“Why are all your moves so smart and noble and I’m always the idiot piece of shit?” I have never played a serious game of poker in my entire life–hell, I don’t think I’ve ever really taken part in any poker game, serious or casual, either in the company of friends or among jaded professionals. […]
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“I don’t subscribe to the credo that there’s enough room for everyone to be successful. I think there are only a few spots available, and people like Dick Koosman and Bono are taking them up.” Can a film whose central characters are uniformly unlikable be dramatically compelling in their midst? Eric thought so in his […]
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“You wanna do the world a real service? Tell funnier jokes.” More than anything else, it’s the breadth of Woody Allen‘s craft as a filmmaker that has never been fully recognized or appreciated. With a body of work varied enough to include “Love and Death,” “Interiors,” “Husbands and Wives,” and “Everyone Says I Love You,” […]
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“If the guy I was then met the guy I am now, he’d beat the shit out of me.” “SLC Punk!” is a strange amalgamation of elements that seem to be operating at cross-purposes. It has passages reminiscent of John Hughes, “Sid and Nancy,” and Tarantino, a tone that convincingly encompasses dramatic shifts in temperament […]
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“We all sell out every day; it might as well be on the winning team.” What “They Live” has to offer may come as a surprise. It is, after all, about an alien civilization creating a global consumer culture through mass hypnosis in order to use the human race as livestock. And it is, after […]
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“I used to think God was angry, too, but not anymore! He used to jump on me like a wild bird and dig his claws into my head. But then one morning, he came to me. He blew over me like a cool breeze and said, ‘Stand up!’ And here I am.” When “The Last […]
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Why bother remaking a 1981 stop-motion classic (“Clash of the Titans”) if you are removing the one thing that made it fun in the first place? Before a single important filmmaker had any bearing on my cinematic life, there was Ray Harryhausen. The stop-motion animation he refined was a fixture of countless monster movies, beginning […]
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Doubters of Michael Cera really have something to grapple with in light of the new trailer for “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” the most recent project from “Shaun of the Dead[‘s]” Edgar Wright, based on the comic book series “Scott Pilgrim” by Bryan Lee O’Malley. With no prior knowledge of the comics and no real […]
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“How could guys like us worry about a tiny little thing like the sun?” The bracing melancholy of childhood is an underrepresented phenomenon in popular entertainment. By and large, children’s films prefer to coast by, parading antiquated, uninteresting archetypes and reducing all conflict to clinical action sequences devoid of substance or originality (see: Tim Burton’s […]
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“Take the greatest Jewish minds ever: Marx, Freud, Einstein. What have they given us? Communism, infantile sexuality, and the atom bomb.” “The Believer” contains one of the most compelling portraits of a psychologically unstable young man ever captured on film. Where “American History X” explicated racism and inter-cultural hostilities as products of social circumstances and […]
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Some intriguing/exciting news coming from The Playlist today: Sean Penn has returned to the role of Larry Fine in the Farrelly Brothers’ ill-fated “Three Stooges” project. A few months back, in the midst of recurring domestic tumult, Penn stated he was going to take a year off from acting and sort things out with his […]
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“Pirate Radio” – the new film from writer/director Richard Curtis (“Love Actually”) – knows exactly what it’s doing. It tells the story of Carl (Tom Sturridge), an 18-year-old recently expelled British student, who in 1966, is sent to stay with his godfather, Quentin (Bill Nighy), on his boat in the North Sea. From this boat, […]
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Is “The Fourth Kind” real? Is the documentary footage shown in the film real or staged? Answers here.
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Here’s a post about the validity of the film’s “documentary footage” and true story claim. Review below. Milla Jovovich, bathed in white light, steps into the foreground. As the camera circles her and abruptly changes angles, the actress delivers a spiel about the film’s production, its authenticity, our freedom to draw our own conclusions, and […]
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