In seventh grade, I had a routine: go to my friend Katy’s house, do our advanced math homework, play Yahtzee and watch “Dark Shadows.” After the credits, I would run the three blocks to my suburban San Diego cul de sac under the bright Southern California sun in abject terror, …
Polarizing Comedy Exposed in The Dictator By Armond White Lazily titled after Chaplin’s 1940 Hitler-Mussolini satire The Great Dictator, Sacha Baron Cohen‘s new film The Dictator is part of our current political slackness where propaganda is confused with news, parody is confused with satire, principle is confused with bias and …
No one ever claimed that women had bridged the director’s-chair gender gap, but it’s a complete kick in the can that this year’s Cannes Film Festival has not a single female-directed film among the 23 in competition. I love contenders like David Cronenberg, whose Cosmopolis — starring Robert Pattinson — …
HollywoodandFine.com “Lovely Molly” is a direct descendant of “The Blair Witch Project.” Aside from the fact that it incorporates the same handheld, shaky-cam, faux-doc technique as that 1999 sensation, it was written and directed by Eduardo Sanchez, one of “Blair Witch”’s co-directors/creators. But this genre of horror film is played …
HollywoodandFine.com Though billed as a Russian film noir, “Elena” skimps on the noir and more’s the pity. Instead, it’s a disciplined, controlled and ultimately disappointing drama of family tension and murder. The crime does not go unpunished, but the punishment seems mild to the point of nonexistence. Nadezhda Markina plays …
HollywoodandFine.com Interesting the difference a few months can make. When I saw Tanya Wexler’s “Hysteria” last fall at the Toronto Film Festival, I enjoyed it for its perspective on how far we’ve come in terms of our attitudes toward women having control over their own bodies. Eight months later, “Hysteria,” …
HollywoodandFine.com Maiwenn Le Besco’s “Polisse” is tough and compelling, a police drama with no real plot but, rather, a snapshot slice-of-life of a group of Paris cops coping with what may be the most demanding assignment on the force. They are the members of the Child Protection Unit, charged with …
HollywoodandFine.com Outrageous, offensive and alternately sophisticated and crude, “The Dictator” is also quite funny – as well as being Sacha Baron Cohen’s first comedy that is mostly scripted. Did I say offensive? Put it this way: If you don’t have a sense of humor about race, religion, ethnicity, sexuality and …
HollywoodandFine.com I’m not sure who thought it would be a good idea to try to make a movie out of the self-help pregnancy guide, “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” but I have to assume that same person is currently hard at work on the video game. Which will undoubtedly …
Spooky or Kooky? Tim Burton’s Campy Dark Shadows By Armond White Gone are the days when Tim Burton films made you laugh first. Now Burton more likely makes you cringe as in Dark Shadows, his new film version of TV’s 1960s daytime soap opera. It retells the story of Barnabas …
