Quentin Tarantino continues his quest to fight history's great oppressors by way of the movies in Django Unchained. Inglourious Basterds conjured up a squadron of tough Jewish-American soldiers who took Nazi scalps and chased down Hitler with the help of a French Jewish theater owner, a British film critic turned lieutenant and a Allies-affiliated German movie star. Django Unchained doesn't literally bring the forces of cinema to bear against slavery in the same fashion, but it does use tropes of Spaghetti Westerns and exploitation films to build the character of a former slave who learns to shoot and eventually faces down the residents of a plantation in order to retrieve his wife. There's something inarguably rousing about Tarantino's exuberant revisionist history, about the way he rewrites wretched eras in the past so that those who suffered are able to have their bloody revenge.
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As beloved and popular as J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit has been in the seventy plus years since its publication, the simple adventure story has never been much more than prologue, a light and sunny rain compared to the epic hurricane force of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, the transformative high fantasy quest narrative which C.S. Lewis once said contained "beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron."
The worst thing that could be said about Peter Jackson's fourth cinematic foray into Middle Earth, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, is that it follows suit, being merely good when greatness was anticipated or expected. more »
Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey had its New Zealand premiere Wednesday, and although local press are still under embargo, the New York Daily News has burst out of the gate with the first published review of the anticipated Lord of the Rings follow-up. What's the early verdict on Jackson's groundbreaking 48 fps presentation, which was so publicly panned in previews?
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Whether you're a devoted Twihard, an absolute hater, or someone who's still just completely bewildered by Stephenie Meyer's oeuvre, you must give the Twilight saga this — these stories are incredible, unabashed distillations of teenage (or just teenage-at-heart) female fantasy. Male equivalents, like, say, most superhero stories, have come to dominate the mainstream and fill the summer blockbuster schedule to such an extent that the Twilight films are striking simply in how very different they are. And how crazily well they target certain girlish pleasure centers with their themes of eternal romance, playing house with the advantages of unlimited vampiric wealth, and being the one that everyone wants without even trying.
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Because the Paranormal Activity movies are defined by their structure rather than by a visible monster or recurring lead characters or surroundings, it's the filmmaking that ends up having to evolve and change to set each new installment apart rather than, say, the mythology. You're got the limited location, the slow burn, the surveillance gear, the demonic hijinks — it's what's done with these elements that distinguishes one film from the next, a fact that makes the franchise interesting technically even if its versions of things that go bump in the night don't do much for you.
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It’s too bad that Frankenweenie comes at this late-middle stage of Tim Burton’s career when the director, now more brand than auteur, has lost his older fans, because it’s exactly the kind of funny, creepy, poignant film many of us have been waiting for Burton to make since Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas. It’s probably too early to peg Frankenweenie as Burton’s comeback vehicle, but it’s certainly the director’s best movie in twenty years.
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Taken 2 grabs everything that was surprisingly enjoyable about the original film and batters it into the ground like... Liam Neeson beating up an Albanian human trafficking ring. The brute charm that the 2008 Taken found in portraying the Irish Oscar-nominee as an ultra-competent badass has withered to kitsch, and what's left is tinged with even more xenophobia and weird paternal wish-fulfillment. Worse, the directing reins have been handed from greater Luc Besson protégé Pierre Morel to the lesser (but, granted, more awesomely named) Olivier Megaton, of Transporter 3 and Columbiana, and he slashes the action sequences to such incoherent bits that half the fights could have been shot on a sound stage thousands of miles from any star and chopped in after the fact. Why are we watching this again?
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Channing Tatum goes back to high school — again — in Jamie Linden's 10 Years. This time, the only thing undercover is his longing for ex-prom date Mary (Rosario Dawson), which Tatum's Jake attempts to drink away before it catches the attention of longtime girlfriend Jess (Jenna Dewan-Tatum, Tatum's real-life wife, gamely playing second fiddle) and Mary's new husband (Ron Livingston). If you're wondering how two former flames could show up to a reunion unprepared to see the other coupled-up, the answer is eventually addressed: Jake doesn't use Facebook because he's "technologically ignorant." Behold, our brave new world of breaking bad news — online ignorance is bliss.
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The Master, the new film from Paul Thomas Anderson, is the story of a spiritual duel — the battle for a soul — though only one of the participants perceives it as such. Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the mystic of the title, is the leader of a young movement not unlike what evolved into a certain real life one well entrenched in the entertainment industry. It's 1950, and he finds a stowaway on his ship, a drunk vagabond who claims to be an able-bodied seaman and who asks for work. The man's name is Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), he fought in the war, and he's not mentally stable, either because of his experiences in battle or because stability was just never meant for him.
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Billionaire Robert Miller (Richard Gere) is a cheat. He cheats on his wife (Susan Sarandon) with his mistress, and on his mistress (Laetitia Casta) with his job. And for his job as CEO of one of those mysteriously mighty hedge funds that control the world in Arbitrage, he'll cheat everybody: the IRS, his daughter and business partner (Brit Marling), the buddy who loaned him $412 million, and the fellow mogul Miller wants to acquire his company so he can, of course, spend time with his family, even though the idea confuses them. “I'm just trying to imagine what we would do?” laughs Marling.
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And I thought this whole Oogieloves business couldn't get any stranger. Take it away, A.O. Scott! "Nobody is mean in this movie. They talk very loud. Theres parts where you dance or say cheers and rimes which made it noisy in the theter. Hallie’s dad said it was Rocky Horror for toddlers whatever that is. Me and Hallie are 7 and we thought it was for babies. Theo is 3 and a half. Dont you dare call him 3. He ran in circels and fell asleep. At the end the Oogieloves get all the bloons and the bloons grow faces. That was kind of a scary part evn tho the bloons were nice." When I was seven I could spell much better than this, but whatevs. Yes, it counts toward the Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes. WTF indeed. [NYT]
The indomitable bike messenger played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Premium Rush is named Wilee, as in Wile E. Coyote, the less successful half of Looney Tunes' eternal desert chase duo. A few minutes into the movie, however, it becomes clear he's more like the Road Runner: Wiry and whippet thin, Wilee darts through Manhattan traffic on his fixed gear bike — chain lock wrapped around his waist — thumbing his nose at the NYPD and evading the dogged pursuit of corrupt detective Bobby Monday (Michael Shannon). No Chamois Ass is he. more »
Easier to admire than to love, David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis is an amplified, feverish vision of the one percent as scarcely human — not because of any innate maliciousness, but because they're so removed from the lives of the masses. They're like children who've already won a video game and now play carelessly, without any need to observe the rules. more »
Hope Springs is not what it says on the package. The trailer is all comedy and quirk, but the movie is not.
Let’s face it though, the premise is a hard sell. Films about old people are anathema to mainstream Hollywood. Since the success of Cocoon — which featured its over-50 cast rejuvenated by a swimming pool containing alien pods — movies featuring actors of a certain age are rare, and despite the success of Space Cowboys, The Straight Story and Meryl Streep's last Oscar-winning vehicle, The Iron Lady, it is almost impossible to get a film made unless someone under 20 is pivotal to the script. more »
Films like Celeste and Jesse Forever and The Five-Year Engagement feel like the start of some new subgenre — these unromantic semi-comedies about the microdramas of nice, emotionally inarticulate people struggling their way through relationships. Both feature comedic actors working with material that's not intended to be all that funny, and both take angles on relationships that don't usually make it to screen — a prolonged breakup leading up to a divorce and a prolonged, unhappy stretch leading up to a wedding. And both cruise on the charms of their lead actors, in this case Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg, holding together just enough to be satisfying while also leaving you wishing they had a little more to them.
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