t’s beginning to look as though the films of George Clooney are less the works of fiction than the products of documentary crews following around the actor leading his enviable life. In film after film, he’s seen dining with beautiful actresses in gorgeous surroundings perfectly lit for an evening’s seduction:…
At this late date, only the acolytes await the latest Bowie release, the casual fan having been waved off by slow sellbacks masquerading as Low comebacks every few years. He’ll never be as artistically rewarding as he was during the ’70s or as commercially viable as he was in the…
Director Richard Linklater’s School of Rock imagines, sort of, what might have become of voluble rock snob Barry the morning after his grand finale in Stephen Frears’ High Fidelity — after his Marvin Gaye impersonation had faded and been forgotten in the daylight hours, after he quit his gig at…
The publicity materials sent in advance of the at-long-last release of The Kids Are Alright on DVD suggest that the maker of the 1979 documentary about The Who has been on the lam–in the rock-and-roll witness relocation program, perhaps, far from the long windmilling arm of justice. A “recluse” is…
The script for The Rundown has lingered for more than a decade and was originally a Patrick Swayze vehicle, well before those wheels fell off. Universal Studios revived it because the studio knows what it has in Dwayne Johnson: a gold mine made of bulging biceps, a man who was…
When Nicolas Cage plays still and sullen — a man possessed by self-loathing and melancholy in Adaptation, say, or the landlocked angel in City of Angels — he comes off as drowsy. He disappears into those roles like a head plopped in a fluffy pillow, and it doesn’t quite suit…
On Sunday, HBO will air the final episode of what has been the most consistently entertaining — and aggravating — show of the summer television season. Project Greenlight will fade to black, and the people who populated the series — the first-time screenwriter who’s had the optimism beaten out of…
He knows there are people, too many, who do not like him. He has to know. They’ve told him to his face–the studio executives who slice and snip the scenes he loves the most and suffer his outbursts for it, the directors he’s pushed out of the way so he…
David Wolstencroft moved from London to Los Angeles in November, and not only so he could rise each morning for a game of tennis–though there is that, and that might have been good enough. He made the trip, which is thus far temporary but may well prove permanent, for the…
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen — or LXG, as Fox refers to it, as though it’s the latest Lexus all-terrain vehicle — would have you think it’s the summer action movie with a brain; certainly, its literary allusions would have you believe it has visited more libraries than video-rental outlets…
Stan Lee, for better or worse the most recognizable face in the history of the comic book, insists he has no love for rehashing his past. He claims to take no great joy from talking about long-ago yesterdays spent in smoky rooms co-creating the likes of the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man,…
You need not leave the house to know what’s playing in movie theaters in coming weeks. You’ve already seen these films, with titles consisting of letters followed by numbers. There’s no surprise in the dark, just the bumping into of familiar faces, legally blond or largely green, and furious franchises…
In November there will arrive on newsstands a music magazine edited by Alan Light, who left Spin to embark on his endeavor of publishing a journal devoted to that long-ignored audience: the over-30 CD-buyer, the old fart for whom “new music” is a mystery left to be fathomed by The…
You’ve been warned: This is a column about politics wherein a popular-culture critic (dunno what that is either, but says so on my tax returns) interviews a former rock journalist-turned-publicist-turned-band-manager-turned-record-label-executive about how the Democratic Party alienated everyone under the age of death. You may take this with a grain of…
Another week, another remake — summer, that season of air-conditioned originality, must be upon us. Only, unlike The In-Laws, which creaked into theaters last week, this latest updating of a decades-old action-comedy has two things going for it: Its forbear is a veddy British caper film little-seen in the United…
In March 2002, days before President Bush was scheduled to visit Peru, a car bomb exploded near the U.S. embassy in Lima, killing nine and injuring dozens. Government officials, here and in Peru, blamed the attack on Shining Path — a Marxist terrorist organization with roots dating to the 1960s,…
He claims to be blacklisted and close to busto. Thirty years in the film biz, with a cult bigger than David Koresh’s and a disemboweled body of work that would make any studio boss blood-red with envy, and still he kvetches in a voice so eerily similar to that of…
You can’t be sure what to make of Identity for its first hour: Director James Mangold’s first foray into the horror genre plays so much like a joke, it’s almost impossible to tell whether he’s making you laugh on purpose or because, well, he is director James Mangold, maker of…
They were loud once, deafeningly so–and dumbingly so, if such a thing is possible. They wore skins of leather stuffed with cucumbers of foil, towered over dwarves who danced around a Stonehenge made of pebbles, sang about women who fit like flesh tuxedos and explored the majesty of rock and…
In Confidence, Edward Burns plays Jake Vig, a con artist whose body temperature runs a few degrees below normal. Even when things seem to go bad, when a would-be partner betrays him with a phone call or a seedy-greedy Dustin Hoffman lays maybe-gay and grubby paws all over him, Burns…
A few things learned from the memoirs of Marines who served in Gulf War I: They’re more terrified of being killed by friendly fire than enemy artillery; they’re bored brainless most of the time; they harbor fantasies of being shot, but never somewhere too painful or where it might inflict…
Among Anger Management’s copious flaws is the fact that its premise doesn’t wash. Adam Sandler’s Dave Buznik, a designer of catalogs for overweight-cats clothing, isn’t really angry at all; he’s just a self-loathing, introverted mess whose insecurities date back to a crowded street party in Brooklyn circa 1978, when he…
