The A.V. Club - Film

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes 2012, Day 10: Cronenberg meets DeLillo, Matthew McConaughey's name is Mud, and our critic plays the jury

Sun, 27 May 2012 06:44:00 -0500

So it’s all over here at Cannes save for the awardin’. And actually even that has already begun: I’m just back from catching up with the winner of the top prize in the Directors’ Fortnight (which you’ll recall is technically a completely separate festival that takes place down the street). Given that I only saw a handful of the films, I can’t say whether Pablo Larraín’s NO was the right choice, but it’s hands down the funniest movie I’ve seen all year—not remotely what I expected, given that the director’s ...

Film: Great Job, Internet!: Behold, a Joker-only supercut from The Dark Knight

Fri, 25 May 2012 14:00:00 -0500

Rumor has it there’s a new Batman movie a-coming this summer. While that last Batman flick was pretty stunning all-around, the film’s greatest claim will always be Heath Ledger’s creepy, epic turn as The Joker, a role that won him a posthumous Oscar. But, as is often pointed out, Ledger actually had a small amount of screen time in a film that clocked in at two-and-a-half hours. In fact, you can squeeze it all into one 10-minute YouTube video, which someone has already done below. [via The Daily What]

DVD: Newswire: Amazon opens "Never Before On DVD" store, mostly collects stuff already available

Fri, 25 May 2012 13:45:00 -0500

The shift toward on-demand production of DVDs of unavailable titles in the past few years has been one of the most welcome moves in home entertainment, even if the number of titles available still lags. Now, Amazon has launched its own service, which combines many of the already available titles (from companies like Warner Brothers and Fox) in one place and adds a few that weren’t available before. To be sure, this is mostly just a place where the company can get all of the, say, Warner Archive titles in the same space, but having multiple titles from multiple ...

Film: Great Job, Internet!: Tim Burton caketrope is scarily delicious looking, wants to eat you

Fri, 25 May 2012 12:00:00 -0500

Alexandre Dubosc, a filmmaker who is apparently also not too shabby at making pastry, has put together a new, appropriately weird tribute to Tim Burton. Dubosc's caketrope—a zoetrope, but in cake form—celebrates the director's oeuvre, signature spooky style, and love of things like old trees and jack-o-lanterns. Being a filmmaker, Dubosc made a short film about the construction of the cake, though the slideshow of pictures on his site are potentially more illuminating about just how the entire thing came to be and, sadly, the fact that it's not actually an edible cake at all ...

Film: Newswire: Turns out John Waters was hitchhiking because he's writing a book about it

Fri, 25 May 2012 11:45:00 -0500

Earlier this month, Brooklyn band Here We Go Magic picked up John Waters hitchhiking somewhere in Ohio and the entire Internet freaked out. It seemed, well, magical, this idea that cult directors could just appear from nowhere on the side of the highway and ride with unsuspecting motorists and pop culture nerds for hours at a time. In the public's mind, John Waters was a rebel who did what he wants when he wanted to. Well, as it turns out, John Waters is out thumbing it on the open road because he's writing a book about the process ...

Film: Movie Review: Chernobyl Diaries

Fri, 25 May 2012 11:16:00 -0500

Horror films are often the first to comment on the mass-scale traumas of the real world, but those traumas are usually sublimated in metaphor, like George Romero’s zombies or the killing floor in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. There’s a good reason for this: Directly evoking an ongoing human tragedy—like, say, the 1986 Chernobyl disaster—for a few ghoulish scares might be in questionable taste. And yet here’s Chernobyl Diaries, scripted by Paranormal Activity creator Oren Peli, which posits that there are survivors in the abandoned city of Pripyat (woo-hoo!), but they’re deranged, cannibalistic mutants ...

