Opening Friday, This Is 40 tickles the travails of being rich, white and smug. Maybe a grown-up comedy isn’t in the cards for Apatow, whose best works (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up) celebrate arrested adolescence. His latest is a generally messy affair: often uproariously funny, but uneven, overlong, largely improvisational, packed with F-bombs and hobbled […]
sex
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Back that up
Credit: Brad Gregg Have you considered the healing power of chiropractic? We’ve been to the chiropractor and we can say unequivocally that it kinda helped. We paid him for his services — with a check. But a local chiro with the not-at-all-creepy name of Shandy Sells was arrested a little over a week ago for […]
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Girls: The Complete First Season
The result, Girls, generated instant millennial buzz — not all of it positive — and Emmy love. It may deal with the lives of four unmarried, 20-something women in New York City, but it’s no Sex and the City, and thank the stars above for that. One of its characters, the shy virgin played by […]
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Deathtrap
Here, Caine stars as Sidney Bruhl, a playwright who has just suffered his fourth straight Broadway flop. Much to the dismay of his wife, Myra (Dyan Cannon, who appeared in an equally keep-’em-guessing film in 1973’s The Last of Sheila), his solution is to kill Clifford Anderson (Christopher Reeve), the former seminar student who has […]
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A Destructive Manner
Last seen this summer in the romantic comedy Mickey and Me, local filmmaker Mickey Reece and his Fall Films repertory company return with a dramatic thriller in A Destructive Manner. This time, however, directorial duties have ceded to the hands of two of his players, James Paulsgrove and Dallos Paz, and Reece takes center stage […]
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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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The Apparition
This is the real estate conundrum vexing the cute couple at the tell-tale heart of The Apparition, Ben (Sebastian Stan, Captain America: The First Avenger) and Kelly (Ashley Greene, The Twilight Saga). It’s all because, unbeknownst to his beaut beau, Ben took active part in a paranormal psychology experiment headed by a fellow student (Tom […]
Posted inMusic
Toby Keith — Hope on the Rocks
For many years, on my late, lamented Colorado-based radio show, Damaged Hearing, whenever I felt like especially annoying the decidedly unpatriotic community-radio audience, I would sing along, loud and proud, to Oklahoma-born Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.” Of course, the more I would sing along to the song, the more I […]
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Rites of Spring
Realizing that’s been done before, writer/director Padraig Reynolds shrewdly introduces a second storyline in the form of a $2 million kidnapping scheme concocted by a white-trash trio on a wealthy family. For these two storylines to converge takes about 50 minutes, and just before they do, Rites delivers a welcome twist. Well, it would be […]
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The Day
The film from director Douglas Aarniokoski (Highlander: Endgame) follows a group of young people wandering the country on foot several years after an event of catastrophic proportions. They include Shawn Ashmore (Frozen), Ashley Bell (The Last Exorcism), Dominic Monaghan (TV’s Lost) and Shannyn Sossamon (One Missed Call), and they spend much of the movie in […]