Friday.
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Brad Pitt knows the parallels are obvious: baseball and the movie biz – two industries where the complex algorithms of stats and star power, home runs and box-office hits, are endlessly worked on and worried over. Old ways of doing business, based on gut instinct and high-priced players, give way to leaner, meaner, formula-driven concepts.
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On the outskirts of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, a 75-acre former communist-era studio will soon draw a contingent of Hollywood heavies including Sylvester Stallone, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. to begin filming the second installment of hit movie "The Expendables."
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Equal measures smug and savage, Rod Lurie's infuriating remake of Sam Peckinpah's vengeance thriller "Straw Dogs" still packs a visceral punch. An exploitation picture built on redneck cliches and big-city liberal outrage, it's not all bad. But it is a pretty unpleasant wallow in the obvious.
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"Lion King" was the movie that Disney insiders regard as a high-water mark for traditional Disney animation. That cell-animated (with some digital sequences) classic earns a nice 3-D dressing up in "The Ling King 3D," Disney's two-week re-issue of the film, opening Friday. That's to be followed by an early October release on BluRay.
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"I Don't Know How She Does It" is an old-fashioned spin on the manic pace of motherhood for today's working woman. The novelty here is that it's that "Sex and the City" conspicuous consumer Sarah Jessica Parker "discovering" what Allison Pearson's novel didn't exactly discover, either – parents are perpetually overworked and over-committed.
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"Drive" is not your typical action movie, and it's definitely not for the faint of heart. Sporting a shiny Members Only-style jacket, Ryan Gosling plays the unassuming leading man. He's a quiet guy who is actually never named. He is known only as "the driver" as he wanders around Los Angeles, living a double life.
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The mythical Nike Mag — the futuristic, light-up, athletic shoe from 2015 that has captured the fascination of sneakerheads and movie fans ever since Marty McFly donned a pair in "Back to the Future Part II" in 1989 — is finally a reality. There are only 1,500 pairs in existence and they can be bought only via auction through eBay.
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"That was the most amazing thing I've ever seen," said Jonathan Levine, the director of the new movie "50/50," after receiving a standing ovation from the audience at the Toronto International Film Festival. There seemed to be an extra amount of good will in the room for the cancer buddy comedy when it made its world premiere here Monday.
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There are many ways an actor or director might unwind after a long day of shooting. When Ryan Gosling and director Nicolas Winding Refn would wrap 12 hours of shooting on "Drive," their new thriller about a man who cruises around Los Angeles, they'd do the last thing you'd expect: They'd get in a car and cruise around Los Angeles.
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Austin Vickers is a Valley-based writer, producer and life coach – a career that came after years as general counsel for large, international corporations. He wrote and produce "The People vs. the State of Illusion" which opens at Harkins Camelview on Friday, September 9. He recently spoke by e-mail with College Times about the film, its goals and what comes next.
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On any given day, "PvtSoI" tells us, the human body receives 4 billion different stimuli, in the form of sight, sounds, smells, physical sensations and tastes, but our brain only processes about 2,000 of those stimuli. If we're processing less than .001 percent of the information given to us in a given day, how we can we accurately assess what is real in our lives and what is not?
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Director Steven Soderbergh's film looks at what happens when a fast-killing virus infects most of the planet. This story is told through a cast that includes Laurence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Marion Cotillard, Elliott Gould and lots of other actors you'll recognize.
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Take half a dozen good-looking but under-credited actors, surround them with horror hacks and turn them loose in the bayou to be hunted by "Lockjaw," a half-gator/ half-man beast who feeds on skinny dippers and those stupid enough to camp next to haunted houses, and you've got yourself a movie.
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AMC, the second-largest theater company in the nation, will open the company's ninth dine-in theater and first in the Valley September 7, equipped with a bar for the general public in its lobby and two different dine-in experiences, the Cinema Suites and Fork and Spoon auditoriums. It's dinner and a movie in one.
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A cast of talented actors cannot keep Vera Farmiga's directorial debut, "Higher Ground" from dragging on. The film follows the journey of one woman, Corinne (played by Farmiga, herself), as she struggles to find her faith and understand what it means to truly believe both in God and the people who surround her.
