Bill Broyles has one of the more diverse résumés that you are likely to find. He served in the Marines during the Vietnam War. He was once the editor of “Newsweek” magazine. Recently, he has dabbled in screenplays, and befriending Tom Hanks early on has proven to be rather fortuitous (he worked on “Apollo 13,” “Cast Away,” and “The Polar Express”). Now promoting the March 7 release of “Jarhead” on DVD, Broyles chatted with Bullz-Eye about the many war-themed projects he has done, the nonsensical ending to “Planet of the Apes,” and why people find “The Polar Express” so creepy.…
Author: David Medsker
Q: How does a snowboarder introduce himself? A: He turns around, waves and says, “Sorry, dude!” Obviously, a skier wrote that joke, but even the skier who came up with that joke would find lots to love about “First Descent.” There is some exhilarating camerawork of the best of the best doing things that they didn’t even know they were capable of doing. The easy way out would be to describe it as a Warren Miller movie for ‘boarders, but it is actually much more than that. While it deals with the stars of the present, it also includes a…
As a movie director, Joe Roth is a great producer, and even that is stretching the truth a bit, to be perfectly honest; recent movies he’s produced include “Daddy Day Care,” “Hollywood Homicide,” and “Tears of the Sun.” His directorial credits – which, let’s not kid anyone, are debits – are an Enron-esque list of money hemorrhaging disasters, including “American Sweethearts,” “Christmas with the Kranks,” and even “Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise.” His latest money pit is “Freedomland,” a crime thriller that pretends to be both a child abduction mystery and biting commentary on race relations, but…
Full disclosure: I cannot stand the sound of Neil Young’s voice. It makes me want to punch babies. Which is why, for the longest time, I did not like Neil Young’s songs. Over time, I heard his songs covered by Roxy Music, the Pixies and Duran Duran, and realized that the songs were good; it was the voice that blew chunks. Now comes a concert movie, “Neil Young: Heart of Gold,” and I am assigned to cover it. This is patently unfair to Young, of course, so I try my damndest to find someone, anyone, who likes Neil Young to…
Assembling a list of deep cuts from the Beatles is one of the grandest exercises in futility that we’ve ever attempted. Is there anyone who doesn’t know all of these songs? Consider the following: • The Beatles had 47 Top 40 hits in a six-and-a-half year period. The Stones, by comparison, racked up 41 Top 40 singles, but needed 25 years to do it. • Those 47 Top 40 hits do not include any of the following songs: “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” “In My Life,” “If I Fell,” “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” “Drive My Car,”…
As movie critics, it is our responsibility to dissect the production, direction, writing, acting and execution of a film and then determine its overall worth. Those rules went completely out the window while watching “Final Destination 3.” Quite simply, the 17-year-old version of me would have loved this movie, and as a result, the considerably older version of me wound up doing the same. The entire movie is preposterous, of course; the series of events that triggers each death sequence requires belief in both Rube Goldbergian precision and the outer limits of chaos theory. And that is what makes them…
In the movie “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” there is a sequence where the filmmakers explain how Enron would use mark-to-market accounting principles to book future earnings, which may or may not exist in actuality, as present day revenue. Likewise, those same people found a way to take any division that was hemorrhaging money – which was nearly every division, really – and shift those debts into shell companies whose “profits” would not show up on Enron’s bottom line. As CYA maneuvers go, it was a brilliant one. Of course, it was also horribly flawed, since you can’t…
This may be the only time that I go on record as saying “Recognize” in reference to a married couple that writes for “Spirituality and Practice.” The Rotten Tomatoes capsule of their review of “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,” which says that it is, “…an excruciatingly boring morality tale with poorly developed characters and a big spiritual finale that sputters,” sums up my feelings for the movie rather well. However, I don’t expect us to be friends forever; while they were at it, they gave positive reviews to “Air Force One,” “Rent” and “Syriana.” This time, though, they got…
Ah, the dreaded Thursday night screening. That alone tells you that the studio knows that they’re sitting on a turkey (case in point: our last Thursday screening was “Aeon Flux”; so was “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo”), since they timed the screening just late enough to prevent print outlets from telling the world how much their movie sucked ass. Luckily for us – and more importantly, luckily for you, our beloved readers – we are not print media, and I am here to tell you that the needless remake of “When a Stranger Calls,” indeed, sucks ass. The most astonishing part…
Did you know that “Annapolis” is a boxing movie? Neither did I, until the movie started rolling. Is there any mention of that in the trailer of the TV ads, or are they all built around that “Officer and a Gentleman” nonsense? Was it the poor performance of “Cinderella Man” that convinced the studio to bury the boxing angle? No matter, the movie isn’t any good either way. “Annapolis” takes way too many elements from the aforementioned Gere/Gossett movie, but that’s not its biggest problem. Its fatal flaw is that it doesn’t contain a hint of emotional depth, or give…