“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a few months before the publication of “The Great Gatsby,” a work now considered his ultimate treatise on the subject. “They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we [...]
Films about racism can portray it two ways: realistically, with poignancy and a balanced, effective point, or tritely, lacking in subtlety and emotional resonance while repeatedly hitting you over the head with a message. “42” hews a lot closer to the second camp than the first, which is a shame. Jackie Robinson was a baseball [...]
Just when you thought it was safe to plan a weekend excursion to a benevolent billionaire’s newly completed theme park, life found a way to bring “Jurassic Park” back to the big screen. Nearly 20 years after dominating 1993’s box office and demonstrating the shared miracle of CGI and Stan Winston’s groundbreaking animatronics, I’m happy [...]
For what it is — a remake of a gory, cult favorite horror flick — the new “Evil Dead” is an enthralling, blood-soaked blast straight out of hell. Horror movies nowadays don’t provide the sort of in-your-face brutality that this film does, where things just get so much more twisted scene after scene in insanely [...]
They shuffle onscreen one after the other, a grim procession of conservatively dressed older men, their faces lined and weathered from years of thankless toil, each of them wearing the same earnest, haunted expression. You wouldn’t think it to look at them now, but at some point, each of these unassuming retirees were responsible for [...]
What does North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un have in common with Stanley Kubrick? In spite of their rather drastic ideological differences, both men have found ways to make us laugh in the face of nuclear war. Kubrick, the director of “The Shining” and “Full Metal Jacket,” furiously lampooned Cold War paranoia in his 1964 black [...]
Every generation gets the debauched beach party movie it deserves, and ours just found its rotten little soul mate. Imagine watching a “Girls Gone Wild” infomercial from the balcony of a glitzy art-house theater with three hits of acid boiling in your belly and you’ll have a rough idea of what to expect from “Spring [...]
In real life, the White House is one of the most secure, well-fortified locations on earth. In the movies, though, it’s a sitting duck. Director Roland Emmerich, whose fetish for demolishing national landmarks has been well documented in so-called disaster porn like “2012” and “The Day After Tomorrow,” famously vaporized the Presidential mansion via interstellar [...]
The macabre story of “Stoker” – concerning a young woman whose creepy, murderous uncle causes trouble when he moves in with her and her widowed mother – makes for a sensational tale of violent family dysfunction, but it’s actually the weakest aspect of the film. The script, by “Prison Break” star Wentworth Miller, takes inspiration [...]
On this week’s Excess Hollywood, Alex Lamb and Landon McDonald discuss the films released over spring break, including Olympus Has Fallen“, “Stoker” and “Spring Breakers“. And in honor of March Madness, they talk about the greatness of “Space Jam” and several other basketball movies.
The exhaustive and comprehensive documentary “West of Memphis” chronicles the case of the West Memphis Three (WM3), in which three teenagers were wrongfully convicted of an atrocious crime they did not commit. As both a document of sustained injustice and a complex, investigative murder mystery, it’s an extremely compelling film. In May 1993, three 8-year-old [...]
This week on Excess Hollywood, Alex Lamb and Landon McDonald talk road movies in honor of spring break and also discuss the excellent documentary “West of Memphis.” Road trip/vacation/spring break film playlist: Piranha 3D It Happened One Night Planes, Trains, and Automobiles Y Tu Mama Tambien Fear and Loathing The Shining [...]
This week on Excess Hollywood, Alex Lamb talks about the True/False Film Festival and the documentaries he saw, while Landon McDonald discusses Oz the Great and Powerful, Snitch and Side by Side. Films from True/False Film Festival: No Stories We Tell The Crash Reel Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? After Tiller Twenty Feet [...]
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” Sam Raimi seems to have taken this advice to heart while filming “Oz the Great and Powerful,” his visually resplendent, dramatically muted quasi-prequel to 1939’s “The Wizard of Oz,” whose status as a cross-generational touchstone will continue to grow long after this lackluster reprise is banished [...]
Actress Sarah Wright stars as love interest Nicole in the raucous college comedy “21 and Over,” helping out party boys Miller (Miles Teller) and Casey (Skylar Astin) as they wildly celebrate the 21st birthday of their friend Jeff Chang (Justin Chon). Here, Wright explains improvising with the guys, playing party games and the travel experiences [...]
“Dark Skies” is the kind of movie Sunday matinees were made for, a modestly diverting sci-fi horror hybrid whose surfeit of ambition and shrewd sense of pacing are sadly undermined by the constraints of a limited budget. Director Scott Stewart desperately wants his film to combine the fraught family dynamics of “Close Encounters of the [...]
