As another summer movie season characterized by cynicism and excess draws to a close, there are few activities less valuable or interesting than complaining about it. The blockbusters arrived, flattened cities, vomited effects, deafened with explosions, made money, didn’t make enough money, pleased populist critics, displeased elitist critics, and finally…
The late, great Elmore Leonard advised writers never to open a book with weather. Does a lightning storm count? Last evening I was welcomed to Venice, where I’m just settling in for the 2013 edition of the city’s film festival, with a spectacular lightning storm over the Grand Canal. This…
This is the first trailer released for Dallas Buyers Club, the new drama based on the life of Ron Woodroof, who smuggled and sold unlicensed medications when he was diagnosed with AIDS in the mid-’80s. Naturally, it’s set in Dallas and stars our favorite paper doll, Matthew McConaughey, who lost…
David Lowery’s newest, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, opens in wide-release today, and naturally he’d like you to see it. As luck would have it, three of his filmmaking buddies also have big releases dropping. Since promoting just his own would be very Un-Lowery of him, he’s designed a challenge, complete…
The laddish pleasures of The World’s End, Edgar Wright’s comedy about a group of middle-aged guys drinking beer and facing mortality, come with a bittersweet edge. In the old days, the lead character, Gary King, used to be the coolest kid in school, at least in the outlaw sense: He’d…
In David Lowery’s sublime new film, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Bob Muldoon (Casey Affleck), who’s serving 25 to life for armed robbery and wounding a cop during a shootout, frequently puts pencil to parchment paper and writes love letters to his girlfriend, Ruth (Rooney Mara). Bob’s aching, lovelorn voice can…
Director Shola Lynch has been mining the rich terrain of black American history for a while now, notably in the award-winning 2004 documentary Chisholm ’72: Unbought & Unbossed, about the 1972 presidential campaign by the late Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American and the first woman to mount a serious,…
The first thing you see in David Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, after the IFC logo, are the words, “This was all in Texas.” What observant viewers will notice in the end credits, though, is that, for a movie set in Texas, a lot of it was made elsewhere, specifically…
Now that Alamo Drafthouse has opened its Richardson location, here at Mixmaster we were curious: After all the hype and popularity Alamo enjoys, how does it measure up? So they chose me, a humble Louisianan who has no bias toward (and until recently not even knowledge of) Alamo, to investigate…
Despite the giddy, gory ridiculousness of Kick-Ass 2, this summer’s most violent yet least punishing comic-book movie, there’s a kernel of ugly human truth at the core of the Kick-Ass fantasy. In the first issue of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick-Ass comic, from 2008, a lonely high school…
Hey, Hollywood can still do romance! Ever since the marketeers worked out that the kiss kiss bang bang formula could be profitably split, with bang bang movies getting wide releases and the kiss kisses sold only to that slim niche demographic called “American women,” movie love stories had gotten frustratingly…
Like so many screenplays, The World’s End has its origins in a Starbucks. As director Edgar Wright tells it, the ideas for next week’s sci-fi action-comedy starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost came to him while shooting the trio’s last film, the buddy-cop parody Hot Fuzz. That film takes place…
Until 2005 or so, no one thought much about modern piracy of the high-seas variety. But then Somali pirates began attacking merchant ships with increasing frequency, seizing vessels and holding their crews hostage for outlandish sums. Danish director Tobias Lindholm’s wiry, neatly crafted thriller A Hijacking wrests fact into the…
You don’t need this writer to tell you that the most hotly anticipated televisual extravaganza of the year is upon us this weekend, as all-time great TV series Breaking Bad returns for the start of its final eight-episode hurrah. It’s been a show based entirely around one question — What…
NOTE: To any PR or media relations people out there: all future press events should include bottomless Champagne. Thank you. Alamo Drafthouse’s new Richardson location had its official ribbon-cutting/giant robot-unveiling last night. Founder Tim League and Chief Operating Officer Bill DiGaetano were joined by various local figures including Richardson Mayor…
Fox’s gut-wrenching cancellation of the cult series Firefly didn’t stop Joss Whedon and the Serenity from giving it’s characters the closure they deserved through the film of the same name. A decade after the show’s cancellation, fans across the world continue to prove year after year that you Can’t Stop…
MTV is launching a new “reality docu-series” called Big Tips Texas. It’s not a porn-based reality series about Texan penis sizes, FYI. We asked. Turns out, it’s about “an eclectic group of women” who work at a bar. In Texas. Allegedly, “Whether they’re partying on Lake Lewisville, planning their futures,…
The Guardian called Post Tenebras Lux “an opaque, unforthcoming, exasperating work.” Salon author Andrew O’Hehir countered, saying Carlos Reygadas’ newest is “a mesmerizing combination of opaque art-house cinema, personal reflection and class-based rural thriller.” (He then went on to slam Terrence Malick.) These reviews are indicative of the erotic, heady…
Endearing is a weird word to use for horror movies, but it’s an accurate one for independent and low budget horror movies that aren’t lazy creature features or slasher flicks. Enter Jug Face, which opens at Magnolia Theater this Friday. Ada lives in a backwoods community in an unnamed part…
Movie stars shouldn’t be subject to the rules of gravity, as we mere mortals are. One of the great pleasures of watching actors is to see them move, and when yesterday’s youngsters start creaking, we feel it in our joints. That’s not to say actors can’t age gracefully, or that…
If there’s one nuance mainstream comedies have yet to learn, it’s that “empathetic” need not mean “likable” — audiences can feel for characters they don’t necessarily want to be. The hit black comedy Horrible Bosses, which had three angry underlings plotting murderous vengeance against their you-know-whats, should have been a…
When David Gordon Green introduced Paul Rudd to Emile Hirsch, the two actors didn’t click. It was an awkward seafood dinner. “Emile just started talking about something — girls, maybe — and I was doing a piss-poor job of trying to follow along,” recalls Rudd. “And when Emile got up…
