Tis the season to be holy. Everybody is getting in on Christianity! It’s the hot new fad in movie land, and even if The Nativity Story was aborted by the wire coat hanger of complete disinterest, Hollywood thinks there’s gold to be mined in them thar Jesus Freaks. Fox has already started their new Fox … Continue reading
In Off the Black, Nick Nolte plays a grizzled old ump who makes a controversial call on a high school student ballplayer. Later that night his house gets vandalized by a group of guys – he manages to catch one and march him inside at gunpoint. The vandal? The ballplayer, of course. Nolte offers him … Continue reading
In the last few years Spike Lee has made a heartbreaking documentary, a crowd-pleasing heist film, a terrible comedy no one bothered with and a great, gritty New York City film. It’s been so long since he’s made a controversial movie that he might actually be considered a safe director now. His next film could … Continue reading
The other day we announced that Joe Carnahan, director of Narc and next month’s Smokin’ Aces, would be answering your questions on his blog, smokinjoecarnahan.com. The response was terrific; we got a ton of great questions, which Joe has been answering at a damn quick clip. This is the second installment, and there are more … Continue reading
We all suspected as much, but now it’s official: JJ Abrams will be captaining the Starship Enterprise on its next adventure in space. The guy behind Alias, Mission: Impossible III and, to some extent, Lost, was long involved as a producer on the newest installment of the Star Trek franchise, but directing wasn’t confirmed until … Continue reading
The National Board of Review – the fairly strange and often secretive group of non-critics who give out the awards season’s first honors – has name Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima as the best picture of the year, certainly making Warner Bros glad they moved the thing up from 2007. It also gives the … Continue reading
Steven Spielberg’s spent the last couple of years attaching himself to projects and then walking away. When he’s at his best, he can be attached to as many as 46 different films in any given week. One that he keeps coming back to, though, is a biopic about Abraham Lincoln, which would star Liam Neeson … Continue reading
I’m a bad reporter. When I was at a roundtable interview with George Clooney this weekend, he casually dropped that he and partner Grant Heslov had bought “that Grisham book.” I assumed this was something that had been announced that I had just missed, so I didn’t lob a follow-up. That was dumb. Today Variety … Continue reading
Yesterday we announced that Joe Carnahan, director of Narc and next month’s Smokin’ Aces, would be answering your questions on his blog, smokinjoecarnahan.com. The response was terrific, and I sent off a whole bunch of questions to Joe this morning. The guy didn’t waste any time and he turned them right back around to me, … Continue reading
The first season DVD set of Lost revealed what I suspected all along: ABC’s hit show plays best in chunks, without weeks and weeks of reruns and pre-emptions. The show was a carefully woven character drama that had its own sense of pacing, best appreciated a couple of hours at a time. I expected that … Continue reading