HollywoodandFine.com REYKJAVIK, Iceland – Mayor Jon Gnarr Kristinsson – better known as comedian Jon Gnarr – relaxes in a rocking chair in a comfy sitting chamber, just off the conference room that’s part of his suite of offices in Reykjavik City Hall. It’s a cold morning – windy, snowy (“Our …
HollywoodandFine.com David Mackenzie’s “Perfect Sense” is an end-of-the-world romance in which the world disappears incrementally. Being involved in this velvet apocalypse is a little like being the Cheshire cat, unable to control which part of you will disappear next. Like Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion” and Fernando Meirelles’ “Blindness,” Mackenzie’s cataclysm comes …
HollywoodandFine.com She’s a nonagenarian who, when dressed in black, looks a little like a bobble-head with a pipe-cleaner body. But, at the age of 91, entertainer Carol Channing has amazing energy and a rare spirit for life. As filmmaker Dori Berinstein shows in “Carol Channing: Larger than Life,” Channing is …
HollywoodandFine.com I have a hard time getting scared by horror films that deal in the supernatural. But a horror film such as “The Grey” has an easier time sinking its teeth into me. I’m too pragmatic to worry about the paranormal, I guess – but trapped in the Arctic wilderness, …
HollywoodandFine.com It’s been interesting to hear George Lucas complaining about the lack of attention being paid to the black-themed film from his production company, “Red Tails.” The conventional wisdom is that Lucas himself had to put his money and his influence behind the movie to get it made and released …
HollywoodandFine.com Dreams not only die hard – they’re trampled to death and then mocked, in Gerardo Naranjo’s nonstop nightmare, “Miss Bala.” The Mexican film, inexplicably left off the short list for the foreign-language feature Oscar, is a high-speed action tale, told through the eyes of a helpless victim of that …
HollywoodandFine.com I don’t know whether Gina Carano has a future as an actress but she certainly kicks ass in Steven Soderbergh’s “Haywire,” a jet-propelled action-thriller that has little time for wasted motion. Working from a script by Lem Dobbs, who also wrote “The Limey,” Soderbergh has made an intense and …
HollywoodandFine.com Peter Facinelli looks a little like the young Tom Cruise: same slightly rabbity smile that radiates a sense of both supreme confidence and gnawing insecurity. Facinelli has a wider face with more prominent cheekbones but he has the same athletic physicality and a looseness that Cruise has lost. Forget …
HollywoodandFine.com In terms of creating moments that capture the excitement a live musical performance can arouse, Todd Graff knows his stuff. He showed it in 2003’s underrated “Camp,” in 2009’s disposable “Bandslam” – and he does it again in “Joyful Noise,” a movie with big, rousing soul-gospel songs that take …
HollywoodandFine.com I’ve always loved animation – make that, good animation – and feel lucky that my kids were the perfect age when Disney had its second golden age of animation in the late 1980s and early 1990s. My son was 4 when I took him to see 1991’s “Beauty and …