Some art-house programmer would be wise to schedule a double bill of The Aristocrats, Paul Provenza’s talkumentary about the dirtiest joke ever told, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, writer-director Judd Apatow’s near-brilliant movie about a grown-up geek who simply lost interest in trying to get laid. Both offer countless giddy variations…
Red Eye may not seem to be your typical Wes Craven movie. It’s not really horror, there are no marketable monsters, and unlike Cursed, Scream 3, and other recent Craven offerings, it’s actually an enjoyable time at the movies. But heroine Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) is very much in the…
2005 Biennial BLOW OUT. This is the third in a series of biennials presented at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In the past, participation in these biennials was limited to artists from around here; for the 2005 version, it’s been expanded to include artists working in most of the Western…
“I always cannot understand why girls don’t wanna be with me for a long time,” says Timothy Treadwell, subject of the documentary Grizzly Man. “I have really a nice personality — I’m fun, I’m very very good in the…umm, well, you’re not supposed to say that when you’re a guy,…
The old John Wayne-Dean Martin hayburner The Sons of Katie Elder wasn’t a very good movie the first time around — Dino and a cowboy hat go together about as well as Sinatra and bib overalls — and John Singleton’s jokey, urbanized rehash, while not bad, isn’t likely to snow…
Pity the daily newspaper critic who must review The Aristocrats without using such phrases as “A longshoreman’s arm up a little girl’s ass,” “Then my wife goes down on my son while the dog’s licking his balls,” “My grandmother’s covered in my cum,” and “Is it shit before piss, or…
The Aristocrats may be the foulest-mouthed movie of the summer, but Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo is the foulest in deed, actually depicting some of the nigh-unspeakable acts that are merely hypothetically talked about in the former film. It’s been a while since we’ve seen a big-time gross-out comedy, and European…
“The most daring rescue mission of our time is a story that has never been told,” boasts the poster for The Great Raid. The credits of the film, however, reveal that it’s based on not one, but two books about the 6th Ranger Battalion, which ventured 30 miles into enemy…
The Skeleton Key ranks high on the list of 2005’s funniest films, bested only by the first two-thirds of The Wedding Crashers, all of The Aristocrats, and that part in Stealth where the airplane starts sassing Josh Lucas. Doubtful that was the intention of director Iain Softley (K-PAX, an inexplicably…
The disturbing French filmmaker Francois Ozon (Swimming Pool, Under the Sand) has never won any friends in America among the Focus on the Family crowd. Long obsessed with the hazards and the hidden agendas of traditional marriage, Ozon has now launched a full-frontal assault on the whole notion of conjugal…
2005 Biennial BLOW OUT. This is the third in a series of biennials presented at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In the past, participation in these biennials was limited to artists from around here; for the 2005 version, it’s been expanded to include artists working in most of the Western…
The contentedly independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch has brought his restless energy to a series of surreal road movies that move nicely along on the strength of rare characters, quirky humor and a willing embrace of chance adventure. These quest stories for hipsters have transported Jarmusch’s fiercely loyal audience from New…
And so, once more, the googolplex emits the stink of the network rerun, this week offering yet another worthless big-screen take on small-screen detritus. While Hollywood wonders (cries, actually, over spilt spoiled milk) why audiences are staying away from theaters — offering theories that range from the absence of such…
Once you get past its negligible plot, scant dialogue and almost zero action, Gus Van Sant’s elliptical rendering of the final hours in the troubled life of a grunge musician is rarely boring. That may seem like a backhanded compliment, but, given the absence of such customary cinematic conventions as…
The zombie king, George Romero, has got to love Shaun of the Dead. In Edgar Wright’s witty 2004 sendup of the ghouls-on-the-loose genre, we meet a pair of North London layabouts who are a lot more concerned with scoring their next pint of bitter than with saving the world from…
2005 Biennial BLOW OUT. This is the third in a series of biennials presented at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In the past, participation in these biennials was limited to artists from around here; for the 2005 version, it’s been expanded to include artists working in most of the Western…
If the Navy is looking for splashy recruiting tools, it could do worse than Stealth, a zillion-dollar action movie stuffed with futuristic jet fighters, glamorous carrier pilots and an overload of explosive (mostly digital) derring-do. Here is Top Gun revised and updated, complete with a new array of enemies –…
Hit me,” Mark Zupan says — begs, actually, like a kid clamoring for a new toy. “I’ll hit you back.” He means it, too, and his ripped pecs and buzzed scalp and tattooed back and arms and bushy gangster goatee promise just as much menace. The dude’s bad and doesn’t…
Toward the end of Saraband, the uneven new film from legendary director Ingmar Bergman, a character sits down with his daughter, a taut girl who is obviously undergoing emotional distress. “I have the feeling that some sort of discussion is coming on,” he says. Indeed it is — as it…
Remember the scene in X2 where Wolverine grabs a Dr Pepper and enlists the aid of Iceman to make it cold? Take the tone of that scene and stretch it out to feature length, and you’ve got Sky High, a less angsty, more kid-friendly movie about teenagers attending a school…
Must Love Dogs, it should be clearly stated, is not the greatest romantic comedy ever made about a quirky couple who meet at a dog park. That honor goes to Dog Park, the oddball 1998 flick starring Luke Wilson and Natasha Henstridge, written and directed by former Kids in the…
The Flashback Wednesdays series at the Regency Tamarac Square is a movie nostalgiaphile’s delight, not least because the fare tends to go easy on the cerebral cortex while providing a maximum of entertainment value. That’s the appeal of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Amy Heckerling’s terrific 1982 feature about Southern…
