Well, this was a first. An artist has a new album to promote – in this case, it’s Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro, who are releasing The Great Escape Artist, their fourth album and first since 2003 – and he agrees to an interview…but wasn’t expecting to talk about music. He thought we were supposed to talk about guy stuff, while we came armed with a bunch of questions about music and, ahem, one question about porn. Somewhere in the middle, though, we found common ground. Bullz-Eye: Maybe it’s just me, but it does not feel like it’s been eight…
Author: David Medsker
“Footloose” is the perfect kind of property to remake because, $80 million in 1984 dollars be damned, the original is a bad, bad movie. The writing is stilted, the acting is spotty, and the story is flat-out ridiculous. The 2011 version has its share of ridiculous moments as well (angry dancing, anyone?), but the story structure is far superior to the original, and the dialogue is much snappier. While it doesn’t excuse Hollywood and their tendency to prefer the established property, regardless of its quality, over a new idea, at least they’re getting better at making the reboots watchable. After…
Quentin Tarantino’s seminal “Pulp Fiction” has become such an integral part of the mainstream culture that it’s easy to take the movie for granted. Indeed, some will blame “Pulp Fiction” for being the film that launched a thousand shitty indie movies. (“2 Days in the Valley,” stand up. Now, walk slowly out of the room.) What people should remember is that “Pulp Fiction,” lousy knockoffs aside, forever changed what we should expect from a movie, in terms of its dialogue, characters and story structure. Its influence is apparent in movies as far-ranging as “Grosse Pointe Blank,” “Go” and “Memento.” While…
It is not easy to mix comedy with tragedy. Even Oscar-winning movies like “As Good As It Gets” had difficulty finding the right balance. “50/50” actually bests “As Good As It Gets” in a few respects, but rhythm eludes the movie from the very beginning. It hits all the right emotional chords, but it hits them like they’re targets in a drive-by shooting, fleeing the scene before the audience has had a chance to survey the damage and contemplate what’s just happened. In spite of this, “50/50” is a very entertaining and touching movie. With a different balance of love…
Michael Lewis surely had no idea what was about to happen when he followed Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane during the 2002 season for the purposes of writing a novel. At best, he was probably hoping for some insight into the mind of the first former big league player to ever become a GM, and what kind of mindset it takes to make the jump from dugout to corner office. What he uncovered, quite literally, changed the game; the resulting book, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” espoused the virtues of sabermetrics, a numbers-driven philosophy that found…
“Glee” creator Ryan Murphy has talked of remaking “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” and that makes sense given his recent Gleeification of the movie, but here’s the thing: this is one movie that should not be remade under any circumstances, and we don’t say this because we consider the original to be beyond reproach. It’s for the opposite reason – the original is incredibly flawed, which is what makes it such a fascinating viewing experience. Anyone who remade the movie would only try to improve it, and to do so would be missing the point completely. The beauty of “Rocky…
It would have been very easy for a movie like “Contagion” to push the panic button and hold it down, but it does something much smarter – it simply allows the events to unfold with little personal commentary to sully the narrative. Even better, the movie dares to take the seldom-traveled path between pre-epidemic containment (“Outbreak”) and post-apocalyptic wasteland (pick any zombie movie other than “Shaun of the Dead”). Like other movies with multiple narratives, some threads go dark for long periods of time while others disappear unexpectedly, and the fact that the movie doesn’t hit the panic button means…
Whenever a studio decides to remake a movie, the news is usually met with two responses. The first response: Hollywood is out of ideas. This one is largely true, as the marquees from this summer will readily attest (“Transformers,” “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Cars,” “X-Men,” “Fast Five,” plus three more superhero movies). The second response: the original movie is a classic, and shouldn’t be touched. This one is almost never true; while many of the movies that studios choose to remake probably shouldn’t be, that is not to say that they cannot be improved upon. (Of course, ask us about…
Movies, unlike albums, don’t have the luxury of being “growers.” They can’t start with the six-minute ambient piece and work their way to the big hit. They’re constructed like Now! compilations, front-loaded with the biggest hits and designed to bombard the viewer into submission. “30 Minutes or Less,” the new comedy from “Zombieland” director Ruben Fleischer, is built like Radiohead’s Kid A (it’s inferior to Kid A, of course, but go with us on this). The overall experience is a satisfying one, but it will try the patience of a saint along the way. Simply put, the first 30 minutes…
God help us, we’re all the way down to the ‘switched bodies’ plot getting a raunchy makeover, as if anyone asked for that. To be fair, “The Change-Up” had the potential to be much better than it is, but the filmmakers clearly mistook raunchiness for a complete lack of restraint. Fools. The best raunch-coms are the ones that know those two ideas are not mutually exclusive. Dave (Jason Bateman) and Mitch (Ryan Reynolds) have been friends since childhood, which might explain why there’s still a connection, if a bit tenuous, as they reach their late 30s. Dave is a successful…