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(10/29/07 4:54am)
The posters for "Dan in Real Life" show Steve Carell blithely squashing his face into a stack of pancakes. This is false advertising, a marketing department's attempt to pass off a sensitive family drama as another wacky Steve Carell comedy. The guy sitting next to me seemed genuinely disappointed that Carell's face never did make contact with any form of breakfast food. But I found the poster to be a pretty apt summary of the film's effect: "Dan in Real Life" offers something potentially delicious, then mashes itself into your face until you're covered in syrupy sweetness.
(10/22/07 3:16am)
Imagine a movie that stars Brad Pitt as the legendary outlaw Jesse James. Now take all the expectations you might have for such a film and turn them inside out. That's the best way I can think to describe "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford." The film contains no shootouts, no high-speed chases, no showdowns in dusty saloons -- nothing you might expect from a story about America's most notorious bandit. Instead, it offers nearly three hours of quiet, contemplative drama punctuated by seemingly endless shots of wheat fields and cloud formations. By turns fascinating and frustrating, "Assassination" isn't a very successful film, but it's one of the most interesting failures I've seen in a while.
(10/16/07 6:54am)
"2 Days in Paris," on the other hand, is an altogether different beast. It's the story of Jack (Adam Goldberg) and Marion (Julie Delpy), a pair of star-crossed lovers who have decided to end their romantic European vacation by spending two days in Marion's native Paris. Sounds really sweet, right? Except for the fact that the romantic European vacation was spoiled by Jack's chronic diarrhea. When he wasn't locked in the bathroom, Jack was prowling the streets of Venice obsessively photo-documenting everything in sight. As Marion notes, "Instead of kissing on the gondola, Jack took 48 pictures on the gondola."
(10/11/07 3:57am)
What would Jane Austen think of "The Jane Austen Book Club?" Ever the satirist of romantic pretensions, would she wrinkle her nose at the film's goofy sentimentality? Or would she take one look at the parade of adorably lovelorn characters and smile with affectionate solidarity? More likely, she would recognize the film as an elaborate form of flattery. Made by lovers of Jane Austen, "The Jane Austen Book Club" is as much an admiring tribute to the author as it is a delightful dramatization of her enduring fan base.
(10/03/07 5:00am)
And who better to bear these emotional scars than Tommy Lee Jones? The venerable actor has played his share of comedies, but his granite-hewn features seem most at home when employed in the expression of unspoken grief. Jones' stoicism reaches an apex of sorts in the form of Hank Deerfield, a gravel hauler and Vietnam veteran who receives a phone call one morning informing him that his son Mike (Jonathan Tucker) has gone AWOL upon arriving home from Iraq. With barely a word to his wife Joan (Susan Sarandon), Hank climbs into his pick-up truck and drives two days to Fort Rudd to investigate his son's whereabouts.
(09/27/07 6:04am)
There are some great moments in David Cronenberg's "Eastern Promises," but you have to wade through an awful lot of carnage to get to them.
(07/31/07 5:59am)
Now wait a moment, you say. If "Sunshine" is set a mere 50 years in the future, isn't the sun snuffing out a few billion years ahead of schedule? What a silly question. As IMDb.com helpfully explains, the sun "has been 'infected' with a 'Q-ball' -- a supersymmetric nucleus, left over from the Big Bang -- that is disrupting the normal matter."
(07/10/07 6:54am)
The rat's name is Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt), and aside from being the cutest rodent in the history of cinema, he is also an aspiring chef. This ambition proves problematic, since rats -- no matter how adorable -- tend not to be welcome in the restaurant business, McDonald's notwithstanding. Disenchanted by his family's culinary philistinism ("Shut up and eat your garbage!" his father bellows), Remy tries to sneak into a human kitchen one night to peruse the cookbooks, leading to a high-speed pursuit, a wild ride through the French sewer system and an eventual arrival in Paris. There, he finds his way to the restaurant of his idol, the renowned human chef Gusteau (Brad Garrett). Gusteau is recently deceased, but that doesn't stop his ghost from popping up now and again as a sort of spectral wingman to offer Remy encouragement and advice. When two of the main characters in a movie are a rat and a dead guy, you know it must be something special.
(05/07/07 5:54am)
In the film business, images like the one I've just described from "Superman Returns" are called "money shots." This seems an appropriate turn of phrase, as it is shots like these -- momentary spectacles of unabashed cinematic wizardry -- that convince thousands of moviegoers to part ways with their hard-earned cash each summer. To put it bluntly, $200 million worth of audiences didn't pay to see soap star Brandon Routh emote in tights; they paid to see him get shot in the face, catch airplanes out of the sky and do lots of other really badass stuff.
(04/23/07 12:20pm)
"You've been making us all look bad," the police chief kindly explains to Nicolas Angel (Simon Pegg), a young upstart on the London Police Force with an arrest rate 400 percent higher than any of his colleagues. Fearing usurpation, Nicolas's superiors have decided to relocate him to Sanford, an idyllic hamlet that boasts the lowest crime rate in all of England. Left with no choice, Nicolas packs up his suitcase, the remnants of his dignity and a gargantuan houseplant ("it's a Japanese peace lily!") and departs for the countryside.
