OpeningContinuingDoris Duke TheatreMovie Museum A selection of films currently playing in island theaters. Unattributed film synopses indicate movies not yet reviewed by HW staff.
Adapted, but deviating from, the cult novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the newest film–a well-done debut venture into 3-D by movie-lover Martin Scorsese–has given us the most handsome, technically adept “holiday” production of the year. It is both an emotionally satisfying story and a colorful discourse on the invention of movies.
OpeningContinuingDoris Duke TheatreMovie MuseumMovie Cafe A selection of films currently playing in island theaters. Unattributed film synopses indicate movies not yet reviewed by HW staff.
The Descendants is a very funny film that embraces the big themes–love, death–without getting all sentimental on us. It opens at sea in a speedboat, with a close-up of a woman’s laughing face, wind in her short blond hair, sounds of the engine and the hull striking the waves cut off by a black screen.
Film buffs, the internationalist division, always look forward to the newest offering from Spain’s bad-boy writer-director Pedro Almodóvar, whose early career–splashy, pan-sexual, comic and melodramatic–heralded the true end of the Franco era. Almodóvar proved not a flash-in-the-pan but an original filmmaker, mixing genres, celebrating divas, adding violence to slapstick and making sex fun and naughty.
Film Review / If you have a more than passing interest in the career and tortured life of FBI devisor and 48-year vet J. Edgar Hoover, then Clint Eastwood’s meticulous (and sometimes shocking) J.
Film Review / Director Tarsem Singh is visually nuts. Check out The Cell and The Fall.
OpeningContinuingDoris Duke TheatreMovie MuseumMovie Cafe A selection of films currently playing in island theaters. Unattributed film synopses indicate movies not yet reviewed by HW staff.
Film Review / Forget the hothouse histrionics of the overheated Oliver Stone Wall Street movies, and even the recent, ambitious documentarys about the billion-dollar shenanigans of our new self-appointed aristocrats–the masters of giant investment firms (Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, et al.) and their brainy analysts. It’s 2008, a pregnant 24 hours in the life (and near-death) of one such firm, given to gambling by way of packaging, re-packaging, and then selling billions of dollars of bonds backed by toxic subprime mortgages, whose additional extralegal leveraging could (and did) create losses greater than the house capitalization.
Film Review / In the future, once you reach the ripe old age of 25, your body starts a countdown clock, with a convenient digital read-out on your forearm. You are given one year.
OpeningDoris Duke TheatreMovie MuseumMovie Cafe A selection of films currently playing in island theaters. Unattributed film synopses indicate movies not yet reviewed by HW staff.
It begins, this movie, the way storm clouds begin to gather: Slowly, perhaps harmless, ordinary, almost forgettable. Our eminently likable main characters, a working class married couple (Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain) with a deaf daughter, go about their quotidian chores.
Johnny Depp returns to Hunter S. Thompson territory with The Rum Diary, but the results aren’t as satisfyingly unhinged as Thompson’s previous foray into gonzo territory–Terry Gilliam’s delightfully manic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
OpeningContinuingDoris Duke TheatreMovie MuseumMovie Cafe A selection of films currently playing in island theaters. Unattributed film synopses indicate movies not yet reviewed by HW staff.
Like most of its studio-financed brethren, the horror remake of The Thing is shocking but not scary, formulaic but not surprising, and predictable, but not suspenseful. The Thing, a bad-tempered alien whose spaceship (looking like a waffle-iron) has crashed into the vast (well, half-vast) Antarctic wastes, began life as a Saturday Evening Post magazine story and became a hit low-budget movie in 1951, a well-told scary creature feature.
One of the scariest ideas for Halloween at the movies is a remake of the 1984 classic Footloose. Surprisingly, this new version is a fitting tribute to the original.
“The moment Idealism gets out of line with conduct, it becomes just another vice.” The face of Ryan Gosling, suddenly ubiquitous on our movie screens, is ideal for that of an actor: almost mask-like and concealing (if seemingly bland), but capable of startling changes in the characters played by this long-time actor. He has, in the last few years, played a neo-Nazi, a conventional protagonist, a get-away criminal, a kindly narcissist and so on, and all of them well.
A car full of pretty college kids head up into the mountains for a weekend of pot smoking and skinny dipping. Two rednecks in trucker caps driving a rusted pick-up are heading to the same area and, of course, the spoiled teens instantly assume the Texas Chainsaw Massacre worst about the pair.
OpeningContinuingDoris Duke TheatreMovie MuseumMovie Cafe A selection of films currently playing in island theaters. Unattributed film synopses indicate movies not yet reviewed by HW staff.
OpeningContinuingDoris Duke TheatreMovie MuseumMovie Cafe A selection of films currently playing in island theaters. Unattributed film synopses indicate movies not yet reviewed by HW staff.
Leave It on the Floor The esoteric world of drag queens, the transgendered and all-around gays in vogue runway contests is the scene of this inventive “musical” with original songs and music. Alienated, usually impoverished gays, many driven from home, form “clubs” to compete for trophies in dance/music competitions, while establishing new friendships.
It’s rare to see Asian imports who suck since American distributors wouldn’t want to waste their money. This makes the US release of 1911 so perplexing; it really freaking blows.
Director/cameraman/editor Steven Soderbergh is one of our most adventurous moviemakers, ranging from obscure indies to experimental narratives, from big glossy entertainments to serious dramas. All those approaches payoff in sheer craft; shooting his own productions with (mostly) digital cameras at amazing speed.
So awful it isn’t boring and incoherent to the point of near-genius, the new Halloween horror thriller Dream House entraps some A-list players–Daniel Craig (shirtless and clueless), Naomi Watts (what is she doing in this movie?), Rachel Weisz and helmer Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot)–in an addlepated “mystery” that can best be described as chaos in search of frenzy. It’s like watching a slo-mo train wreck: You should turn away but it’s too negatively fascinating.
OpeningDoris Duke TheatreMovie MuseumMovie Cafe A selection of films currently playing in island theaters. Unattributed film synopses indicate movies not yet reviewed by HW staff.
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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