Movies

Review: ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—Part 1′

November 22, 2010
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Review: ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—Part 1′

The Harry Potter saga nears its completion with the premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—Part 1, this past weekend. The film drew huge audiences worldwide, as expected. It took in approximately $125 million in the United States in its first weekend, and a monumental $330 million worldwide. That’s the biggest opening weekend for a Harry Potter film so far, and audiences will probably continue to flock to Deathly Hallows Pt 1, having invested much time and money in the series thus far. I suspect, however, that the film will engender a certain amount of disappointment. The producers have chosen to forgo almost entirely the more lighthearted, charming elements of the series—the humor, the styles and technologies of bygone eras, the amusing byplay among the central characters—in favor of a more contemporary look that emphasizes the darker, more sinister aspects of the story. These latter have been in the ascendant throughout the film version of the saga, as the presentations have become somewhat darker in tone with each installment. And that was all to the good, as the seriousness helped audiences identify with the characters and their plight in spite of the fanciful nature of the premise. Unfortunately, I

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Weekend Movie Box Office Record Set

November 9, 2010
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Led by Megamind, Due Date, and For Colored Girls,, U.S. movie theaters set a box office sales record for the first weekend of November. Story here.

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Mitch Albom’s Stupak Stupor

November 9, 2010
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Jimmy Stewart

Stupak was swayed by the adoration of his voters and the promise by the president made in the national spotlight, was subsequently spanked by the public and couldn't muster the fortitude to run for another term.

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‘USA Today’ Holiday Movie Update

November 6, 2010
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Will Hollywood rebound from a poor box-office autumn? You decide: holiday-season movie preview here.

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A Spooky Treat — George Pal’s ‘War of the Worlds’

October 28, 2010
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A Spooky Treat — George Pal’s ‘War of the Worlds’

by Mike Gray The first film version (Paramount, 1953, 85 mins.) of H. G. Wells’s 1898 novel is still a favorite, and goes well with Halloween. What’s noteworthy is how it falls more into the category of “horror film” rather than pure science fiction, which is how most people regard it. Of course, it’s not one of those “gross out” movies that depend too much on blood and gore; along with The Thing (From Another World) from a couple of years previous, War of the Worlds manages to terrify viewers without making them want to regurgitate. What’s even more charming (no doubt some would use the word “disgusting”) is how producer George Pal subverts Wells’s Social Darwinism by introducing overtly positive religious undertones; the author of Things to Come would probably have been appalled. The nearly hysterical voice of the narrator (the superb Paul Frees) sets the scene and the tone of the film from the outset, and the movie maintains that breathless pace all the way up until the finale: In the First World War, and for the first time in the history of man, nations combined to fight against nations using the crude weapons of those days. The

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“Secretariat,” Nostalgia for Baby Boomers

October 24, 2010
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“Secretariat,” Nostalgia for Baby Boomers

As soon as I learned Disney was putting out a movie about the greatest horse of all time I knew I had to see it.  But it wasn’t so much about the horse as much as it was about the time. It’s hard to imagine in 2010 a race horse having rock star status in America, but it was a different time. Horse racing was still a major sport, and in the era of Watergate, hippies, and Vietnam the American people were looking for something to believe in. This was before the VCR, before cable, before the internet; a time when American culture wasn’t fragmented in a million different directions. And who could not be moved by what might be once in forever greatness. Although I don’t remember the specific moments when Secretariat raced, like I remembered Nixon announcing his resignation, Robert Kennedy’s assassination, or the first landing on the moon, I vividly remember the phenomenon of Secretariat. This freak of nature swept up an entire country in his pursuit of immortality. Nostalgia is a powerful and interesting phenomenon we tend to indulge in as we get older, and it is something I used to disparage when I was young.

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‘Exorcist’ Blu-Ray Released

October 6, 2010
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“What I was really trying to do was not to make a horror film but make a film that mostly dealt with some of the brutal mysteries of life and the power and mystery of faith.”—William Friedkin on The Exorcist, released on blu-ray today. More info here.

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Fincher Makes the Uninteresting Interesting in ‘The Social Network’

October 5, 2010
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Fincher Makes the Uninteresting Interesting in ‘The Social Network’

By Aleks Karnick Film director David Fincher seems intent on becoming the master of making the uninteresting interesting. His latest effort, The Social Network, exemplifies that: it’s a movie about corporate law. I’m not kidding. Much of the film is told through depositions for two separate court cases Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) faced. In the first, Zuckerberg was accused of intellectual property theft by two 6’ 5” Olympic rowers (and twins), Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. In the second, he was accused of ripping off his initial investor, Eduardo Saverin. Intellectual property law and corporate squabbles typically affect me like a double dose of Nyquil. And yet The Social Network had me fully engaged. As with Zodiac, a terrific 2007 thriller also directed by Fincher, The Social Network is a semi-factual fictional film involving material which initially struck me as not inherently cinematic.  Zodiac deals with the story of the infamous Zodiac killer, but it does so by telling the story of the investigators and reporters who attempted to identify the killer, whose identity still remains unresolved. In both of these films, Fincher creates realistic and convincing characters thrust into a difficult situation of both strategic and moral complexity.

