For the better part of 83 years, Paul Newman made pretty much everything look easy. The iconic roles, the powerful auto-racing interests, the staggering philanthropy, and a half-century of marriage against all Hollywood odds are just the obvious successes, and Paul Newman: A Life (Harmony Books, 496 pp.), Shawn Levy's sweeping new biography of the actor, doesn't necessarily contradict that conventional wisdom. But what it reveals about Newman -- or, more specifically, what it reminds us of -- points out the far more mixed fortunes of one of America's greatest movie stars.
more »
The Jonas Brothers play semi-catchy, over-produced pop songs about young love and are one of Disney's hottest properties. Now, they have a semi-catchy, over-produced Disney Channel show about the problems any superstar sibling boy group face when forced to interact with regular society. It's not as anarchic as The Monkees or brilliant as Flight of the Conchords, but at least it's better than the other recycled garbage on Disney. A hearty endorsement, indeed.
more »
Name values aside, perhaps Wired should have considered Jim Jarmusch over J.J. Abrams as a guest editor for its May issue. Abrams's emphatic sense of puzzlement, after all, has little on that of Jarmusch, whose new film The Limits of Control reaffirms his place among the mindbending vanguard.
more »
Franchise fanboys may have no problem nitpicking J.J. Abrams's Star Trek reboot, but I must confess that the experience leaves me feeling a little guilty. This is a bright, gleaming piece of solid studio pop in the Iron Man tradition, and it's so damn eager to please that it might as well send baby Tribbles into the theater to lap at the faces of the unconverted. I've got no doubt that the film had the vision, the budget, and the time to nail every one of Abrams's intentions. It's just that some of those intentions take a little bit of a trek to get over.
more »
"The hot ones are always crazy," goes the old maxim, and if we're to believe what we see in the movies, those hot ones are especially unhinged when their advances are rebuffed by a successful family man. Obsessed is the latest chapter in the saga of crazy white women and the men who come to fear them, and though it casually hops into bed with that genre, it does so with the disadvantage of a PG-13 rating. Obsessed's trailer promised us "the sexiest thriller of the year" and hinted at guilty pleasure potential, but the movie delivers nothing of the sort.
more »
Wherein we revive one of Movieline's finest, most enduring legacies, Bad Movies We Love:
The Bret Easton Ellis canon has yielded more than its share of outré screen adaptations since 1987, when Less Than Zero, effectively capped that go-go decade with now-dated, debauched thrills. The graphically unfilmable American Psycho wore its campy excess with pride in 2000, giving way two years later to the sordid mixed bag (at best) that was The Rules of Attraction. "We get it, already" viewers say, bleary eyes rolling into the back of their heads. But that's exactly the thing: Until The Informers, director Gregor Jordan's spectacularly misbegotten take on Ellis's 1994 short-story collection, it was impossible to know just how much you didn't get. Or rather, couldn't get.
more »
The Soloist is based on Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez's unorthodox friendship with Nathaniel Ayers, a former Juilliard cello prodigy whose untreated schizophrenia led to a life on the streets of downtown L.A. That's where Lopez discovered him, playing a two-stringed violin about as well as a two-stringed violin can be played. It's a touching story, but is it a movie?
more »
As noted a few days ago, I'll be pounding the Lower Manhattan pavement for much of the next 10 days, stalking whatever Tribeca Film Festival news is fit for Movieline consumption. Though the downsized line-up (88 features) and the concentrated screening zone might make for easier overall navigation, even the most selective TFF's in previous years have yielded a crap shoot of material rejected from Sundance and Berlin and/or too esoteric for Cannes. This edition may or may not be that different in the end, but if you're in New York and feeling adventurous, consider this lightning round of favorites from my own early viewing:
more »
If a network is going to initiate comparisons to Arrested Development while promoting a new show, they had better not be taking that name in vain. Like AD, Fox's new animated series Sit Down, Shut Up has an ensemble cast, heaping helpings of meta-humor and Mitchell Hurwitz at the helm, but (not surprisingly) falls short of that masterwork and into the cheap joke traps that AD deftly avoided. This shouldn't come as a huge surprise, but there is some hope for the future.
more »
Calculating as they were, even the Maysles Brothers didn't likely foresee the ways their 1976 documentary Grey Gardens would captivate the American imagination. One follow-up doc, one Tony-award winning musical, and now one superb film adaptation later, Big and Little Edie Beale remain both as accessible and as elusive as they were when the filmmakers first arrived at their shambolic East End estate almost four decades ago. That paradox is made definitively clear in Michael Sucsy's new Beale biopic, premiering Saturday on HBO. And the contrast owes almost everything to stars Jessica Lange and, in the performance of her life, Drew Barrymore.
more »
There are those who'd dismiss 17 Again for its shopworn premise -- and it would be hard to argue with them -- but when it comes to an old-fashioned age-swap movie, we're always game. Whether it's about a kid moving clumsily in a jaded adult world (Big, 13 Going on Thirty), a parent and child experiencing each other's life for one terrifying day (Freaky Friday, Like Father, Like Son), or just a satisfying high school do-over story (18 Again, Peggy Sue Got Married), the hokey premise seems to produce an inordinate amount of charmingly memorable films.
17 Again is not one of them.
more »
There are, in fact, many mysteries left unsolved at the close of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, some intentional and some not. For example, just how many bisexual, low-level gang members with gambling problems are there in the Steel City? How could a doughy Peter Sarsgaard have the upper-body strength to pull himself effortlessly onto a second-floor terrace during a jewel heist? Who signed off on Nick Nolte's Steven Seagal makeover?
more »
Comedy Central is a strange channel. For one, it insists on broadcasting stand-up comedy in spite of the fact that only opera translates worse to the small screen. Secondly, one-third of its programming seems to come from Blue Collar Comedy Tour alums (Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy, et al.) while the other two-thirds makes fun of those lovable Southerners whenever possible. Stranger still are the two new shows that debuted this spring, including Important Things with Demetri Martin, which premiered in February to high ratings and critical accolades for its low-budget showcase of subtle, esoteric humor.
The other new series, a fantasy-comedy-adventure dubbed Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire, premiered last Thursday. While many outlets avoided reviewing it, it's difficult to see critics embracing its high-budget parade of blunt, low-brow humor. But last I checked, teenage boys don't read Tom Shales.
more »
Take All the President's Men, add liberal doses of potboiler melodrama and existential journalist angst, and you've got the foundation for State of Play, director Kevin Macdonald's stateside adaptation of the hit 2003 BBC miniseries. Its muscular provenance alone could have supplied enough horsepower for liftoff, and in general, the filmmaker's command of D.C. intrigue -- not to mention an ensemble cast cut from his same Oscar-winning cloth -- clears the runway with plenty of room to spare. It's his crazy landings, however, that viewers need to worry about.
more »
Due in large part to the lobbying efforts of Judd Apatow, society has come to expect adolescent behavior from adults who should know better. Age 30 is fast becoming the new 20, and "perpetual student" is no longer an insult, it's a career track. Now that arrested development is in the water, it's time that the Coming of Age genre gets with the times. Adventureland is a mostly sincere step in that direction.
more »
