Eight years after their uproarious “Wedding Crashers” proved that R-rated comedies could still score at the box office, the once-dependable Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson have reunited for “The Internship,” a middling generational comedy that doubles as an alarmingly shameless two-hour infomercial about how nifty it might be to work for Google. In fact, director [...]
Could a work of art ever be worth more than a human life? That’s the diabolically intriguing question posed by “Trance,” a style-conscious psychodrama in which a shimmering puzzle box artifice masks the densely plotted machinations of a fairly standard bait-and-switch crime thriller. Danny Boyle’s newest film desperately wants to scale the cerebral heights of [...]
The problem with “The Place Beyond the Pines” is that its grand scope and narrative structure aren’t more interesting or effective than the simple crime thriller it starts as. It’s an admirable effort to be sure, providing a unique kind of storytelling rarely seen in cinema. But the direction the film takes in the middle [...]
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 [...]
