It’s so funny: whenever there’s a new technology introduced, there’s always this fear it’s going to end entertainment as we know it. When records came around, they were going to be the end of live music. Nobody would ever want to go see live music again.
The director Steve McQueen has found a way to constantly include the element of surprise in his work, both as an artist and as a filmmaker.
One of the funniest things about Mr. Kaufman is that all of his filmed scripts – ‘Being John Malkovich,’ ‘Human Nature,’ ‘Adaptation’ and now ‘Sunshine’ – sound like titles from REM’s ‘Reckoning.’
Before he became ‘a working actor,’ as he now proudly calls himself, Jamie Dornan initially caught the public’s attention as a model – you may remember him from those greasy underwear ads with Eva Mendes, among many others.
We want to see ourselves – but differently. We want to see these dream versions of ourselves. We want to be surprised; we want to be entertained. I think primarily, especially in this country, we ask that movies entertain us, which seems to be something they’re less and less likely to do on a continual basis.
‘Boat Trip’ is more tiresome and dumb than actually bad.
The documentary ‘Certifiably Jonathan’ has engrossing moments in it. How can it not? It’s got a great subject – the extraordinarily voluble comedian Jonathan Winters, whose constant rush of words can be like a blizzard: beautiful, maddening, exhausting, and finally beautiful again. But it’s not a great film.
Real-life conduct aside, LaBeouf, a Los Angeles native, has been working steadily as an actor since he was 12 years old.
Music is a big part of the director’s life; Ms. Coppola’s previous feature, a screen adaptation of ‘The Virgin Suicides,’ was informed more substantially by the score by the group Air than by the narrative.
The picture is being promoted as Disney’s ‘Spirited Away,’ although seeing just 10 minutes of this English version of a hugely popular Japanese film will quickly disabuse any discerning viewer of the notion that it is a Disney creation.
Probably the worst thing that ever happened to the movies was the megahit.
You know what? As a black person, you see so much racism. Films are no different than the government, politics – it’s everywhere. It’s not exclusively film. It’s infuriating to see it in film. But my being in film changes things.
My first paying job in Los Angeles was taking tickets at the Bing under Ron Haver.
Like his countryman, Kiefer Sutherland, Seth Rogen has a voice that’s 10 years older than he is – a combination of world-weariness and exuberance, an instrument that he’s mastered for specific comic shadings.
I want to expand and not ignore the late 20th-century additions to filmed entertainment.
In the early ’60s, it was still a fairly subversive thing, though, to say that you should take a painting, cut it, set it on fire, step on it, hammer nails into it.
One of a handful of films made in Detroit, ‘8 Mile’ doesn’t feature the Motown renaissance that Mayor Coleman A. Young dreamed of in the 1970s. Instead, it’s the beaten-down city: 8 Mile refers to the line of demarcation between Detroit and suburban, mostly white Oakland County.
‘Va Savoir’ is a lovable comedy about love that looks upon life as drama and uses the world of the theater as a staging device.
I dress well. I travel; I seem to be relatively glamorous for a film guy – which, to me, is like being the fastest midget in the circus.
It’s true that as Mr. Chan makes more American movies – and gets older – we will never again see the kind of fistfight choreography that the star would devote four months to shoot.
In ‘Requiem for a Dream,’ the director Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.’s lower-depths novel, Jared Leto has lost so much weight, he looks like another person altogether.
Some people bring their work home with them. You might suppose that Sid Mashburn is one of those guys – the man was born with a name so brand-ready he basically had to become an entrepreneur.
The battle scenes in ‘Gladiator’ don’t have the exultant lift of Hong Kong period-action pictures like the ‘Once Upon a Time in China’ series, where the fights have the eye-popping panache of dance sequences from a musical.
Miramax seems to be showing the same faith in Roberto Benigni’s ‘Pinocchio’ that the Republican Party showed in Trent Lott; the live-action version of Carlo Collodi’s fairy tale about the wooden puppet whose only ambition was to be a real live boy was sneaked into theaters Christmas Day.
‘Eight-Legged Freaks’ runs out of gas scarily fast – its one-joke premise lends itself more to a short than a feature.
We do want to be diverted and be interested and be provoked by popular culture – by art, if we’re lucky. And it’s amazing how often people have lost sight of this.
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