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It's more dangerous to be a friend or relative of Jackie Chan in the star's movies than it is to play the third yeoman on a 'Star Trek' episode.
Elvis Mitchell
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Often, when Jim Carrey plays it straight, all of the vitality is drained from his face; he looks like a root-canal patient trying out a pleasant expression for his oral surgeon.
Elvis Mitchell
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Performance art is really more of a command than an invitation.
Elvis Mitchell
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Given the knee-jerk patriotism of recent war movies, it's discouraging to see 'Windtalkers' evade pertinent facts that could have recast the doubled-edged issues of racism and loyalty and made them relevant to contemporary times.
Elvis Mitchell
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In the early '60s, it was still a fairly subversive thing, though, to say that you should take a painting, cut it, set it on fire, step on it, hammer nails into it.
Elvis Mitchell
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The stoic drama 'A Somewhat Gentle Man' is photographed in a palate of steel gray tones that match Stellan Skarsgard's complexion. It's a low-blood-pressure version of the kind of thing James M. Cain used to do in his sleep, and its filmmaking accomplishment is as minimalist as its narrative ambition is minimal.
Elvis Mitchell
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Ali was the African-American who exulted in saying exactly what he was capable of, and the bouncing-boy braggadocio of hip-hop is impossible to imagine without him. So it makes sense that one of his spiritual children, the sunny-dispositioned rapper turned actor Will Smith, would play him.
Elvis Mitchell
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In 2013, when it turned out that the plot of LaBeouf's short film 'HowardCantour.com' (2012) had been purloined from graphic novelist Daniel Clowes's 2007 comic 'Justin M. Damiano', the actor-director responded with a series of tweet apologies that also appeared to be shoplifted.
Elvis Mitchell
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Watching daring, high-tech criminals in action, I have the same thought that probably occurs to other moviegoers: if these guys just held on to some of the money they spend on equipment, they wouldn't have to turn to a life of crime.
Elvis Mitchell
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'Infernal Affairs' uses a vibrating terseness usually found in the writer and director Michael Mann's work. Thematically, this film deploys the techniques Mr. Mann brought to bear on 'Heat,' right down to using a similar cold-blooded electronic score.
Elvis Mitchell
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Adapted from the novel by L. Ron Hubbard, who cranked out sci-fi pulp by the cubic ton, 'Battlefield Earth' has the musty feel of the days when the genre's highlight was Flash Gordon.
Elvis Mitchell
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My parents are from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and I feel like it's an old Southern thing where people say that, as a kid, you can be an astronaut or a ballerina or a singer, but as a grown person, you need to go and get a job.
Elvis Mitchell
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Though finally overwhelmed by a preening lassitude, 'Hotel' is never less than fascinating, breaking into multiscreen scenarios like Mr. Figgis's 2000 experiment, 'Timecode.'
Elvis Mitchell
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One thing that I've noticed about big families is that they usually break down into two camps: the talkers and the watchers.
Elvis Mitchell
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The kind of filmmaking excitement that director Peter Weir brings to movies is bone deep.
Elvis Mitchell
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What we're most aware of in 'Eight-Legged Freaks' is how similar it is to other movies, a recombinant mutated species itself, the product of the crossbreeding of the suffering-from-gigantism movies of the 1950s and the 1990 B-picture classic 'Tremors.'
Elvis Mitchell
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We do want to be diverted and be interested and be provoked by popular culture - by art, if we're lucky. And it's amazing how often people have lost sight of this.
Elvis Mitchell
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In 'Training Day,' Mr. Washington's dry-ice grandeur - the predator's reflexes contrasting with a pensive mouth - deserves regard, and his powerhouse virtuosity will almost guarantee him an Oscar nomination.
Elvis Mitchell
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For years, Ono's work - musical and otherwise - was, in large part, dismissed and derided; at best, it was often misunderstood.
Elvis Mitchell
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'8 Mile' could do without an unnecessary class swipe. In a final throwdown, Rabbit clowns a competitor by revealing that the guy went to suburban Detroit Cranbrook, one of the finest private schools in the country.
Elvis Mitchell
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Theron says that she was intrigued by the psychological demands of the material in playing the complicated 'Queen Ravenna', and Stewart's performance as 'Snow White', the fairest of them all, in her first action-heroine role, kept her literally in constant motion.
Elvis Mitchell
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Selling tickets at the Bing Theater at LACMA was my first job in L.A.
Elvis Mitchell
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'Boat Trip' is more tiresome and dumb than actually bad.
Elvis Mitchell
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With his compulsively slamming lyrics and king-of-the-world delivery, DMX intuitively echoes the existentialism of the projects of the novelist Donald Goines.
Elvis Mitchell
