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Robert Zemeckis’s A Christmas Carol opens today to a chorus of negative reviews and a rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes. A particularly harsh assessment comes from Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal: To put it bluntly, if Scroogely, Disney’s 3-D animated version of “A Christmas Carol” is a calamity. The pace is predominantly glacial—that alone would be enough to cook the goose of this premature holiday turkey—and the tone is joyless, despite an extended passage of bizarre laughter, several dazzling flights of digital fancy, a succession of striking images and Jim Carrey’s voicing of Scrooge plus half a dozen...

The film, The 13th Day, distributed in North America by Ignatius Press, continues to earn rave reviews from viewers. Sr. Helena Burns, FSP, who authors the "Hell Burns" blog, writes: This is a triumph of a film. And I don’t think I’ve ever used that word for a film before. “The 13th Day” was screened here at the 1st Annual John Paul II Film Festival in Miami: http://www.jp2filmfestival.com/. British producer Natasha Howes (birthday: May 13, feast of Our Lady of Fatima) was present. I was prepared not to like this film, and very apprehensive about not liking it because...

Just got hold of the latest issue of the magazine my old alma mater in Spain sends me regularly. A feature about a movie actor, now also a producer, immediately got my attention. First, a magazine that tries to be serious in character would normally not talk about actors and celebrities. Second, though I’ve heard of the story before in a tangential way, I thought it would just have a short shelf life, just a flash in the pan, you know. In short, the article broke my guiding principles. It deserved to be read. And I did. Now, I feel...

I'm amazed by the soothsayers: Ayn Rand, for instance, who warned us fifty years ago of the risk of dictatorship or civil war if collectivism persisted. Or economist Friedrich Hayek, who wrote in the 1940s that we'll become serfs if we move toward big government. However, what feels most prophetic lately is an obscure movie from the l970s called Little Murders. The writer, Pulitzer-Prize-winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer, predicted that the '60s would unleash a feral, primitive society. The movie has a checkered history. It started out as a play on Broadway in the mid-'60s that was such a bomb, it...

What is your favorite movie theme tune? Mine is definitely the "Third Man" theme from the movie of the same name. Interestingly the director of that film didn't originally intend for music to play such an important part of that movie but Carol Reed was doing location scouting in Vienna and heard the zither sounds of Anton Karas at a beer garden. Reed loved the sound and brought Karas to London to compose a tune for his movie. Even before the movie was released, then tune was a big hit. When the movie was released, it too became a big...

There’s something weird about Law Abiding Citizen, and it isn’t simply the movie’s attempt to gussy up the legal thriller genre with gruesome, Saw-style theatrics. No, the most notable thing about the film is how it appears to inadvertently channel the recent, inchoate Republican anger at the Obama administration and use it to power a violent revenge fantasy. Don’t believe me? Here are four ways Law Abiding Citizen feels like a Republican wet dream. Mild spoilers ahead: Sympathy with the Devil Jamie Foxx’s district attorney Nick Rice is ostensibly our hero, struggling to put an end to the murderous schemes...

SAN FRANCISCO, OCT. 27, 2009 (Zenit.org).- A new film on Mary’s apparitions in Fatima is being offered with an advance screening program for groups before the DVD is available to the public in North America. "The 13th Day" tells the true story of the May 13 - Oct. 17, 1917, apparitions to Lucia Santos and her cousins, Francisco and Jacinta Marto. The film is based on the memoirs of Lucia after she became a nun. Ignatius Press, the North American distributor of the film, is offering dioceses, parishes, schools and other organizations an opportunity to show "The 13th Day" before...

The 13th Day: The True Story of Fatima See it on the big screen! Based on the memoirs of Sister Maria Lucia de Jesus dos Santos, and thousands of independent eyewitness accounts, The 13th Day is a dramatic retelling of the experiences of three shepherd children between May and October 1917. (Read more...) "The 13th Day is a powerful presentation of the events surrounding Our Lady's apparitions. I believe this film will assist the cause of the world's peace and the salvation of souls."

