Florence Foster Jenkins singing voice was flat and off-key, yet her generosity to others, friendship with music greats such as Arturo Toscanini, and love of music brought happiness to many during the dark days of World War II. Labeled by some intemperate critics as “the worst singer in the world,” she is given something of…
“The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” was a television series that ran from 1964 to 1968. It was actually misnamed because it concerned TWO men — an American, Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn, Oscar-nominated for “The Young Philadelphians”) and a Soviet, Illya Kuryakin (David McCallum, “A Night to Remember”) — who worked for an espionage organization called “U.N.C.L.E.”…
Cloud Atlas is a challenge. It does not arrive as 99% of its film peers do, with a beginning, middle, and an end. Six different stories spanning over 500 years of time are woven together and make your mind work overtime not only keeping them apart, which is its job while you watch the film,…
The first full theatrical trailer for the Wachowskis’ (with Tom Tykwer) Cloud Atlas has arrived and as much as it dazzles it confuses. The story, adapted from a novel by David Mitchell, intertwines many story arcs that range from prehistoric times to millennia into the future all played by the same actors in differing (but…
There is certainly something to be said for the wonderful claymation and quirky British comedy of The Pirates! Band Of Misfits, the by-product of such other animated films as “Flushed Away,” “Chicken Run” and the “Wallace and Gromit” series. I have always appreciated this technique because it shows that the old-style way of making this…
Every year or so a claymation project gets greenlit, to, I suppose, offset the plethora of computer animated features clogging cineplexs nowadays. The feature for 2012 is The Pirates! Band of Misfits, a Sony Pictures Animation and Aardman production that borrows a story from Gideon Defoe’s The Pirates! book series. In this adventure, Pirate Captain…
Did You Hear About the Morgans?, the latest romantic comedy from director Marc Lawrence purports to be one of those cutesy, funny things happen when two people are put into foreign or uncomfortable positions kind of films. It succeeds in putting its stars Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker in stupid situations. It fails miserably,…
