Month: October 2004

Talk about a handicap. Not the comedian-turned-serious-actor one, which was dispatched when Jamie Foxx turned in a smart, subtle performance in this summer’s Collateral. No: To portray a beloved cultural figure in a big-budget, Oscar-bound biopic (translation: pots of money and tons of prestige are riding on this one), Foxx divests himself of a sensitive … more…

“Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear” would sound like a threat to poor Dennis Weaver, who’s just driving along a desert highway, minding his own business, when an 18-wheeler leaps out from behind a rock, like Wiley Coyote after the Road Runner, only way more competent. This is, famously, Steven Spielberg’s (Catch … more…

The spooky kid here? He doesn’t see dead people, he *is* dead people. And that’s how *Birth* differs from *The Sixth Sense.* Oh, and *Birth* is quite horrendously bad, too.

I’m not a huge fan of David Gordon Green — I found his much-lauded debut *George Washington* ponderously and self-consciously “arty” and his recent *All the Real Girls* simply dull. But with *Undertow,* Green (and fellow screenwriters Lingard Jervey and Joe Conway) attempts narrative, quite a bold move for a filmmaker who’d seemed content merely to photograph in a painterly way ugly or merely unseen ordinariness. He’s still doing that here, looking at people and places with a fresh, uncritical eye, but there’s more story to go with it this time. Call me bourgeois, but I like a story.

These are flawed and fascinating people: *Stage Beauty*’s Edward Kynaston, the based-on-reality Restoration-era (1660s) actor who played female roles at a time when women were forbidden to do so; and *Being Julia*’s Julia Lambert, a 1930s W. Somerset Maugham character treading the boards in the West End. Both are superstars, coddled and protected in their little bubbles of fame; everyone wants to bask in their reflected glory, which makes it harder, one supposes, for them to avoid always playing a part…

Be very afraid: It’s Goldie Hawn with a twang. Aw, Hawn’s (The Banger Sisters) fine, actually, as an ex-con mom frantic to save her child from being adopted away from her — they frown on felony moms in the state of Texas, apparently — but it kinda smells like a Lifetime MOW in here. This … more…