Can we talk about Robert Downey Jr.’s beard for a minute? It’s not quite pencil thin, but it’s distressingly narrow; a strip that connects tweezed sideburns with a manicured mustache and a chin strap. It’s decidedly not fashionable; the look really hasn’t been hip since the late 1990s, which is when the third installment of…
It has been a while since I saw something on screen and said out loud, “Oh, my God.” But I did that while I watched Graceland, Ron Morales’s taught indie thriller about kidnapping, child prostitution and poverty in Manila. Early in the film, Marlon (Arnold Reyes), the driver for the rich and sleazy Congressman Manuel…
Oblivion The screening at which I saw Oblivion was, as many advanced screenings are, hosted by a local radio station that had given away passes to contest winners. Usually, someone low on the totem pole at the station gives away T-shirts and tries to get the crowd excited that they got to see a movie…
In the late ‘90s, Danny Boyle directed two of John Hodge’s screenplays in a row that made them and their star Ewan McGregor famous. Trainspotting – the brilliant, disgusting, kaleidoscopic examination of a crew of Scottish heroin addicts – is better known, but Shallow Grave, a post-modern Hitchcock thriller about morally troubled Londoners, is just…
Before I delved into Tyler Perry’s hysterically moralistic potboiler Temptation, I need to tell you I am going to spoil the plot in this review, because in order for you to know just how awful the movie is, I need to let you know about its ending. You’ve been warned. Like most of Perry’s movies,…
I miss the days when movies occasionally had long weird names like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar. The long name certainly didn’t indicate excellence, but rather a quirky nature; this was not meant to be a mainstream movie. Those usually…
Spring Breakers I saw Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine’s perverse exploitation art film, with five bears and a couple hundred teenagers who thought they were seeing a Tarentino-fied Where the Boys Are. That said, I doubt any of those kids have ever heard of Where the Boys Are, the 1960 film starring George Hamilton and Yvette…
The night before the screening of The Croods, the marvelous animated film about a prehistoric family overcoming their fear of the world, a friend of mine said, “It’s just going to be a bunch of old jokes stolen from The Flintstones.” I can definitely understand that fear, and I don’t think I could be paid…
Oz the Great and Powerful When I was a kid, CBS would show The Wizard of Oz every March, and my parents would let my brother and me stay up way past our bedtime to see it. (We had to brush our teeth and get into our pajamas first.) While Star Wars, Superman, and ET…
During the first third of so of Jack the Giant Slayer, among the battalion who accompany Jack on the quest to rescue the princess and kill some giants is one particularly handsome, rather strapping bald-headed knight who has a couple of lines before meeting his demise. While I was reading through the IMDb page for…
