The A.V. Club - Film

Film: A.V. Talk:A Christmas Carol / The Box

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:31:00 -0600

Keith Phipps, Scott Tobias, and Tasha Robinson talk about two very different movies featuring men and money: Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol and Richard Kelly's The Box. Subscribe to A.V. Talk iTunes http://feeds.theonion.com/avtalk

Film: Review:The Box

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:19:00 -0600

The dilemma is simple: A couple has 24 hours to choose whether to press a button and consequently kill someone they do not know in exchange for $1 million. The movie, however, is anything but simple. The opening stretch of Richard Kelly’s third feature (after Donnie Darko and Southland Tales) faithfully keeps the beats of Richard Matheson’s story “Button, Button” by way of its previous adaptation for the 1980s version of The Twilight Zone, which gave Matheson’s tale a different final twist. The film keeps going long after exhausting the logic of the original tale, almost as ...

TV: AVQ&A:Drop-everything movies

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d like us and the readers to answer? E-mail us at avcqa@theonion.com. What’s your “drop everything” movie? You know the moment; you’re flipping through your channel guide, not looking for anything in particular, and you run across that film: It ...

Film: Newswire:Danny Boyle to make movie about rock climber Aron Ralston

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:40:00 -0600

According to Variety, Danny Boyle is set to direct a film about Aron Ralston, the rock climber who was stranded in the Utah desert for four days with his arm pinned by a giant boulder, before he ultimately amputated it himself with a dull blade and climbed down a 65-foot rock wall. The film is called 127 Hours, presumably because Between a Rock and a Hard Place was already taken by, well, anyone who's ever written anything about Aron Ralston. Boyle, who recently swept the Oscars with his hit Slumdog Millionaire, will be re-teaming with Slumdog producer Christian Colson ...

Film: Review:Precious

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:05:00 -0600

Precious features plenty of off-putting images and attitudes, beginning with the movie’s straight-out-of-Rush-Limbaugh’s-nightmares vision of lazy welfare queens, and ending with the way the film seems to wallow in inner-city misery. It isn’t enough that director Lee Daniels and screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher (working from a controversial bestseller by Sapphire) present teenager Gabourey Sidibe as morbidly obese and functionally illiterate; she’s also a victim of sexual and physical abuse, with a mentally retarded daughter, another child on the way, and a serious health crisis looming. Not even Douglas Sirk or Lars von Trier would heap so much ...

Film: Review:The Men Who Stare At Goats

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:04:00 -0600

A gag early in the eccentric military comedy The Men Who Stare At Goats neatly summarizes what the movie’s about. George Clooney, playing one of a secret cadre of American super-soldiers, is driving into Iraq with hapless reporter Ewan McGregor by his side, and is attempting to demonstrate his ability to disperse clouds with his mind. Clooney successfully clears the sky, but while his eyes are off the road, he crashes into a boulder. The Men Who Stare At Goats effectively satirizes the blinkered arrogance of military types and New Agers, showing Clooney and his colleagues—played by Kevin ...

Film: Review:A Christmas Carol

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:03:00 -0600

A digital Scrooge scowls through a digital London in Robert Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol, a new attempt to warm up Charles Dickens’ holiday chestnut using state-of-the-art technology. But the results feel like the product of a microwave instead of an open fire. A skilled director long infatuated with technological breakthroughs, Zemeckis here makes his third excursion into the animation-meets-live-action world of performance capture. Zemeckis has described the process as offering the “best of both worlds,” but in A Christmas Carol, it feels neither here nor there, never multiplying the warmth of human performances by the artistic freedoms of animation. It ...

Film: Review:The Fourth Kind

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:02:00 -0600

When considering the spooky questions raised by the science-fiction/horror docu-fiction The Fourth Kind, it’s helpful to remember Occam’s Razor, the logical principle that rejects unnecessarily complex theories when trying to arrive at an explanation for a phenomenon. Take the case of Dr. Abigail Tyler, a Nome, Alaska psychologist played by Milla Jovovich in the dramatized sequences, and appearing as “herself” (if she exists at all, which she almost certainly doesn’t) in documentary-ish segments. A disproportionate number of people in her city have disappeared under odd circumstances over the past 40 years, and under hypnosis, several of ...

Film: Review:Collapse

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:01:00 -0600

The current documentary landscape is chockfull of doom-laden scenarios of every stripe: If global warming (An Inconvenient Truth) doesn’t get you, then maybe genetically engineered Frankenfoods (Food, Inc.), will. Or contaminated water (Flow). Or crushing personal (Maxed Out) and national (I.O.U.S.A.) debt. But few apocalyptic visions are as comprehensive and frighteningly assured as the one offered by Michael Ruppert, the subject of Chris Smith’s mesmerizing new documentary Collapse. A former Los Angeles police officer turned independent reporter, Ruppert has chased big stories for his self-published newsletter, From The Wilderness, on everything from CIA involvement ...

Film: Review:La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:00:00 -0600

Frederick Wiseman is an American institution, albeit an invisible one. Every few years, he adds to his formidable body of documentary work, slipping, apparently unnoticed, into environments ranging from hospital wards to housing projects, and returning with unblemished portraits of life within. Wiseman’s latest subject is the Paris Opera Ballet, whose roots go back more than 400 years. As is characteristic of his method, Wiseman minimizes his presence, both on- and offscreen. There are no interviews, no captions, and few contextual clues as to which of the seven ballets featured in various stages of rehearsal is being performed at ...

TV: Hater:Economy Got You Down? Rent Your Kids To The Entertainment Industry!

