Columns By Leonard KladyKlady@moviecitynews.com
Friday Estimates: June 30
It’s a stripper and teddy bear weekend! While Merida and her Brave friends will no doubt capture more of the family market, Ted and Magic Mike are at the top of the box office charts on Friday.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: The Graduate
Sometimes a movie comes at exactly the right time. Like The Graduate — director Mike Nichols’ and screenwriters Buck Henry’s and Calder Willingham’s marvelously edgy and arousing romantic comedy about plastics and family affairs and life in California, with one of those heroes, or anti-heroes, who strike a chord: young, nervous, recent college graduate, Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), who’s a little worried about his future and also torn between his clandestine affair with a married lover, Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) and his seemingly genuine open-air love for her beautiful college-age daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross).
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Ted
Listen, I’m like almost everybody else. If you make me laugh, I’ll forgive you. I’ll forgive almost anything. In fact, I feel here like the priest with the Mafia guy on the other side of the screen. There’s a lot to forgive and expiate: a lot of Hail Marys here. But what the hell. It made me laugh. I forgive it. Bring it in, yuh bastid. Where’s the brewskis?
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: The 39 Steps
CO-PICK OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC THE 39 STEPS (Also Blu-ray) (Four Stars) U.K.: Alfred Hitchcock, 1935 (Criterion Collection) Back in 1985, I wrote these liner notes for one of the earliest Criterion Collection releases: a videotape, in a silver-colored box, of Alfred Hitchcock’s love-on-the-run spy-story masterpiece, The 39 Steps. (The original is still on their website.)…
Read the full article »Pride’s Friday 5 (June 29, 2012)
Sarah Polley’s “lucid and lucent” “Take This Waltz”; “Magic Mike” and the love of “Saturday Night Fever”; the modern dance between Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone in “The Amazing Spider-Man”; Mila Kunis, in a towel, in “Ted,” and the grave beauty of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Once Upon A Time In Anatolia.”
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: 21 Jump Street; Spider-Man; Spider-Man 2; Spider-Man 3; Erin Brockovich; Sister Act; Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit
The first two Spider-Man movies were such smash critical hits (Spider-Man 2, co-scripted by Alvin Sargent, has been hailed as the acme of the whole genre, until The Avengers), that an inevitable backlash plagued the vulnerable and tearful Spider-Man 3. (Seen by itself, most critics would have probably liked it fine – just as the public liked all three). But some smasheroos deserve their popularity and this is one (excuse me, these are three) of them.
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: Deliverance
CO-PICK OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC DELIVERANCE (40th Anniversary collector’s edition) Four Stars U.S.; John Boorman, 1972 (Warner Bros.) Four Southern businessmen, searching for the joys of youth, join together for a Georgia canoe trip on the beautiful but often dangerously turbulent Cahulawassee River. Soon however, after a violent confrontation with two evil backwoodsmen, they find themselves…
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: The Artist
It’s a cinematic feast in the style of the old time silent movies that flourished from the time of film‘s invention in 1895 — or at least since Georges Méliès started telling stories with them before the turn of the century — until 1927, when Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer made the screen speak and croon and told us we ain’t heard nothing yet and, unmaliciously of course , drove a nail in the coffin of the old technology, while ushering in the new.
Read the full article »The DVD Wrapup: Oranges & Sunshine, Bullhead, Spalding Gray, Deliverance … More
Michaël R. Roskam not only uses steroid smuggling as a device to advance the plot, but his protagonist is addicted to them physically and psychologically, as well.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
The whole movie is nervous and over-loud and expensive-looking, full of tacky jump-at-you 3D effects; and watching it sometimes makes you feel as if the country was under attack by a conspiracy of blood-sucking idiots. Even though it was shot by the sometimes marvelous Caleb Deschanel (The Right Stuff, The Black Stallion), the film’s visual style seems like a mistake.
Read the full article »Pride’s Friday 5 (June 22, 2012)
The tangled red of “Brave”; the sensation of “Gerhard Richter Painting”; gentle geek fable “Nate & Margaret” and its light, platonic “Harold and Maude” vibe; the family dynamics of “Declaration of War” and the bop Italiano of Woody’s latest late-career ensemble comedy.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Brave.