(04/03/07 9:00am)
The film special begins on Friday at 7 p.m. with "Dreamgirls," the electrifying Motown musical that took the box office by storm last Christmas. Adapted from the Tony-winning stage play by acclaimed director Bill Condon ("Gods and Monsters"), "Dreamgirls" certainly hit theaters loaded with pedigree -- the cast included such classy actors as Jamie Foxx, Danny Glover and (ahem) Eddie Murphy, as well as luminous newcomer Jennifer Hudson. The film racked up eight Academy Award nominations, but a lot of eyebrows were raised over its exclusion from the Best Picture list. After all, wasn't "Dreamgirls" supposed to be the film to beat last year?
(03/28/07 9:00am)
This appalling premise is made only mildly more permissible by the fact that both the chain and the radiator belong to Samuel L. Jackson. Jackson plays Lazarus, a grizzled Southern bluesman who's become understandably unhinged after seeing his wife run off with his younger brother. Lazarus' marital concerns are soon forgotten, however, when he happens upon Rae (Ricci), a half-naked hussie lying unconscious in the middle of the road. Being a good Christian, Lazarus takes Rae into his home and nurses her back to health. Upon making some inquiries, however, he learns that Rae has a reputation of being what Austin Powers might tactfully call "the town bicycle." After thoughtful consideration, Lazarus draws the reasonable conclusion that God has chosen him to cure Rae of her promiscuous ways. So he chains her to his radiator, opens up his Bible, and the rest is history.
(02/09/07 11:00am)
It all started, as important moments in history often do, with a bottle of booze. In this case, the booze was champagne, given as a parting present to Budd Schulberg '36 from his father B. P. Schulberg, the former CEO of Paramount Pictures.
(02/08/07 11:00am)
God bless the Academy Awards. Just when you're ready to write them off as predictable panderers to public expectation, they go and drop a bombshell on you. On Jan. 23, that bombshell was dropped by another bombshell, namely Salma Hayek, when she and Academy President Sid Ganis announced to the nation that "Dreamgirls" had not been nominated for Best Picture.
(01/12/07 11:00am)
Former Democratic senator Mike Gravel spoke to a crowd of roughly 50 students Thursday in one of the earliest stops on his presidential campaign. The event, which took place in Hinman Forum at 6:30 p.m., was hosted by the College Democrats.
(01/04/07 11:00am)
If you took the Lord of the Rings trilogy, peppered it with liberal helpings of Narnia, Harry Potter and any number of other big fantasy epics, then turned the whole concoction upside down and shook it until every last spark of creativity came tumbling out, the result might look more than a little bit like "Eragon." In an age when the grandeur of fantasy films is limited only by the imaginations of their creators, here is a movie made without the scarcest hint of inspiration or originality. "Eragon" feels so derivative that to note that is also atrociously bad seems almost beside the point. It's worse than bad -- it's bland.
(11/01/06 11:00am)
My uncertainty was compounded by the unpleasant suspicion that the filmmakers shared this same confusion. "Flags of Our Fathers" starts with a single iconic image -- the raising of the American flag on Mount Suribachi at the battle of Iwo Jima -- and ends in a tangled knot of subplots and half-baked characters. It's not really a bad movie, per se; it's more like the scattered shards of six or seven good ones, reassembled into a whole that is far less than the sum of its parts.
(10/10/06 9:00am)
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that "The Departed" is not an Ozzy Osbourne biopic, but a gritty crime drama set on the mean streets of South Boston. Nicholson plays Frank Costello, an Irish mobster with a lust for power and a somewhat eccentric personality. The movie opens with Costello, understandably wary of law enforcement, embedding one of his most loyal henchmen into the ranks of the Massachusetts State Police to act as an undercover saboteur. The henchman is Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), a man whose intelligence and chiseled jawline allow him to rise with alarming speed to the highest ranks of the department.
(07/27/06 9:00am)
Jerry Goldstein Adv'00, who received a doctorate in physics from the College, will receive the Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union in December for his research on the structure and dynamics of the Earth's plasmasphere. Goldstein, a principle scientist at the Space Science and Engineering Division, is the thirteenth recipient of the award. Goldstein used satellite observations, numerical simulations and analytical theory to study the plasmasphere, the region of the inner magnetosphere that contains relatively cool and dense plasma. The award is given for significant contributions to the geophysical sciences by a young scientist and includes an appointment as a fellow of the AGU. Goldstein received a bachelor's degree in physics from Brooklyn College and is also a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
(07/27/06 9:00am)
The soggy titular sprite is discovered one night by Cleveland, who seems only mildly surprised to find a woman with gills splashing around in the pool. He seems unfazed when she introduces herself as "Story" and explains in a gentle monotone that she is a Narf who has traveled from her underwater home to save humanity. Or something like that -- most of Story's dialogue is comprised of such enigmatic riddles that I was never quite sure of what exactly her amphibious mission entailed. Luckily, Story turns out not to be much of a talker -- mostly she just stares quietly at Cleveland and wanders aimlessly around his apartment, occasionally proffering fortune-cookie lines like "All beings have a purpose" or "Nobody truly knows themselves."