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"Warrior" has a central focus on the sport of mixed martial arts fighting, but there is a deeper plot here about family and hardships. Tom Hardy ("Inception) stars as Tommy Conlon, the youngest son of retired boxer and former alcoholic Paddy Conlon (Nick Nolte). One night, Tommy shows up at his father's house and says he wants to start fighting again.
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With two muscular, physical actors brimming with testosterone cast as brawling brothers in "Warrior," the set of the mixed martial arts drama could have been trash-talk central. "You mean like, ‘Hey, I just got cast as the new ‘Mad Max?' How do you like that, Aussie?' And ‘Oh, yeah? I just got a role in ‘The Great Gatsby,'" Joel Edgerton cracks.
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In "Contagion," the fast, frightening global pandemic drama opening Friday, Jude Law is a mad blogger, a Web journo whose raging posts against Big Pharm and Big Gov turn incendiary when people start dropping like flies. Is Law's Alan Krumwiede prophet or paranoiac? A voice of sanity in the chaos and dread, or a nutter?
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By selecting Murphy, the academy is returning to its comedic host roots. The academy attempted to court younger viewers, hiring James Franco and Anne Hathaway to host the 83rd Academy Awards in February. Franco was roundly trounced by critics for his lackluster performance; reviews were kinder toward Hathaway.
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"The Debt" is interesting, thrilling, suspenseful and emotional; and it rides those traits through its entirety. Helen Mirren plays Rachel Singer, a former Israeli spy who, along with a band of colleagues, is sent to Berlin to track down and kill Nazi war criminal Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen), known as the Surgeon of Birkenam, who mutilated Jewish people in the name of science.
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Calling "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy" a romantic comedy is an injustice to the film because even the romantic parts are pure hilarity. This is pure comedy, really. This movie is really made because of its cast of actors and because the script is well-written with great comedic timing. And in the wake of some less-than-stellar summer blockbusters, a gut-busting chuckle is a welcome sight indeed.
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Actor Tyler Labine, a veteran of TV with spots on shows like "Invasion," "Reaper" and "Sons of Tucson," recently spoke with College Times about his role as the slacker sidekick McCrudden in the new film "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy" and how it was hard for him to keep a straight face – let alone not be star-struck – acting alongside Jason Sudeikis, Will Forte and David Koechner.
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Want to see a movie, get a meal and a drink - all for free? College Times and AMC Dine-In Theatres Esplanade 14 is giving readers the opportunity to do just that on Saturday, September 3. There are no restrictions (other than age/PG13). You can see all 3 films and have 3 free meals if you desire. Seriously. No strings attached. Just because we love you. Here's how.
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The movie year is 1983. The Oscar contenders include "The Big Chill," "Yentl," "Silkwood." The winner is "Terms of Endearment." Across the country, all the good little boys and girls line up to see "Return of the Jedi," with its furry Ewoks. Then, in December, like a 20-ton hunk of crack plopped in the placid millpond of American movies, comes "Scarface."
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"The Help" continued to surge at the box office this weekend, but Hurricane Irene still did some serious damage to overall movie attendance. Upon its debut in early August, the adaptation of Kathryn Stockett's popular novel opened behind "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," but the film has since worked its way into the No. 1 spot at the box office for two consecutive weekends.
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Big breaks rarely happen quite this way: Comic book artist and aspiring director Troy Nixey submitted his short "Latchkey's Lament" to Oscar-nominated filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, looking for guidance and feedback. What he received instead was a shot to direct his first feature, Friday's "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark," an update of the 1973 TV movie of the same name.
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"Life, Above All" is a story featuring previously unknown actors in a relatively unknown setting for most people. That could be a recipe for disaster, but this powerful film couldn't be further from that. Khomotso Manyaka stars as Chanda, a teenager living in South Africa with her mother Lillian (Lerato Mvelase) and her two younger siblings, Iris and Soly.
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"Senna" is a documentary with the pace of a thriller, a story of motors and machines that is beyond compelling because of the intensely human story it tells. Brazil's Ayrton Senna was the boy genius of Formula One racing, winner of three world championships before dying in a crash in 1994 at age 34, a driver current and former Formula One racers recently voted the greatest who ever lived.
