The A.V. Club - Film

Movie Review: The Hangover Part III

A.A. Dowd — Thu, 23 May 2013 00:06:00 -0500

Setting aside the rampant sexism, broad racial caricatures, and unfunny Mike Tyson cameos, the most irksome thing about the Hangover films may be the gimmick that drives them. What could be less exciting and less cinematic than three hapless dudes spending an entire movie being told about the mischief they got into the night before? (No surprise that the photo montages during the end credits, which deliver a few glimpses of genuine naughtiness, earn the biggest laughs.) The best that can be said for the third, supposedly final chapter is that it jettisons the retracing-our-steps scenario of the 2009 original and its 2011 carbon-copy sequel. There is, in other words, no hangover in The Hangover Part III.

And yet a sense of creative dehydration still pervades. “I will never change,” declares Zach Galifianakis’ crazed man-child at his father’s funeral. The line feels like a mission statement, a permanent pledge ...

Movie Review: Fast And Furious 6

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky — Thu, 23 May 2013 00:05:00 -0500

Fast & Furious 6 is equal parts Ocean’s movie, Road Runner cartoon, and WWE SmackDown. In other words, it’s more or less the same movie as its predecessor, 2011’s Fast Five—a surprise commercial and critical hit that didn’t so much reinvigorate the Fast & Furious franchise as reinvent it. The series, which began in 2001 with Rob Cohen’s throwback exploitation movie The Fast And The Furious, has dropped any pretense of grit; like Fast Five, Furious 6 is a big, colorful B-movie romp where the laws of physics are routinely ignored. There are long, mayhem-heavy setpieces involving armored race cars, tanks, harpoons, and cargo planes. There are logic-defying leaps, as well as leaps in logic. It’s dumb fun—nothing more, nothing less.

In the world of the Fast & Furious franchise, any crime can be committed using a car and every problem is solved by adding ...

Movie Review: Before Midnight

A.A. Dowd — Thu, 23 May 2013 00:04:00 -0500

When Richard Linklater announced last autumn that he had secretly shot another sequel to Before Sunrise, his 1995 one-night-in-Vienna romance, it was difficult not to feel both excited and a little apprehensive. Before Sunset, the previous film in the series, had ended on such a perfect note—a heart-stopping ellipsis, one of cinema’s great non-endings—that taking the story any further seemed a bit like flirting with disaster. Wouldn’t it just be better to leave Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) hanging in the blissful moment, lost in song and dance and the probability of a missed flight? The answer, it’s a pleasure to report, is a resounding “no.” Just as swoon-worthy, and essential, as its predecessors, Before Midnight reveals the full scope of Linklater’s ambition. This is not just another stellar follow-up, but the latest entry in what’s shaping up to be a ...

Movie Review: Epic

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky — Thu, 23 May 2013 00:03:00 -0500

In the animated film Epic, forests are protected by legions of tiny soldiers, all but invisible to the naked eye. Small enough to ride hummingbirds, they are locked in an endless war with a race of equally tiny goblin-like creatures who want to destroy the forest. Why do the goblin-like creatures want to destroy the forest? Because they’re the bad guys. Why do the tiny soldiers—called Leaf Men—look like humans, while the rest of the forest’s inhabitants look like anthropomorphic plants and invertebrates? So that the main character can fall in love with one without raising any questions about interspecies romance.

Though Epic is loosely based on William Joyce’s picture book The Leaf Men And The Brave Good Bugs—in which the Leaf Men are humanoid leaves—it also draws heavily from Avatar, Lord Of The Rings, and FernGully, with some Lion King and Phantom ...

Movie Review: We Steal Secrets: The Story Of WikiLeaks

A.A. Dowd — Thu, 23 May 2013 00:02:00 -0500

Julian Assange, the Australian celebrity-hacker behind WikiLeaks, is not among the people interviewed in We Steal Secrets: The Story Of WikiLeaks, Alex Gibney’s sprawling new primer on the document-disclosing website. Assange appears only in previously recorded news clips. According to Gibney, speaking in voiceover, that’s because the controversial figure demanded a whopping $1 million for the face time. But perhaps Assange also caught the scent of an exposé. More than just another of the prolific filmmaker’s streamlined treatise on an issue—though it functions that way as well—We Steal Secrets also amounts to a less-than-charitable thesis on Assange himself. Big thinkers and former colleagues make a number of damning cases against him, including that his expanding ego eventually eclipsed his ideals (“Somehow this anarchist I met became someone else,” one talking head claims), and that he deliberately linked opposition to his free-information crusade to the sexual-assault ...

