Sitting through Raising Helen is an exercise in frustration, because somewhere inside this big heap of Hollywood nothing is a something (someone, actually) worth saving and savoring. Her name is Joan Cusack, always a supporting player but never a star, no matter her grace and warmth and charm even in…
What becomes of Morgan Spurlock’s body after a month of eating and drinking nothing but McDonald’s assembly-line foodstuffs is not surprising. He bloats up, gaining nearly 30 pounds in 30 days. His sex drive peters out, among the myriad disappointments visited upon Spurlock’s vegan-chef girlfriend, who’s only too happy to…
Laws of Attraction is the kind of film you might mistake for “cute” or “charming” at first glance. Maybe you will open the paper and spot the ad with Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore canoodling and think to yourself how nice it would be to see James Bond defrosting indie…
The six-month intermission is over; those of you left in the lobby, wondering if Uma Thurman ever did kill Bill, may now return to your seats and unbuckle your belts and resume your gorging. Rest assured that Kill Bill Vol. 2, the final half of Quentin Tarantino’s fifth movie, offers…
The Golden Age of the Comic Book Movie has turned the color of tarnished copper. But there is no going back, not when comic shops have become movie studios’ research and development labs. No moving forward either; the comic-book movie has become a cinematic smudge once more, one blurring into…
So good it’s, ahem, illegal. The Beatles’ White Album meets Jay-Z’s The Black Album on the way to the courthouse, where EMI’s lawyers lie in wait with cease-and-desist orders to protect copyright holders who want to fuck up what a bedroom DJ funked up on a Christmas Eve lark. The…
Jersey Girl, the sixth film by writer-director Kevin Smith, is the least Kevin Smith-y film he’s ever made, which will be welcome news to those exhausted by Smith’s everlasting obsession with his dick, fart jokes, and stack of comic books; and bad news to those enamored of Smith’s everlasting obsession…
The Ladykillers is the second film in as many years made by Joel and Ethan Coen to fill space between pet projects that seem to run off leash; it’s their time-killer, if you will. But even their recent paychecks reflect the brothers’ restlessness: Their movies have grown more manic and…
Maybe the most amazing thing about the big-screen version of Starsky & Hutch is how much smaller it feels than its predecessor, the William Blinn-created, Aaron Spelling-produced cop series that ran on ABC from 1975 to ’79. Everything about this cineplex variation feels rinky-dink, like some extended variety-show skit that…
This Jew has spent several hours in the past week reading all four Gospels, as well as various supplementary (and often inflammatory) texts, upon which Mel Gibson based his The Passion of the Christ. I’ve read the interpretations of scholars, the apologias of popes, and the damnations of zealots. I’ve…
Albert Maysles, with brother David, made two different films about two different rock-and-roll bands five years apart, but to this day he can’t think of one without immediately thinking of the other. The first he was shooting 40 years ago this very day, more or less: The Beatles were on…
It was only a few days ago that Shane Carruth, software engineer-turned-filmmaker, was ready to walk away from the money on the table and keep his movie–78 minutes’ worth of cheapo celluloid that had, in a Utah instant, become as valuable as strands of gold. He had stopped answering his…
It has become a subject of much discussion and debate among film fetishists in recent weeks: For which movie will Sean Penn win the Academy Award, Mystic River or 21 Grams? Perhaps this seems like so much jockeying for blurbs on a movie poster or a newspaper advertisement — Sean…
For all of its inspired side trips down Imagination Lane, Big Fish is ultimately about one thing: the relationship between a son about to become a father and a father about to become a ghost. The movie is being marketed as one more Tim Burton fantasia, with its luminescent teaser-trailer…
Seems a little early for a remake of Minority Report, but when your movie’s all about seeing and forgetting the future, who’s gonna remember Paycheck anyway? Like Steven Spielberg’s film of long-ago 2002, in which Tom Cruise sees the future and goes on the run to change it, John Woo’s…
This being the end of the year, and since none of the people I wanted to write about this week felt it necessary to return any of my calls, from the leftover heap comes this collection of random topics I considered tackling this year but lost interest in after 200…
Maybe you know the feeling. Maybe it struck you one morning as you stared in the mirror before trundling off to the job you hate, or maybe it hit you so hard one night it woke you from your sleep like a prowler in the bedroom. It’s that feeling of:…
Bad Santa, in which Billy Bob Thornton plays a drunken department-store Santa who repeatedly swears at children, pisses himself publicly, chain-smokes like an industrial plant, and cracks safes on Christmas Eve, is the least sentimental holiday release ever made. No one is redeemed, no one comes to believe in the…
In director Ron Howard’s The Missing, Tommy Lee Jones’ Samuel Jones takes his place among the oldest archetypes in the Western genre — the white man who has lived among the Indians till he has at last become one. This plot device, used in Hombre and Nevada Smith and myriad…
Even when people were watching Will Ferrell on television every Saturday night, they weren’t seeing Will Ferrell. They saw no more than a glimpse of him, beneath wigs and behind glued-on beards and buried under characters who became almost better known than he during his seven years on Saturday Night…
On October 12, BBC America aired the second-season premiere of The Office, the beloved mockumentary that follows paper-selling rats ’round the maze of cubicles leading to the office of head cheese David Brent, a pathetic little man who says in public things no rational human being would even think in…
he opening credits insist that Kill Bill: Volume 1 is “Quentin Tarantino’s 4th film,” when it’s actually his 3.5th; it’s too incomplete to be measured as a whole, half a movie waiting for a proper ending due to arrive in the next volume in February. Till then, we’ll have to…
