http://www.kentucky.com/121/index.xml News, sports, and entertainment from Kentucky.com en-us Copyright 2008 Kentucky.com Movies 60 Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:02:26 EDT http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss McClatchy Interactive's Workbench webmaster@kentucky.com http://www.kentucky.com/485/story/448995.html http://www.kentucky.com/485/story/448995.html Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:34 EDT
The word "mystery" was dropped from the film's original title. The movie didn't lose the actual mystery Kit (Abigail Breslin) must solve. It is there in the second half of the new movie. There lies the problem.

The first half of Ann Peacock's adaptation of the Valerie Tripp book holds true to the American Girl theme. Kit lives in Cincinnati at the height of the Great Depression. She provides a spunky attitude in a world being devoured by poverty, crime and despair.

The young girl tries to deal with a world where her friends have to move away when their home is taken by the bank. It is a world where her father (Chris O'Donnell) leaves her life as he searches elsewhere for work.

Kit lives in a time when people have to band together to survive. That's a great theme for a family film. When "Kit Kittredge" stays focused on that element it is a first-rate story.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/485/story/449036.html http://www.kentucky.com/485/story/449036.html Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:54 EDT
No wonder the taxpaying public is irked at Hancock, the superhero who can't seem to limit his collateral damage even as he fights crime. Finally, a film for the grouch in the bunch who pesters his fellow moviegoers afterward by asking such questions as: "But who pays for all the broken stuff?"

Unfortunately, even with Smith's considerable charms and his proven track record as Independence Day weekend movie god, "Hancock" doesn't succeed as a truly satisfying holiday-movie blockbuster.

Sure, the film starts out well enough with its extended riff on the thorny issues that other superhero movies never seem to address. (What keeps flying avengers of justice from, say, running into birds? When it comes to Hancock, not much. He knocks out more of God's flying creatures than a 747 taking off from Los Angeles International Airport.) But as the movie unfolds, it gets progressively muddier in terms of tone and vision.

Wobbling at times toward anemic romance and then finally descending into a harsh, dark clutter of vaguely mythological angst, the film ends up feeling sort of like an M. Night Shyamalan "Unbreakable" wannabe.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/485/story/449043.html http://www.kentucky.com/485/story/449043.html Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:39 EDT
Superhero comedy? Social satire? Tragic love story?

They all swirl around in Will Smith's latest, but no sooner does director Peter Berg's film find a comfy rhythm than it jumps the tracks and becomes a different movie.

That pain in your neck is cinematic whiplash.

The first hour is a diverting inversion on the usual superhero cliches.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/485/story/444689.html http://www.kentucky.com/485/story/444689.html Fri, 27 Jun 2008 23:37 EDT
Some movies have taken the low road and (arguably) succeeded. "Caddyshack" turned a Baby Ruth bar floating in a swimming pool into one of the most appallingly funny sight gags in film history. The Farrelly brothers occasionally succeeded with "Kingpin" and "There's Something About Mary," the latter of which featured a raunchy yet all-natural substitute for hair gel.

A little bit of gross-out humor goes an awful long way, and this less-is-more idea apparently never occurred to the makers of "The Love Guru."

Mike Myers, who co-wrote the film and stars as the Guru Pitka, the title character, is a funny man. On "Saturday Night Live" and in the first Austin Powers movie he created memorable characters who, even when vulgar, had a touch of innocence that made their most juvenile moments forgivable, and sometimes oddly endearing.

Guru Pitka is a different story. Almost every other line he utters is a smutty double entendre delivered with an unwholesome leer, as if he's trying to grope the audience with his eyes. He's altogether creepy, and that's just with his clothes on.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/485/story/444421.html http://www.kentucky.com/485/story/444421.html Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:34 EDT
Genghis Khan, of course, is more than brutal; he will eat tigers for breakfast. The legendary 13th century conqueror, who controlled a fifth of the world at the height of his power, has been the protagonist of two previous Hollywood films. In one, he was played by John Wayne; in the other Omar Sharif. Neither film is remembered today, for good reason.

