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The supremely underappreciated Barry Pepper (25th Hour) gets his Cast Away — or maybe it’s his Dances with Wolves — with this captivating Canadian film about a bush pilot and WWII veteran in the remote, arctic Northwest Territories in 1953 who crashes in the middle of cold, frozen nowhere. He’s not quite alone — his … more…
Imagine if Christopher Guest had all sense of compassion excised and saw fit to remove his frontal lobe — you know, the area of the brain that prevents us from doing and saying every damn outrageous thing that crosses our minds. Then he might make a film like Hacks, a refreshingly aggressive and offensive mockumentary … more…
It’s very easy to puncture the self-importance of Hollywood types, and this HBO original series never fails to take that easy route, though it cloaks itself in a veneer of intelligence and insight. Vince Chase is the hottest thing to hit the movies since Johnny Depp, but Adrian Grenier (Hart’s War) fails to make us … more…
This isn’t just a movie. You don’t have to have been married by a justice of the peace in Jedi robes or have named your dog Boba or have spent the last three weeks on a line outside the Ziegfeld or Grauman’s Chinese Theater to feel that. If you’re any kind of geek and you’re around my age — 35 — you’ve spent pretty much your whole life waiting for this moment. It was nine years ago — 1996 — that George Lucas announced he’d be making a new *Star Wars* trilogy, and if you’re like me, hearing this was like being eight years old again and being told to wait patiently for summer vacation or your birthday. It won’t be finished until *2005*? How can I possibly be expected to wait for that kind of eternity to find out how Darth Vader becomes Darth Vader?
Here’s what you have to do in order to survive *The Star Wars Holiday Special*: Don’t watch it. If you must, then 1) Have alcohol or some other inebriating substance close to hand — a rock to bang against your skull will do in a pinch. And 2) Remember that your tender 10-year-old self probably witnessed this atrocity the one time it aired on TV to unsuspecting, nay, *eager* audiences, and suffered such psychological trauma that your brain blocked off the memory in order to spare you further harm; know that you may suddenly experience violent flashbacks to Christmas 1978 as that mental wound is viciously reopened.
Just when you think the genre of the humiliation comedy can’t reach any new depths of repugnance and depravity, along comes Will Ferrell, the doofus king of self-debasement in the name of entertainment, to prove you wrong.
With its clear and obvious choices — think Eddie Izzard’s ‘cake? or death?’ bit — *Unleashed* really is a fairy tale next to *Crash,* where half the time when you think you’ve got a grasp on what’s the ‘right’ thing to do and the ‘right’ way to live, you turn out to be wrong, even if the other guy is wrong, too.
Is the movie silly? Yup. Even maybe kinda dumb? You betcha. I laughed anyway — I admit it. I think maybe it’s cuz I’ve missed Martin Short all these long years since SCTV. Remember Ed Grimley? I loved him. His Nathan Therm on Saturday Night Live? (Of course I remember Nathan Therm? What makes you … more…
This is it right here, people: the ‘ownership society’ our so-called leaders think we ‘deserve,’ an unregulated, unpoliced Wild West of corporate hegemony. Fraud, greed, arrogance, powermongering? All part of the game, folks, all part of the game. It’s every man for himself, the way God intended, and God help you if you were so fucking stupid that you let yourself be born with anything less than a platinum spoon in your mouth and powerful connections out the wazoo. Cuz most of us are gonna end up serfs if this stuff continues.
Hey, if you’re into whiny soap operas about self-obsessed people who never shut up complaining about how miserable they are, have at it. But if you get enough of that in real life or just don’t care to spend a couple hours with fake people who are that exasperating, no one would blame you for … more…
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