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12 articles
Film: Review:Sherlock Holmes
23 December 2009 10:04 AM, PST
“My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so,” Sherlock Holmes tells his sidekick Dr. Watson at the conclusion of Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Red-Headed League.” It’s one of Doyle’s periodic hints that his hero uses his brilliance to placate a tortured psyche. Doyle’s most famous character has an unparalleled genius for detection, but he’s also kind of a mess, a drug-abusing weirdo kept from turning into a total recluse only by Watson’s friendship and a steady parade of mysteries »
Film: Review:The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus
23 December 2009 10:03 AM, PST
Knowing the inside story of Terry Gilliam’s history of failed or flawed projects just makes his latest, The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus, all the more heartbreaking. Heath Ledger’s death during filming was yet another painful setback in a career full of them, but Gilliam worked around it, bringing in a plot device that lets Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law sub in for Ledger in a series of fantasy sequences. That gimmick works passably well, though in their CGI-heavy imagination-land scenes, all three actors seem hammy and flailing, with an understandable lack of connection to the character »
Film: Review:It’s Complicated
23 December 2009 10:02 AM, PST
With Something’s Gotta Give and the new It’s Complicated, writer-director Nancy Meyers has cornered the market on poorly titled dramedies about revitalized older women finding love after menopause. Both films are shrewdly and even cynically calculated to some extent, aggravated further by Meyers’ habit of backing away from thorny dramatic situations with broad, pandering stabs at crowd-pleasing humor. (It’s Complicated should really be It’s Far Less Complicated Than It Initially Appears To Be, but that wouldn’t solve her title problems.) But say this for Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin, and Steve Martin: They’re professionals, and »
Film: Review:Alvin And The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel
23 December 2009 10:01 AM, PST
Even before it hit theaters, the achingly essential follow-up to 2007’s surprise blockbuster Alvin & The Chipmunks blessed pop culture with an infectiously idiotic subtitle (The Squeakquel) destined to join “Electric Boogaloo” and “The Quickening” in the pantheon of sequel-based pop-culture punchlines. So perhaps it would be churlish to expect anything more from the movie. Sure enough, director Betty Thomas delivers pretty much the bare minimum: peppy, brightly colored, tune-filled nonsense sure to meet the low, low standards of its pre-kindergarten core audience. A film that promises to resolve all the nagging questions left at the end of Alvin And »
Film: Review:Police, Adjective
23 December 2009 10:00 AM, PST
In the famous last scene of The Untouchables, Eliot Ness, the straight-arrow federal agent tasked with hunting down Al Capone, is asked what he’ll do if Prohibition gets repealed. “I think I’ll have a drink,” he responds. Point being, Ness doesn’t complicate his job by questioning the letter of the law; whatever society dictates through its lawmakers, he’s duty-bound to carry out those rules. That rigid fidelity would make Ness the villain in Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective, a clever, exceedingly wonky procedural about a undercover cop (Dragos Bucur) who quietly refuses to do what he »
DVD: Review:DVDs In Brief: December 23, 2009
22 December 2009 10:00 PM, PST
With Avatar currently stampeding into theaters, the DVD release of the late-summer science-fiction/action sleeper District 9 (Sony) couldn’t be better timed; it serves as a superior example of the humans-as-the-real-enemy alien- invasion story, and illustrates how to slip political metaphors into escapist genre fare. It’s also nimbler and wittier, using a faux-documentary approach to track the contentious relationship between humans and the giant cricket-like creatures they intend to expel from a Johannesburg slum. In a fine lead turn, first-time actor Sharlto Copley plays the mid-level functionary tasked with serving up the eviction notices… The closest thing to »
DVD: Review:The Steve Coogan Collection
22 December 2009 10:00 PM, PST
Steve Coogan made his first real impression on U.S. audiences in the 2002 biopic 24 Hour Party People, playing real-life TV presenter and music mogul Tony Wilson, though few Americans realized at the time that this was just the latest in a string of Coogan performances that examined the quirks, insecurities, and arrogance of television personalities. The staggering 13-disc DVD box set The Steve Coogan Collection contains most of Coogan’s major BBC projects—from the decade-spanning Alan Partridge series to the short-lived The Tony Ferrino Phenomenon—and while the shows vary in style and quality, they all offer »
DVD: Review:Know Your Mushrooms
22 December 2009 10:00 PM, PST
Ron Mann’s Know Your Mushrooms initially appears to be an elaborate act of misdirection. Mann got psychedelic icons Flaming Lips to contribute new music to his film, and previously directed the stoner classic Grass and the Woody Harrelson-lectures-you-on-how-to-live monstrosity Go Further, so viewers can be excused for expecting a documentary about the more magical, psilocybin-happy side of the mushroom experience. Yet for its first half hour, Know Your Mushrooms seems to be exclusively about mushrooms of the non-hallucinogenic variety. It’s a giddy infomercial for the misunderstood fungi, which Mann posits as the most wondrous substance since hemp (which »
Books: Review:Ha Jin: A Good Fall
22 December 2009 8:38 AM, PST
Ha Jin’s latest short-story collection continues developing one of his favorite themes: the plight of Chinese immigrants in the United States. Even the children of immigrants, or those who immigrated long ago, still feel the chains tying them to the homeland, whether they parted with it peacefully or feel they escaped a cruel, unfair nation. Jin sets the tone in the six-page leadoff story, “The Bane Of The Internet,” where a young woman who immigrated to America finds that e-mail ties her too closely to home, and to a sister who makes increasing demands of her. It’s that »
Books: Review:Jasper Fforde: Shades Of Grey
22 December 2009 8:37 AM, PST
British author Jasper Fforde scored a comic hit with his first published novel, 2001’s The Eyre Affair, which introduced the detective Thursday Next. After five novels set in Next’s literature-mad world, chasing Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters in and out of their venerable stories, Fforde is starting a new series in a different alternate history, or perhaps future. Shades Of Grey introduces an England several centuries after a mysterious Epiphany that reorganizes society based on its citizens’ ability to perceive portions of the visible-light spectrum. As if building a color caste system weren’t enough »
Games: Review:Zombie Driver
20 December 2009 10:00 PM, PST
Certainly no one can accuse Zombie Driver of false advertisement: You drive around in a car and run over unending hordes of the walking dead. Problem is, that’s all you do. The story—as if anyone really needed an excuse or context to mow down zombies—is minimal and about as coherent as anyone would demand from such a title. After an unfortunate chemical outbreak, you emerge as seemingly the sole survivor in a city now rampant with discolored brain-eaters. And naturally, the military is counting on you and your wheels to rescue survivors and flatten zombies. Hey, if »
Games: Review:Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
20 December 2009 10:00 PM, PST
The biggest question about Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is why it has that name. It’s billed as a “re-imagining” of the first title in the groundbreaking psychological horror franchise, but that’s a bit generous—it revisits the premise of Harry Mason’s search for his missing child following a car crash, but otherwise, there’s little to recognize. Even the titular town, known for being alternately foggy and rusty, has been reconceptualized as a town of perpetual snow that ices over when things get scary. And things get wonderfully scary. Shattered Memories accomplishes a significant feat in making »
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