Posted Oct 10th 2008 7:03PM by Jette Kernion
Filed under: Sports, New Releases, Universal, Theatrical Reviews, Family Films
It's football season, which means it's also the season for at least one heartwarming and inspiring movie about the sport. This year the film comes from Universal --
The Express, a biopic of Ernie "The Elmira Express" Davis, the first African-American to win the Heisman trophy, back in 1963. However, the movie divides its time between Davis and his coach at Syracuse University, Ben Schwartzwalder, and shows the ways in which the two characters changed one another (for the better, natch).
The movie opens during the notorious Cotton Bowl game of 1960, when Davis (
Rob Brown) was a running back on the Syracuse University team that played The University of Texas, which had not yet allowed black varsity team members. It's a rough game, but Davis is handling himself until all hell breaks loose ... and then we flash back to Davis's childhood in the 1940s and see how he learned to handle nasty racist situations even at an early age. He's stubborn and he's speedy, and eventually decides to use those assets to strive for his goal of playing professional football. His idol, Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown, advises Davis to play for his alma mater Syracuse because Schwartzwalder (
Dennis Quaid) is such an excellent head coach. But Davis encounters difficulties in the ways Schwartzwalder handles the black team members. The coach's primary goal is to avoid "trouble," so they're warned away from the white female students, and worse yet, at certain Southern games they're not allowed to score touchdowns. The real action culminates when the film returns to the Cotton Bowl game in Dallas.
Continue reading Review: The Express
Posted Oct 10th 2008 8:03AM by Eric D. Snider
Filed under: Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Foreign Language, Gay & Lesbian, Independent, New Releases, Family Films, Columns, Cinematical Indie, Indie Spotlight
Welcome to the
Indie Spotlight, our weekly roundup of the limited-release films opening outside the multiplexes all over this great land of ours. There are quite a few indie films debuting today, and while it's especially good news for movie buffs in New York City, the rest of us can make a note of the ones that look good and keep an eye out for when they come to our neck of the woods (wherever that neck may be).
Today we have, in alphabetical order:
Ashes of Time Redux, Billy: The Early Years, Breakfast with Scot, Choose Connor, Fraude: Mexico 2006, Good Dick, Happy-Go-Lucky, Nights and Weekends, and
Talento de Barrio. Here's the scoop on each of them, from widest opening to smallest.
Billy: The Early Years What it is: A friendly, faithful biopic about the Rev. Billy Graham.
What they're saying: Nothing so far. If I had to guess, I'd reckon fans of the good reverend will find it pleasant, while those unfamiliar with or uninterested in him will find it boring. That's if I had to guess.
Where it's playing: About 300 locations throughout the southeastern quadrant of the United States, below the Mason-Dixon line and east of Amarillo.
More info: Here's the
official site.
Talento de BarrioWhat it is: Puerto Rican drama starring Daddy Yankee as a drug dealer who falls in love and becomes a reggaeton singer. I guess it's like a Puerto Rican
Hustle & Flow.
What they're saying: The only
two reviews available so far are very, very negative.
Where it's playing: About 20 screens in the greater New York City and Los Angeles areas.
More info: The
official site lists the theaters it's playing in.
Continue reading Indie Spotlight: New Releases for Oct. 10
Posted Oct 9th 2008 9:03AM by Eugene Novikov
Filed under: New Releases, Lionsgate Films, Celebrities and Controversy, Newsstand
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Oliver Stone's
W. has screened for the more important among us, and I am pleasantly surprised to report that people are not openly laughing at it. Some seem downright impressed. Here, for example is David Poland on
The Hot Blog:
"[Josh] Brolin should be nominated for the Oscar. We'll see whether the crowd around Best Actor is too big for him to crack, but it is a letter perfect performance that looks much, much easier than most critics and audiences, I think, will understand . . . . The only downside is that the movie doesn't offer the massive supporting cast a lot of big awards-style moments. They are just really, really good. And that really should be enough."
Variety's
Todd McCarthy is a bit more mixed than Poland, but concedes that
W. "offers a clear and plausible take on the current chief executive's psychological makeup and, considering Stone's reputation and Bush's vast unpopularity, a relatively even-handed, restrained treatment of recent politics." And
Kirk Honeycutt over at
The Hollywood Reporter says that though the film is more bold than it is good, "Stone goes out of his way to give Bush a fair hearing."
