Hancock was here
Will Smith plays Hancock, a hard drinking, self-loathing, foul-mouthed creep who just happens to be endowed with invincibility, super strength and the ability to fly. He protects Los Angeles from the criminal element, but he tends to do more damage than good and the citizens find him more of a menace than an [...]

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I was going to skip a middle of the year recap, but then Alexander Coleman got me to thinking about how well this year stacks up with last year in terms of quality. Mr. Coleman rightfully points out that 2008 is shaping up to be a solid in its own right.
On the other hand, Variety’s Timothy M. [...]

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For a movie I really liked, I’ve sure treated Jeff Nichols’ debut feature Shotgun Stories cheaply. First I never wrote a full review of it. Then on Tuesday, I missed the fact that it hit DVD this week. Thanks to the infinitely more thorough Evan Derrick of MovieZeal, I’m here to mend my ways. It’s [...]

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The Wackness is the dopeness
Friday is a major US holiday and the release calendar is all mucked up so I’m rolling out the Weekend Forecast a day early again this week. First up is the only wide release which actually opened on Tuesday for those of you keeping score at home:

Hancock (7/1). Just what summer needs, [...]

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Norah Jones in Wong Kar-Wai’s My Blueberry Nights
Finally appearing on Tuesday where it belongs, here’s this week’s look at movies you may have missed that are now available on DVD.
The big news in some quarters is of course confirmation that The Godfather Trilogy is coming to Blu-ray on September 23, newly restored and with some [...]

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Robert Feinberg and Ruby Lynn Reyner are finally Finishing Heaven
I spent most of Sunday decompressing so my Saturday report is a day late. It all fits into the big picture though because the first film I watched was a documentary that tests the notion of whether late is indeed better than never. Let’s just pretend I’m [...]

Filed under: Film Festivals, Movies | 40 Comments »

Moviefone has the new James Bond trailer in HD Quicktime. 
Click here to see the Low-D version.
There’s something about James Bond that’s connected directly to the part of my brain that’s still 12 or 13 years old so please forgive my continual plugging of this movie.

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The Los Angeles Film Festival Audience Awards were handed out last night.
Audiences chose The Wackness as Best Narrative Feature, Anvil! The Story of Anvil as Best Documentary Feature and Man on Wire as Best International Feature.
I didn’t catch the Anvil documentary because it played too far away from Westwood, but Man on Wire was the [...]

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So, on Friday I took time out from watching movies at the LA Film Festival…to watch more movies outside of the festival. Explain to me which part of taking a break from movies by watching movies doesn’t mean my life has spun out of control.
Anyway, first up was WALL•E. I enjoyed it, but it didn’t [...]

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The 2008 Los Angeles Film Festival wraps up today with Family Day, the premiere of Journey to the Center of the Earth, a scattering of other screenings and the announcement of the Audience Awards, but for me it ended last night.
Before I post the usual recount of yesterday’s movie activity, I wanted to report the [...]

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Baghead: Be afraid. Be very afraid. 
I took some time out to catch a few new theatrical releases on Friday night so there’s only one movie from LAFF to report on.
How do you describe Mark and Jay (The Puffy Chair) Duplass’ Baghead. Is it a horror movie? Is it a comedy? Is it another entry in [...]

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Roy Andersson’s You, the Living (Du Levande) 
Have you ever known someone you feel sorry for but can’t bear to spend more than a few minutes with? That describes the main character Eléonore (Eléonore Hendricks) in Josh Safdie’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed, a film I saw just before the festival began but am only now [...]

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Wednesday was a day at LAFF that probably would’ve been more rewarding earlier in the festival when my energy was higher. As it is, we’ve passed the half way mark, there’s a feeling of winding down and I’m finding myself losing patience with some of the more challenging fare. Nevertheless, I came away with some [...]

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Eve and WALL•E - Just a couple of crazy robots in love
Thursday brings us to another Weekend Forecast. Prospects are certainly better than last week.

WALL•E. I’m taking a break from the tail end of the LA Film Festival just for opening night of the latest from the fine folks at Pixar. I’ve said it before [...]

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A scene from Robert McGuire’s segment of Fear(s) of the Dark
I very nearly skipped The Wackness last night for the late addition of Winged Creatures with Kate Beckinsale. Something about The Wackness didn’t feel right. More than the mixed reviews out of Sundance, I hated the title and the prospect of another story about a [...]

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Danny Glover in John Sayles’ Honeydripper - A movie you may have missed
Ok, I know I said this item would be run on Tuesdays (if it ran at all) and here it is Wednesday again. I’ll tell you what. If you send in a self-addressed stamped envelope, I will happily refund your full LiC subscription [...]

