HollywoodandFine.com How much bad luck can one family have? Enough for a hit movie – “Taken” – and what I assume the makers hope is a hit sequel: “Taken 2.” “Taken” starred Liam Neeson as Brian Mills, a security expert and former special-ops guy whose daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) is …
HollywoodandFine.com I’m not one who worships at the altar of Tim Burton, probably disliking his films as often as I am moved by them. For every effort as emotionally rich as “Sweeney Todd,” there’s something as flat and wankish as “Dark Shadows.” But I fell hard for “Frankenweenie,” an extrapolation …
HollywoodandFine.com Would “Butter” be a funnier movie if Michele Bachmann were still at the center of the American political conversation? Of course not. Bachmann is her own perpetual punchline, more extreme and ridiculous than any satirist’s imagination. If you wrote her as a character, she would be unbelievable. Her truth …
HollywoodandFine.com Lee Daniels received all sorts of accolades for 2009’s “Precious,” which seemed to announce a fiery new filmmaking talent. But the real indicator of Daniels’ sensibility may actually be 2005’s “Shadowboxer,” an overwrought and preposterous tale of professional killers (Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding Jr.) who also happen to …
Won’t Back Down contributes to the education crisis By Armond White A dyslexic child looks into the camera at the end of Won‘t Back Down and correctly pronounces a word she had previously stumbled over: “Hope.” Thank God for the smart-aleck in the audience who loudly responded: “Boo!” Whether or …
“Won’t Back Down”: Three name changes later, this controversial piece of propaganda is finally reaching theaters. Call it what you may, it’s a failure. Maggie Gyllenhall and Viola Davis star as single moms, one a teacher, who want to change their kids’ failing elementary public school in Pittsburgh into a …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s one thing when documentaries like Davis Guggenheim’s “Waiting for ‘Superman’” and Madeleine Sackler’s much better “The Lottery” look at problems in public education and offer some solutions (such as charter schools). It’s something else when a manipulative drama like “Won’t Back Down” tries to lay the blame for …
HollywoodandFine.com Occasionally, two studios make the same movie and then try to be the first to release their version. It’s less common for the same year to produce two different films with almost identical storylines. But then, the plot for “Pitch Perfect” was old long before this year. So it’s …
HollywoodandFine.com Rian Johnson went dark noir via teen angst in his breakout film, “Brick,” then got all Wes Anderson in “The Brothers Bloom.” Now, with “Looper,” he thinks big – or, at least, bigger, going futuristic sci-fi. But he treats the material as a crime-fiction saga, rather than a special-effects …
HollywoodandFine.com As you get older, it’s easy to forget that age when every moment of life seemed fraught with all possible feelings at the most dramatic levels. Life and death seemed to hang in the balance with each step you took, each encounter you had, each moment you spent, each …