Thursday, June 20, 2013
Features Stories
When it comes to packing a picnic basket, sandwiches are almost always the stars of the menu. And why not? They are easy to eat with your hands, pack well and are versatile enough to keep everyone happy.
For their May wedding reception in Bourne, Mass., Jason and Amelie Neese turned to their shared love of literature as inspiration for table names and homemade escort cards.
It was a risk for director Richard Linklater to go so dark in "Before Midnight," the latest round of the romantic musings he began with his stars, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, nearly 20 years ago.
It has been a black eye to Hollywood that throughout this, the unending and increasingly repetitive age of the superhero blockbuster, the comics' most iconic son has eluded its grasp.
The lads of Hollywood's "Pot Pack" get together for a riotous riff on the Rapture in "This Is the End," an often hilarious and generally irreverent comedy about the biblical apocalypse as seen through the windows of a movie star's mansion.
From the very first moments of "The Internship," the buddy comedy starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, it's obvious exactly where it's going. Two washed-up salesmen on the wrong side of 40 vie with a bunch of mouthy millennials for a job at Google.
"The Purge" begins with the most stupid concept for a mainstream movie in recent memory. We will probably see a cereal commercial this summer that has a more thoughtful and realistic vision for the future.
The first sign of trouble in the romantic comedy "Love Is All You Need" is the cliched and incessant use of "That's Amore." Ever since that early-'50s Dean Martin hit was used in "Moonstruck" in 1987, the song has been pop culture's Pavlovian signal to wallow in the jollier side of all things Italian.
Michael Shannon has basically rewritten the book on how to portray dark, volatile men in film with his unerring way of channeling rage and repression.
Canadian actress ("Splice") turned director ("Away from Her") Sarah Polley engages in a bout of navel-gazing with her new documentary, "Stories We Tell."
The story that Khaled Hosseini tells in "And the Mountains Echoed" is one of loss and love — in that order. At its heart, this tale spells out what happens when a brother and sister are torn apart as children — a father's choice to do what he hopes is the right thing.
ABC's sexually charged summer series "Mistresses" has many secrets. But they're nothing for actress Yunjin Kim compared with the mysteries she faced as Sun-Hwa Kwon on "Lost." Even the way the new drama is filmed is a complete change for the actress.
After decades of decline, independent bookselling has become a growth industry. For the fourth year in a row, membership has increased in the American Bookseller Association, the independent stores' trade group.
For it's one, two, three strikes, you're … married? A major league baseball stadium might be one of the last places you would consider for your fairy-tale wedding.
There's a great movie out now about magicians, sleight-of-hand maestros, illusionists, card and coin tricksters. "Now You See Me" is not that movie.
“Expand or die.” That ominous motto of Henry Whipple, a successful Iowa farmer in Ramin Bahrani’s new film, “At Any Price,” distills the business philosophy of a man driven by ambition.
Effortless and effervescent, "Frances Ha" is a small miracle of a movie, honest and funny with an aim that's true. It's both a timeless story of the joys and sorrows of youth and a dead-on portrait of how things are right now for one particular New York woman who, try as she might, can't quite get her life together.
What do you give the kid who has everything? His own summer action-adventure blockbuster, of course.
For some women it's just this way and probably always will be: The size of their swimwear tops and bottoms don't match. So, why not have some fun with it?
Buying a diamond ring can be intimidating. What do you look for? How much should you pay? Should you buy online or in a store? Demystify the process by learning about the four C's.
It didn't have to be like this. In the age of green screens and VFX houses, filmmakers responsible for the sixth installment of the "Fast & Furious" franchise didn't have to destroy hundreds of cars.
If "Fast & Furious 6" were any dumber, the script would have been written in crayon. But no one goes to any installment in this car-chase, skull-bashing slam-o-rama expecting education, enlightenment or, heck, even a story that makes any kind of sense.
Derivative as all get out and plainly concocted by a committee, "Epic" is a children's animated film that is more entertaining and emotional than it has any right to be.
More personal, more inventive. Those are the dominant trends in wedding receptions, experts say, in an era when brides have all the resources of the Internet to plan, share and often produce their own affairs.
The 50th State Fair is back with three new rides on the E.K. Fernandez midway of rides, racing pigs and performing puppies.
There is some intermittent complaining, in "Star Trek Into Darkness," about the militarization of the Federation's Starfleet. You may recall that the historic mission of the starship Enterprise was "to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations."
