HollywoodandFine.com Elaine Stritch is one of those pop-culture figures who you either know too much about or have never heard of. A star of the Broadway stage for 70 years, she landed in New York at 18, took the town by storm and never looked back. She has a looong …
HollywoodandFine.com Here’s everything you need to know about what’s wrong with the movie industry today: This week, three remakes of movies that didn’t need remakes – or weren’t very good in the first place – will open on thousands of screens: “Robocop,” “Endless Love” and “About Last Night.” Having seen …
HollywoodandFine.com Akiva Goldsman’s track record is a spotty one, chockablock with commercially successful films full of formulaic writing and manipulatively sentimentalized emotion. Or just plain hogwash: “Batman & Robin,” anyone? Sure, he won an Oscar for Ron Howard’s “A Beautiful Mind,” as middlebrow a choice as you could get in …
HollywoodandFine.com Having been mentioned as an Oscar contender for 2013, George Clooney’s “The Monuments Men” was abruptly bumped from awards season to this week because, according to the press release, Clooney needed more time to finish it. So its release was moved to February, a month whose releases are seldom …
HollywoodandFine.com I’ll admit that, during moments in “The Lego Movie,” my mouth was hanging open at the audacity and imagination of the images I was seeing. I also found myself laughing a lot more than I thought I would. Written and directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who did …
HollywoodandFine.com Penn and Teller’s “Tim’s Vermeer” is like a cinematic magic trick, one that unveils itself over the course of roughly 90 minutes – and encompasses the years it took Tim Jenison to work the illusion. Except it’s not an illusion. Jenison is an inventor who made his fortune creating …
HollywoodandFine.com Adam Rodgers’ “At Middleton” is that rarity: a romantic comedy that manages to surprise by subverting the formula and coming up with something fresh. Rodgers and cowriter Glenn German create two pairs of opposites, then mix and match them in a story about parents taking their children to tour …
HollywoodandFine.com Almost from the moment the economy collapsed during the 2008 presidential campaign, there has been a war to control the narrative of what led to the disaster – nearly a catastrophe – that almost brought down the nation’s (and the world’s) economy. One of the earliest was Charles Ferguson’s …
HollywoodandFine.com “Labor Day” is one of those movies that either gets you to buy in and play along, or loses you at a crucial moment, earning only your mockery for the rest of its running time. I understand that urge to mock – and yet I’m not mocking: Jason’ Reitman’s …
HollywoodandFine.com Godfrey Reggio makes the kind of movies I think Terrence Malick longs to make. While Malick has already rejected story and plot, as well as dialogue, character development and, occasionally, even characters, he’s never made a film where he ignored all of these things completely. And that’s all that …