For the past three years, Filmcritic.com has provided more than 8,000 movie reviews from major Hollywood blockbusters to smaller independent films. Coming this June, this database of information can now be accessed directly at amctv.com, AMC's online destination for original...... more »
Fans of the Dan Curtis cult classic need to proceed with caution. This is not your -- or your parents' -- Dark Shadows. Oh sure, the cast of characters appears to be the same and the storyline still centers on the cursed Collins clan, but for the most part, director Tim Burton and screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith (the scribe behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter) have decided to take the material in a more familiar, non-fan friendly direction. Gone are the interpersonal intrigues and snarky subtexts that made the '60s/'70s soap so successful. In its place is a 'shadow' of its former self, still fun and fascinating but a bit of a letdown for those on the original Barnabas bandwagon.
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After making so many films about basically decent people, it's good to know that Richard Linklater had some Hitchcock in him. In his deft comedy Bernie, Linklater brings not just the winsome touch that's made his lighter work like The School of Rock so broadly appealing but also a more acidic and satirical tone that darkens the shade under the bright Texas sun. Hitch would have sharpened his hooks more, particularly for a film set in such a busybody-riddled small town, but he would have appreciated Linklater's steady accumulation of detail and grievances, not to mention the resolutely straightforward handling of the murder itself. What Linklater brings to this curious and fact-based story, which just about no other American filmmaker of the moment could, is his expansive sense of character and genial lack of judgment. This is a film about a really nice guy. A murderer, for sure, but just the nicest murderer you're ever likely to meet.
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Artists who try to understand the minds of children are hardly ever successful. The usual tendency is to err on the side of the simplistic (wide-eyed wonder of the innocent) or unbelievably complex (the child who acts like a miniature adult). In his bright-eyed and wispy-light comedy I Wish, Hirokazu Kore-Eda doesn't fall prey to either cliched manner of handling his young, sprightly characters. The children he puts on screen here are smart and thoughtful, but not overly so, whimsical, short-sighted, and fully convinced of the efficacy of magical thinking -- in other words, wholly like children in the real world. That he's not able to take these characters and turn his film into something more engaging and easier to grab a hold of, is an unfortunate thing -- he understands people to a degree most filmmakers would envy. If only that was all that were necessary.
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Filmmakers run all kinds of risks when they try to update the classics; for all the universality of some of the great dramas, they can fail miserably when downloaded into new and sometimes incompatible formats (witness what happens when studios try to dress up Austen and Shakespeare as candy-colored high school comedies). This risk is even more prevalent, though, when it comes to the Greeks -- everything being declaimed from on high and all those gods causing mischief makes for a tricky translation -- which is why most everybody stays away. (Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite is one of the only films in recent memory that used an honest-to-God chorus and got away with it.) Nadine Labaki's zesty Where Do We Go Now? has to navigate two minefields: updating Aristophanes's Lysistrata and setting this comedy amidst modern Lebanon's murderous religious strife. The result isn't a new classic, but stands nevertheless as a potent and lively satire about how the violence of men tears societies down and the lengths to which women go to staunch the bleeding.
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Well, folks, this is a Very Special Column, and to make that point, I am going to interview myself about it. So, everyone, meet Interviewer Me!
Hello, everyone.
Let's get started, shall we?
Right then. To cut right to the chase: Rumor has it this is your last science fiction film column for Filmcritic.com. Is this true?
Indeed it is. I started this column on May 8, 2008, and am stopping today, May 9, 2012. That's as close to symmetry as you get in this business.
Why are you stopping?
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Hello, everyone.
Let's get started, shall we?
Right then. To cut right to the chase: Rumor has it this is your last science fiction film column for Filmcritic.com. Is this true?
Indeed it is. I started this column on May 8, 2008, and am stopping today, May 9, 2012. That's as close to symmetry as you get in this business.
Why are you stopping?
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"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."
Thomas Edison is not the first person I think of when it comes to advice for women, but this one rang true. Women, we know, are not afraid to work. But often, particularly in the film industry, women function as support staff. They work in development (the "D-girls"), or as agents, publicists, casting agents, executive assistants, designers. The women who currently have the most potential to change the face of the movies we watch are the most familiar faces -- the actresses who can use their star-power currency to "fund" projects.
Some actresses vote with their choices of roles; some create their own production companies; and some step up behind the camera. Here are three who have made great strides for women in movies by bringing terrific and varied female images to the screen.
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Thomas Edison is not the first person I think of when it comes to advice for women, but this one rang true. Women, we know, are not afraid to work. But often, particularly in the film industry, women function as support staff. They work in development (the "D-girls"), or as agents, publicists, casting agents, executive assistants, designers. The women who currently have the most potential to change the face of the movies we watch are the most familiar faces -- the actresses who can use their star-power currency to "fund" projects.
Some actresses vote with their choices of roles; some create their own production companies; and some step up behind the camera. Here are three who have made great strides for women in movies by bringing terrific and varied female images to the screen.
more »
It's one thing to join a bunch of standalone superheroes in the comics and quite another in the movies. Superheroes are attention hogs, so commanding of the myopic spotlight that a single specimen can carry multiple films all on his/her own. In the comics, a writer has the freedom to develop origins and individual tangents, allowing each major character the time and space to chart their own stories while joining forces for the major set pieces. The serialization allows readers to settle into the superhero omnibus. On the big screen, however, time is swift and finite, even in an epic spectacle. A filmmaker has anywhere between 120 and 150 minutes to establish each character, bring them all together, develop a labyrinthine world domination plot, and save space for each character to make signature impressions amid a handful of massive action ballets. Somehow, against all odds, Joss Whedon does just that with The Avengers, a slam-bang comics-inspired blast where the superhero collective fuses seamlessly and works marvelously.
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It's familiar fish-out-of-water meets nutty oldsters in the latest from Shakespeare in Love's John Madden. The premise finds British pensioners of all archetypical makes escaping to India because it's cheap and unusual. Hopefully, in the far off mystical East, they won't be treated like government/social/familial burdens. Our collective includes a man who was raised in "the Colony" (Tom Wilkinson), a widow trying to jump start a new life (Judi Dench), a couple (Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton) whose marriage is crumbling, a pair of sexed-up singles (Celia Imrie and Ronald Pickup) and an elderly matron (Maggie Smith) in desperate need of some important medical care. They all end up in Dev Patel's rundown excuse for holiday lodging, a place where the phones don't work, there are no doors, and the dirty, grimy accommodations are less than inviting.
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When it comes to creative careers, choosing to become a ballet dancer is close to the most punishing one you could select. Starting from an age at which most children are still trying to master using a spoon while sitting upright, would-be ballet dancers train for hours a day in the finer points of the craft. Bloody feet and broken bones are the least of it. As a record of this kind of endeavor, Bess Kargman's crowd-pleasing but ultimately dissatisfying documentary First Position doesn't come close to conveying the level of dedication required to become even moderately competent in ballet. However, if you want to see a clutch of thoroughly talented and frighteningly motivated young dancers get put through their paces in the pursuit of a scholarship to a top-line dance school, then Kargman's film is the ticket.
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