The five siblings dragging themselves across the woods and fields in Cate Shortland's fierce and powerful "Lore" have been buffeted by forces of man, not nature: namely, war.
There's one mountain in Hollywood that even "The Hunger Games'" scrappy heroine Katniss Everdeen hasn't been able to move: the number of roles for women.
When it comes to Obama, Borland wants the world to understand one thing: The president is a native son of Hawaii. She spent the past six years making "Barack Obama: Made in Hawaii," a two-hour documentary she hopes will set the record straight.
The traditional bridal gown isn't a skimpy silhouette: It's long and typically without a plunging neckline or high slit. There's often a whole lot of fabric. One of the few opportunities for brides to be a little bare is to go with a strapless or sleeveless dress — and go with them they do.
NEW YORK >> F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" is short, almost novella size. It features larger-than-life characters, glamorous extravagance and dramatic demises. On its surface, it's the most Hollywood-friendly of the Great American Novels.
The people of "Peeples" make a better impression than most collections of oddballs in the weary mold of comedies centered on meeting the prospective in-laws. They still overstay their welcome, though.
Call it "The Grating Gatsby." Although the incurably exuberant Baz Luhrmann had the glitter factories and sequin mines working overtime, his glitzed-up "Gatsby" is dishwater dull.
Handsomely mounted but dramatically anemic, Gilles Bourdos' "Renoir" offers some modest rewards, though its treatment of artistic endeavor, the lure of the flesh and generational issues finally feels lightweight.
Grab your lei and good wishes, and celebrate Hawaii's newest batch of high school graduates at commencements across the state
Hollywood is banking on the future this summer — and not just a future where Capt. Kirk orders warp speed or Tony Stark builds a better Iron Man outfit. Though some film franchises seem to live on forever, most come with a shelf life.
The loudest thing about "Iron Man 3" isn't the constant boom of explosions, the heavy barrage of bullets, or even the impressive destruction of our hero's magnificent mansion, which ends up crumbling into the sea.
In a world of increasing segmentation, allow me to add a couple of segments. As I see it, the world can be divided into two distinct groups — people who were alive on June 20, 1975, and people who don't know what it was like to live in a world without summer blockbusters.
Pablo Berger's "Blancanieves" combines two movie trends: the updating of classic fairy tales and the rediscovery of silent film. Hollywood studios have lately been turning venerable children's bedtime stories — "Little Red Riding Hood," "Hansel and Gretel" and of course "Snow White," Berger's source — into special-effects-heavy action spectacles.
There's a siege mentality about Michael Bay's movies, as though viewers are the enemy holed up in a bunker and he's the guy ordering heavy metal music around the clock to wear down our morale and force us to surrender.
There are no dinosaurs. No swirling cosmos. Not even a confused Sean Penn stumbling about in the desert.
With the coming of spring and summer, a young multiplex moviegoer's thoughts turn to special-effects-driven blockbusters set amid fantasy worlds. So it's refreshing to have a film come along at this time of year that is aimed at adults, takes place in the real world, and evokes a sense of literary grace.
Wire work and outrageous (read: silly) plots have been a staple of Hong Kong, Chinese and Taiwanese martial arts films for decades, but when was the last time you saw a fight or a stunt you believed was actually happening?
Given how often they're on the floor, occasionally inside a public restroom, it should come as no surprise that a third of women's purses crawl with E. coli.
Oblivion" is the Frankenstein's monster of science-fiction movies. Stitched together from spare bits of other, often better films, it stumbles awkwardly in story and plot, shuffling toward the predictable explosions and fireballs of the final act.
To see "56 Up" is to be reunited with an old friend. Make that 13 old friends, together again for a documentary project the likes of which the world has never seen.
"The Sapphires" sparkles with sass and Motown soul. It's a girl-group charmer set in the midst of the civil rights era, but half a world away from the strife-torn streets of the United States.
‘HOME RUN'
Jackie Robinson was the ideal class act to break the barrier and become the first black player in Major League Baseball.
Violence is the trigger in "The Place Beyond the Pines," Derek Cianfrance's latest love letter to bad breaks. But it's the ripple effect of responsibility, regret, limited resources and guilt that makes "Pines" particularly relevant in a time when so many struggle from paycheck to paycheck.
Plot-twisting puzzlers are a bubble market in the movies these days, with an arms race of "Inception"-like reality reversals that flip like a coin until dizzy audiences lose all interest in how it lands.
