Thighs Wide Shut

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
The Art of Shaving
Trailers & Mo

Sweeney Todd marks the 6th pairing of director Tim Burton and his muse Johnny Depp (also the 5th one with his other muse and fiancée, Helena Bonham Carter). And for those keeping score at home, including the bloody good time that is Todd, this makes a total of 5 hits and 1 near miss (that being C & The C Factory). It may not the best of that bunch, but it’s certainly one of the best films being released in this jam-packed Holiday month. Burton-Depp Statistics aside, this 3 hour Stephen Sondheim Broadway show slit down to a 2 hour audio/visual fun fest puts all the other recent movie musicals to shame. Dreamgirls was a nightmare, Hairsparay didn’t stick and Chicago was a chicagoat, but Sweeney Todd was oddly sweet. For once, the songs worked to enhance the story, not take away from it. It probably helped Burton’s cause that he cast great actors who could sorta sing instead of casting actors who could sing great. Enter Depp, Bonham Carter, and Sasha Baron Cohen (in a very brief, but memorable role as a rival barber). They may not be classically trained vocalists, but yer gonna have so much fun watching them mince words and pies that it won’t matter, so just sit back and enjoy the splatter!

Hairy Shearers: we live in one state and grew up in another, and that’s why we heart two places to get our haircut at, Seven Locks Barbershop in Merryland and Brothers Barbershop in NYC

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): Breast In Show

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
Comes Purty Close To Sucking Cox, Hard
Trailers & Mo

Spoofin aint easy. For every slaptastic Airplane! there’s about 17 boovies like Epic Movie. Even parody masters like Mel Brooks and the ZAZ trio have handed in a boatload of clunkers in their time. A ray of hope shinned mighty brightly on Dewey Cox, a take off of heavily Oscar-baited musician biopics, especially with all them notes being scripted by comedy man of the moment Judd Apatow. Yet for all its showy showmanship, spanning the birth of rock and every genre that followed it, Cox aint no symphony, just another middle of the road comedy yielding nuttin but cheap laffs (in particular the lame Jewish jokes that not even Blanche Knott would find truly tasteless). Sure, the songs John C Reilly belts are quite nifty, the costumes and scenery are beyond chewable, and Jenna Fischer has never been lovelier, but to smoke it bluntly, this comedy really isn’t all that funny. We’re sure many of you all will disagree with our assessment (the other critics already have), but if you think for one moment that the bit where Dewey meets the Beatles is tat all humorous, then there will be b(l)oo(d)!!!

Je T’aime The Savage Beast: doesn’t Ma Cox (Margo Martindale) look darn familiar? If you saw Paris, je t’aime, she starred in the best vignette of dem all, Alexander Payne’s 14th arrondissement. Watch it here

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): Sum Merit But No Stinkin Badges

both Sweeney & Cox open in theaters this Friday

until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Billy The Kid
Adolescence & Sensibility
Trailer & Mo

High school was fun whilst wees was in it, but looking back, we’re kinda glad that our time in that pimple and braces penitentiary has already been served. Shiz be a mighty tuff time for any kid. You start growing physically, as well as mentally, and all the while you have to deal with fitting in with your peers. For small town teen Billy (the ‘kid’ namechecked in this doc’s title), he’s got to deal with the same typical problems that everyone else his age has to, but with a few more issues heaped on top. His biological father is out of the picture and you can quickly see how that has had an effect on his insecure soul. But nothing past or present could stand in this kid’s way. Cause he’s got gumption, and a rat tale, and a love for heavy metal, and a million other things and he’ll tell you all about them, even if you’re not listening. When he’s not trying to win over a local girl’s heart, he’ll end up owning yours, like he owns Jean Reno’s. This may not be the mos overpowering doc you’ll see this year, but Jennifer Venditti‘s winning debut is certainly the mos honest one we’ve seen

Netflux Capacitor: Billy reminded us a lot of another troubled soul whose life was also very documenterrific, Daniel Johnston. If you haven’t already, peas see this doc about him and the devil

