WASHINGTON POST: One cannot say he or she has watched a terrible movie trailer until he or she has witnessed all two minutes and 33 seconds of the recently released trailer for Adam Sandler’s upcoming comedy, “Jack & Jill.” This clip/promotional debacle boasts Adam Sandler in drag, Adam Sandler as the twin brother of himself in drag, Al Pacino hitting on Adam Sandler in drag with help from a hot dog weiner and Katie Holmes attempting not to look embarassed by her involvement in this motion picture. MORE GAWKER: I don’t know that there’s really anything to say about this. […]
CINEMA: The Man Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest
[Illustration by NOMA BAR] BY ALEXANDER POTTER In America in the late 1960s and early 1970s, real life was truly more shocking — and infinitely more sleazy — than fiction. The resignation of a disgraced president was still fresh in citizens’ minds, and the stench of corruption permeated the walls of every bureaucratic institution in the nation. Likewise, the Big Apple was rotting from the inside out: Garbage collectors went on strike, leaving fetid mountains of refuse to pile up on the city’s streets; the murder rate was skyrocketing to an all-time high; and to add insult to injury, president […]
CINEMA: Let There Be Light
THE TREE OF LIFE (2011, directed by Terrence Malick, 138 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The Tree of Life, the fifth film from maverick filmmaker Terrence Malick in 38 years, is an improbable master stroke, a film that amplifies and clarifies the singular vision of his previous work while heading places his admirers could have never foreseen. It is impossibly ambitious. Using surrealism and CGI for the first time, Malick is looking to expound on the biggest questions of life. Over the course of two hours and 15 minutes, this impassioned, ethereal epic succeeds so well that it […]
CINEMA: Back To The Future
X-MEN: FIRST CLASS (2011, directed by Matthew Vaughn, 132 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK Certainly a step up from the last X-Men installment in 2006, the somewhat lush X-Men: First Class has so many intriguing elements I’m surprised how its impression vaporized once the film was over. The film is not without ideas: you’ve got the origin of the conflict between one-time friends Magneto and Professor X, the story of the mutant group’s birth, you’ve got Nazi Germany, Las Vegas, the Cuban missile crisis and January Jones decked out in leather like a refugee from Barbarella. Directed by British Matthew […]
CINEMA: Hair Of The Dawg
BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC One good drink deserves another and when the original Hangover grossed nearly half a billion dollars in 2009, it was a sure thing that the Wolfpack was going to be back for a second round. Phil, Stu, and Alan are definitely the guys with which you still love to party yet how ironic that a film about cutting loose should be so unimaginative about how to run wild. It’s the difference between the expectations of a film that costs 40 million dollars and has no stars and being a $80 million dollar film that’s […]
CINEMA: The Hissing Of Summer Lawns
DAVID EDELSTEIN: A middle-aged husband is cast out, forced to move his belongings and furniture (including his comfy easy chair) to his lawn, where he sits getting blotto—until a young couple invades his new world, mistaking it for a yard sale. […] That lawn with its scraps of a ruined life is a setting both satirical and poignant, and Will Ferrell gives a performance of Chekhovian depth. I’d say Ferrell’s work is a revelation, except it isn’t. Even in slapstick comedies like Step Brothers, he shows a delicate touch, his child-men holding onto a defensive arrogance that barely conceals their […]
CINEMA: Cracked Actors & Headbangers Bawl
CRACKS (2009, directed by Jordan Scott, 104 minutes, U.K.) HESHER (2010, directed by Spencer Susser, 100 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Society’s expectations of women has led to their condescendingly being referred to as “the gentler sex,” but isn’t this diminished expectation why it is so fun to watch women on-screen when they go stark raving mad? From Sissy Spacek in Carrie, to Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, and Faye Dunaway in Mommy Dearest, it is a special kind of thrill to watch women when they lose all composure and let their psyches run wild. […]
Spielberg In Town To Honor Comcast For Doing Something Nice And Un-Evil For A Change
[Photograph by RAY SKWIRE] ASSOCIATED PRESS: Spielberg was inspired by his 1993 Holocaust epic “Schindler’s List” to establish the Shoah Foundation, which gathers video testimonials from Holocaust survivors and eyewitnesses to use as teaching tools for current and future generations. Shoah is the Hebrew word for Holocaust. Today, the foundation’s Visual History Archive is one of the world’s largest video libraries, with nearly 52,000 testimonials from 56 countries and in 32 languages. Its goal is to provide the videos to scholars and educators as a way of educating young people about the suffering caused by xenophobia around the world. Roberts, […]
CINEMA: Hammer Of The Gods
THOR (2011, directed by Kenneth Branaugh, 114 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It’s the unofficial kick-off of the summer blockbuster season when it seems that a Marvel super hero epic arrives as dependably as Spring allergies. At this point the Marvel franchise can’t pretend to be a product of inspiration; Marvel characters are being forged into films like widgets on an assembly line. Past botched entries like Wolverine and Daredevil have kept expectations low, so it is a pleasant surprise to discover that the latest, featuring the intergalactic Norse God Thor, has been hammered into a pretty […]
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A MIDDLE-AGED MAN: A Q&A With Dan Clowes, Cartoonist Extraordinaire
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Daniel Clowes’ 30-plus-year career as a cartoonist/graphic novelist/screenwriter has seen some remarkable reversals of fortune. Back in the mid-80s, when Clowes was fresh out of Pratt and looking to take the graphic design/illustration world by storm, he couldn’t get art directors to return his phone calls. These days, post-Ghost World, the New Yorker and The New York Times plead with him to return their calls. When not busy cranking out darkly hilarious comic works like Eightball, Dan Pussey and David Boring, or illustrating Ramones videos and Supersuckers album covers, or working with Coke to create the infamous […]
INFINITE JEST: You Are Missing Almost Everything
[Artwork via BATTLEROYALEWITHCHEEZE] NPR/MONKEY SEE BLOG: The vast majority of the world’s books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It’s just numbers. Consider books alone. Let’s say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That’s quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let’s say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you’re 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you’re 80. That’s 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot. […] Of […]
CINEMA: Elephant’s Memory
WATER FOR ELEPHANTS (2011, directed by Francis Lawrence, 122 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC If you thought a seen-it-all big city film critic was too cynical to enjoy a film adaptation of Sara Gruen ‘s Depression-era circus romance Water For Elephants, you would be mistaken. A romantic triangle between a circus owner, his star attraction wife, and an Ivy-League-drop-out turned roustabout is just the sort of old-fashioned hokum that Hollywood once did best. There was every reason to believe that movie stars Reese Witherspoon and Edward the Vampire from Twilight could bring their sizable star power to make […]
CINEMA: Blow-Up Turns 45
VANITY FAIR: Forty-five years ago, English model Jill Kennington agreed to appear in an art-house film—one that would memorably capture the energy of London’s 1960s fashion and art scenes. Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 classic, Blow-Up—his first English-language film—was a sensation, and earned the Italian modernist Oscar nominations for directing and writing. Today, Kennington discusses her participation in Blow-Up and the real-world London atmosphere it depicted with Philippe Garner, international head of 20th-century decorative art and design at Christie’s. With David Alan Mellor, Garner has co-written a book that analyzes and contextualizes the film: Antonioni’s Blow-Up. (Steidl). MORE ROGER EBERT: Antonioni uses […]