film criticism by maryann johanson | since 1997
Deeply moving, truly tragic; a biography with a keenly journalistic but hugely sympathetic eye. Powerful compassion and a get-up-and-dance deployment of Houston’s music may well bring her a new generation of fans.
[This post is not behind the paywall.]
Stuff my followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ saw today…
It’s all shark attacks on Discovery, ice road truckers on the History Channel, and Honey Boo Boo on what used to be known as The Learning Channel. WTF?
Would that make it too confusing to know which is the “real” version? Or would it be barely different from the “director’s cut” versions we often get on DVD?
It’s worth noting that the U.K. version of Skins is about to debut its fifth series this week, and the country is, for the most part, still standing. I have seen no wild gangs of feral teenagers, those who were not protected from Skins, roaming the streets, mugging dogs and harrassing old ladies…
Plus: Kevin Smith was lying about how cool it was to direct Bruce Willis in Cop Out; CBS now stealing ideas from German TV; Joan Rivers gets kicked off Fox for bitching about Sarah Palin; more…
So it’s $128 million for Iron Man 2 over its first weekend in North America: that’s down more than $5 million from the Sunday estimates, but it’s still good enough to trump Iron Man’s $98 million opening two years ago. (IM2 dropped 52 percent in the U.K. over its second weekend there, but still easily … more…
My brother Ken forced me to watch this over the weekend, because he thought I’d find it hilarious. So I watched. It bored me, then I started to find it pathetic, and then it made me angry. Take a look: This is one of the most aggressively ignorant things I’ve ever seen, and what’s worse … more…
I saw this headline yesterday at Cinematical: “Paul Verhoeven Working on Untitled Video Game Movie” and I thought: What’s the point of an untitled videogame movie? Isn’t the whole reason for adapting movies from videogames in the first place is that there is built-in name recognition from the gamer fanbase, much in the same way … more…
