HollywoodandFine.com When is a comedy not a comedy? When it’s one of what apparently is becoming a series of holiday-themed movies by Garry Marshall. “Valentine’s Day” was the 2010 date movie from hell – an all-star cluster-grope that had fewer laughs than a rerun of “Laverne & Shirley,” Marshall’s signature …
HollywoodandFine.com People in Minnesota have this reputation for being “nice” that Diablo Cody seems determined to undermine – which she does in slashingly funny style in Jason Reitman’s “Young Adult,” opening in limited release Friday (12/9/11) before going wide on Dec. 16. The film reteams the “Juno” duo with a …
HollywoodandFine.com Perhaps I’m not qualified to write about “Sleeping Beauty,” the debut film from Australian director Julia Leigh. I am, after all, a middle-aged man. And this meandering movie, which manages to make nudity monotonous and presents sex as a distasteful commercial venture, seems to be about a kind of …
Weak Celebrity Bio of Marilyn My Week with Marilyn By Armond White Art critics cite Andy Warhol’s 1962 Gold Marilyn Monroe (a tinted print using a Niagara movie still) to exemplify the movie star’s “infinitely reproducible” image. Movie critics simply yell “Oscar!” at Michelle Williams’ image of Monroe in My …
HollywoodandFine.com Never a popular part of the Shakespeare canon, “Coriolanus” (opening in limited released Friday, 12/2/11) bears a peculiar timeliness, in the muscular directorial debut by Ralph Fiennes. Fiennes directed and stars in this film, which transposes Shakespeare’s drama about a career soldier forced to cope with political reality to …
HollywoodandFine.com Takeshi Kitano has always been a rule-breaker so it’s no surprise that “Outrage,” his latest gangster film, should foil expectations. A good part of that has to do with Kitano himself. Cast as a yakuza underboss in a violent, almost Shakespearean tale of double-dealing underworld power struggles, Kitano lets …
HollywoodandFine.com The fact that the dim-witted and near-sighted MPAA has slapped an NC-17 rating on Steve McQueen’s “Shame” implies that there is something prurient about this film, whose central figure is a sex addict, struggling with his demons. But, as intense and involving as this film is, the last thing …
David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method” is about the talking cure – specifically, the kind of talk therapy pioneered by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung at the start of the 20th century. Freud and Jung, however, nearly talk the audience to death in Cronenberg’s bloodless, pokey film. Though his cast – …
Scorsese’s Fantasy Autobiography By Armond White As a children’s film, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is overwrought and under thought. Its story of Hugo (Asa Butterfield), an orphaned boy who lives in a Paris train station where he surreptitiously maintains the clock mechanisms, suggests a fantasy autobiography. He wants to think of …
HollywoodandFine.com Three cheers for Martin Scorsese, who has not only made “Hugo” one of the most lovingly fanciful and heartfelt films of the year – he has also pulled off the subversive trick of introducing a new generation of kids to the magic of silent movies. And, to boot, he’s …