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Writer-producer Luc Besson gives us a parody of his earliest hits "La Femme Nikita" and "The Professional" with "Colombiana," a lady-assassin star vehicle for "Avatar's" blue angel, Zoe Saldana. See Zoe kill. See Zoe strip. Many times. See Zoe shower , a PG-13 shower. See Zoe dance seductively all by herself. See Zoe go for a swim. With sharks. In a sexy swimsuit.
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Even with a first-time director and a lead actress who's comfortable doing mostly television, "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark" takes viewers on leaps and bounds of fright and terror. That director Troy Nixey's first feature-length film takes a script from Guillermo del Toro and makes it come alive is a feat, considering del Toro's a modern-day master at making creatures who go bump in the night.
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The film is shot beautifully and is visually intriguing, but the plot lacks a central line in reality. "Bellflower" comes off as this weird reflectionary piece about love, loss, infidelity and friendship with a bit of violence thrown into the mix, a combination that just doesn't seem to work on the big screen as well as it might on paper.
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When Evan Glodell started writing the script for his film "Bellflower" back in 2003, he sold everything, was in debt and homeless, all to devote his time to his first feature-length film. He lived that way for about five years until the film finally went into production in 2008. In those in-between years, he kind of thought he lost his mind. Now, his first film is generating plenty of buzz.
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Charming and good for a laugh, "Our Idiot Brother" is a movie perfect for its star Paul Rudd because it is full of that awkward and off-the-cuff humor he has always deftly brought to the big screen. Rudd stars as Ned, a "biodynamic" farmer who also wheels and deals in a certain type of greenery. He gets caught selling marijuana to a uniformed cop – that's just how Ned is – and goes to jail for eight months.
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For the last five years, Jesse Peretz has been in director jail. While he didn't actually sit behind steel bars, he was exiled, he said, to a place where "the phone doesn't ring a lot" after the 2006 release of "The Ex," a romantic comedy he directed starring Zach Braff that earned scathing reviews and grossed only $3.1 million at the domestic box office.
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At the premiere of "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" last month, a clutch of impassioned animal activists gathered on Hollywood Boulevard. But they weren't there to throw red paint on fur-coat-wearing celebrities. Instead, one demonstrator — dressed in a full-body monkey suit — had arrived with a sign complimenting the filmmakers: "Thanks for not using real apes!"
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"Conan the Barbarian," starring the excellent rippling chisel of Jason Momoa, is brutal, bloody beyond belief, and has no socially redeeming value. So it is with a certain amount of guilt that I say it's kind of a wicked blast to watch, especially if you're in the mood for some righteous revenge. For those who decry gratuitous violence, this is not a flick for you.
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Miranda July writes, directs and stars in her second feature film, a strange story about a 30-something woman, Sophie, who is in a stale relationship with a 30-something man, Jason (Hamish Linklater). The couple decides to rescue a cat from a shelter, but they can't take it home for a month because it has an injured paw and needs to be monitored for a while.
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In a new twist on the romantic comedy, "One Day" travels across twenty years following two people destined for love but fighting to get there. Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess play college graduates Emma and Dexter. All throughout college she has a crush on him, but doesn't let on. Twists and turns mold the rest of their relationship and, with a clever directorial hand, the film.
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Lone Scherfig didn't want to upset fans of the book with big changes. But the 52-year-old director had to make sure the days in the book where nothing really happens didn't create lulls in the film. "This is where I really had the chance to turn the film into cinema. I wanted to make these time jumps work by making them as interesting to look at as possible," Scherfig says.
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Remaking a classic movie is a tough job, because staying true to the original is hard to do – if it's too similar, some say it's just a copycat, and if it's too different, some say it should just be a stand-alone movie. "Fright Night" walks the fine line between both, and does well holding its own against the 1985 original.
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The news last week that Disney was hitting the stop button on a planned reboot of "Lone Ranger" with Johnny Depp was greeted by a chorus of surprised reactions around Hollywood, followed by tentative explanations. The consensus feeling in Hollywood is that, whatever the other doubts, the main concern was a matter of dollars and cents.
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The film is thrust into a world of high-class hotels and a marble-bound, jewel-encrusted, leather- and silk-adorned mansion in the middle of Baghdad where one man must serve as a targeted leader's body double, but not without some dangerous twists and revealing character developments along the way.
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