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Cinema Pacific, the annual festival featuring films from Pacific-bordering countries, is in full swing, and like any good film festival there is a dizzying array of options for movie buffs and casual cinemagoers alike to choose from. This year’s focus will be on films and filmmakers from Singapore, Mexico and the U.S. West Coast. Continue reading
The Place Beyond the Pines is an ambitious, beautifully filmed follow-up to director/co-writer Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine (2010). That bleak bruise of an indie darling gave a stamp of greatness to the careers of Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, and it divided viewers, who thought it was a searing portrait of a dissolving marriage — or thought it had little to say. Continue reading
As my old Seattle friend Big Gay Bob once told me years ago over gin fizzes: “Honey, nobody has more fun than the gays.” It’s true: Not only do gay people tend to earn more, dress better and screw more often than straight folk, but they really do know how to cut a rug, if you know what I mean. I’d even take this one step further and argue that were it not for the gays, this would be one bleak, narrow existence. Continue reading
It’s finally getting a little easier to look at Gael García Bernal and not see the young man from Y Tu Mamá También. García Bernal has hardly seemed to age since that 2002 film, but as René Saavedra, in the Oscar-nominated Chilean film No, he has a scrappy beard dotted with just enough gray to make him believable as the father of a young son. Continue reading
Two sets of fingerprints are smeared all over The Host, a quiet sci-fi story about a strange invasion. The film is based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer, whose weaknesses as a writer have been plentifully detailed. Her dialogue is leaden, her adjectives overused, her love triangles — or squares — so predictable that my date leaned over, midway through The Host, to say of its matching blond hunks, “I’m confused about which one is Robert Pattinson and which is the werewolf guy.” Continue reading
Yes, yes, yes: Spring Breakers, the latest film by aging wunderkind Harmony Korine, is a veritable fiesta of tits and ass. And we’re not talking about your daddy’s Mousketeer variety of bikini-and-tramp-crack-clad tits and ass, a’la Annette Funicello, but the sort of gone-wild nekkid tits and ass that shake and undulate in drunken slow motion, so that even on the most toned collegiate body you can see ripples of cellulose motoring around under the burnt umber of tanned skin. Continue reading
Once upon a time, I was an Oz purist. Not for the 1939 movie, though I liked it well enough, but for L. Frank Baum’s books, which I read until they were ragged. The first time I saw the cover of Wicked, Gregory Maguire’s novel about the Wicked Witch of the West, I stopped dead, thinking: One does not do that to Oz. Continue reading
Filmmaker Peter Wang’s In the Family came to him in a mental flash. “I had a glimpse of this family, the family at the center of the movie — two dads playing soccer with their kids,” Wang tells EW. It seems simple; a fleeting spark that captures the imagination, but Wang’s feature-length directorial debut tackles some complex issues — death, same-sex partnership in the South, guardianship, a custody battle — and it does so with unconventional filmmaking. Continue reading
It’s never too late to start watching the Up movies. The British documentary series began in 1964 with Seven Up, in which children from varied socio-economic backgrounds were interviewed. The series follows 14 (give or take) of these kids, revisiting their lives every seven years. Continue reading
On May 24, 1990, in Oakland, Calif., a car bomb exploded beneath the seats of Earth First! activists Darryl Cherney and Judi Bari. Cherney escaped with minor injuries while Bari, who had to be cut out of the car, was disabled by the blast. Before Bari was out of the hospital, the duo found themselves as the main suspects in the attack. Continue reading