Here's a fascinating piece of history that escaped much of the world's notice when it happened back in 1988.
In these 500 years since Leonardo da Vinci, he has upstaged every genius multitasker in his wake. (OK, not you, Benjamin Franklin and James Franco.)
Ruth Ozeki opens her third novel, "A Tale for the Time Being," with a small deception — or, more accurately, a sleight of hand. Forgoing context or explanation, she plunges us into the diary of a 16-year-old Japanese girl named Nao.
"Imagine yourself in the Cretaceous period," says paleontologist Alan Grant in the opening minutes of Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park." Played by a suntanned Sam Neill, Grant is explaining to a mouthy kid what it would feel like to be hunted down by velociraptors, the wily dinosaurs that have since terrorized millions of moviegoers worldwide.
Relentless, pitiless, bloody and intense — that's the remake of Sam Raimi's "The Evil Dead." But is this "Evil Dead" (they dropped the "The" in the title) any good?
"From Up on Poppy Hill" is frankly stunning, as beautiful a hand-drawn animated feature as you are likely to see.
All you need is love, according to "Upside Down," to save your planet from the dystopian doldrums. Nice sentiment: Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," among others, got there first.
Just before the candy-colored apocalypse comes to Harmony Korine's "Spring Breakers" you hear the peaceable murmurings of a beach, of lapping water, calling gulls and playing children.
A spider crawls up the leg of 18-year-old India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) early in Park Chan-wook's English-language debut, "Stoker," and she regards it passively, intrigued.
Cavemen — they're just like us! Or so "The Croods" seems to be saying with its familiar mix of generational clashes, coming-of-age milestones and generally relatable laughs.
Everybody in "Admission" is funny — Tina Fey, Paul Rudd, Lily Tomlin, Wallace Shawn — but they're not funny in "Admission." The movie is a drama with wisecracks, with some random scenes tilting oddly in the direction of comedy, but without producing a laugh.
"Greedy Lying Bastards" is a provocative premise for a documentary: The oil industry and various groups are thwarting progress on battling climate change in the face of meteorological disasters and mounting scientific evidence that humans cause global warming.
For those who thought the recent Bruce Willis movie was a little light on the casualty list, "Olympus Has Fallen" arrives toting the biggest body count since "Die Hard II."
It's not uncommon for soap opera characters thought dead to spring back to life. Now a pair of soap operas thought dead are being resurrected.
BETHLEHEM, Pa. » It's Easter morning. A boy rouses his younger brother, and they run to the living room to find their baskets filled with — what else? — Peeps.
There are a lot of big stars in the comedy "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone." What's missing are a lot of big laughs.
A 911 operator may be one of the most underappreciated jobs out there. But maybe not after "The Call" comes out today.
Rare is the thriller that goes as completely and utterly wrong as "The Call" does at almost precisely the one-hour mark.
With its minimalist style and simple but highly resonant story, "Like Someone in Love" is recognizably the work of Iranian master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami.
Enter to Win $300! Beefy Warrior football players are doing it; so are the lithe dancers at Ballet Hawaii. University of Hawaii artists with blowtorches and students at Kamehameha Schools, Aiea High School and Hawaii Pacific University are also doing it.
We focus so much energy turning a house into a home, we sometimes forget to aim our decorating genius in the notable direction of the office cubicle.
"OZ: The Great and Powerful" would probably knock 'em dead as the basis for an attraction at Disney World. But it doesn't make for a very good Disney film. Mildly diverting and clever in spots, this "Oz" is certainly no bookend for the 1939 classic.
FOR untold millions, "The Wizard of Oz" — the 1939 MGM musical, but also the 14 Oz-themed L. Frank Baum books that preceded it — has always been there, as much universal truth as pop entertainment.
To fully appreciate the strange mix of unintended comedy and real achievement in Tommy Lee Jones' performance as Gen. Douglas MacArthur, it helps to have some familiarity with MacArthur — with the sonorous voice, the melodrama, the vanity, the swagger.
For 50 years I've collected and researched Don Blanding, author, artist and the father of Lei Day in Hawaii. My research has taken many twists and turns and is presently focused on a Hawaiian woman, Aunty Pinau Kalaukalani.
Twice now I have failed to finish the 2011 film "Drive." The first time I left the theater. The second time, encouraged by friends who love the movie, I tried to watch it at home. Soon after Ryan Gosling smashed a man to death in an elevator, I was out.