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): Breast In Show

Enchanted
Fair Tale
Trailers & Mo

While Disney has a long history of cartoons mixin’ and minglin’ with real life peeps (Mary Poppins, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Pete’s Dragon, Bedknobs & Broomsticks and our personal flav, The Three Caballeros), sirprizingly, they have never had one of their animated characters transform into a human in the flesh. That question mark has now become a period, or maybe more like a semicolon, with the release of Enchanted. With that golden premise, the possibilities were endless, but the final product didn’t really capitalize on what could have been. Spankfully, the cast make up for the vanilla script by pouring about 28374 mo z’s to the phrase ‘jazz hands‘. Everyone sez that damsel in dis-dress Amy Adams saves the movie, but why no mad love for Susan Sarandon or Timothy Spall (his guy incognito Italian waiter bit could have starred in its own movie!)? Or what about James Marsden? Besides Josh Brolin, dude is secretly having the bestest year mt EVERest. Usually known for his bore-tastic role as X-Man Cyclops, he’s seemed to struck acting gold as a ham and cheesy actor. He rox it here as prince smarming and did it earlier this summer as Corny Collins in the Hairspray [TWS.org review]. So to sum up, Enchanted is plenty o cheese, light on the meat, but still tasty enuffm to take a bit out of

Lick My Naples: a court in Italy has ordered that Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, his girlfriend Daisy and Tweety Bird appear in court to testify in a counterfeiting case!

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Billy The Kid opens in select theaters today
and elsewhere elsewhen

until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
(Le Scaphandre et Le Papillon)
Blink 182… Million Times
Trailers & Mo

It’s that time of year again folks, when the shitty movies go away and the good ones that inspire, both the heart AND Oscar talk, are here to stay. And no movie this fall (well, thus far) is more inspiring (and should be Oscarlicious) than The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. As we always preach here, true life stories always make for the best in film, and if you swooned to such inspirational films like My Left Foot or The Sea Inside (our top pick for the ‘004) then Butterfly is right up yer alley… and yer a$$ (Ok, we’ll stop using different forms of the word ‘inspiration’, but only if someone buys us a new Dell Inspiron)! Butterfly tells the incredible story of Jean-Dominique Bauby (played by that French dude in Munich), the editor of France’s Elle, who after a stroke is paralyzed from head to toe. Luckily he’s surrounded by a lot of totally hot women (including Anne Consigny, aka what Emma Watson will look like when she’s all growns up), who want nothing more than for him to live as normal a life as he possibly can. With their help, he eventually learns how to communicate, by blinking while someone speaks the letters of the alphabet. Amazingly enuff, he had the patience and courage to pen a memoir this way, which became a best seller and now a muss c movie. We dunno what it is, but no one can seem to capture the spirit of an artist and display it on film quite like the painter come director Julian Schnabel (with great lens work by the grape Janusz Kaminski). He did it with Basquiat and Before Night Falls and he does it here again. Remembering kids, you can’t spell ‘fart’ w/o ‘art’!

All In The Family Part I: Schnabel’s wife, Olatz Lopez Garmendia, has appeared in all three of his films

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): Breast In Show

Protagonist
The Fanatical Four
Trailers & Mo

A kung-fu junkie, a bank robber, a radical terrorist and a gay-curing missionary (starting clockwise from the top left). No, these aren’t our BFFs, but four men who set out to change their lives, and in the process were so enveloped in their own extreme odysseys that they ended up becoming the exact opposite type of person they set out to be. While terrorist Hans-Joachim Klein’s incredible story could stand alone on its own (and it did, in the Dutch doc My Life As A Terrorist), it helps to put perspective on his and the other gentlemen’s lives when all their tales are told simultaneously. Director Jessica Yu (who made one of our mos flavorite docs of this new century, In The Realms of The Unreal) lets her protagonists tell their stories without the interference of other’s opinions. Instead, she finds parallels between them with the help of Euripides and a bunch of wooden rod puppets. Protagonist reminded me a lot of Fast Cheap and Out of Control, which also chronicled the lives of four seemingly unrelated men, and if she keeps on creating fascinating people docs like this, she may end up in more sentences comparing her work with the director of that film, the great Errol Morris