Directed by the Russian Sergei Bodrov ("Prisoner of the Mountains"), "Mongol" - which features an all-Asian cast and was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar this year - is a much more lasting work, doing justice to a man rivaled only by Alexander the Great in terms of mythical stature.

Oliver Stone tried encapsulating Alexander's life into one movie, only to discover the task was impossible. Bodrov knows better, using "Mongol" - the first of an intended trilogy - to center on Genghis Khan's formative years, when he still went by the name Temudgin and had not yet led Mongolia's warring tribes and factions to consolidate into a formidable whole.

Beginning with his boyhood, "Mongol" depicts Temudgin as a proud, defiant, indomitable warrior (charismatically played by the Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano) and doting husband to his wife Borte (Khula Chulunn). Or at least as doting as time allows, since he is frequently busy leading armies into bloody battle, rotting away in dank prisons or avoiding assassins' arrows and swords.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/485/story/444422.html http://www.kentucky.com/485/story/444422.html Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:34 EDT
Brooks Baekeland (Stephen Dillane) inherited the fortune his grandfather amassed with Bakelite plastics. When he married gorgeous Barbara Daly (Julianne Moore), his friends all agreed that the former model and would-be starlet was socially inferior. Still, her charisma and flair for emotional drama held Brooks in thrall.

Their son, Tony (Eddie Redmayne), a failure in his father's eyes, matured into a disturbed young man unnaturally attached to his domineering mother. As their relationship grows ever more twisted, dependent and mutually wounding, the drama builds to a devastating, destructive climax.

Director Tom Kalin ("Swoon") manages the difficult feat of being shocking without becoming sensationalistic. He wisely refuses to judge or over explain his characters, letting us make of their emotional ambiguities what we will. Although they inhabit a glamorous, globe-trotting world where appearances are all-important, the actors allow us to see the insecurities that the socialites' narcissism and snobbery disguise. Vanity and self-regard are poor substitutes for a genuine sense of self-worth.

Moore's performance as the unsympathetic porcelain beauty Barbara is fearless, especially as the story climaxes in taboo-shattering catastrophe. If ever there was a film to extinguish any envy over the lifestyles of the rich and famous, "Savage Grace" is it. ]]> http://www.kentucky.com/485/story/439363.html http://www.kentucky.com/485/story/439363.html Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:44 EDT
One appears in sharp-witted, humanistic "small" movies like "Little Miss Sunshine" and "Dan in Real Life" and the occasional smart comedy blockbuster like "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" - not to mention starring in "The Office," one of TV's edgiest comedies.

The other Steve Carell makes overinflated summer gobblers in which more attention is paid to the special effects than to the script - turkeys like "Evan Almighty" and now "Get Smart."

Carell would seem the perfect choice to reprise the role of '60s TV's Maxwell Smart, bumbling secret agent for a shadowy government agency known as CONTROL. Few actors so embody endearing ineptitude.

And every now and then you get a flash of what "Get Smart" might have been if Carell had cut loose - or if writers Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember (working with the characters created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry) or director Peter Segal (a veteran of Adam Sandler films) had gotten off their duffs and actually broken a sweat at being clever.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/485/story/432749.html http://www.kentucky.com/485/story/432749.html Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:12 EDT
The latest from writer/director M. Night Shyamalan ("Sixth Sense," "Signs") is an exercise in paranoia with ecological underpinnings. It starts out strong, but as has so often become the case with this filmmaker's idiosyncratic work, it gets lost along the way.

Basically, it's a half-hour "Twilight Zone" episode blown up to feature length.

In New York's Central Park one fine morning, walkers and joggers suddenly begin babbling and become disoriented, paralyzed and, finally, suicidal.

Shyamalan is at his best when depicting the mysterious affliction that spreads across the city, causing traffic cops to blow out their own brains and sending a shower of high-rise construction workers thudding into the pavement.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/485/story/432761.html http://www.kentucky.com/485/story/432761.html Fri, 13 Jun 2008 21:17 EDT
The story begins as the hunt for the Hulk heats up. Bruce Banner is on the run in Brazil, attempting to cure his condition with exotic medicinal plants before he's captured by Gen. Thunderbolt Ross, who wants to use his blood chemistry to create an army of super-soldiers. Director Louis Leterrier (of the high-velocity "Transporter" films) and cinematographer Peter Menzies make superb use of the mountainside shantytown where Banner has gone to ground.