For a myriad of reasons, I have spent the last few months watching a movie most every weeknight. I have finally gotten my money’s worth from my Netflix account. But, lately I have had trouble finding movies I think I will like. I scour Netflix and am having a hard time finding movies that interest me, though I know they are out there. My interest runs from war movies to action flicks to quirky indy films to foreign art things. Some of my favorite movies I have seen the past few months are Defiance, all of the Sean Connery Bond...

Donors got access to bowling alley, WH movies, Messina It turns out that the White House-complex bowling alley might be the new Lincoln Bedroom. [Getting Dem pushback on the lede -- the argument being that the perks weren't part of a formal fundraising program like the Clintons' Lincoln bedroom arrangement.] Matthew Mosk of the Washington Times sifts the records and finds that President Obama's high-rolling donors got access to a ten-pin alley, the White House movie theater and the Oval. The big shots were also treated to an in-person West Coast briefing on health care reform by Jim Messina, one...

Charles Bronson is dead. But if he were still with us, where would he find roles to play? Now many movie heroes are cartoon characters like Spiderman, or magical characters like Harry Potter. Young people may be entertained, but they cannot emulate such fantasy heroes. Many people have become pacifists. They sit on the sidelines of life, watching with smug indifference. They are apathetic spectators, both in our struggle against violent criminals at home, and in our war against terrorists abroad. Many people have been taught not that they should fight evil, but that it is evil to fight. But...

MEXICO CITY -- When the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez penned his most recent novel, "Memories of My Melancholy Whores," he was being provocative. The book begins with this line: "The year I turned 90, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin." But there is art and there is life. And so just as an international cast and crew were about to begin filming a movie adaptation of the 2004 novella, the plug was pulled as the filmmakers and García Márquez were denounced as aiding and abetting perverts....

The stage and screen star was cast as the sinister title character in 1962's 'Dr. No'. Joseph Wiseman, a stage and screen actor who played the sinister title character in "Dr. No," the 1962 film that introduced Sean Connery as James Bond, has died. He was 91. Wiseman, who had been in declining health in the last few years, died Monday at his home in Manhattan, said his daughter, Martha Graham Wiseman. The Canadian-born Wiseman already had appeared on Broadway numerous times and in films such as "Detective Story" and "Viva Zapata!" when he was cast as the mysterious villain...

Scene from One Flew Over a Cuckoo's Nest

COLUMN Character AssassinationHollywood Kills Off the Movie HeroInterview with Barbara Nicolosiby Bobby Maddex In Salvo 7, we asked our resident film critic Barbara Nicolosi about the essential elements of good storytelling, as well as the egregious manner in which contemporary filmmakers tell their stories. What we didn’t get to discuss was the importance of character. Specifically, we failed to explore the concept of the hero and speculate on why the franchise hero has all but disappeared from Hollywood. Can you start by identifying the qualities of a hero? What attributes must a hero possess? I’m going to defer to Aristotle...

The Expendables Trailer

Maybe DVD Sales Collapsed Because Movies SuckPosted By John Nolte On October 13, 2009 @ 2:31 pm In Entertainment, News | 163 Comments Everyone seems to have an opinion as to why DVD sales have cratered since hitting their peak in 2006, but no one’s looking at the obvious answer. Plunging sales have been blamed on piracy [1], competing technologies such as video games [2]and low-priced rental outlets like Redbox [3]… everything but the quality of the actual films. First and foremost, I’m a movie lover. Nothing competes for my attention in this regard, including dollar rentals and the like. But...

...Say what you will about the roughly 150 black action, horror and comedy films that came out between 1971 and 1976, the height of the blaxploitation era: that they were cheaply made, poorly acted, hyper-violent and glorified pimps, prostitutes, criminals and con men -- all those things are true, to a certain extent. But they were also utterly empowering, gobbled up by African American audiences desperate for strong, and recognizable, working-class heroes... Howard believes that '70s cultural references have stuck with us -- afros are popular again, and there are countless music videos that reference "Superfly" and "The Mack" --...

