Based on the novel “The True Meaning of Smekday” by Adam Rex, HOME is a sweet animated film that is equal parts cheery and poignant. Aimed more at kids than at adults, it takes the time-honored themes of friendship, family, and keeping promises and wraps them in an imaginative new package as shiny and inviting… Read More »
IT’S COMPLICATED
Working from a slight script that rarely surprises, the superb cast of IT’S COMPLICATED make an otherwise mediocre cinematic exercise into something that, if not profound, at least entertaining, at times, even moving. Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin are Jane and Jake, a happily divorced Santa Barbara couple who have spent the last 10 years… Read More »
FANTASIA/FANTASIA 2000: 2-Movie Collection Special Edition
Finally together and on both DVD and Blu-Ray format, the deluxe, 4-disc, release of FANTASIA and FANTASIA 2000 is more than the chance to see both features in all their glory. It’s a chance to marvel that the old-fashioned hand-drawn animation, for all its limitations, has none when it comes to imagination. It is the emotional… Read More »
THE BIG YEAR
Birds are sublime creatures. THE BIG YEAR, a film about the birders who rabidly pursue a sight or sound of them, is not. Based on the book of the same name by Mark Obmascik, it is a flat pastiche of painfully clichéd moments strung together around the theme of three guys competing for the honor… Read More »
LOONEY TUNES — BACK IN ACTION
The wonderful thing about Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck when I was a kid was that they were deliciously subversive. I may not have known that word exactly, but I had no trouble understanding the concept, the which I latched onto with a full heart and a wicked delight that has endured to this day.… Read More »
SHOPGIRL
In the voice-over narration Steve Martin reads at the beginning of SHOPGIRL, based on his novella and for which he provided the screenplay, he informs the audience that the eponymous wage-earner of the piece, Mirabelle Buttersfield (Claire Danes), is special, if only people would realize it. He also informs us that she came to Los… Read More »
THE PINK PANTHER
Peter Sellers is so deeply identified with monumentally bumbling Inspector Clouseau that one wonders why Steve Martin would want to take a crack at the character with a remake of THE PINK PANTHER. Others, including the character’s co-creator, Blake Edwards, have taken their shot and failed miserably. Martin, who co-wrote the script, at least makes… Read More »