Archive for July, 2010
Feminine Fancy
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010Alphabet
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
Slick animated alphabet from Sofia based Pavel Pavlov.
The Campaign Trail
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010On the ‘town
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010
The trailer for the new Ben Affleck movie, "The Town," isn't on the Web yet. The movie's scheduled to open Sept. 10. The trailer was shown before the advance screening of "Inception" last night. Jeremy Renner looks scary. Rebeca Hall, being Rebecca Hall, looks wonderful, and the whole thing goes on way too long. What makes the trailer worth noting is how at one point a character in voiceover says something to the effect, "There are 300 bank robberies attempted in the Boston area each year. Most of them are committed by people who live within a single square mile, in a place called Charlestown." Well, the AMC Loews Boston Common, where the screening was being held, is about a mile and a half from Monument Square. The theater was packed. You can imagine the response when "Charlestown" was spoken As Tip O'Neill might say, "All laughter is local." Presumably, an audience on Pandora watching a trailer for "Avatar" would have reacted much the same way.
New on DVD – July 13, 2010 – The Bounty Hunter and Chloe
Monday, July 12th, 2010The Bounty Hunter
Jennifer Aniston is bounty hunter Gerard Butler's ex-wife, and -- wouldn't you know it? -- he's been hired to catch her. Let the fun -- not commence. Our very, very unimpressed critic said, "A romantic comedy is built from the relationship of its leads, and all The Bounty Hunter has to work with are blank stares."
Chloe
Sweet Hereafter director Atom Egoyan's latest tale of sexual mores and oddities stars Julianne Moore as an insecure wife who's so convinced that her husband (Liam Neeson) is having an affair that she hires a hooker (Amanda Seyfried) to seduce him, as a test, only to become enamored of Chloe herself. We thought that it ended as a letdown but that the film's "Hitchcockian overtones and apt pacing mark a welcome return to form for Egoyan."
Greenberg
In this urbane drama from Margot at the Wedding filmmaker Noah Baumbach, Ben Stiller plays a surly misanthrope house-sitting for his much more successful brother in Los Angeles, when he enters into a curious relationship with his brother's young nanny. We thought this off-key story to be "perceptive and very beautiful."
Formosa Betrayed
Dawson's Creek's James Van Der Beek resurfaces to star as an FBI agent who gets in way over his head in this politically tinged Taiwan-set suspense thriller that we found "directed with skill and precision."
8: The Mormon Proposition
When California passed Proposition 8 to keep same-sex couples from getting married, the fact that the Mormon church was one of the proposition's biggest supporters riled many people, including the makers of this incensed documentary. While we appreciated the film's subject matter, some "overwrought and saccharine" passages undermined an "otherwise strongly worded piece of issue cinema."
Saint John of Las Vegas
The ever-reliable Steve Buscemi plays a gambling junkie on a road trip to (where else?) Las Vegas in this low-budget drama. Our critic thought the cast was one of the film's strongest points (Buscemi, Sarah Silverman, Peter Dinklage, among others) but disliked the "paper-thin story" that was only "good for a quick laugh."
Our Family Wedding
Everything you need to know about this new wedding comedy (starring Forest Whitaker, America Ferrera, and Carlos Mencia) is summed up by our critic, who asked, first, whether the film was made because somebody lost a bet, and then noted, "Never have 100 supposedly laugh-filled minutes felt more like a death in the family instead of a marriage."
Well Suited
Monday, July 12th, 2010Bits & Bytes: Andrejyny
Monday, July 12th, 2010The Swiss Refuse to Extradite Polanski and Set Him Free
Monday, July 12th, 2010Filed under: Celebrities and Controversy
Almost ten months ago, filmmaker Roman Polanski traveled to Switzerland for the Zurich Film Festival. Though he had been to the country many times, during this visit he was arrested and held as the country decided whether or not he'd be extradited back to the United States for his 30+ year-old crimes. As we all know, in the late '70s, Polanski had sex with a 13-year-old girl, and plea bargained his sentence to unlawful sexual intercourse with an underage girl. He spent just over a month in a psychiatric unit as his sentence, and when it seemed like the judge would treat him unfairly, he fled, kicking off a decades-long argument about his actions, his flight, and the consequences.Switzerland, at least, has made its judgment: Roman Polanski is a free man.
Continue reading The Swiss Refuse to Extradite Polanski and Set Him Free
Will Joaquin Phoenix Be Marvel’s New Hulk?
Monday, July 12th, 2010Filed under: Action, Casting, Paramount, RumorMonger, Celebrities and Controversy, Newsstand, Comic/Superhero/Geek, Remakes and Sequels
In case you missed the news, Marvel and Ed Norton lobbed a gossip grenade into geekdom on Friday night. Marvel announced, once and for all, that Norton would not be reprising his role of Bruce Banner / The Hulk in The Avengers. Norton's agent fired back to HitFix, calling Marvel's statement "purposefully misleading" but also noted that he and his client "accepted their decision with no hard feelings."Whether those feelings are good or bad are inconsequential to the Marvel moviemaking machine. With ComicCon only a week and a half away, Marvel is racing to recast. They are hoping to have all those Avengers onstage come Saturday, July 24. The rumor mill is about to go into overdrive and we have our first name, courtesy of CHUD. Their Marvel sources report that an offer has gone out to none other than Joaquin Phoenix.
It's rumor, and it's only an offer. Phoenix could still turn them down. Nevertheless, it's a surprising choice, though I could see the actor-turned-rapper doing it. Phoenix needs a comeback big time, and he's never been entirely above big popcorn movies. He is certainly as talented as his predecessor, and looks enough like Norton and Eric Bana that many who don't follow this stuff as exhaustively as we do (and there are many!) would barely notice. But it's hard to understand why Marvel keeps flinging themselves against notoriously troubled and difficult actors. Could Phoenix really be cheaper and more malleable than Norton?