More people may know Christopher McDonald for his role as the villainous Shooter McGavin in “Happy Gilmore,” but given that his IMDb listing credits him with having appeared in 83 films and making 58 television appearances as an actor, he can take comfort in the knowledge that plenty of people recognize him for a lot of other projects, too. One of McDonald’s most recent films is the independent comedy “Splinterheads,” and Bullz-Eye had a chance to chat with him in connection with its recent DVD release. Naturally, we also asked him about as many of his other past gigs as…
Author: David Medsker
You can see why Martin Scorsese would be attracted to a property like Dennis Lehane’s “Shutter Island.” Clint Eastwood and Ben Affleck had great success (or at least acclaim) adapting the Lehane novels “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone,” respectively, and Scorsese hadn’t directed a straight-up thriller in almost 20 years. On paper, it’s a genius move. In execution, it is a group of very talented people making a rather predictable movie. Sure, it looks great, but so what? Set in the year 1954, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) travels to Shutter Island, a remote island in the Boston…
“Valentine’s Day” is a magic trick of a movie; you’ll be dazzled by its tricks and surprises as they happen, only to realize later that you were in fact baffled by bullshit. For as many moving parts as it has, it does a good job getting all of the characters to intersect – think of it as “Crash, with Love” – but the characters don’t do anything that you haven’t seen a dozen times before. The entire movie takes place on one Valentine’s Day. Reed (Ashton Kutcher) runs a flower shop. He proposes to his girlfriend Morley (Jessica Alba) first…
Perhaps the worst thing you can say about “More Than a Game,” the documentary that follows four young basketball players as they go from fifth-grade Cinderellas to high school powerhouses, is that the story is so similar in structure to Disney sports dramas like “The Greatest Game Ever Played” and “Glory Road” that it’s hard to believe the plot wasn’t massaged a little in order to represent those movies. But that’s the thing about these stories – no matter the sport, or occupation, they all begin in the same place, one of insurmountable odds. If the story of these boys’…
There are times when batshit crazy is a good thing, when a movie flies in the face of convention in order to let it all hang out. The problem with “When in Rome” is that it confuses batshit crazy with noise and chaos, and what it leaves hanging out should be covered up. It’s poorly constructed, completely lacking in rhythm, lazy, and so far beneath Kristen Bell’s abilities as an actress, comedic or otherwise, that it’s looking up her skirt. Bell is Beth, a curator at the Guggenheim Museum (more on this later) who flies to Rome for the quickie…
It appears that the best way for we movie folk to get quoted on the interwebs these days is by coming up with some withering one-liner. I’ll be the first to admit that my writing style doesn’t accommodate that approach – also, it feels like pandering – but let’s just say that “Extraordinary Measures” inspired me, as it were. So here goes: there is so much barking in this movie, you’d think it took place in a dog pound. Ta-dum, boom. Don’t forget to tip your bartenders and waitresses. Brendan Fraser is John Crowley, an executive with Bristol Myers-Squibb and…
There is a story about Harry Knowles giving Elijah Wood a hard time for signing on to do “Flipper” (Knowles had seen the script, and knew it would tank, which it did), and Wood, who was 14 years old when he shot the movie, gave the most refreshing answer you could ask from an actor: “Hey, I got to play with dolphins for six months. What kid wouldn’t want to do that?” Moral of the story: it’s easy for us to criticize actors for their poor judgment when choosing scripts, but sometimes their decision to make a movie has absolutely…
There is scarcely a note of “It’s Complicated” that rings true. Everybody’s laughing at the beginning of nearly every scene, presumably because they’re so damn happy to be together. The children of the main characters all get along famously and are each other’s best friends. It’s the kind of movie that thinks New York hotel bars would expect people to dance to Tom Petty, and that a 60-year-old mother would get stoned before attending a party thrown by her children. Think of an alien race making a movie based on their observations of us; the events that take place are…
The 2007 “Alvin and the Chipmunks” wasn’t a great movie, but it also wasn’t terrible, which actually makes it the perfect candidate for a sequel, since there is room for improvement. (The fact that it grossed $217 million didn’t hurt, either.) Fox should have considered themselves lucky that the movie was such a hit in spite of its shortcomings; instead, it appears that they thought that they put too much effort into it the first time around, because the most clever thing about “Alvin & the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel” is the title. After a near-fatal accident lands Dave Seville (Jason…
This has been an extraordinary year for animation, from stop-motion (“Coraline,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox”) to CGI (“Up,” “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs”). The most pleasant surprise though, for my money, is “The Princess and the Frog,” Disney’s first traditional 2D feature in five years. Perhaps the most shocking thing about “Princess” is that the person who led the charge to re-launch the hand-drawn division was none other than John Lasseter, the #1 dog at Pixar. And God love him for it: the public deserved better than to have 2004’s “Home on the Range”…