In Made of Honor, Patrick Dempsey plays a conveniently rich and willfully single serial “fornicator” who is, slowly but surely, domesticated by his unspoken love for longtime BFF Hannah (Michelle Monaghan), who’s on her way to Scotland to marry Mr. Right Now since Mr. Right’s too chickenshit to say boo…
Watching Marilyn Monroe in Cinemascope, a critic once wrote, is “like being smothered in baked Alaska.” Reading that as a teenager raised some thrilling questions: Is that good or bad? What is “baked Alaska”? And then a realization: How singular it must be for a woman — or a filmmaker…
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…
Could have sworn I’ve seen this episode of Baby Mama before — like sometime in January 2007, when it was originally titled “The Baby Show” and aired on the other prime-time series starring Tina Fey, 30 Rock. (Waitaminute — you say Baby Mama’s a movie and not a TV show?…
Earnest, sad, and righteous, they are not. More inspired by M*A*S*H or Dr. Strangelove than The Deer Hunter or Coming Home, a new pack of political films that defy the clichés of the post-9/11 Iraq War cinema has arrived. Notwithstanding a few holdovers of moral outrage (Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss, Nick…
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…
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…
Jon Avnet’s cheesy new thriller, 88 Minutes, is 105 minutes long. Going in, I feared that 100 of them would be eaten up by Al Pacino chewing the furniture. Alas, it’s worse than that. Pacino plays a Seattle forensic psychiatrist in symbiotic thrall to the serial killer he helped put…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A lonely dwarf, a wisecracking Cuban-American, and a grieving mother walk into each other’s lives, laugh together, cry together, grow, change, and heal each other’s emotional wounds. Cue Sundance prizes, Miramax pickup, torrent of glowing reviews, and surprisingly robust indie box office…
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…
Smart people got no reason to live — and, sure, that’s not quite how Randy Newman sang it, but the point stands. Because in Noam Murro’s directorial bow — one of those Sundance premières starring famous people slumming in dingy Indieland — the smart people ain’t doing much l-i-v-i-n’ at…
When Time recently featured George Clooney on its cover accompanied by the headline “The Last Movie Star” you didn’t have to read the article to know where it was coming from. After all, stars of the post-pubescent variety are an increasingly rare commodity these days, whereas Clooney, in just about…
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…
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’ new movie is less about families than about cheating…
Ben Mezrich’s 2002 bestseller 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,…
Considering that the war in Iraq has proved 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 gave way…
As John Simon once said of Jeanne Moreau — cast in a virginal role — making Simon Pegg a fat guy is like casting Lassie as a vegetarian. Take Chris Elliott, subtract Don Knotts: the remainder is Pegg, the British actor-screenwriter who barely registered as an appetizer for Shaun of…
At the crosswalk the other day, I noticed something peeking out from the usual pasting of fliers on the light pole in front of me. It looked like an address label. In a nondescript typeface was printed: “OUT OF IRAQ” — a plea unlikely to persuade any policymakers who happened…
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…
Was Dr. Seuss oblivious to his own genius? The allegory of his charming Horton Hears a Who! remains fluid today and, like its crafty rhymes, ebbs and flows with the times. The conviction of an innocent pachyderm known as Horton to stand up against tyranny and for the survival 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 helping…
To the uninitiated viewer, Austrian director Michael Haneke may best be described as the modern cinema’s master of the unkind rewind. In the opening scene of his second theatrical feature, Benny’s Video (1992), we see crude camcorder footage of a farm pig being shot with a cattle gun during a…
