I don’t know what to make of Mike White’s presence in a small role in the new film D Train, or of his name in the producing credits. White, who is a successful and talented screenwriter of The Good Girl and School of Rock, first became famous for writing and starring in Chuck and Buck,…
Robert Downey Jr. in Avengers: Age of Ultron The Avengers: Age of Ultron It should come as no surprise to my readers that I have a thing for superheroes. I’ve reviewed nearly every superhero movie released in the last five years, and in “DVR This” I’ve written about just about all of the TV series,…
The 100th anniversary of World War I is passing by in the United States quietly mostly because, I suspect, how little the United States suffered during that war, compared to Europe and its colonies. Around 17 million soldiers and civilians died during the war’s four years; it wiped away huge swaths of the British, French,…
Hollywood is enthralled with big budget science fiction and fantasy films, particularly those starring superheroes, but despite their technological sophistication few of them do much more than please the eyes and leave you a little hard of hearing. Too much of a good thing is not good. These films have also brought along with them…
I now live five blocks from the giant blue Scientology building in Hollywood, and I often catch a bus at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Vermont Avenue, where young Scientologists, wearing blue blazers and solicitous smiles pass out proselytizing leaflets proclaiming, as all religions do, that they have the true answers to enlightenment. I…
Maybe it’s because I’m about the same age at the characters Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts play in While We’re Young that I so identified with them, their ennui about aging and their adulation of a much younger, fresh and earnest couple played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried. Josh (Stiller) and Cornelia (Watts) have…
People laughed during the preview screening of Get Hard. This is what bothered me most about the comedy featuring Will Ferrell as a clueless finance executive who hires a much more clueful Kevin Hart to prepare him for 10 years in prison. More than how terribly made it is, how pathetic and offensive its humor…
Also playing The second in the Divergent series, a sub-Hunger Games dystopian trilogy about a young woman who is the key to her oppressed society’s freedom, Insurgent is disappointingly worse than its predecessor. Considering the cast – the remarkable Shailene Woodley as our heroine Tris, studly Theo James as her boyfriend Four, Kate Winslet as…
Sometimes, you have to do it straight. I don’t mean that you need to be heterosexual – perish the thought – but rather that you sometimes need to resist the temptation to change a classic. You don’t have to set Hamlet in 21st century Manhattan, sing “Billie Jean” as a guitar ballad, turn Hansel and…
When Neill Blomkamp arrived with District 9 in 2009, he was heralded as the next great science fiction filmmaker. The film about apartheid policies against deceptively scary looking aliens in a slightly futuristic South Africa was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, most deservedly. Because of how good District 9 was, his not…
