MCN Weekend Reviews Archive for September, 2011

Wilmington on Movies: 50/50

50/50 (Three and a Half Stars) U.S.: Jonathan Levine, 2011   Your best friend looks you in the face and tells you that he’s dying. Wait a minue, it’s not quite like that…He tells you that he has a rare form of spinal cancer and that his chances of survival, according to the doctors, are 50/50….

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Wilmington on Movies: Love Crime

  Love Crime (Three Stars) France: Alain Corneau, 2010 Movie murder mysteries can sometimes get too tricky and convoluted for their own good, and that’s pretty much what happens in Love Crime (Crime d’Amour),  a fine, itelligent, neatly made little French film neo-noir that would have been even better if it didn’t try so hard to outsmart us…

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Wilmington on Movies: Moneyball

   (Four Stars) U. S.: Bennett Miller  It’s not whether you win or lose. It’s how you read the spreadsheet.     For many Americans, baseball is a great American game, and a great American sports myth as well — and it’s also, at times, a business, a gamble, a crud-boatload of media hype, and, last…

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Wilmington on Movies: Killer Elite

  (Two Stars) U.S.: Gary McKendry, 2011 There are lots of reasons to get irritated with Killer Elite — a big-bucks, big-star, mucho-macho, heavy-duty actioner that throws up several hours of murkily photographed violence, preachy dialogue and byzantine plot twists, while wasting three good actors — Jason Statham, Clive Owen and, sadly enough, Robert De…

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DVD Geek: Source Code

There is a romantic component to the story, naturally, and more than one life affirming, love affirming conclusion, leaving a viewer feeling both happy and satisfied, several times, after a stimulating and exciting ride. Jake Gyllenhaal stars, with Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, and Jeffrey Wright. In that the film also evokes aspects of Quantum Leap, there is a cleverly chosen cameo appearance by Scott Bakula.

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Wilmington on Movies and DVD; Straw Dogs (Peckinpah and Lurie)

  Film: Straw Dogs (Two Stars) U. S.: Rod Lurie, 2011 DVD: Straw Dogs (Blu-ray) (Three and a half Stars) U.S.: Sam Peckinpah, 1971 (MGM) I. Bloody Sam Straw Dogs, Rod Lurie‘s remake of Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 classic — with Dustin Hoffman as a Vietnam era intellectual forced to face the beast in himself and…

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Wilmington on Movies: I Don’t Know How She Does It

    U.S.: Douglas McGrath, 2010 (Two Stars)   I Don’t Know How They Do It     Summary You think you’ve got problems? Let me tell you, you don’t know what “problems” mean until you’ve had a peep at the Perils of Parker in the movie I Don’t Know How She Does It, Sarah Jessica’s…

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Wilmington on Movies: Drive

  Drive (Three and a Half Stars) U.S.: Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011  Drive is an L. A. action movie that can really tighten your throat and twist your guts. Story-wise, it’s lean, mean and stripped to the bone, but it’s also drenched with visual style. Directed by Nicolas Winding-Refn, the flashy Dane of The “Pusher”…

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Wilmington on DVDs. Co-Picks of the Week: New. Meek’s Cutoff, Secret Sunshine

  Meek’s Cutoff (Three and a Half Stars) U.S.: Kelly Reichardt, 2011 Meek’s Cutoff, like the Coen Brothers’ True Grit, is an art film Western for a contemporary audience, and an unusually good one — made by a director and writer (Kelly Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond), who show a real feeling for what it must have been…

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Wilmington on DVDs. Pick of the Week: Blu-ray. O Brother, Where Art Thou?

  CO-PICK OF THE WEEK: BLU-RAY   O Brother,  Where Art Thou?  (Four Stars) U.S.: Joel and Ethan Coen, 2000 (Touchstone/Disney)      O Brother, Where Art Thou? — for whose title alone Joel and Ethan Coen deserve a medal — is an outrageously entertaining and inventive movie that still hasn’t gotten its due. The Coen…

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Wilmington on Movies: Mozart’s Sister

  (Three and a Half Stars) France: Rene Feret, 2010 Mozart’s Sister, a film often lovely to see and hear, by French writer-director Rene Feret, is the fictionalized semi-biographical tale of a remarkable girl, her extraordinary family and of the beautiful music they all made together. But it’s also a very sad story, as stories…

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Wilmington on Movies: Contagion

 (Three and a Half Stars) U.S.: Steven Soderbergh, 2011   Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion begins with a cough in the dark — something mundane, and ordinary, if irritating and unhealthy, that soon grows into something else: an explosion of fear, death and hysteria. As the movie proper begins, a title soon informs us that it‘s Day…

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Wilmington on Movies: Warrior

  Warrior (Three  Stars) U.S.: Gavin O’Connor, 2011 Improbabilities won’t necessarily knock out a good fight film, if the feeling and the footwork are there. Warrior is a movie about a high profile, multi-million-dollar TV Mixed Martial Arts tournament in which too long-estranged brothers are both competing, and in which they finally meet in the ring….

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Wilmington on Movies: Sholem Aleichem Laughing in the Darkness

Sholem Aleichem Laughing in the Darkness (Three and a Half Stars) U.S.: Joseph Dorman, 2011 Let me tell you about this fellow Sholem Aleichem, or Solomon Rabinowitz, or Rabinovich, or whatever his name is: the very famous Jewish writer of long ago whom this documentary fellow Joseph Dorman just made the movie about. Yes, I’ve seen…

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Wilmington on Movies: A Good Old Fashioned Orgy

  A Good Old Fashioned Orgy (One Star) U.S.: Alex Gregory & Peter Huyck, 2011 I don’t want to come across like a prude, but the new Jason Sudeikis sex comedy A Good Old fashioned Orgy is pretty much a bad, newfangled mess. Try as they might, writer-directors Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck can’t make…

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MCN Weekend Reviews

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Richard on: DVD Geek: Batman v Superman: The Dawn of Justice Ultimate

estes1963 on: The DVD Wrapup: Drive Angry, Once Upon a Time in the West, Adua & Her Friends, A Clockwork Orange, Undertow, The Joke, Passion Play, Kaboom, Harvest ...

isa50 on: Wilmington on DVDs: Gladiator; Hell's Half Acre; The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

tamzap on: Wilmington on DVDs: The Magnificent Seven, Date Night, Little Women, Chicago and more …

Johanna Lynch on: Wilmington on DVDs: The File on Thelma Jordon; Adua and her Friends; Bullet to the Head

【14時までのご注文は即日発送】04-0017 03 48サイズ JILL STUART NEW YORK (ジルスチュアート ニュ on: Wilmington on DVDs: House of Wax (1953); After Earth; The Purge

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon