AltWeeklies Wire
'It's Complicated': Nancy Meyers' New Movie is Really Annoyingnew
Does Nancy Meyers hate women? The thought ran through my head not very long into It’s Complicated, Meyers’ biennial stocking-stuffer about the romantic trials and tribulations of obscenely privileged and narcissistic Southern Californians.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
12-28-2009 |
Reviews
'Nine': Rob Marshall Tries to Connect the Dance Numbersnew
An assault on the senses from every conceivable direction—smash zooms, the earsplitting eruption of something like music, the spectacle of a creature called Kate Hudson—Nine thrashes about in search of “cinema” the way a child thrown into the deep end of a pool flails for a flotation device.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
12-18-2009 |
Reviews
'Avatar': On Top of a Distant Worldnew
As we sit in the darkened cinema (or, increasingly, in our living rooms), so much of what is clearly meant to dazzle us feels like a demonstration more than an application, an elaborate demo reel in search of meaning and purpose. James Cameron returns to bridge the gap.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
12-18-2009 |
Reviews
'Frog' of the South: Disney's Song and Dance About a Black Princess Croaksnew
Six decades after unleashing persistent NAACP bugaboo Song of the South, and two after firmly suppressing it, that peculiar cultural institution known as the Walt Disney Company has made a symbolic reparation by creating its first African-American princess -- and plunking her down in the middle of Jim Crow–era Louisiana!
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
11-30-2009 |
Reviews
'Precious': The Sad Education of Precious Jonesnew
Hothouse melodrama one moment, kitchen-sink (and frying-pan-to-the-head) realism the next, with eruptions of incongruous slapstick throughout, this may be Lee Daniels' stab at finding a cinematic analog for the novel's inventive, naïf-art language -- a film style, like Precious' writing, seemingly being made up as it goes along.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
11-09-2009 |
Reviews
Tags: Precious, Lee Daniels
Sebastian Silva Takes a Searing Look Inside the World of 'The Maid'new
Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but for the title character of the pitch-black Chilean comedy The Maid, it's closer to infernal torment.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
10-23-2009 |
Reviews
1960s Period Piece 'An Education' Gets Good Marks, as Does Star Carey Mulligannew
Danish director Lone Scherfig's movie is something of a deceptively packaged Oscar-season bonbon -- a seemingly benign, classily directed year-I-became-a-woman nostalgia trip that conceals a surprisingly tart, morally ambiguous center.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
10-09-2009 |
Reviews
'Crude' Dives into the Toxic Battle Between Big Oil and Dying Natives in Ecuadornew
Joe Berlinger's remarkable documentary recounts an infuriating litany of South American exploitation, backroom glad-handing and bureaucratic dead ends that has, among other collateral damages, created a Rhode Island-sized "death zone" of toxic pollution in the middle of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
09-18-2009 |
Reviews
It's a Battle of Thingamabob vs. Machine in '9'new
WALL-E would never get out alive in director Shane Acker's postapocalyptic hellscape.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
09-11-2009 |
Reviews
'District 9' Uses Alien Invasion as Apartheid Metaphornew
With its corrugated tin sheds and abject poverty, District 9 stands in for the township settlements where more than a million South African blacks still live without basic human services, two decades after the end of apartheid.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
08-14-2009 |
Reviews
Hayao Miyazaki Dives Under the Sea for His Latest Environmental Fairy Talenew
Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, by way of Jules Verne, Miyazaki's Ponyo sticks to Andersen's basic story of an enchanted sea creature and her love for a human -- except, in the Miyazaki version, the mermaid princess is an anthropomorphic goldfish, and her handsome prince is a 5-year-old schoolboy still in full possession of his baby teeth.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
08-14-2009 |
Reviews
Tags: Ponyo, Hayao Miyazaki
'Somers Town' Gets at the Heart of Working-Class Londonnew
Without ever trivializing his characters’ meager circumstances or resorting to the rags-to-riches fantasy of Slumdog Millionaire, Shane Meadows has made a lovely film about the ability of the imagination to offset the harshness of reality.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
08-10-2009 |
Reviews
That Old Black Potter Magic Continues to Beguile in 'Half-Blood Prince'new
Going a few shades blacker than 2007's already funereal Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, this penultimate Potterpicture includes the firebombing of a series regular's home, an episode of demonic possession that wouldn't look out of place in an Exorcist movie, and multiple attempts on the life of Harry himself. The greater threat, however, is those unseen forces that compete for the hearts and minds of impressionable boy wizards.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
07-17-2009 |
Reviews
'Away We Go' Is an Unaffecting Work of Staggering Vacuitynew
Not surprisingly, in Dave Eggers' first original screenplay, Away We Go, the characters never shut up.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
06-05-2009 |
Reviews
Freaks and Freaks: 'Frownland'new
Like a signal flare rising above the streets of L.A.'s Fairfax District, Frownland announces that underground cinema is alive and well.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
05-01-2009 |
Reviews
