Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg wrote Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle with the novel idea: What if you made a John Hughes movie, but instead of writing garishly caricatured bit players with names like Long Duk Dong, you cast an Asian actor as the smart, handsome, upwardly mobile…
Jason Segel is responsible for two of the most cringe-inducing, hands-in-front-of-your-face moments in the recent history of television, both of which occurred during the sole season of NBC’s Freaks and Geeks, on which Segel played bright-eyed burnout Nick Andopolis. On the episode “I’m With the Band,” Nick imagined himself an…
Morgan Spurlock, the daredevil documentarian who lived on Big Macs for a month and turned this exercise in “body art” into the 2004 hit Super Size Me, returns—this time expanding his horizons rather than his girth. Paraphrasing the title of a venerable computer game, Where in the World Is Osama…
Smart People got no reason to live—and, sure, that’s not quite how Randy Newman sang it, but the point still stands. Because in Noam Murro’s directorial bow—one of those Sundance premieres starring famous people slumming it in dingy Indieland—the smart people ain’t doing much l-i-v-i-n’ at all. They’re just drifting…
For a movie built around questions of failed ethics and duplicitous behavior, Street Kings is just as dishonest as its characters. Though conceived as yet another sobering frontline report on law enforcement’s ever-expanding gray area, director David Ayer’s grim police thriller mostly plays as one long dick-measuring competition. You sense…
When Time recently featured George Clooney on its cover accompanied by the headline “The Last Movie Star”—note not even a question mark at the end—you didn’t have to read the article to know where it was coming from. After all, stars of the postpubescent variety are an increasingly rare commodity…
Mick Jagger’s most essential physical feature, according to Martin Scorsese: his bellystache. On the poster for Shine a Light, the big-shot director’s Rolling Stones concert film, Sir Mick is frozen in mid-song aerobics, his back arched, his half-shirt raised, that yawning navel and faint hairline more prominently showcased than his…
Ben Mezrich’s 2002 best-seller Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas For Millions was a smart narrative about…well, you did see the subtitle, right? Mezrich more or less recounted a fantastic tale spun by an old acquaintance from Boston, an M.I.T. grad named…
Considering that the war in Iraq has proven to be Washington’s shot-by-shot remake of Vietnam, it’s only natural that Hollywood has followed suit, giving us a series of Iraq-themed films that can be set neatly alongside their Vietnam-era counterparts. Just as the initial wave of angry anti-Vietnam documentaries (In the…
When it was revealed in September 2006 that the Deep Ellum Film Festival would be shuttered to make way for the AFI Dallas International Film Festival, and its attendant big-money corporate sponsors, local cineastes fretted that DEFF founder Michael Cain had sold out to the highest bidder. Which proved absolutely…
Rare is the star vehicle that is as poorly matched to its star as Drillbit Taylor, which casts Owen Wilson as a homeless Army deserter and con man, able to fool people into believing he’s both a substitute teacher and a master of hand-to-hand combat. It’s a part that requires…
Do we need another look back at the rotten heart of the ’50s nuclear family? Ira Sachs thinks we do, and as one who can’t get enough of sweaty melodramas about rotting families, I’m with him in principle. Mind you, Sachs’ noticeably childless new movie is less about families than…
No Country for Old Men (Paramount) “A horror comedy chase” is how a grinning Tommy Lee Jones describes No Country for Old Men in the making-of — meanwhile, his fellow actors add to the list such adjectives as “a very primitive ride,” “a rabbit chase through Texas,” and “a very…
The pleasing circularity of Gus Van Sant’s masterful Paranoid Park is not only a function of the film’s narrative structure but reflects the arc of its maker’s career. Few directors have revisited their earliest concerns with such vigor. Van Sant’s debut, the 1985 Mala Noche, was a moody drizzle of…
For the crime of obliterating high culture, for the crime of getting off on vicarious degradation—and, above all, for the crime of sitting through any movie that resembles the one he’s (re)made—Michael Haneke sentences you (me, us) to Funny Games. Scratch that: to a second fucking helping of Funny Games…
Into the Wild (Paramount) Sean Penn waited a good decade before adapting Jon Krakauer’s book about Chris McCandless, who graduated college in 1990, then disappeared into the American unknown, re-emerging as Alexander Supertramp before his final, tragic farewell in the Alaskan wilderness in ’92. Penn’s patience is evident in every…
Based on a true story,” brags The Bank Job before diving into the clear blue water of the Caribbean, where, in 1970, a topless woman frolics with two swimming mates—just another day in paradise. The trio retires to a hotel room for a sweaty, breathless afternoon quickie, which is photographed…
Near the beginning of The Counterfeiters, a fact-based Holocaust drama by Austrian filmmaker Stefan Ruzowitzky, we meet Jewish money forger and former jailbird Salomon Sorowitsch (brilliantly played by Karl Markovics), packing to flee Berlin in 1936 with a suitcase full of fake money. We know from an opening coda that…
Justice League: The New Frontier (Warner Bros.) Based on Darwyn Cooke’s comic-book miniseries — a masterpiece starring all of DC Comics’ major-leaguers at the dawn of their immortality during the Cold War — this animated adaptation plays stronger, faster, and further than any direct-to-DVD in recent memory. It’s a grown-up…
Semi-Pro’s much better than Blades of Glory, which wasn’t nearly as good as Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, which was a little better than Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, which was almost as funny as Old School, which was better than everything else Will Ferrell had done…
Last fall, The Band’s Visit made headlines after being disqualified as Israel’s foreign-language submission to the 2008 Academy Awards—an ironic fate, indeed, for a movie that takes language as its very subject. The official ruling of the Oscar referees was that too much of the film’s dialogue is in English,…
Margot at the Wedding (Paramount) Margot (Nicole Kidman, or someone who looks just like her) is a fiction writer whose tales are based, uncomfortably and unkindly, on the real-life family for whom she seems to care very little. Hence sister Pauline’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) late discovery that Margot’s a “monster”…