Film: Movie Review: Virginia

Fri, 25 May 2012 11:15:00 -0500

While it might not rival the story of a small-town boy of uncertain parentage whose schizophrenic mother is involved in an S&M relationship with a married Mormon sheriff, Dustin Lance Black’s What’s Wrong With Virginia has a tangled history of its own. The film, his fourth feature as a director, was shown not long after Black won an Oscar for his Milk screenplay at the Toronto Film Festival, where it was savaged by some and forgotten by most. Taking his critics to heart, Black withdrew the film, recut it, and changed the title to boot, shortening it ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes 2012, Day Nine: The director of Precious drops another prestige stinkbomb and an unfilmable novel gets filmed

Fri, 25 May 2012 10:41:00 -0500

No film festival is complete without an unmitigated disaster, and Cannes 2012 finally served one up yesterday morning in the form of Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy,the most repugnant and inept movie to be inexplicably treated like high art since…whaddaya know, since Precious (Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire), the last film directed by Lee Daniels. Combining the lurid grotesquerie of exploitation quickies with the patronizing self-seriousness of middlebrow prestige dramas, Daniels has created a genre of his own that I can only term “degradebait”; judging from the rave reviews and multiple Oscars doled out to Precious, that ...

Film: Great Job, Internet!: Top voice actors give new life to Star Wars at script reading

Thu, 24 May 2012 17:10:00 -0500

It’s been a while since we’ve posted anything Star Wars-related here, but this seems awesome enough to warrant mentioning. At the Emerald City Comic Con (that’d be Seattle) in March, a host of entertainment’s best voice actors gathered for a special in-character script-reading of Star Wars Episode IV. And by “in-character,” we mean in the voice of each actor’s most popular voice-over character. So you have Billy West playing Dr. Zoidberg as Luke Skywalker (at the 29:16 mark). See? Fun times. The whole cast was Billy West, Tara Strong, Maurice LaMarche, John DiMaggio ...

Film: Newswire: Billionaire gives world the In The Army Now sequel no one wanted

Thu, 24 May 2012 15:30:00 -0500

Remember In The Army Now, the hit comedy of 1994 that had audiences rolling in aisles, gasping for air between fits of laughter, and racking up hundreds of millions of dollars in box office returns? No, because none of the preceding sentence is true except for the fact that In The Army Now did, indeed, come out in 1994. (To put things in perspective, its nearly $29 million gross was only good enough to make it the third-highest grossing Pauly Shore movie.) But that’s not stopping billionaire Alki David, the CEO behind FilmOn.TV, from funding a sequel starring ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes 2012, Day Eight: The director of Silent Light drops a bold curiosity and Bernardo Bertolucci makes his first movie in nearly a decade.

Thu, 24 May 2012 12:42:00 -0500

Well, the honeymoon was bound to end eventually. And I kinda suspected that the big disappointment might turn out to be my most anticipated film of the festival: Post tenebras lux,Carlos Reygadas’ follow-up to the sublime Silent Light (which won a Jury Prize here in 2007). Reygadas has never been afraid to go for the grandiose, opening him up to charges of pretension; I found his first two features, Japón and Battle in Heaven, painfully self-conscious in their determination to provoke, but Silent Light seemed like a giant leap forward into—as much as I hate this word ...

Film: Newswire: The director of Martha Marcy May Marlene wants to turn The Exorcist into TV series that will make your head spin

Thu, 24 May 2012 12:21:00 -0500

With Game Of Thrones currently thriving on HBO, the idea of turning novels into serialized TV shows—not movies, not miniseries, but full-on, take-all-the-time-you-need series—has become more attractive, and given creators the opportunity to tell big stories without abridgment. According to Vulture, gifted Martha Marcy May Marlene writer-director Sean Durkin is proposing a 10-episode series based on William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, the source of William Friedkin’s 1973 horror classic. Given all that extra time, Durkin plans to spend more time on the build-up and the aftermath to the eponymous event, and the deep psychic scars that ...

Film: Gateways To Geekery: There’s more to Russ Meyer’s films than breasts, though those are pretty important

Thu, 24 May 2012 12:00:00 -0500

Pop culture can be as forbidding as it is inviting, particularly in areas that invite geeky obsession: The more devotion a genre or series or subculture inspires, the easier it is for the uninitiated to feel like they’re on the outside looking in. But geeks aren’t born; they’re made. And sometimes it only takes the right starting point to bring newbies into various intimidatingly vast obsessions. Gateways To Geekery is our regular attempt to help those who want to be enthralled, but aren’t sure where to start. Want advice? Suggest future Gateways To Geekery topics by ...