“Brave” is a beautifully visualized, sometimes blisteringly funny and exciting Pixar cartoon fairytale about a wee Scottish lassie who grows up into a feisty, flame-haired young adventuress who shoots off great big arrows and battles bears and witches and boisterous clansmen.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Andrew Sarris (1928-2012)
Andy Sarris was my favorite movie critic because, in “The American Cinema,” he opened up a world for me, for all of us. That’s what a good critic, or a great one, does.
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: And Everything Is Going Fine; Sex and Death to the Age of 14.
He’s dead now, and his friends suspect he threw himself off the Staten Island Ferry and drowned, took his life because he was suffering the pain from a bad traffic accident on a lonely road in Ireland that left him with a smashed skull and some brain damage, and, according to Nell Casey “an orbital fracture, a broken hip, and a permanent limp“ — unable to swim, unable to ski. Unable… So he jumped, maybe. Drowned, maybe. As the Manhahttan skyline approached or receded — maybe. Unless he was on the other side of the ferry. We don’t know because he isn’t around to tell the story.
Read the full article »The DVD Wrapup: Jeff at Home Project X, The FP, Nine Muses … More
A decade ago, Mark and Jay Duplass helped create a niche in the indie world commonly referred to as “mumblecore.” Generally speaking, these are low-budget, largely improvised productions, populated by characters that would be considered unexceptional and treated as invisible, unless, perhaps, they lived in the apartment next door, occupied a cubicle beside you at work or dated one of your kids. This isn’t to imply these people lead meaningless lives; only that almost everything they do falls under the loose heading of “normal.” If there’s been a hipster cachet attached to mumblecore titles, it’s because what’s considered commonplace by most mainstream standards can be revelatory when observed by viewers in similar circumstances and when photographed in credibly natural fashion.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Rock of Ages
“Rock of Ages” is a rock movie for people who still have their old Foreigner and REO Speedwagon album collections intact, but can’t really feel the beat.
Read the full article »Wilimington on Movies: Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding
Jane Fonda plays Grandma Grace, whom you might describe as the permanent ambassador from Woodstock Nation. A devotee of sex, drugs and rock n’roll — as well as peace, love and understanding — and a still sexually adventurous old gal who claims she was once in a threesome with Leonard Cohen, Grace lives in Woodstock in a combination pot farm and upscale painters studio that looks as if it were designed by somebody rich and famous for somebody like Jane Fonda.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: That’s My Boy
Say one thing for Adam Sandler: He isn’t afraid of looking like an idiot on screen. Or a boor. Or a horny dude. Or a comedian who doesn’t give a damn what the the critics think of him. In Sandler’s outrageously uninhibited, defiantly obnoxious but good-natured new movie, That’s My Boy, he plays, to the hilt, Donny Berger, an outrageously uninhibited, defiantly obnoxious, good-natured guy who became famous in the ’80s — or had fame thrust upon him, as his classmates colorfully put it — when, as a lippy 13-year-old eighth-grader, he had an affair with his sexy junior high (or middle school) teacher, Mary McGarricle (Eva Amurri Martino), had a baby with her, and became a tabloid sensation.
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: La Terra Trema; Conversation Piece
La Terra Trema is an almost didactic and preachy leftist film, which often tells you how it feels. (Visconti, along with Antonio Pietrangeli, writes and speaks the narration himself.) But there‘s a majesty in the images of landscape and sea, and an unforced naturalism in the performances, by the actual villagers of Aci Trezza, that both pull you deeply into the human side of the story.
Read the full article »The DVD Wrapup: In Darkness, Sherlock Holmes, Accident, Ghost Rider … More
Try to imagine a Hitchcockian thriller, as choreographed by Rube Goldberg, and you might have an idea what to expect from Pou-Soi Cheang’s perversely clever “Accident.” Set largely in the bustling streets of Hong Kong, the award-winning import describes how a tightly-knit gang plots elaborate hits on people targeted by a mastermind known as the Brain.
Read the full article »
