Columns By David Polandpoland@moviecitynews.com
20 Weeks Of Summer: This Year’s $200 Million Movies So Far
As you can see, I have included a few titles that are not at $200m worldwide yet, but are guaranteed to get there. (numbers from BO Mojo) Seven of the nine studio wide releases to date this summer have achieved this mark. Six have or are highly likely to pass $300m worldwide. (If you are…
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs. Sherlock Holmes: AGOS; Journey 2; Ghost Rider: SOV
Elementary…
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: In Darkness
The sewers of Lvov are small and inky black and steeped in an airless-looking gloom, cramped and comfortless, wet with sewage and slime. These sewers look like real sewers. They are true hellholes, and the people hiding there are a mismatched crowd of businessmen, operators, snobs, adulterers, ordinary people, families and even children, all escaping from the Lvov ghetto, crowded together on the walkways and pressed to the breaking point.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Children of Paradise
Prevert’s script has never been surpassed as sheer literature for the screen. The cast is a great one too, from that ultimate femme fatale Arletty as the irresistible beauty Garance, to the four superb actors who play the four men who adore her unto death: lively, cheerfully seductive Pierre Brasseur as the commanding virtuoso classical actor Frederick LeMaitre; cold Louis Salou as the reptilian Count Edouard de Montray; Marcel Herrand with his evil smile, as the nihilist/dandy/playwright/thief/murderer Lacenaire; and melancholy-looking genius Jean-Louis Barrault as the great sad-eyed mime.
Read the full article »Pride’s Friday 5: June 7, 2012
Three movies, in theaters now; two books, downloadable today. “Oslo, August 31”; “The Color Wheel”; “Moonrise Kingdom”; David Bordwell’s lucid, frightening overview of the digital bend-over, “Pandora’s Digital Box: Films, Files, and the Future of Movies”; and Paul Maher, Jr.’s oral history of the cryptic career of Terrence Malick, “One Big Soul.”
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Prometheus
The template for both the first Alien and Prometheus — movies about small, isolated groups of humans besieged by a malignant space alien or aliens — is probably John W. Campbell’s famous story “Who Goes There?” which was later made, not very faithfully, into Howard Hawks’ and Christian Nyby’s zingy 1951 pop classic The Thing from Another World, and later, more faithfully, into John Carpenter’s gory and generally underrated 1982 The Thing. The 1979 Alien sort of reset that template for all time, at least for movies. (It’s still much used and abused).
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs. Coriolanus
Here we have another film treasure taken from the vast and wonderful dramaturgy of William Shakespeare, the greatest playwright who ever lived: “Coriolanus,” bitter, bleak, murderous play of the hell of warfare, of deadly comrades in arms, of the masses and the few, of the ties of blood and the evils of politics — now made into a movie set in the age of bombs and the land of ethnic cleansing (Serbia), directed by and starring, in the title role, that fine melancholy actor Ralph Fiennes, with a performance so extraordinary by Vanessa Redgrave, as Volumnia, the ultimate warrior‘s mother, that it takes your breath away to watch her, and to hear her — as it must have staggered Fiennes while he watched and directed and acted with her, and said the words above, with feeling.
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs.The Woodmans
One problem with being a great artist, or a hugely gifted artist, is that the temperament isn’t always easy to live with — especially for the artists themselves. Another problem: You have to depend on perceptive critics and audiences to earn your living or win recognition, and they aren’t always available.
Read the full article »The DVD Wrapup: John Carter, Journey 2, Safe House, Hit So Hard, Hondo, Act of Valor, Desire, Falling Skies … More
This epic sci-fi adventure would have been much better served if it had been marketed as “Edger Rice Burroughs’ John Carter,” instead of simply, “Disney: John Carter.” It takes an ego the size of the Matterhorn to think audiences would feel better about seeing a movie as generically titled as “John Carter,” simply because of the Disney brand, instead of as the brainchild of one of the genre’s godfathers.
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: John Carter; Safe House; Act of Valor
With its cast of real-life Navy Seals playing characters based on themselves, in a script partly drawn from real life, in scenes that the Seals actors helped design and choreograph, Act of Valor should have been the last word in SEALS combat realism. And that’s something that you’d think American audiences would be ready for — especially in the aftermath of the inspiring real-life SEALS trackdown and termination of Osama Bin Laden.
Read the full article »DVD Geek: The Rape of the Vampire
The greatest bad movie ever is Plan Nine from Outer Space, but coming in a close number two is Jean Rollin’s exquisitely ridiculous The Rape of the Vampire, which has been released on Blu-ray no less, by Kino Lorber Incorporated as a Redemption title. For one thing, it is in that hoity-toity language, French, which connoisseurs of badness embrace as the language of their superiors. For another thing, it has lots of topless women, which in itself is not a bad thing at all—just ask a nursing infant—but is really dopey when there is no particular narrative reason as to why the women should choose not to drape themselves respectably, particularly when there are a bunch of grunting, farmer-looking types, chasing after them with pitchforks.
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: High School
This particular “High School” is a knowing but mediocre stoner comedy with lots of marijuana in-jokes, but few real laughs — a joyless little pot farce about how a nutty school superintendent, Dr, Leslie Gordon (Michael Chiklis), goes on an anti-pot crusade, and runs up against the detemined sabotage of would-be valedictorian Henry Burke (Matt Bush) and his stoner pal Travis Breaux (Sean Marquette).
Read the full article »Wilmington on Movies: Snow White and the Huntsman
The production design (by Dominic Watkins) and the cinematography (by Greig Fraser) is impressive, but the story loses its polish and swing and a lot of its coherence when the narration stops and it turns into an over-produced ersatz classic.
Read the full article »Wilmington on DVDs: Classic, Box Set. David Lean Directs Noel Coward (In Which We Serve; This Happy Breed; Blithe Spirit; Brief Encounter)
David Lean, the director of Lawrence of Arabia and Noel Coward, the playwright/star of “Private Lives,” weren’t exactly kindred spirits. Lean was a movie master craftsman and heterosexual romantic whom Rex Harrison once claimed had “no sense of humor.” Coward was a gay showman, theatrical prodigy and international social lion whose wit was world-famous. Lean sometimes seemed superficially repressed due to a strict religious upbringing; Coward had few, if any, inhibitions.
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