Film: Interview: Men In Black 3 director Barry Sonnenfeld on creating character and managing 3-D

Thu, 24 May 2012 10:00:00 -0500

Barry Sonnenfeld began his career as the cinematographer of choice for style-conscious directors like the Coen brothers and Danny DeVito, and has continued to work in broad strokes while directing his own blockbuster comedy hits, such as The Addams Family, Get Shorty, and Men In Black. After a decadelong hiatus, the Men In Black franchise is back, with Sonnenfeld at the helm. In the film, the titular government alien-fighters deal with a temporal anomaly that sees Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) erased, forcing Agent J (Will Smith) to head back to the ’60s and work the case with a younger ...

Film: Movie Review: Men In Black 3

Thu, 24 May 2012 00:04:00 -0500

Sequels to fish-out-of-water comedies make progressively less sense the longer a series continues. By the time Crocodile Dundee In Los Angeles rolled around in 2001, 15 years after the first Crocodile Dundee became a surprise blockbuster, the title character had been given an awfully long time to grow acclimated to those kooky Americans. Men In Black 3 finagles its way out of this predicament by literally resetting the clock with a time-travel premise that makes Will Smith both a contemporary intergalactic cop in the late 1960s and a stranger to Josh Brolin, who plays the younger version of Smith’s ...

Film: Movie Review: Oslo, August 31st

Thu, 24 May 2012 00:03:00 -0500

When the audience first meets Anders Danielsen Lie in Joachim Trier’s perceptive second feature, Oslo, August 31st, he’s on the other side of a heroin rehabilitation program, having earned enough trust to leave a state facility for a day and start establishing a new life on the outside. As a 34-year-old of means and literary talent, his prospects are better than many people’s, but thoughts of suicide are nonetheless not far from his mind. The problem for Lie isn’t necessarily the potential for relapse, though he admits to craving heroin after 10 months of sobriety. The ...

Film: Movie Review: The Intouchables

Thu, 24 May 2012 00:02:00 -0500

Detractors of, say, Wong Kar-wai sometimes theorize that his movies’ swooning, romantic dialogue only plays well to Western audiences because it’s delivered via subtitles; if not for the diluting effect of onscreen text, we might choke on its sweetness. The same goes for The Intouchables, a thick tranche of honey-glazed ham in which an unemployed African immigrant (Omar Sy) plays caretaker to a cantankerous French quadriplegic (François Cluzet). Writer-directors Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache shamelessly lift huge chunks from formulaic Hollywood tales of mutual uplift—think Wheeling Miss Daisy—but it turns out even moldy leftovers go down ...

Film: Movie Review: John Huston’s Let There Be Light

Thu, 24 May 2012 00:01:00 -0500

Novelist, reporter, screenwriter, and critic James Agee spent much of the ’40s picking through the output of Hollywood studios, seizing on anything clever or mature, and championing any writer or director who seemed willing to sneak some art into the mass media. Agee was especially taken with the work done by Hollywood filmmakers on behalf of the U.S. government during World War II, seeing these clear-eyed, straightforward, passionate documentaries as an example of “what men of talent, skill, and courage can do if even one hand is untied from behind their backs.” But the government wasn’t always as ...

Film: The New Cult Canon: Vampire’s Kiss features one of Nicolas Cage’s best, most out-of-control performances

Thu, 24 May 2012 00:00:00 -0500

“You’re a very bright girl. That’s why I know today, by God, is the day you’re going to find that Heatherton contract.” —Nicolas Cage, Vampire’s Kiss A performance like Nicolas Cage’s gonzo turn in the brilliant 1989 black comedy Vampire’s Kiss—and this is true of many Nicolas Cage performances—raises the question of what good acting really means. Take accents, for example. As Peter Loew, a womanizing New York literary agent, Cage isn’t identified as British. But some kind of accent comes out of his mouth anyway, flickering in and out like ...

Film: Movie Review: Moonrise Kingdom

Thu, 24 May 2012 00:00:00 -0500

When Kara Hayward steals away for a romantic camping adventure with her endearingly awkward 12-year-old suitor (Jared Gilman), she brings along an impractical array of supplies, including a portable record player and a cachet of illustrated books with titles like Shelly And The Secret Universe. Wes Anderson’s charming fantasy Moonrise Kingdom feels like an adaptation of one of those books, at least in the world it creates—cloistered, enchanted, and full of hand-drawn wonders, the sort of place that authors lay out in a detailed map before the first chapter. For seven features now, Anderson has created secret universes ...