Co-creators Danny McBride, Bill Best, and Jody Hill created another proud addition to HBO’s Hall Of Great Antiheroes in the form of Kenny “Fucking” Powers (McBride), an overweight, coke-snorting, booze-chugging major league burnout turned wildly inappropriate gym teacher in the profanely hilarious cult comedy Eastbound & Down (HBO). The six episodes in the show’s first season cohere beautifully as a self-contained narrative about the fall, rise, and fall of a delightful fuck-up, but it looks like McBride’s misadventures in misanthropy are far from over: HBO has greenlit a second season…
If Joaquin Phoenix truly has given up acting for whatever it is he thinks he’s doing now, he’ll at least gone out giving an affecting performance in an interesting movie. In James Gray’s Two Lovers (Magnolia), Phoenix plays a depressed photographer living with his parents and forced to choose between two women. The story’s simple, but the emotions beneath it are deep and Gray’s moody direction adds to the richness…
A trio of first-rate directors— Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind), Leos Carax (The Lovers On The Bridge) and Bong Joon-ho (The Host)—looks at a city from a sci-fi/fantasy vantage point in Tokyo! (Liberation), a surprisingly cohesive and exciting anthology. Of the three, Carax’s outrageous and politically loaded piece about a man-beast (Denis Levant) sprung from the sewer system strikes the only bum note, but even it has an infectious, go-for-broke energy to it…
Audiences inexplicably looking for Chris Klein to channel Kuffs-era Christian Slater or watch vapid mouth-breather Kristin Kreuk solidify her standing as the worst actress of her generation should check out the mind-bogglingly awful, surreally misconceived Street Fighter: The Legend Of Chun Li (Fox), a strong early contender for worst of 2009. A tardy, low-budget Street Fighter movie was probably never going to be good. But it didn’t have to be this bad…
A seemingly unstoppable pop juggernaut came to a screeching halt when Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience (Disney) arrived in theaters looking for Miley Cyrus numbers and left a few deflating weeks later. Plans for the boy band’s twist on the coyly autobiographical Hannah Montana: The Movie, if they ever existed, were almost certainly put on the back burner…