If any ounce of you, maybe your optimistic, glass-half-full side of you, thought The Bachelor had any string of realness, a new Lifetime scripted series confidently puts that to rest. In the 30 combined seasons of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, there has yet to be a TV show, movie,…
There will be days this summer when you want to blow your brains out. The kids are going to whine about being bored every few minutes; the temperature will hover in the low 300-degree range, and the biggest movie of the summer will most likely be Mission Impossible 32 with…
When John Cusack was launching his career in the ’80s, Brian Wilson had gone from rock star to living lore — a brilliant Bigfoot. “People would have Brian Wilson encounters,” says Cusack, who plays Wilson in the new biopic Love & Mercy. “In L.A., people would say, ‘Oh, I was…
If you enjoy ironic consumption, Granada Theater and Dallas Comedy House have joined forces for the Summer Mockbuster Series. Starting with Batman and Robin on Saturday June 6, this exercise in bad taste gives you the chance to sit with others, imbibe, and talk shit about awful movies. Or rather,…
iZombie is about as sunny and optimistic as the zombie genre gets, which of course isn’t all that much. Even by supernatural standards, it’s a bloodthirsty canon, demanding regular sacrifices of innocents and grisly feats of skull splitting and cerebellum cannibalizing. The CW’s Seattle neo-noir boasts plenty of both to…
As a middle-aged woman, I rarely have a conversation with other middle-aged women in which the subject of movies “for us” fails to come up. As a critic, I don’t really think of movies in terms of which ones are “for” me and which are not, but I know what…
“I hate myself.” That’s an unusual statement coming from the hero of an animated film, let alone in the first two minutes. But 12-year-old orphan Anna (Sara Takatsuki), the protagonist of Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s lovely anime When Marnie Was There, has no illusions about her place in the world: There’s an…
The Melissa McCarthy of Spy is different from the one who rose to prominence by shitting in a sink. Bridesmaids scored her an Oscar nomination, and for the ceremony McCarthy donned a glamorous rose gown with a diamond collar and belt. But in the years since, Hollywood continued to see…
What does the world sound like when you’re Brian Wilson? When you’ve made a record that sounds like cirrus clouds look — as Wilson did with the Beach Boys’ small modern miracle of harmony, the 1966 Pet Sounds — all bets are off when it comes to the way ordinary…
The first line in Entourage is a good indication of what the next 104 minutes will bring. Peering through a pair of binoculars while a speedboat carries him toward a yacht in the dazzling waters of Ibiza, Johnny Drama (Kevin Dillon), the big brother of megastar Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier),…
In this industry, I meet a lot of people who talk a lot of shit. “This industry” meaning the film industry. Most heard: “Love your idea, let’s get together and talk about it,” “Send me your script and I’ll pass it to the right people,” “I’d love to be a…
June is one of the biggest months for cinema. It’s right in the middle of what is known as blockbuster season. Or, if you want to be edgy, call it “popcorn cinema.” It’s the summer –the time when all the movies with giant budgets hi theaters: some with a brain,…
Everything looks so much easier on TV. Baldness is cured with the simple spray of a can. A methamphetamine empire can be built in an RV with school supplies. A sponge can live in a pineapple under the sea without being contaminated by off-shore drilling. American Ninja Warrior, the NBC…
Little Edie and Big Edie were related to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Edith “Big Edie” Ewing Bouvier Beale and Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale were the aunt and first cousin of the former first lady. Grey Gardens, the Long Island home of the Beales, was almost shutdown by the health department…
In space, no one can hear you scream (or speak French, which is tragic because it’s so difficult to learn), but at the Texas Theatre, you can howl as loud your lungs will let you. Where I’m going with this: TT is doing a double feature tonight of Ridley Scott’s…
During “Compliments,” a first-season sketch on Inside Amy Schumer, a group of female friends respond to every bit of praise with a verbal self-maiming: “I tried to look like Kate Hudson but ended up looking like a golden retriever’s dingleberry,” says one. Sighs another, “Of course I see everyone when…
Disney has a genius way of turning large sums of money into even larger sums of money. The executives at Disney probably laugh at the size of Scrooge McDuck’s money bin for being small and unsightly as they back stroke through one the size of a college football stadium. With…
In a junk-food summer, Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland is a defiant carrot stick, a blockbuster adventure flick where the message is “Think smart.” It’s a deliberate phooey to the kiddie carnage of movies like Transformers and The Avengers, which frighten children about the apocalypse before they can even spell the word…
“This is the oldest skull I have,” the Swiss artist H.R. Giger says, showing off this prized possession the breezy way you might a set of Fiestaware. He lifts the skull and regards it. But then his speech is breathy and halting, tender with age, as he elaborates: His father…
Poltergeist 2015 is to Poltergeist ’82 what today’s shipped-frozen-to-the-store Pizza Hut dough is to the kneaded-on-site pies the chain’s stoned cooks tossed in the Reagan era. It’s the same kind of thing, with the same shape and some shared ingredients, but the texture’s gone limp, and there’s no sense of…
Two and a half years ago, Judd Apatow released This Is 40, the most personal film of his career. He was anxious. He usually is. His default setting is inward panic. “I don’t know if people can understand the pressure to be funny,” Apatow says today, “just knowing how badly…
In the decadent 21st century, the summer movie season now sprawls from March through December. (Star Wars: Episode VII is due to awaken the Force December 18; every prior Star Wars picture has come out Memorial Day weekend.) But I’ll stick to tradition and call Memorial Day the start of…
