items tagged with Stanley Tucci

JACK THE GIANT SLAYER

It happened to Hansel and Gretel. It happened to Red Riding Hood. It happened to Snow White. (It happened to a couple of Snow Whites, actually.) And now it’s Jack, of “... and the beanstalk” fame, who’s getting a pricey, kitschy, effects-filled makeover, serving as protagonist for director Bryan Singer’s Jack the Giant Slayer. At the rate this trend is going, I can hardly wait for the inevitable big-budget updating of The Pied Piper with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Marion Cotillard, and Harvey Fierstein taking on the role of a lifetime in The Frog King.

As you’re probably aware, director Gary Ross’ The Hunger Games is the movie version of the first in a trio of wildly popular young-adult novels by author Suzanne Collins. And perhaps the highest compliment I can pay the film, among the many compliments it deserves, is that unlike with the Harry Potter and Twilight screen adaptations, at no point are viewers such as myself punished for being too blasé or lazy to have read the book.

If you will, please permit me a quick public apology before I expound on my 10 favorite movies of this past year:

Sorry, Muppets. If I hadn’t caught that out-of-town flick a week ago, you totally would’ve made the list. (Instead, you top the list of the 150 other 2011 movies I saw.)

In a rather perverse bit of scheduling, at least for me, last weekend brought with it the area release of exactly zero debuting films, while this past weekend delivered six ... on the same weekend, I should add, that I had a lengthy road trip out of town and appeared in four performances of a local stage production. But I’m not one to complain. Onward!

LOVE & OTHER DRUGS

In my 2009 review of the director’s turgid World War II drama Defiance, I opened by asking, “Am I the only person who wishes that Edward Zwick would go back to making sharp, bitchy comedies like his 1986 Rob Lowe-Demi Moore romance About Last Night ... ?” Well, less than two years later, Zwick has returned to those romantic-comedy roots with Love & Other Drugs. Because, apparently, I needed another reminder to be careful what I wish for.