After several stillborn attempts at creating the next water cooler drama, HBO has excitedly seized upon True Blood as its only marquee series to show the signs of a (delicious) pulse. Certainly, the Alan Ball vampire show is watchable and well-acted, and the first four episodes of the new season exhibit no signs of a sophomore slump. However, I couldn't shake one nagging feeling while watching them: Shouldn't this be a little bit better?
The makers of The Taking of Pelham 123 maintain their film is not a remake of the 1974 classic featuring Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw. That's smart. Instead, by pointing back to novelist John Godey's original thriller about a New York subway car hijacking, they borrow the more malleable of two sources -- an enduring tale of a city completely unable to reconcile the far ends of its sprawling ambition. That's a place where stars Denzel Washington and John Travolta can run fantastically wild, and where director Tony Scott can once again showcase both his talent and his limitations in attempting to harness them.
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The 2009 CineVegas Film Festival kicked off Wednesday with the world premiere of St. John of Las Vegas, filmmaker Hue Rhodes's quirk-addled feature debut. A low-key (for Vegas, anyway) red carpet preceded the screening, where leading man Steve Buscemi was a no-show, co-star Sarah Silverman rocked cargo pants and a backpack, and we joined Holly Madison of all people on a stroll down art-house memory lane. And -- bonus -- we awoke with all our teeth! A full recap follows the jump.
Francis Ford Coppola loves to tell people these days about his second career in filmmaking. The first career... well, we know how that went. But even more interesting than the born-again indie's weirdly riveting sophomore effort Tetro is the period of unlearning that accompanied his decade away from directing. How did Coppola -- a world-class auteur with five Oscars, two Palmes d'Or and who created what even Stanley Kubrick called the best film ever made -- detour so far from his expertise while retaining the chops to tell utterly singular stories? More to the point, why did he take that detour? Tetro offers plenty of clues, and maybe even an answer.
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Moon emerged in January as one of Sundance's more provocative curios: a one-man show tens of thousands of miles from Earth, an existential thriller about a single astronaut both for and against himself. Critics fussed over its influences, then complained about the impossibility of writing about a film whose Big Twist arrives in its first 25 minutes. Sony Classics nabbed it for distribution despite no real track record with sci-fi, but with designs on selling the feature directorial debut of David Bowie's son Duncan Jones. All of which are fine, but overlook the most essential of the many true things about Moon: It's excellent.
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Since TNT rebranded eight years ago, it's been hard to pass a bus stop or flip through the channels without being slapped around by the network's tag line: "We Know Drama." Sure, they also know that people will watch Law & Order reruns until the cows come home, but their homegrown efforts have shown more than a modicum of dramatic understanding. Two of those original shows return tonight: The quirky lady detective drama The Closer and the sophomore season of Steven Bochco's Raising the Bar. These shows aren't exactly escapist summer fare, but everyone needs some drama now and then.
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It didn't take much reading between the lines of my Land of the Lost coverage over the past few days to deduce my feelings about it. But now that the embargo is up, let's make this official: I liked Land of the Lost. I quite liked it. This probably instantly tags me as some of kind of review leper, left to gather my appendages and join the other smattering of pro-Lost outcasts (Roger Ebert among them) penned in quarantine camps on the far outskirts of the critical community. So be it.
The poster tagline for Maria Bello's new Downloading Nancy promises "the most controversial film you will see this year." Clearly the marketers either weren't paying attention at Cannes or were just counting on Antichrist opening in 2010, but even so, the most controversial thing about this arid, grueling melodrama is its prodigious waste of talent. Genital mutilation notwithstanding, it's even harder to endure Bello -- and everyone else involved -- yanked to this level of badness.
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The conventional wisdom is that it's not length, but girth that really matters. However true that might be, after watching the pilot and many subsequent episodes of Showtime's new medical dark comedy Nurse Jackie, it seems that this show needs elongation to really tell a full story. Not that Nurse Jackie isn't thick with confident acting rooted in clearly-drawn characters, but a half-hour doesn't do the material justice. When you have to be dramatic and profound and conflicted and symbolic in that short of a time period, sometimes, well, you're going to come up short.
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I came to The Hangover ready to laugh. More than ready: I came primed, as if my entire life (for the past six weeks) had been leading up to witnessing for my own eyes this blinding, white supernova of funny. If I were to do it all over again, I'd probably lower those expectations by 30%. It's frequently amusing, and almost always entertaining. It's in truth way above average for your typical dudes-acting-stupid movie. But it's also far from a classic.
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Really, Nia Vardalos should be a superstar. She's smart, beautiful, a Second City alumna with sharp instincts and exquisite comic timing. She understands audiences, and how -- the woman conceived, wrote and starred in an indie that made $368 million globally. But the seven years since My Big Fat Greek Wedding haven't yielded quite the bounty she deserves: the sitcom effort My Big Fat Greek Life tailspun at CBS in 2003 after seven episodes, and her big-screen follow-up, Connie and Carla, underacheived at the box office a year later. More miss than hit, but surely no fluke, she returns this week with My Life in Ruins, as serviceable a romantic comedy as it is a breathtaking anti-intellectual broadside.
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Any Sam Mendes film would be a palate cleanser following his aggressively foul Revolutionary Road. But Away We Go, featuring John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph as a pair of 30-something expectant parents on the road to somewhere and nowhere all at once, represents more than some automatic bounding back from rock bottom. It's even more than watchable! In fact, the more I think about it, did Sam Mendes make a good film?
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With the superb Drag Me to Hell, writer/director Sam Raimi couldn't announce any more audaciously his intentions to break free from the constricting web of mega-budget superhero franchises, and return to the gross-out comedy-horror genre that made him famous. Before it even begins, the signs are there. A familiar, starry sky reveals itself to be the 1980s Universal logo, leading into a deliciously hammy, spectacularly staged prologue that wastes no time in swinging open the first of the film's many trap doors. By the time you're smacked in the face with a title card, you're all in.
As the Cannes Film Festival winds down amidst some of the hottest weather yet, it couldn't be a better time to look at the slate of contenders and their wholly subjective odds of winning the prestigious Palme d'Or.
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Of all the filmmakers showing in competition here at Cannes, few were more eagerly anticipated by cinema-goers and critics alike than French auteur Gaspar Noé. Perhaps that's due to the fact that it's been seven years since he last made a feature film -- the excellent Irreversible, which debuted at Cannes in competition. Or perhaps it's due to the fact that Noé only finished Enter the Void days ago. He was so late in completing it, in fact, that the screening had to be rescheduled to accommodate his tardiness — no time even for a black-tie screening.
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