Movies

I’ve been told Tony Scott, the shameless pimp responsible for such box-office bait jobs as Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop 2, is the younger brother of Oscar-nominated director Ridley Scott, but I’m not so sure. Where’s the proof? I want to see a birth certificate. Because, just having sat through Prometheus, I’ve come to the conclusion that Hollywood has hatched the boldest conspiracy since they sealed Uncle Walt’s nuts in a Mason jar of formaldehyde.

When a movie poster trumpets not the film’s stars but that it’s “From the producers of Alice in Wonderland,” we should see that as a bright and telling signpost: The film to come will be full of brief flashes and thin shadows, hollowness and pretty costumes, a mass-produced print hung in an antique frame. 

First Position is an unfussy, enjoyable documentary that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is: an inspirational sports movie about young dancers hoping to enter the highly competitive world of professional ballet.

It’s possible that Joss Whedon’s true calling in life is to write dialogue for Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark. Or maybe RDJ was born to speak Whedon’s quippy, pop-culture-laced dialogue, which sounds as natural coming from Downey’s mouth as it did from Sarah Michelle Gellar’s when she played Whedon’s best-known creation, vampire slayer Buffy Summers.

As an archetypal resident of L.A.’s shadier streets, the Dude abides, a latter-day California Buddha in the Holy Temple of Slackerdom, plum mystic and stoned immaculate, a knocker of pins, drinker of Caucasians. “He’s the man for his time and place,” says the man in the cowboy hat, his purple baritone of a voice rumbling like warm milk in your stomach.

Once upon a time, there was a blonde girl in an alley, and she looked like easy prey for a hungry vampire. But that girl’s name was Buffy, and the vampire was totally wrong. 

Once upon a time, and another time, and another time before that, there was a group of kids, and when they thought they were going to have a nice weekend in a cabin in the woods, they were totally wrong. 

Director Antony Cordier’s Four Lovers is a film that travels far beyond the borders of most comfort zones. When Rachel (Marina Foïs) brings home new friends Vincent (Nicolas Duvauchelle) and his wife Teri (Élodie Bouchez) to have dinner with her and husband Franck (Roschdy Zem), there is distinct chemistry among the four. 

The Oscar-nominated Polish film In Darkness truly resides in darkness. There is the dank, flickering dimness of the sewer system where a small group of Polish Jews hides after their ghetto is murderously hollowed out by Nazis; there’s the looming shadow cast by the city worker upon whom this starving, hunted group is forced to place its tenuous trust; and overwhelming everything is the black hole of the Holocaust, extinguishing every glimmer of human hope.

Very likely not coming any time soon, if ever, to a theater near you is a locally produced work-in-progress of guerilla moviemaking that might just qualify as the biggest farce and most extravagantly produced anti-event since Geraldo Rivera cracked open Al Capone’s vault to a big fart of dust.

George Clinton describes their music as “too black for white people, to white for black people,” and Circle Jerk singer Keith Morris says of their status, “If there’s twelve levels, they’re on the thirteenth level.”

If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front cuts from dramatic media footage, including the burning of a $12-million ski resort at Vail, Colo., and the arson at the University of Washington Center for Urban Horticulture, to the streets of New York City, where activist and ecosaboteur Daniel McGowan was living in 2005.