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Choke: Two sex addicts walk into a strip club…
I might be stating the obvious here, but something has come into clearer focus for me these past few days: Beware of reviews from film festivals. They’re not to be trusted. Environment, expectations and state of mind are all mutable, they all have an impact on a [...]

Filed under: Film Festivals, Movies | 24 Comments »

Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort in Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude
Fact #1: Hal Ashby rules.
Fact #2: People don’t talk enough about Hal Ashby’s remarkable and unbroken run of movies during the golden age of 1970s American Cinema. Seriously. Come on. The Landlord (1970). Harold and Maude (1971). The Last Detail (1973). Shampoo (1975). Bound for Glory [...]

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Sunday was another good day at LAFF. I saw three documentaries and one narrative feature and they all ranged from good to great.
First up was Man on Wire, a superb and surprisingly moving documentary about Philippe Petit, a Frenchman, acrobat and mad dreamer who walked a tight-rope between the twin towers of Manhattan’s World Trade [...]

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It’s Watercooler time, but I’m afraid I don’t have much to start it off. At LiC it was all LAFF all the time this weekend and there was no time for new releases.
It looks like The Love Guru would’ve stiffed even if I had seen it though. Did anyone see it? Was it as bad [...]

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On the surface, the most obvious choice for the third day of the Los Angeles Film Festival would’ve been Werner Herzog’s man vs. nature in Antarctica documentary Encounters at the End of the World. Besides playing at the Majestic Crest, the coolest venue in the LAFF circuit, I’ve also been looking forward to seeing it [...]

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After a month of having my face pressed against the candy store window, gazing longingly at all the mysterious and exotic treats in their brightly colored wrappers, I finally got my golden ticket, the doors of the Los Angeles Film Festival chocolate factory swung wide and, like Augustus Gloop, I made a bee line for [...]

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The LA Times reports that Spider-Man 4 is coming in 2011.
(sound of crickets chirping)
Since #3 combined at least three potentially good movies into one bad one, I’m not sure what there is left to do next. Plus, they don’t have a director a script or a star. Ah well, they only need a franchise character and a [...]

Filed under: Movies, Reviews | 13 Comments »

The 2008 Los Angeles Film Festival kicked off last night in Westwood with the World Premiere of Timur Bekmambetov’s Wanted starring Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman. The adrenalized action film based on Mark Millar’s comic seems a strange choice for a film festival ostensibly focused on independent and foreign cinema, but it fits [...]

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At DVD Panache, Adam Ross runs a weekly feature called Friday Screen Test where he takes someone who writes about movies, ties them to a chair, turns a hot light on them and grills them with movie related questions.
I recently survived the experience and Adam has posted the results this morning.
Head on over to DVD [...]

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According to AICN’s Harry Knowles, Quentin Tarantino recently sat down to shoot the shit with Enzo Castellari for the upcoming 3-DVD Special Edition of the Italian director’s 1977 WWII exploitation film, Quel Maledetto Treno Blindato. A Tarantino favorite, the film stars Bo Svenson and Fred Williamson as part of a group of US soldiers facing [...]

Filed under: Movies, News, Rumors | 23 Comments »

French filmmaker Jean Delannoy died on Wednesday at the age of 100. Though his film career lasted more than 60 years, he will always be inextricably intertwined with the French New Wave because he exemplified everything its proponents were fighting against.
François Truffaut famously said that even the worst of Jean Renoir’s films would be more [...]

Filed under: Movies, News, Obituaries | 19 Comments »

You could do worse than watching Singin’ in the Rain this weekend
I’m just saying…
I thank the movie gods that the LA Film Festival starts tonight because this is truly an awful weekend for new movies. My suggestion? Go rent an armload of Cyd Charisse musicals instead.
Nevertheless, because we must, here are the wide releases:

Get Smart. [...]

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I like to encourage people to watch movies in a theater, but the reality is that more and more people are doing it at home. Also, not all of the movies we talk about here play in everyone’s neighborhood. Sometimes DVD is the only chance people have to catch up on some of this stuff.
I [...]

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The love for JJ Abrams approaches Whedonesque or Apatowian heights in some quarters, but LiC is not one of them. Then again, I’m a mystery-puzzle nerd so the news yesterday that Mr. Abrams would be producing a movie based on this NY Times story by Penelope Green caught my attention.
The short of it is that [...]

Filed under: Movies, Upcoming | 11 Comments »