The A.V. Club - Film

Film: Great Job, Internet!: Get Involved, Internet: Help complete an Andrei Tarkovsky documentary based on his diaries

Tue, 21 May 2013 20:00:00 -0500

Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky created some of most visually arresting films of his generation—Solaris, Andrei Rublev, Stalker, The Mirror—in a brief career cut short by lung cancer. But despite influencing contemporaries like Akira Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman, not to mention countless others since then—three of his films made the Top 50 in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll—there has never been a comprehensive English-language documentary on the director until now. PJ Letofsky’s project Time Within Time uses Tarkovsky’s own diaries as its basis, as well as interviews with Tarkovsky’s surviving collaborators and family members ...

Film: Watch This: Thunder Road is one of the first, and finest, automotive action movies off the Hollywood lot

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:00:00 -0500

Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: Fast & Furious 6 inspires us to look back on other vehicular action movies. Thunder Road (1958) Thunder Road stars Robert Mitchum as a moonrunner, one of the “wild and reckless men who transport illegal whiskey from its source to its point of distribution.” Night after night, he loads up the trunk of his 1950 Ford with moonshine and goes racing down the twisty roads of rural Kentucky. On the rare occasions that the Feds manage to catch up with him, he shrugs ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes 2013, Day Six: Michael Douglas plays Liberace in Steven Soderbergh’s swan song, Behind The Candelabra

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:28:00 -0500

Sometimes I forget that prizes are handed out at the end of this festival. It’s always difficult to guess what a given year’s jury will find worthy, especially when it comes to the acting awards—Cannes strongly encourages a share-the-wealth approach, so often Best Actor or Actress will really be a compromise decision regarding a movie that didn’t have enough support to win something bigger. (For the lowdown on how this works, seek out William Goldman’s invaluable book Hype & Glory.) I hadn’t thought about Actor candidates until this morning, and now that I look back ...

Film: Newswire: Dan Aykroyd offers scientific explanation for threatening the Ghostbusters universe with another sequel

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:45:00 -0500

It’s been months since we last heard Dan Aykroyd discuss details for Ghostbusters 3, then ignored those details in favor of doing literally anything else, such as accepting that the past is the past and growing as people. Yet Aykroyd is still out there nattering into the void, this time in the form of Larry King—Aykroyd’s repeated insistence that the sequel is happening (despite any official word from Sony or anyone else that might be involved) finally being met with the serious journalistic inquiry it deserves. “It's based on new research that's being done in ...

Film: Newswire: Seth MacFarlane is officially too busy to host the Oscars and then take a lot of criticism for it again, thanks

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:52:00 -0500

It turns out that when Seth MacFarlane preemptively refused to host the Oscars again, he wasn’t just whistling “Dixie” (“Dixie” being the name of a girl whose boobs he saw). “Traumatized critics exhale: I'm unable to do the Oscars again,” MacFarlane tweeted today, officially putting to rest the rampant speculation that he would return, despite his already denying this three months ago. However, this time MacFarlane says he’s bowing out after “trying to make it work schedule-wise,” and realizing the job would conflict with all the not-getting-blamed-for-furthering-the-ugly-culture-of-misogyny he had earmarked for that week. Still, MacFarlane remains upbeat ...

Film: Watch This: Walter Hill’s The Driver is all about work done well

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:00:00 -0500

Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: Fast & Furious 6 inspires us to look back on other vehicular action movies. The Driver (1978) Stripped to its barest neo-noir essentials, The Driver is all fatalistic cool, stoic professionalism, and tire-screeching auto mayhem—a genre vehicle that, like its eponymous Driver (Ryan O’Neal), is defined by its expertly modulated action. Walter Hill’s 1978 film is a work of quiet attitude and breakneck road rage, paying homage to Robert Bresson and Jean-Pierre Melville (in particular, Le Samouraï). Its portrait of ...

Film: Scenic Routes: A quiet scene from The Matrix demonstrates how to make exposition compelling

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:00:00 -0500

In Scenic Routes, Mike D’Angelo looks at key movie scenes, explaining how they work and what they mean. Here’s a shameful confession: I enjoy exposition. Let me qualify that right away, though. Bad exposition, in which characters tell other characters things they already know for the benefit of the audience, is uniquely painful. That’s one of the reasons I’ve never been able to embrace, for example, Brian De Palma’s Mission To Mars, which kicks off with frustrated astronaut Gary Sinise being briefed on the trajectory of his entire life so far. (My favorite such line ...

