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…
Beautiful Creatures One of the most repeated complaints about Hollywood is its lack of originality. (Others include: It’s too liberal, it’s too conservative, it’s homophobic, it’s pro-gay, it’s too populist, it’s elitist, and so on.) Considering the number of remakes, reboots and rip-offs of great or popular movies we’ve been offered in recent years –…
In case you forgot, the reason we have Bruce Willis is Die Hard, John McTiernan’s ridiculously entertaining 1988 action film about a wise-cracking lone cop trying to save his wife from a hostage-taking gang of criminals in an L.A. skyscraper. (Yes, it was his Emmy-winning role in Moonlighting that got him Die Hard, but Die…
Steven Soderbergh has announced that Side Effects will be his last Hollywood film. At 50, he’s done; he’s said that he’s going to turn to painting and, maybe, directing television. But after directing Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Out of Sight, The Limey, Traffic, Erin Brockovich, Oceans 11, Che, The Informant, and Magic Mike, I would…
MOVIE REVIEW Warm Bodies Written and Directed by Jonathan Levine Starring Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer and John Malkovich Rated PG-13 At your local multiplex This winter, two of my students are writing research papers on why zombies are such a popular topic in media culture. And what they’ve taught me is that, while horror trends…
When I was a teenager, I found great joy in Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. And even then, I was a budding movie critic, so I knew, more or less, that my joy was not based in some aesthetic appreciation of his acting, or the film’s surrounding, or even in the often great special effects that would…
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…
Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s masterful movie about the manhunt for Osama Bin Laden, arrived in San Diego’s theaters Jan. 4 with more baggage than any film in recent memory. It was shown to critics at the beginning of December and they went on to give it award after award. Then various…
