HollywoodandFine.com In the Will Ferrell era of “Saturday Night Live,” there was a running bit: “Celebrity Jeopardy,” which always seemed to feature Darrell Hammond as Sean Connery, making rude jokes about Ferrell’s Alex Trebek. In one of those episodes, Tobey Maguire portrayed a semi-comatose Keanu Reeves, who kept muttering, “I …
HollywoodandFine.com I heard a lot of critics sniff at the inclusion of Richard Curtis’ “About Time” in this year’s New York Film Festival. The same cadre, no doubt, uses Curtis’ “Love, Actually” as an example of what’s wrong with romantic comedy. I’d like to demur. I happen to think that …
HollywoodandFine.com Having squandered most of this century’s first decade being a movie star, Matthew McConaughey has approached its second stanza as an actor. The results have been salutary. In a year in which he’s already turned in stellar work in “Mud,” after last year’s “Magic Mike” and “Killer Joe,” here …
HollywoodandFine.com Back in the days when he was still funny, Jay Leno used to have a routine about why an appreciation for the Three Stooges was a uniquely male phenomenon. It was dead-on. To that list of gender-specific entertainment geared to men, I’d add the willingness to watch and laugh …
HollywoodandFine.com You could think of “Aftermath” as a Polish version of “12 Years a Slave”: a film that exhumes a shameful chapter in its nation’s history which some people would just as soon leave buried, rather than confront. Instead of slavery, however, “Aftermath” deals with Polish anti-semitism, as it was …
HollywoodandFine.com Pity the poor filmmaker who has to follow Alex Gibney in tackling any subject. Gibney, the Oscar-winning documentarian, has made a string of tough, incisive nonfiction films examining such topics as Enron, the Iraq war and beyond. His 2010 documentary about crooked Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, “Casino Jack and …
HollywoodandFine.com Oscar-winner Jonathan Demme has built a whole side business making films that most other filmmakers would be happy to have as a career: documentaries about music and musicians. Boswell to Neil Young through three films, Demme has also made a film about Robyn Hitchcock – and now Italy’s cult …
HollywoodandFine.com Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave” is the year’s most powerful film, an arthouse masterpiece which demands to be seen – and which will punch mainstream audiences in the gut. McQueen may be the most distinctive filmmaker to emerge since Quentin Tarantino. But while this film deals with similar …
HollywoodandFine.com Like bookends – or perhaps a double-feature for adrenaline junkies – “All Is Lost” comes on the heels of “Gravity” with the distaff and earthbound version of a similar story. But where Sandra Bullock barely stopped talking during “Gravity,” Robert Redford barely says a word in the course of …
HollywoodandFine.com Randy Moore’s “Escape from Tomorrow” may be the year’s most subversive film: a horrifying satire of the manufactured fun we’ve come to associate with the Disney assembly line. Make no mistake: I’m a huge fan of the shiny, witty entertainment which, for years, has been the Disney trademark. I …