The twisting maze of breakneck steps, narrow alleys and small rooftops becomes the scene of a breakneck, "Bourne"-worthy pursuit between the fugitive scientist and his would-be captors.

The film takes the form of a chase movie as Banner moves north, toward his lost love, Prof. Betty Ross, and a mysterious scientist called Mr. Blue, who has been asking for samples of Banner's gamma-irradiated blood in the search for an antidote. The route he travels allows for eye-catching Hulk battle sequences on a Virginia college campus and across New York City (why is the big climax never in Dubuque?).

The film, the second produced with creative control from Marvel Studios, continues the "Iron Man" practice of casting interesting character actors, not movie stars, as the principals. Edward Norton, one of the few American actors of his generation who can stare into a microscope without inspiring laughter, steps easily into the role of Dr. Bruce Banner. In his human form, he's given to nervous, rabbity glances, hoping to locate and outrun danger before he has to fight it. As his longtime antagonist Gen. Ross, William Hurt is a portrait in conflicted power, a man used to issuing orders, yet who can't control his rebellious daughter Betty or use the military might at his command effectively against the Hulk.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/484/story/453922.html http://www.kentucky.com/484/story/453922.html Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:01 EDT
Yet Smith's "Hancock," the tale of an anti-social boozer who happens to be a superhero, comes with an abrupt plot twist, one that has divided critics and the moviegoing public in the real world (Critics and everyone else can't agree. Now there's a real surprise).

For those who have yet to see "Hancock," we won't give the secret away, but it has something to do with why Charlize Theron's soccer-mom-style character doesn't want Smith's surly superhero anywhere near her family.

Critics generally thought the turn the movie takes halfway through was a cheat, spoiling what had been a promising idea that was a fresh twist on the superhero genre in its own right.

The people who turned "Hancock" into an instant blockbuster beg to differ - to the sum of $185 million worldwide at the box office in just a few days.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/484/story/453840.html http://www.kentucky.com/484/story/453840.html Sun, 06 Jul 2008 20:56 EDT
That raised the total for Sony's "Hancock" to $107.3 million since it opened Tuesday night to get a jump on the holiday.

It was a familiar place for Smith, one of Hollywood's most-consistent draws. "Hancock" is his fifth movie to open at No. 1 over the Fourth of July. The others were "Men in Black" and its sequel, "Independence Day" and "Wild Wild West."

"Will Smith, Mom, apple pie and the Fourth of July. It doesn't get any better," said Rory Bruer, head of distribution for Sony. "People just so relate to him and the characters that he plays. They totally embraced it as something different, something fresh."

The previous weekend's top flick, the Disney-Pixar animated tale "WALL-E," slipped to second place with $33.4 million. Its 10-day total is $128.1 million.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/484/story/451426.html http://www.kentucky.com/484/story/451426.html Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:57 EDT
His latest, "My Winnipeg," is something else again. Maddin calls it a "docu-fantasia." Canada's now-defunct documentary channel asked the director if he would be interested in doing something about his hometown - the midsized, mid-Canadian city - and Maddin said yes.

"I was urged to make it a personal one, not a real travelogue," he explained on the phone from Toronto recently. "I had never had any interest in making documentaries, there's too much work involved - objectivity, scientific detachment, all that - but when I was told to make it personal, I knew I could conduct all my research within my own heart, and so away I went. I just started walking the dog and daydreaming, coming back with some notes, and before I knew it I had enough material for Winnipeg Alexanderplatz. ... I easily could have had 16 hours of stuff."

The version Maddin made for theaters, however, is a mere 80 minutes - 80 minutes of fact and fiction, of '40s B-movie starlet Ann Savage playing Maddin's mom, of haunting images of frozen horses trapped in ice, of homeless people sleeping on skyscraper roofs, of Nazis trooping through downtown, as if Hitler had won the war. It is, like most of Maddin's work, dreamlike and deliriously odd.

