After watching 3:10 To Yuma, I could imagine Russell Crowe in the Christian Bale role, playing a one-footed rancher whose hardscrabble life has left him without hope and only one slim chance to ever be a hero, but I couldn’t imagine Bale in the Crowe role, playing an outlaw who relishes his badness and takes … Continue reading
Though I have the utmost respect for director David Frankel and screenwriter Scott Frank, I cannot countenance another film based on a memoir of personal growth hitched to an author’s relationship with a dog. The emotional distance traveled is usually very small, while the narrative always ends with the faithful, furry companion keeling over. It’s … Continue reading
Judd Apatow’s Title Judd Apatow’s Weekend Judd Apatow’s Per Screen Judd Apatow’s Total 1 Judd Apatow’s Superbad $31,200,000 $10,583 $31,200,000 2 Rush Apatow 3 $21,830,000 (-55.5%) $5,778 $88,153,000 3 The Apatow Ultimatum $18,986,000 (-42.3%) $5,129 $163,806,000 4 The Simpsons Movie $6,675,000 (-40.8%) $2,111 $165,117,000 5 The Apatow Invasion $6,000,000 $2,161 $6,000,000 6 Apatowdust $5,244,000 (-42.8%) … Continue reading
Thanks to an inopportune slot in the August release schedule, I can’t help stacking The Ten up against Superbad, and it’s never going to win that contest. The difference is that while The Ten, a comic collection of stories based on the ten commandments, is funny and unwilling to set arbitrary content limitations and taboos, … Continue reading
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
Over the last few weeks I’ve seen Superbad more than once and had innumerable conversations about it. The dialogues all start the same way: ‘is it actually funny?’ When I emphatically assure friends, enemies and Republicans that it is fucking hilarious, not merely ‘funny’, I’m always met with the same rebuttal: ‘really?’ I can see … 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
What divides a disaster from a fiasco, artistically speaking? What is the line between a failure and a complete pants shitting? Whatever separates just plain fucking a movie up from inflicting pain on audiences, The Invasion lands firmly on the worst side of it. A terrible movie by any reasonable standards, The Invasion is a … 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
Jason have Midnight Violence Rock ‘N’ Roll!