Monthly Archives: March, 2012
The Hunger Games: How a Real Film Emerged from the Deadly Arena of Young-Adult Movie Franchises
If we must have long, over-hyped film-franchise adaptations of annoyingly popular young-adult fantasy/sci-fi books (and it appears we must), then The Hunger Games from director Gary Ross and his co-writers trilogy author Suzanne Collins and Billy Ray (Shattered Glass, State of Play) have figured out the way to do them. Some flaws aside (see below), [...]
John Carter of Disney
Watching Disney’s cinematic red-planet boondoggle, I suffered a semi-serious film-critic/fan-boy crisis. Every time I tried to write about the film last week, my efforts derailed quickly into a frothing Inside Baseball rant about budgets and marketing and Industry Schadenfreude instead of the film itself. So does my lack of heartfelt interest in the relentlessly hyped [...]
21 Jump Street Cuts Class, Gets Laughs
Despite my earnest appreciation of Johnny Depp, I don’t think I’ve seen a single episode of the original 21 Jump Street TV series, so from a cheap nostalgia standpoint I’m not the target audience for its remake 21 years later. In recent years, however, I’ve been a strong and vocal supporter of the children’s animated [...]
Interview: Being Flynn‘s Writer-director Paul Weitz
At one point in our interview, writer-director Paul Weitz described his directorial career as “a checkerboard.” A game of Twister might be a more apt metaphor. Weitz and his brother Chris hit it big in 1999 when they co-wrote and directed the original American Pie. They went on to also co-direct the Chris Rock vehicle [...]
W.E. Unhappy Few
You’ll be hard pressed to find a funnier line in a film this year than “Directed by Madonna.” Technically W.E. is not Madonna’s directorial debut—in 2008 she helmed Filth and Wisdom, a “comedy/drama/musical/romance” about a cross-dressing Ukrainian dominatrix with rock-n-roll dreams that made it to ten theaters in the United States. I was unaware of [...]
The Lorax: Notes from a Seuss-icide
As you can imagine in this day and age of CGI singing Chipmunks and picnic-basket-stealing bears, there are myriad ways a big, mainstream, animated film could screw up a Dr. Seuss story, including paving over the good doctor’s gently clever whimsy with Shrek-y pop-culture shtick, lame jokes, and slapstick; stripping away (or worse, over-playing) the [...]
Interview: Friends with Kids’ Writer-Director-Star Jennifer Westfeldt
Actress and writer Jennifer Westfeldt made her mark on the film scene in 2001 when she wrote and co-starred in the indie romantic comedy Kissing Jessica Stein about a young, straight woman who, frustrated by her dating opportunities with men, falls into a lesbian relationship. In her latest comedy, Friends with Kids, Westfeldt is once [...]