Over the summer, I
guffawed at the notion that Stone was going to be fair and sympathetic to Bush in
W., but it looks like I may be eating those words before too long. Apparently the problem people are having with the film isn't its politics but its lack of formal audacity, which is the opposite what I expected to hear. But it's certainly good to learn that Stone at least attempts a serious treatment of the subject -- those
script pages that
Slate "leaked" a while back could have fooled me.
Posted Oct 8th 2008 9:02PM by Eric D. Snider
Filed under: Action, Comedy, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews, Toronto International Film Festival
You'd think that being married to Madonna, Guy Ritchie would have picked up on the value of occasionally reinventing oneself. But no, he keeps making the same movie, the same ultra-cool exercises in British gangster violence and stylish criminal shenanigans, and
RockNRolla is the latest entry. Then again, the one time he did try something different, the result was
Swept Away, so maybe he's wise to stay in his comfort zone.
At any rate,
RockNRolla inspires strong feelings of "meh" in me. It's not nearly as clever, funny, or stylish as
Snatch or
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, though the accents are a lot less indecipherable this time around, so that's nice. It's also not as good as
Gangster No. 1 or
Sexy Beast or many of the other gritty British gangster capers that have come around in the last several years. It feels like a rerun -- which isn't necessarily a bad thing, after all. People watch reruns all the time.
Our narrator is Archie (
Mark Strong), who works as the calm, suave right-hand man to Lenny (
Tom Wilkinson), the most powerful money-lender and underworld boss in London. Half the city's councilors, judges, and cops are in Lenny's pocket, and he has leveraged this influence into a massive fortune in real estate.
Lenny is not a figure to be messed with, but the Russians don't know that. A new mover and shaker named Uri (
Karel Roden) has come to town to strike a deal with Lenny -- it involves paying Lenny to bribe city officials to get a construction project underway -- and he's a formidable figure himself. Lenny is old school; Uri is dangerously modern.
Continue reading Review: RockNRolla
Posted Oct 8th 2008 3:32PM by Eric D. Snider
Filed under: Horror, New Releases, Mystery & Suspense, Trailers and Clips
Stop me if you've heard this one before. It's an American remake of an Asian horror film about ghosts that seek revenge against, or try to pass messages to, the living. And the studio's releasing it in January. But instead of listing the first 20 films matching that description that come to mind, watch the new trailer for
The Uninvited, courtesy of
Rotten Tomatoes (we've got it embedded below).
The trailer makes the film look relatively promising: Two sisters deal with their father's much-too-young new girlfriend, who it turns out might have murdered the last family she lived with. Casting the marvelous Elizabeth Banks as the potential murderess gets my attention immediately; she can do funny and sexy, but can she do creepy? I bet she can.
By the way, the film apparently has nothing to do with the 1944 movie of the same title. It is, rather, a remake of a 2003 South Korean movie called
Janghwa, Hongryeon (or
A Tale of Two Sisters, as it was known internationally), which got a very small U.S. release in December 2004. The remake is due Jan. 30. What do you think?
The trailer is after the jump....
Continue reading RSVP for the 'Uninvited' Trailer
Posted Oct 6th 2008 9:02AM by Eugene Novikov
Filed under: New Releases, Box Office
Eric D. Snider tried his best to
trick me into watching
Beverly Hills Chihuahua this week. It didn't work on me, but it worked on millions of Snider acolytes all over North America, who joined forces to give the talking-animals kidflick a strong $29 million, first-place debut. I didn't see it, as I say, so it would be wrong for me to bemoan the decline of civilization that this surely (if unsurprisingly) represents. Feel free to do so in the comments.
Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist opened to $12 million and third place, which I'd have to say is okay for the low-profile, borderline-niche film. That number, though not terribly impressive, is actually a fair testament to Michael Cera's star power, since his presence was literally the only mass-marketable aspect of the movie. So the debut is at least a draw for Sony.
It was an interesting weekend in that there were several films opening in, or expanding into, semi-wide release. The biggest winner of that bunch has to be
Religulous, Bill Maher's aggressively anti-faith documentary, which did $3.5 million on around 500 screens for $6,972 per screen. Given the preaching-to-the-relatively-small-choir quality of the film, I don't expect it to hold up too well in the weeks ahead, but this level of interest is a mild surprise. Facing off against
Religulous ideologically was David Zucker's conservative spoof
An American Carol which, according to the estimates, edged out
Religulous with $3.8 million on over 1,600 screens.
Ed Harris's lightweight western
Appaloosa expanded to roughly 1,000 screens and took in $5 million -- which is okay, but seems like a missed opportunity. Faring worse were
Flash of Genius (1100 screens) and
Blindness (1700), with $2.3 and $2 million respectively, both landing outside the top 10. The grim
Blindness was a no-sale from the beginning, especially since the critics never got on board, but the unabashedly populist
Flash of Genius underperformed. Maybe the ads emphasized windshield wipers too much.
