Whenever I see a gay or other LGBT genre movie as strikingly good as Weekend, it makes me ponder gay cinema. The dearth of good movies about gay people is palpable. I am reminded of this sad circumstance every week reviewing movies for an LGBT newspaper, and rarely do I get to write about a…
Hugh Jackman confuses me; and I think about him a lot. I’d say that much of my semi-obsession with him is that he’s ridiculously hot – tall, furry, ruggedly handsome, built like an Olympic athlete, all with a smile that makes you forgive even his worst stinkers, like Van Helsing or Deception. Part is that…
I think one of the weirder genres of film is the disease comedy. Even if the film itself is an organic melding of comedy and tragedy, the idea itself is jarring. Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey is a damn good movie (though a much better play), but it’s a sex comedy about AIDS. I mean, really. The…
Michael Lewis’ 2003 book about how the Oakland Athletics’ general manager Billy Beane used baseball statistics in complex, innovative and surprisingly winning ways was a phenomenal bestseller. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Gamehas remained hugely popular for years, not just because Lewis managed to write a good sports drama but also because he…
I guess if you really want to scare the Bejesus out of audiences, releasing a movie about a mysterious, end-of-the-world viral pandemic on the weekend of the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks is one sure-fire way. Unlike traditional horror movies that revolve around supernatural evil (The Exorcist) or angry psychopaths (Friday the 13th)…
I must admit that going into the theater to see the mixed martial arts movie Warrior, I thought it was based on a true story. I don’t know why I thought this. It may have been its gritty similarity to The Fighter, last-year’s Oscar-winning movie about the real-life boxer Micky Ward and his brother Dicky….
MOVIE REVIEW: I must admit that I walked into The Help expecting to be offended. Because I knew it to be about a young white woman writing a book about the black maids in early 1960s Jackson, Miss., perhaps unfairly I expected it to be a prequel of sorts to The Blind Side. That movie,…
MOVIE REVIEW: Paul Rudd makes me happy like few actors do. He’s in two movies I adore, The 40 Year Old Virgin and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, and two that I really adore, The Object of My Affection and Clueless. His sweet, still boyish (after all these years) face falls nicely somewhere between…
MOVIE REVIEW: About ten minutes into the review screening of the surprisingly moving and not-so-surprisingly entertaining Glee concert movie, I whispered to the Gleek I was allowed to bring, “This is gayer than a leather man in an Easter bonnet.” The hit TV show about a high school show choir from which the concert movie…
MOVIE REVIEW: If your jaw dropped at how realistic, how life-like and creepy Gollum was when you first saw him in The Fellowship of the Ring ten years ago, it will fall open again and your mouth will dry out when you see Caesar, the super smart chimpanzee at the center of Rise of the…
