When Did You Last See Your Father? Colin Firth stars in a bittersweet look back Kent Williams on Friday 08/22/2008, (1) Comment, (2) Recommendations Dear old dad takes another left hook to the chin in When Did You Last See Your Father? — well, not a hook so much as a series of jabs. Colin Firth, as handsomely dour as ever, stars in this adaptation of British writer Blake Morrison's memoir about having grown up with a man who never got around to growing up himself. >MoreElegy: Hot for teacher Marjorie Baumgarten on Friday 08/22/2008, (2) Recommendations Old age is creeping up on David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley), something that this New Yorker has managed to outrun until recently. In his 60s, with enviable work as a cultural critic and part-time academic, Kepesh remains strong in body and mind, but his illusory island of self-preservation begins to crumble once he becomes sexually involved with Consuela Castillo (Penélope Cruz). >More
Vicky Cristina Barcelona: The strain in Spain Woody Allen's latest is less than captivating Kimberley Jones on Friday 08/15/2008, (1) Recommendation Yes, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the new Woody Allen film widely hyped for a threesome, although it's not the configuration advertised in the ungainly title. Vicky (Rebecca Hall, indefinable but intriguing) is the smart, sensible brunette, and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) the amorous, free-thinking blond. Together, they are American best friends summering in Barcelona and falling, at a staggered clip, for a sultry Spanish painter named Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem). >MoreTropic Thunder: Heart of snarkness Marjorie Baumgarten on Friday 08/15/2008, (1) Recommendation Instead of entering the jungle to find the heart of darkness, Ben Stiller (the director, co-star, and co-writer of Tropic Thunder) goes in to take aim at the Achilles heel of Hollywood: its utter pomposity and self-importance. >More
Pineapple Express: High times Bringing elegance to the stoner comedy Kimberley Jones on Friday 08/08/2008, (4) Recommendations Rounding the third act of this stoner action-comedy, there's a big laugh that comes from a small moment of art-reflecting-life-reflecting-art. A low-level pot dealer named Red (played by the terrific character actor Danny McBride) psychs himself up for a modern-day OK Corral by cocking his firearm and sing-songing "Thug Life." He's playacting at being a toughie, and so too are the many and varied talents at work here in this affectionate bid at the buddy pics of the '70s and '80s. >MoreMister Lonely: Celebrity impersonators Kent Williams on Friday 08/08/2008, (5) Recommendations Harmony Korine was the It Boy of off-off-Hollywood filmmaking back in the late '90s, alienating audiences and critics alike with his Diane Arbus-like portraits of life's neglected and rejected. Now, a decade after Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy, here's Mister Lonely, Korine's return to the Cinema du Poète Maudit. And if it's just as fanciful as the others, in a what-the-hell's-going-on kind of way, it's also sweeter, sadder, more romantic. >More
The Wackness: Head case A pot dealer comes of age Kent Williams on Friday 08/01/2008, (9) Recommendations Nostalgia ain't what it used to be, but try telling that to writer-director Jonathan Levine, who's reached all the way back to 1994 for his somewhat autobiographical coming-of-age movie The Wackness. You may have forgotten the words "dope" and "wack." It may have been a while since you started a sentence with "Yo." Your pair of Air Jordans may be long gone or safely tucked away on the top shelf of your closet. But here they all are. >MoreThe X-Files: I Want to Believe: Still out there Kent Williams on Friday 08/01/2008, (8) Recommendations It's been six long years since Fox Mulder and Dana Scully closed their last X-file, but neither of them appears much worse for wear in their second movie outing, The X-Files: I Want to Believe. Show creator Chris Carter, who directed and co-wrote the script, has decided to strip things down this time around — no alien abductions, no Cigarette Smoking Man, no conspiracies involving everybody from J. Edgar Hoover to E.T., just man in all his depravity and the greatest extraterrestrial of them all, God. Luckily, having at least one foot on the ground turns out to be a good thing. If you want to get truly lost, you'll just have to watch Lost. >More
The Dark Knight: Best Batman ever Kent Williams on Friday 07/25/2008, (13) Recommendations In a summer jam-packed with superheroes, Batman has made a couple of smart moves. He's waited until everybody else -- Ironman, The Hulk, Hancock, Hellboy -- exhausted themselves, letting anticipation build. And he's kept things serious, refusing to stoop to comic-book high jinks. If anything, The Dark Knight is even more serious than Batman Begins. >MoreTell No One: Cherchez la femme Kent Williams on Friday 07/25/2008, (8) Recommendations There must be a reasonable explanation, and the French are
nothing if not rational. That’s what I kept telling myself as Guillaume Canet’s Tell No One unfolded on the screen. Actually, it doesn’t unfold so much as
twist and turn, like dough being shaped into a pretzel. >More