All In The Family Part II: the kung-fu kid, Mark Salzman, also happens to be director Yu’s hubbie

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): Jeepers Worth A Peepers

both films open in select theaters today
and elsewhere elsewhen

until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

Thanksgiving is the Jewish Christmas, and yet we still treated it like it was gentile Christmas, by munching on Chinese food and taking in a bunch o movies. Time is short, and so are these reviews…

No Country For Old Man
Old Spice of Life and Death
Trailers & Mo

After the very un-Coenish and un-goodness that was Intolerable Cruelty and the very underwhelming and un-everything that was Ladykillers, the Bros desperately needed to get their shit together, hispecially if they still wanted to be regarded as one of the best writer/director duos in the biz. Luckily for them and for us, they choose a juicy Cormac McCarthy novel to adapt and turn into one of the year’s mos tense and engrossing films. For those of you expecting the usual Coen Bros charm and quirkiness, you may want to throw dem expectations out the window cause this trip is mighty bumpy, and awfully frumpy, and it’s this chilly willy the penguin ride to the dark side that makes No Country one of their best films as well. Much has been mushed about its abrupt conclusion, but it’s not a stinker of an ending, it’s a thinker. One you’ll be investigating days after. As well as what the eff is up with Javier Bardem’s hair? You don’t need to know anything else cept for the time and place of the next showing

Barking Up The Same Tree: love yerself this kinda modern western? then you should czech out Tommy Lee Jones’ directorial debut, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada [TWS.org review]

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): Breast In Show

American Gangster
Training Afternoon
Trailers & Mo

Ridley Scott’s American Gangster is ultimately juss New Jack City with a better cast and a different ending. Not that there’s anything wrong with being compared to a Mario Van Peebles film, but one expects a lil more oomph with Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington playing cat and mouse instead of Ice T/Judd Nelson and Wesley Snipes. Let’s not dwell on lost potential, cause any movie where topless chicks are cutting dope is still a solid night of entertainment

Devils of Harlem: American Gangster is the Frank Lucas story and the recently released doc Mr Untouchable [TWS.org review] is all about Nicky Barnes. Somehow neither one of these films rocked our world, even though we really wanted them to. Anywho, NY Mag reunited the two of them for a nice lil interview

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Gone Baby Gone
The Boston Flee Party
Trailers & Mo

Are we the only one out there who’s tick and sired of seeing movies about seedy Boston and the good cops/bad cops who inhabit it? We think it’s time that a moratorium is declared on this mini-genre before a forth film walks the same exact walk. I’d rather watch Mystic Pizza than the vastly overrated Mystic River, and The Departed, while thighly enjoyable, will always be juss a jazzed-up remake of a solid Hong Kong film that somehow won Best Picture, in a year where big movies kinda blew. Ben Affleck did a good enough job on this, his first big screen adventure behind the camera (despite the miscasting of his little brother, who to me has about as much screen gravitas as the cane from Citizen Kane), but to me, Gone Baby Gone‘s turf is all too familiar. Maybe the next spoof movie can be about bad bad Beantown . We can see it on the marquee now: Enough Is Enough

IMDb Sweeney: Affleck’s first short, I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney, is still one of the greatestist titles we’ve ever heard of

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): Sum Merit But No Stinkin Badges

The Mist
Supermarket Sweet!
Trailers & Mo

In an age where horror movies are filled with blood and devoid of scares, nuttin has been more welcome than a renaissance of the Stephen King brand. Earlier this year, we were mighty sirprized at the goody gumdropedness that was 1408 [TWS.org review], and with The Mist, well, we were completely MISTified! Sure, we weren’t expecting much at all, but who knew that we’d actually be cowering in our seat for most of the film?! For those who thought Spielberg’s War of The Worlds kinda licked donkey diarrhea, this is the film you’ve been waiting for!

IMDb Sweeney: we all know director Frank Darabont is right at home with adapting King stories, with Shawshank and The Green Snooze Fest Mile under his belt, but didja know his first directing gig was the short The Woman in the Room, from King’s Night Shift?

