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Perfect Sense | Review
Saturday, February 4th, 2012Director: David Mackenzie Writer: Kim Fupz Aakenson Starring: Ewan McGregor, Eva Green, Connie Nielsen, Stephen Dillane, Ewen Bremmer In most cases, science-fiction features about catastrophes on Earth are made according to one, well-known scheme — harmony in the world is destroyed by a sudden tragedy. Nowadays – more often than previous years – mankind needs [...]
Carol Channing (Carol Channing: Larger Than Life) | Interview
Friday, February 3rd, 2012The life story of legendary performer and Carol Channing (“Hello Dolly”) is as colorful as the lipstick on her big, bright smile. CAROL CHANNING: LARGER THAN LIFE captures the magic and vivacity of the 90-year-old icon—both onstage and off…past and present. The film is both an intimate love story and a rarefied journey inside Broadway’s most glamorous era. It is, above all, a look at an inspiring, incomparable and always entertaining American legend. Directed and co-written by Dori Berinstein (ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway, Gotta Dance), a three-time Tony Award-winning Broadway producer. Starring Carol Channing, Harry Kullijian, Loni Anderson, Mary Jo Catlett, Marge Champion, Tyne Daly, Phyllis Diller, Betty Garrett, Tippi Hedren, Jerry Herman, Angela Lansbury, Rich Little, Bob Mackie, Jimmy Nederlander Sr., Debbie Reynolds, Chita Rivera, Harvey Sabinson, George Schlatter, Richard Skipper, Lily Tomlin, Tommy Tune, Bruce Vilanch, Barbara Walters and JoAnne Worley. Carol Channing is also a beloved San Francisco institution, having grown up and first introduced to the stage in the City. -Entertainment One US
Carol was recently kind enough to sit down and answer a few questions about her experiences below.
Innkeepers, The | Review
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012Director: Ti West
Writer: Ti West
Starring: Sara Paxton, Pat Healy, Kelly McGillis, George Riddle, Alison Bartlett, Lena Dunham, Jake Schlueter
The greatest critics of the horror genre will make definitive statements about its reliance on formulas and tropes, cliches and repetition, and cheap tricks to garner gasps and shrieks from the audience. While these observations may be true for most of the Blockbuster hits that will spike adrenaline in theaters, this trend has also given birth to a delightful breed of satirical horror masters. Let it be said that Ti West is royalty among them, and his new film, The Innkeepers, does not disappoint.
Set in a retiring hotel, The Innkeepers is a neat horror package. Skeleton crew of the hotel staff, Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) are self-fashioned ghost hunters, intent on capturing evidence of a haunting in the Yankee Pedlar Inn’s final days. Naturally, rumors of an apparition related to a death on the property forms a classic origin story for the haunting, and the vast open spaces of the near-empty hotel provide a perfect setting for a suspenseful ghost hunt.
Writer/Director West is not an artist to conjure up tales of unique creativity or edgy insight; instead, he works with the existing tropes, cliches, and repetitions to create something acutely smart and cheeky. Gripping the classic haunting film by its edges, he crinkles it up, adds a few lines, and smooths it out again. The result is charming, and impossibly fresh.
This is in no small part due to Claire. Paxton is a childfaced pixie with a petulant attitude. She stomps around the hotel, growling at Luke, flinging her tiny body from one activity to the next like a possessed rag doll. Her comic timing is impeccable, and armed with West’s writing, she is charmingly off type for a horror heroin. Playing against the grumpily aloof Luke, she makes one of the most engaging horror characters ever to grace the screen.
SXSW Film Announces 2012 Features
Wednesday, February 1st, 2012The South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Conference and Festival announced the features lineup for this year’s Festival, March 9 – 17, 2012 in Austin, Texas. The world premiere of Emmett Malloy’s documentary Big Easy Express will be featured as the Closing Night Film on Saturday, March 17. This year’s program also includes the world premiere [...]
Eric Schaeffer (After Fall, Winter) | Interview
Wednesday, February 1st, 2012It seems as though films that portray characters who do not abide by vanilla heterosexual behavior in favorable and sympathetic perspectives are a dime a dozen these days. All of these films share a very similar message — we need to be honest about our sexuality, first and foremost with our lovers. Writer-director Eric Schaeffer’s [...]
Annie Hall | Review
Wednesday, February 1st, 2012Director: Woody Allen Writers: Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman Starring: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon, Shelley Duvall, Janet Margolin, Colleen Dewhurst, Christopher Walken Having been born in 1973, I was too young to see Woody Allen’s best works in the theater. If memory serves correct, I believe 1994′s Bullets Over Broadway, [...]
JOURNEY 2 | Advance Screenings Giveaway
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012Smells Like Screen Spirit & Warner Bros. invite you
to RSVP for passes to our special advance screenings of
JOURNEY 2: THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND
February 6, 2011 at 7:00 PM in
Austin, Dallas, Houston & San Antonio, TX.
Synopsis: In this follow-up to the 2008 worldwide hit “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” the new 3D family adventure “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island” begins when young Sean Anderson (Josh Hutcherson, reprising his role from the first film) receives a coded distress signal from a mysterious island where no island should exist. It’s a place of strange life forms, mountains of gold, deadly volcanoes, and more than one astonishing secret.
Unable to stop him from going, Sean’s new stepfather, Hank (Dwayne Johnson), joins the quest. Together with a helicopter pilot (Luis Guzmán) and his beautiful, strong-willed daughter (Vanessa Hudgens), they set out to find the island, rescue its lone inhabitant and escape before seismic shockwaves force the island under the sea and bury its treasures forever.
Director: Brad Peyton
Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Michael Caine, Josh Hutcherson, Vanessa Hudgens, Luis Guzmán, Kristin Davis
Studio: Warner Bros.
MPAA Rating: PG
Release Date: Friday, February 10, 2012
Screening Info: Monday, February 6, 2012 at 7:00 PM
NO PURCHASE NECESSARY.
Austin click here to RSVP
Dallas click here to RSVP
Houston click here to RSVP
San Antonio click here to RSVP
Can | Review
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012Director: Raşit Çelikezer Writer: Raşit Çelikezer Starring: Selen Uçer, Serdar Orçin, Yusuf Berkan Demirbağ, Erkan Avcı, Serhat Nalbantoğlu, İdil Yener, Erdal Cindoruk, Cengiz Bozkurt, Zeynep Yalçın, Güray Görkem We usually like what we have already know — songs, we have heard lots of times, films we have watched over and over again, and ideas that [...]
5 Broken Cameras | Review
Monday, January 30th, 2012Directors: Emad Burnat, Guy Davidi Emad Burnat is from the Palestinian village of Bil’in. Burnat got his first video camera in February 2005 when his fourth son, Gibreel, was born. From that moment on, Burnat began documenting everything. Specifically, Burnat began to document the upheaval in Bil’in as the Israelis began to build a separation [...]
About the Pink Sky (Momoiro sora o) | Review
Sunday, January 29th, 2012Director: Keiichi Kobayashi Writer: Keiichi Kobayashi Starring: Ai Ikeda, Ena Koshino, Reiko Fujiwara, Tsubasa Takayama Izumi’s (Ai Ikeda) world is black and white (literally, Keiichi Kobayashi shot the film in black and white), just like the newspapers that she is obsessed with reading. Everything in the world is either good or bad; and, for the most [...]
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