Posts for 'Old Movies' Category

Has Telluride done it again? As the film festival wrapped its 37th year in Colorado's San Juan mountains Monday, the prevailing wisdom was that the event had launched yet another serious Oscar contender in the British royalty drama "The King's Speech."

The film, which stars Colin Firth, Helena Bonham-Carter and Geoffrey Rush, had its world premiere as a sneak peek on Saturday morning, five days before its higher-profile screening at the Toronto Film Festival.

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Considering the risks Amelia Earhart took, losing her life in the call of aviation, Hilary Swank and director Mira Nair don't put much on the line in their film biography "Amelia."

Swank and Nair play it safe to the point of benumbing this woman's life, leaving Earhart as remote and muted as she is in the black-and-white photos and news footage of the aviator included at the film's end.

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"Watch out, Shaft! Black Dynamite's in town!" is what I would write if I did was not raised to honor and respect the private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks.

(And had a lack of respect for myself). Regardless, Black Dynamite proves itself a worthy successor to the blaxploitation classic, and wouldn't be out of place on a double bill, although, Dolemite is the more obvious comparison film. Black Dynamite  is also the hardest I've laughed during a movie all year. In the good ways, too!

Black Dynamite is both a cheeky parody and a loving homage to the blaxploitation films of yesteryear. From the poor production design, to the mistakes left in.

From gratuitous nudity to the big names used in just one scene, it all adds up to a movie that's in on the joke, but doesn't think it's better than what it's making fun of. It might not be able to sustain the joke the whole way through, but it's thoroughly entertaining enough in it's own right, and nowhere near as arch as it could be.

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Capsule reviews of films opening this week: "New York, I Love You"  The title is "New York, I Love You," and it's a collection of shorts intended as one big love letter to the city and all the romance it has to offer. The result is a curiously bland hodgepodge  not terribly evocative of such a famous place, and not all that inspiring in the connections it depicts.

Following 2007's "Paris Je T'Aime," this is the second in a planned series of "Cities of Love" films. Each features a group of eclectic directors and well-known actors coming together to concoct brief clips. Inherently with such a structure, you're going to have hits and misses. Not all the segments are going to work for every viewer.

But whereas "Paris Je T'Aime" had a healthy number of hits, "New York, I Love You" is the unfortunate opposite. The challenge presented to filmmakers was intriguing, too: Each of them had two days to shoot, then a week to edit. Each short had to take place in an identifiable New York neighborhood. And each had to involve some kind of love encounter.

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District 9, the original sci-fi doc-style drama by Neill Blomkamp, produced by Peter Jackson, has been building a strong following online ever since it first started to debut marketing material. The film takes place in Johannesburg, South Africa, where an alien ship arrived in the eighties loaded with over a million aimless and malnourished insect-like aliens whom humans label with the derogatory term “prawn.”

Surprisingly, District 9 is Neill Blomkamp’s first ever directorial role of a full-length feature film. Its star, Sharlto Copley is also making his acting debut, emphasizing how much faith Peter Jackson put in his chosen director and he was right to do so.

To me, District 9 was going to be the sleeper hit of the year and it easily looked like it was going to be one of my top films of the summer. I had high expectations going in, especially after being treated to a large chunk of footage at San Diego Comic-Con a few weeks back. I would say that it certainly met my high expectations and it’s something I want to see again to take it all in.

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Zooming in on DVD today is "Fast & Furious," the latest chapter in the popular series. Star ratings are by Seattle Times movie reviewers, freelancers or wire services Chow Yun-Fat goes for the laughs as Master Roshi, trainer to Goku (Justin Chatwin), the young protagonist who must gather seven magical dragonballs lest the world face apocalypse in James Wong's comic and video-game adaptation.

"Fast & Furious" (PG-13): Vin Diesel and Paul Walker of the original cast are back, this time joining forces to bring down a murderous drug dealer, in the fourth installment of the franchise, directed by Justin Lin and written by Chris Morgan (both behind the third film, "Tokyo Drift")."Miss March" (R): Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore — directors, writers and stars of this raunch comedy — play two mismatched pals who take a road trip to see the ex-girlfriend who became a Playboy playmate.

