BEOWULF SKIPS VENICE
There is no movie here. The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer does many things most movies do in that it features a variety of characters striving to attain a variety of objectives, many of which are in direct opposition to one another. This is called conflict, and, in a classical narrative motion picture, … Continue reading
The story of a man wrecking his life over an invention as ingenious and trivial as the intermittent windshield wiper is incredibly ripe for tragicomic satire, and that’s why I wish a wit as sharp as Preston Sturges were still around to turn the odd life of Robert Kearns into a quirky feature film. The … Continue reading
I would never push a seventy-two-year-old woman down a flight of stairs without provocation. Marvel Prez Sez "No More Auteurs!" During yesterday’s Iron Man set visit (I am embargoed, so please stow all questions), Kevin Feige, president of production for Marvel Studios, was surprisingly candid when it came to the subject of the company’s Hulk … Continue reading
From Trois 3: The Escort to I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer to Stomp the Yard, Sylvain White has, in his very young career, demonstrated that he will direct anything provided there’s a steady paycheck in it – which makes him the Winston Zeddmore of the American film industry. In a way, there’s … Continue reading
One of the pluses of Stephen Sommers’s Van Helsing underperforming a few years ago is that it kyboshed the director’s attempt to single-handedly travesty Universal’s "classic monsters" catalogue. Had he succeeded, we wouldn’t have Mark Romanek’s and Andrew Kevin Walker’s The Wolf Man (starring Benicio Del Toro) looming on the horizon. We also wouldn’t have … Continue reading
What the hell happened to the African-American filmmaking renaissance? In the 1980s, there was Spike Lee, Charles Burnett, Wendell B. Harris Jr., Robert Townsend and Charles Lane. A few years later, Carl Franklin, The Hughes Brothers, Mario Van Peebles, John Singleton and Rusty Cundieff got into the mix. Then, late in the 1990s, there was … Continue reading
Only a deeply pathetic creature would brag about scooping Variety on Rachel Weisz being cast in Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones, so I’ll just pretend I didn’t bring it up last Saturday in my cockamamie new column (after sitting on it for two weeks). Since I was more than a little wrong about Warner Brothers … Continue reading
Holy Christ on Oprah, if this ain’t the most mindblowingly awesome poster I’ve seen in years! If only I had any confidence in director Hyung-rae Shim delivering the goods. I mean, if the movie is a quarter as astounding as the above image, it’d still my number one must-see of Summer 2007. My sweet lord! … Continue reading