American Dreamz (Universal) Till this, Paul Weitz had a stellar filmography, a career in ascension: American Pie (good), About a Boy (great), In Good Company (absolutely perfect). But this, er, satire about a dumb American president (Dennis Quaid, channeling whassisname) trying to get smart, a cynical wannabe singer trying to…
Publisher: 2K Sports
Platform: PS2, Xbox, X360
Price: $20-$60
ESRB Rating: E 10+ (for Everyone 10 and older)
Score: 7 (out of 10)
In its 21 years, the crusty Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival evolved from an intimate little affair for South Florida cinephiles to the World’s Longest Film Festival, recognized as such by the Guinness Book of World Records. This year, however, director Gregory Von Hausch has vowed to put FLIFF on…
Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West. Don’t you just love a good hate flick? This one takes a whack at Islam (after offering the caveat that it’s not targeting all Muslims), asserting that the terrorist threat is real and that Islamic militant extremists need to be stopped before they…
Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Season Two (Universal) Anytown USA (Film Movement/Repnet) Behind Enemy Lines II: Axis of Evil (Fox) The Big Black Comedy Show (Fox) Big Love: The Complete First Season (HBO) The Break-Up (Universal) Clean, Shaven: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) Feast: Unrated (Weinstein) Frankenhooker (Anthem) Charmed: The Complete Sixth Season…
Flannel Pajamas. This one should have worked. It’s a good movie. It doesn’t hedge its bets, it doesn’t insult anybody’s intelligence, and it doesn’t lie. It’s well-written, skillfully acted, and lovingly directed. All the same, Flannel Pajamas made me want to crawl inside my own navel and die. And that’s…
In The Last King of Scotland, an adequate thriller redeemed by Forest Whitaker’s sensational turn as Idi Amin, freshly qualified Scottish physician Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) arrives in Uganda in 1970, ravenous for adventure. Under the rigorous and vaguely romantic tutelage of a lithe blond with a flabby marriage and…
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…
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…
God is in the details no matter what you believe, but Jesus Camp is content to introduce its appalled exposé of Christian youth indoctrination with shots of a fast-food- and flag-lined highway and the words “Missouri, USA.” Welcome to hell, kids. Missouri — yikes! — is among the holy lands…
Amsterdam… a city of excess. Marijuana, spacecakes, magic mushrooms — and did I mention a plethora of prostitutes? The city is a veritable smorgasbord of sex and drugs, so, of course, what young guy in his right mind wouldn’t want to travel to this uninhibited vacation destination? Well, Matt (Antonio…
“We need to tend the garden of Mother Earth,” photographer Barry Haynes urges in commentary that accompanies his “Spiritual Places” exhibit, which literally offers a mountaintop experience. The environmentalist photographer’s images of mountains, lakes, sea, and sky are lovely (although the pocked, stained white bulletin boards on which the framed…
A Prairie Home Companion (New Line) This all-star sing-along — with Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Tommy Lee Jones, Virginia Madsen, Woody Harrelson, etc. — that wears its smile bright and wide looked for all the world like a summertime sleeper hit. Not so much, even though no movie this year…
Publisher: Capcom
Platform: PS2
Price: $39.99
ESRB Rating: T (for Teen)
Score: 9 (out of 10)
The Andy Milonakis Show: The Complete Second Season (Paramount) The A-Team: Season Five, the Final Season (Universal) Bloodied but Unbowed: Bloodshot Records’ Life in the Trenches (Bloodshot) Carlos Mencia: No Strings Attached (Paramount) Click (Sony) Don’t Go in the Woods Alone: 25th Anniversary Edition (Code Red) Everybody Hates Chris: The…
No studio director was a greater hero to the Hong Kong new wave than Martin Scorsese. John Woo dedicated The Killer to him; Wong Kar-wai modeled his first feature, As Tears Go By, after Mean Streets; Taxi Driver’s rain-slicked slo-mo urban stylistics worked their way into countless lesser HK films…
Front-loaded with family discord, terminal cancer, prodigal jailbait, a cute kiddie looking for love, and other accessories of the ready-to-wear soap opera, Zhang Yimou’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles is as heartfelt, sincere, and soggy with nostalgia as some of his other periodic homages to the virtues of peasant…
Two young girls are in front of me in FAU’s Studio One Theater. They might be college freshmen, maybe sophomores. They are laughing, gushing, manic in that special way that only pretty 18-year-old girls from Boca can ever really manage. One insists on reading the Director’s Notes from the evening’s…
“GEOMETRIC, why not?” the new exhibition at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, is an austere counterpoint to the current Latin American show at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. The artists in the Boca show are all Latin American, while the Hollywood show’s Latin American majority is complemented…
Inevitably, Giannina Coppiano Dwin ends up with ants in her pants. That’s because the lacy bikinis, discretely named Untitled, are made of sugar. They are “drawn” with the loose crystals. These are among the works exhibited in “2006 South Florida Cultural Consortium Visual and Media Arts Fellowship Exhibition.” The show…
(HBO) Like many other Daily Show success stories, Lewis Black is a comedian made for these times; his facial contortions and verbal tics are expressions of the Bush-era phrase “outrage overload.” But unlike other big names in political stand-up right now (David Cross, Bill Maher), Lewis isn’t smug and smirking…
Publisher: THQ
Platform: Xbox 360
Price: $59.99
ESRB Rating: M (for Mature)
Score: 8 (out of 10)
