Damsels in Distress is perhaps the most pretentious screenplay ever filmed. I imagine there was a more comprehensible first draft and then writer/director Whit Stillman (“The Last Days of Disco”) pulled the thesaurus off the shelf and went to work. These damsels come across more as ridiculous caricatures than actual flesh and blood characters; nobody…
With its budget said to have exceeded a whopping $200 million, James Cameron’s Titanic was the most expensive motion picture in history upon its 1997 release. During production, the cards were heavily stacked against the movie; it starred commercially unproven actors, the story was derided as a Romeo and Juliet rip-off, and the film ran…
All good things must come to an end. In the case of The Twilight Saga, even bad things end. It’s ending, for which the first, albeit short, theatrical trailer has been released by Summit Entertainment, comes in the form of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2. I’m not a fan of the series,…
An Arab sheikh with more money than sense wants to import the sport and/or lifestyle of salmon fishing from cold and rainy Scotland to the barren desert of Yemen. In the meantime, the British government is floundering from scandal to scandal and greedily seizes upon the idea of a cultural rapprochement between the West and…
The poet Rilke said, “There is only one journey. Going inside yourself. Here something blooms; from out of a silent crevice an unknowing weed emerges singing into existence.” The unknowing weed takes its time to sing but sing it does in director Anh Dung Tran’s film Norwegian Wood, his first since “Vertical Ray of the…
Well it is mid-February and already my hope is that This Means War is the worst movie I will sit through all year. It’s a waste of talent and utterly senseless . . . which would be fine if it happened to be funny as advertised. Instead, the screenwriters — Timothy Dowling and Simon Kinberg…
Although I got a review out of it (making the experience a humanitarian effort), I take great pride in knowing I’m one of the few men comfortable enough with my masculinity to see a movie like The Vow. If its premise — the “true (at least by Hollywood’s standards) story” of love and the lengths…
