Typically, the creators of comic book adaptations assume that ingratiating themselves to anyone unfamiliar with their characters/properties demands boilerplate origin stories where protagonists exhaustively declare who they are in no uncertain terms. This is, thankfully, not true of Dredd, whose creators have the confidence to treat their narrative like just…
There is a scene in last year’s Moneyball in which Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane is confronted by a long conference table of dreary-looking, uncomprehending, stick-in-the-mud veteran scouts. Trouble With the Curve, Clint Eastwood’s first on-screen role in four years, is those scouts’ revenge, casting the Sabermetrics nerds as nemeses. Eastwood…
In conjunction with our annual Best of Dallas issue, which hits the streets and the interstreets today, we held debates for several awards, including Best Burger. Mostly these were debates between two writers; in this case, I transcribed an ongoing internal struggle. Joe: The Ticket? Really, dude? Joe: It’s great…
You shouldn’t have lost faith in the first place. There is no Kristen Wiig if Tina Fey and Amy Poehler never move on, no Forte without Ferrell’s departure. The show must go on, and it did on Saturday night, with a lot of help from Bill Hader. This was the…
A critic’s report from a film festival like Toronto, where something like 300 features were unveiled from September 6 through 16, can be something like a Rorschach test — or, at least, it can be something like the Rorschach test depicted in Paul Thomas Anderson’s TIFF entry, The Master, in…
Film critic Karina Longworth is reporting from the Toronto International Film Festival this week. As the summer of self-plagiarism comes to a close, add Terrence Malick to the list of those accused of this debatable crime: The auteur’s quick follow-up to last year’s The Tree of Life, To The Wonder,…
Film critic Karina Longworth is reporting from the Toronto International Film Festival this week. See also: How Hollywood Movies Led to Genocide. For maybe the first hour of Yellow (written and directed by Nick Cassavetes, the man responsible for the national treasure that is The Notebook), I kept thinking about…
Film critic Karina Longworth is reporting from the Toronto International Film Festival this week. See also: Threesomes at the Toronto Film Festival The best, most daring and form-defying documentaries in the world right now are being funded by the Danish Film Institute, and so it goes that the nonfiction knockout…
An intimate relationship between a fisherman and a lobster. An ice cube waxing on the topic of modern refrigeration. A team of kung fu chefs, negating peril from aggressive, mutated chickens. A woman with orange juicers for breasts. It can only be Fantastic Fest, Austin’s annual celebration of grind house,…
Village Voice Film Critic Karina Longworth is out at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Tom Hanks is possibly playing all the characters. Karina will be along each day on The Mixmaster with news, reviews and updates from Canada. This is a blog post about two movies that were screened…
Weddings make such bitchin’ film scenarios because the stakes are believably high: If anything goes wrong, social opprobrium, the loss of your beloved or both can ensue, right in front of your disdainful parents, the clergy and probably Vince Vaughn or somebody. Directors have placed every obvious symbol of holy…
The story goes that while filming in Tunisia in the summer of 1980, Steven Spielberg avoided the dysentery that afflicted most of the cast and crew of Raiders of the Lost Ark by holing up in his hotel room with a suitcase full of SpaghettiOs. Like most studio-approved behind-the-scenes errata,…
Somewhere on Earth right now, an Alf movie is in the works. Rebooting and rehashing big film ideas isn’t a new Hollywood trend, but the modern Hollywood is notable for taking a huge, caustic dump on an already-beloved franchise. Earlier this year, we noted 55 trends that we thought needed…
Game Boy
The big movie event of September will be the anticipated latest from a certain filmmaker who signs his films with the surname Anderson and a pair of initials, a prodigious talent who burst onto the scene with a stylish entry in the mid-’90s crime-thriller wave and never left. The master…
See also: The Five Best Bald Actors on DFW Stages Dallas is one of a limited pocket of US cities getting this new-to-America Jet Li flick in 3D. Opening Saturday the 31 at AMC NorthPark 15, Flying Swords of Dragon Gate brings you sweeping Ming Dynasty landscapes flooded with magical…
It’s pretty Pollyannaish to complain when companies that are in the business of making money on movies make certain movies solely to make money. Yet it seems to be widely acceptable to be cynical about big-budget movies that are made, marketed and released in order to sate an appetite that…
Boyishly lean, with a brooding angularity that suggests both high maintenance and nefarious vacancy, Robert Pattinson has managed to fill the role of a grade-A male sex symbol without ever evincing anything like carnal energy, rising to top the Hollywood A list as a representative of the undead. Pattinson’s casting…
See also: Here’s What Stylish SMUers Wore During Their First Week Back on Campus Sassy fashionista, blogger and breakout star of Most Eligible Dallas, Courtney Kerr has scored her own Bravo show, Courtney Loves Dallas, set for the 2013 lineup. We’re told it will center on Kerr’s travails among the…
See also: 55 Movie Trends That Need to Die Now. Somewhere on Earth right now, an Alf movie is in the works. Rebooting and rehashing big film ideas isn’t a new Hollywood trend, but the modern Hollywood is notable for taking a huge, caustic dump on an already-beloved franchise. Earlier…
Hit & Run: A ’70s Car-Chase Flick for the Utne Reader Set
Hit & Run, a new action comedy engineered by co-director/writer/star Dax Shepard, is as much about running mouths as running motors, and injects estrogen into the few remaining enclaves of American testosterone, muscle cars and FM cock rock. Shepard plays Charlie Bronson, a 35-year-old in Nowheresville whose life, as we…
Julie Delpy Brings the Paris Gang Stateside for 2 Days in New York
Calling back many of the same characters and more than a few of the same jokes, 2 Days in New York, Julie Delpy’s fourth film as writer-director, is a sequel to her 2007 2 Days in Paris. A spin-off of sorts itself, Paris piggybacked on the popularity of 2004’s justly…
Icy and barren, Alps Is Above All Human
In a gymnasium, a clandestine four-person group meets to discuss its name. One member suggests “Alps,” explaining: “The mountains of the Alps cannot be replaced by any other mountain. Anything else would be smaller, less imposing, thus, a poor substitute. While the mountains of the Alps cannot be replaced, they…
