It's How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, girlchild! The movie that made "You're So Vain" uncool again, as if Janet Jackson and her Carly Simon sampling weren't enough. This 2003 romp is the finest in Pillow Fight Cinema, the kind of movie you pop into your DVD/VHS/toaster while your girlfriends and you jump on a bed and decapitate each other with couch cushions. "Gretchen, stop!" you yell, spitting up feathers and entrails. "Kate Hudson just made a joke about puppy pee, and I missed it." Gretchen recants and stops licking up your viscera. She likes Kate Hudson too, and we all like Kate Hudson, and what is wrong with our upbringings. This movie is Bad ™ and we Love ™ it. And Matthew McConaughey, the Lincoln Lawyer himself, stars as a Matthew McConaughey lookalike. Let's get into it.
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Long before "street-fashion photographer" was even a job description -- before the Sartorialist first spotted a pocket square folded just so, before Tommy Ton even knew what a platform shoe was -- there was Bill Cunningham's regular New York Times photo-column, "On the Street," a weekly feature capturing the range of looks and combinations found on the sidewalks of New York. Cunningham's eye might be attracted by the recurrence of the color red, for example, or a dozen women wearing some variation of a black suede ankle boot. If Cunningham's weekly photo-essays are catnip for people who care about fashion, they're indispensable for people who don't: The French, wisely, believe it's important to have at least a glancing interest in fashion to be culturally literate, and on that score, "On the Street" neatly fulfills the minimum weekly requirement and then some.
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An alternate title for Red Riding Hood might have been "Catherine Hardwicke's Revenge": This might have been the director's chance to restake her claim on the territory of steamy teen fairytales, after New Moon, the sequel to Hardwicke's enormously successful (and, for my money, effective) Twilight, was removed from her plate and given to Chris Weitz. Red Riding Hood certainly reads like a faux Twilight, only this time a werewolf, not a vampire, is the stand-in for the terrifying unknowability of sex. There's no reason that little tweak shouldn't work. One set of fangs is as good as another, right?
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Calling a book a classic is a peculiar damnation, a way of simultaneously placing it on a pedestal and shutting it into a musty old box. As much as we all groan when we hear that yet another great book is set to be "ruined" by some assuredly hapless filmmaker, movies are often the only thing that can save books from themselves -- or, rather, from our calcified ideas of what certain books have to be.
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Certified Copy, the title of writer/director Abbas Kiarostami's latest film, comes from the name of a book-length essay by one of its leads, lecturer and art historian James Miller (William Shimell). And, like much of the Iranian filmmaker's work, the believable observations are present from the very start; when Miller enters a room to begin a speech, the place is about two-thirds full. Miller plows ahead the distracted assertion of a man used to holding his own before crowds -- his voice fills the room with a sueded elegance. But coming after his game (and game-playing), 2008 diversion, Shirin, Certified Copy is something unique to Kiarostami's career, bringing to mind an adjective I never thought I'd append to him: adorable.
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The equilibrium-punishing visual style of the alien apocalypse flick Battle: Los Angeles suggests two possibilities to me, the first being that budgetary restrictions account for the epileptic, close-up camerawork sometimes used to convey a sense of "action" and "excitement" in films that can't afford to come by those things in a more interesting, inventive way. Matt Reeves's Cloverfield, for instance, made at the veritable clearance rate of $30 million, used point-of-view shaky-cam so extensively that warnings of motion sickness were posted in some theaters. The other possibility is that my mom is using her new iPhone to moonlight as a cinematographer.
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True fact: I've never seen an episode of Star Trek, or any of the original franchise's spin-offs onto screens large and small. And yet even I am aware of the episode where Spock's brain is stolen and spirited off to a planet populated solely by vindictive and yet vaguely aroused women.
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Yes, we're over Charlie Sheen and his Bengal viscera, but we've actually been over it for 17 years, remember? The world already explored Charlie Sheen's tiger soul in the 1994 action movie The Chase. You've seen it before. It had Kristy Swanson in it, because she's one of 1994's champions. The Chase puts Charlie Sheen's mania in perspective so we can (once again) put it behind us -- that is, if we can stomach a carousel of unlikable characters and the thespian prowess of Henry Rollins. Good luck, everyone.
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At one point in Sebastian Gutierrez's exceptionally sweet-natured Elektra Luxx, an entertainment set in the world of adult entertainment, a young porn-site impresario states plainly, "Porn stars are people too." That sounds like a throwaway truism, until you consider that in the movies, as in real life, porn actors are more often treated as objects of scorn or pity, people who have made careless choices because they were shallow, victimized or just didn't know any better. In those terms, porn stars aren't people; they're more like receptacles for our own guilt and shame.
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Happythankyoumoreplease, the filmmaking debut of Josh Radnor of How I Met Your Mother, tries a little too hard to be quirky.
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It's bad enough that Michael Dowse's retro-comedy Take Me Home Tonight isn't nearly as much fun as the '80s actually were. Even worse, it's less fun than most '80s comedies were -- and that's bad. Topher Grace plays Matt, a recent MIT grad circa 1988, whose life is stuck on "pause": He's working a dead-end job at Suncoast Video, and he still has the hots for Tori (Teresa Palmer), the golden goddess who wouldn't look twice at him in high school and who barely looks once now. She comes into the store one day; he not-so-subtly puts the moves on her, telling her he works for Goldman Sachs (in the old days, this was supposed to drive girls wild). They agree to meet later at a huge Labor Day bash, where Matt will be able to perpetuate his silly lie and, with luck, win the girl.
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A teen-idol vehicle with the ultimate aim of leaving the young misses combusting in the aisles, Beastly takes little care with its task, dumping gasoline and gun powder where it might rig a modest array of fireworks. A twist on the Beauty and the Beast story that turns a cyborg-handsome high schooler's pernicious vanity into a teachable moment, Beastly manages to show you all the ways it might have worked by missing every available mark, sometimes by the gaping expanse between Alex Pettyfer's ears, sometimes only by the feline curl of Vanessa Hudgens' smile.
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No actor has made a career of exerting determination to the extent that Matt Damon has. In the Bourne movies, he burned himself down to a central nervous system -- his focus fried away unnecessary calories. In The Informant!, the comedy comes from doughy Mark Whitacre's single minded pursuit of the life he has in his head; the weight he happily carries didn't make him earthbound. That film's examination of identity played like a Philip K. Dick adaptation; it seems to serve the purpose of making writer/director George Nolfi's simultaneously drab and florid adaptation of Dick's Adjustment Team superfluous.
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When it comes to animation, kids like bright colors, and often adults do too. That's just one reason to applaud Gore Verbinski's Rango for having the courage of its convictions: Once you get past the ho-hum candy-color-pop of the opening sequence, the movie's palette unfolds in various shades of sandy ochre, earth taupe, thundercloud gray and many, many permutations of mud brown. I wasn't sure if I wanted to watch Rango or wear it.
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"Do you know where you're going to?" asks the theme to Diana Ross's 1975 movie Mahogany. Well, do you? Turns out it doesn't matter, because Mahogany doesn't know either. Is it a fashion movie? A love story? A political thinkpiece? A treatise on how photographers are gay predators who suckle your breasts and try to kill you? The answer: All of the above! And yet, so much less. After seeing Ms. Ross on Oprah this week, we've had a craving for her old films, and Movieline has chosen to reexamine the nuttiest one of all. The one where she fornicates with Norman Bates.
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