HollywoodandFine.com Let’s sum up, shall we? I essentially worked right through the holidays, in terms of posting on a daily basis. So I’m taking a few days off from reviewing and will resume the daily treadmill when I get back from a short break next Wednesday (1/12/12). I did my …
HollywoodandFine.com Think of “It’s About You” as the “Tree of Life” of rock-docs: a movie so in love with atmospherics and self-examination that it completely loses track of its subject. As rock documentaries go, “It’s About You,” ostensibly a film about John Mellencamp by photographer Kurt Markus and his son, …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s not that I don’t think David Fincher is a solid director. But I don’t think he’s the Second Coming either, though some of the reviews he tends to get would have you believe otherwise. What finally tore it was his version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” …
HollywoodandFine.com One of the intriguing phenomena of the 2008 election was the fact that, while African-Americans voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama for president, that surge of black voters at the polls in California was one of the factors in the passage of Proposition 8, which rendered same-sex marriage illegal in …
HollywoodandFine.com Family dynamics make for potent drama – and few films this year have used that idea to better effect than Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation,” which made my 10-best list for 2011. The drama stems less from head-to-head conflict – though that comes, eventually – but from subtler things. Truth …
HollywoodandFine.com The focus isn’t even on her. We’re in a grungy British superette (as we used to call them in the Midwest) and some raucous music is playing loudly as an elderly woman shops for milk. It’s only because the camera turns its attention in her direction that we really …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s unusual to have Steven Spielberg competing with himself at the box office this holiday weekend, but there he is – with “The Adventures of Tintin” and now with “War Horse.” Based on the popular children’s book that inspired the Tony-winning Broadway production, “War Horse” is exactly what it …
HollywoodandFine.com Matt Damon has had a strong career playing hard-edged, serious guys like Jason Bourne or the title character in “Good Will Hunting.” So you forget his aptitude for comedy. He brought it to “30 Rock,” just as he did for the Farrelly brothers in “Stuck on You.” Still, I …
HollywoodandFine.com You would think that, after World War II, Europe had seen all of the genocide it could stomach for a century or so. But, no, here came the Serbs in the early 1990s, with their ethnic cleansing and wholesale butchery and rape of the Bosniak and Muslim population. There …
HollywoodandFine.com I keep want to referring to Stephen Daldry’s film of Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” as, instead, “ ..& Incredibly Cute.” That’s unfair. It’s not even true; well, not completely. Still, the performance by young “Jeopardy” champion Thomas Horn as the central character of this movie …
HollywoodandFine.com Herge’s “Tintin” comics have been huge in France since they were first published in 1929, but have never quite translated to American popularity. In the 1990s, an animated version of Tintin stories showed up on American TV, on Nickelodeon – which was the go-to channel for my kids in …
HollywoodandFine.com You know a tent-pole movie series is in trouble when it has to explain its title in its dialogue. As in Tom Cruise saying, about midway through “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,” to the rest of his crew, “We’re going to Ghost Protocol. Ghost Protocol is…” and then explaining …
HollywoodandFine.com What can you say about Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows” that wasn’t said previously about Ritchie’s Baker Street reboot from 2009, “Sherlock Holmes”? That it’s bigger, louder and more expensive? That’s hardly a shock from a sequel. Indeed, it’s kind of de rigueur, right? How about …
HollywoodandFine.com Roman Polanski takes the experience of watching Yasmina Reza’s play, “God of Carnage,” and amplifies the tension, turns anger into absurdity and captures an entire universe in, essentially, two and a half rooms of a Brooklyn apartment, in the film, “Carnage.” The apartment belongs to Michael and Penelope Longstreet …