Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of bubbly. Adults and youngsters (especially parents with kids) should raise a toast of fizzy grog to Aardman Animations and its army of painstaking artists, who’ve effectively plundered Hollywood’s archive of swashbuckling tricks to create the zany-quirky spoof “The Pirates! Band of Misfits.” As animation aficionados and guileless youngsters have come [...]
BY DENNIS KING NEW YORK – Picture a couple of gnarly, cutlass-wielding, Victorian-era pirates of the high seas and the last pair you’d probably envision would be urbane British actor Hugh Grant and pixyish, bespectacled animator Peter Lord. But they are two of the primary scalawags behind Aardman Animations’ newest feature-length comedy, “The Pirates! Band [...]
The creative team of actor-writer Jason Segel and director-writer Nick Stoller has made its romantic comedy reputation by gently tweaking the standard boy-meets-girl conventions of the well-worn genre and tilting them slightly askew. They did that quite winningly in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and they do it again in the offbeat and warmly funny, though slightly [...]
NEW YORK – In what business does a great week of work amount to six seconds of product? In the rarefied world of stop-motion animation, where puppet figures are moved in tiny increments between individually photographed frames to create the illusion of movement, six seconds of animated footage is widely considered a solid week’s labor. [...]
This week, the oddest DVD to appear on release lists is: “Thor at the Bus Stop” The weirdly titled “Thor at the Bus Stop” (due out on DVD Tuesday) is a hipster hash of Monty Python-esque skits, offbeat street denizens, existential philosophizing and low-low-budget ingenuity that shows some promise from filmmaking brothers Jerry and Mike [...]
Woody Allen’s history-hopping chameleon “Zelig” has nothing on the real-life cipher Juan Pujol Garcia, a shadowy Spanish double agent who changed the course of World War II with his amazing espionage exploits, which are compellingly detailed in the documentary thriller “Garbo: The Spy.” This insanely clever and amazing true-life story from documentarian Edmon Roch reveals [...]
The best thing about studios celebrating their centennial anniversaries is that they tend to dig into their vaults and roll out restored versions of some of their greatest titles, and they don’t get much greater than Paramount’s 1974 neo-noir nugget, “Chinatown,” now on Blu-ray for the first time. Jack Nicholson was born to play sharp-dressed, [...]
This week, the oddest DVD to appear on release lists is: “Man vs. Wild: Top 25 Man Moments” British adventurer Bear Grylls is famous for seeking out some of the harshest, most life-threatening places on earth and demonstrating some of the radical survival measures necessary to make it out alive. Extreme and queasy highlights from [...]
Since Moe, Larry and Curly made their bones in their 1930s and ’40s heyday with some 200 comedy short subjects for Columbia Pictures, a short review of the Farrelly Brothers’ chaotic but affectionate “The Three Stooges” seems fitting. So here are some highlights and lowlights from the movie that, depending on your point of view, [...]
In an amazing burst of brilliance from 1939 to 1943, writer-director Preston Sturges virtually defined the “screwball comedy,” a uniquely American style of comedy characterized by farcical situations, witty dialogue, social satire and cheeky battles of the sexes. In a frantic run of popular hits, Sturges (one of the first studio screenwriters allowed to direct [...]