In her 6.17 N.Y. Times review of Brett Easton Ellis's just-published Imperial Bedrooms , Erica Wagner laments the numbing effect of reading books (and, she might have also said, watching movies and cable TV shows) that are saturated with flash and brutality. "The reader has to wonder what Ellis is trying to prove," Wagner writes. "That people numbed by the poison of a society based solely on money, fame and beauty are capable of practically anything?

"If that's not news to us it's thanks, in large part, to Bret Easton Ellis. But what purpose can simple repetition...Read More

This is ancient, I realize (having appeared four months before Barack Obama's election), so yeah, I'm late to the table. Obviously. And there are dozens of talented Tom Cruise imitators out there, but this guy really has the voice and body language down. This is episode #2 in "Tom Cruise is a Cock Block," a YouTube mini-series. Here are episodes #1 and #3.

If this video were re-done today there'd have to be some kind of Les Grossman bit thrown in, I suppose.

This November 2009...

LexG attended last night's Jennifer Lawrence's q & a at the Arclight following a screening of Winter's Bone. Pete Hammond conducted the interview; costar Dale Dickey also attended. Here's what LexG sent along, minus the usual hormonal stuff:

"Lights go down, movie starts up and I'm sitting there watching it, and out rolls this backwoods teenaged girl with puffy cheeks, and at first I'm like, er, 'Wait a minute, is this the new Megan Fox I paid 16 bucks to see in person? It's like some rural chick in acid-washed jeans or something. Shouldn't she be glazed in...Read More

I've known Phil Spector's musical signature all my life -- that "wall of sound" thing that gave such ecstatic echo-phonic oomph to all those early to mid '60s hits ("Be My Baby", "Walkin In The Rain", "River Deep, Mountain High") and Beatle songs he produced a few years later. But I'd never heard Spector speak or gotten to "know" him until I saw Vikram Jayanti's The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector, which will play the Film Forum from 6.30 to 7.13.

And...Read More

Last night I finally watched the trailer for Red (Summit, 10.15), an action comedy about over-the-hill spies that someone has described as Space Cowboys meets the Bourne franchise. The director is the German-born Robert Schwentke, who makes slick, semi-diverting programmers like The Time Traveller's Wife. An awful lot of smirking and chuckling going on. Meh.

However, I admire the fact that almost the entire cast is over 50 -- Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren, John Malkovich, Karl Urban, Julian McMahon, Ernest Borgnine, Richard Dreyfuss...Read More

The teaser tells you that David Fincher's The Social Network (Sony/Columbia, 10.1) has some kind of grave element going on. It says it's not just another "this is what happened back at Harvard" whatever-dude story of ambition and greed and fucking your friends. The dialogue clips and theme titles say this initially, but the main ingredient is that ominous musical score.

It sounds like a London Symphony Orchestra arrangement that may have taken an inspiration from Bernard Herrmann's "Gort" music from The Day The...Read More

Yesterday's Restrepo-meets-Rachel Maddow post got two whole responses...yes! Moviebob noted that Big Hollywood people "are pissing and moaning about this one for the same yet totally opposite reason -- they're mad that it's just-the-facts approach is 'hiding the truth about the war being just,' and here on HE I'm reading that it's 'hiding the truth about the war being a lost cause.' And then AH wrote that Restrepo "shows that to the soldiers on the ground, reasons don't matter."

Yeah, sure -- reason and context don't matter. Just do the job, get your three squares and sleep in a warm...Read More

In the possibly correct view of N.Y. Post critic Kyle Smith, Adam Sandler's Grown-Ups -- which currenty has an 8% Rotten Tomatoes rating -- was more or less sired by the lackluster commercial response to Judd Apatow's Funny People, in which Sandler played a realistic but somewhat dislikable comic. He didn't like the vibe so he turned around and went full-whore commercial.

There's a clear difference between the U.S. trailer for David Michod's Animal Kingdom (Sony Classics, 8.13), which I saw at Sundance 2010, and what I gather is the Australian version (which I've posted below). I'm cool with the former, but a bigger fan of the latter.

Nothing says "instant buy" to me like first-rate Blurays of classic black-and-white films. Warner Home Video's forthcoming Blurays of John Huston's The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (due on 10.5 but secretly so far -- Amazon and other sites haven't posted the news) will presumably be up to the standards of their 2008 Casablanca Bluray, which, if true, will make me drool with anticipation.

Consider the between-the-lines implications in Rachel Maddow's recent interview with Restrepo co-directors Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger. Does she not seem to be agreeing with what I said on 6.20, which is that the film "lies through omission about what's really going on in Afghanistan in the broader, bigger-picture sense"? The doc's refusal to supply context about a platoon's experience in Afghanistan's war-torn Korangal Valley makes it almost value-less, I feel.

Jezebel deputy editor Dodai Stewart has posted descriptions of and excerpts from the script for Matthew Wilder's Inferno: A Linda Lovelace Story, which may go before cameras with Lindsay Lohan in the title role.

More than a few sites have described Wilder's script, which may have a certain integrity on the page but also sounds like a sleazy exercise. It somehow feels less dicey to link to Jezebel's story about it.

