items tagged with Catherine Keener

SPRING BREAKERS

At the screening of Spring Breakers that I attended, I counted eight viewers who walked out of the movie, and stayed out, well before the end credits rolled. In all honesty, I’m amazed the tally wasn’t higher than that. The movie being touted in print and in trailers promises a rowdy, randy romp in the sun with built-in audience-grabbers: Disney princesses acting nasty! James Franco with cornrows and grillz! But the movie that writer/director Harmony Korine has actually made – despite, indeed, its also being a rowdy, randy romp in the sun – bears so little relation to its cheeky, borderline-innocuous advertising campaign that patrons can be easily forgiven for feeling badly misled and deciding to bolt. It would be like going to see Dumbo and instead getting Gus Van Sant’s Elephant.

CYRUS

Splice came and went in the blink of an eye and Predators sucks. So if you're jonesing for a good horror movie these days, you're advised to catch Jay and Mark Duplass' Cyrus, even though it isn't any kind of conventional scare flick; Jonah Hill's title character, however, could stand proudly next to Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates in the Crazy-Ass-Mama's-Boy Hall of Fame.
Read More About Mother Lovers: “Cyrus” And “The Sorcerer’S Apprentice”...

PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS: THE LIGHTNING THIEF

Just because the title is rather unwieldy, and the film is about an adolescent with otherworldly abilities, and this kid has male and female tag-along pals with powers of their own, and there are a lot of CGI effects on display, and the director is Harry Potter & the Sorcerer's Stone and Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets helmer Chris Columbus, don't think that Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief is necessarily indebted to J.K. Rowling. The latest Harry Potter movie, after all, found its hero contending with a Half-Blood Prince. This adventure, on the other hand, finds its son-of-Poseidon protagonist attending Camp Half-Blood. See? They're not even remotely similar.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

Where to begin in describing all the things that could've gone wrong with director Spike Jonze's live-action take on Where the Wild Things Are? And where to begin in describing all the things that have gone magically, even miraculously, right with it?

HAMLET 2

Hamlet 2 has been designed as a broad farce, but I'll tell you: In the movie's climactic number, when Hamlet and Jesus took their time machine back to the night of Hamlet's death, and Hamlet prevented Gertrude from drinking the poisoned wine, and Hamlet found it in himself to finally forgive his father, and the Tucson Gay Men's Chorus sang Elton John's "Someone Saved My Life Tonight," it was pretty damned moving.

Now there's a sentence I never thought I'd write.