Call it delayed reaction. A year after Madonna called him "emotionally retarded," former husband Guy Ritchie said in an Esquire magazine interview that hit the Web on Wednesday that he still loves her, but that she is "retarded" herself. The 41 year-old British director said Madonna "makes things happen" and works hard at her career. "And, of course, here you go: I still love her," Ritchie told the magazine. "But she's retarded, too." The couple finalized their divorce in a U.K. court last November, after eight years of marriage. They have a 9 year-old son together, and also adopted a...

"Your Freedom Has Been A Lie. Liberation Is Here." [ US flag with People's Liberation Army red star insignia superimposed ] "We Are Here To Help"

classic Gang Fight from A Clockwork Orange...

Quick Name three Roman Polanski films. (Don't use IMDB.com) Rosemary's Baby Chinatown and...... Thought so. These movies, plus many others in subtitles, seem to excuse this man of raping a 14 year old girl. Debra Winger complains "the whole art world suffers" in such arrests. I beg to differ. Polanski should be in prison for subjecting the movie viewing world to the abomination that is Rosemary's Baby, an absolutely horrible horror film. I'm seen it twice hoping that after a second viewing it would get better. It Doesn't Read more HERE

Compass? We Don’t Need No Stinking Compass! by Big X Before Big X achieved fame, glory and untold wealth as a writer-producer, he spent a decade or so  as an executive in the financial industry. So when I read Mr. Weinstein’s comment that “Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion,” I couldn’t help but choke and spray a fine mist of Starbucks all over my laptop screen. In comparison to “real” businesses, I think I can say from personal experience inside and outside the bubble that Hollywood is the most systemically ruthless, amoral, deceitful, cruel and thuggish...

Here is a scene from the 1979 cult classic The Warriors...

Ok People...Being that it's Friday and the latest news has basically elated most of us....I decided to take a que from some of the recent zombie threads to start a strict Horror movie post as there seems to be a few pretty die-hard Horror fans here! What are your top ten Horror flicks? Likes and Dislikes about the genre? Classics and Failures? Genre Icons? Discuss it all my friends!

Hollywood Activists, Or How Norma Rae Got Norma Raed by Ned Rice The cruel exploitation of the impoverished masses has been a staple of Hollywood storytelling since the earliest days of movie making.  In fact, thanks to big-screen classics from The Grapes of Wrath to Slumdog Millionaire you might say that grinding poverty has been a real gold mine for Tinseltown.  Given Hollywood’s progressive politics you might also think that a good chunk of the vast box office earnings inspired by the world’s poor might by now have filtered down to the same unwashed throngs who are, in a sense,...

Movie critics are, by definition, folks with strong opinions about movies. But opinions are personal and subjective, so usually critical response to any movie is split between the positive and the negative. Still, there are a few extraordinary films every year that unite reviewers. When they all uniformly praise a movie, it's probably close to a masterpiece. When they all hate a flick, it probably stinks worse than week-old Limburger. RottenTomatoes.com, which aggregates the opinions of over 100 professional movie critics and distills them down to a single numeric "freshness" rating, has compiled the "Worst of the Worst," a list...

We've seen it before. Hollywood seems to need to find a way, any way, to jab Governor Palin as much as possible. Case in point we have the soon to be released movie titled "Did You Hear About The Morgans?" starring Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker. Right in the trailer for this new laugh riot film is a jab at Palin. But it is a typically illogical jab, one that makes no sense at all. But it IS a jab and I guess logic isn't necessary to the good folks in Hollyweird if it results in a jab at...

opening scene of Trainspotting...