Film: Why Do I Own This?: A pint glass nicked from Forks, Washington, a.k.a. “Twilight, U.S.A.”

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:00:00 -0500

Why Do I Own This? is a column exploring the weirder pop-culture flotsam and jetsam that washes up in the lives of A.V. Club writers, the impulses that drive us to acquire such things, and the motives for clinging to them long after their ephemeral eras pass. What is it? A pint glass from Pacific Pizza, a small restaurant on the main drag in Forks, Washington, the little town on the Olympic Peninsula where Twilight was ostensibly set. While the glass itself is fairly straightforward in its depiction of an “Italian” chef, the notation that the restaurant is located ...

Film: Contest: Chicago, see Before Midnight early and for free

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:00:00 -0500

Before Sunrise and Before Sunset remain two of Richard Linklater's most affecting films, and after nine years he's revisiting Ethan Hawke's Jesse and Julie Delpy's Celine in Before Midnight. The film sees Jesse and Celine in their forties, looking back on their past, examining their present, and speculating about what their futures may hold. Before Midnight opens in Chicago on May 31, but we have passes to an advanced screening on Wednesday, May 29 at the Landmark Century. To be entered to win follow this link and you could win passes to this advanced screening of ...

Film: Cannes Film Festival: Cannes 2013, Day Five : Takashi Miike schlocks it up, in a good way

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:37:00 -0500

Monday is traditionally the day at Cannes when people start making qualified assessments of the year’s overall strength or weakness—usually finding it wanting compared to previous years that were themselves considered hugely disappointing at the time. It’s all a bit silly, as we’re only at roughly the midpoint, with plenty of potential riches ahead; at this time last year, Holy Motors, the runaway favorite of much of the press corps, hadn’t yet screened. Still, I confess to feeling a bit discouraged that there’s been no U.F.O. so far, by which I mean ...

Film: Newswire: Weekend Box Office: Star Trek into slightly less profitable darkness

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:13:00 -0500

Fans flocked to Star Trek Into Darkness this weekend, determined to outrace the energy ribbon of spoilers rolling through the universe and ruining the surprise that Benedict Cumberbatch plays late Sinatra lyricist Sammy Cahn. (“You’ve got high hopes, Captain. High, apple-pie-in-the-sky hopes,” a wrathful Cahn growled before several million moviegoers this weekend, then fired his apple-pie torpedoes.) And yet, even though J.J. Abrams’ sequel has already brought in $84.1 million since it opened last Wednesday—easily topping the box office—its performance is still considered a relative disappointment, given that its predecessor managed $86.7 million in ...

Film: AVQ&A: Tell us about your pop-culture weekend: May 17-19

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 -0500

We’ve expanded the definition of AVQ&A—our weekly thought-starter—by asking you (and us) a simple question each week: What pop culture did you consume this weekend, and what did you think of it? If you have suggestions for AVQ&A questions, big or small, you can e-mail them to us here.

Music: Newswire: We bid farewell to The Office and met HIMYM's mother this week on The A.V. Club

Fri, 17 May 2013 17:40:00 -0500

What’s new this week? Our coverage of the Cannes Film Festival began on Thursday and will be running regularly for the next week. Enjoy reading about movies you won’t be able to see for another six to 12 months. Don’t Miss In Inventory, we looked at the various series that HBO Go is currently omitting from its service and celebrities we couldn’t believe wrote novels. Each one is perplexing but for very different, yet equally frustrating reasons. Our New Girl walkthrough with the series' showrunners came to an end, offering insights on the past season’s ...

Film: Newswire: There's already been a jewel heist and a gun scare at this year's Cannes

Fri, 17 May 2013 17:11:00 -0500

Suggesting a lavish gathering of wealthy celebrities amid a non-stop media circus might be attractive to thieves and malcontents, this year’s Cannes film festival has already had two major security incidents. First, yesterday’s screening of Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring was accompanied by the theft of around $1 million in Chopard jewelry—a heist that might have made for a clever tie-in publicity stunt, were it not an actual burglary that involved ripping the safe from the wall of a hotel room occupied by a Chopard employee, who was hosting a Cannes gala elsewhere at the time ...

