For the last 15 years, Pixar has carved out a niche making old-fashioned entertainments that appeal to audiences of all ages without pandering to any one of them. More impressively, they’ve done it using the highest level of craft and without repeating an obvious formula. In nine films they’ve told nine different stories with eight [...]
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Benny Goodman of course had more to do with music than movies, but there was a time in the early part the sound era when the line between the two was much blurrier than it is today.
On what would have been his 100th birthday, here’s Benny Goodman with a couple of numbers from Busby Berkeley’s [...]
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“I feel the world is forgetting about us. By being a video
reporter, at least I can show that Burma is still here.”
- The leader of the Democratic Voice of Burma, known as ‘Joshua’
In 2007, Danish filmmaker Anders Østergaard set out to make a short documentary about one of the members of the Democratic Voice of [...]
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Here’s my impression of 90% of movie fans when they find out today that Reel Talk with Jeffrey Lyons and Alison Bailes has been cancelled: “Wait, Jeffrey Lyons was still on TV?”
I have fuzzy, extremely hungover Sunday or Saturday morning memories of such a show existing in the last few years, but I couldn’t promise [...]
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First Showing has a clean, Entertainment Tonightless version of the teaser trailer for Toy Story 3 for those of you who just can’t wait to see it before Up this weekend. Check it out in HD if you’d rather: 480, 720, 1080
This was pretty clearly designed to take semi-subtle advantage of 3D and that’s mostly [...]
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Masahiro Motoki and Tsutomu Yamazaki in Departures
Yojiro Takita’s Departures, Japan’s Oscar winner for best foreign language film, is a likable enough story rooted in some fascinating raw material, but it is marred by ham handed voiceover, exaggerated sentimentality, odd jags of black humor and sappy montages that would feel at home in a CD commercial [...]
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Taking a 180 degree turn from the attention getting fluff of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, programmers for the LA Film Festival have announced that the opening night film will be the world premiere of Paper Man starring Jeff Daniels.
It’s an honest-to-god indie from first-time filmmakers Michele and Kieran Mulroney about a middle-aged writer (Daniels) [...]
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This week’s wide releases:
Up. Can Pixar’s latest creation lift what has so far amounted to a disappointing summer blockbuster season? I don’t think there is another filmmaking brand that automatically piques my interest like Pixar does. Although it’s taken me a while to warm up to the idea of a balloon-borne adventure with a 78-year-old [...]
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A little over a year ago, we scratched our heads over news that Werner Herzog was remaking Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant with Nicolas Cage. A month later we read that it wasn’t so much a remake as it was a whole other story about a different bad lieutenant.
Well, now there’s some sort of unofficial trailer [...]
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LAFF says: “Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto”
In 2007 we scoffed that the programmers of the Los Angeles Film Festival chose Michael Bay’s Los Angeles-set Transformers as the festival’s centerpiece gala. The move was justified as being a part of a retrospective of films featuring the City of Angels getting trashed by assorted disasters natural and man [...]
Filed under: Film Festivals | 6 Comments »