The script is "full of sex and dirty language," Stewart says, and with "downright harrowing" depictions of ugly humiliations that Lovelace suffers at the...Read More

Today marks the one-year anniversary of Michael Jackson's death. An epitaph came to mind on the evening of 6.25.09 (i.e., the day that everyone in New York saw an all-media screening of Michael Mann's Public Enemies) that I didn't post out of sensitivity to the fans. It was the same line that Gore Vidal spoke after the more-or-less-suicidal death of Truman Capote: "A wise career move."

Hitfix's Greg Ellwood reported today that during a Los Angeles Inception interview Leonard DiCaprio said (a) he's definitely "hard at work" on a J. Edgar Hoover biopic with director Clint Eastwood, but that (b) he won't wear a dress, in line with rumors that Hoover was a gay cross-dresser.

"Will I wear a dress? Not as of yet," DiCaprio said in answer to a question on the subject. "No, we haven't done the fitting for those. So, I don't think so."

On 4.3.10 I wrote that that I'd read "most of Lance Black's J. Edgar Hoover script, and I haven't...Read More

At first I thought the Twi-hard thing was just another dumb-squealy-girl phenomenon, but then I saw Catherine Hardwicke's original 2008 film and went, "Okay, I get it...there's something happening here with the film, which is pretty good, but also with Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson and the whole I-love-you-so-much-we-can't-have-sex thing -- a very clever packaging of conservative values.

The abstinence thing wasn't about Mormonism or conservatism per se, but about how the current between a couple can feel much more powerful and transporting before sex --...Read More

Australian film journalist Sam Cleveland sent me a link to a few pages of what may be Jon Spaights' script for Ridley Scott's upcoming Alien prequel movie, otherwise known as Alien Harvest. I've no way of verifying if this is Spaights' script, but it sure reads like a solid, grounded pro-level thing.

On 6.14 Coming Attractions Patrick Sauriol wrote that "sometime in early January 2010 the Alien Harvest PDF file was uploaded to the Scribd file-sharing website. (Except it isn't there now.) The 122-page script is credited to Jon Spaights, the screenwriter hired...Read More

Proportionately-speaking, Thursday's box-office figures were almost the exactly the same as Wednesday's. Toy Story 3, in its seventh day of commercial release, did more than triple the business of Knight and Day, which was in its second day of release -- $13,056,000 vs. $3,477,879. (Wednesday's figures had TS3 pulling down $13.458,000 vs. K & D's $3,810,649.)

I don't know what to expect from the James Mangold-Tom Cruise-Cameron Diaz action cartoon on Friday, but a weekend figure of less than $15 million looks like a possibility. Or will it do a bit more?

Fandango has sent out a release saying that...Read More

The mark of a truly funny joke or a bit or situation in a comedy isn't "I laughed so hard I was in pain." The mark of a really great world-class joke is when it comes back to you five or ten minutes later and it makes you laugh (or at least chuckle) all over again. Or it comes back to you on the way home, or a month or a year later. Or it makes you laugh ten years later.

I don't "laugh" at the "nobody's perfect"...Read More

A third one? Sure, whatever. I have this residual feeling that the last Fockers film (six years ago!) watered the brand down a bit. I do recall that Dustin Hoffman, as Greg Focker/Ben Stiller's dad, got the warmest notices in that film. And yet Hoffman is absent from Little Fockers. And yet the reportedly under-used Barbra Streisand (Hoffman's wife/Stiller's mom in Meet The Fockers) gets a clip and a name card.

Imagine the reaction if this time, just to add a little curveball element,...Read More

I chose not to see Joel Schumacher's Twelve at Sundance 2010 for what I felt was a pretty good reason. As much as I'd like to see Schumacher proverbially bounce back with another Tigerland, which I thought was better than decent, I'm very suspicious of moral-crisis-leading-to-moral-wakeup dramas about jaded rich kids doing the old Less Than Zero, or an approximation of same.

I'm not saying Twelve is one thing or another, not having seen it, but the milieu, which I feel I've come to know from...Read More

A 6.24 CNET report by Erica Ogg about the dropped-call complaints dogging the iPhone 4 explains the basic beef -- i.e., touching the metal antenna band that runs around the iPhone 4, especially if you're holding the iPhone 4 in your left hand, "interrupts reception, slowly causing the phone to lose its signal."

There's a solution, apparently, in the rubber bumper (which costs about $30 bills) that fits around the phone. I was given one and I haven't had any dropped-call issues...yet. But it is rather sickening...Read More

I have a complaint about the iPhone 4.0 that nobody's mentioned yet. It won't synch with your computer unless you use the new white cord that connects the phone to a USB plug (which also fits into a square wall-socket plug) that comes in the 4.0 box. In other words you can't synch the new iPhone to your computer, or so I've discovered (and have been told by Apple techies), with the identical white USB cord that worked just fine with the previous iPhone models (3GS, 3G, etc.).

So the four USB cords I've bought over the...Read More

Fox News anchorperson Jane Skinner, famed worldwide for that hilarious 2006 Freudian slip, is leaving her job to become a traditional wife and mom. That's nice, but imagine if a male newscaster had said that his life "over the last twelve years has changed significantly in wonderful ways...I added a wife who's become [a serious big shot], and who has a job even busier than mine. I have twin daughters, so to do justice to this new life I've decided to take a break from the business."