Trey Parker and Matt Stone are clever filmmakers and inspired comedians, but I can’t help despising where they’re coming from politically in Team America: World Police (Paramount, 10.15), their R-rated puppet flick. I’d love to fall in line with my journo friends and call them the cat’s meow in all respects, but man, I can’t. … Read more
It’s built into our genes to show obeisance before power. It’s obviously a big tendency in Hollywood circles, but hardly an exclusive one. Every culture, every species does the bow-down. I was speaking the other night to this know-it-all guy who goes to a lot of Academy screenings and parties, and we were talking about … Read more
I admired and enjoyed Bill Condon’s Kinsey (Fox Searchlight, 11.12) upon seeing it Monday night. It’s a smart, probing, movingly performed portrait of what it was like to live in sexually suppressed times, and how a startling work of research by an gangly odd-duck scientist named Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson) began to lift the cloak … Read more
I’m all over the place this morning (researching, ad concerns, re-designing) and running late with Wednesday’s (10.6) column. It probably won’t be up until 3 pm Pacific time. If only there two of me…or three of me, for that matter. One could sleep on the couch and the other on a cot in the dining … Read more
The column is supposed to be completed and up on Wednesdays and Friday mornings, and today (10.1) it’s not. Again. My work load has tripled since Hollywood Elsewhere launched in August, and I haven’t figured how to work faster or better. I’ve been trying to wash and dry some clothes this week, and it’s taken … Read more
I forgot a likely development when I made some forecasts about ’04 Best Picture Oscar nominations a couple of days ago. I guess I didn’t want to consider it. Almost every year there has to be one semi-awful, vaguely embarrassing Best Picture nominee. You know…a flick that people like me tend to despise or worse … Read more
If only the second two-thirds of Shaun of the Dead (opening 9.24) were as good as the first third… The geeks calling this thing a way cool horror-comedy are deluding themselves. The threat element is shit and the story tension goes south around the 35-minute mark. You can’t just say “it’s a spoof” and leave … Read more
A couple of 40ish guys drive up from L.A. to go on a wine-tasting tour of vineyards north of Santa Barbara for a few days. They get lucky with a couple of local women. The lying they use to get going with these women, not to mention certain character flaws (immaturity, impulsiveness), comes back to … Read more
Who can think about movies at a time like this? The bad guys are probably going to be running things for another four years and I’m supposed to shrug this off and bang out some kind of riff on this weekend’s openers — Wimbledon or Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow or Head in … Read more
Digital Choo-Choo I’m kind of an undistilled-reality type guy, visually speaking, so don’t expect me to cream over the latest animation technique. I can take or leave Japanese anime (and Japanese anime snobs tick me off). I was never a fool for Disney-style paint-cell animation. I’ve always liked but never quite loved those bursting colors … Read more
There’s a vaguely bothersome echo in Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries (Focus Features, 9.24) that nobody in Hollywood journalist circles seems to want to talk about…but it’s there. It doesn’t trouble me to any great degree, although it’s grown into a slight roadblock in terms of my core feelings about the lead character, Ernesto “Che” … Read more
I want to put this carefully so as not to be misinterpreted. I’m trying to formulate what I consider to be a modest and temperate industry initiative. The unmalicious goal is the total termination of acting jobs given to Rhys Ifans, the downmarket, stubble-faced tall guy with dirty-blonde 1971 hippy hair who, in his movie … Read more