Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood’s MAGIC TRIP is a freewheeling portrait of Ken Kesey and the Merry Prankster’s fabled road trip across America in the legendary Magic Bus. In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” set off on a legendary, LSD-fuelled cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair. He was joined by “The Merry Band of Pranksters,” a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers, including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and the driver and painter of the psychedelic Magic Bus. Kesey and the Pranksters intended to […]
CINEMA: Too Much Monkey Business
RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (2011, directed by Rupert Wyatt, 105 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK Rise of the Planet of the Apes brings another apocalypse to our late summer, taking a new twist on the still-kicking 43 year-old franchise. A predictable techno-thriller, Rise is aggressively conventional, which is a shame, not just because the original remains such a weird piece of work but because there’s some intriguingly dark details in this new script that never quite get teased out. Written by the team of Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa (who haven’t seen a script produced since 1997’s […]
CINEMA: When Worlds Collide
ANOTHER EARTH (2011, directed by Mike Cahill, 90 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Another Earth is an under-baked, overly-somber indie drama that attempts to enliven its paper-thin premise with an overlay of spiritual sci-fi. While both the drama and the fantastical elements are under-developed and poorly-executed, this independently-produced Sundance award winner has a deep well of earnestness that gives the film its own unique cock-eyed passion. Like the low-budget Christian-themed films that played the church circuit in the 70s and 80s, Another Earth‘s soggy storytelling may skirt believability yet it casts an odd spell because it believes […]
CINEMA: Space Oddity
THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976, directed by Nicholas Roeg, 139 minutes, U.K.) * BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC True to its title, The Man Who Fell To Earth begins with David Bowie’s alien Newton crashing down from the sky in his alien vessel. It isn’t just Newton, Nicholas Roeg’s experimental sci-fi epic also seems like an alien document sent from a far-off place, that place being the mid-1970s. Before Star Wars‘ arrival, mid-70s sci-fi was still heavily influenced by the mystical vagaries of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Roeg’s film, which brought rock phenomenon David Bowie to the […]
CINEMA: Meat The Press
TABLOID (2010, directed by Errol Morris, 88 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Documentary master Errol Morris’ last couple features were such dark tales that the timing seems right for the good-natured naughtiness of his new film, Tabloid. The still-evolving scandal around Rupert Murdoch and the News of the World threatens to give this film a contemporary resonance but no, Tabloid‘s tale of true love gone criminally awry doesn’t reflect on the the doings of the rabid press. Instead, Morris uses his all-powerful Interrotron to examine Joyce McKinney, the one-time sex pot at the center of the 1977 sex […]
CINEMA: There Will Be Blood
BY ALEX POTTER Terrence Malick averages about one film every seven years, but it’s always worth the wait — he is widely regarded as a director’s director and A-List actors wait in line to work with him. He has not made a film that critics don’t consider great. His new one, Tree Of Life is no exception. If you like that, you’ll like Badlands, Malik’s bleak, beautiful 1973 directorial debut, starring a young and very James Dean-esque Martin Sheen and the always-great Sissy Spacek as young lovers on a killing spree across the American prairie. Set in the Badlands of […]
MUST SEE TV: George C. Scott Is NOT A Fan Of The Aggressively Awful New Adam Sandler Movie
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. […]