Wilmington on Movies: Rio

Rio (Three Stars) U.S.: Carlos Saldanha, 2011 Rio is a big, coruscatingly colorful feature-cartoon love-letter to Rio de Janeiro from Brazilian director/writer Carlos Saldanha (director and co-director on the Ice Age movies), and it’s full of spectacular computer-cartoon images of Saldanha’s legendary city of samba, aswarm with funny animals acting wild and crazy in Carnival time….

Review – Game of Thrones

“Game of Thrones delivers a lot of male-first sex. Women are most often taken from behind or see with their heads bobbing just out of frame. Women, is seems, are objects for these men. (We also get many sexual varieties, loving and otherwise, as we travel through the series.) But like so many elements of this series, it goes to the next level. The women are not unaware of what’s going on in this piece. And the power of sex is discussed and manipulated smartly.

Violence is also a big part of this film. It doesn’t take long to run into the first chopped up bodies. And there will be blood…. lots of it. But it is all for a purpose. And it isn’t only creatively done, but it is connected to character in a real way. It never feels like someone came up with something cool that they wanted to see played out on screen. It all feels necessary.”

Wilmington on Movies: Scream 4

“I was glad they had some more adults in this one. In fact, that’s an idea: Why don’t they make the next one, Scream 5, with a lot of horny or fornicating, slaughtered adults instead of, you know, the usual horny or fornicating, slaughtered teenagers? Broaden the audience. Just an idea.”

The DVD Wrap: Country Strong, Harry Potter etc., White Material, Le Cercle Rouge, The Incredibles, Highwater, The Walking Dead Girls …

Country Strong: Blu-ray With the possible exception of her good friend, Madonna, it would be difficult to think of a more overexposed celebrity than Gwyneth Paltrow. The Kims, Chloes and GaGas of the world will continue to come and go, as long as the media pays attention to them. Madonna, Gwyneth and, even in death,…

WILMINGTON ON DVDS: Tangled, Fair Game, Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Casino Jack, Little Fockers, Skyline, Helena from the Wedding, Safe…Not Sorry

“Tangled — for all its jokes about its cutie-pie heroine’s multi-purpose hair (used variously in the movie as manacles, whip, lash, escape-rope, mop, blanket, hideaway and erotic come-on), is cleverly written and visualized, inventive, well-acted, and mercifully devoid of cute little bunnies, and tricksy little pixies.”

“If Dawn Treader doesn’t quite succeed, it’s not for want of effort and some talent, and even a determination to stir things up.”

“Little Fockers not only didn’t make me laugh. It didn’t even make me fantasize about laughing.”

Sidney Lumet Is Wrapped. A Big Hand For Sidney Lumet.

We all seem to remember him as a gentle man with an easy laugh and great professionalism, but to imagine him as a craftsman first is to disregard the giant, hairy, hangin’ balls this little Jew (5′ 6″) must have had. Jews weren’t welcome everywhere in the early 60s. Black celebrities were still being brought into clubs and hotels through the kitchen. But there Lumet was, living his life.

The Weekend Report: April 10, 2011

Audiences continued to Hop to it as the animated Easter eggs-travaganza topped weekend tickets sales with an eggs-timated $21.6 million. The film bounded well ahead of a quarter of new national releases that saw the remake of Arthur and the distaff thriller Hanna competing for the second slot with the former squeaking ahead by about 200k with a $12.5 million tally. The inspirational Soul Surfer bowed to $10.9 million and the tongue-in-cheek swashbuckler Your Highness swiped $9.5 million.

Review: Your Highness

NOT-SO-HIGH TIMES “Your Highness” is about as fun as a bag of schwag and an episode of Starz’s “Camelot” Pot can make any movie better. Don’t forget, though, that you actually have to smoke the pot to achieve these results. Just watching a bunch of scenes where characters smoke pot won’t do it. This is…

Wilmington on Movies: Arthur

After the sheer lousiness or mediocrity of so many Hollywood romantic comedies, it’s depressing to see the memory of a good old one go blotto, in the hands of a lot of talented people. Why did this happen? Where is there a romantic comedy touch today anything like Lubitsch’s? Or Wilder’s? Woody Allen some time again, maybe?

CinemaCon 2011: Who needs Home Premiere, when you can have hot dog sliders, gourmet licorice, ‘Puss and Boots’?