A bit more plus the weekend's top 12 after the jump.
Continue reading Weekend Box Office: Never Bet Against Talking Animals
Posted Oct 4th 2008 1:32PM by Cinematical staff
Filed under: Drama, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews
(We're re-posting our review of Flash of Genius from the Telluride Film Festival to coincide with the film's theatrical release this weekend)
By: Eugene Novikov
Flash of Genius is a conventional crowdpleaser but not, I'm pleased to report, a shameless one. Chronicling the true story of a college professor's fight to reclaim his invention – the intermittent windshield wiper – from the car company that stole it, the film does many of the things you'd expect, but it may also surprise you. Don't let its Telluride placement fool you: this is a staunchly mainstream, unchallenging film, the sort of underdog-vs.-corporate-behemoth story you've seen time and again. But it's a decent rendition, hitting the right notes without insulting our intelligence.
Now, the intermittent windshield wiper is not exactly the light bulb. If you're not familiar with the term, the wiper is "intermittent" in the sense that it can pause between wipes – a problem that apparently puzzled engineers at all the major car companies until Kearns cracked it the late 60s. But part of what's nifty about the film is its ability to create suspense and curiosity around something so seemingly mundane. Kearns' first demo of his device to Ford is exciting in a very goofy way, but exciting nonetheless.
Continue reading Review: Flash of Genius
Posted Oct 4th 2008 9:03AM by Cinematical staff
Filed under: Comedy, Drama, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews
(We're re-posting our review of Rachel Getting Married from the Toronto International Film Festival to coincide with the film's theatrical release this weekend)By: James RocchiRachel Getting Married is a terse, smart, funny and tough family drama about forgiveness and failure written by Jenny Lumet; it's also a loose, smart, broad and bright film about family and love directed by Jonathan Demme. When these two things are in sync, the end result is something truly impressive – a moving story that appeals to your heart and soul without insulting your intelligence, a film full of big scenes that never stoops to the most obvious possible iteration of those big scenes, a movie loaded with great and sincere performances from the top down. When the two parts of
Rachel Getting Married fall out of synch – as they do, most notably, in the last third of the film during Demme's raucous, joyous post-wedding reception – it's less catastrophic than it is curious, and the final film is still very much worth watching.
Continue reading Review: Rachel Getting Married
Posted Oct 3rd 2008 9:02AM by Jeffrey M. Anderson
Filed under: Comedy, New Releases, MGM, Theatrical Reviews, New in Theaters
Entertainment journalists are very often the last line of defense between movies/movie stars and the general public. We work for the public and are available to disentangle cinematic takes on baseball, superheroes, various wars, Elizabethan times, romantic conquests, car chases, or what have you. But when the material is more or less about us, it's much harder to find some perspective. Based on a memoir by British journalist
Toby Young, the very funny new film
How to Lose Friends & Alienate People is tough going at first, but it ultimately avoids relieving itself where it eats. And it has an underlying sweetness that should appeal to a large cross section of movie people and people who like movies.
Simon Pegg stars as Sidney Young, an anarchic British journalist who runs his own tiny, gutsy rag, the Post Modern Review. He measures himself against the kinds of celebrities he can get close to, but also despises them and loves to poke holes in their images. When he runs a nasty story on a powerful New York publisher, he receives a phone call and a job offer. Soon he finds himself standing in the office of Sharps magazine and its editor-in-chief, Clayton Harding (Jeff Bridges). Sidney idolizes Clayton for a more hardcore magazine he used to publish, and considers Sharps a sellout, but also loves the power and the paycheck it can bring. With his outsider attitude, he immediately begins screwing up and alienating all his co-workers, including powerful publicist ("I don't like that word") Eleanor Johnson (Gillian Anderson) and co-worker Alison Olsen (Kirsten Dunst). But he's so persistent (and they had such a good, solid "meet-cute") that Alison eventually tolerates him and then warms up to him.
Continue reading Review: How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
Posted Oct 3rd 2008 8:02AM by Eric D. Snider
Filed under: Comedy, Drama, Foreign Language, Independent, New Releases, Columns, Indie Spotlight
Did you hear there are like a million new films opening in wide release today? Well, there are. Some of them are pretty good, too. But just in case that's not enough to keep you occupied, here's the
Indie Spotlight with several
more titles that might interest you, most of them in limited release and a bit under the radar.
Now, "indie" can be a hard thing to pin down. Bill Maher's
Religulous (opening today on 500 screens) might qualify, but you've probably already heard about it. Same goes for
Blindness (1,700 screens). You don't need me for those. Instead, here are the five that we're shining the indie spotlight on:
Allah Made Me Funny, An American Carol, Ballast, Kidnap, and
Rachel Getting Married.
Rachel Getting MarriedWhat it is: One of the big hits at the Toronto International Film Festival, it's a naturalistic drama about an addict (Anne Hathaway) who gets out of rehab just in time for her sister's wedding.
What they're saying: Cinematical's James Rocchi had almost
nothing but good things to say about it in Toronto, particularly with regard to the screenplay and Hathaway's performance. (There's a bit of Oscar buzz around both.) At
Rotten Tomatoes, the film stands at a solid 76%.
Where it's playing: New York City (Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, City Cinemas, Regal Union Square), Los Angeles (ArcLight Sherman Oaks, ArcLight Hollywood, Laemmle Playhouse in Pasadena, Edwards Westpark in Irvine, The Landmark), and International Falls, Minn. (Cinema 5).
More info: Sony Classics'
official site.
BallastWhat it is: A bleak drama about life and death among the lower classes on the Mississippi Delta.
What they're saying: Cinematical's James Rocchi
praised the film at Sundance (and interviewed the writer/director, Lance Hammer,
here). At
Rotten Tomatoes, 75% of the critics agree with The Rocch. It won prizes for its directing and cinematography at Sundance, too.
Where it's playing: New York City (Film Forum).
More info: The
official site says it will expand to "select cities" in two weeks.
Continue reading Indie Spotlight: New Releases for Oct. 3
Posted Oct 2nd 2008 9:02PM by Eric D. Snider
Filed under: Comedy, New Releases, Disney, Theatrical Reviews, Family Films
To: Scott Weinberg, managing editor,
CinematicalFrom: Eric D. Snider, blogger/reviewer
Subject: Beverly Hills ChihuahuaHey Scott --
When you assigned me to review
Beverly Hills Chihuahua, I assumed it was because we both expected it to be terrible, and you knew I would enjoy writing a review ripping it apart. The film's trailers certainly don't do it any favors, and the basic premise alone -- a spoiled lapdog gets lost in Mexico and has to find her way home -- almost makes me reconsider my career path.
So I'm afraid I have to disappoint you by reporting that, as it turns out,
Beverly Hills Chihuahua isn't awful. It's not even really annoying. It's actually kind of ... almost ... sort of ... OK.
I know! I was as surprised as you are skeptical. And I know what you're going to say. You're going to point out that I also kind of liked
Yours, Mine & Ours, which -- heaven help me -- was made by the same director,
Raja Gosnell. In my defense, let me remind you that I hated
Big Momma's House and the
Scooby-Doo movies, which he also directed. I am by no means a Raja Gosnell apologist. If such a thing as a Raja Gosnell apologist exists, I am not it.
But
Beverly Hills Chihuahua -- or
BHC, as the kids are calling it -- isn't the braying, garish nightmare that the trailers make it out to be, or that we've come to expect from Disney's live-action-excrement factory. In fact, once it gets the dumb "Talk to the paw!" jokes out of its system, it's actually a reasonably charming, mostly benign kids' movie that adults can watch without their heads exploding. I even laughed a few times. Honest-to-goodness laughter!
Continue reading Review: Beverly Hills Chihuahua
Posted Oct 2nd 2008 6:02PM by Cinematical staff
Filed under: Comedy, Drama, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews
(Note: We're re-posting this review from the Toronto International Film Festival to coincide with the film's theatrical release this weekend)
By: James RocchiStarring
Michael Cera and
Kat Dennings,
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist is a light, slight, fleet-footed teen comedy of romance and indie rock; there are logic holes in it, and lulls, and moments that seem devoid of sense, to be sure, but there are also moments in where Cera or Dennings will smile and your momentary doubts and disagreements are washed away and your head is filled with a sense of gladness, not despair, that you're watching our young, happy hipster heroes on screen.
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist combines the shaggy-dog sprawl of an early John Hughes film with the blunt talk and softly-rounded feelings of the Apatow comedies, and if it did not have leads as charismatic and tonally correct as Cera and Dennings, it would be very close to dead in the water; however, since it does, it isn't.
