'What About Bob,' and other things only Bill Murray can get away with :
Bill Murray might be America's favorite celebrity prima donna.
Bio: Simon Abrams writes about comics, books and movies for The Comics Journal, L magazine, The New York Press and Slant Magazine. You can find a lot of his writing here.
Woody Allen's What's Up, Tiger Lily? was distributed by American International Pictures (AIP), a company that is responsible for releasing such schlocky Roger Corman productions as The Pit and the Pendulum and The Masque of the Red Death, and which made its money primarily off of grindhouse and drive-in audiences. The crossover between the films we now associate with AIP and the films we now associate with Allen is nonexistent. More
Postedsdf
on April 27th, 2012 2:07pmThe Pirates! Band of Misfits proves that you don’t have to behave like an adult to learn how to grow up.
It's the latest import from Aardman Studios, the British company that produces the “Wallace and Gromit” claymation cartoons. Co-directors Jeff Newitt and Peter Lord and screenwriter Gideon Defoe trust their audience to understand their film's implicit individualistic message. The movie they made is not just consistently funny, but is also mature enough to not throw its maturity in its viewers' faces. More
Postedsdf
on April 26th, 2012 4:51pmMary Harron, the director of the 2000 adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho, is known in some circles as a horror film maker, even though this isn’t quite accurate. Harron (The Notorious Bettie Page, I Shot Andy Warhol) chooses her projects carefully, and American Psycho isn’t really a horror film anyway. More
Postedsdf
on April 22nd, 2012 8:45pmLast week, Joe Eszterhas publicly condemned actor/director Mel Gibson in a scathing rant which unsurprisingly accuses Mad Mel of being antisemitic. Gibson and Eszterhas were supposed to collaborate on a film about famous Jewish leader Judah Maccabee. But according to Eszterhas, Gibson was impossible to work with. Eszterhas has since backed up his claims with audio of Gibson demanding to see his script and cursing out his own ex-wife. More
Postedsdf
on April 21st, 2012 7:59pmIt’s frustrating to see a naturally charming actor get stuck with subpar material. Danny Trejo (Machete, Predators) is a character actor turned action star. Having appeared in more than 200 movies since the ‘90s, Trejo’s got what has become an increasingly precious commodity: screen presence. When Trejo cold-cocks a guy, you immediately want to see him do it again. More
Postedsdf
on April 12th, 2012 10:16pmYou can tell a lot about Morgan Spurlock’s take on the San Diego Comic Convention in Comic-Con Episode IV: A New Hope based on the way he tiptoes around the issue of just how marginalized comic books have become at the festival in recent years.
Conventional wisdom has it that more and more people attend Comic Con, which will celebrate its 52nd year anniversary later this year, for everything but comic books. Instead, people go to see the pilot episodes of shows like "The Walking Dead" and "Caprica" and clips and trailers from upcoming movies from people like Francis Ford Coppola and Eli Roth. More
Postedsdf
on April 6th, 2012 3:25pmThis weekend, Williamsburg's Nitehawk Cinema will screen two very different movies, one at midnight and one at noon. Both films concern questions of memory and nostalgia.
The two films in question are Dario Argento's Deep Red and John Hughes' Sixteen Candles, both of which are about the way we remove vital information from our memories in order to make the present more palatable. More
Postedsdf
on April 6th, 2012 10:55amEven if you’re one of the few moviegoers who goes to see Mirror Mirror because it was directed by Tarsem Singh (director of Immortals and the music video for R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”), you’re bound to agree with Julia Roberts when she asks, “What is it with this kingdom?!” More
Postedsdf
on March 31st, 2012 3:19pmThe all-American, regular-Joe persona that Sylvester Stallone has honed over the last three and a half decades can be seen in its purest incarnation in Paradise Alley. Written and directed by Stallone, Paradise Alley shows the beginning stages of the Stallone character: the self-made mook, the hard-working local kid who made good. More
Postedsdf
on March 31st, 2012 7:40amIt's been suggested that Battle Royale, the 12-year-old film that screens at the Nitehawk Cinema this weekend, is a mature movie.
The occasion for this suggestion is the release of the surefire-blockbuster adaptation of The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’s Young Adult sensation, of which Battle Royale is supposedly a grown-up version. More
Postedsdf
on March 24th, 2012 4:50pm