Film: Newswire: Spike Lee directing a movie about a 1990s gold prospector

Fri, 17 May 2013 14:23:00 -0500

After unearthing and polishing up that precious Oldboy resource that was just lying there, Spike Lee will next cash in with Gold, following in the footsteps of so many of today’s savviest investors who have mailed in their broken and unwanted jewelry to become millionaires. The project, originally attached to director Michael Mann, hails from Friday Night Lights writer-producers Patrick Massett and John Zinman, and was once described as a modern-day Treasure Of The Sierra Madre-style adventure. Now it’s being more accurately described as based on the 1993 Bre-X Mineral Corporation mining scandal, and The Wrap says ...

Film: Great Job, Internet!: Caption Contest: Star Trek Into Darkness goes through the looking glass

Fri, 17 May 2013 14:00:00 -0500

In the interest of science, creativity, and the science of creativity, we're posting a film or TV still every week, and we're going to ask you to come up with a clever caption. Whoever's caption gets the most likes will win some kind of nonsense prize from The A.V. Club office, most likely a Simpsons toy of some sort. The winner of the last contest, featuring a still from The Great Gatsby, was Arthur Edens And His Bread, who offered the inside-jokey "What?! Rabin, Tasha, Koski, AND Noel?!" Well played, Arthur. Make sure you post your ...

Film: Newswire: David O. Russell and Leonardo DiCaprio get hip to the "assassinating JFK" trend that's so hot right now

Fri, 17 May 2013 13:37:00 -0500

Proving that the retro-‘60s fad still has some legs, assassinating John F. Kennedy is suddenly all the rage again, as more and more of today’s filmmakers get hip to the far-out sound of a nation’s innocence dying. As with so many horrible moments in history, Tom Hanks was right there with Parkland, followed soon after by J.J. Abrams saying he might be interested in taking Stephen King’s 11/22/63 from Jonathan Demme, and then came announcement of David Mamet’s Blackbird, a Cate Blanchett-starring thriller about a modern-day woman who begins to suspect her ...

Film: Newswire: John Slattery smooth-talks his way into directing some of the best character actors around in his feature debut

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:36:00 -0500

Having honed his skills by directing several episodes of Mad Men—episodes that, demonstrating admirable restraint, weren’t just a series of scenes in which Roger Sterling beds every woman in the office—John Slattery is now moving on to movies. Variety reports that Slattery has landed the impressive cast of Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Turturro, and Richard Jenkins for his feature-directing debut, with the triumvirate of character actors joining his co-star Christina Hendricks in an adaptation of Pete Dexter’s novel God’s Pocket. The disappointingly non-literal story—which does not concern a bored God digging a half-packet of ...

Film: Watch This: With Beavis And Butt-head Do America, Mike Judge skewered the idiocy of cinematic adventures

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:00:00 -0500

Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: The release of Star Trek Into Darkness has us fondly remembering other movies based on, or spun-off from, TV shows. Beavis And Butt-head Do America (1996) Beavis and Butt-head make unlikely movie stars. Although they debuted in a short film, they are known for television, and they also function primarily as a satirical critique of their own medium, annotating the idiocy of music videos with an endless chorus of grunts, sniggering, and toilet humor. So Mike Judge’s decision to bring them ...

Film: Newswire: It's time for the speculation about Christopher Nolan directing a James Bond film to begin again

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:56:00 -0500

With Sam Mendes taking a step away from the James Bond franchise to concentrate on exploding legitimate theaters, talk has turned to who will direct the follow-up to Skyfall, and withstand the preemptive criticism for not being Christopher Nolan that’s become standard ever since Nolan expressed his enthusiasm for the franchise. So naturally, producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson have reportedly approached Christopher Nolan—whom many believe to be the only man who is Christopher Nolan—to see if he’s interested in being Christopher Nolan while directing the 24th James Bond film. It’s a logical move ...