A MAN IN FULL: Clint Eastwood At 80

JOE QUEENAN: Because he started out as an actor, and very quickly became an actor that a large segment of the population positively adored, in the same way that they adored Jimmy Cagney and Cary Grant and both Hepburns, Eastwood has long benefited from a personal relationship with the American people that no other living director can even dream of. (In my lifetime, only Alfred Hitchcock, who came into everyone’s living room once a week to deliver his weird, deadpan introductions to his creepy TV series, has enjoyed this sort of ongoing, intimate rapport with the American people. But little […]

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CINEMA: Metaphysical Graffiti

EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP (2010, directed by Banksy, 87 minutes, U.S.) THE SQUARE (2008, directed by Nash Edgerton, 105 minutes, Australia) THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN (2009, directed by André Téchiné, 96 minutes, France) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC The new documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop. starts off as a seemingly slight, self-promotional look at the guerrilla Street Art movement, then takes a surprisingly complex turn to look at the nature of art itself. The movement, in which stickers, stencils, spray paint and markers interact with public spaces, mixes Warhol, graffiti and anarchist ideas in ways that can […]

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CINEMA: Please Don’t Eat The Banksy

NEW YORK TIMES: “Exit” is billed as “a Banksy film,” but Banksy, the notoriously reclusive British street artist, appears only rarely, face hooded and voice distorted. Even so, it is Banksy whom audiences will come hoping to see, stimulated by the canopy of hype that this artist has carefully erected, in interviews and on the festival circuit. What they will find is, like Banksy’s best work, a trompe l’oeil: a film that looks like a documentary but feels like a monumental con. Spanning almost a decade and several continents, “Exit” tells of Mr. Guetta’s infiltration of the secretive world of […]

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TONITE: The Animal Collective Movie Comes To Town

BY JONATHAN VALANIA FOR THE PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY: At turns disturbing, confusing, disgusting, hilarious, mesmerizing and stone cold beatific, Oddsac is perhaps best explained by clarifying what it is not: it is neither a rock documentary nor a concert film, nor is it the kind of film you would see at the cineplex. There are no stars, no car chases, no dreamy romantic interests who meet cute and live happily ever after. In fact, there is no plot, no linear narrative arc. Instead, there is a series of hallucinatory vignettes: a girl attempting in vain to stanch the flow of black […]

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FREE TIX: For The Philly Film Fest’s Spring Preview

TICKET OFFER: Philadelphia Film Festival has offered us limited number of passes for the Spring Preview screenings, if you would like to attend drop us a line at feed@Phawker.com and please include a cell-phone number. RELATED: Dan Buskirk’s Spring Preview Review *** SCRAPPLE TV NEWS: The Week In Weed A.P. Ticker puts Philly’s new pot possession policy in his pipe and stuffs it.

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CINEMA: Philadelphia Film Festival Spring Preview

BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Most local film lovers don’t even want to discuss the collapse of this Spring’s Philadelphia Film Festival, it’s down there with bummer thoughts like the loss of a beloved pet or the rise of the Tea Party.  I know some of the my favorite films of the decade were features caught during the festival that never again arrived on area screens.  Like a friend looking to cushion the blow, the Philadelphia Film Society has staged a Spring Preview mini-festival this weekend, bringing twelve new films to the Prince Theater and the best thing is that […]

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CINEMA: The Incredibly Strange World Of Marwencol

LA WEEKLY: I came to the SXSW Film Festival this year at the invitation of the film festival, to serve on its Documentary Feature jury. At tonight’s awards ceremony, I was proud to present our Grand Jury Prize to Marwencol, Jeff Malmberg’s documentary on Mark Hogencamp, an artist/alcoholic left with brain damage after a bar brawl, who deals with his disability by creating and photographing a 1/6th scale WWII-era Belgian town in his backyard, populated by Barbie-doll surrogates for himself and other members of his real world. Marwencol stood out from the competition pack for a number of reasons, but […]

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NOW ON DVD: Fantastic Mr. Fox

[Artwork by ZOLTRON] FRESH AIR: Director Wes Anderson has worked on many movies — The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited, Bottle Rocket and Rushmore among them — but Fantastic Mr. Fox is his first animated film. The movie, released on DVD this week, uses miniature animal puppets and miniature sets, animated through stop-motion photography to create a visually amazing world. MORE DAN BUSKIRK: One hates to agree with such braggadocios bluster but yes, that Mr. Fox is quite fantastic.  Director Wes Anderson (known for creating painstakingly mounted neurotic whimsy like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited) takes an unexpected […]

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