Another week, another remake — summer, that season of air-conditioned originality, must be upon us. Only unlike The In-Laws, which creaked into theaters last week, this latest updating of a decades-old action-comedy has two things going for it: Its forebear is a veddy British caper film little-seen in the United…
You’ve been warned: This is a column about politics wherein a popular-culture critic (dunno what that is either, but says so on my tax returns) interviews a former rock journalist-turned-publicist-turned-band-manager-turned-record-label-executive about how the Democratic Party alienated everyone under the age of death. You may take this with a grain of…
Occasionally I can be convinced it’s the singer, not the song. I’ve no love for Britney Spears’ “Baby… One More Time,” but can’t get enough of Brit band Travis’ laconic redo of said iconic single, which squeezes out the then-teen temptress’ toxic sugar ’til it’s just a bittersweet lament. On…
Ross Hunter, dead seven years, hasn’t been this alive at the movies since the 1950s and ’60s, when he produced some of the weepiest melodramas and cheeriest romantic comedies ever to barely stick to the screen. His ghost has been wandering up and down the aisles ever since Don Simpson…
Two women, dressed in standard waitstaff uniforms, emerge from the bar and into the well-appointed lobby of the hotel built 90 years ago by beer magnate Adolphus Busch, who tried to bring the Jazz Age to what would become a Muzak town. About 50 feet away, an interviewer and his…
Long ago Eddie Murphy had grown tired of Eddie Murphy parts: the fast-talking high-jiver, the preening put-on. Even before he began parodying himself in Bowfinger and Showtime and I Spy, the latter two perhaps accidentally, he accepted high-paying roles in low-rent movies that neutered and humiliated the character he had…
He claims to be blacklisted and close to busto. Thirty years in the film biz, with a cult bigger than David Koresh’s and a disemboweled body of work that would make any studio boss blood-red with envy, and still he kvetches in a voice so eerily similar to that of…
They were loud once, deafeningly so–and dumbingly so, if such a thing is possible. They wore skins of leather stuffed with cucumbers of foil, towered over dwarves who danced around a Stonehenge made of pebbles, sang about women who fit like flesh tuxedos and explored the majesty of rock and…
In Confidence, Edward Burns plays Jake Vig, a con artist whose body temperature runs a few degrees below normal. Even when things seem to go bad, when a would-be partner betrays him with a phone call or a seedy-greedy Dustin Hoffman lays maybe-gay and grubby paws all over him, Burns…
Better Luck Tomorrow, about Asian-American high schoolers making good grades but up to no good, arrives with the furor (albeit minor — a rumpus, perhaps?) attendant a Sundance Film Fest fave. In this case, Internet movie-gossip hounds bark about changes made to the movie after MTV Films and Paramount Classics…
A few things learned from the memoirs of Marines who served in Gulf War I: They’re more terrified of being killed by friendly fire than enemy artillery; they’re bored brainless most of the time; they harbor fantasies of being shot, but never somewhere too painful or where it might inflict…
Among Anger Management’s copious flaws is the fact that its premise doesn’t wash. Adam Sandler’s Dave Buznik, a designer of catalogues for overweight-cat clothing, isn’t really angry at all; he’s just a self-loathing, introverted mess whose insecurities date back to a crowded street party in Brooklyn circa 1978, when he…
Maybe all you want out of your pop music is a few minutes of escape, a radio-friendly respite from the heavy humdrum of your workaday existence. Maybe you likes to hang with 50 Cent, who survived a few gunshots (and doesn’t let you forget it) to party another day; or…
A man, peering through the scope of a sniper’s rifle muffled by a silencer, holds hostage someone he considers an evildoer. They communicate via telephone: The sniper insists that if his prey disconnects for any reason, he will shoot to kill. To prove he is serious, not merely a lunatic…
March 21, 2003though he never knew the precise date, it was the very day Nile Southern had been waiting for longer than he cared to remember. On that day, Southern went into the Chelsea Mini-Storage facility on Manhattan’s West Side, grabbed the largest dolly he could findit looked like a…
It’s hard to believe they were originally going to release Basic before bombs started falling over Baghdad; if it isn’t the worst movie of 2003 so far, it’s only because I haven’t seen Boat Trip. Now, in the shadow of smoke rising from the rubble in Iraq, it’s even more…
War, as it turns out, is good for absolutely nothing when it comes to anti-war songs. At the risk of sounding like Bill O’Reilly (who, no doubt, listens only to Wagner), it’s time to protest the protesters, most of whom are blowin’, all right, just not in the wind. The…
Tony Grisoni can always tell when his old friend Terry Gilliam, the visionary who sees too far for his own good, is in pain: He laughs. The worse the pain, the harder the laughter. If that is the case, then the Terry Gilliam seen throughout Lost in La Mancha, Keith…
Dark Blue, according to its credits, is based upon a story by Los Angeles-born author James Ellroy, who pens grisly and guilt-ridden pulp-noir haiku that spread across hundreds of pages. Its screenplay was penned by copper caper fetishist David Ayer, a native Angelino with an affinity for Hollywood-dark stories that…
The fanboy suckled at the teat of comic-book writer-artist Frank Miller, circa 1980-81, will be satisfied, for the most part, with this cinematic Daredevil; if nothing else, the thing’s got enough Marvel Comics in-jokes to amuse ’em down at the comics shop for ages, or at least till Hulk smashes…
If nothing else, because there’s nothing else to this movie, Shanghai Knights allows Jackie Chan, he of halting dialogue and poetic movement, to pay direct homage to his idols. He hangs from the arms of Big Ben, dangling off the stories-tall clock like Harold Lloyd in 1923’s Safety First; he…
It was supposed to be make-believe, a disturbing but ultimately uplifting work of science-fiction from a celebrated author of grim futurama and glorious fantasy. The subject matter of Orbiter, a hardback graphic novel about a spaceship that disappears for years and returns sheathed in skin after visits to faraway places…
