Elvis Mitchell Quotes
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I'm honored to be asked by Stephanie Allain - whom I've long admired - to add to the scope of my programming purview at Film Independent. I salute David Ansen for his work with the festival and look forward to continuing to follow his example.
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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.'
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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.
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Tarantino thinks the Bing is a great room for comedy.
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I thought that, as a black audience member, I would like to see something that reflected an experience that's not normally exhibited in documentaries, or is so much about black people as victims in this country, and black people not taking control of their own lives and their own destinies.
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The story of a proud Roman soldier who is sold into slavery and must fight his way back to freedom, 'Gladiator' suggests what would happen if someone made a movie of the imminent extreme-football league and shot it as if it were a Chanel commercial.
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'Old School' is so breezy it could be a late-night talk show, especially when Craig Kilborn, of 'The Late Late Show,' sidles into camera range as a particularly loathsome competitor to Mitch.
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Selling tickets at the Bing Theater at LACMA was my first job in L.A.
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Just the idea of seeing a type of narrative we've not seen before is a chance to be surprised.
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If you start off as a fearsome figure in pop culture, it's almost axiomatic that at some point, years under the lights softens you into a cuddly family figure.
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Performance art is really more of a command than an invitation.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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No actor has made a career of exerting determination to the extent that Matt Damon has. In the 'Bourne' movies, he burned himself down to a central nervous system - his focus fried away unnecessary calories.
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Duncan Jones has skills; he's an architect of emotional dislocation.
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The influence of John Hughes is fully felt in the melodrama 'Donnie Darko.' This first film written and directed by Richard Kelly is a wobbly cannonball of a movie that tries to go Mr. Hughes one better; it's like a Hughes version of a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
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In 'The Adjustment Bureau,' Damon shows movie-star concentration as David Norris, a politician whose world ambitions hit a pothole when his angry streak becomes public.
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The kind of filmmaking excitement that director Peter Weir brings to movies is bone deep.
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The director Steve McQueen has found a way to constantly include the element of surprise in his work, both as an artist and as a filmmaker.
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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.
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In 'Windtalkers,' the director John Woo is meticulous in melding his own intimate style into the cliches of a large-scale war movie, paying homage to all the tired conventions of the genre. But it's an honor that these cliches don't deserve.
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It's an oddity that will be avoided by millions of people, this new 'Pinocchio.' Osama bin Laden could attend a showing in Times Square and be confident of remaining hidden.