As part of a broader gun-control plan he announced in January, President Barack Obama said he will push Congress to fund research into the causes of gun violence, including, potentially, the role of entertainment.
I abhor violence. As a rookie police reporter years ago I saw the damage guns, knives, broken bottles, metal pipes, hands — humans — can inflict. From the terrifyingly premeditated to the unfortunately accidental, those images still have the power to shake me to the core. They will never leave me.
Among the most important rap albums released over the last year or so, one contains a song about Nas' complicated relationship with his teenage daughter.
To any viewer who thinks "Sons of Anarchy" is too violent, consider the bright side: At least the castration scene was … um … deleted. Kurt Sutter presented the idea of showing a character suffering the unkind cut early in the run of the show, now FX's highest-rated.
Years after she first saw "The Passion of the Christ," Lori Pearson still feels queasy when she recalls the brutally graphic movie about the final hours of Jesus' life.
Genre filmmaking helps make sense of the world, creating codes by which the seemingly irrational ways of human behavior can be understood. With storytelling modes that travel from country to country — the crime picture, the horror film, the action movie — genres cross borders and barriers with audiences the world over. On-screen violence can be seen as an international language.
For as long as there has been filmed entertainment, there have been producers and directors retelling the dramatic stories from the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments. But the cable channel History's coming 10-hour miniseries, "The Bible," might be the first to include an angel skilled in Chinese martial arts.
It's been four years — almost a generation in video game years — since Lara Croft embarked on a "Tomb Raider" expedition. The unenviable task of rebooting the well-known and well-worn series seemed impossible, but with a gritty and focused approach, it's one developer Crystal Dynamics got almost completely right with Croft's latest adventure.
Rock band Los Lonely Boys have postponed their concerts in Hawaii, scheduled for this weekend, due to an injury to guitarist/singer Henry Garza.
A big-budget, effects-laden, 3-D retelling of the Jack and the Beanstalk legend may seem like the most unlikely pairing yet of director Bryan Singer and writer Christopher McQuarrie, but "Jack the Giant Slayer" ends up being smart, thrilling and a whole lot of fun.
If you've signed a petition in the past seven days expressing outrage at the Oscar night political incorrectness of Seth MacFarlane, stay far, far away from "21 and Over."
The case of the West Memphis Three — Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, imprisoned as teens in the 1993 murders of three Cub Scouts — has become widely known through the activism of A-list actors and musicians who took up the cause, along with three ‘‘Paradise Lost'' documentaries that called the convictions into question.
A game effort by a decent cast highlights the old-fashioned submarine thriller "Phantom," but heavy-handed dialogue, flurries of melodrama and a silly ending make the whole enterprise sink like a stone.
Hollywood gave its top honor to Ben Affleck's "Argo" during a song-and-dance-filled Academy Awards ceremony Sunday, completing a remarkable turnaround for a film that was once a long-shot contender.
Giorgio Armani could claim some big wins at the Oscars on Sunday night: The designer dressed best-actress nominees Jessica Chastain, Naomi Watts and Quvenzhane Wallis.
Here's a quick guide to tonight's broadcast of "The Oscars" — yes, that is now the official name for the 85th annual Academy Awards ceremony (7:30 p.m., ABC/KITV), according to the American Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The clock ticks past 1 a.m., and "Saving Private Ryan" is on HBO, each scene more riveting than the last. Sleep is just gonna have to wait. One thought leaps to mind: "How in the world did this movie lose to ‘Shakespeare in Love' for the best picture Oscar in 1999?"
Oscar nominee Quvenzhane Wallis was only 5 years old when she auditioned for acting and 6 when she played the part of Hushpuppy, a little girl of fierce strength and resourcefulness living with her daddy in a squalid slab of Louisiana swampland known as The Bathtub.
The scene: Tehran’s Mehrabad airport, January 1980. Six U.S. diplomats, disguised as a sci-fi film crew, are about to fly to freedom with their CIA escorts. But suddenly there’s a moment of panic in what had been a smooth trip through the airport.
"Snitch" takes forever to get going, and lollygags even after that. As a businessman scrambling to find a way to get his son's federal prison sentence reduced, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has to play fear, tough love, pity and panic — and he's a bit in over his head.
The latest production from the BBC Natural History Unit is a typically eye-catching, years-in-the- making chronicle of animal life that is tainted by the urge to anthropomorphize.