"I can never seem to entirely wake up, nor do I want to," Maddin says. "There's just so much truth in everything you dream because your dreams ... come from within you, exclusively, and so they're true expressions of something.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/484/story/451689.html http://www.kentucky.com/484/story/451689.html Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:55 EDT
Smith's role as a superhero-gone-bad could be jarring to some moviegoers - but not his children and wife Jada Pinkett Smith.

"Fortunately, our kids are in the business so they kind of understand," the 39-year-old actor told Associated Press Television News at the red-carpet premiere of the film. "But it is such a bizarre shock for them to see daddy being mean. It was fantastic in our house."

The Hollywood couple's son Jaden co-starred with Smith in 2006's "The Pursuit of Happyness"; daughter Willow can now be seen in the family flick "Kit Kittredge: An American Girl."

(Smith's 15-year-old son, Trey, is from his previous marriage.)]]> http://www.kentucky.com/484/story/451241.html http://www.kentucky.com/484/story/451241.html Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:55 EDT
But Berg, the actor ("The Last Seduction," TV's "Chicago Hope") turned director, landed the gig. He heard about the project, and about Will Smith's interest in the role, when Berg was midway through shooting "The Kingdom," the Jamie Foxx/Jennifer Garner Middle East action pic.

"Michael Mann was a producer on 'The Kingdom,'" explained Berg, on the phone from Santa Monica last week. "I had wanted to do a superhero film for a while, and had tried to work with Will Smith, and then Michael said, 'We got this thing we're doing, and Will wants to talk to you about it.'

"Of course, I was there."

Although "Hancock" - with Charlize Theron and Jason Bateman in key roles - is dark, Berg says that the original screenplay, written by Vincent Ngo, was way more so. "You know the Nicolas Cage character in 'Leaving Las Vegas'?" he says, referring to the booze-soaked, suicidal scribe that won Cage an Oscar. "Well, Vincent's screenplay took a left turn from 'Leaving Las Vegas' ... We all loved the idea of that character, but weren't ever interested in making a film that tough."]]> http://www.kentucky.com/484/story/450610.html http://www.kentucky.com/484/story/450610.html Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:20 EDT
Several big movies set for release next year also were still rolling the cameras Wednesday.

In the five-week period ended June 24, the number of film permits increased 12 percent from 94 to 105, according to the nonprofit agency FilmL.A. Inc., which gets government permits for film producers. And during the week ended Tuesday, FilmL.A. obtained 21 permits, up from 13 in the same period a year ago, spokesman Todd Lindgren said.

The brisk activity seemed to belie assertions by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers that the industry had lapsed into a "de facto strike" because of uncertainty about the potential for a strike by the Screen Actors Guild.

"I wouldn't say it is the de facto strike that the AMPTP has mentioned," Lindgren said. "We are seeing the opposite."]]> http://www.kentucky.com/484/story/447262.html http://www.kentucky.com/484/story/447262.html Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:41 EDT
"We have taken no steps to initiate a strike authorization vote by the members of Screen Actors Guild," Union President Alan Rosenberg said in a statement Sunday. "Any talk about a strike or a management lockout at this point is simply a distraction."

The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers has taken out an advertisement in trade publications calling a strike "harmful and unnecessary." Citing $2.8 billion in lost wages, the ad says "We've completed four equitable and forward-thinking labor agreements. Let's get the fifth done."

The ad is scheduled to run in Monday's editions of Variety and Hollywood Reporter.

"The industry is shutting down because SAG's Hollywood leadership insisted on 11th-hour negotiations and dragging these talks into July so they can continue attacking AFTRA," AMPTP spokesman Jesse Hiestand said in a statement.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/484/story/448024.html http://www.kentucky.com/484/story/448024.html Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:34 EDT
Glamour, however, was in quite short supply for our band of film extras. Waiting around for hours in our 1940s period costumes, we slouched in the elegant wood paneled bar of a luxury hotel eating cold food from McDonald's, waiting to shoot a five-minute dining room scene. The lead actors had yet to even show up.

Still, it was a unique opportunity, one I had searched for off-and-on during the decade I have lived in Egypt - especially since this production is being touted as a rebirth of Egyptian cinema.

