This week’s new releases are a curious hodgepodge ranging from a big-budget studio retread (Fast & Furious) to an experimental feature by a 79-year-old enfant terrible (Pere Portabella's The Silence Before Bach, which opened in New York City more than a year ago). Lodged in-between is a pair of movies that debuted to mixed responses at the Sundance Film Festival (Sunshine Cleaning in 2008, Adventureland earlier this year), both of which feature strong casts and capable directors.

Read More

Movies that populated theaters in the '80s and '90s are making a comeback. Some are better than others but since there is a built-in audience, Hollywood is cranking out remakes and reboots left and right.

This practice has been done for years but recently more movies than ever have been redone. March brought 21 Jump Street with skinny Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum. The buddy cop movie was actually funny and has made more than $90 million so far.

Other notable remakes over the last few years include Fright Night, Conan the Barbarian, Karate Kid, Clash of the Titans, Footloose, Nightmare on Elm Street, Wall Street, Arthur and Die Hard. Out of the nine mentioned, only Fright Night and Die Hard were actually enjoyable (in my opinion).

The worst out of the bunch had to be Clash of the Titans. Cheesy acting and bad 3D effects plagued this Sam Worthington CGI-fest. Worthington did a better job in the ads for the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 video game.

Now an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie is getting another look, and thank goodness it isn’t Junior.

The first trailer for a new Total Recall was released Sunday. No, this isn’t a late April Fool’s joke. The remake to the 1990 Schwarzenegger movie is a real thing, and fans of not only the original but of science fiction in general should be giddy with anticipation.

The remake stars Colin Farrell, coming off of his performance from the 1980s vampire remake Fright Night, with Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel taking roles of eye candy. Will there be another three-breasted woman? Fans of the original can only hope. AMC’s Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston plays the bad guy. The cast alone gives a lot more credit to this remake than most.

We will all have to wait to actually watch the thing to figure out if it’s worthy enough to be considered a decent remake.

In other movie news, the next American Pie installment hits theaters today. To me, this is going to be a paycheck movie. Meaning, the original cast of characters is only returning because they haven’t been in anything major in the last few years. Well, for the exception of Allison Hannigan who has been on the long running show How I Met Your Mother. Expect a lot of dick and sex jokes, which is essentially what the first movie was, but now the cast is much older.

The original American Pie was released in 1999 and was seen as a fresh take on the high school sex comedy. The second added on to that with more outlandish situations — like mixing up lube with super glue. American Wedding was thought to be the ending to Stifler and the gang’s stories — compared to the first and second, it was somewhat of a letdown. Then came the straight-to-DVD American Pie Presents movies. I will admit, though, American Pie Beta House was a hilarious college comedy; women might not want to watch because it focuses on a misbehaving fraternity.

Squeezing film stars for as much money as possible is the norm nowadays with movie franchises – just look at Pirates of Caribbean. Maybe I am jumping to conclusions with American Reunion, but the pie lost its flavor a long time ago.

Our largely uneventful summer movie season gets a kick in the ass this week with the arrival of not only one of the best films of 2009 — Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker — but also the third annual Oxford International Film Festival (OIFF), which moves to Cincinnati this year.

Read More

The Ides of March is nearly here. George Clooney's political thriller, partially shot here in Cincinnati, opens wide tomorrow, and the film's publicity blitz is now in full effect with TV spots flooding the airwaves (you know, the ones pimping Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers' typically overly exuberant blurbage) and Clooney himself doing a few selected interviews.

While CityBeat unfortunately didn't get one of those interviews (our bribe of complimentary CB T-shirts and a pass to the MidPoint Music Festival apparently weren't sufficient enough to sway his handlers; we instead talked to Ides actor Max Minghella), Clooney will appear on tonight's episode of The Charlie Rose Show on PBS to discuss the film. It's probably no surprise, then, to learn that Clooney's character in Ides — an articulate liberal Pennsylvania governor who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination — appears on Rose's show in the film.

Read More

I'm through bitching about how clueless the Academy is for overlooking my favorite films in favor of "geriatric coffeetable dogshit" (aka The Reader), as Christian Slater put it in True Romance. (To be fair, The Reader is slightly better than dogshit, mostly due to the presence of Kate Winslet.) Yes, I've finally accepted the Oscars for what it is: an industry wank-fest punctuated by a few moments of genuine spontaneity and/or emotion. Look for Slumdog Millionaire to clean up tonight despite not garnering a single acting nomination, which is almost unheard of for a Best Picture nominee. And look for an elaborately coiffed, sunglasses- and chain wallet-clad Mickey Rourke do something wonderfully eccentric while accepting the Best Actor Oscar.

Read More

Oscar nominations were announced this morning. At first glance, I have to admit that this year’s batch seems uncommonly competent.

The 10 Best Picture nominees are all worthwhile in one way or another, and four of them actually made my top 10 of 2010: The Social Network, Toy Story 3, True Grit and Winter’s Bone. See, I told you they were competent.

Read More

The economic meltdown of 2008 has now yielded a decent amount of feature-length films on the topic — from mediocre fictional dramas (Oliver Stone's Wall Street 2 and John Wells' The Company Men) to an effective, semi-tangential documentary (Alex Gibney's Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer) to a solid docudrama (Curtis Hanson's HBO-backed Too Big to Fail).

Read More

Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko might be the cult film of the new millennium.

The young auteur’s moody opus struggled to find an audience amid a post-9/11 climate that apparently had little patience for the film's head-scratching, reality-shifting narrative and apocalyptic overtones — it received a limited theatrical release about a month after the terrorist attacks and quickly faded from view.

Read More

Cincinnati is a long way from Cannes. And, barring a merger with Conde Nast or a hefty donation from George Soros, CityBeat will not be sending me to cover the Cannes Film Festival anytime soon. Lucky for us, our fellow AAN peeps at Village Voice Media still take film criticism seriously enough to send its lead film critics, The Village Voice's J. Hoberman and LA Weekly's Karina Longworth, to the grandaddy of all film festivals, which wraps up this weekend.

Read More

Finding fault with the Academy Awards’ Oscar nominations is kinda like getting pissed about the even more clueless Grammy nominations — discerning “aficionados” don’t take either seriously as arbiters of what’s truly “the best” in each medium. This year’s nominations, announced earlier this morning, are another mixed bag — some nominees are deserving of nods, many others are not.

Read More