HollywoodandFine.com Having been mentioned as an Oscar contender for 2013, George Clooney’s “The Monuments Men” was abruptly bumped from awards season to this week because, according to the press release, Clooney needed more time to finish it. So its release was moved to February, a month whose releases are seldom …
HollywoodandFine.com Not since “127 Hours” have I run into a movie that provoked that mixture of excitement and trepidation in people I know who have seen the trailer as “Gravity.” The excitement is understandable. The trailers make it look like exactly what it is, which is a harrowing, white-knuckle tale …
Hope for the best, don’t expect the worst. It’s my movie criticism mantra, but as the lights darkened at the Princess of Wales Theater for “Gravity’s” Canadian gala, already hailed as a masterpiece following a Venice Film Festival Premiere, it wasn’t just the fact that I was way up in …
HollywoodandFine.com This was originally going to be a piece about how wrong it was for Will Smith to remake “The Wild Bunch.” But that metastasized into an idea about remakes and reboots in general. So I wound up simply writing an open letter to Smith about “The Wild Bunch” – …
HollywoodandFine.com A couple of weeks ago, someone I know, after scanning the movie listings of a Friday newspaper (and really, I’m dating that person just by identifying them as an actual newspaper reader), asked me, “When will we get some good movies?” Without missing a beat, I said, “Maybe October.” …
HollywoodandFine.com I have, on occasion, posted rants about filmmakers and actors who I consider overrated, a list that includes John Hughes, Terrence Malick, Zooey Deschanel and Ridley Scott, among others. And, at some point, a reader sent in a comment that said, “Why not write about someone who’s underrated?” To …
Thud of Recognition: Payne’s Cynicism Ruins Descendants By Armond White “We Didn’t do anything to own this land. It was entrusted to us,” says George Clooney as Matt King, the mixed-race Hawaii-born lawyer in Alexander Payne’s The Descendants. King’s pronouncement lands with a thud, exposing Payne’s sentimental cynicism. This serio-comedy …