Toby Jones has, seriously, the worst agent. In 2005, his take on the cartoony Truman Capote in a not-quite-a-biopic Infamous ended up getting pushed back a year when all the attention was gobbled up by Philip Seymour Hoffman playing the same part in a film with a virtually identical story, Capote, which announced right from […]
I should not speak ill of Yann Martel’s humongously popular 2001 novel Life of Pi, because I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. Got a third of the way through, decided that one day, I was going to die, and on my deathbed, I didn’t want to find myself reflecting on the time I wasted […]
Whatever else you might want to say about DreamWorks Animation’s Rise of the Guardians, it sure has a mother of a high concept: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and other mythological figures from Euro-American childhood are a Justice League-esque team of heroes. Maybe even too high of a concept, in fact, given how the film […]
Twice now, director Joe Wright has set his sights on a masterpiece of world literature that has been adapted more times than anybody is comfortable thinking about, and attempted to bully his way using nothing but pure style into justifying the existence of yet another version. The first time, in 2005, it was with Pride […]
It took many years and false starts to get a feature-length adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth fantasies, but once they started to happen, they happened fast: just barely less than a year after the Rankin/Bass The Hobbit premiered on U.S. television screens, United Artists released a theatrical adaptation of the author’s later, longer, better-known […]
It was only in the process of reviewing the animated 1977 The Hobbit – the second-ever filmed adaptation of a work by J.R.R. Tolkien – that I discovered that the first-ever Tolkien adaptation was as close as a YouTube search. And thus it is that I present the much-rarer 1966 short version of The Hobbit, […]
The road that led to the first successful adaptation of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien was a long and tormented one: attempts started as early as the 1950s, only to fail in the face of Tolkien’s disapproval of scripts and filmmakers terrified at the thought of condensing the massive totality of The Lord of the […]
It’s tempting to accuse Danish costume extravaganza and official Oscar submission A Royal Affair of being more of the same damn thing, for that is exactly the effect it has as you’re watching: Good Lord, surely not another lushly-appointed period piece about the torrid love lives of royalty saturated from head to toe with detailed […]
Today we give thanks – for health, family, friends, for having great readers who follow me into all these wretched dark alleys, and for not being murdered by a hells-ugly hand puppet. Let’s be blunt: ThanksKilling – I am assured that the capital “K” is accurate – is basically outsider art. Shot in 2007, but […]
Our long national nightmare is over: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 has come out, and brought an end to the beloved teen paranormal love triangle franchise that began four achingly long years ago with Twilight, in which an insipid young woman falls in love with a shiny vampire who embodies all of […]
First surprise: that Lincoln is not a touch-feely biopic of the much-loved historical icon, and it does not gawk at him with starry-eyed hero-worship, but instead is a rather hard, clear-eyed study of mid-19th Century Realpolitik that has the audacity to depict the most romanticised of all U.S. presidents as – shock and gasp – […]
Duck Amuck and What’s Opera, Doc? are the freebies. There’s no point in calling one of those the best Warner Bros. cartoon ever made, because, well, duh. Declaring yourself a fan of American animation and then professing a love for Duck Amuck and What’s Opera, Doc? is like opening a conversation about your tastes in […]
