It’s not for nothing that 1959’s Plan 9 From Outer Space is often hailed as “the worst movie ever made.” Directed — if that’s the right word — by the famously delusional shlockmeister Ed Wood, it’s a hilarious bit of nonsense about space aliens who think they can conquer Earth…
The Armory Group. In a summer art calendar that’s uncharacteristically filled with significant exhibitions, /i>The Armory Group: 40 Years has got to be one of the most important of them all. The story begins back in 1966 in Boulder — specifically, in the fine-arts department at the University of Colorado…
V for Vendetta (Warner Bros.) Illustrator David Lloyd calls this adaptation of the comic he made with writer Alan Moore “very good” — so why did Moore beg to have his name removed? The intentions are noble, sure; name another big-studio blockbuster in which a government manufactures fear to keep…
For 35 years, Woody Allen was a long shot to stray into the Bronx or Staten Island — much less the alien reaches of London, England. The creator of Manhattan has always been joined to his chosen borough like pastrami on rye, so when he ventured abroad last year to…
Michael Mann’s Miami Vice is like a car that’s been stripped of everything but its two bucket seats and rebuilt from the ground up. The protagonists are still a pair of detectives named Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), and a cover of Phil Collins’s “In the…
The Ant Bully is based upon a very short children’s book by John Nickle, who wrote and illustrated the 1999 work all by his lonesome after years of providing illustrations for the Wall Street Journal and Sports Illustrated, not to mention other works of kiddie lit. The book, as most…
From the moment a naive college student discovers a severed human ear in a suburban parking lot, David Lynch’s classic Blue Velvet perversely begins to alter our perceptions about the true qualities of American life. Even twenty years later, Lynch’s overdoses of murder, depravity and kinky sex retain the power…
The Armory Group. In a summer art calendar that’s uncharacteristically filled with significant exhibitions, The Armory Group: 40 Years has got to be one of the most important of them all. The story begins back in 1966 in Boulder — specifically, in the fine-arts department at the University of Colorado…
Feed (TLA) Remember the old jokes about “What’s grosser than gross”? The makers of Feed do, as they prove in the first 10 minutes — one-upping their opening scene featuring a voluntary victim of cannibalism by bringing in a guy who gets nekkid and shoves cheeseburgers down the throat of…
Two weeks ago, a colleague insisted that Superman Returns isn’t the remake of the 1978 original, as I wrote, but a reinterpretation — its melancholic flip side. Where the Christopher Reeve model was pop art and a cool breeze, the Brandon Routh version is heavy and solemn, weighed down by…
It would be a mighty sweet thing to see M. Night Shyamalan as the great redemptive storyteller he clearly thinks he is — or as he portrays himself in those American Express commercials. Genuine yarn-spinning, even as a doomed ambition, is virtually extinct in American movies; what had been the…
Originally, Ward Serrill set out to make a documentary — and a short one, at that — about Bill Resler, an avuncular tax professor at the University of Washington who thought he knew enough about basketball to coach the girls’ team at Roosevelt High School in Seattle. Never mind that…
In the latest extravaganza from executive producers Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, millions of dollars and long hours in the digital animation studios have produced…a photorealistic, computer-animated, generic American suburb! Location costs must be getting pretty damn expensive nowadays. As Monster House begins, we follow a leaf slowly descending on…
Tour pros and frustrated duffers alike love Harold Ramis’s classic 1980 golf comedy Caddyshack — thanks in large part to inspired turns by the late Rodney Dangerfield as a foul-mouthed, wisecracking plutocrat, and Chevy Chase as a playboy hacker who doesn’t bother keeping score on fairway or green. Set at…
The Armory Group. In a summer art calendar that’s uncharacteristically filled with significant exhibitions, The Armory Group: 40 Years has got to be one of the most important. The story begins back in 1966 in Boulder — specifically, in the fine-arts department at the University of Colorado. The title of…
Edison Force (Sony) Gritty cop stuff must write itself — just make sure everyone’s tough, corrupt, and talking like they stole Mickey Spillane’s thesaurus. Then cast Justin Timberlake. Screech! Employing the talented (at music) popster as a crusading journalist isn’t this lame flick’s worst flaw — merely the one you’ll…
Slipped into the summer movie season like acid into your happy meal, Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly is a blockbuster of counter-programming. No matter that the dude from The Matrix is its star — or would be, if he weren’t half hidden under a thick swath of digital paint. Linklater’s…
Owen Wilson has moved up in the world: He’s gone from crashing weddings to crashing entire marriages. In the listless farce You, Me and Dupree, his eponymous ne’er-do-well, having lost his job and been evicted from his apartment after taking time off to be the best man at the Hawaiian…
Perhaps no one can pinpoint the exact moment vaudeville died, but there’s a moment early in Strangers With Candy where you’d swear you had just witnessed the death of visual comedy. En route to her first day of high school, a tarty middle-aged jailbird — this is not a Disney…
Balanced Dissolution. Chuck Parson, one of the region’s top sculptors, is an artist whose work you’d expect to see in a fall slot, but his solo, Balanced Dissolution, is on right now at Artyard. Parson does non-objective metal sculptures with deep roots in conceptual art and constructivism. He’s chiefly interested…
Grand Prix (Warner Bros.) John Frankenheimer, as underrated as he was brilliant, made a racing picture in 1966 that’s yet to be topped forty years later. James Garner suffered through the director’s churlish demands (which Frankenheimer reveals and owns up to, in archival footage on one of the documentaries here)…
The fact that 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was such a hit had much to do with viewers’ pre-launch expectations, which were approximately none. Who could have been blamed for thinking a Gore Verbinski-directed, Jerry Bruckheimer-produced movie based on a theme-park ride would proffer…
