I first discovered Elaine Stritch on the original Broadway soundtrack to Company, the classic 1970 Stephen Sondheim musical about then-modern love in New York. The plot revolves around perennially single Bobby and his married friends; Stritch played Joanne, the oldest of the group. At the end of the second act she sings “The Ladies Who…
It’s pretty easy to imagine how Pompeii got made. Some screenwriter said, “Gladiator crossed with Titanic. In 3-D.” And I can imagine that if I were a producer with a few boatloads of cash and a throbbing desire to get a few more boatloads that sort of pitch would give me a tingling, ecstatic thrill….
When I told another critic at the screening of Winter’s Tale that it was adapted from a novel many consider to be one of greatest of the last quarter of the 20th century, I was given a blank stare. As in: Really? Are you kidding me? I don’t know this factoid because I’ve read Mark…
The Lego Movie The Lego Movie could be the greatest advertisement ever made. I mean this in two ways: First, after I saw the movie, I walked immediately to Target and bought Legos, the first time I’d given myself and not a child Legos since I was a child myself. I’m sure that the sales…
If you’re like most people, when choosing your Oscar pool picks, you guess on a bunch of them, and definitely for the winners of the three short film awards. For many years, the short films were nearly impossible to see; the compilations of all of the nominees often didn’t show up at theaters until after…
As Gloria in Gloria, Paulina García has such a gravitational effect on your eyes, ears and empathy that it’s nearly impossible not to be enrapt with her, as an actress and as a middle-aged Chilean divorcée coping with both loneliness and with falling in love again. Unfortunately, Gloria was not nominated for the Best Foreign…
Looking, HBO’s new half-hour dramedy about three gay men looking for love and sex in San Francisco, is written by the somewhat unknown Michael Lannan but directed by Andrew Haigh, who was responsible for Weekend, one of the most lauded gay films since Brokeback Mountain. Weekend was a naturalistic, emotionally and physically raw examination of…
Two years ago, Apple introduced Siri, a program for their iPhones that acts like a personal assistant, complete with a female voice. You talk to it, it talks back, and the famous advertisements featured conversations between celebrities and Siri that made her seem, well, intelligent. Anyone who has used Siri knows Siri isn’t as helpful…
Jonah Hill and Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street A couple weeks ago, a woman named Christina McDowell published a scathing essay in LA Weekly attacking The Wolf of Wall Street, its director Martin Scorsese and its star Leonardo DiCaprio. The movie, a three-hour orgiastic comedy about Wall Street con men, is based…
August: Osage County In 2008, Tracy Letts’ three-and-a-half hour comic tragedy August: Osage County won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for Best Play, and it was considered one of the theatrical events of the first decade of the century. Transforming the play into a film was a no-brainer, but whittling three-and-a-half hours to…
