Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg wrote Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle with the novel idea: What if you made a John Hughes movie, but instead of writing garishly caricatured bit players with names such as Long Duk Dong, you cast an Asian actor as the smart, handsome, upwardly…
Could have sworn I’ve seen this episode of Baby Mama before — like sometime in January 2007, when it was originally titled “The Baby Show” and aired on the other prime-time series starring Tina Fey, 30 Rock. (Waitaminute — you say Baby Mama is a movie and not a TV…
Earnest, sad, and righteous, they are not. More inspired by M*A*S*H or Dr. Strangelove than The Deer Hunter or Coming Home, a new pack of political films that defies the clichés of the post-9/11 Iraq War cinema has arrived. Notwithstanding a few holdovers of moral outrage (Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss, Nick…
Morgan Spurlock, the daredevil documentarian who lived on Big Macs for a month and turned this exercise in “body art” into the 2004 hit Super Size Me, returns — this time expanding his horizons rather than his girth. Paraphrasing the title of a venerable computer game, Where in the World…
During George W. Bush’s fourth term as president, the administration’s desire for crises and predisposition toward fuckups leads to the creation of a zombie virus that the government hopes will help replenish troops for its various overseas conflicts. Infected women become superstrong and maintain their intelligence, but the men remain…
Before either was famous, Judd Apatow and Adam Sandler were roommates in Los Angeles, where they both worked the stand-up circuit and awaited their big breaks. Those breaks would come: Sandler has been one of the most bankable performers in Hollywood for the past decade, while screenwriter/director/producer Apatow is singularly…
Jason Segel is responsible for two of the most cringe-inducing, hands-in-front-of-your-face moments in recent TV history, both of which occurred during the sole season of NBC’s Freaks and Geeks, on which Segel played bright-eyed burnout Nick Andopolis. On the episode “I’m with the Band,” Nick imagined himself an arena-size drummer…
Smart people got no reason to live — and, sure, that’s not quite how Randy Newman sang it, but the point still stands. Because in Noam Murro’s directorial bow — one of those Sundance premieres starring famous people slumming it in dingy Indieland — the smart people ain’t doing much…
For a movie built around questions of failed ethics and duplicitous behavior, Street Kings is just as dishonest as its characters. Though conceived as yet another sobering frontline report on law enforcement’s ever-expanding gray area, director David Ayer’s grim police thriller mostly plays as one long dick-measuring competition. You sense…
If you turn the first page of Scott Smith’s The Ruins, a friend said astutely, you won’t put it down — but if you know what it’s about beforehand, you won’t pick it up. So let’s just say that if this reworking never approximates the abandon-all-hope ferocity of Smith’s hair-whitening…
When Time recently featured George Clooney on its cover accompanied by the headline “The Last Movie Star” — note not even a question mark at the end — you didn’t have to read the article to know where it was coming from. After all, stars of the postpubescent variety are…
An unusually blunt melodrama by David Gordon Green, melodious poet of sentimental delicacies such as George Washington and All the Real Girls, Snow Angels introduces a pair of gunshots and then follows with a flashback narrative to account for them, cross-cutting between the emotional bludgeoning of two unhappy couples. Louise…
Mick Jagger’s most essential physical feature, according to Martin Scorsese, is his bellystache. On the poster for Shine a Light, the big-shot director’s Rolling Stones concert film, Sir Mick is frozen in midsong aerobics, his back arched, his half-shirt raised, that yawning navel and faint hairline more prominently showcased than…
Considering that the war in Iraq has proven to be Washington’s shot-by-shot remake of Vietnam, it’s only natural that Hollywood has followed suit, giving us a series of Iraq-themed films that can be set neatly alongside their Vietnam-era counterparts. Just as the initial wave of angry anti-Vietnam documentaries (In the…
Ben Mezrich’s 2002 best seller Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions was a smart narrative about … well, you saw the subtitle, right? Mezrich more or less recounted a fantastic tale spun by an old acquaintance from Boston, an MIT…
Film noir and melodrama cast a long shadow over Ira Sachs’s look back at the rotting heart of the Fifties nuclear family, but his movie rarely breaks a sweat. Slow, deliberate, and russet to a fault, this quietly controlled chamber piece, based on a 1959 murder mystery by British writer…
Rare is the star vehicle that is as poorly matched to its star as Drillbit Taylor, which casts Owen Wilson as a homeless Army deserter and con man, able to fool people into believing he’s both a substitute teacher and a master of hand-to-hand combat. It’s a part that requires…
Remember that scene in The Warriors where the Turnbull ACs chase the heroes in a pimped-out bus? Whoa! And remember that part in Escape from New York where Snake Plissken pulls the switcheroo on the commander-in-chief? Cool! How about that showdown in The Road Warrior with all the modified hot…
No Country for Old Men (Paramount) “A horror comedy chase” is how a grinning Tommy Lee Jones describes No Country for Old Men in the making-of — meanwhile, his fellow actors add to the list such adjectives as “a very primitive ride,” “a rabbit chase through Texas,” and “a very…
For the crime of obliterating high culture, for the crime of getting off on vicarious degradation — and, above all, for the crime of sitting through any movie that resembles the one he’s (re)made — Michael Haneke sentences you (me, us) to Funny Games. Scratch that: to a second fucking…
The English media has spent the better part of a year back-and-forthing over the true-or-false plot points of the 1971-set Bank Job, a movie about the plan to steal nudie pics of Princess Margaret from the bank vault in which they were stashed. More important, and about bloody time, The…
. . . And Justice for All: Special Edition (Sony) Appleseed Ex Machina (Warner Bros.) August Rush (Warner Bros.) Bee Movie (DreamWorks) Black Widow (Fox) Dan in Real Life (Buena Vista) Def Comedy Jam: D.L. Hughley (HBO) Fantastic Four: World’s Greatest Heroes Volume 3 (Fox) Hitman (Fox) Housewife, 49 (Acorn)…