Another Paramount classic, given the lavish “Centennial Collection” treatment – Cary Grant at the height of his powers as the suave and debonair reformed jewel-thief, once known as “The Cat”, Alfred Hitchcock at the height of his own directorial powers, Grace Kelly in her last big-screen role as the willful heiress … and the French Riviera in all of it’s mid-century glory.

Tiny villages with weathered tile roofs cling to the mountain ridges, classical villas with formal gardens overlook the distant blue Mediterranean, and in the casinos and grand hotels of Nice and Cannes, the wealthy amuse themselves with gambling and displaying their wealth – including lavish jewels.

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It's not very often that I am able to take away a meaningful message from a Bollywood flick so I had to write about it. The movie in question is Laaga Chunari Mein Daag.

The story is an old chestnut overdone Bollywood-style. A family of four in a decaying mansion - the mother spinning the years away Arachne-like on the sewing machine, the idle father hoping the next lottery ticket will reverse the tide of his fortune and the two pretty daughter unequipped to seek a better future.

Desperate to help her struggling family, she goes to Bombay to find work and runs into a man who promises her a job in return for spending the night with him. She calls her mother defeated and ready to abandon her quest for employment. She is frightened by the proposition and wants to come home to Benares right away.

The mother's response to this SOS is tinged by her precarious circumstances, she does not rush to embrace her child and snatch her out of harm's way. In her daughter's most desperate hour she is not able to be her mother. The girl begins her new life as an escort. The mother is consumed by guilt even as the family benefits tremendously from the first-born's lucrative profession.

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JK Rowling is writing a brand new Harry Potter story – and it will be turned into a short movie.

The film will be shown at new theme park The Wizarding World Of Harry Potter in Orlando, Florida.

All the stars of the movies – including Daniel Radcliffe, 18, Emma Watson, 18, and Rupert Grint, 19 – will shoot scenes for the special film before they start making the final Potter instalment The Deathly Hallows.

‘They are working on extra sequences and clips which will be part of the rides,’ a source tells the Sunday Mirror.

‘JK Rowling has been involved in everything. She wrote the story.'

The theme park – an extension of Universal Studios – is due to open in 2010.

It will contain the village of Hogsmeade, the Forbidden Forest and Hogwarts Castle.

"The Happening" - Not much happens in fright specialist M. Night Shyamalan's latest. "The Sixth Sense" director effectively delivers his usual broody air of foreboding. And this fear-mongering story of an airborne toxin that causes victims to snuff themselves will induce seat-squirming as people shove hairpins into their throats or hurl themselves en masse off a high rise. The shock value wears off quickly, though, and Shyamalan strands us in a boring cautionary tale with an infantile eco-message about humanity needing to live in harmony with nature - or else. Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel play a couple racing through the countryside to keep ahead of some mysterious substance that induces suicide. The movie's vague, shame-on-us finger-pointing would have been tepid in the 1960s and 1970s, when Hollywood condemned our rapacious species with more fun and interesting future-shock flicks such as "Planet of the Apes" and "Silent Running." All Shyamalan comes up with is an intriguing impetus for a story that ultimately goes nowhere and says nothing. Two stars out of four.

David Germain, AP

"The Incredible Hulk "The fanboys will probably be happy with this incarnation of "The Incredible Hulk." At least we can say that much for it. And that's something we most assuredly could not say about Ang Lee's sombre, introspective and largely derided 2003 take on the beloved Marvel Comics hero. There's a lot more action this time around as you might expect from "Transporter" director Louis Leterrier - a deafening, endless amount by the colossal conclusion - as well as fond references both to the comic book series and to the television show it inspired starring Bill Bixby. (Leterrier even sneaks in some of Joseph Harnell's "Lonely Man" theme, or as Stewie on "Family Guy" refers to it,

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