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3 articles from 2008

5 June 2008 2:37 PM, PDT | From avclub.com | See recent The AV Club news

John C. Reilly long ago established himself as one of our best film actors. He's quickly emerging as one of our funniest actors as well, thanks to turns in Prairie Home Companion, Year Of The Dog, Talledega Nights, and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Reilly's evolution from theater-trained thespian to funnyman continues with a standout turn in The Promotion as a heartbreakingly fragile former biker/drug addict just barely hanging onto his hard-won happiness and sobriety in the face of fearsome professional competition with an archrival played by Seann William Scott. The directorial debut of screenwriter Steve Conrad (The Weather Man, Pursuit Of Happyness), The Promotion casts Scott as an ambitious, unsatisfied Chicagoland grocery-chain employee who seizes upon a potential opportunity to become the manager of a new store as a chance to finally kick his undistinguished career into high gear. His primary competition for the promotion is...

Nathan Rabin

4 June 2008 8:01 AM, PDT | From ifc.com | See recent IFC news

By Stephen Saito

When Steve Conrad's directorial debut went into production, it was originally called "Quebec," a reference to the hometown of the character played by John C. Reilly, a middle manager who competes with another middle manager (Seann William Scott) for the top job at their supermarket. It was a small detail, but more so than most, Conrad's films are about the accumulation of small details. Maybe that's the reason why in the few months since the oddball comedy, which is now called "The Promotion," premiered at the Sxsw Film Festival in March, it's been hailed as "a comedy that balances broad farce and actual humanity with wit, warmth, and weirdness" (Cinematical) and dismissed as something that should be "added to the Geneva Conventions' list of humanitarian abuses" (The Hollywood Reporter).

What's particularly odd about the extreme reactions to Conrad's film is that he explores a subject that's

Stephen Saito

2 June 2008 7:35 AM, PDT | From ifc.com | See recent IFC news

By Neil Pedley

Among this week's offerings: The pregnancy comedy goes pre-natal, the fate of all the jungle rests in the hands of the world's most lethargic endangered species, and Dario Argento has a new film, rendering the rest of this list mostly unnecessary.

"Dreams With Sharp Teeth"

Author Harlan Ellison is widely regarded as one of the finest writers of the 20th century. He is also, as this documentary readily highlights, abrasive, petulant, egotistical and prone to fits of belligerent rage. Collecting together more than two decades worth of footage and interviews, "Grizzly Man" producer Erik Nelson lifts the dust jacket off one of literature's genuinely larger than life characters and a man who has filed more lawsuits than the Aclu, proving that sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction, even Ellison's sci-fi tales.

Opens in New York.

"The Go-Getter"

On paper, it sounds like the dictionary definition of

Neil Pedley

3 articles from 2008