Now that audiences will finally have a chance to see The King's Speech, they can assess for themselves whether they can "relate" to a movie -- based on a true story -- in which a stuttering monarch works with a speech therapist to overcome his deficiency. That's a question critics, journalist-types and Oscar watchers have been pondering since the movie started gathering buzz in Toronto in September, and plenty of critics have already called the movie middlebrow. While they don't necessarily mean the word as a perjorative, their use of it does give the sense that a movie is something you examine from the safe end of a long stick, and in the case of The King's Speech, yes, by golly, the ordinary folk out there just might take to it.
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We revived Bad Movies We Love last week with Cher's Chastity, a quaint '60s jam full of boring monologues and menacing lesbianism. But Movieline is barreling ahead with a film that combines superhero glitz, melodrama and the campy pizazz of a Gwen Stacy dye job: Spider-Man 3. You think James Franco is fancy now with his Oscar buzz and amputee cred? Wait until you revisit him in Spider-Man 3, the film that pinned our disbelief under a boulder and forced us to saw it off using Topher Grace's frosty tips. Are you emotionally ready to revisit when Spider-Man went emo?
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With its trailer alone, Burlesque has already gotten tons of mileage out of its obvious camp value: You don't put Cher in a movie these days -- in a glitter mini-tuxedo, no less -- if you're angling for the National Board of Review's Dull, Worthy Snoozer of the Year prize.
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Bullet-headed counterprogramming to this week's slate of soft-palate fare, Faster was built for speed, and for an action-savvy audience who can appreciate a throwaway vengeance flick for exactly what it is. Though the film's serviceable pretense of a plot is doled out in increments small enough to pull off a big, bruising twist at the end, Faster is about delivering -- early, often and without shame.
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Love and Other Drugs is a sort-of romantic comedy about erectile-dysfunction drugs and Parkinson's Disease. Because Lord knows you can't make a romantic comedy that's just about erectile dysfunction. Jake Gyllenhaal is Jamie Randall, a pharmaceutical-salesman smoothie who talks his way into doctors' storerooms, where he fills their cupboards with his samples and chucks out those of his competitors. It's the mid-1990s, and Viagra, which began as a gleam in some scientist's eye, is just about ready to be unleashed on the public. Jamie's company, Pfizer, is the manufacturer, and when our randy young go-getter learns of the drug's miracle properties, he begs his supervisor (a weary Borscht Belt Willie Loman, played by Oliver Platt) for the account.
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How do you solve a problem like Rapunzel? Cinematically, at least, she's one of the most neglected of the Grimm brothers' fairy-tale heroines; Disney-wise she's been positively snubbed. The story had great optics but not a lot of action, I suppose, though as a child who walked around in towel-fashioned headdresses to simulate the long hair my mother wouldn't let me have, Rapunzel's was the story I longed to thrill to on the big screen.
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J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter saga began as a series of children's books and evolved into young-adult ones: The series grew up right in step with that first group of readers, even though, of course, people of all ages continue to love them today. The movies based on those books have offered a concurrent, dovetailing kind of pleasure: The joy of watching young actors grow up on-screen, learning as they go and, quite surprisingly, finding new dimensions in their characters each time out. Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint -- as Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley -- haven't become worn out by their roles, as the admittedly older Twilight stars have. Who knows what their post-Harry Potter careers will bring? The body of work they've already amassed -- up to and including this almost-final installment in the franchise, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 -- can stand by itself. Over the years, the magic in their bones has only grown stronger.
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A substantial slice of socio-history cut with plain yogurt and a glob of treacle, then pulse-puréed to a smooth, hyper-digestible consistency, Made in Dagenham tastes how I imagine a feminist placebo might. The true story (an account of British woman machinists who strike for equal pay in 1968) and the star (the ineffable Sally Hawkins) are bound up in director Nigel Cole's recipe for a film that's passable in every available way.
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Blood on a trench coat, a wholesome-seeming wife and mom behind bars, a spouse who's devoted almost to the point of obsession: Paul Haggis' marital thriller The Next Three Days has a lot going for it, including two appealing and extremely capable actors, Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks. The plot is worked out with care, and it takes its time, unapologetically, in a manner that's perfectly suited to thinking adults. The whole enterprise reeks of class.
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The original Movieline magazine ran a bunch of great features, but the most lamented one has to be Bad Movies We Love. The world never runs out of horrible, adorable films, and that's because they're the most gratifying to talk about. I haven't discussed my favorite movie, Rear Window, as much as I have Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze, and that's because James Stewart and Grace Kelly never rapped with Vanilla Ice about crime-fighting humanoids (though you never know about Thelma Ritter). The point of it all: Thanks to the infinite, Biblical, pathetic joy that bad cinema produces, we're exhuming Bad Movies We Love in weekly installments. Throw your vanities in a bonfire and join us!
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As played by Isabelle Huppert in White Material, Claire Denis' grim, numinous postcard from post-colonial Africa, Maria Vial is an implacable, impossible force in the almost unbearably attenuated body of a young girl. Our first glimpse of Maria, a sylph with thin, floating limbs, finds her running across richly vegetated land in a pink cotton sundress, alone but somehow pursued.
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If the trailers for Skyline made you believe this picture might be a reasonably entertaining space-invasion thriller, with at least semi-dazzling visual effects, actors who make a decent attempt to impersonate believable human beings and a script that isn't scraped from the very bottom of the screenwriting barrel, you could be forgiven: The advertising for Skyline makes it look like a real movie, the sort of thing you might be willing to check out just for fun if you happen to have a spare 10 bucks (or so) lying around.
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"I'm writing 'young and gifted' in my autobiography," goes an old Sloan song. "I figured who would know better than me?" They're lyrics I found myself humming after watching Tiny Furniture, 23-year-old Lena Dunham's breakout triple threat, a time-lapse snapshot of young, wannabe womanhood in flux. Tiny Furniture (its title the foremost of a long line of references to Dunham's mother, the artist Laurie Simmons, who reprises that role in the film's lightly fictionalized take on their family) is less an artisanal, autobiographical calling card than it is a singularly self-conscious debut, although it is assuredly both.
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The thrill of Tony Scott's Unstoppable, in which a runaway freight train hurtles through rural -- and toward not-so-rural -- Pennsylvania, is that its setup asks us to believe only in human ineptitude. There are no scheming terrorists, no lone crazies: Just one numbnuts who decides to jump from the engine he's driving, fully intending to jump back in before the thing really gets going. No one in Unstoppable actually wants this train -- which happens, by the way, to be loaded with hazardous substances -- to wreak havoc on the countryside and its attendant population. But everyone, including the moron who set the thing on autopilot in the first place, wants to stop it.
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Positioned as a pragmatic antidote to the panic-attack tactics of prominent global warming docs, Cool It, as even its title suggests, implores the well-intentioned hordes and top-tier policy makers to just chill for a second. Based on the controversial 2007 book of the same title by noted enviro-contrarian Bjorn Lomborg, Cool It provides a documentary platform for the ideas that Lomborg has been espousing, much to the established movement's distemper, since he published his first book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, nine years ago. To her credit, director Ondi Timoner (DiG, We Live In Public) has recruited at least one Lomborg critic -- a Stanford professor -- to voice dissent, but his dismissals seem based in pedigree rather than fact; by the end of the documentary they are essentially stumping for the same solutions.
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