The train grand vitesse is packed, everybody snug in a reserved seat except for this disruptive young mother standing in the aisle, babe in arms, asking if someone will switch so that she and her family can sit together. No one will, and her stubbly-faced husband says, “It’s only three hours.” She kisses him.
The newish term “dramedy” is meant to describe a film that is part-drama/part-comedy. It’s an ugly term, scarcely English in structure, and, if anything, suggests a movie made by a camel.
Mixing splatter and hilarity, the surprising Cabin in the Woods makes a good case for post-modern horror. Consider first, if you will, the ingenious poster for the long-delayed project: There’s a basemented cabin (not in the woods) suspended in blank white space, whose naked architectonics reveal that the structure can be manipulated like Rubik’s cube, twisted this way and that.
Unless you were a bully yourself, you have probably been bullied in school. The cruelty of children is common doctrine, no?
Like many who read him as an adolescent, my introduction to serious literature was Edgar Allan Poe. So when I heard, some 50 years after Roger Corman’s campy cinematic send-ups, that a truly serious attempt at transposing Poe to the screen had arrived at the multiplex, I was as curious as excited.
First-time filmmakers can glean some very helpful tips from Chuck Mitsui’s debut feature: the Hawaii-based One Kine Day. Neophyte directors often fail because of the self-applied pressure to make Citizen Kane, Breathless, She’s Gotta Have It or Reservoir Dogs on the first outing.
It’s too bad that the word “icon” has become the most overused term in what passes for modern celebrity journalism. But if the word icon doesn’t apply to Bob Marley, who became a kind of quasi-religious figure to millions, a sign of hope, and, as it turns out, financially generous, to whom can it possibly apply?
This writer saw The Three Stooges, the longest-running comedy team in American movies, in person only once–as a late-career stage act at a state fair. And after a more than 30-year career, the three–minus the marvelous Curly Howard (substituted by the mediocre Curly Joe DeRita)–had honed down their best movie sketches, brought along their all-important soundman (Bonk!
What inspired you to start the Found Footage Festival? My friend Joe [Pickett], who I’ve known since sixth grade–he’s the other guy doing the festival–we were just bored in our small hometown of Wisconsin.
Oka! tells tales within tales of primitive, transitional and perhaps sustainable Africa. For her third film, part-time Hawaii writer-director Lavinia Currier (Passion in the Desert, full disclosure: this writer worked as a consultant on this film) has chosen an intricate challenge: a narrative without melodrama, telling several stories: Equatorial Banzele forest pygmies enduring enmity from neighboring Bantus; incursion by timber companies and illegal hunters (some from China) chasing after the magnificent elephants within the forest; a quest by a terminally ill American ethnomusicologist trying, before shades fall, to complete his musical-instrument collection by finding the befabled Molimo, an extremely rare instrument said to be able to call elephants.
Karen, a sophisticated 40-something poetry and dance teacher almost exclusively referred to as “Ma’am,” gazes around the classroom before zooming in on her prey. “When you stare at a woman, do you undress her with your eyes or cover her up?” she asks Marlon (Paolo Avelino), a struggling student utterly enamored by the enigmatic poetess, played by Jean Garcia in this film, the lineup in this weekʻs Third Annual Filipino Film Festival.
Franchise comedy movies–meaning a stable of at least three or four films with related casts and plots–are rare, the most lucrative of the lot belonging to the American Pie collective, six and counting (two of these on direct-to-DVD). The newest, if not the freshest, is the current American Reunion, replete with scatology, cunnilingus, fellatio, infidelity, sex-with-food, major drunkenness and old jokes.
Listening to Science Friday on NPR last week, I heard the author Ian Tattersall opine on the question as to whether Homo sapiens had any more evolution left in them. Based on the population pool of 7 billion and counting, he said, the answer was no.
The comedies of director Lasse Hallström (Chocolat, My Life as a Dog come to mind) are like no one else’s: deft, “humanistic,” character-driven and funnier as they go along. They often begin gently, with here and there a few chuckles, and then rope audiences in, ending up far more eccentric than they first appear.
Dinner and a movie was a weekend standard until the tab for two crept past $40. An evening better spent would be to pair up rented Netflixed or streamed movies with complementary edibles.