For their May wedding reception in Bourne, Mass., Jason and Amelie Neese turned to their shared love of literature as inspiration for table names and homemade escort cards.
It was a risk for director Richard Linklater to go so dark in "Before Midnight," the latest round of the romantic musings he began with his stars, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, nearly 20 years ago.
It has been a black eye to Hollywood that throughout this, the unending and increasingly repetitive age of the superhero blockbuster, the comics' most iconic son has eluded its grasp.
The lads of Hollywood's "Pot Pack" get together for a riotous riff on the Rapture in "This Is the End," an often hilarious and generally irreverent comedy about the biblical apocalypse as seen through the windows of a movie star's mansion.
From the very first moments of "The Internship," the buddy comedy starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, it's obvious exactly where it's going. Two washed-up salesmen on the wrong side of 40 vie with a bunch of mouthy millennials for a job at Google.
"The Purge" begins with the most stupid concept for a mainstream movie in recent memory. We will probably see a cereal commercial this summer that has a more thoughtful and realistic vision for the future.
The first sign of trouble in the romantic comedy "Love Is All You Need" is the cliched and incessant use of "That's Amore." Ever since that early-'50s Dean Martin hit was used in "Moonstruck" in 1987, the song has been pop culture's Pavlovian signal to wallow in the jollier side of all things Italian.
Michael Shannon has basically rewritten the book on how to portray dark, volatile men in film with his unerring way of channeling rage and repression.
Canadian actress ("Splice") turned director ("Away from Her") Sarah Polley engages in a bout of navel-gazing with her new documentary, "Stories We Tell."
The story that Khaled Hosseini tells in "And the Mountains Echoed" is one of loss and love — in that order. At its heart, this tale spells out what happens when a brother and sister are torn apart as children — a father's choice to do what he hopes is the right thing.
ABC's sexually charged summer series "Mistresses" has many secrets. But they're nothing for actress Yunjin Kim compared with the mysteries she faced as Sun-Hwa Kwon on "Lost." Even the way the new drama is filmed is a complete change for the actress.
After decades of decline, independent bookselling has become a growth industry. For the fourth year in a row, membership has increased in the American Bookseller Association, the independent stores' trade group.
For it's one, two, three strikes, you're … married? A major league baseball stadium might be one of the last places you would consider for your fairy-tale wedding.
There's a great movie out now about magicians, sleight-of-hand maestros, illusionists, card and coin tricksters. "Now You See Me" is not that movie.
“Expand or die.” That ominous motto of Henry Whipple, a successful Iowa farmer in Ramin Bahrani’s new film, “At Any Price,” distills the business philosophy of a man driven by ambition.
Effortless and effervescent, "Frances Ha" is a small miracle of a movie, honest and funny with an aim that's true. It's both a timeless story of the joys and sorrows of youth and a dead-on portrait of how things are right now for one particular New York woman who, try as she might, can't quite get her life together.
What do you give the kid who has everything? His own summer action-adventure blockbuster, of course.
For some women it's just this way and probably always will be: The size of their swimwear tops and bottoms don't match. So, why not have some fun with it?
Buying a diamond ring can be intimidating. What do you look for? How much should you pay? Should you buy online or in a store? Demystify the process by learning about the four C's.
It didn't have to be like this. In the age of green screens and VFX houses, filmmakers responsible for the sixth installment of the "Fast & Furious" franchise didn't have to destroy hundreds of cars.
If "Fast & Furious 6" were any dumber, the script would have been written in crayon. But no one goes to any installment in this car-chase, skull-bashing slam-o-rama expecting education, enlightenment or, heck, even a story that makes any kind of sense.
Derivative as all get out and plainly concocted by a committee, "Epic" is a children's animated film that is more entertaining and emotional than it has any right to be.
More personal, more inventive. Those are the dominant trends in wedding receptions, experts say, in an era when brides have all the resources of the Internet to plan, share and often produce their own affairs.
The 50th State Fair is back with three new rides on the E.K. Fernandez midway of rides, racing pigs and performing puppies.
There is some intermittent complaining, in "Star Trek Into Darkness," about the militarization of the Federation's Starfleet. You may recall that the historic mission of the starship Enterprise was "to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations."
The five siblings dragging themselves across the woods and fields in Cate Shortland's fierce and powerful "Lore" have been buffeted by forces of man, not nature: namely, war.
There's one mountain in Hollywood that even "The Hunger Games'" scrappy heroine Katniss Everdeen hasn't been able to move: the number of roles for women.
