Film

ENDLESS SUMMER Michael Tully, the writer and director of Ping Pong Summer, seems like a sweet guy, so I’ll try and be brief. Sitting through his movie, which attempts to both imitate and parody the 1980’s American coming-of-age formula film, feels like a punishment; imagine chewing soap or drinking castor oil for 90 minutes. With…

“I TOLD YOU SO” The drawling aristocratic lethargy of Gore Vidal’s public manner would have seemed cartoonish if not for the darting intelligence in his eyes and his words.   For all its craft – crown of the head tipped back, the long pointed nose elegantly spearing something in you, the indulgent but disapproving wag of…

THE ROAD TO HELL IS PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS Most good actors need some help to be excellent – Nicholas Cage comes to mind, Kevin Spacey, the young Mickey Rourke. And then there are those few who are mesmerizing no matter what they are doing. Jesse Eisenberg is one of these brilliant rarities, fascinating to…

YET ANOTHER STUDY OF SUBURBAN TEENS It’s difficult to make a successful first feature, even for one who comes from cinematic royalty, as Palo Alto demonstrates. Writer/director Gia Coppola’s film, based on a short story collection of the same name by James Franco (who also acts in the film), is by no means a disaster….

EMPTY CALORIES Chef concerns Carl, a successful L.A. chef who finds he must reinvent himself after a Twitter fight with an important critic goes viral. First, let me tell you what I like of the film written, directed and starring Jon Favreau. Number one: Jon Favreau. I fell in love with him as an actor…

MAKING IT IN MOROCCO Set in Tangier, writer/director Sean Gullette’s admirable debut feature Traitors follows Malika (Chaimae Ben Acha), a rebellious young woman from a struggling, working-class family, who is trying to get her all-female punk band off the ground. When a producer offers her a chance to cut a demo, provided she can pay…

DOES ANYONE FEEL A DRAFT? With two first-round picks in the 2012 NFL draft, the Cleveland Browns were favorites to trade up to the No. 2 overall pick and land the rights to Heisman Trophy winner Robert Griffin III. They were outbid by the Washington Redskins, whom Griffin would lead to the playoffs. The Browns…

GRAND Enough with the Wes Anderson-bashing. It’s as if, in having an imagination, Anderson has committed a crime. Can we just sweep words like “quirky” and “whimsy” under the bed? I’m thinking “dollhouse” could also burn to the ground or get tossed out the window like Jeff Goldblum’s unlucky cat in Anderson’s latest film. Are…

THE WRIGHT STUFF In this highly stylized adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi novel The Futurological Congress, Robin Wright stars as herself, but the scenario is different. She’s still the aging star of the classic films Princess Bride and Forrest Gump, but her career has taken a long, slow dump because of her frequent need to…

NOT MONUMENTAL In theory, George Clooney’s The Monuments Men tries to tell the story of the “greatest treasure hunt of all time” – the race by U.S. Army art curators to save European art gems from Nazi looting and destruction. In practice, it becomes a movie about old men in jeeps, asking for directions. The…

EXTERIOR. NOWHERE IN PARTICULAR. The 1980 William Friedkin movie Cruising sent Al Pacino undercover for the NYPD, threatened not by other cops as in Serpico but by the gay S&M scene.   The butch detective questions his own persona once he starts identifying with the “other,” providing the story’s real interest within a banal cops-and-robbers framework.  …

WHO’S HUSTLING WHOM? In American Hustle’s would-be signature moment, a con man shows a G-man a Rembrandt in a gallery. He explains that it’s really a fake. Who is the better artist, he asks, the original artist or the person who took the time and skill to fake it? Well, I would say the artist….

ROYAL SHAKESPEARE’S RICHARD II COMES TO WESTWOOD Brits had already heard about Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Richard II, directed by Gregory Doran and starring former Doctor Who star David Tennant, who is joined in the Company by Oliver Ford Davies as the Duke of York, Michael Pennington as John of Gaunt and Nigel Lindsay…

SLAVES TO HISTORY Among movies about race in America, how many great films have been made about slavery? We’ve seen pizza places going up in smoke for our sins (Do the Right Thing),  gentle drivers (Driving Miss Daisy), and sisterhoods of maids (The Help). Most of these films focus on the sixties or modern day occurrences….

DEATH OF AN ERA, BIRTH OF A GENRE Rob Kuhns’ Birth of the Living Dead is in part a making-of documentary, and a good one, about the revolutionary 1968 zombie picture Night of the Living Dead.   It’s also a sharp essay celebrating the original George Romero film in historical political context.   It only plays through…

FOUND AND LOST AGAIN Formula movies can make you feel that you’ve already seen them.   But György Pálfi’s latest film, which closed the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, is a love story so familiar that you have, in fact, sat through much of it before.   Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen is a feature-length collage of clips…

SPACE CADET Alfonso Cuaron’s space station disaster saga Gravity is an intellectually soft video game’”a SuperMario of space debris, and a disappointment as a space survival story. A great deal of praise is being heaped on the 3-D outer space experience, labeled as immersive and hypnotic. Comparisons are being drawn to the upside-down, gravity-free experience…