When I was coming out and learning about the various LGBT people who came before me, one of the images I saw repeated the most was the last shot of the absurdist tennis match called the Battle of the Sexes, when then-closeted Billie Jean King backhanded the ball past chauvinist huckster Bobby Riggs’s right and…
I relatively recently became a Los Angeleno, and among the many lessons I have learned since arriving is that the movies that taught me about L.A. are mostly bold, beautiful lies. I have long known that Hollywood is in the business of pablum, artifice and mythmaking; I’m a film critic, after all. But the extent…
Birdman (Or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) One of the great lines – and there are many – in Birdman is spoken by Ed Norton’s lauded method-actor Mike Shiner to Michael Keaton’s blockbuster star Riggan Thomas, who wants to earn respect by appearing on Broadway: “Popularity is the slutty little cousin of prestige.” The scene…
The second of Marc Webb’s reboot of the Spider-Man franchise starts shortly after the events in the previous film. Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield) is a superhero-about-town, trying to balance his heroics with his relationships with Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) and Aunt May (Sally Field). Peter’s childhood friend Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan) is determined to find a…
One of the problems Woody Allen faces when he is trying to defend himself against charges of pedophilia is how often the male protagonists in his films, usually well into middle age, pursue and win the affections of much, much younger women. Most notoriously, he cast himself, at age 42, as a man dating 17-year-old…
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 My biggest peeve with many comic book movies is how much they divert from their source materials. However, Sam Raimi’s three Spider-Man movies, whatever liberties taken with plot points, did not change the essence of Peter Parker and his alter ego: he was a teenage orphan who was bitten by a…
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…
People complained that free blacks were given short shrift in Lincoln; that the Canadians had more involvement in the escape from Iran that was depicted in Argo; that Alfred wasn’t as cartoonish as he was shown in Hitchcock and torture was over-emphasized in Zero Dark Thirty. But so far, there hasn’t been too much buzz…
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – Nominations for the 85th Academy Awards® were announced today (Thursday, January 10) by this year’s Oscar host, Seth MacFarlane, and actress Emma Stone. MacFarlane and Stone announced the nominees at a 5:38 a.m. PT live news conference attended by more than 400 international media representatives. Academy members from each of the…