Taking place in some movie version of Manhattan where parking is always immediately available and everyone over 25 has, apparently, been executed
Logan's Run-style,
Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist begins as Nick (Cera) is trying, and failing, to get over his breakup with the tedious-yet-tempting, hot-yet-hateful Tris (Alexis Dzienia), leaving lengthy messages on her phone and exquisitely sequenced mix discs at her door. Tris laughingly discards Nick's most recent effort into the trash at school; sarcastic-but-sweet Norah (Kat Dennings) retrieves it, as she's done for several of Nick's discarded offerings: "He makes the best mixes
ever." The fact that Nick's latest effort is labeled "The Road to Closure, Vol. 12" tells you that Nick has strong feelings, and, in this case, weak vocabulary skills.
Continue reading Review: Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
Posted Oct 2nd 2008 4:02PM by Eric D. Snider
Filed under: Action, Drama, New Releases, New Line, Theatrical Reviews, Western
There's no question
Appaloosa is a Western. It's set in 1882 in the New Mexico Territory, it has tin-star-wearing city marshals getting into gunfights with ornery cusses, it includes some scenes involving problems with Indians -- the whole nine yards. But underneath all that, it's really just a buddy movie, a rough-and-tumble, no-girls-allowed, steak-and-potatoes romp that happens to be set in the Old West. It's as much Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as it is Butch and Sundance.
The buddies are Virgil Cole (
Ed Harris, who also directed) and his sidekick, Everett Hitch (
Viggo Mortensen), an inseparable pair of freelance peacekeepers and expert gunmen. At the film's outset, they are hired by the dusty frontier town of the title to protect it from Randall Bragg (
Jeremy Irons), a devious rancher whose band of ne'er-do-wells occasionally murders local citizens, including the previous city marshal. With Cole as the new marshal and Hitch as his deputy, the two set about enforcing law and order.
One of the town's new ordinances, under Cole's direction, is that you can't bring guns inside the city boundaries. He informs a couple of Bragg's men of this when they show up at the saloon one day.
"That's the law," Cole says.
"
Your law," replies one of the men, scoffing.
"Same thing," Cole says. OH SNAP!
Continue reading Review: Appaloosa
Posted Oct 2nd 2008 12:20PM by Eugene Novikov
Filed under: Horror, New Releases, Fan Rant
I defended the
Saw franchise long past the point where most self-respecting cinephiles and even genre geeks abandoned it. It was only after the moronic, baffling
Saw IV that I got off the bandwagon. But as someone who thinks the franchise has (had?) something to offer beyond the admittedly questionable thrills of what smug know-nothings call "torture porn," I'm anticipating this month's annual installment with an ever-so-slight glimmer of hope. The first three films took a gimmicky serial killer concept and expanded it to something big and increasingly baroque, piling on twist after twist that, to me, consistently seemed bold rather than (merely) ludicrous. They were gruesome, yes, but they were also moody and visually exciting;
Darren Lynn Bousman, in particular, seemed to take painstaking care in the second and third films to construct a cruel, self-contained universe around the crazy-ass story.
So here, briefly, are three things
Saw V -- which sees the franchise's production designer
David Hackl take over directing duties from Bousman -- could do to avoid the pitfalls of its immediate predecessor and restore my faith in the series.
Continue reading Fan Rant: How 'Saw V' Could Actually Be Good
Posted Oct 1st 2008 5:02PM by Erik Davis
Filed under: New Releases, Celebrities and Controversy, Newsstand
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Those folks with plans to see Fernando Meirelles'
Blindness this weekend may find themselves blinded by ... protesters? That's because activists from the National Federation of the Blind
were pretty ticked off after learning the premise behind the flick: that, essentially, a blindness epidemic strikes leading most folks to go absolutely apesh*t on one another. It would probably be in poor taste to criticize the group for not seeing the film before they protested against it, however I should point out that this all came about after seven NFB staffers watched the movie (three of which were sighted) at a screening.
The NFB claim the movie is offensive, and that it "portrays blind people as monsters ..." A spokesman for the organization added, "We face a 70 percent unemployment rate and other social problems because people don't think we can do anything, and this movie is not going to help ... at all." See, I tend to disagree. First of all, people who aren't smart enough to realize that
it's a movie deserve to be repeatedly kicked in the head by a one-armed monkey on steroids. Second of all, if an entire city full of citizens suddenly became blind and couldn't see a thing, you bet your ass people would freak out -- after all, how could they keep up with this season of
Dancing with the Stars if they're blind!?
The NFB plan to protest at 75 theaters across the country this Friday, carrying signs that read: "I'm not an actor. But I play a blind person in real life." Where do you stand on all this?
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