The surprise hit "Inglourious Basterds" appears to have breathed some life into Weinstein Co., but the independent movie studio is still facing a serious cash squeeze. Several people familiar with the finances of the company, founded by independent film producers Harvey and Bob Weinstein, said it needs a fresh capital infusion or successive box-office blockbusters to ease the growing pressure. snip The four-year-old film company has burned through most of the roughly $1.2 billion in debt and equity financing raised for its launch in 2005, these people said. Now, these people said, the company likely has to do one of...

TimBurtonJP Exclusive! Tim Burton's "Superman Lives" : Nicolas Cage Costume Test

Just like the film, the making of 'The Godfather’ was an ugly story of fear and dysfunction. What was the formula that made The Godfather one of the most successful films of all time? Surely it would take an unusually harmonious combination of talents working in concert, a rare balance of commercial entertainment and artistic challenge, a run of luck those involved couldn’t miss. Related Articles The Godfather - memorable lines But all wasn’t plain sailing on Francis Ford Coppola’s film in 1972. It was nominated for 11 Oscars, winning three, and on its $6 million budget grossed $101million for...

If you're buying fewer DVDs and renting more of them -- especially from automated Redbox kiosks -- you've got the Hollywood studios scared. DVD sales fell 13.5% to $5.4 billion during the first half of 2009, according to the Digital Entertainment Group. During the same span, DVD rentals rose by 8.3% to $3.4 billion. Digital sales and rentals -- such as those conducted over online stores like Amazon.com and Apple's iTunes -- jumped 21% to $968 million. The studios know that DVD sales have been in decline since at least 2005. Now, however, a depressed economy, convenient rental options and...

Arnie starred in a LOT of great action/sci-fi flicks in his day. I'd like the FReepers who watched these flicks to weigh in on this (a friend of mine and I got in an argument today about the best one - I won't reveal my pick just yet). The Terminator Total Recall Predator Commando Terminator 2 The Running Man

Patrick Swayze, the actor and classically trained dancer whose role in the enduringly popular "Dirty Dancing" made him a movie star, one who struggled with the alienation of fame and against being typecast as a leading man, died Monday. He was 57.

Alec Baldwin, GlenGarry GlenRoss...

The Top 10 White Trash Heroes of Cinema Redneck and "white trash" culture tends to get a bad rap by the snootier elements of our culture. Maybe you think that hicks and hillbillies don’t know nothin’ ‘bout nothin’, but you couldn't be further from the truth. Sometimes we need to look to the trailer parks for succor, refuge, and justice. Source: Twentieth Century Fox 10. Aileen Wuornos from Monster Source: Columbia TriStar Charlize Theron was one of the first of the bombshell actresses to get on the white trash bandwagon. Never one to make a misstep when it comes to...

Frank Darabont, the director of The Shawshank Redemption, has words for the millions of people who believe his 1994 prison drama is the greatest film of all time. “I think that’s a little crackers, to be honest, especially when you think of the other films on the list.” He means films such as The Godfather, Citizen Kane, Lolita, Vertigo and foreign-language contenders like Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. But, hey, pointy-headed film critics can have their high­falutin’ crushes. There’s no getting round...

Back to web version Thursday, Sep 10, 2009 Posted on Wed, Sep. 09, 2009 Big beer, big movies: Both fall flat By ROBERT W. BUTLERThe Kansas City Star The other day I watched the new documentary “Beer Wars” because … well, because it has the word “beer” in the title.But Anat Baron’s film (she was one of the founders of Boston Beer Co., makers of the Sam Adams line) ended up making me think about movies.Bear with me. (I almost wrote “beer with me,” but I retain a smidgen of self-respect.)“Beer Wars” (you can pick up a DVD at...

As if NewsReal hasn't stumbled into enough debates already, now we have John Nolte, Editor-In-Chief of the essential conservative pop culture blog Big Hollywood challenging us. On September 1 Chris Yogerst (who also writes for Big Hollywood and Parcbench in addition to NewsReal) wrote a post here jumping into the debate about "Inglourious Basterds" and why Hollywood often employs politically correct villains: With the politics surrounding Hollywood, one thing people have to understand is that not every filmmaker thinks he or she is a politician. They don’t all want to make political statements with their films. Quentin Tarantino is one...