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Heroes and Villains of School Reform Wars Skillfully Depicted in ‘Waiting for Superman’ Documentary

October 1, 2010
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Heroes and Villains of School Reform Wars Skillfully Depicted in ‘Waiting for Superman’ Documentary

By Aleks Karnick Documentaries, by their nature, are directed. Much like in a fiction narrative film, a documentary is not an unfiltered view of reality; it is  a collection of images and sounds constructed by the director and editor to produce a work that will elicit a specific response in the viewer. The difference is that a documentary uses facts and (hopefully) true information to elicit this response—even if this response is rather vague, as in understanding and respecting nature in March of the Penguins. Davis Guggenheim, director of Waiting for Superman, clearly understands this concept. In his new film as in his previous effort, An Inconvenient Truth, Guggenheim uses facts and information to elicit an emotional response on a complex issue. He succeeds magnificently. Waiting for Superman weaves several stories into a classic tale of heroes, villains, and those poor souls trapped in the middle—and, frighteningly, it’s all true. As in An Inconvenient Truth, Guggenheim spends much of the film presenting statistics that support his main contention: business as usual in the nation’s public school systems has poisoned public education and is breeding a generation of people without the necessary skills and information to thrive in the rapidly specializing

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Tony Curtis Defined the Limits of the Hustler Persona

September 30, 2010
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Tony Curtis Defined the Limits of the Hustler Persona

The late Tony Curtis, who died yesterday at the age of 85, was once one of the most popular and celebrated actors in Hollywood. Unfortunately, the same things that made him a star drove his career into the doldrums in his later years. Curtis had some acting talent, but his popularity and box office appeal were really based on his rather prissy handsomeness, a quality that elevated several other actors to stardom at the same time: Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Paul Newman, Rock Hudson, Warren Beatty, etc. Curtis gave some appealing performances and conveyed a good deal of personal charm on-screen. Once his looks faded, as they must for all, he could not find a persona that would work for him as a middle-aged and then an elderly man. The hustling scammer type was a good character for him in his early years, and it made his career, but he wanted to play the hero. It was not to be. Curtis just didn’t have the seriousness and evident strength of character that are required to make audiences like a person as an antihero (as, for example, Marlon Brando, Clint Eastwood, and Dennis Hopper did). There was a certain slightness to

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Hollywood Bought Your Novel—Now What?

September 24, 2010
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Hollywood Bought Your Novel—Now What?

You’ve spent hour after hour, day after day, week after week fashioning your contribution to the literary world. Deep down inside you not only hope it will wow book reviewers, but that Hollywood will also come knocking, seeking to translate your words into images. Then, one day, lightning is captured in a bottle and your book is optioned for a movie. What happens next? Novelist T. M. Wright’s experiences when his well-received novel A Manhattan Ghost Story was optioned for film shed some light on that question. In an interview with Apex Book Company, Wright describes what happened after Hollywood bought the rights to his book: Apex: A Manhattan Ghost Story is probably one of your best known novels, and has been in and out of development as a movie for years, where does that stand now? And can you talk a bit about the history of it being optioned? T.M. Wright: The novel, first published in 1984 by TOR Books, was optioned by Robert Lawrence Productions, through my agent at the time, Howard Morhaim, in 1991. That option was exercised by Lawrence in 1993, and the film was scheduled to begin production that year through Carolco Pictures (same studio

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Affleck’s ‘Town’ Does Well in Opening Weekend

September 20, 2010
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Affleck’s ‘Town’ Does Well in Opening Weekend

As Hollywood has known since the 1960s, heist films, also known as caper movies, are generally a good box office draw, and this week’s strong opening performance by The Town confirms that truism. The Ben Affleck-directed film about Boston bank robbers finished first in U.S. movie box office receipts over the weekend with a decent $23.8 million, about 50 percent more than industry analysts had expected. That’s a very decent performance for a film with no big stars in its cast and a cost of $32 million. The film received very good reviews—93 percent positive, according to RottenTomatoes.com. Affleck is proving himself a capable director, after Gone, Baby, Gone and this film. Takers, another heist movie, topped the movie box office three weeks ago, without the benefit of positive reviews (but audiences disagreed, rating it twice as positively as critics). Other new releases were the positively reviewed romantic comedy Easy A, which came in second with $18.2 million, and Devil, which finished third with $12.6 million despite having the box-office poison of M. Night Shyamalan attached to it as the film’s producer. The animated film Alpha and Omega stumbled out of the gate, finishing fifth with $9.2 million. Hampered by

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Confessions of an Atheist Darwin-Doubter

Secularization and Christian Institutions

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Government is Force!: Why individual rights demand limited government and constitutional democracy

A New Dark Age

Media Works To Suppress Obama 'Born in Kenya' Bio

"Freedom's Forge" tells the story of how U.S. business leaders were mobilized to build ships, tanks and weapons faster and better than the enemy, to win World War II

How to Enjoy Going to the Movies Again

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