Writer-director Trent Haaga takes on Bryan Smith’s novel about a beta dude (Matthew Gray Gubler, looking like a cross between Jim Carrey, Steve Buscemi, and Joel McHale) who finds himself in thrall to a series of alpha chicks — several of whom are cheerfully, plainly psychopathic — and who must …
Wanna-be Dog Day Afternoon, only a (wanna-be) comedy, about a wanna-be rock band who take over an L.A. radio station with water guns, precipitating a standoff with police. (To maintain topicality, the cry of "Attica!" gets replaced by "Rodney King!") Good physical humor from Michael Richards; unrivalled by any other …
A chewable bone thrown to the famished fans of Ghost World, with a protagonist closely related to the latter's Steve Buscemi in his marginal existence, his menial job, his obliviousness or out-and-out resistance to fashion, his patronage of yard sales, his esoteric record collection, his congenital negativity. One difference, of …
Just two months after Earth was threatened by giant comet in Deep Impact, it gets threatened again by giant meteoroid. Too near in time; too distant in tone. The total focus of our attention here, to say nothing of our hopes and our prayers and our desire to identify with …
The reunion of director Terry Zwigoff with the writer of his Ghost World, graphic novelist Daniel Clowes, seemed to bode well for his recovery from the badness of his Bad Santa. Boding even better, the subject matter -- the lowdown on high art in higher education -- must be one …
Adam Sandler adopts a five-year-old in order to appear mature by comparison and impress his girlfriend. It doesn't work: neither the impressing nor the appearing mature. Lovers of peepee jokes are requested to love him anyway. With Joey Lauren Adams, Leslie Mann, Jon Stewart, Rob Schneider, Steve Buscemi; directed by …
Big bore. Tim Burton, to inhibit erosion of his "fan base," needed to bounce back in a big way from the commercial conservatism of Planet of the Apes, and in Daniel Wallace's slender novel he has found a fund of peculiarity: the sententious and sentimental memoirs of an Alabama fabulist, …
There are actually two Lebowskis, a big one and a little one, a multimillionaire philanthropist and a lazy, laid-back bowler, both christened Jeffrey; and when the latter — who prefers to be addressed as "the Dude" — is mistaken for the other by a pair of dim-bulb thugs, he is …
There are actually two Lebowskis, a big one and a little one, a multimillionaire philanthropist and a lazy, laid-back bowler, both christened Jeffrey; and when the latter — who prefers to be addressed as "the Dude" — is mistaken for the other by a pair of dim-bulb thugs, he is …
A showcase for the talent-impaired Adam Sandler (co-written by him), in the impossible part of the idiot son of a hotel magnate, obligated to repeat grades one through twelve (two weeks apiece) if he hopes to inherit the family business. He -- it -- they -- are lazy and unimaginative …
An indie documentary about the underground indie-film craze in New York City in the late ’70s — sort of a low-budget SparkNote to the big bang of Super 8. The archive footage is expectedly atrocious, but it does garner some nostalgia for the time — the outlaw attitude, the financially …
E.B. White's barnyard children's story, a friendship fable about the promise of a spider to save a spring pig from the smokehouse. Sweet sentiment soured by the cacophonous Cultural Diversity of the animal voices (British sheep, Southern cows, African-American geese, New York City rat, Julia Roberts spider, and so on) …
A collection of eleven comic sketches filmed over a period of almost two decades by Jim Jarmusch, all of them involving, if not actually revolving around, coffee and cigarettes (or in one case, tea and cigarettes) and the various restaurant tables on which these are arrayed. Each takes place in …
At some level, inaccessible to the naked eye, this could be classified as a jailbreak thriller, but any family resemblance to the likes of Black Tuesday or The Concrete Jungle has been obliterated beneath the mask of spectacle -- the cosmetic surgery, the collagen injections, the earrings and nose studs, …