movie Page 11 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Not Minding That It Hurts
Little Boy Blues is Malcolm Jones’ beautiful memoir about growing up with his mother (and sometimes, his father) in North Carolina in the late Fifties and early Sixties. It’s my favorite kind of memoir—understated, succinct, honed. The prose is precise without being delicate: “My father was a quiet...
<i>Chocolate </i>Is A Martial-Arts Classic If You Just Focus On The Kicking
So Chocolate is not Chocolat, the 2000 Johnny Depp/Juliet Binoche movie where people eat chocolate from a particular shop and it somehow makes them fall in love with each other. Chocolat is the sort of movie where you know it takes place in France because people speak English in French accents. It w...
Lots Of Athletes Are Identically Excited About This Mediocre Movie
That Angelina Jolie-produced movie about Olympic runner and World War II P.O.W. Louis Zamperini comes out on Blu-ray today. Know how we know? The totally organic announcements from a whole mess of athletes (as noticed by Dave Lozo):...
<i>Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry </i>Is Acidic B-Movie Nihilism Done Right
The car-chase movies of the '70s really only had one plot: Someone drives a muscle car really fast, hoping to avoid police cars, some of which end up driving into streams or ponds. But each movie found a vastly different way to tell that one story. Vanishing Point, the genre's real masterpiece, to...
<i>Iron Monkey </i>Is An Underrated Goof From Hong Kong's '90s Golden Era
Somehow, in the early '90s, the Hong Kong film industry just had the action movie figured out. You'll see something like this every once in a while: A particular locale just going ham on some particular art form. It's like New York rap in the mid-'90s: All these classics coming out at a dizzying s...
Confusion Is Sex: <i>It Follows</i>, Reviewed
It's not unusual for a horror movie to connect sex with death: Scream even made a joke of the fact that the best way to stay alive in a slasher flick is to be a virgin, since the horny teens always get offed first. So there's not much novelty to the fact that the much-hyped indie It Follows draw...
Vin Diesel's Gloriously Absurd <i>XXX </i>Is Mountain Dew For The Soul
XXX, the fantastically stupid Vin Diesel vehicle from 2002, starts with a shaky premise: James Bond is done. The world has changed, and he can't survive. You can understand how someone might've arrived at that conclusion. The Pierce Brosnan era was nearing its bloated end, and Die Another Day, with ...
Will Smith Is A Blank Slate Now, And <i>Focus </i>Doesn't Help
Most movie stars charm us by creating the illusion that we know them. Tom Cruise's appeal comes in large part from our identification with his intense, full-throttle performances; the Rock, his eyebrow always arched in a self-mocking way, lets us in on the joke that action movies are preposter...
<i>Headhunters </i>Proves That Norway Is Secretly A Super-Messed-Up Place
For a non-fan, the whole idea of the Nordic noir phenomenon can feel a bit strange: An entire genre of mass-market paperback thrillers dedicated to the idea that people in some of the world's cleanest, brightest, richest, most polite countries are really doing unspeakable things to each other behi...
Marshawn Lynch Made A Movie About His Life And It Looks Really Bad
Listen, I'm as confused as you are, but this is appears to be a promo for a movie about the life of Marshawn Lynch, starring Marshawn Lynch. It looks like an extremely bad movie! ...
Al Pacino's Worst Movie Ever Is <i>Revolution</i>
Flipping around cable, I land on 1993's Carlito's Way and check in for a few scenes of a lurid, pulpy, and very Brian De Palma movie that's arguably like Scarface with an interior life. And as Al Pacino struts and chews his way through another role with another weird accent that ultimately leave...
<i>The Running Man</i>'s Goofy, Violent Dystopia Hasn't Arrived Yet, Alas
Right around New Year's Day, I saw a bit of online chatter pointing out that we were entering the year depicted in Back to the Future II, and that to our great disappointment, we still don't have hoverboards or '80s-themed diners. Tragic as that may be, I'm more concerned that we're now only two yea...
Let's Cast The ESPN Movie!
Yesterday, James Andrew Miller, one of the co-authors of the ESPN oral history Those Guys Have All The Fun, announced on Twitter that a movie of the book is currently in the works, and that he's writing the script. We're hoping the script features some suit telling Keith Olbermann to turn in his b...
And Now, Russell Wilson Reviews <i>Fifty Shades Of Grey</i>
Russell Wilson saw Fifty Shades of Grey last night, and he has some thoughts....
The Loopy <i>Project A</i> Is Jackie Chan At His Most Violently Ridiculous
There's a moment in the 1983 Jackie Chan movie Project A where he's dangling from a clock tower's minute hand, clinging for dear life as people watch him from stories below. Chan has always been a big silent-comedy head, and the scene was directly inspired by a famous stunt that Harold Lloyd pulle...
You Only Smirk Twice: <i>Kingsman: The Secret Service</i>, Reviewed
At a time when our superhero movies and action films are often dressed in dark tones, the gleefully sarcastic and proudly hyper-violent Kingsman: The Secret Service ought to be a relief. Eschewing the trend of brooding characters nursing mournful back stories, this adaptation of Mark Millar and D...
Jason Statham Will Hopefully Never Stop Making Movies Like <i>Homefront</i>
There are things you expect to see in a Jason Statham movie, and 2012's Homefront has those things: kicks, headbutts, armbars, heads smashed through car windows, weary neck-stretches, imperiled little kids, muttered warnings not to fuck with Jason Statham. It also has James Franco banging Winona Ryd...
Dodge This: The Lousy, Endless <i>Jupiter Ascending, </i>Reviewed
1. Why did The Matrix work? For all its pseudo-philosophy and whiz-bang effects, for all its blue-pill-red-pill This is all an illusion sci-fi wonkery, may I humbly suggest that it was Keanu Reeves all along? Without him, you have a fun, expansive vision that may have never escaped its creators' h...
Beautiful Baltimore Bums
My father was born and raised in New York City. He idolized, among others, Sid Caesar, Walt Kelly, and Adlai Stevenson. As his son, I campaigned for Mondale/Ferraro when I was in the 8th grade, drew anti-Reagan political cartoons for my social studies class, and hung a huge Keith Haring "Free South ...
The Terse, Explosive <i>Drug War </i>Is Nearly As Hard As <i>Hard Boiled </i>Itself
The Hong Kong shoot-'em-up is a venerated cinematic genre, one that blew a whole lot of minds and changed the way all movies look, but it really had a pretty short shelf life. The halcyon era really only lasted about seven years: From 1986, when John Woo made the groundbreaking gangster flick A Bett...