dvd of the week Alexander Payne won another Oscar for his screenplay to this low-key dramedy about a man dealing with finding out that his comatose wife cheated on him, their problematic children, and a large family squabble about what to do with a huge track of Hawaiian land they inherited. George Clooney is more…
dvr this Arguably the funniest movie ever made, Billy Wilder’s movie about cross-dressing musicians (Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis) and the most amazing ditz to ever grace the screen (Marilyn Monroe) was shot at San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado and has as many quotable lines as Casablanca, Wizard of Oz and Star Wars combined. On…
WASHINGTON, DC – The Weinstein Company has announced that “Bully,” the award-winning documentary about the epidemic of school bullying in the United States, will open in theaters on March 30 as “unrated” after nearly 500,000 people signed an extraordinarily popular online petition at Change.org demanding that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) remove the…
It has already been more than a year since the passing of Elizabeth Taylor (March 23, 2011). Although she was of my mother’s age and generation, she managed to stay in the limelight her entire life. There are many things that were extraordinary about Elizabeth Taylor. But the one thing that the LGBT community needs…
Jeff, Who Lives at Home When I was getting my master’s in fiction writing, one of my professors had a rule that has stuck with me for the last 13 years: “You can only have one coincidence per story.” Characters should be the engine of the story; their actions, decisions, quirks and mistakes need to…
There seems to be two ways to turn a TV series into a movie. Either you take the original show seriously and try to replicate the good stuff while making it grittier and widening the scope. This worked for The Untouchables and The Fugitive, while it was an abject failure for The Mod Squad and…
When you cast someone whose last name is Kitsch in a bound-to-be-cheesy sci-fi action film, you’re begging for a review that says that the movie is “kitschy.” And that would be a perfect description of John Carter, since the film is “a worthless imitation of art of recognized value.” (Thank you, Wikipedia, for that apt…
LOS ANGELES, CA – Katy Butler, a bullied high school student from Michigan, delivered more than 200,000 petition signatures to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) today, urging the MPAA to lower its “R” rating on the upcoming film “Bully” to “PG-13.” Butler, who experienced severe bullying in school, says that the MPAA’s “R”…
After seeing Wanderlust, I was exhausted and teary. Happily, it wasn’t a maudlin factory of crying jags, like some of last year’s Oscar bait. No; I just hadn’t laughed as hard at the movies since Bridesmaids. While not nearly as surprising nor as carefully and smartly written as Bridesmaids (which was deservedly nominated for an…
dvd of the week Like Crazy is a naturalistic romance about two young people in love who behave like young people in love. There’s nothing crazy about them or the movie. That it’s still so successful, so entertaining and moving, despite being so honest and realistic, is a testament to the skills of director Drake…