Heard this one before? Jeff is a run-of-the-mill thirty-something pothead slacker still living in his mom’s basement.
Yes, it’s all true, Disney spent $250 million on the budget for John Carter, which only reinforces what Dolly Parton said about her enhancements: “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” Well, not cheap exactly in the case of Carter–just maybe uninspired. Your humble reviewer could spend the rest of this page listing the titles of the movies from which Carter borrowed.
Due to his striking good looks and youthful appearance, Officer Tom Hanson (a breakthrough role for Johnny Depp) is approached with an undercover sting assignment where he would play a high school student and report on the scenes and happenings of . .
Watching Norwegian Wood and writing about it call upon two different and opposed parts of the brain. Writing Mind says: A Japanese Love Story (with suicides).
“This used to be a glorious soldier’s department,” snarls Rampartʻs “Date-Rape” Dave, a beat officer in the police district in L.A. for which the film, set in the late 1990s, is named.
It’s a thneed: a utilitarian As-Seen-on-TV squeegee of shape-shifting proportions! This sweater-like fabric reconfigures to fit all your fantastical needs!
When it begins later this week, the 10th annual Temple Emanu-El Kirk Cashmere Jewish Film Festival, with films from seven countries, examines the history of anti-semitism in a wide range of material, including the Olympics and recent American political scene. These films will not have played at commercial theaters here.
Summer, 1984. That’s just a year after Michael Jackson’s Thriller becomes a worldwide musical sensation touching every corner of Planet Earth, including Waihau Bay, the sleepy seaside New Zealand town portrayed in the comedy-drama Boy.
Given the city’s crumbling infrastructure and rail controversy, it’s hard to believe anyone would want to be the next mayor of Honolulu. But a few do want the job, including the incumbent, Mayor Peter Carlisle, the former Honolulu Prosecuting Attorney who won a 2010 special election to fill the remainder of Mufi Hannemann’s term.
I’d never been to a Honolulu City Council meeting until a few weeks ago. Features, not politics, was my beat.
Victoria Holt Takamine is a kumu hula, a cultural activist and a teacher and has an impeccable pedigree to back up all these titles. Born of an alii family whose kuleana was in Moanalua, she graduated as a hula teacher under the legendary Auntie Maiki Aiu Lake and taught hundreds of students in her own halau (Pua Alii ‘Ilima) and at the University of Hawaii.
On April 25, a state judge dismissed trespassing charges against a Kauai man after finding that he had been exercising traditional native Hawaiian rights hunting wild pigs on private land. Kui Palama, 28, was arrested on Jan.
The city plans to dish out $3.5 million from its Affordable Housing Fund and either purchase or renovate a structure to provide transitional housing for Honolulu’s special needs homeless population. “Our community has invested considerable effort and resources in addressing homelessness,” Mayor Peter Carlisle said in a statement, “but there remains a population whose disabilities or chronic conditions make it difficult for them to participate in traditional shelter programs.” Carlisle is referring to those homeless with mental illnesses, addictions and physical disabilities.
Makaweli Poi faces an uncertain future after its owner, a corporate subsidiary of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA) ordered the West Kauai mill to suspend operations May 23. Mona Bernardino, chief operating officer of the corporation, Hiipoi LLC, says the move to shut down Makaweli Poi was prompted mainly by financial concerns.
A resolution adopted by the City Council will solidify an agreement between the City and County of Honolulu and the University of Hawaii Water Resources Research Center (UH-WRRC) to conduct an analysis of impacts from ocean sewer outfalls on the marine environments off of Oahu. The city will pay UH-WRRC as much as $2.5 million for biological and sediment studies in portions between now and June 30, 2017 .
Along with the deep, verdant growth of spring sprouts an unyielding desire to spend more time in the open air. That’s why it should come as no surprise that National Bike Month falls in the sun-drenched time of May.
Of the many letters you publish against rail, how many offer an alternative that won’t send us into further economic demise? Billions of gallons of oil are imported for us from every oil-producing nation on this planet so that we can buy billions of gallons of gasoline.
TheBus is taking a back seat to rail. At the May 3 Downtown Neighborhood Board meeting, an audience member asked city Transportation Director Wayne Yoshioka when we could expect the bus route cancellations and changes to be reversed.
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