In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, director David Zucker said distributor Vivendi Entertainment did not screen An American Carol in advance for reviews because 'those [who] don't like the politics will tend to label the film as `not funny.' '' The implication, of course, is that movie critics are a pitchfork-and-torch mob of raging leftist liberals who will tear down anything that opposes their personal ideologies.
When authors Rachel Cohn and David Levithan decided to collaborate on the novel Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, about two teenagers who meet and fall in love over the course of a single night in the New York City underground music scene, they took turns writing alternate chapters -- Cohn wrote Norah's and Levithan wrote Nick's.
Early on in the documentary Religulous, stand-up comedian/political commentator Bill Maher states his thesis -- ''Religion is detrimental to humanity'' -- and then spends the rest of the movie hopping around the world, trying to prove it.
The problem with most movie romances -- the thing that makes so many of them tough to sit through -- is that you're usually just waiting for the couple to get on with it and realize they're made for each other, so you can go home and continue about your business.
Only the meanest of grouches can resist a talking-animal movie. But no one, absolutely no one, is immune to the charms of a talking-dog picture. Even a film as shabby and humdrum as Beverly Hills Chihuahua, which never musters up the wit and beauty of a single frame of Lady and the Tramp, is not without its pleasures.
The home video release of the summer blockbuster Iron Man (Paramount Home Entertainment, $40 for the two-disc DVD and Blu-ray versions, $35 for the single-disc) comes packed with as many cool goodies as Tony Stark's armor. The movie, of course, is smashing entertainment, taking a not-so-popular comic-book and turning its characters into household names.
File this under the pleasant surprise category: Election, Alexander Payne's superb satire of American politics set in a high school, will get the high-definition treatment on Blu-ray disc on Jan. 20 -- Inauguration Day -- courtesy of Paramount Home Entertainment. Other catalog titles the studio is preparing to release on the format include Ghost, the Farrelly Brothers comedy The Heartbreak Kid and last year's Oscar-nominated Into the Wild.
Jasira Maroun, the 13-year-old Lebanese-American girl at the center of Towelhead, endures an endless number of indignities, humiliations and transgressions during the two-hour movie: racial epithets, cruel classmates, an abusive father, a pedophilic neighbor.
If the word ''cool'' hadn't already existed, it would had to have been invented for Paul Newman, who died Friday at age 83 after a long battle with lung cancer.
SMALL SCREEN Friday Night Lights (9 p.m. Wednesday, DirecTV) -- You pathetic Luddite fools still clinging to 20th century technology have to wait until February, when West Texas' sexiest, if not necessarily most skilled, high-school football team returns to NBC. But if you've got DirecTV's satellite service, you can see Friday Night Lights' third season debut on channel 101. Dillon High has a new principal, a new quarterback and a whole new set of illicit romances to stew over.
If the word ''cool'' hadn't already existed, it would had to have been invented for Paul Newman, who died Friday at age 83 after a long battle with lung cancer. Newman became a bona fide star after just his second movie, 1956's Somebody Up There Likes Me, a boxing drama in which he played Rocky Graziano, a role originally intended for another icon of cool, James Dean.
For further proof that actor Shia LaBeouf is a Hollywood superstar in the making, check out Eagle Eye, a ridiculous wrongly-accused-guy-on-the-run thriller in which the actor spends most of his screen time running, and yet still manages to hold the movie together. Barely.
Towelhead, the film directorial debut of Alan Ball, is just as provocative and disquieting as his previous work (he wrote American Beauty and created HBO's Six Feet Under and True Blood). It may even be more unsettling. Right from the opening scene, in which a man helps his 13-year-old stepdaughter with a bit of personal hygiene he has no business whatsoever conducting, the movie rattles you, makes you squirm in your seat.
In one of the new featurettes found on The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration Giftset (Paramount, $70 DVD, $125 Blu-ray), actor Alec Baldwin compares the first film in the trilogy to a drug. ''When it's on, you're gonna watch it whether you want to or not,'' he says.
SMALL SCREEN Heroes (9 p.m. Monday, NBC) -- Returning to the air for the first time since the Hollywood writers' strike cut its second season abruptly short 10 months ago, this energetic sci-fi series tries to make up for lost time with a slam-bang two-hour episode that clears up one bunch of questions at the same time it asks another. Chief among the former: We're finally going to find out what secret that mysterious Angela is keeping.
Has Neil LaBute lost it? The writer-director of merciless provocations such as In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors and The Shape of Things is suddenly one movie away from hack status. In his last film, a remake of The Wicker Man, he had Nicolas Cage running around slugging women in the face while dressed in a bear suit.
Since its premiere at last year's Tribeca Film Festival, The Man of Two Havanas, Vivien Lesnik Weisman's documentary about her controversial father Max, has been screened around the world, from Arkansas to Rhode Island, Germany to Switzerland.
The first time Robert De Niro and Al Pacino acted in the same movie (The Godfather Part II), they never appeared onscreen together. The second time they co-starred in a film (Heat), they shared just one meaty scene.
Revered by anyone who grew up in the 1980s, writer-director John Hughes' first three movies -- Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Weird Science -- are emblematic of the decade of tall hair and synth pop. Although the films have been previously released on DVD several times, the new High School Flashback Collection (Universal, $40), which collects the trilogy in a metal tin shaped to resemble a high school locker, marks the first time the movies have received any substantial supplements.
SMALL SCREEN It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (10 p.m. Thursday, FX) -- The five slackers at the heart of this viciously funny show have continually set new standards for sitcom sociopathy: posing as Vietnam vets to get free drinks, sleeping with one another's mothers for revenge, starting sweatshops and stealing dumpster babies. Now, opening their who-would-have-believed-it fourth season with back-to-back episodes, they've reached a new comic frontier -- cannibalism. Not for the squeamish or vegetarian...