Movie Review: Fill The Void

A.A. Dowd — Thu, 23 May 2013 00:01:00 -0500

There’s a hushed, disarming power to Fill The Void, a new Israeli drama set in contemporary Tel Aviv, but cast in the classic mold of a Jane Austen romance. The film takes place in one of the city’s most devout Hasidic communities, and that alone lends it an uncommon fascination. (The infectious music! The mighty beards!) First-time filmmaker Rama Burshtein gazes upon this rarely explored subculture—that of the Haredi, to which she belongs—with a mixture of awed reverence and shrewd social critique. She’s reinvigorated a familiar narrative by painting it against an unfamiliar backdrop.

Exquisitely doleful Hadas Yaron, who won a deserved acting prize at Venice last year, plays the 18-year-old daughter of a rabbi, barely out of childhood but already fitted for the shackles of domesticity. Her folks have matched her up with a frumpy peer; she’s excited about the arrangement, less so ...

Movie Review: Doin’ It In The Park: Pick-Up Basketball, NYC

Nick Schager — Thu, 23 May 2013 00:00:00 -0500

The joys of hustling, scuffling, and trash-talking on the basketball court are celebrated with boisterous (if skin-deep) enthusiasm by Doin’ It In The Park: Pick-Up Basketball, NYC. The documentary traces more than half a century of the history and culture of playground roundball in the five boroughs. Directors Kevin Couliau and Bobbito Garcia spent 90 days playing pick-up games on 180 courts throughout New York City, chatting along the way with a gaggle of local legends who wax nostalgic about the innovation that took place on, and the particular rules of, famed Manhattan and Brooklyn asphalt venues like Rucker Park, Goat Park, or the West 4th Street courts. The documentarians find plenty of old-school stars eager to discuss a variety of topics: the ins and outs of successfully earning some court time by calling “next”; the revolutionary advances, born at these spots in the ’70s and ’80s, that eventually became ...

Great Job, Internet!: Read This: 20 essential music documentaries are streaming online now, well worth watching

David Anthony — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:30:00 -0500

Music documentaries are seemingly a dime-a-dozen, with nearly every artist, genre, or subculture worth discussing having some sort of coverage. It can make it difficult to determine what is actually worth watching and what's not, but thankfully Pitchfork rose to the occasion and compiled a handy list of 20 music docs that both merit their existence and are currently streaming online. Some, such as 1996's examination of the grunge movement Hype!, are considered to be classics of the form, whereas others explore musical curiosities such as Jandek and G.G. Allin, but they all exude the necessary traits of being both informative and wholly entertaining.

Great Job, Internet!: Read This: A physicist checked the math of Fast Five’s climactic bank vault car chase, arrived at the only logical buzzkill conclusion

Kevin McFarland — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:20:00 -0500

The Internet is full of interesting things to read outside of The A.V. Club—no, really! In our periodic Read This posts, we point you toward interesting or norteworthy pieces that caught our eye.

The climax of Fast Five features the usual street-racing gang breaking into a Rio De Janeiro bank, ripping out the vault with cars, and dragging it along for a lengthy car chase (so much for that rumored Brazilian-set sequel to The Italian Job). Sure, it was visually engrossing—but does the math check out? Harvard physicist Dr. Randall Kelley helped Vulture run the numbers (on a question that's been posed before), coming to the stunning conclusion that Fast Five may have overstated the realism of towing a bank vault through the streets of Rio. To be fair, the basic feat of towing the vault is theoretically possible, just with significantly more horsepower—467 cars ...

Great Job, Internet!: Get Involved, Internet: The King Of Kong producer is trying to make a doc about a long-lost severed limb

Danny Gallagher — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:00:00 -0500

Every day, the Internet gods choose a handful of weird news stories to become viral hits, from burglars leaving their wallets at the scene of the crime to the latest squirrel- or monkey-related assault. It's easy to forget in the midst of such endless amusement that there are still real people behind these stories whose lives may or may not have been profoundly affected.