When it comes to Obama, Borland wants the world to understand one thing: The president is a native son of Hawaii. She spent the past six years making "Barack Obama: Made in Hawaii," a two-hour documentary she hopes will set the record straight.
The traditional bridal gown isn't a skimpy silhouette: It's long and typically without a plunging neckline or high slit. There's often a whole lot of fabric. One of the few opportunities for brides to be a little bare is to go with a strapless or sleeveless dress — and go with them they do.
NEW YORK >> F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" is short, almost novella size. It features larger-than-life characters, glamorous extravagance and dramatic demises. On its surface, it's the most Hollywood-friendly of the Great American Novels.
The people of "Peeples" make a better impression than most collections of oddballs in the weary mold of comedies centered on meeting the prospective in-laws. They still overstay their welcome, though.
Call it "The Grating Gatsby." Although the incurably exuberant Baz Luhrmann had the glitter factories and sequin mines working overtime, his glitzed-up "Gatsby" is dishwater dull.
Handsomely mounted but dramatically anemic, Gilles Bourdos' "Renoir" offers some modest rewards, though its treatment of artistic endeavor, the lure of the flesh and generational issues finally feels lightweight.
Grab your lei and good wishes, and celebrate Hawaii's newest batch of high school graduates at commencements across the state
Hollywood is banking on the future this summer — and not just a future where Capt. Kirk orders warp speed or Tony Stark builds a better Iron Man outfit. Though some film franchises seem to live on forever, most come with a shelf life.
The loudest thing about "Iron Man 3" isn't the constant boom of explosions, the heavy barrage of bullets, or even the impressive destruction of our hero's magnificent mansion, which ends up crumbling into the sea.
In a world of increasing segmentation, allow me to add a couple of segments. As I see it, the world can be divided into two distinct groups — people who were alive on June 20, 1975, and people who don't know what it was like to live in a world without summer blockbusters.
Pablo Berger's "Blancanieves" combines two movie trends: the updating of classic fairy tales and the rediscovery of silent film. Hollywood studios have lately been turning venerable children's bedtime stories — "Little Red Riding Hood," "Hansel and Gretel" and of course "Snow White," Berger's source — into special-effects-heavy action spectacles.
There's a siege mentality about Michael Bay's movies, as though viewers are the enemy holed up in a bunker and he's the guy ordering heavy metal music around the clock to wear down our morale and force us to surrender.
There are no dinosaurs. No swirling cosmos. Not even a confused Sean Penn stumbling about in the desert.
With the coming of spring and summer, a young multiplex moviegoer's thoughts turn to special-effects-driven blockbusters set amid fantasy worlds. So it's refreshing to have a film come along at this time of year that is aimed at adults, takes place in the real world, and evokes a sense of literary grace.
Wire work and outrageous (read: silly) plots have been a staple of Hong Kong, Chinese and Taiwanese martial arts films for decades, but when was the last time you saw a fight or a stunt you believed was actually happening?
Given how often they're on the floor, occasionally inside a public restroom, it should come as no surprise that a third of women's purses crawl with E. coli.
Oblivion" is the Frankenstein's monster of science-fiction movies. Stitched together from spare bits of other, often better films, it stumbles awkwardly in story and plot, shuffling toward the predictable explosions and fireballs of the final act.
To see "56 Up" is to be reunited with an old friend. Make that 13 old friends, together again for a documentary project the likes of which the world has never seen.
"The Sapphires" sparkles with sass and Motown soul. It's a girl-group charmer set in the midst of the civil rights era, but half a world away from the strife-torn streets of the United States.
‘HOME RUN'
Rated: PG-13
HH
<BIf$>Opens today at Ward Stadium 16<BI>
Review By Roger Moore
McClatchy Newspapers
The first rule of any baseball movie is that the guys cast to star in it have to look like they can play.
Jackie Robinson was the ideal class act to break the barrier and become the first black player in Major League Baseball.
Violence is the trigger in "The Place Beyond the Pines," Derek Cianfrance's latest love letter to bad breaks. But it's the ripple effect of responsibility, regret, limited resources and guilt that makes "Pines" particularly relevant in a time when so many struggle from paycheck to paycheck.
Plot-twisting puzzlers are a bubble market in the movies these days, with an arms race of "Inception"-like reality reversals that flip like a coin until dizzy audiences lose all interest in how it lands.
