An HE reader saw Jim Sheridan‘s Brothers, which I briefly discussed yesterday. I asked him to elaborate and he did, but I found his claim that Tobey Maguire‘s performance is the “revelation” as opposed to Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman‘s, whose performances he described as “sweet.” Maguire plays the solid, responsible, hard-wired husband-father who’s captured … Read more
Here’s another mediocre old film that not even bad-movie buffs are likely to ever see or even think about it (except for the brief blip afforded by this item) due to the 99% certainty that it’ll never see the light of a DVD or Blu-ray release. There are hundreds if not thousands of films that … Read more
A curiously undated N.Y. Times Home and Garden piece called “Far From Conservative” offers a slide-show presentation of director Roland Emmerich‘s radical abode in London’s Knightsbridge section. The photos tell us that Emmerich is an nouveau-riche anti-traditionalist with a sensibility that is almost entirely defined by news-channel impressions of the last 15 or so years; … Read more
I once rode shotgun on a cross-country flight (Van Nuys airport to La Guardia Airport) in a 4-seat Beechcraft Bonanza. The pilot was a Russian pediatrician named Vladimir. It was a two-day trip, and I’ll never forget flying blind through heavy fog as we approached St. Louis and having to be talked down by the … Read more
“I am so sick of Anakin Skywalker. Why does George Lucas repeatedly try to shove this guy down our throats? Remember when we all loved Luke and Han? What happened to those characters? If you want to do a cartoon so bad, what about one about those guys? Nope. We get Anakin. “Do you know … Read more
Simon Pegg, who was in talks to play British Lt. Archie Hicox in Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglorious Bastards, has had to bail because of a scheduling conflict, according to a post on Pegg’s Myspace page. Pegg would have acted alongside Mike Myers, who recently signed on to play a British general. An 8.16 post on “The … Read more
This i-Phone shot of a horse sculpture is inaccurate in one key respect. The horse, located near the foyer of a sprawling Beverly Hills McMansion where a small party was given last night, isn’t flesh-colored but bright orange. Whoever designed the huge home, owned by a French financier-producer (and previously owned, incidentally, by the late … Read more
The rule of thumb is that the best literary adaptations tend to be based on pulpy novels, or sometimes not even very good ones. (Mario Puzo‘s The Godfather being the paramount example of this.) The more formidable the reputation of the book that’s been made for the big screen, the greater the odds that the … Read more
Curiously missing in this minor 8.15 N.Y. Times story about Bradley A. Blakeman‘s lawsuit against the guys behind Swing Vote, claiming that it’s pretty much based on a screenplay he wrote called Go November, is an observation I made a couple of weeks ago that the basic bones of Swing State are fairly similar to … Read more
This is a second-hand but reliably sourced story about the currently-shooting Wolverine movie, the upcoming 20th Century Fox tentpoler that’s currently being shot by Gavin Hood (Rendition, Tsotsi) and an issue that begs the question “who’s really in charge here?” In one corner is Hood, whose once-soaring stock suffered a NASDAQ falloff last year after … Read more
“Penelope Cruz‘s work in Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the most bolt-out-of-the-blue performance I have seen since Daniel Day Lewis‘ work in There Will Be Blood, which, and of itself, was the most bolt-out-of-the-blue performance since Robert De Niro‘s work as La Motta,” writes an HE loyalist and successful screenwriter. “Nothing I have ever seen from … Read more