Next year’s prestige pictures keep on castin’! Yesterday, we learned of Jamie Foxx’s decision to play crazy and homeless; today, we’ve got Nicole Kidman and Ralph Fiennes joining the high-toned adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader. The Academy might as well reserve a good eight to ten nominations for this sucker. Check out this pedigree: … Continue reading
Getting indignant over remakes of our favorite movies may be old hat, but it’s not always unwarranted. Remember "The Case of The Film-Going Fuck Chassis Who Mistook Mel Brooks’s To Be Or Not to Be for an Original"? Though this is hardly epidemic, the rise of the amateur critic via the internet is endangering the … Continue reading
Whenever a documentary breaks life down into a battle of good versus evil, it’s usually an indication that the filmmaker has plunged headlong into not only subjectivity, but prejudice. This has been especially true of the recent spate of political documentaries; in the absence of an overriding, absolute truth or a smoking gun, many documentarians, … Continue reading
Just when Jamie Foxx gets back into my good graces with a nice, nuanced performance in The Kingdom, he goes and indulges his worst glory-seeking interests by taking the lead in The Soloist, a true-life biopic (ugh) centered on the heartbreaking tale of Nathaniel Ayers, who tumbled from being a Juilliard prodigy to schizophrenic and … Continue reading
Y’all know me. Know how I feel about men fightin’ in the nude. And now you know how David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen – with their second collaboration, Eastern Promises – feel about it, too (courtesy of The Globe and Mail‘s Liam Lacey): "But the scene that will undoubtedly prove the major talking point of … Continue reading
I have a feeling time is of the essence on this story, so here, sans swipes at Batman Begins‘ moronic third act, are a bunch of highly unauthorized pictures from The Dark Knight (you can find more at Worst Previews): "Nope, that’s just a zit, not a Manitou." "I’m sorry, Joker, but I’m a big … Continue reading
Here’s something slightly different from Der Komedy Kommandant Judd Apatow: a full-blown parody of music biopics. Judging from its just-released trailer, Walk Hard is going to play much more broadly in the Adam McKay/Will Ferrell vein. And following his bravura turn as the puppy-dog faithful Cal Naughton, Jr. in Talladega Nights, I can’t think of … Continue reading
After Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Sex *But Were Afraid to Ask, Innerspace and the "Parasites Lost" episode of Futurama, can a straight-faced remake of Fantastic Voyage work for the average moviegoer? What’s that? The average moviegoer is aware of neither the original nor its parodies? Well, then, let’s shrink up some C-list … Continue reading
In case you’re actually trying to keep track of the various screenwriter factions, there’s John Wells’s Writers Co-Op, Christopher McQuarrie’s 1.3.9 and, now, Fox’s Writing Partners. If you want me to handicap which faction has the best opportunity to make the most coin movies, the smart money has to be on Writing Partners, which is … Continue reading
In what can only be viewed as good news for a group of veteran filmmakers in desperate need of critical re-validation, The New York Film Festival has tapped Brian De Palma’s Redacted, John Landis’s Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project and Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead for their 2007 lineup. These films … Continue reading