One such story that caught in the Internet's attention in 2007 involved John Wood, a man who lost a leg in a plane crash and kept the severed limb preserved in a barbecue smoker. The smoker (complete with leg) was left in a storage unit to await Wood’s eventual cremation, but it was eventually sold at auction to Shannon Whisnant after Wood failed to keep up with the payments. It got stranger when Whisnant decided to turn the leg and smoker into a ...

Great Job, Internet!: Here's an animated music video for Rachel Bloom's ironically cheery "Historically Accurate Disney Princess"

Kevin McFarland — Wed, 22 May 2013 13:40:00 -0500

Everyone has watched Disney movies as an adult and questioned just how much of history the films ignore in order to tell simple little romantic stories of a princess finding her prince. And Disney even tried to get meta with its own princess constructions in Enchanted. But writer and comedian Rachel Bloom—a UCB alum who has written for Robot Chicken—took it a step further in an animated music video that puts all of the difficulties of Disney settings right beneath the surface of a cheery pining-for-love song. While it doesn’t skewer any particular Disney story in animation style or melody, it’s closest to Beauty And The Beast, a medieval provincial locale in the midst of a violent plague, resorting to primitive medicine while subjugating young girls and trying to eradicate the Jewish people living away in the woods. “Historically Accurate Disney Princess” comes from Bloom’s ...

Watch This: Ronin is a triumph of crime-flick economy

Nick Schager — Wed, 22 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.

Ronin (1998)
Whether it’s laying out its ambush-and-heist schemes or racing through French city streets at breakneck speeds, Ronin expects viewers to keep up. John Frankenheimer’s film makes the groan-worthy mistake of explaining the significance of its title twice—first in a textual introduction, and later via an expository conversation between two characters. Yet in all other respects, the movie is a work of no-nonsense proficiency, moving at a fleet pace that allows the audience to revel in the sights and sounds of freelance ex-military professionals and criminals adeptly concocting and executing elaborate smash-and-grab plans. The heists initially involve Irish beauty Natascha McElhone conspiring (on behalf of boss Jonathan Pryce) to steal a briefcase from a moving ...

Cannes Film Festival: Cannes, Day Seven: J.C. Chandor makes good, Nicolas Winding Refn goes bad, and Claire Denis gets ugly

Mike D'Angelo — Wed, 22 May 2013 11:51:00 -0500

Ah, so here’s where all the truly distinctive films were hiding. The last three I’ve seen run the gamut from the nearly sublime to the frankly abysmal, but they’re all bold, memorable, risk-happy adventures—exactly the kind of movies Cannes ought to be showcasing. Even the one I despised made me happy, just by virtue of being unafraid to fail. My Leone-style rundown of the past 24 hours:

THE GOOD: If anything, advance word about J.C. Chandor’s All Is Lost underplayed the starkly elemental nature of this one-man survival tale. I’d heard that Robert Redford is its sole cast member, which is true, and that he gives an essentially wordless performance, which is also true (just some attempts to communicate via a broken radio and one pent-up, anguished “FUUUUUUCK!!!!”). But I was pleasantly surprised—gobsmacked, actually—by the film’s total rejection of context ...

Newswire: Get Involved, Internet: Help make a documentary about Joe Strummer's old car

David Anthony — Wed, 22 May 2013 11:40:00 -0500

Hot on the heels of the announcement that The Clash will be releasing the Sound System box set in September, and the late Joe Strummer having a small plaza named after him in Granada, filmmaker Nick Hall is attempting to enact some cosmic justice by finding out what happened to Strummer's long lost car. The film, I Need A Dodge!, examines Strummer's time in Spain during the mid-'80s, specifically his falling in love with a Dodge that he lost in a parking garage through some folly of errors (read: cocaine-induced confusion).

With the film nearing completion Hall is reaching out to the Internet in the hopes that he can receive $25,000 in donations so the film can receive the finishing touches it needs. And, with every other facet of Strummer's life already fairly well documented, the film also promises to give a look at his ...

