Morgan Spurlock's latest documentary Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope plants a sloppy, moist kiss on the sweaty brow of geek culture's premiere event. Where it stops short from also getting on its knees and offering a different sort of sloppy, moist service to the four-day San Diego affair is in the sight of one of the film's subjects weeping in the audience of a panel entitled "Breaking into Comics the Marvel Way." Comic-Con Episode IV is indulgent to a fault about everything that happens on the convention floor, but Spurlock makes the smart decision to shape the film primarily around subjects who have an economic stake in the goings-on.
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Do you live in the New York area? Are you interested in film criticism? If you answered "yes" to both, then clear your calendar on the evening of April 4, when Movieline's chief critic Stephanie Zacharek will join an esteemed panel of peers to discuss film criticism today. No, really! The event is even called "Film Criticism Today." And it's free! Read on for the details.
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Based on a true story out of World War II-era Lvov, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), In Darkness seeks to distinguish itself from the painfully distended genre of Holocaust movies with relentless “you are there” realism. It’s not quite Smell-o-vision, but the idea seems to be to try and make the experience of the 12 Polish Jews who hid in a sewer for 14 months as uncomfortable for the audience as it was for them.
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In 2005, when Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was published, Walter Kirn, writing in the New York Times Book Review, summed up the book's "grand ambition" this way: "To take on the most explosive subject available while showing no passion, giving no offense, adopting no point of view and venturing no sentiment more hazardous than that history is sad and brutal and wouldn't it be nicer if it weren't." Kirn couldn't, at that point, have seen Stephen Daldry's film adaptation of the book. But with that sentence, he pretty much wrote the review in advance.
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Film bloggers and pundits and awards season watchers have pecked this David Denby-Scott Rudin exchange to death with no clear consensus or solution, but one player in the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo kerfuffle has a solution. "If it were up to me, I wouldn't show movies to anybody before they were released," director David Fincher told the Miami Herald. "...If I had my way, the New York Film Critics Circle would not have seen this movie and then we would not be in this situation." More wishful thinking from Fincher after the jump!
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