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 [...]

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I was a scrawny kid growing up, but I never idolized the muscle-bound types. Bodybuilding was always a bore, I hated the He-Man cartoon, I didn’t worship Arnold Schwartzenegger or Sylvester Stallone and I never took professional wrestling seriously. Ordinarily I wouldn’t be interested in a documentary about three Hulk Hogan idolizing boys from New [...]

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“Hello. My name is Bruce Banner and I’m a rageaholic.”
Ang Lee sure ruined the Hulk. No, I’m not talking about the 2003 movie where he had the temerity to try injecting real adult emotion into a comic book story. I’m talking about the new 2008 incarnation that is so desperate to forget Lee ever happened, [...]

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Najib: From Afghanistan to South Africa in Kicking It 
It’s easy to look at a homeless person and see nothing but a dead ender. It’s easy to forget that these strangers are human beings. However, a single moment in time does not necessarily tell us who a person has been nor does it project who they [...]

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Commies…I hate these guys 
The paradox of sequels is that, by definition, they only exist because of the movie they’re spun off from, yet all too often they’re unable to hold up to the inevitable comparisons. Can a movie be judged on its own when its reasons for being are inextricably linked to something else? Should [...]

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Stephen Rea gets Stuck
Stuart Gordon’s new film, Stuck, kicks off with a slow motion credit sequence of senior citizens in a rest home taking their medication as a profane rap by DJ Honda blares on the soundtrack. There’s nothing supernatural, but even audiences who’ve never seen the director’s cult hits, Re-Animator and From Beyond, will [...]

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Danny R. McBride in The Foot Fist Way 
The self-proclaimed “King of the Demo,” Fred Simmons teaches Taekwondo to little kids, old ladies and awkward teens at a second rate strip mall dojo in Concord, North Carolina. That he isn’t very good at what he does is irrelevant because there isn’t anyone around who seems to [...]

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In the interest of supporting and promoting a Los Angeles institution and in encouraging others to do the same for their local revival movie theaters, here’s the first of what I hope becomes a semi-regular LiC feature: New Beverly Nights, wherein I will sample some of the cinematic double-feature bounty The New Beverly Cinema serves [...]

Filed under: Movies, Retro, Reviews | 19 Comments »

Bill Milner, Jules Sitruk and Will Poulter in Son of Rambow
Will Proudfoot is a frail looking 11-year-old growing up fatherless in a small town in England in the 1980s. His family belongs to a religious sect that forbids movies or television, but he has an active imagination and he spends hours filling notebooks with colorful [...]

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Reservoir Pathologists
The MPAA inadvertently provides the most compelling reason to see Pathology, rating it R “for disturbing and perverse behavior throughout, including violence, gruesome images, strong sexual content, nudity, drug use and language.” This is a selling point to some movie viewers (including this one, I admit) and I’m sure the filmmakers rejoiced when the [...]

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Evan Rachel Wood in The Life Before Her Eyes 
In Vadim Perelman’s The Life Before Her Eyes, Evan Rachel Wood and Uma Thurman both play the same woman, but at different points in life. Wood is the rebellious 17-year-old Diana and Thurman is the adult, now a mother with a difficult little girl of her own. Besides [...]

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“It’s a long ride, Beth. I didn’t want to go alone.”
Natalie Portman to Norah Jones (right) in My Blueberry Nights.
My Blueberry Nights is another gorgeous and melancholy meditation on longing and love from Wong Kar-Wai, his first in English. If it doesn’t quite reach the heights of some of Wong’s previous work, it still deserves [...]

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Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. - Dylan Thomas
It opens with an enraptured crowd captured in slow motion. The colored lights, the sound of cheering and the sense of anticipation are familiar. It’s a scene that has [...]

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I fell in love with The Rolling Stones in 1979 when I was 10 years old. My older brothers had exposed me to the band and they also took me to my first Stones concert, the 2nd Seattle date of the Tattoo You tour in 1981. The venue was the equivalent of a giant concrete [...]

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For Gad Elmaleh and Audrey Tautou, five cocktails lead to an elevator
ride and an elevator ride leads to a roll in the hay in Priceless
If you peer too deeply into the heart of Priceless, you might be horrified by what you see. My suggestion is that you don’t look that hard because you’ll be depriving [...]