Here's a fascinating piece of history that escaped much of the world's notice when it happened back in 1988.
In these 500 years since Leonardo da Vinci, he has upstaged every genius multitasker in his wake. (OK, not you, Benjamin Franklin and James Franco.)
Ruth Ozeki opens her third novel, "A Tale for the Time Being," with a small deception — or, more accurately, a sleight of hand. Forgoing context or explanation, she plunges us into the diary of a 16-year-old Japanese girl named Nao.
"Imagine yourself in the Cretaceous period," says paleontologist Alan Grant in the opening minutes of Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park." Played by a suntanned Sam Neill, Grant is explaining to a mouthy kid what it would feel like to be hunted down by velociraptors, the wily dinosaurs that have since terrorized millions of moviegoers worldwide.
Relentless, pitiless, bloody and intense — that's the remake of Sam Raimi's "The Evil Dead." But is this "Evil Dead" (they dropped the "The" in the title) any good?
"From Up on Poppy Hill" is frankly stunning, as beautiful a hand-drawn animated feature as you are likely to see.
All you need is love, according to "Upside Down," to save your planet from the dystopian doldrums. Nice sentiment: Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," among others, got there first.
Just before the candy-colored apocalypse comes to Harmony Korine's "Spring Breakers" you hear the peaceable murmurings of a beach, of lapping water, calling gulls and playing children.
A spider crawls up the leg of 18-year-old India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) early in Park Chan-wook's English-language debut, "Stoker," and she regards it passively, intrigued.
Cavemen — they're just like us! Or so "The Croods" seems to be saying with its familiar mix of generational clashes, coming-of-age milestones and generally relatable laughs.
Everybody in "Admission" is funny — Tina Fey, Paul Rudd, Lily Tomlin, Wallace Shawn — but they're not funny in "Admission." The movie is a drama with wisecracks, with some random scenes tilting oddly in the direction of comedy, but without producing a laugh.
"Greedy Lying Bastards" is a provocative premise for a documentary: The oil industry and various groups are thwarting progress on battling climate change in the face of meteorological disasters and mounting scientific evidence that humans cause global warming.
For those who thought the recent Bruce Willis movie was a little light on the casualty list, "Olympus Has Fallen" arrives toting the biggest body count since "Die Hard II."
It's not uncommon for soap opera characters thought dead to spring back to life. Now a pair of soap operas thought dead are being resurrected.
BETHLEHEM, Pa. » It's Easter morning. A boy rouses his younger brother, and they run to the living room to find their baskets filled with — what else? — Peeps.
There are a lot of big stars in the comedy "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone." What's missing are a lot of big laughs.
A 911 operator may be one of the most underappreciated jobs out there. But maybe not after "The Call" comes out today.
Rare is the thriller that goes as completely and utterly wrong as "The Call" does at almost precisely the one-hour mark.
With its minimalist style and simple but highly resonant story, "Like Someone in Love" is recognizably the work of Iranian master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami.
Enter to Win $300! Beefy Warrior football players are doing it; so are the lithe dancers at Ballet Hawaii. University of Hawaii artists with blowtorches and students at Kamehameha Schools, Aiea High School and Hawaii Pacific University are also doing it.
We focus so much energy turning a house into a home, we sometimes forget to aim our decorating genius in the notable direction of the office cubicle.
"OZ: The Great and Powerful" would probably knock 'em dead as the basis for an attraction at Disney World. But it doesn't make for a very good Disney film. Mildly diverting and clever in spots, this "Oz" is certainly no bookend for the 1939 classic.
FOR untold millions, "The Wizard of Oz" — the 1939 MGM musical, but also the 14 Oz-themed L. Frank Baum books that preceded it — has always been there, as much universal truth as pop entertainment.
To fully appreciate the strange mix of unintended comedy and real achievement in Tommy Lee Jones' performance as Gen. Douglas MacArthur, it helps to have some familiarity with MacArthur — with the sonorous voice, the melodrama, the vanity, the swagger.
For 50 years I've collected and researched Don Blanding, author, artist and the father of Lei Day in Hawaii. My research has taken many twists and turns and is presently focused on a Hawaiian woman, Aunty Pinau Kalaukalani.
Twice now I have failed to finish the 2011 film "Drive." The first time I left the theater. The second time, encouraged by friends who love the movie, I tried to watch it at home. Soon after Ryan Gosling smashed a man to death in an elevator, I was out.
