HollywoodandFine.com I’ll give Will Ferrell credit for this: There aren’t many actors who would make an entire comedy in a foreign language just as a joke. Now – if only the joke itself were funny… The movie in question is “Casa de mi Padre,” which feels like a spoof of …
HollywoodandFine.com Say “Jump,” and I’ll ask, “How high?” Say “21 Jump Street” and I’ll ask, “Why? Why? Why?” Why, indeed. The answer seems to be in the credits: because Jonah Hill, who was a preadolescent when the Johnny Depp TV show of the same name was on the air, apparently …
HollywoodandFine.com Playing like some disjointed hybrid of “Strangers on a Train” and “The Parallax View” by way of “Death Wish,” “Seeking Justice” is never terrible – just never terribly anything else, either. Having a seasoned action pro like Roger Donaldson at the helm helps. On the other hand, putting Nicolas …
HollywoodandFine.com Adapt and evolve – hey, it’s what we do. But when you get stuck in the rut of your life without realizing it, it’s nice to have someone unexpected come along and nudge you out of it. That, at least, is one of the lessons to take away from …
HollywoodandFine.com “Silent House” is one of those gimmick-movies that you can easily imagine beginning with a conversation along the lines of, “Hey, you know what would be cool?” In this case, the answer to that question is, “It would be cool to make a horror movie in one continuous unedited …
HollywoodandFine.com There seem to be an endless series of student competitions about which to make documentaries – and any number have been made over the years. From “Spellbound” (about the National Spelling Bee) to last year’s “Louder Than a Bomb” (about high-school poetry slams) to “Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon” …
HollywoodandFine.com You shouldn’t see “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” on an empty stomach. Indeed, you should have sushi in ready proximity once you have seen this fascinating look at the world’s greatest sushi chef. And it better be good. Directed by David Gelb,”Jiro Dreams of Sushi” is a documentary portrait of …
HollywoodandFine.com I’d probably seen the placard on the side of New York city buses a half-dozen times – the one for “John Carter” in which what appear to be two giant, eye-less, four-armed apes are shown against an orange background with “John Carter” in big capitals – before I actually …
HollywoodandFine.com I don’t think there was a movie at last fall’s Toronto Film Festival (or New York after that) that thrilled me in the same way that “Footnote” did. Joseph Cedar’s film, about a family of academics, creates a tension that squeezes laughs out of the audience. It’s the kind …
HollywoodandFine.com Writer-director Taika Waititi may be the founder of his own school of humor: call it “cruel-reality” comedy, Kiwi division, as practiced in his film, “Eagle vs. Shark,” and now his semi-autobiographical “Boy.” Told from the first-person perspective of the title character, “Boy” is the story of what happens one …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s unfortunate but understandable that they had to change the name of Nick Flynn’s memoir, “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,” to the more TV-ready title “Being Flynn.” If only they could have made it into an interesting tale, instead of a movie about miserable people making each other …
HollywoodandFine.com You know that feeling when a comedy has just elicited an unexpected howl of laughter from you? The kind that has you momentarily breathless from the sheer pleasurable violence of it? Well, that’s not something you’ll experience while watching David Wain’s “Wanderlust,” a movie that really wants to make …
HollywoodandFine.com Does heroism translate from real-life to the big screen? Not really, as it turns out. Oh sure, Johnny Weismuller was an Olympic hero – and he turned that into big-screen career playing Tarzan. On the other hand, Audie Murphy, a real-life World War II hero, played a civil-war soldier …
HollywoodandFine.com Films remind us of how far we’ve come as a society – as well as the opposite. We are, after all, in the 21st century, a time of virtually instant communication and any manner of futuristic devices that differentiate us from, say, our ancestors in the Middle Ages, or …