AltWeeklies Wire
'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
Will Actor and Country Has-been Jeff Bridges Finally Snag the Elusive Oscar?new
Jeff Bridges is a physical presence who leads with his body in a way that often obscures the intelligence he lends his characters — a gallery of American manhood in all its compromised, destroyed or hopeful ambiguity.
L.A. Weekly |
Ella Taylor |
12-11-2009 |
Profiles & Interviews
Eastwood on the Pitch: At 79, Clint tackles Mandela in 'Invictus'new
It’s the 24th day of filming on Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, the 30th film he has directed in a career that now spans more than a half-century — and, as usual on an Eastwood set, if you didn’t know they were shooting a major Hollywood movie here, you’d be none the wiser.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
12-11-2009 |
Profiles & Interviews
'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
What's Wrong With Wes Anderson?new
A decade after Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, Generation Y's anointed auteur tries for a comeback with Fantastic Mr. Fox.
L.A. Weekly |
Joe Donnelly |
11-20-2009 |
Profiles & Interviews
Tags: Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson
'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
The Secret Lives of Queer Leading Mennew
How Howard Bragman, Hollywood's coming-out guru, helps gay actors tell the truth. Bragman's parents were "tolerant and accepting" when he came out in his 20s; Proposition 8 was "extremely painful"; gays and lesbians need to "call people on their shit."
L.A. Weekly |
Patrick Range McDonald |
10-09-2009 |
Movies
'Disgrace' Faces the Facts of Post-Apartheid South Africanew
This film adaptation of J.M. Coetzee's brilliant 1999 novel looks the chaos and hatred of postapartheid South Africa squarely in the face, probing the terrible fallout from white denial and pride without patronizing blacks by caricaturing them as noble victims.
L.A. Weekly |
Ella Taylor |
09-25-2009 |
Reviews
Audrey Tautou Flexes Her Acting Muscles as Fashion Icon Coco Chanelnew
Her new movie, Coco Before Chanel, is an elegant little black dress of a movie, simple but complex. At the center is Tautou as young Gabrielle Chanel, before the revolutionary menswear-inspired haute couture, before the fully articulated philosophy of pared down, practical luxury.
L.A. Weekly |
Gendy Alimurung |
09-25-2009 |
Profiles & Interviews
Michael Moore Sells the Same Old Shtick in 'Capitalism'new
I wish that more of the contradictions of late capitalism had made it into this scattershot, lazy slice of agitprop, which recycles Moore's usual slice-and-dice job on corporations, while bobbing a curtsey to the current crisis.
L.A. Weekly |
Ella Taylor |
09-24-2009 |
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
Chris Fuller on His Microbudget 'Loren Cass'new
An autodidact whose words tumble out in a slurry stream, Fuller carries himself with such intense conviction that, when he tells you Loren Cass is a project he's been working toward his entire life, you believe him.
L.A. Weekly |
Scott Foundas |
09-11-2009 |
Profiles & Interviews
Tags: Chris Fuller, Loren Cass
