J. EDGAR
Pretty much everything that's bothersome about director Clint Eastwood's biographical drama J. Edgar is only bothersome for the movie's first half hour. That may sound like a lot of time spent bothered. But the film does run 135 minutes, even its weakest moments are by no means awful, and in the end, it emerges as a really fine work with a really fine central performance. So as a nod to J. Edgar (the movie, not the man), let's just get it out of the way and address its failings at the start.
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TOWER HEIST
ANONYMOUS
Described by the Chicago Sun-Times as "simultaneously hilarious and touching," the road-trip comedy Leaving Iowa is the final presentation in the Playcrafters Barn Theatre's 2011 season. Leaving Iowa is also the first presentation in Black Hawk College's 2011-12 theatre season, but don't chalk that up to either coincidence or some sort of Moline-based rivalry; the productions are actually one and the same.
A young man sits in his living room, in a large, inviting house that, as we'll learn, is located in the small town of Perry, Iowa. He practices a quiet melody on his guitar, occasionally glancing at his handwritten sheet music for a song titled "Last Looks." It's a sunny day in late afternoon, and both the man and his surroundings exude an air of utter, unalterable calm, a feeling only briefly disrupted by the sound of a plane passing overhead. Well, that and the faraway screaming.
IN TIME
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PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3
"A guy once sent me this story," begins comedian Tim Bedore. "He had a great muscle car from the '60s, and he had it all waxed and polished to this beautiful shine, and he had it parked under a tree. And this squirrel started dropping nuts onto his hood, over and over again.
