In December 2002, ABC’s 20/20 ran a story on Eric O’Neill, an undercover surveillance specialist for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The piece was titled “Spycatcher,” because it was O’Neill who, at a mere 27 years old, helped bring down Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who, for more than two…
You remember Andrew Ridgeley, don’t you? He was the other guy in Wham!, the one who found himself stranded in 1986, after George Michael had faith enough in his own talents to break up the act. Ridgeley went on to record one solo record before CBS Records decided, yeah, no…
A year ago, Paul McCartney opened the vaults to the Freelance Hellraiser, who smashed the back catalog all to, well, hell by mashing up mediocre Macca till it sounded brighter than the solo Beatle ever did all by his lonesome. Now comes the old pro himself, Sir George Martin, attempting…
At face value, Alpha Dog — based on a real-life story that’s still waiting for its ending — plays like an amped-up, drugged-out episode of Dragnet: In 2000, a gang of SoCal kids kidnapped and murdered 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz, a soft-spoken boy from the San Fernando Valley who dreamed of…
It’s official: Hollywood has run out of original ideas. If you thought 2006 was bad, just wait. In 2007, the studios will give up on birthing blockbusters and instead concentrate on cloning them, with sequel after sequel after sequel. Familiar titles will be followed by so many numbers that filmgoers…
It took Norman Mailer seven years and 1,282 pages to write 1991’s Harlot’s Ghost: A Novel of the CIA, and if memory serves, it took me 12 years to actually finish it. So director Robert De Niro and screenwriter Eric Roth can be forgiven for taking two hours and 40…
About Will Smith’s estimable talents, there is no doubt. Six Degrees of Separation, Ali… um… the “Parents Just Don’t Understand” video — the man’s got skills to pay the bills, yours and mine and his. That he seldom uses them, or their attendant clout, is dispiriting. This is an actor…
The first few minutes of Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny’ are something to behold: a four-minute rock opera cranked to 11. A doughy young boy with dirty-mop locks (Nacho Libre’s Troy Gentile, once more playing lil’ Jack Black) laments his tragic plight: He’s stuck in Kickapoo with “a…
This doesn’t sound like a Willie Nelson record, and it doesn’t sound like a Ryan Adams record (though he produced it). I don’t know what it sounds like, to be honest, save for some show-offy mash-up that does less to pump up Shotgun Willie than shoot his legs out from…
By all rights, 2002’s Die Another Day should have been and could have been the final James Bond film. It was packaged like a cynical, weary best-of concert coughed up by an aging dinosaur, offering copious nods to the franchise’s past without bothering to offer any new material of consequence…
Tom Waits cleans out the closet, holds a garage sale, and finds the crowd begging for more, more, more. Hence the 26 soundtrack/compilation/etc. familiars and 30 “new” songs that sound like all the old ones, spread over three discs that glibly and ably summarize the career thus far: “Brawlers” (or:…
There’s a scene about halfway through Catch a Fire during which freedom fighters — men and women, each boasting such nicknames as “Pete My Baby” and “Hot Stuff” — are being trained at an African National Congress safe house in Mozambique. Their ranks consist of South Africans who’ve been politicized…
Barry Levinson hasn’t made a movie of note in almost a decade — since 1997’s Wag the Dog, to be precise, and even that was less a work of substantial relevance than a bit of lucky timing based on someone else’s better novel. Granted, it had its moments — at…
There is no way of sidestepping the issue, so why not jump right into it: Infamous, this year’s retelling of how Truman Capote wound up in Kansas writing his nonfiction novel In Cold Blood, never comes close to approaching the quiet, devastating brilliance of Capote, last year’s retelling of how…
One would never confuse the work of writer/director Todd Phillips with that of the late Robert Hamer, whose filmography includes the essential Kind Hearts and Coronets. Hamer’s movies had a gentlemanly quality, no matter the cruelty that skulked beneath their prim exteriors; one always felt that the characters in his…
Low, which is to say no, expectations can be a wonderful thing; expect nothing and maybe you’ll get that little outta-nowhere sumpin-sumpin that turns an otherwise unfulfilling occurrence into a vaguely rewarding experience. It’s not like Invincible boasts the most promising of credentials: a first-time filmmaker (Ericson Core, the cinematographer…
Veronica Mars: The Complete Second Season (Warner Bros.) Any concept along the lines of “high school hottie solves crimes” is bound to make for watchable TV, but who would have expected this? Equal parts 90210 teen soap, murder mystery, and comedy, Veronica Mars pulls you in with its sharp writing,…
World Trade Center is about just that — the attacks on, and the collapse of, the twin towers on September 11, 2001. But 45 minutes in, a viewer might easily forget the movie is set during that nightmarish day. There is little talk of terrorism and scant suggestion that a…
There is no modern-day antecedent to the movies Will Ferrell makes with writer-director Adam McKay, with whom Ferrell collaborated during their tenure at Saturday Night Live only a few years ago. To compare their offerings, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy and the new Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky…
Two weeks ago, a colleague insisted that Superman Returns isn’t the remake of the 1978 original, as I wrote, but a reinterpretation — its melancholy flip side. Where the Christopher Reeve model was pop art and a cool breeze, the Brandon Routh version is heavy and solemn, weighed down by…
Grand Prix (Warner Bros.) John Frankenheimer, as underrated as he was brilliant, made a racing picture in 1966 that’s yet to be topped 40 years later. James Garner suffered through the director’s churlish demands (which Frankenheimer reveals and owns up to in archival footage on one of the documentaries here)…
The fact that 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was such a hit had much to do with viewers’ prelaunch expectations, which were approximately none. Who could have been blamed for thinking a Gore Verbinski-directed, Jerry Bruckheimer-produced movie based on a theme-park ride would proffer…
