In the poem “In Just-,” e.e. cummings described the world as “mud-luscious” and “puddle-wonderful” — words so perfectly befitting MotorStorm’s gorgeously sloppy off-road hijinks, the game’s designers probably had them tacked up on a wall somewhere. And had Cummings paid $60 for MotorStorm, the verbally inventive (and upper-case averse) poet…
Children of Men (Universal) Set in a tomorrow that looks like yesterday, Alfonso Cuarón’s wrenching adaptation of P.D. James’ novel feels more like documentary than fiction. In the movie’s world, women have gone barren, and immigrants are tossed into prison camps; it’s the proverbial nightmare to which we might actually…
“Reflections from Within: Charlie Emmert” at West Valley Art Museum: If Emmerts oil portraits of notable historical figures accurately reflect their personalities, then these guys were one miserable lot. In OKeeffe Study, a thin veil of gray watercolor drips like tears over the artists heavily wrinkled and forlorn face. It…
Bow (Tartan) Comeback Season (First Look) Curse of the Golden Flower (Sony) The Eden Formula (Westlake) The Addams Family: Volume 2 (MGM) Errol Flynn: The Signature Collection, Volume 2 (Warner Bros.) Fantastic Four: World’s Greatest Heroes, Volume 1 (Fox) Following Sean (New Video Group) Hacking Democracy (Docurama) Happy Feet (Warner…
Your lyrical arsenal is stocked and ready for action: You can name at least seven words that rhyme with “chillin’ ” and you’ve pretty much got the dictionary memorized (both Webster’s and Urban). You think you’ve got the mic skills to pay the bills, but do you have the balls…
As Charlie Fineman, a New York dentist who lost his wife and three young daughters in one of the September 11 plane crashes, Adam Sandler sports a mass of bedraggled locks and walks with his head hung low, the sounds of the city drowned out by The Who or Bruce…
Packed with female book club members, a screening of Mira Nair’s The Namesake left no doubt about the film’s target audience. If anyone’s going to flock to this warm and likable tale, it’s going to be women, yet it seems a pity to confine the movie behind the bars of…
By Monday afternoon, they had all left Austin — the A-minus-listers who flew into Texas to promote their studio releases with encroaching release dates. Among them were Shia “Is He or Isn’t He Indy Jones?” LaBeouf touting the Rear Window redo Disturbia and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Isla Fisher, and Matthew Goode…
Hardcore fantasy geeks will relish role-playing every enemy of The Last Mimzy, a family-style sci-fi adventure whose director Bob Shaye is better known to them as the evil wizard — the alien executive who peed all over the Fellowship. Shaye, in his other job as New Line Cinema topper, has…
In the same week that sees Adam Sandler playing a grieving 9/11 widower in Reign Over Me, another lone figure reeling from post-traumatic stress fills the central role in the new Antoine Fuqua-directed thriller, Shooter. Named Bob Lee Swagger and played with appropriately gruff machismo by Mark Wahlberg, he’s a…
On paper, Richard Dresser’s Augusta sounds a whole lot more dreary than it turns out to be. Thanks to some fine acting and smooth direction, this comedy about the travails of the lower-income working class not only entertains, but reveals subtleties about the diminished power of blue-collar workers in Dresser’s…
I suppose it could happen to anyone: You spend a good chunk of your professional life getting paid to pretend you’re Christ, and after awhile you start believing you can part the Red Sea. At least that’s what I’m hoping is behind the Christ complex implied in Ted Neeley’s “Interview…
There’s one similarity between Ghost Rider and most videogame movie tie-ins: Get too close to either, and your ass will probably get burnt. Though it stars goofy Nic Cage and Sam Elliott sound-alikes, Ghost Rider claims only to be an offshoot of this year’s soul-sucking blockbuster — not a direct…
Blood Diamond (Warner Bros.) Ed Zwick’s Blood Diamond, about the civil war over diamonds that devastated Sierra Leone in the late 1990s, plays like a guilt-ridden Jerry Bruckheimer movie. It’s little more than action-adventure pulp drenched in someone else’s blood — which it tries to wash off by proselytizing to…
Previews and reviews by Robrt L. Pela Frozen: Bryony Laverys dark, thoughtful drama about a pedophile serial killer won Londons prestigious Barclay Award for Best New Play of 1998, then went on to pile up accolades in New York the following year. Lavery is so skilled a scriptwriter, she manages…
Batman Beyond: Season Three (Warner Bros.) The Bridge on the River Kwai (Sony) Burning Annie (Warner Bros.) The Caine Mutiny (Sony) The Care Bears Movie: 25th Anniversary Limited Edition (MGM) Come Early Morning (Weinstein) Eragon (Fox) The Guns of Navarone (Sony) JAG: The Third Season (Paramount) Justice League Unlimited: Season…
American Cousins (BFS) Appetite for Deconstruction: A Punk Rockumentary (MVD) Barbie Fairytopia: Magic of the Rainbow (Universal) Bloody Reunion (Tartan) Blood Trails (Lions Gate) The Ed Wood Collection: A Salute to Incompetence (Passport) Favela Rising (Netflix) Fires on the Plain: The Criterion Collection (Criterion) The Gene Autry 100th Anniversary Collection…
The space-time continuum smacks the shit out of Sandra Bullock in Premonition, the latest in nonlinear nonsense, but the fun really gets going when she starts to smack back. As Linda Hanson, humdrum mom of Anywhere, U.S.A., Bullock sets things up by doing her thing, effortlessly establishing the girl next…
On January 1, one day after his 27th birthday and fresh from his honeymoon, James McAvoy slips into a coffee shop in the fashionably scruffy North London borough of Crouch End, where he’s bought a house with his bride, the actress Anne-Marie Duff. Rumpled in baggy jeans and carrying a…
To get an idea of why I was so deeply frustrated by Black Theatre Troupe’s excellent production of Fabulation or the Re-Education of Undine, try this: Put a DVD of your favorite movie on, turn the volume way up, then go out onto your front porch and watch the film…
Whether it’s slaying dragons in Zelda, zapping aliens in Halo, or inserting foot A into ass B in Virtua Fighter, the best games are the ones that offer some level of wish fulfillment. Grand Theft Auto added “Help yourself to a car” and “Drive it on the sidewalk” to the…
Casino Royale (Sony) James Bond gets a stirring shake-up in the best — yeah, Goldfinger fans, the best — film in the series’ 44-year history. Daniel Craig’s 007 has more going on above the neck and below the waist than even Sean Connery’s. He’s a genuinely compelling character — a…
