Danny Boyle’s brilliant new film, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, is the improbable tale of how innocence triumphs against the most seemingly impossible odds. It begins and ends on the fateful night when Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), a former slum resident, plaything of an indifferent world, and current tea-boy in Mumbai, is about to answer a question on… Read More »
EAT PRAY LOVE
EAT PRAY LOVE is a glossy travelogue of a flick, full of stereotypes and caricatures providing a colorful backdrop to Julia Roberts’ glamour lighting. Based on the book of the same name by Elizabeth Gilbert, it is the personal journey towards inner happiness taken by Liz (Julie Roberts) as she learns the lessons of the… Read More »
127 HOURS
Danny Boyle doesn’t make it easy for himself. After exploring the teeming slums of India with SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, he’s turned in a different direction with 127 HOURS. In it, James Franco, as intrepid hiker Aron Ralston, spends most of the film trapped in a sliver of a crevice carved very deep into one of the… Read More »
MONEYBALL
The starring role in MONEYBALL is not a showy one. Rather it requires of the actor playing it to posses a consummate skill in inhabiting a character rather than merely playing one. Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland A’s must be all things to all people, low-key and cool as he is glad-handing… Read More »
VANITY FAIR
Mira Nair’s telling of Thackery’s classic, VANITY FAIR, is a lush, sprawling, sensual film that totters unevenly under the weight of its own ambition. It’s an apt metaphor considering that its heroine, Becky Sharpe, has the same Achilles Heel. Blithely skipping through so many decades of necessity leads to a feeling of sketchiness in some… Read More »
Neil Burger Unveils THE ILLUSIONIST
When I spoke with Neil Burger on July 31, 2006, it was impossible to not start with his previous film, INTERVIEW WITH THE ASSASSIN. Both that film and THE ILLUSIONIST deal with what is real and what is a clever bit of misdirection. His newest film, though, boasts not just a fiendishly clever plot, but also… Read More »
Armistead Maupin & Patrick Stettner Pay Attention to THE NIGHT LISTENER
The story on which Armistead Maupin based his novel and now film THE NIGHT LISTENER proves the old axiom that truth is stranger than fiction. When I spoke to him and to the director of the film, Patrick Stettner, on July 26, 2006, I was curious what conclusions they had drawn about the human capacity to… Read More »
Forest Whitaker is THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND
Idi Amin is a daunting subject for a feature film, but Forest Whitaker played the former Ugandan dictator’s charismatic side as well as the murderous rages into which he could erupt at any moment. When I spoke with him on October 6, 2006, that was the first thing I asked him about before moving on… Read More »
Eric Schlosser Visits Our FAST FOOD NATION
Eric Schlosser’s non-fiction book, “Fast Food Nation” on which the feature film is based pulled no punches when it came to detailing exactly how a cow becomes a hamburger. The film is the same way. Why the actual workings of a slaughter house are included was just one of the many questions I had for this soft-spoken but… Read More »
The ATONEMENT of James McAvoy & Joe Wright
The power of words, the questioning of received wisdom, and the reasons behind a recurring porcine motif were all on the table when I talked with James McAvoy and Joe Wright about ATONEMENT on November 28, 2007. They were by turns philosophical and whimsical while discussing how to use naughty words in an elegant film, filming the… Read More »
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