HollywoodandFine.com It’s been interesting to hear George Lucas complaining about the lack of attention being paid to the black-themed film from his production company, “Red Tails.” The conventional wisdom is that Lucas himself had to put his money and his influence behind the movie to get it made and released …
HollywoodandFine.com Dreams not only die hard – they’re trampled to death and then mocked, in Gerardo Naranjo’s nonstop nightmare, “Miss Bala.” The Mexican film, inexplicably left off the short list for the foreign-language feature Oscar, is a high-speed action tale, told through the eyes of a helpless victim of that …
HollywoodandFine.com I don’t know whether Gina Carano has a future as an actress but she certainly kicks ass in Steven Soderbergh’s “Haywire,” a jet-propelled action-thriller that has little time for wasted motion. Working from a script by Lem Dobbs, who also wrote “The Limey,” Soderbergh has made an intense and …
HollywoodandFine.com Peter Facinelli looks a little like the young Tom Cruise: same slightly rabbity smile that radiates a sense of both supreme confidence and gnawing insecurity. Facinelli has a wider face with more prominent cheekbones but he has the same athletic physicality and a looseness that Cruise has lost. Forget …
HollywoodandFine.com In terms of creating moments that capture the excitement a live musical performance can arouse, Todd Graff knows his stuff. He showed it in 2003’s underrated “Camp,” in 2009’s disposable “Bandslam” – and he does it again in “Joyful Noise,” a movie with big, rousing soul-gospel songs that take …
HollywoodandFine.com I’ve always loved animation – make that, good animation – and feel lucky that my kids were the perfect age when Disney had its second golden age of animation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. My son was 4 when I took him to see 1991’s “Beauty and …
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 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 …