“Agony and beauty for us live side by side,” laments Mameha (Michelle Yeoh), the most successful geisha in Gion. You’ll know how she feels: Memoirs of a Geisha, as directed by Chicago’s Rob Marshall, is beautiful to look it, but when it comes to the dialogue and storytelling, agony just…
Close to a decade ago, at a comic book convention in Los Angeles, animator Peter Chung was asked by a fan if he’d ever consider allowing a live-action movie to be made based on his avant-garde MTV series Aeon Flux. Chung said he had no interest in such a thing,…
In his terrific new documentary Seamless, director Douglas Keeve provides a bizarre look at a contest cooked up by Vogue magazine and the Council of Fashion Designers of America to encourage the next generation of clothing designers. Although he proceeds straight-faced, Keeve seizes on some hilarious and touching incidents –…
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (Fox) The pairing of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, both in real life and on celluloid, is so obvious as to be almost cartoonish. So even though both are better actors than they need to be, they perfectly belong in this goofy, explosiony world. Married assassins,…
Andy Warhol’s Dream America. Hot on the heels of its smash hit, Chihuly, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is presenting yet another blockbuster devoted to the work of a household name in contemporary art: Andy Warhol’s Dream America. The exhibition was curated by Ben Mitchell of Wyoming’s Nicolaysen Museum…
Deception, betrayal and revenge. In his film directorial debut, acclaimed playwright/screenwriter/theater director Craig Lucas is done in by his own script, which becomes so excessively icy and cruel that it breaks, rather than solidifies, any bond it could hope to establish with its audience. A modern-day Greek tragedy — complete…
Sometimes a movie just works, despite its many mistakes: It might not be particularly original or smart, it might wobble on shaky legs and feel familiar in all the wrong ways — and yet it reaches us. Witness Dorian Blues, a coming-of-age coming-out story featuring nearly every convention of its…
What the hell happened to director Ron Underwood? Not that he was ever a master of the craft, but his City Slickers and Tremors were fine pieces of entertainment. And thenPluto Nash? Maybe the guy should only make films about wannabe cowboys, because In the Mix, while not the financial…
Trekkies — and mere mortals — will argue endlessly about the best movie of Star Trek’s big-screen franchise, but in the end, most aficionados settle on Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan (1982). It’s a relentless stem-winder featuring everyone’s heroes from the original TV series — William Shatner, Leonard…
Andy Warhol’s Dream America. Hot on the heels of its smash hit, Chihuly, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center is presenting yet another blockbuster devoted to the work of a household name in contemporary art: Andy Warhol’s Dream America. The exhibition was curated by Ben Mitchell of Wyoming’s Nicolaysen Museum…
Most movies intend to entertain or inform us, or even momentarily take our minds off personal problems — that bullet-riddled body in the trunk, say, or Aunt Edna’s arrest for shoplifting doughnuts. Presumably, no picture really means to make an airtight case against children. But after sitting through the witless,…
Ever since its Broadway debut in 1996, Rent has generated a loyal, almost cult-like following. Showered with praise, the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical touched a nerve among the young, artistic, gay, urban and alternatively dressed people who identified as outsiders and wondered how they would make their way in the world…
For those of us who dug Rob McKittrick’s recent comedy Waiting…, Just Friends offers up some good news: Ryan Reynolds and Anna Faris are together again as a dysfunctional couple. He’s a slick music executive named Chris Brander, still traumatized at having gotten the “Let’s just be friends” speech from…
A few weeks ago, Harold Ramis was sitting in a hotel conference room discussing the subtext of The Ice Harvest, his new film based on the novel by Scott Phillips and adapted by Robert Benton and Richard Russo. Ramis explained that he took the project, which Benton (Nobody’s Fool, The…
Science fiction films come and go, but Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, endures as an epic of the genre. From its mysterious black slab to its defiant computer, HAL 9000, the iconography of the piece has become part of our cinematic and cultural heritage; it continues to…
Born to Run: 30th Anniversary 3-Disc Set (Columbia Home Video) The centerpiece of this three-disc boxed set isn’t the classic 1975 album, but the two DVDs that come with it. On one, shot in London in 1975, Bruce and the band tear through most of Born to Run and its…
Colorado: Then & Now II. In the late 1990s, internationally known photographer John Fielder came up with the idea of re-photographing old shots done by William Henry Jackson. This idea led to an exhibit at the Colorado History Museum in 1999, with this current show being the long-anticipated sequel. The…
The part with the dragon is really cool. Might as well cut to the chase, right? It’s not as though you need anybody to tell you the basic premise of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; if you somehow missed the last three, this likely won’t be the one…
It seems like so much nitpicking, but why is the Johnny Cash biopic called Walk the Line when a far better name would have been Ring of Fire? Surely co-writer and director James Mangold would insist he chose the former because of its lyrics dealing with the temptations that crop…
A common criticism of Hollywood from the right side of the political spectrum is that it hasn’t made any movies that deal with the War on Terror, the way it did with World War II, for example. The truth is that it’s probably less an example of political bias than…
Richard Gere? That’s the first thought that came to mind upon learning that Mr. Salt-and-Pepper-Sexy-Buddhist-Wasp had been cast as Saul Naumann in Bee Season, the film version of Myla Goldberg’s best-selling novel. In the book, Saul is an oppressive and learned Jewish patriarch, a cantor and student of mysticism whose…
Years before those airplanes attacked a big monkey as he clung to the Empire State Building, filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack traveled to exotic climes in their roles as documentarians. This week, Milestone Film & Video released new DVDs of two of their silent masterpieces, and anyone…