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:15:00 -0600

Do you want to make more money? Sure as Sally Struthers doesn't do those commercials anymore, we all do! And now, if you have children, you can! Simply put your offspring to work in the fields and factories. Children are diligent workers, they're easily intimidated, and many factories need kid employees because their tiny hands are the only ones that can fit in between the big, dangerous cogs of the machines in order to clean them. The children gain valuable menial labor experience and a taste of the drudgery that will come to define their adult lives, while ...

Film: The New Cult Canon:Hedwig And The Angry Inch

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

“I gave a piece to my mother I gave a piece to my man I gave a piece to the rock star He took the good stuff and ran.” —“Hedwig’s Lament,” Hedwig And The Angry Inch “This is San Francisco? But it’s so clean!” Every time I think about Rent—or really any enterprise that repackages unruly culture for mass consumption—the Mr. Show sketch “San Francisco: The Theme Park” inevitably springs to mind. Thanks to the omnipresent, all-powerful GloboChem corporation, a once-scary city known for “hippies, angry lesbians, and Chinese” has been transformed into a happy-faced amusement ...

Film: Interview:Lee Daniels and Gabby Sidibe

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

In his movie Precious, producer-turned-director Lee Daniels has the kind of cinematic success story that gives hope to generations of independent filmmakers and other assorted dreamers. On paper, the film looks almost comically non-commercial. It’s a kitchen-sink melodrama about a morbidly obese, illiterate black teenager in 1980s New York who is physically abused by her monstrous welfare-cheat mother and sexually abused by her father, who is also the father of her two children. Throw in a complete unknown in the lead (Gabby Sidibe) and a director whose only other directorial effort (2005’s Shadowboxer) came and went without a ...

Film: Newswire:Wait, someone wants to host the Oscars after all: Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:22:00 -0600

And as predicted, the search for an Oscar host has quickly been concluded: According to Variety, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, co-stars of the upcoming Meryl Streep romantic comedy It's Complicated, have picked up the hosting gig that was turned down by Hugh Jackman, Ben Stiller, and Robert Downey Jr. Las Vegas oddsmaker Johnny Avello had Steve Martin at 25 to 1 (well behind Whoopi Goldberg), so here's hoping you all had money riding on him. Regardless, this is almost certainly good news. Baldwin is funny on 30 Rock, and Martin has recently shown he's still got ...

DVD: Hater:Choose Your Own NYC Borough Adventure!

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:27:00 -0600

The thing that no one ever tells you about New York (until it's too late) is that every borough plays by its own rules. Unfortunately, these rules are all pretty standard movie genres. For example, if you're in Brooklyn, chances are that pretty soon after you set foot in the borough of Kings, things are going to turn into a melodrama about two young people on the cusp of adulthood. Sorry, but that's just Brooklyn. There are some nice brownstones, though. On the other hand, if you go to Manhattan, it's basically guaranteed that you're ...

Film: Newswire:No one wants to host the Oscars

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:41:00 -0600

Poor shiny Oscar; everyone has their eyes on him, but no one really loves him. It's a tradition at this point for every major media outlet to assign someone on staff to watch the annual Academy Awards ceremony and write the next morning about how disappointing the host was, no matter what happens during the broadcast — some of those articles have probably already been pre-written for the 2009 awards (which air in March 2010), even though the host hasn't been determined yet. Maybe that relentless criticism of whoever volunteers to shepherd the always-bloated ceremony explains why no one ...

Books: Hater:Berenstain Bears Movie To Change The Way You Think About Anthropomorphic Bears

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:15:00 -0600

Thanks to Where The Wild Things Are, Hollywood now knows that you don't need to have more than 130 words in a source material to make a successful live-action children's-book-to-film adaptation. (However, you may need a lot of therapy-speak, some great costumes, and the ability to wring of James Gandolfini's loud, sonorous breathing for every ounce of dramatic effect possible.) Of course, words and already developed characters might not hurt, which is maybe why Hollywood (the giant, monolithic entity. Heard of it?) has decided to make a movie out of the beloved Berenstain Bears books. Well, that ...

Film: Interview:Charlotte Gainsbourg

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600

The daughter of French singer-provocateur Serge Gainsbourg and Swinging London icon Jane Birkin, Charlotte Gainsbourg was born to fame, but her career path hasn’t been a straight line. At the age of 12, she dueted with her father on “Lemon Incest,” a proclamation of paternal devotion whose ambiguous lyrics and semi-clad video prompted public outcry. She quickly followed it in 1986 with the album Charlotte For Ever, but it took two decades for her next album, 5:55, to arrive. She started young as an actress as well, playing the lead in 1988’s The Little Thief and an ...

TV: Hater:Have You No Shame, Direct TV?

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:09:00 -0600

Well, this is just despicable. First, DirectTV let Craig T. Nelson prop himself up with the corpse of the late Heather O'Rourke to shill for their awful cable service. But no one noticed, because whatever. Maybe there aren't a lot of Heather O'Rourke fans on the Internet? Then, those ghouls at Direct TV used poor, defenseless King Kong to sell their shoddy cable service, which is basically CGI animal abuse. Where is Peta when you need them? And then last week, the bottom-feeding leeches at Direct TV no doubt forced Chris Farley's family to sign off ...

Film: Newswire:Joss Whedon in negotiations to take over the Terminator franchise. Sort of.

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:05:00 -0600

News broke today that the rights to the Terminator franchise are now up for sale. And it looks like there's now a frontrunner in the ensuing bidding war: None other than Joss Whedon who, in an open letter, has put up an offer of $10,000 ("That's four -- FOUR! -- zeroes after that one") to take control of the series. He even has plans already. To wit: Terminator... of the Rings! Yeah, what if he time-travelled TOO far... back to when there was dragons and wizards? (I think it was the Dark Ages.) Hasta La Vista, Boramir! Cool, huh ...