VILLAGE VOICE: He was — even more as time went on — the living, breathing image of a cowboy: tall, preposterously thin, ruggedly handsome, and maximally taciturn unless words were absolutely necessary. The few brief times I encountered him in this century, I would always think for an instant that I was encountering an ambulatory myth — The American Cowboy — and not my longtime acquaintance, Sam Shepard, the playwright, that quirky constructor of hypnotically fascinating plays, who had really wanted to be a rock drummer and had somehow settled for being a world-class movie star instead, while continuing […]
CINEMA: Lost In Space
VALERIAN (Directed by Luc Besson, 137 min., USA, 2017) BY CHRISTOPHER MALENEY Going into Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, I really hoped it was going to be excellent. Though I have never read Valérian et Laureline, the French graphic novel that provides the material for the film, I was impressed by director Luc Besson’s credits (Leon: The Professional, The 5th Element, Taken, Lucy, etc.). I love science fiction movies and detective movies, so the trailers seemed to promise a film that very rarely gets made. I mean, space police, alien worlds, political intrigue, what’s not to love? […]
CINEMA: Bedtime For Gonzo
EDITOR’S NOTE: Hunter Thompson would have turned 80 today. NEW YORK TIMES: HUNTER S. THOMPSON, who has been lionized in two feature films, served as the model for a running character in “Doonesbury” and is the subject of enough doctoral dissertations to build a bonfire, now has a documentary devoted to him, “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson,” by Alex Gibney. Thompson, who always seemed to keep one drug-crazed eye on posterity behind his ever-present shades, would surely be pleased but not surprised. But how to freshly document the life of a man who was his […]
CINEMA: On The War Path
WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (2017, directed by Matt Reeves, 140 min, U.S.) LOST IN PARIS (2016, directed by Dominique Abel & Fiona Gordon, 83 min, France/Belgium) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I remember how perplexed Charlton Heston’s Taylor was back in 1968 when he made the realization that the planet he and his men landed on was ruled by apes. As the third of the rebooted sequels touches down in blockbuster season I find myself similarly flummoxed by glowing reception of War For the Planet of the Apes, a terribly turgid, self-serious, gloomfest. Have the critics all […]
CINEMA: Blackmail Is My Life
NEW YORK TIMES: Roger J. Stone Jr., the subject and star of “Get Me Roger Stone,” struts through this documentary with peacock feathers fully fanned. He’s first heard from a perch in some luxury digs, dressed in a tailored chalk-stripe suit with an olive martini at the ready. “My name is Roger Stone,” he says, “and I’m an agent provocateur.” The scene suggests James Bond cosplay, although it’s worth mentioning that the definition of an agent provocateur isn’t a supercool British fantasy spy but someone who persuades others to do wrong. So, who is Mr. Stone persuading? It’s an inevitable […]
SECOND OPINION: ‘Baby Driver’ Ain’t All That
WASHINGTON POST: Nominally, “Baby Driver” takes place in Atlanta, but it really exists in the imaginative world of Edgar Wright, the British filmmaker whose previous films — “Shaun of the Dead,” “Hot Fuzz,” “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” — brim with equal parts sophomoric humor, boyish kicks and grating self-satisfaction. This often clever but ultimately appalling piece of genre inversion has originality on its side: It’s a Tarantino-esque heist film re-conceived as a jukebox musical. But that novelty soon wears off as it becomes clear that it’s less written than reverse-engineered to live up to its title. It’s about […]
CINEMA: Maximum Overdrive
BABY DRIVER (2017, directed by Edgar Wright, 112 minutes, USA) BY CHRISTOPHER MALENEY When Youtube first began playing adds for Edgar Wright’s new crime and car flick, Baby Driver, I will admit I was a little upset that they seemed to have made a glaring omission by not including Simon & Garfunkel’s eponymous song anywhere in the trailer. “Just where do these jokers get off?” But, before I could take to social media to bemoan the state of modern cinema, I decided to do a little digging. What I found there more than satisfied me. In fact, it whet […]
CINEMA: Growing Up Spider-Man
SPIDER-MAN HOMECOMING (2017, Directed by Jon Watts, 133 minutes, USA) BY RICHARD SUPLEE GEEK SPACE CORRESPONDENT I bought my first my first Spider-Man comic book last century. I watched the Spider-Man cartoons every saturday as a kid. I own three Spider-Man T-Shirts, five Funko Pop collectibles, and wrote at least three poems (one of which made my creative writing thesis) focused on the character. However, I was not excited about Spider-Man: Homecoming. Sure, Tom Holland’s Spidey was amazing in Captain America: Civil War (2016) but I didn’t care. He was every bit the adorable nerdy smartass that Peter Parker […]
CINEMA: The Making Of Luc Besson’s Valerian
WIRED: Valerian, though, will be an order of magnitude stranger. For starters, there’s the source material, a French series of bandes dessinées (graphic novels, literally “drawn strips”) called Valérian et Laureline, a moderne sci-fi title not well known in the US. Then there’s the Avatar-level amount of alien that Besson is pumping in—far more than anything else he has made. The movie has visual effects from both Weta (The Lord of the Rings) and Industrial Light & Magic (basically everything else). Where The Fifth Element had just under 200 effects elements—that flying-car chase through Manhattan, the luxury-cruise starship—Valerian has […]
CINEMA: Beggars Banquet
BEATRIZ AT DINNER (2017, directed by Miguel Arteta, 83 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It’s a truly classic premise at the heart of the new film from director Miguel Arteta and screenwriter Mike White, the pair who previously worked together on indie dark comedies Chuck And Buck (in which White co-starred as “Buck”) and the under-appreciated Jennifer Aniston vehicle The Good Girl. Their latest, Beatriz At Dinner, centers around a wealthy dinner party that takes on an unexpected interloper, the working class mystic/masseuse, Beatriz (played by the always-intelligent beauty Salma Hayek, suitably dressed-down here.) You can see […]
CINEMA: Release The Bats
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds have announced the return to US cinemas of One More Time With Feeling, the acclaimed feature film about the making of their album Skeleton Tree directed by Andrew Dominik. The film will screen in select cities in the USA around the band’s live shows from May 2017. One More Time With Feeling probes the deeply personal circumstances surrounding the making of the band’s 16th studio album Skeleton Tree, and features live performances by the band in the studio. It is the first ever non-animated black and white film shot in 3D. One More […]
CINEMA: I’m With Her
WONDER WOMAN (2017, directed by Patty Jenkins, 141 minutes, USA) BY RICHARD SUPLEE GEEK SPACE CORRESPONDENT Wonder Woman has a lot riding on it. It has to singlehandedly save the DC Comics’ Extended Universe from an advanced state of cinematic suckitude while simultaneously adapting DC’s third most popular superhero of all time without pissing off 75 years worth of comic book geeks, proto-feministas and latter day riot girls AND be a better female superhero film than Supergirl (1985), Tank Girl (1995), Catwoman (2004), and Elektra (2005). For years studio execs were able to say “the audience doesn’t want female superheroes, […]
CINEMA: White Hawk Down
THE WALL (2017, directed by Doug Liman, 81 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The battlefield on which the new thriller The Wall is set in is boringly familiar, a cliché even: the beige blankness of the desert, the armored U.S. soldiers, the bent and blasted rubble, and the forbidding drone-laden soundtrack with Arab voices chanting overtop. The history of Hollywood’s war films makes for a telling window into public attitudes about national conflicts about our endless wars in the Middle East (if you begin with the Afghanistan invasion of 2001), and the public’s unthinking acceptance of them, […]