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Paranoid Park is perhaps the most rewarding expression yet of the elusive European arthouse sensibility Gus Van Sant has been exploring in his most recent films. He’s still less interested in a strong narrative than he is in moods and in the internal lives of characters who don’t appear to have any, but he’s achieved [...]

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Young love: Michael Angarano and Olivia Thirlby in Snow Angels 
From the beginning, the new drama Snow Angels would like you to consider the interconnectedness of people as each name in the opening credits is drawn in part from the letters of the one before it.
The theme continues through the first scene which follows a shambling [...]

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Rachel McAdams is the other woman and Chris Cooper
is the unfaithful husband in Married Life 
Married Life is difficult to categorize. It takes place in a post-war America at a kind of crossroads; an era before the sexual revolution blurred the lines between gender roles, but a time when some of the forces that led to the [...]

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Horton Hears a Who, but he can’t see them 
“On the fifteenth of May, in the Jungle of Nool,
In the heat of the day, in the cool of the pool,
He was splashing…enjoying the jungle’s great joys…
When Horton the elephant heard a small noise.”
So begins Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss and so begins the new animated [...]

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Naomi Watts in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games 
Funny Games, starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth is director Michael Haneke’s shot-for-shot US remake of his own German language thriller from 1997. Why has he remade his own film? Because the English language offers a new and bigger audience for him to lecture and a lecture is what Funny Games [...]

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Frances McDormand and Amy Adams in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day 
The Amy Adams cute factor is starting to wear out its welcome. She brings an overabundance of it to Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, but it’s not enough to jumpstart this uneven comedy that begins in a screwball vein and then loses its nerve, [...]

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Jason Statham and Saffron Burrows in The Bank Job 
It begins in the early 1970s with a spider’s web of complications including a surreptitiously photographed threesome in the Caribbean; a two-bit car dealer who owes too much money to the wrong people; a pretty ex-model “in a spot of bother” after getting pinched at Heathrow airport with [...]

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“I like it. It’s like a mystery romance.”
Abigail Breslin with Ryan Reynolds in Definitely, Maybe
I steer well clear of most modern romantic comedies. It’s not that there is no romance in me, it’s that there’s no romance in the movies themselves. Mostly they serve up smarmy, insipid gruel that repulses and offends rather than enlightens [...]

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Semi-funny
It’s 1976 and Will Ferrell is Jackie Moon, owner, coach, promoter, pre-game announcer and power forward for the Flint Tropics, a lowly American Basketball Association team hoping to become one of four franchises to merge with the NBA. To get his team out of last place in the standings and attendance, Jackie trades the team [...]

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Melonie Diaz and Jack Black on the set of King Kong in Be Kind Rewind 
Imagine a world where it is accepted fact that legendary Jazz pianist Fats Waller was born in Passaic, New Jersey instead of Greenwich Village and that a video store operating in the tenement where Waller supposedly lived could survive well into the [...]

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Ronit Elkabetz and Sasson Gabai warm up to each other in The Band’s Visit
Israel’s The Band’s Visit opens quietly, like a Jim Jarmusch film. In it, eight Egyptian men who comprise the Alexandria Police Ceremonial Orchestra find themselves standing in the hot sun, lined up outside the airport in Tel Aviv, looking uncomfortable in their [...]

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Colin Farrell finds something to do In Bruges
Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson are a pair of British hit men who are, after a particularly messy job, sent off to the Belgian tourist mecca Bruges to cool down and await instructions for their next assignment. It sounds simple, but Farrell, the antsy troublemaker of this Laurel and [...]

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Jess Weixler in Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Teeth 
So, you live in the shadow of a nuclear power plant and your half-brother is a creep. Oh, and also your vagina has teeth. Yep, that’s right. The old Vagina Dentata myth come to life. Such is the bummer of life for teenaged Dawn in Mitchell Lichtenstein’s new horror film, [...]

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Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s Persepolis 
Based upon the autobiographical graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, the animated Persepolis is a series of vignettes that follow the author’s life from little Iranian girl living under the Shah to young woman wondering where she fits in the world.
Growing up is hard enough by itself, but imagine having the [...]

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61-year-old Sylvester Stallone gets it up with .50 caliber Viagra in Rambo (2008)
There are three reasons I hesitate to review Rambo. First, I’m just going to sound like a scold and a buzz kill. I swear I’m not completely joyless. I take pleasure in movies that exist for no other reason than to push buttons. [...]

Filed under: Current, Movies, Reviews | 30 Comments »