Wilmington on DVD: Truth is stranger than fiction Mike Wilmington on Friday 08/22/2008 12:00 pm, (1) Comment, (2) Recommendations Recount, a recent HBO original, is one of the best and most revealing of all dramatic movies about American electoral politics -- except, of course, it's not fictional. The performances here are something else -- especially Tom Wilkinson's smooth-talking Texas sharpie James Baker, a near-perfect impersonation, and Laura Dern's priceless Katherine Harris, a bizarre figure, with quasi-vamp makeup and wildly flickering smile, right out of a classic '30s screwball comedy. >MoreCollecting MadVideos -- Olympics '08: Competitive Zen Gardening by Guerilla Friday Kristian Knutsen on Wednesday 08/20/2008 11:28 pm, (4) Recommendations As the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing draw to a close on Sunday, so too do the thousands of hours of television and online broadcasts lighting up screens around the globe. One of the most familiar elements of this programming is that of the biographical sketch, so ubiquitous and formulaic in the last few decades that it has become a standard sports broadcasting cliché, particularly those for dedicated athletes that are otherwise ignored outside the context of the quadrennial competition. >MoreWilmington on DVD: West Africa animated Kirikiou and the Wild Beast and All My Good Countrymen Mike Wilmington on Friday 08/15/2008 1:19 pm, (2) Recommendations Right now, we're in a golden age of ultra-computerized movie animation, of the voluptuous sights and fantastic shapes of WALL•E and Finding Nemo. But that doesn’t mean the older style can't still summon up its old charms -- especially the splendid Japanese fairytales of Hayao Miyazaki and the wonderful "Kirikou" films of French animator Ocelot. >MoreWilmington on DVD: A magnum opus from the BBC and Evelyn Waugh The Counterfeiters, Terms of Endearment, Brideshead Revisited, and Larisa Shepitko Mike Wilmington on Friday 08/08/2008 11:10 am, (5) Recommendations Beautifully scripted by John Mortimer and very richly and finely directed by Charles Sturridge and Michael Lindsay Hogg, the BBC version of Brideshead Revisited is one of the most faithful, lavish and wondrously literary of all the best British TV classic novel adaptations. In its sumptuous 11 episodes and 659 minutes, we follow Charles (Jeremy Irons, in his deservedly star-making performance) and his love affair with a family and a house: the Marchmains and Flytes of Brideshead. >More
Edgewood College students intern on Public Enemies in Wisconsin Behind the scenes wrangling all those local extras Amelia Cook on Tuesday 06/03/2008 12:30 pm, (34) Recommendations Shawn Johnson got an unexpected query back on February 11. The Director of Edgewood College Career Services was expecting a Monday like any other when a call from Chicago came into her office. Joan Philo Casting needed student interns to help with selecting extras for the production of Public Enemies in Wisconsin, and needed them fast. >MoreEnthusiastic crowd watches Public Enemies production in Madison Fans go crazy for Christian Bale, not to mention friends and family in shoot Erica Pelzek on Tuesday 05/06/2008 12:19 pm, (30) Recommendations As the Public Enemies production took over the Capitol Square on Monday, crowds gathered along the sidewalks and peripheries of the set to watch the spectacle. As the morning progressed, my fellow onlookers' morning coffee kicked in and their hunger for celebrity sightings intensified. Though many in the crowd hoped for a peek at Christian Bale or Billy Crudup, others sat patiently looking for their loved ones in the swarm of cast and crew members. >More
Found Footage Festival is back in Madison, bigger and sexier than ever Stoughton natives arrive from Queens with new collection of bizarre videos Erica Pelzek on Thursday 06/26/2008 10:47 pm, (25) Recommendations Awkward sexual harassment in the workplace reenactment videos, flamboyant 1980s exercise tapes, and ridiculous home movies unite in the latest edition of the Found Footage Festival, a touring collection of discarded video clips that are, usually unintentionally, gut-bustingly funny. Returning Madison for the third time with their show, Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett meld ironic chuckles with the "old school charm" of stumbling upon strange discoveries. >MoreMadison welcomes a third year of Rooftop Cinema at MMoCA Kristian Knutsen on Wednesday 06/04/2008 10:15 pm, (24) Recommendations "If you show it, they will come." That's been Tom Yoshikami's experience with Rooftop Cinema at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art over the last couple of years. The UW-Madison grad student who has helped program the Wisconsin Film Festival and UW Cinematheque in recent years launched a summer series of outdoor film screenings on the roof of the downtown museum shortly after its 2006 opening. The response was immediate and enthusiastic, with capacity crowds viewing a variety of short experimental and avant-garde films under the stars both that summer and last. >More
Wilmington on DVD: A staycation with foreign cinema In Bruges, Persepolis, Belle Toujours, The Witnesses, The Furies, and Before the Rain Mike Wilmington on Friday 06/27/2008 11:03 am, (15) Recommendations Modern film noir with an Irish-British twist is served up with tough grace and skill in playwright and short-film Oscar-winner Martin McDonagh's In Bruges, a sweet, salty thriller about two Irish hired killers (nervy Colin Farrell, melancholy Brendan Gleeson) who bungle a job and are stashed for a while, at Christmas, in the stunning Belgian medieval city, Bruges, by their infuriated Brit/London boss (Ralph Fiennes). Like most really good noirs, In Bruges is obviously hell-bent and doom-drenched. >MoreWilmington on DVD: The Brazilian Bombshell Carmen Miranda, the Romanian New Wave, Classe tous Risques, and Popeye Mike Wilmington on Friday 06/20/2008 12:18 pm, (16) Recommendations Carmen Miranda, the Brazilian bombshell of 20th Century Fox's '40s musicals, was the ultimate showstopper. Though she was a genuine star -- and one of Hollywood's main trump cards in grabbing a share of the wartime South American market -- she never really played leads. Instead, she acted as an explosive sidekick for the Alice Fayes and Betty Grables, or as a femme fatale, either way deliberately fracturing the English language, rattling off Portuguese dialogue a mile a minute and then coming on and blowing away audiences with her fruit bowl hats, tight tropical dresses and machine gun delivery. >More
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