On the third day of the Spooky Movie International Film Festival, showing at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland, I caught the home-invasion thriller Crush the Skull, directed (and cowritten) by Viet Nguyen. It’s a reasonably solid movie, with agreeable performances and some slick dialog, but it begins to fall apart about halfway…
Opening night at the Spooky Movie International Horror Film Festival, held annually in Silver Spring, Maryland, is always a treat. This year, the opener was The Final Girls, a thriller/comedy that subverts many horror-film conventions — indeed, the very notion of movies themselves. Teenager Max (Taissa Farmiga, “Anna”) happens to be the daughter of the…
Nancy Meyers’ The Intern is both about an intern and an intern in itself. Mainstream comedies often feature a young, driven individual whose commitment to his/her career affects his/her romantic or family relationships, but the sage advice of a smart minor character helps the protagonist see things more clearly and re-establish their priorities. That sub-plot…
Driving is an androgynous slob. Could be a woman, a man or a mime — she actually looks like Marcel Marceau without makeup. It’s raining, drizzling over her windshield, drops that produce a mud the wipers intermittently splatter onto her sight. When she arrives where she was going to, we watch her leaving her car,…
Like the infamous Roach Motel, once you check into Hotel Transylvania 2, you don’t check out. At least your brain doesn’t check back in until the concluding credits roll after its 90ish minute running time. Getting back together with former SNL writer (and creator of the often-hilarious cartoon parodies, “TV Funhouse”) Robert Smigel, Adam Sandler…
Making a movie that feels both realistic and satisfyingly entertaining is not an easy thing to do. In fact, the notion of producing a film that feels entirely true to life is almost antithetical to the cinematic framework. Life is often uncomfortable, random, ambiguous and inconsequential — traits that could understandably be seen as detriments…
In fiction as in life the secret lies in believing too much while knowing too little. This lack of self-awareness, which often translates in a very low awareness of one’s own environment, can be a blessing in such difficult times as the ones we live in. Naiveté is the closest we can get to innocence,…
