“Least you got to see a motherfucker crucify himself,” Richard Pryor spits in the most surprising footage director Marina Zenovich has unearthed for her new documentary Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic. The scene is of Pryor’s last great cock-up, just before his last, great comeback. Pacing restlessly before a Hollywood…
The surprise twist in the new M. Night Shyamalan film is that the film is directed by M. Night Shyamalan, a fact that the movie—like the posters and commercials—won’t admit until after you’ve already sat through it. While at heart a Pinkett-Smith family bonding project, the kind of sci-fi play…
Wait, you didn’t know that After Earth, the Will Smith–Jaden Smith sci-fi adventure hitting theaters this weekend, is the latest from Shyamalan, he of The Sixth Sense fame and Lady in the Water infamy? Columbia Pictures has done everything in its power, in both trailers and print and TV advertisements,…
After completing five months of principal photography on The Avengers, Joss Whedon flew back to Los Angeles and threw himself a welcome-home party. As the guests circled his pool, he asked friends like Firefly’s Nathan Fillion, Angel’s Amy Acker, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Alexis Denisof if they were busy…
Nerd. Geek. Dork. By whatever name, these poor, unfortunate souls with bad haircuts, unflattering clothes and few social graces are everywhere. Especially pop culture. Few films have captured the ideal of the awkward, disastrously uncool teen like Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse, in the character of Dawn Wiener. The…
Ania Gola-Kumor. One of Colorado’s greatest abstract painters is the star of Ania Gola-Kumor: Moving Paint, at Sandra Phillips Gallery. These large oil paintings, along with small works on paper that were done in oil stick and oil bar, represent both a continuation of Gola-Kumor’s longstanding interests and a new…
Taken together, Ulrich Seidl’s three Paradise films will be hard to beat this year for sheer art-house scald. Seidl has a relentless vision, but one worth reckoning with, especially now that he has turned world-class ambitious and crafted his epic: this trilogy of doomed emotional struggle. The first film, Love,…
The unlikeliest of all the Hangover trilogy’s comic implausibilities might be its four pampered, rich-boy leads unironically calling themselves the “Wolf Pack” without anybody ever making fun of them. In the slobs-versus-snobs comedies of the 1970s and ’80s, the snooty rich kids were always the antagonists, bullying the nerds and…
New York is a cruel and beautiful place, just as 27 is a cruel and beautiful age. In Frances Ha, Greta Gerwig plays a woman who’s feeling the weight of both. Frances is an aspiring dancer who has reached the age when “aspiring” really means not cutting it. Life with…
In Arnaud Desplechin’s English-language Jimmy P. (Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian), Benicio Del Toro—freed at last from the tyranny of playing bit-part heavies in American thrillers and action movies—is James Picard, a Blackfoot Indian who has lost his way in post-World War II America. He’s a veteran, but he’s treated…
I. First, Something About the Badges (Then We’ll Get to the Coens) Someday I’m going to write a song and call it “Ballad of the Blue Badge.” I haven’t figured out a rhyme scheme yet, let alone a melody, so please allow this outline to suffice: At Cannes, the color…
Daniel Mindel, A.S.C., is part of an ever-shrinking population: cinematographers who have yet to shoot a feature digitally. He acknowledges that he “will be forced” to do it eventually by “the corporate entities that drive our industry,” but he believes “there is no need to use an inferior technology at…
Ladies and gentlemen—anyone, really, who cares about his or her mug—step right up. According to a bit of advice proffered in one of the festival editions of The Hollywood Reporter a few days back, the beauty product to buy while in Cannes is Avibon, an “only-in-France aging cream.” If sun…
The Israeli arranged-marriage drama Fill the Void begins as a spy caper. Eighteen-year-old Shira (Hadas Yaron) and her mother (Irit Sheleg) play P.I. at the supermarket, observing a handsome asthmatic with gold-rim glasses and a gawky frame to see if he’s marriage material. Satisfied with the way he reads the…
Justin Lin may strike some as out of place in the pantheon of contemporary auteurs. The Taiwanese-born American filmmaker, best known for having directed Fast Five and its sequel, Fast & Furious 6, makes unabashedly populist blockbusters for mainstream audiences—hardly the purview of a “serious” artist. His films, wafer-thin in…
You know those two little lines you get in your forehead when you frown? The ones that, if you frown too much, stick there for good? The French have a name for that: “the lion wrinkle.” And by the tenth day of Cannes, there are a lot of lion wrinkles…
The first film by Martin Scorcese that truly wore his mark, Mean Streets is a small and personal tour de force, held together by a killer jukebox score and the explosive on-screen meeting of Robert De Niro (as the ne’er-do-well gambler, Johnny Boy) and Harvey Keitel (as Charlie, a conflicted…
Ryan Demers, a Denver-based filmmaker, is the co-founder of Gaylord St. Productions, and has managed the impressive feat of helming two independent films without going completely bankrupt and abandoning the dream. The Honey Cooler, a farcical detective story set in the milieu of an economically depressed Denver rife with furries. In this week’s edition of Westword Book Club, Demers discusses his noir influences, politics, primary sources and trying to avoid being derivative.
Ania Gola-Kumor. One of Colorado’s greatest abstract painters is the star of Ania Gola-Kumor: Moving Paint, at Sandra Phillips Gallery. These large oil paintings, along with small works on paper that were done in oil stick and oil bar, represent both a continuation of Gola-Kumor’s longstanding interests and a new…
A trashy vampire flick in art-film drag, Kiss of the Damned satisfies on neither level. Drawing on a host of Euro-horror influences, including but far from limited to a synth score reminiscent of Dario Argento’s Goblin-performed soundtracks, Xan Cassavetes’s pastiche follows lonely bloodsucker Djuna (Josephine de la Baume) as she…
Who are you?” pleads a doomed man as Benedict Cumberbatch looms into his first close-up in Star Trek Into Darkness. The answer is Khan. And that’s not a spoiler — it’s a selling point. A less secretive director (i.e., all save the ghost of Stanley Kubrick) would trumpet that his…
Seemingly crafted to validate the fears of those conservatives who rage that the white man can’t get respect on the big screen these days, the smart-till-it-isn’t thriller Black Rock centers on a tense scene of hero-pantsing and gender inversion. The piece-of-shit bad guys, a couple of vets of our desert…
