HollywoodandFine.com It’s noteworthy that Disney/Pixar’s “Brave,” opening Friday (6/22/12), is the first Pixar feature – and the first Disney animated feature in a while – to focus on a heroine, rather than a hero. And not a heroine whose fate is somehow bound up with romance – that’s a crucial …
The Duplass Gang Humps Again The Indie film movement may have some high points (your call) but it also commits innumerable disasters such as Your Sister’s Sister and Peace, Love and Misunderstanding. Each plot is undistinguished but Your Sister’s Sister’s plot is so poor it exposes how the Indie movement’s …
HollywoodandFine.com Even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while. And there aren’t many blinder than Adam Sandler – or his fans. Sandler does find a few acorns – make that laughs – in “That’s My Boy,” his latest cinematic extrusion. Few of them are provided by him, …
HollywoodandFine.com “Rock of Ages” is technically a jukebox musical: a stage presentation of comedy, drama and song in which, instead of using original songs, the writers build a story out of existing music, re-purposing it to retrofit a plot or a plot point. Think “Mamma Mia.” But really, the jukebox …
HollywoodandFine.com I settled in for the screening of “Marina Abramovic The Artist is Present,” with the same skepticism I’d had when I went to see her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, which the film documents. But I came away feeling chastened – mostly that I’d been so dismissive …
HollywoodandFine.com Lynn Shelton had me at “Humpday,” the feature that introduced me to the intuitively funny filmmaker, who comes back strong with “Your Sister’s Sister,” opening in limited release Friday (6/15/12). Working once again with Mark Duplass, Shelton brings Emily Blunt and Rosemarie Dewitt into the mix, in a story …
HollywoodandFine.com I’m not sure why, but no one has been willing or able to speak truth to box-office power, so let me try: Robert Pattinson is a terrible actor. Oh, he’s pretty enough, with his sleepy eyes and pouty lips. Let him play a vampire in the “Twilight” series and …
Zombie Mantra: Solondz abhors irony in Dark Horse By Armond White In answer to contemporary culture’s manic competition for fame, Todd Solondz offers Dark Horse, a film about Abe (Jordan Gelber), a 35-year-old Jewish man, overweight, living with his parents, employed in his father’s real estate business yet still playing …
Beauty is a bitch. That’s always animated the Snow White story: Vanity and jealousy drive the evil stepmother queen to slip Snow White that poisoned apple. Now, along comes “Snow White and the Huntsman,” which is all about teasing out the backstory of these Grimm characters and asking, “Why?” Why …
Americans want the French with baguettes and berets,” the actress-writer-director Julie Delpy (“Before Sunrise”) told me last month, “The way French people handle sexuality is too controversial for American audiences.” That remark resonated when I watched actress-writer-director Maiwenn submerge herself in the sordid world of the Paris Child Protection Unit. …
A Noxious Burp: Ridley Scott Hiccups Alien Fumes in Prometheus By Armond White Now the Alien franchise becomes a Quintilogy–a purely market-drive neologism following the recent Blu-Ray boxset that labeled the first four Alien films not as a “Quartet” but a “Quadrilogy.” Prometheus is made with the same contempt for …
HollywoodandFine.com Greta Gerwig is a cross between a younger Chloe Sevigny and a young Meg Ryan. She’s somehow backed into semi-“It” girl status, at least among boosters of a certain segment of independent film. She comes off mostly as off-puttingly self-pitying and mopey in “Lola Versus,” a self-consciously quirky-moody rom-drom. …
HollywoodandFine.com There’s spoof that works and there’s caricature that depends on stereotype – and Bruce Beresford’s “Peace, Love & Misunderstanding” is witless caricature. Watching it makes you wonder what its creators saw in the script by Joseph Muszynski and Christine Mengert. In the world it creates, the town of Woodstock, …
HollywoodandFine.com As an act of cinema, “Prometheus” is stunningly designed, shot with great purpose in a serious fashion. When it finally shifts gears from “Building Dread” to “Action,” director Ridley Scott is in his sweet spot: cannily designed, well-crafted suspense in the familiar pattern of tension and release, tension and …