"The Passenger" has a cast full of Egyptian stars, topped by Sharif in a heralded comeback to Egyptian film after a 15-year absence. The movie has been billed by Culture Minister Farouk Hosni as a "return to the golden age of cinema."

The ministry itself is footing the bill for the film, the first time it has done so in 30 years, in effort to boost the flagging reputation of what was known as the Hollywood of the Middle East.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/484/story/448373.html http://www.kentucky.com/484/story/448373.html Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:15 EDT
The top 20 movies at U.S. and Canadian theaters Friday through Sunday, followed by distribution studio, gross, number of theater locations, average receipts per location, total gross and number of weeks in release, as compiled Monday by Media By Numbers LLC:

1. "Wall-E," Disney, $63,087,526, 3,992 locations, $15,803 average, $63,087,526, one week.

2. "Wanted," Universal, $50,927,085, 3,175 locations, $16,040 average, $50,927,085, one week.

3. "Get Smart," Warner Bros., $20,211,242, 3,915 locations, $5,163 average, $77,477,031, two weeks.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/484/story/446806.html http://www.kentucky.com/484/story/446806.html Sun, 29 Jun 2008 21:36 EDT
The contract between the Screen Actors Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers expires Monday, and negotiations have dragged on for weeks with no apparent headway.

SAG leaders have said they are willing to continue talking beyond the contract deadline. Yet their hard-line rhetoric and a squabble with another actors union could put performers on the sidelines, taking electricians, set-builders, caterers and other Hollywood working stiffs along with them.

"If you're a below-the-line worker, your blood is probably running cold, because they're the ones that took the biggest hit from the writers strike," said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp., which estimates the WGA walkout cost the town $2.5 billion in lost wages and other revenue.

A strike in July - or a potential actors lockout if producers decided to play tough - could delay the return of many fall TV shows, which normally would be going back into production then.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/121/story/281826.html http://www.kentucky.com/121/story/281826.html Thu, 10 Jan 2008 23:31 EST
Needless to say, that list will change, maybe take on a certain urgency, if you learn you have a terminal illness. What's the old adage? "Nothing focuses the mind like the knowledge of impending death."

That's the premise of Rob Reiner's engaging but well-worn comedy The Bucket List. Pair a rich health care mogul with a working-class mechanic in a hospital room, tell them both they have months to live, and let them work out a list. The rich guy will pay for it. The mechanic-philosopher will provide "meaning."

Jack Nicholson devours the scenery as hospital magnate Edward Cole. Morgan Freeman is Carter Chambers, who has had a real life, just not a lot of fun. The cancer patients, thrown together, decide to make their last months memorable, at least to themselves.

Theirs is a reluctant partnership. The rich guy is a loner, a bon vivant, a jerk who intentionally gets people's names wrong just to put them in their place. The mechanic is a kindly Jeopardy! fanatic, a reader, whose wife and grown children love him. One has sacrificed family for a lifestyle and wealth, the other has given up himself for his family.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/121/story/281827.html http://www.kentucky.com/121/story/281827.html Thu, 10 Jan 2008 23:32 EST
A tender redemptive tale of two boys who grow up to be men, with one taking much longer to "grow up" than the other, it reminds us that guilt endures even when relationships don't.

But if there is any claim to "epic" in this film based on the novel by Khaled Hosseini, it is its vivid depiction of the consequences of "Islamo-fascism," a before-and-after picture of Afghanistan that shows a land where civilization came to an abrupt end. You'd swear this Afghan Killing Fields was science fiction if we hadn't already watched it happen.

In 1978, Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi) is a child of wealth, a passive, sensitive boy who likes to "make up stories."

Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada, an open-faced wonder) is the son of Amir's family servant, an illiterate innocent who is Amir's best friend, his protector. They are like brothers. They do everything together and are at their very best when they fly and fight their kite at Kabul's big kite festival. When they swoop in and cut the string of a foe, no one is better at running down and claiming the vanquished toy than Hassan, the greatest kite runner of them all.]]> http://www.kentucky.com/121/story/114420.html http://www.kentucky.com/121/story/114420.html Tue, 03 Jul 2007 13:16 EDT