As part of a broader gun-control plan he announced in January, President Barack Obama said he will push Congress to fund research into the causes of gun violence, including, potentially, the role of entertainment.
I abhor violence. As a rookie police reporter years ago I saw the damage guns, knives, broken bottles, metal pipes, hands — humans — can inflict. From the terrifyingly premeditated to the unfortunately accidental, those images still have the power to shake me to the core. They will never leave me.
Among the most important rap albums released over the last year or so, one contains a song about Nas' complicated relationship with his teenage daughter.
To any viewer who thinks "Sons of Anarchy" is too violent, consider the bright side: At least the castration scene was … um … deleted. Kurt Sutter presented the idea of showing a character suffering the unkind cut early in the run of the show, now FX's highest-rated.
Years after she first saw "The Passion of the Christ," Lori Pearson still feels queasy when she recalls the brutally graphic movie about the final hours of Jesus' life.
Genre filmmaking helps make sense of the world, creating codes by which the seemingly irrational ways of human behavior can be understood. With storytelling modes that travel from country to country — the crime picture, the horror film, the action movie — genres cross borders and barriers with audiences the world over. On-screen violence can be seen as an international language.
For as long as there has been filmed entertainment, there have been producers and directors retelling the dramatic stories from the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments. But the cable channel History's coming 10-hour miniseries, "The Bible," might be the first to include an angel skilled in Chinese martial arts.
It's been four years — almost a generation in video game years — since Lara Croft embarked on a "Tomb Raider" expedition. The unenviable task of rebooting the well-known and well-worn series seemed impossible, but with a gritty and focused approach, it's one developer Crystal Dynamics got almost completely right with Croft's latest adventure.
Rock band Los Lonely Boys have postponed their concerts in Hawaii, scheduled for this weekend, due to an injury to guitarist/singer Henry Garza.
A big-budget, effects-laden, 3-D retelling of the Jack and the Beanstalk legend may seem like the most unlikely pairing yet of director Bryan Singer and writer Christopher McQuarrie, but "Jack the Giant Slayer" ends up being smart, thrilling and a whole lot of fun.
If you've signed a petition in the past seven days expressing outrage at the Oscar night political incorrectness of Seth MacFarlane, stay far, far away from "21 and Over."
The case of the West Memphis Three — Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, imprisoned as teens in the 1993 murders of three Cub Scouts — has become widely known through the activism of A-list actors and musicians who took up the cause, along with three ‘‘Paradise Lost'' documentaries that called the convictions into question.
A game effort by a decent cast highlights the old-fashioned submarine thriller "Phantom," but heavy-handed dialogue, flurries of melodrama and a silly ending make the whole enterprise sink like a stone.
Hollywood gave its top honor to Ben Affleck's "Argo" during a song-and-dance-filled Academy Awards ceremony Sunday, completing a remarkable turnaround for a film that was once a long-shot contender.
Giorgio Armani could claim some big wins at the Oscars on Sunday night: The designer dressed best-actress nominees Jessica Chastain, Naomi Watts and Quvenzhane Wallis.
Here's a quick guide to tonight's broadcast of "The Oscars" — yes, that is now the official name for the 85th annual Academy Awards ceremony (7:30 p.m., ABC/KITV), according to the American Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The clock ticks past 1 a.m., and "Saving Private Ryan" is on HBO, each scene more riveting than the last. Sleep is just gonna have to wait. One thought leaps to mind: "How in the world did this movie lose to ‘Shakespeare in Love' for the best picture Oscar in 1999?"
Oscar nominee Quvenzhane Wallis was only 5 years old when she auditioned for acting and 6 when she played the part of Hushpuppy, a little girl of fierce strength and resourcefulness living with her daddy in a squalid slab of Louisiana swampland known as The Bathtub.
The scene: Tehran’s Mehrabad airport, January 1980. Six U.S. diplomats, disguised as a sci-fi film crew, are about to fly to freedom with their CIA escorts. But suddenly there’s a moment of panic in what had been a smooth trip through the airport.
"Snitch" takes forever to get going, and lollygags even after that. As a businessman scrambling to find a way to get his son's federal prison sentence reduced, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has to play fear, tough love, pity and panic — and he's a bit in over his head.
The latest production from the BBC Natural History Unit is a typically eye-catching, years-in-the- making chronicle of animal life that is tainted by the urge to anthropomorphize.
‘Soul Sessions’ feat. Taimane
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