A few years ago, a movie like “The Escapist” would have been on the festival circuit, emerging with critical buzz as a tough-minded, compelling, suspenseful prison-escape film. It would have found its audience on the arthouse circuit and, perhaps, might have been a sleeper hit.
“The Escapist,” which was at the 2008 Sundance, opens in New York on Friday at the Village East Cinemas – but it’s available on video on-demand as of Wednesday. That’s the wave of the future – well, really, the present – and, with luck, audiences will wise up and find movies like this one, the kind that don’t have the budget to flood the airwaves with commercials. (More…)
“Adventureland” is a return to form for director Greg Mottola – by which I mean that it calls to mind his 1996 debut film, “The Daytrippers.”
Never mind that the ads trumpet this as a film by the director of “Superbad.” As solidly funny as that film was, Mottola was a director for hire, working in Apatown, the province of Judd Apatow. “Adventureland,” on the other hand, is only masquerading as a youth comedy, despite a cast that includes Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Ryan Reynolds, Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig.
In reality, “Adventureland” is a personal comedy about post-teen characters. Partially autobiographical, it’s about coming of age – but using the loss of one’s virginity as only a secondary aspect of that process. (More…)
Most adults assume that animated films are strictly for kids. But they’re only half-right.
The best animated movies these days – as is true, really, of the best animation since the beginning of the form – is pitched as much at adults as it is at kids. Perhaps it’s that animators recognize that adults will be sitting through these films with their kids, so they want to make the experience less painful. Or maybe it’s just that, given how long it takes to craft an animated feature, the animators need to keep themselves amused while they’re working.
Whatever. The point is you don’t need a child as an excuse to take yourself to see “Monsters vs.Aliens,” a delightfully goofy sci-fi (or isthat Syfy?) spoof with a strong voice cast and a consistently witty script. (More…)
If “The Education of Charlie Banks” were a better movie, it would be a star-making vehicle for Jason Ritter.
As it is, this is only half a good movie – but Ritter is the main reason to see the whole thing. Charismatic, imposing, unpredictable yet smooth and at ease, he’s hot-wired for action, on a short fuse that’s always in danger of being ignited. (More…)
Race is such a hot-button issue that it’s virtually impossible to have an honest discussion about it in a formal or institutional setting. One on one, absolutely – but the past is too fraught with mistakes and the present is too full of people who are either insensitive or overly sensitive, scrutinizing everything for the veiled insult.
Not that racism isn’t a problem; it’s just not always the problem. Sometimes people are just jerks.
The worst response, of course, is the institutional reaction, which invariably is an overreaction that’s long on appearance and short on substance. To the institution, it’s about the appearance of caring – “We’ll appoint a committee to examine the problem” – more than the response itself.
That’s at least part of what’s at work in “Spinning into Butter,” a film adaptation of Rebecca Gilman’s play of the same name. There’s been a hate crime at a private New England college – what does the administration intend to do about it? (More…)
Paul H-O is the kind of person you’d meet at a party and end up telling other people about: “Wow, I met this guy who was kind of funny and cool to talk to.” The kind of person who, when you spot him on cable-access TV, would make you say, “Hey, I just talked to that guy at a gallery-opening party.”
Paul H-O (which is certainly easier to type – or remember – than Hasegawa-Overacker, which is his full moniker) made a name for himself of sorts doing exactly that: turning up at Manhattan art galleries with his video camera beginning in the1990s, taping himself talking to artists for a cable-access show called “Gallery Beat.”
Like his TV show, his film, “Guest of Cindy Sherman,” which he co-directed with Tom Donahue, has a Spalding Gray-ish quality: His work morphs into his life and back again. (More…)
At once raw and formal, minimal yet graphic, “Hunger” by director Steve McQueen (the black British filmmaker, not the dead American icon of cool) challenges the audience by alternately rubbing its face in and keeping its distance from the physical and psychological brutality the British visited upon IRA prisoners in the early 1980s.
McQueen ostensibly is retelling the story of the hunger strike in Maze Prison in 1981 by paramilitary prisoners. They struck – after other attention-getting protests (including refusing to wear prison uniforms and smearing their cells with excrement) – over their demand to be treated as political prisoners, rather than as criminals or terrorists. Sands’ section of the film is only the focus of the final half-hour. (More…)
The American dream still intoxicates and its influence has a reach that extends worldwide, even as our economy implodes.
In other parts of the world, our standard of living serves as a magnet, attracting floods of aspirants to that vision of America – in spite of an anti-immigration furor in certain parts of the country.
Still, when you look at the world these characters are fleeing in “Sin Nombre” (which translates as “Without Name”), flight seems to be worth the numerous deadly risks – from a beating by officials to death at the hands of a bandit, in the airless trunk of a car or under the wheels of a train.
Yet “Sin Nombre,” directed by Cary Fukunaga, is more than just an immigration drama. It is also a look at the bleak life of street gangs in Mexico and about the intersection of those two worlds. Think “City of God” on the road and you’ve got the idea. (More…)
“I love this crowd!” Buck Howard exults, no matter where he is or how small the assemblage – or how aged. Every audience is a good audience in the anachronistic show-biz universe of which Buck seems to be the sole occupant.
That universe apparently disappeared by the end of the 1970s, but somehow Buck has persevered. As played by John Malkovich, he’s an old-school entertainer, a mentalist and magician who has outlasted his era. But he doesn’t seem to know it. (More…)
John Hamburg’s “I Love You, Man” is one of those guilty-pleasure movies: You feel bad for laughing – but you often can’t help it.
Never profound nor even particularly clever, “I Love You, Man” still regularly produces small-to-medium-sized laughs, a few big ones – and an ongoing sense of good will that’s hard to deny. (More…)
