Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My parents are from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and I feel like it's an old Southern thing where people say that, as a kid, you can be an astronaut or a ballerina or a singer, but as a grown person, you need to go and get a job.
Given the knee-jerk patriotism of recent war movies, it's discouraging to see 'Windtalkers' evade pertinent facts that could have recast the doubled-edged issues of racism and loyalty and made them relevant to contemporary times.
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.
The pleasantly crude 'Hall Pass' reminds us of what's been missing from movies: Those squirm-inducing moments in comedy that produce enough discomfort that, at points, what we're watching is half a heartbeat away from a horror film.
Watching daring, high-tech criminals in action, I have the same thought that probably occurs to other moviegoers: if these guys just held on to some of the money they spend on equipment, they wouldn't have to turn to a life of crime.
'Ali' is a breakthrough for its director, Michael Mann. The film, based on the life of Muhammad Ali, is Mr. Mann's first movie with feeling; his overwhelming love of its subject will turn audiences into exuberant, thrilled fight crowds.
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.
A lot of the time, you see all this ambition from these black actors, and it's just pouring off the screen. Because they don't often get a chance to work, and when they do, they don't usually get a chance to work with other black people.
In 'Windtalkers,' the director John Woo is meticulous in melding his own intimate style into the cliches of a large-scale war movie, paying homage to all the tired conventions of the genre. But it's an honor that these cliches don't deserve.
'Pootie Tang' may be raw and slovenly - hey, it often is raw and slovenly - but it succeeds as a laugh getter because of the spot-on satirical notes. You might say that the movie walks it like it talks it; I'm not sure what Pootie would say.
I'm honored to be asked by Stephanie Allain - whom I've long admired - to add to the scope of my programming purview at Film Independent. I salute David Ansen for his work with the festival and look forward to continuing to follow his example.
For those not so taken by the star power, this new 'Ocean's Eleven' is the equivalent of a domineering team you can't stand that enters the Super Bowl. Even if you don't like the players, the odds are so good that it's tough to bet against them.
The story of a proud Roman soldier who is sold into slavery and must fight his way back to freedom, 'Gladiator' suggests what would happen if someone made a movie of the imminent extreme-football league and shot it as if it were a Chanel commercial.
The mission of '8 Mile' is essentially to garner sympathy for a white rapper involved in an old-school shootout - a rap contest. This may be the final frontier for pop, more unbelievable than the prospect of launching a member of 'N Sync into orbit.
'Infernal Affairs' uses a vibrating terseness usually found in the writer and director Michael Mann's work. Thematically, this film deploys the techniques Mr. Mann brought to bear on 'Heat,' right down to using a similar cold-blooded electronic score.
What we're most aware of in 'Eight-Legged Freaks' is how similar it is to other movies, a recombinant mutated species itself, the product of the crossbreeding of the suffering-from-gigantism movies of the 1950s and the 1990 B-picture classic 'Tremors.'
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.
Theron says that she was intrigued by the psychological demands of the material in playing the complicated 'Queen Ravenna', and Stewart's performance as 'Snow White', the fairest of them all, in her first action-heroine role, kept her literally in constant motion.
The influence of John Hughes is fully felt in the melodrama 'Donnie Darko.' This first film written and directed by Richard Kelly is a wobbly cannonball of a movie that tries to go Mr. Hughes one better; it's like a Hughes version of a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
The director Sofia Coppola's new comic melodrama, 'Lost in Translation,' thoroughly and touchingly connects the dots between three standards of yearning in movies: David Lean's 'Brief Encounter,' Richard Linklater's 'Before Sunrise' and Wong Kar-wai's 'In the Mood for Love.'
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.
In 2013, when it turned out that the plot of LaBeouf's short film 'HowardCantour.com' (2012) had been purloined from graphic novelist Daniel Clowes's 2007 comic 'Justin M. Damiano', the actor-director responded with a series of tweet apologies that also appeared to be shoplifted.
Tina Fey, a performer and head writer for 'Saturday Night Live,' has deftly adapted Rosalind Wiseman's nonfiction dissection of teenage girl societal interaction, 'Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence.'
