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Here’s the thing: *Calendar Girls* will invariably be compared to *The Full Monty.* It’s charming English-type people getting naked for a good cause, so how could it not be? But not to put down *The Full Monty,* which is a lovely little film, or men — some of my best friends are male, after all — but there’s a world of difference between *Monty* and *Girls,* and that difference is the one between how male and female nudity are depicted onscreen.
Have you heard? The 1950s were tyrannically conformist. Women were horribly oppressed. All that underwear — girdles and bullet bras and such — was like a prison. And everyone’s minds were even more shackled than their floppy bits. It’s downright startling, isn’t it? I mean, who knew?
The words I keep coming back to, the ones that seem to fit this most astonishing of films best, are ‘terrible’ and ‘awful.’ The old-fashioned senses of the words are what I’m talking about: Peter Jackson has given us a grandly eloquent film that inspires more terror and more awe than anything I’ve seen in a long time. I can compare my reaction to it only with the moviegoing experiences of my childhood, when the hugeness, the all-encompassing-ness of movies in all ways — emotionally, viscerally, visually, aurally — first astounded me, when ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ and Darth Vader’s stormtroopers horrified me to such a degree that I can still feel it.
I can’t say that I actually have fond memories of *Battlestar Galactica.* I have only vague memories of the show itself, of shag hairdos, and Starbuck getting caught with some chick or other in a Viper launch tube, and the cool robot dog, and a kid named Boxey which I thought was kind of a neat name for some inexplicable reason, and bits from after the show jumped the shark, when they found Earth, and all the colonials could jump really high because of some ridiculous thing to do with gravity. Or was that in *V*? It’s all kind of a blur.
Quite possibly the most preposterous film of the year. It doesn’t start out that way, of course. No, it seems at first that director Norman Jewison (The Hurricane) is adding to his string of strong thrillers with a political conscience, but it rapidly descends into inescapable absurdity. As a young man, Frenchman Pierre Brossard (Michael … more…
Shallow, fickle people doing stupid things… and those are the characters we’re supposed to be rooting for. When impossibly popular high-school hottie Paris Morgan (Christina Milian) crashes her mother’s Cadillac SUV, nerdy Alvin Johnson (Nick Cannon) sees his chance: in exchange for spending his own hard-earned, scrimped-and-saved $1500 on parts and doing all the work, … more…
What inspired one of Johannes Vermeer’s most enigmatic paintings, a portrait of a sad, mysterious girl wearing a blue headband and a single earring? This speculative but informed story, based on Tracy Chevalier’s best-selling novel, posits domestic intrigue at the 17th-century Delft household of the painter (Colin Firth: Love Actually) when a new maid, young … more…
Am I the only one who’s tired of seeing Jack Nicholson doing his best Jack Nicholson impersonation? Am I the only person not charmed by Diane Keaton’s typically twitchy, neurotic, uptight intellectual? Am I the only one who doesn’t see, in *Something’s Gotta Give,* two fictional characters who’re crazy about each other but instead two iconic movie stars pretending to be in love for our entertainment?
This exercise in improvisational acting and low-budget on-the-fly filmmaking is more interesting in its ambitions than it is entertaining or intriguing as a story in its own right. Director Straw Weisman set up 24 digicams in 20 rooms of a Hollywood Hills mansion and invited a small army of actors — including John Ritter (Bad … more…
Whaddaya know: it’s a movie about music videos from a hot music-video director, Bille Woodruff, that actually looks and feels like a real movie instead of a frenetic, quick-cut advertisement. Even more surprisingly, it’s a sweetly old-fashioned movie to boot. TV’s Jessica Alba stars as Honey Daniels, a girl from the Bronx who just wants … more…
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