Filmmaking brothers Joel and Ethan Coen have always liked to sprinkle a dash of misanthropy into their comedies, taking more than a little delight in the dire dilemmas of their protagonists, mired in circumstances usually of their own idiotic making.
The women in The Women are wealthy New Yorkers who spend their days shopping, getting their nails done, gossiping, having lunch -- wait, does any of this sound scarily familiar? Writer-director Diane English (from TV's Murphy Brown) spent 13 years trying to get this remake of the 1939 George Cukor satire off the ground, and she managed to do it the same year Sex and the City became a movie. How's that for bad timing?
SMALL SCREEN Fringe (8 p.m. Tuesday, Fox) -- When a jet lands at Boston's Logan Airport with no signs of life, the FBI quickly rules out the most likely cause -- airline food -- and decides there's only one person who can figure out what happened, a scientist known as our generation's Einstein. Unfortunately, he's been locked in the nuthouse for the past 17 years. This new series is as weird and engrossing as Lost, and not coincidentally created by the same executive producer, J.J. Abrams.
The fall movie season arrives, which means the superheroes go on vacation, the sequels take a breather and the literary adaptations, costume dramas and Oscar-hopeful pictures start arriving at the multiplex. Here is a list of some of the 50-plus movies heading to theaters between now and Thanksgiving. Release dates are subject to change.
Although it came and went so quickly this summer most people haven't even heard of it, The Promotion (The Weinstein Co., $20) arrives on DVD with a nice assortment of extras. The directorial debut of former screenwriter Steven Conrad (The Weather Man, The Pursuit of Happyness), the movie, about two supermarket employees (Seann William Scott and John C. Reilly) competing for a manager's job, is laugh-out-loud funny.
Pixar hit Wall-E will land in stores Nov. 18 in DVD and Blu-ray formats, along with an extensive collection of extras and, as is quickly becoming standard, a digital copy to watch on your iPod or laptop.
Soon after arriving at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, last January, where she had come to present her debut feature Frozen River, writer-director Courtney Hunt crossed paths with one of the famous filmmakers serving on the jury panel.
BIG SCREEN Frozen River (PG-13) -- Who says chick flicks are girly? Writer-director Courtney Hunt's debut is a harrowing and suspenseful look at motherhood, focusing on two women (Melissa Leo and Misty Upham) who smuggle illegal immigrants across the U.S.-Canada border in order to provide for their children. Story of film's making, 1M.
Based on the memoir by British writer Blake Morrison, When Did You Last See Your Father? uses its title to pose a penetrating question. When did you last see the man when he was himself -- not sick, not fading but healthy and vibrant? How you answer largely determines how you will respond to this gloomy little movie, which is frustratingly stagnant at times but ultimately a moving story about a dying father and the son who must come to terms with him.
I'd bet that sometime during the making of Transsiberian, writer-director Brad Anderson was tempted to call the movie Strangers on a Train but deferred out of reverence for Hitchcock.
Hunter S. Thompson was a hard man to pin down. His friends swore by him. But Thompson had an undeniable dark side. His abuse of drugs and drink could turn ugly. He lived like a hermit, had a cruel and confrontational streak and a world-class gun fetish.
Baghead opens at a film festival where the creator of a horrifically bad little movie called We Are Naked holds forth with the audience during a Q&A session, answering the usual questions of what the budget was (''less than $1,000'') and how the actors were found. The self-important director is oblivious to how awful his movie really is: At a film festival screening, in front of eager, forgiving crowds often filled with aspiring filmmakers, every picture is an Oscar contender, at least for a...
Traitor is Syriana for dummies, a globe-hopping, multi-character look at the war between America and Islamic terrorists that keeps things as relatively simple as an episode of 24. Not that there's anything wrong with that: 24 is a really good show. But it doesn't pretend to be something it's not, either.
There isn't a moment in What Happens in Vegas (20th Century Fox, $35 DVD, $40 Blu-ray) when you forget you're watching Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz -- instead of characters, they're playing concepts, which is why the movie just sits there. Any successful romantic comedy must make the viewer want the would-be lovers to get together. But in Vegas, you don't care because all you see is a pair of actors trying their hardest to be wacky.
Just in time for school, Universal Studios is dusting off John Hughes' trio of 1980s high school classics -- again -- but they're finally doing them right this time. Due in stores Sept. 16 are new editions of Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Weird Science, each accompanied for the first time by commentary tracks, retrospective documentaries and other goodies.
SMALL SCREEN Z Rock (11:30 p.m. Sunday, IFC) -- This comedy series follows the adventures of three guys who are a party-hearty rock band by night, a Wiggles-style kiddie-rock group by day. Kind of like A Hard Day's Night except with a lot more depravity and a lot fewer Beatles.
Where were you on Dec. 9, 1983? I was a teenager at the Miracle Twin Theater on Miracle Mile, eluding aggressive ushers rigorously checking IDs and sneaking into the first afternoon screening of Brian De Palma's controversial, R-rated Scarface. Yes, it was a school day. But so much had been written about the film before its release, there was no way I could wait until Saturday or even later that day. Scarface had to be seen immediately.
In Elegy, Ben Kingsley plays David Kepesh, an erudite, 60-something literature professor who reviews plays for The New Yorker, writes books on the origins of American hedonism and likes his women young. When he sets out to seduce one of his former students, a Cuban woman named Consuela (Penelope Cruz), we're made to understand she will simply be another conquest, a way for him to amuse and pleasure himself for a spell, appease his still-raging virility and, at his ripe old age, remain engaged ``in...
Even though it earned four Oscar nominations and tons of media attention, Oliver Stone's Nixon never drew a sizable audience, probably because people weren't willing to sit through a three-hour movie about a president they loathed.