Even without the release of news about the launch of Home Premiere – Hollywood’s latest attempt to have its cake and nibble from everyone else’s plate, too – there was a portentous air surrounding last week’s inaugural CinemaCom convention. NATO members clearly enjoyed themselves during preview sessions and screenings, but the urge to count fingers…

A New Dawn At The Academy… But Don’t Expect A New Landscape

What will the hiring of Indie Spirit Queen Dawn Hudson mean to The Academy?

And more impactfully, what will it mean to Film Independent?

Wilmington on Movies: Hanna

“All the characters, in fact, have more fullness, personality and surprises than the action movie norm. They’re reminiscent at times of the more psychologically detailed or richly eccentric lead and secondary characters in an old style British thriller by Powell & Pressburger or Alfred Hitchcock, or a classy American or international thriller by John Huston or Orson Welles (or by the expatriate Hitch).

We haven’t had many literate thrillers lately (The “Bourne” movies excepted, of course), and it’s a non-guilty pleasure to see one here, to see filmmakers who are trying to please us on a multitude of levels and not just trying to smash us out of our seats and blow us out of the back of the theatre — filmmakers who want to give us, as they do here, explosive action, fairytale romance and grim suspense, solid character and exciting adventure, good acting and writing, exotic locales and splashy technique, and both visual beauty and visual shock.”

Delivelution 4711: Is It “The End Of The World?” (Part 2 of 2)

“All of the studio executives with whom I’ve discussed this issue indicate that their support is largely predicated on a belief that there is no good commercial reason for withholding a film from the home for a four-month period.” Ken Ziffren, show biz lawyer, The Hollywood Reporter No one can argue that in six weeks,…

Dallas IFF Dispatch: Murder Songs and Warlords

“After a long day of travel, I finally made it to Dallas this afternoon for a couple days at the Dallas International Film Festival, just in time to check into my hotel room (replete with round bed and zebra rug), change into something more appropriate for the warmer Dallas weather (the sun! my eyes!) and hit the ground running with a couple screenings.”

Review – Sucker Punch

“As the stabbings and physical attacks and gunfire and sexual threats piled up, all endlessly intercut with Browning trembling, moist lips and shots up her micro-skirt, I wondered whether the audience under 17 would be sophisticated enough to separate the mélange of adult-simple subtexts in play. With the Browning character “going someplace in her head” – really, for 90+% of the film – after being brought to the all-girls facility where “baby doll” was waiting for the “High Roller” who would take her virginity/give her a lobotomy… what would this say to a 14-year-old boy? Or girl, for that matter?”

The DVD Wrap: Fair Game, I Love You Phillip Morris, Chronicles of Narnia, The Next Three Day, Desert Son, Treme …

Fair Game: Blu-ray Here’s another feel-bad movie about being an American … just what we need, right now. It used to be easy for those on the right (as opposed to left) side of any political debate to blame Hollywood’s many commies, sodomites and Jewish studio executives – sometimes all three simultaneously — for distributing…

Wilmington DVD Picks of the Week: Black Swan, Raging Bull, The Complete Sherlock Holmes Collection, Farley Granger

“Like Red Shoes, Black Swan is a movie that seems to adore art and creativity. It also seems terrified of both, scared silly of the worlds they open up.”

“The violence and the brutality and the language (are) done in Raging Bull not just to shock us or give us ugly jolts or show us how streetwise these filmmakers can be, but to reveal to us with lacerating clarity what this world and its people are really like. ”

“Rathbone and Bruce, though: Nobody beats them, as a pure team.”

Wilmington On… Farley Granger (1925-2011)

There aren’t many major ‘40s-‘50s film noir actors left, but Farley Granger was one. Granger, who died at 85 on Sunday, March 27, was the darkly handsome, disturbingly sensitive-looking lead in four indisputable noir classics, Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night (1949), Anthony Mann’s Side Street (1950), and Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951)…

The DVD Geek: The Sweet Smell of Success

There are many outstanding Blu-rays in the marketplace, and not a few of them have been released by the Criterion Collection, but every once in a while you come across a Blu-ray that is even better than outstanding, one that has an extra sort of subliminal something that crystallizes its perfection of delivery and transports the viewer to the illusion of a genuine theatrical experience.

Delivelution 4411: Is It “The End Of The World?” (Part 1 of 2)

Every time the studios have decided to make a unilateral decision in their best interests, the industry has survived… even thrived. But there is a price paid, time after time.

Is a 60-day window for “Premium VOD” the straw to break the camel’s back? Or is it just another moment of change that will soon be forgotten?