Stanley Marcus’ Self-Portrait at a Flea Market, March 1966, Paris, France People likely know Stanley Marcus as the trailblazing former president of high-end retailer Neiman Marcus, not an accomplished photographer. His granddaughter, Allison V. Smith, fully understands. “He always had a camera with him, but he never really shared his images,” she said. “Maybe he […]
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All Superheroes Must Die
The low-budget effort’s premise takes a page from Saw: Tired of “asshole goody-two-shoes getting in the way,” the career criminal who calls himself Rickshaw (James Remar, TV’s Dexter) wants his archenemies — this story’s superheroes — to play a game. He has kidnapped 100 innocent civilians, rigged them to explosive devices and scattered them across […]
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Game Change
If Sen. McCain’s choice of the largely unknown Alaska Gov. Palin as his veep choice seemed out of nowhere then, there’s good reason: Because it pretty much was. McCain, here played by Ed Harris (Man on a Ledge), wanted Sen. Joe Lieberman, but was talked into someone “more transformative” by hired gun Steven Schmidt (Woody […]
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Wuthering Heights
Costume dramas are not my thing. That goes double when they’re staged with an epic sweep — true tests of patience and bladder resolve. So there’s something admirable about directors tackling oft-adapted material with a decidedly different approach, which could account for two such pictures making many a critic’s 2012 best list: Joe Wright’s Anna […]
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Dick Tracy
As its director, producer and star, Beatty aimed to translate Chester Gould’s iconic comic strip from the funny pages to the silver screen, and he did that wonderfully – with the help of its Oscar-winning production design and makeup effects, of course. The backlot artifice serves a purpose; the primary colors burst with wide-eyed appeal; […]
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The Ice House
The corpse is located in the titular locale on the grounds of an opulent estate occupied by three women whom the townspeople refer to as “the butch beauties of Streech Grange.” The home is owned by Phoebe Maybury (Penny Downie, Invictus), whose husband disappeared a decade earlier — a case that remains unsolved. She lives […]
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Doomsday Book
Doomsday begins with the most fun of the bunch, “A Brave New World,” in which a nerdy, horny young man is upset that his family embarks on a fabulous getaway vacation without him, leaving a long list of chores. Many of them deal, unsettling enough, with food waste. He gets ill, and I’ll leave the […]
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With Great Power …: The Stan Lee Story
But no household name has led a life devoid of conflict and drama, and the three-director doc skirts over those portions, because I assume this project was made with the subject’s full approval. It is — pardon my French — one ass-kisser of a career retrospective. To give credit where credit is due, Lee truly […]
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The Man Who Created Halloween — Irwin Yablans
This self-published paperback is his story — emphasis on The Man, not Halloween. The making of that 1978 now-classic movie is only a small part of the autobiography, which covers his entire life. Luckily, Yablans is an engaging storyteller who’s full of amusing anecdotes — some of which are intentional (John Wayne declaring his wish […]
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The Girl
Premiering Saturday, The Girl is the first of two high-profile biopics of the master filmmaker to hit screens this season. The other, simply titled Hitchcock, is a larger-budget feature with a whiff of Oscar bait, yet there’s room enough for both. While that forthcoming film focuses on the making of 1960’s Psycho, The Girl concerns […]