Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
The good news is that “The Hangover Part III” isn’t a rerun like the second episode. The bad news is everything else. For all the promise of mayhem and WTF moments, the final episode hits you with all the force of a warm can of O’Doul’s.
While it was occasionally done here or there, nobody else had a figurehead like Walt doing it. Jack Warner wasn't on TV. Walt was the boss, but he had a real public profile and he used it to his advantage. And he became a household face.
Because we can engineer genetics, because we can telecast real lives-of course we must, right? But are these good things to do? The irony is, the people who will finally answer that question will be the very ones produced by the process.
If it's a choice between spending twenty five dollars for tickets to a movie and almost that much again for drinks and popcorn, it's understandable that people are opting to buy a movie on DVD for fifteen dollars, even if it's no-frills.
I think I can safely call 2012 average. Overall, it was a stronger year for nonfiction than fiction - a situation that would've surprised me back in January, when I was looking forward to big new novels from several authors I really love.
The right really dominates radio, and it's amazing how much energy the right spends telling us that the press is slanted to the left when it really isn't. They want to shut other people up. They really don't understand the First Amendment.
Through the magic of motion pictures, someone who's never left Peoria knows the softness of a Paris spring, the color of a Nile sunset, the sorts of vegetation one will find along the upper Amazon and that Big Ben has not yet gone digital.
Growing up, I missed the whole 'Three Stooges' thing. Either they weren't on the station in my hometown, or we hadn't bought a TV set yet, or they came to town too late for me. I'm pretty sure that at the right age, I would have loved them.
It's time to start recognizing that not all escapist entertainment is created equal. And that some of it isn't even entertainment. "Miss March" is, to use the vernacular of the escapist moviegoer, the biggest pile of crap I've seen in ages.
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.
It's not a good thing to be friends with people you're covering. There's just no point in doing it. It's tempting, but they're not going to consider you their friend anyway. They just know that you're somebody that can do something for them.
And so popular culture raises issues that are very important, actually, in the country I think. You get issues of the First Amendment rights and issues of drug use, issues of AIDS, and things like that all arise naturally out of pop culture.
Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in The Fugitive. I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies.
Created for MTV in 1990, the sharply observed, pop-conscious Ben Stiller Show - featuring its star's lacerating impersonations of Bono, Tom Cruise, and Eddie Munster, among others - subsequently moved to Fox TV and copped an Emmy for writing.
"Dirty Love" wasn't written and directed, it was committed. Here is a film so pitiful, it doesn't rise to the level of badness. It is hopelessly incompetent... I am not certain that anyone involved has ever seen a movie, or knows what one is.
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.
It's sometimes discouraging to see all of a director's movies, because there's so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director's artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he's a hack.
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.
3-D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension. Hollywood's current crazy stampede toward it is suicidal. It adds nothing essential to the moviegoing experience. For some, it is an annoying distraction. For others, it creates nausea and headaches.
Jane Austen wrote six of the most beloved novels in the English language, we are informed at the end of Becoming Jane, and so she did. The key word is beloved. Her admirers do not analyze her books so much as they just plain love them to pieces.
The generation of consumers who swallow this pessimistic sentiment can't see past the product to its debased morality. Instead, their excitement about The Dark Knight's dread (that teenage thrall with subversion) inspires their fealty to product.
The movies that are honored at The Oscars are always a certain type: Old-fashioned. It's a bunch of well-made, old-fashioned movies that support our idea of ourselves. They uplift the human spirit. That's why horror films never even get nominated.
Before Midnight is one of the years best movies. Full to the brim with humor, heartbreak, and ravishing romance. Richard Linklater directs with ardor and artistry. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy shine brilliantly. Heads up, Oscar. This ones a keeper.
Here's how much I know about hockey. Mike Royko and I were in a tiny bar one winter night, and the radio kept reporting goals by the Blackhawks. I mentioned how frequently the team was scoring. 'You're listening to the highlights,' Royko observed.
Improvisation is a weird word because we often think it means that you make things up out of whole cloth right there on the spot, and that's rarely the case in acting. You have to know who the character is, what the situation is and what is needed.
The buried code of many American films has become: If I kill you, I have won and you have lost. The instinctive ethical code of traditional Hollywood, the code by which characters like James Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda lived, has been lost.
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.
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.
Cillian Murphy is the guy who battled viral zombies in '28 Days Later' and put a gas-spewing bag over his head in 'Batman Begins'. With his pallor, cut-glass cheekbones and glazed blue eyes, he's right on the border between dreamboat and spooky freak.
'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.
I believe that young people wearing hoods, unless they are very young, can be frightening. What are they hiding? Why don't they want to come out into the light with the rest of us? They may be perfectly nice, but the hoods send an uncertain statement.
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.'
All but a very few of us are in debt. We exist as entities who borrow money and spend the rest of our lives making interest payments on a debt tally that never seems to budge. Whatever wealth we have, in labor, property or cash, is suctioned to the top.
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.
I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.
It is all very well and good for Linda Lovelace, the star of the movie, to advocate sexual freedom; but the energy she brings to her role is less awesome than discouraging. If you have to work this hard at sexual freedom, maybe it isn't worth the effort.
The right really wants to punish you for having an opinion. And I think both the left and the right should celebrate people who have different opinions, and disagree with them, and argue with them, and differ with them, but don't just try to shut them up.
The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again.
For the last 30 years our cinemas have been ruled by science fiction and horror. We've had some very good Fantasy films in that time period, but for my tastes I still haven't seen fantasy done to absolute perfection. That is the hope I have in this project.
If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago.
We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls. They allow us to enter other minds, not simply in the sense of identifying with the characters, although that is an important part of it, but by seeing the world as another person sees it.
If you pay attention to the movies they will tell you what people desire and fear. Movies are hardly ever about what they seem to be about. Look at a movie that a lot of people love, and you will find something profound, no matter how silly the film may be.
This sucks on so many levels." Dialogue from "Jason X" Rare for a movie to so frankly describe itself. "Jason X" sucks on the levels of storytelling, character development, suspense, special effects, originality, punctuation, neatness and aptness of thought.
Radio wasn't outside our lives. It coincided with and helped to shape our childhood and adolescence. As we slogged toward maturity, it also grew up and turned into television, leaving behind, like dead skin, transistorized talk-radio and nonstop music. . . .
All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.
Although I am not averse to wasting a few hours playing computer games, I have never tried my hand at Doom. Judging by sales figures and testimonials, playing the game has to be an infinitely preferable experience to watching this pathetic excuse for a movie.
His (Lloyd Kaufman) string of low-budget, lowbrow horror comedies stretching back to the ’80s has been cited as influence by Peter Jackson, the Farrelly Brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Takashi Miike, and Guillermo Del Toro, just to cite a few prominent examples.