Tolerability Index: This week we're barely putting up with The Hangover Part III

Amelie Gillette — Wed, 22 May 2013 11:00:00 -0500

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

Kevin McFarland — 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 to create a complete portrait of the legendary director, from his early life and exposure to nature through secretive communication with his collaborators to avoid persecution from strict censors.

Letofsky even brought in renowned Soviet/American actor Oleg Vidov to narrate Tarkovsky’s words throughout the film. Principal photography is ...

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

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky — 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 them off with laconic cool. He ignores the law and fights the gangsters who are trying to muscle their way into his territory; to the mob, moonshine is a lucrative criminal enterprise, but to Mitchum, it’s a family business. This is an outlaw ballad of a movie.

Thunder Road ...

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

Mike D'Angelo — 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 over the films that have screened so far, there appear to be quite a few: Ali Mosaffa in The Past; Masaharu Fukuyama in Like Father, Like Son; Jan Bivjoet in/as Borgman; Oscar Isaac in Inside Llweyn Davis; for some tastes, perhaps, even those temperamentally opposed hams Benicio Del Toro ...

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

Sean O'Neal — 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 particle physics by the young men and women at Columbia University,” Aykroyd said of Ghostbusters 3 and, quite possibly, his belief in a parallel universe that would be hospitable to another Ghostbusters film in which they’re all old and Bill Murray isn’t there.

“Basically, there's research being ...

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

Sean O'Neal — 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 about recommending both the gig and returning producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, even going so far as to suggest he be replaced by Joaquin Phoenix—a nod to Phoenix’s publicly stated disgust with the ceremony, as well as the fact that none of this matters, really.

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

Nick Schager — 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 O’Neal’s expressionless getaway wheelman reveals a sandy-haired hunk in a blazer and open-collared blue shirt whose life is driven by an unwavering insistence on performing his job on his own terms. Hill introduces Driver emerging from the depths of a parking garage before stealing a Ford and blazing ...

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

Mike D'Angelo — 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, from an obscure Australian movie called Blame: “Of course you’re upset. I mean, she was my best friend, but she was your sister!” Okay, got it, thanks.) When the recipient of the info dump genuinely needs the lowdown as much as we do, however, and the information itself is ...

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

Marah Eakin — 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 in “Twilight, U.S.A.” is probably why I’ve held onto it.

How did I get it? When I started dating my now-husband, he was living in Seattle and I’d frequently fly up to visit him. Before one visit, Andrew and I decided to take a driving vacation ...

Contest: Chicago, see Before Midnight early and for free

David Anthony — 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 Before Midnight.

A lengthy plot synopsis and trailer below:

An American father, JESSE, (Ethan Hawke) is seeing off his son HANK (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick) at the Kalamata Airport in Greece. Hank’s returning to his mother and life in the U.S. after spending the “best summer ever” with Jesse and ...

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

Mike D'Angelo — 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 a film so audacious and unexpected that it seems to hit the reset button on what the medium can do. The Past is a terrific movie, sure to rank high on my year-end best-of list (it was just picked up by Sony Pictures Classics, who’ll likely give it the ...

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

Sean O'Neal — 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 the same timeframe.

You can likely credit Star Trek’s negligible yet still notable slide to several things: the long wait between sequels; overall J.J. Abrams fatigue; the fact that it’s still not Star Wars; all that darkness—who wants to go into that?, etc. Some say it ...

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

The A.V. Club Staff — 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.

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

David Anthony — 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 “big kiss” and how Taylor Swift’s bit part was not the worst thing ever.
A.V. Undercover continued with Blessed Feathers’ stripped-down version of Paul Simon’s classic “Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard.”
On the heels of metal oral history Louder Than Hell’s release, we examined ...

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

Sean O'Neal — 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. While the investigation is still ongoing, Chopard has already been downplaying the value of the stolen jewels and denying reports that they had them on hand to be loaned to A-list celebrities (without explaining why they had them), presumably to avoid everyone drawing the comparisons to The Bling Ring that ...

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

Sean O'Neal — 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 it tells the story of a ‘90s-era “rough-around-the-edges prospector who stumbles onto one of the largest gold mines in the world in the Indonesian jungle.” “Hooooo-wee, this is the biggest gold mine I’ve found since that Gin Blossoms CD, dag-nab-it!” this crusty old ‘90s prospector will exclaim, while Spike ...