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Pierce Brosnan (Laws of Attraction) continues to play Remington Steele, the dashing, elegant gentleman scoundrel, and that’s just fine. Unfortunately, the inelegant doofus Woody Harrelson (EDtv) is part of the package deal for this outing, and if Brosnan is still turning heads, Harrelson is still turning stomachs. Harrelson’s mere presence, as a dumbass FBI agent, … more…
That teaser trailer — you know the one I’m talking about — with the fat old ex-superhero struggling to get into his spandex costume? It left such a bad taste in my mouth whenever I contemplated the film that must go with it. I imagined a gang of former masked crusaders called out of happy retirement, reluctantly huffing and puffing their way back into action, replete with very unfunny cracks about getting fat and old, and probably with an even more unfunny getting-into-shape-a-la-*Rocky* sequence thrown in for good measure.
Jude Law (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow) is irrefutably charming as unrepetant womanizer Alfie Elkins… maybe a bit more genuinely, warmly charming than Alfie should be, actually. Alfie’s swinging lifestyle — complete with moped and Mod neckware — is about as dated as you’d expect from a fairly faithful remake of a 60s … more…
Of course, most respected anthropologists and biologists recognize that the New World Vampire, or *vampirus americanus*, differs greatly from the European species, or *vampirus continentalus*, but few films have recognized that the wide-open spaces of the U.S. produce a vastly altered creature than Europe’s dense urban spaces or intimate, if remote, medieval villages. But years before John Carpenter and the team of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez documented the vampires that dwell in the lonely stretches of the Americas, the criminally underappreciated ethnographer Kathryn Bigelow did it — spookily, grimly, hilariously, gloriously — with 1987’s *Near Dark,* in which a coven of nasty bloodsuckers roam the deserted American Southwest.
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…
I tell ya, if ‘reality TV’ was like this, I’d actually watch it. Let’s put some real bite into *Survivor.* If some unknown, untalented schmuck wants to be an instant celebrity *and* take home a million bucks, he should have to gnaw his own foot off and put a bullet in some other fame-whore first.
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…
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