The Messenger / Let’s get a few things straight. The Messenger is a flat-out masterpiece.
Splice / Elsa and Clive (Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody) are a brilliant, ambitious scientist-couple experimenting with gene splicing. They create a new species of lumpy creatures that look like flesh-colored caterpillars.
Sex and the City 2 / Sex and the City 2 finds our beloved Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) upset at her multi-millionaire husband Mr. Big (Chris Noth) because he bought her a giant flat screen television for their anniversary.
Penguins in the Sky / The Asahiyama Zoo, located in the northwest of Japan, was in trouble, and for good reason. The pens were dirty and dilapidated.
The Secret in their Eyes / At first, the Oscar-winning The Secret in their Eyes (20l0 best foreign-language feature) seems to be a superior legal procedure thriller, about the investigations (25 years apart) of the brutal rape/murder of a young married Buenos Aires teacher. But look again.
A Lower Power / Funny, engaging and believable, A Lower Power is a refreshing gay coming-of-age movie, smartly written and well-acted. Its characters, denizens of San Francisco, are smart and witty, if intellectually way ahead of their emotional maturity.
Shrek Forever After / There’s no denying that Dreamworks pulled off an anomaly with How to Train Your Dragon. Released back in March–a lifetime ago for film–it’s still in the top 10 for box office numbers this week.
Is it Just Me? / The gay indie romantic comedy genre is relatively young, but in addition to neu-classics such as Trick, Eating Out and Latter Days, we now have Is it Just Me? The film follows Blaine, a young Los Angeles columnist for an alternative publication named USA ToGay, who wonders in print if he’ll ever find a true, unshallow love in the decidedly shallow Hollywood scene. As he writes in his article, “Am I the only gay man looking for more than what’s behind the zipper?” And find a connection he does.
Princess Kaiulani / There’s an urgency in first-time director Marc Forby’s film, Princess Kaiulani [sic], reflective of its original title, Barbarian Princess in that–surprise!–she’s not a barbarian at all. Unfortunately, with the film’s loose facts and insertion of a fictional love interest, the audience is never sure what to make of her.
Robin Hood / Overly long and darkened, Robin Hood claims to be a prequel, but really it just cashes in on the new-ish trends engineered by studio filmmakers: Find a pre-sold, allegedly iconic figure (Batman, The Spirit, Sherlock Homes) and then spin a little, by going Dark or going low-camp, with inside jokes. Sometimes this works (The Dark Knight), sometimes it doesn’t (The Spirit) and sometimes it takes chances (Sherlock Holmes, with all that inside homoerotic dithering).
Letters to Juliet / Sophie (Amanda Seyfield from Mamma Mia! and Dear John) is a fact-checker for The New Yorker who has dreams of becoming a writer. She goes on a “pre-honeymoon” with her fiancee-chef Victor (a spazzy Gael Garcia Bernal) to the city of Verona, but all he wants to do is sample cheeses and wines.
The Runaways / In music history, The Runaways comes off as almost a novelty act. Featuring five young women, rocking out in what’s supposedly a man’s man’s man’s world (emphasizing the point with MC5’s version of the song), they are often noted as inspiration for women in rock.
The Black Balloon / Australia’s The Black Balloon has its heart–and mind–in the right place. As star and executive producer, Toni Collette (The United States of Tara) completely de-glamorizes herself as a very pregnant lower-middle class housewife with two teenage sons, one of whom is both ADD and autistic.
Iron Man 2 / Robert Downey Jr.’s first appearance in Iron Man 2 has him at the Stark Expo surrounded by fireworks, cheering fans, dancing girls in red and yellow armored bikinis, and AC/DC’s “Shoot to Thrill” blasting. And that’s pretty much the symbolic reaction we have to the actor’s return to the comic book hero that regenerated him into a box office force of nature.
The Unbroken / The Unbroken opens on the island this week as the winner of three Japan Academy Awards–for Best Picture, Best Editing and Best Actor for its star Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai, Batman Begins). While its whopping three-hour-and-20-minute runtime is not entirely necessary, the film is an absorbing, symbolic look at the state of affairs at Japan Airlines in the late ’80s.
Fish Tank / Mia is l5, a foul-mouthed, hard-drinking near-delinquent living in the Essex housing projects with her drunken, party-loving single mother and her sarcastic younger sister. She’s not above theft in order to get the things she loves.
A Nightmare on Elm Street / Yet again, we’ve gone back to the well of iconic 80s movie slasher killers. The question is why, and if you don’t know the answer, it can be summed up with one man: Michael Bay.
The Losers / The A-Team and The Expendables are exploding into theaters this summer, but the first mercenary team out of the gates are The Losers. Based on a Vertigo comic book, the Losers are a rag tag bunch of soldiers that get double-crossed by a mysterious villain named Max and left for dead.
The Joneses / [Editor’s note: Bob Green spoils the plot this week, which usually means he really, really hated it. Read on at your own pleasure, risk, etc.] Lifeless and flat as a pancake, The Joneses, equipped with a great hook and being billed as a satirical comedy, is an unfunny fiasco wading in the muck of its own making, but pretending to take the moral high ground.
Date Night / Stick Tina Fey and Steve Carell in a movie together and they could read the Twilight series onscreen for 90 minutes with hilarious results, so it goes without saying that Date Night works simply because two of the funniest TV sitcom performers have an excuse to play off of each other. And that’s all Date Night is, really–a fun reason to stick the pair in a big-budget motion picture and josh around for a bit.
Death at A Funeral / If you like your comedy big, broad and medium-raunchy, with here and there a touch of scatology, then Death at A Funeral will serve you admirably. Film re-makes are a sub-habit of the film biz, and usually don’t turn out well.
Kick-Ass / The Comic Code Authority, started in 1954 by the witch hunt led by Fredric Wertham’s book, Seduction of the Innocent, regulated comic books for gore, violence and sexual innuendo, much like the Motion Picture Association of America rates films. Restrictions were put in place with outlined rules prohibiting scenes of excessive violence, profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity and, more specifically, the code read, “crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal, to promote distrust of the forces of law and justice, or to inspire others with a desire to imitate criminals.” In case you haven’t heard, Kick-Ass, the newest comic turned into a film, did not receive a CCA seal of approval.
A Prophet / For many Americans, the last French film was probably Amélie in 2001. For those whom this rings true, there’s a reason to return to French cinema with the arrival of the Oscar-nominated A Prophet this weekend.
The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans / The latest movie from that most idiosyncratic of all directors, Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man), is a story-liner called TheBad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans, and it’s uncompromising in its depiction of drug addiction, police corruption and general all-around sleazoid human behavior. General wisdom has it that the movie is excessive in its depiction of drug-addled characters.
Formosa Betrayed / Inspired by actual events, Formosa Betrayed follows Chicago FBI agent Jake Kelly as he looks into the death of an economics professor in 1983. The investigation leads him to the land once named Formosa (“beautiful island”) by Portuguese sailors, but better known as Taiwan.
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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