It is evident that the grip of 'The Return of the King' on Mr. Jackson is not unlike the grasp the One Ring exerts over Frodo: it's tough for him to let go, which is why the picture feels as if it has an excess of endings. But he can be forgiven. Why not allow him one last extra bow?
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.
Ice Cube went straight outta Compton to hearing, 'Are we there yet?' Eddie Murphy blew up striding across the stage in a red leather ensemble that would have made Elvis Presley chuckle, yet is probably best known to anyone born in the 21st century as the overly chatty donkey from 'Shrek.'
Ali was the African-American who exulted in saying exactly what he was capable of, and the bouncing-boy braggadocio of hip-hop is impossible to imagine without him. So it makes sense that one of his spiritual children, the sunny-dispositioned rapper turned actor Will Smith, would play him.
I thought that, as a black audience member, I would like to see something that reflected an experience that's not normally exhibited in documentaries, or is so much about black people as victims in this country, and black people not taking control of their own lives and their own destinies.
Spending time with Mexican-born writer and director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, you'd never guess that he's the filmmaker behind a series of movies known as the 'Death Trilogy.' The way he dotes on his children and talks about his wife makes it clear that he has a crackling passion for life.
What makes 'Pootie Tang' the motion picture enjoyable is its no-brow ambitions; it's a joke action film. It slides through enough African-American pop culture signifiers to raise laughs out of those who will appreciate the references; it revels in more cheese per square inch than a soul food diner.
Muhammad Ali inside the ring and Muhammad Ali outside the ring were totally different men; his abrasive, magnetic daring and infectious self-love outside the ring galvanized the world and distracted many from his sniper's precision. He was a heavyweight with the fluttering gracefulness of a middleweight.
When Bruce Lee gets his cameo in 'The Green Hornet' - as one of the drawings in Kato's notebook - it clarifies what the film is: an unrealized sketch. A sketch can afford to allude to a point of view. Moviemakers need to show their point of view, something this shrug of a movie never gets around to doing.
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.
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.
'Ali' offers stunning re-creations of bouts Ali fought. In the second Liston fight, the auditorium is underlighted and clouded with fetid cigar smoke, which was why the famous picture of a snarling Ali standing over Liston was so dramatic; indoor arenas are now bright enough to be spotted from Alpha Centauri.
The stoic drama 'A Somewhat Gentle Man' is photographed in a palate of steel gray tones that match Stellan Skarsgard's complexion. It's a low-blood-pressure version of the kind of thing James M. Cain used to do in his sleep, and its filmmaking accomplishment is as minimalist as its narrative ambition is minimal.
Given how unflinching his productions have been, the 44-year-old McQueen is remarkably gentle and thoughtful - so much so that he will request a moment to consider a question, and turn it around in his head to get the shape and weight of it, before answering, occasionally with an excited rush of words in response.
Since most of 'Mean Girls' consists of the outsider Cady observing the tribal rites of her new setting and laying it all out in narration, this movie is just like home for the meticulous and ruthless deadpan that Ms. Fey has perfected for the satirical 'S.N.L.' newscast in which she and Jimmy Fallon are the anchors.
Though narrative cohesion isn't the strength of 'Mean Girls,' which works better from scene to scene than as a whole, the intelligence shines in its understanding of contradictions, keeping a comic distance from the emotional investment of teenagers that defined 'Ridgemont High' and later the adolescent angst movies of John Hughes.
Establishing mood through pictorial means is the director Ridley Scott's most notable talent. There may be no working director more accomplished at wringing texture out of the color blue than the prodigious and now prolific Mr. Scott; you'd swear that with his dazzling washes of blues and sand tones, he was inventing additional hues on the spot.
Mr. Miyazaki's specialty is taking a primal wish of kids, transporting them to a fantasyland, and then marooning them there. No one else conjures the phantasmagoric and shifting morality of dreams - that fascinating and frightening aspect of having something that seems to represent good become evil - in the way this master Japanese animator does.