...Let's just consider this one thing for the time being. Hugo Chavez. Over the past several days I've been reading about his star turn at the Venice Film Festival. Since when did it become so chic to celebrate dictators? WTF is up with that?! Whats up is that Oliver Stone has made a film, a documentary, about Chavez which as IBDeditorials says, "emphasizes that the public has it all wrong about the clowning Chavez being a threat to the West. It's merely an image problem he has, brought on by unjust demonization from George W. Bush." Can we just lock...

Plot Synopsis: Julie Powell (Amy Adams) plays a 29-year old Queens woman who works in some redevelopment corporation for remediation of 9/11 issues, who's bored with the job, and depressed with the stories she has to deal with. Her husband suggests she write a blog, but the only blog-worthy thing in her life is her work, which would defeat the purpose of blogging. She realizes she enjoys cooking and does start the blog with the intention of working through a Julia Child cookbook with about 500 recipes in one year. She posts the number of days and recipes remaining on...

Fred Astaire Swing Time...

To pen a living as a Hollywood screenwriter has always required fortitude and patience. Given the ratio between number of writers and available work, the odds of success are long. Now it looks like the odds have become a whole lot longer. Thanks to a recession-driven downturn forcing studios to make fewer movies and TV shows, coupled with a screenwriters strike last year that ground production to a halt, the wordsmiths of Hollywood have seen jobs and income evaporate. That's the bleak take-away from the annual financial report of the Writers Guild of America, West, the union that represents about...

Started another thread about getting sights for my 1911. And it got me thinking that another thread might be worthwhile... What are some films that use the 1911 prominently? Terrific (or sucky!) movies that have the ole standby as the handgun of choice? Tell me, tell me, tell me...

Let's be frank. I'm not sure if Megan Fox, the sultry starlet of "Transformers" fame, actually knows all that much about Hitler, other than the fact that he had a mustache, makes a brief appearance for some reason in Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" and -- if you believe various right-wing nut-jobs -- seems to have promoted a healthcare plan back in the 1930s that was a lot like the one the Democrats are trying to ram through Congress this year. (OK, I'm not actually sure Fox knows that last part at all.) But having been on a few movie sets...

The Shining hallway scene...

If 2009 is remembered for anything in American cinema, it might be as the year grown-ups and Hollywood finally agreed to call it quits. This is the year when such slick, star-driven, adult-oriented movies as "State of Play," "Duplicity," "The International" and "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3" underperformed at the box office. And when talking-toy movies like "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" and "G.I. Joe" raked in millions. Suddenly, movies for grown-ups are in the cross hairs. "I'm caught up all in it," Spike Lee said recently with a rueful laugh, noting that the sequel to his 2006...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) - Filmgoers who have long turned to the local newspaper to find theaters and show times for movies may have to start looking elsewhere as theater chains rethink the value of paper and ink in a digital age. The top two U.S. chains, Regal Entertainment Group and AMC Entertainment Inc., have begun in recent months to reduce or eliminate the small-type listings showing the start times for movies at individual theaters. Theaters typically must pay newspapers to print that information. Looking to cut costs, the theater chains are instead directing consumers to their Internet sites or...

Did you see Michael Sragow's article "Twitter Effect rattles Hollywood" in the Baltimore Sun? Sragow's thesis is neatly laid out in the first paragraph: "Although word of mouth could always make or break a movie, it usually took days to affect the box office. But the rise of social networking tools such as Twitter might be narrowing that time frame to hours. And that has Hollywood on edge." Now keep in mind that, as Sragow goes on to note, "Movietickets.com recently ran a home-page poll in which 88% of the voting sample said Twitter had no effect on them." Of...