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): Breast In Show

Into The Wild
The Wild Keeps Calling Us Back
Trailers & Mo

If you haven’t seen this film, do yerself a flavor and do so ASAP, before it leaves the theaters for good. We already did, but after reading the incredible Jon Krakauer book of the same name, we had to do it all over again. The flick may be long, but so was his adventure, so shut yer darn trap!

McCandless In The Wind: next up on our list of the McCadnless mystery is Ron Lamothe’s doc The Call of The Wild. Hopefully the Netflix people will be gettin a copy soon

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): still Breast In Show

until next thyme the balcony is clothed…

The life and times of musicians have always provided prime material in which to make a film from, entertainmentwise and of course, awardswise. That’s been especially true these days with such hits as Ray [TWS review] and Walk The Line [TWS review], which worked well with both audiences and academy members. Howevs, those two flicks were purty by the book, a simple A to Zzzzzzzzz examination of an artist, with not much real insight and more importantly, creativity. This year’s crop have broken from that boring mold and are redefining the music biopic as we know it. While Edith Piaf’s tale, La Vie En Rose [TWS review], was a bit on the straightforward side, it was still far more compelling than the cinematic takes on Mr Charles and Mr Cash’s lives. Luckily for Bob Dylan, Ian Curtis, and Joe Strummer (and for us), three unique directors, with great gifts for sound and vision, tackled their lives in not the most conventional ways. All three of these films may hit theaters this fall, but all three will linger in people’s memories for many years to come

I’m Not There
Another Side of Bob Dylan, And Another, And Another…
Trailers & Mo

Warning: you will not walk out of this movie knowing any more about Bob Dylan than you did before you walked in. This film is not a history lesson, but more of a history suggestion, letting you try to figure out what pieces of the puzzle make up who Bob Dylan ‘is’. And that’s the problem of making a movie about Bob Dylan, cause there are so many ‘is’eseses that it’s impossible to create a linear path from yesterday to today. Enter director Todd Haynes, who recognizes that issue and decided to split the pie of Dylan into 6 slices of his persona (Cate Blanchett as ’65 Dylan may seem like a contrivance, but her bit steals the show. Only Richard Gere’s piece feels a bit undercooked). This hodgepodge of impressions may irk some Dylan diehards looking for a complete portrait, but who really cares when this results in one of the mos creative love letters to an artist ever committed to celluloid. Like with his brills Velvet Goldmine, a kaleidoscopic ode to David Bowie and the glam rock era, Haynes isn’t interested in revealing truth, but instead evoking a certain time and a place by recreating/reimagining it in a mos freewheelin’ way. One could say that his films are heavy on style and light on substance, but Haynes’ style is his substance. He’s probably the single greatest homage-r going. Remember Far From Heaven? It was made in 2002, but show it to someone with no working knowledge of film and they might juss mistake it for one of the Douglas Sirk films from the ’50s dat it’s trying to emulate. I’m Not There works the same way, and Haynes really outdid himself by not only painting different Dylans, but by using different palettes for each of his canvases. By copying others, Haynes has created something wholly original, and in the process, become an artist in his own right

All The News That’s Fit To Mint: do yerself a flavor and read or re-read this NYTimes Mag article on Haynes and I’m Not There

Control
His Pride For Joy… Division
Trailer & Mo

If you’ve seen 24 Hour Party People you already know the whole story about impresario Tony Wilson and how he put Manchester on the map with the help of a lot of memorable music. But there are plenty of stories within Wilson’s story that are worth investigating on their own. Such is the case of the short and most turbulent life of Joy Division’s lead singer, Ian Curtis. Sean Harris perfectly portrayed him in 24HPP, and in Control, a film solely about Curtis, he could have easily expanded on what he started. However, the role was turned over to another gent who’s head popped up in 24HPP, Sam Riley, who played Mark E Smith of the Fall. Although he looks more like Pete Doherty than Curtis, Riley hands in the best performance by a man I’ve seen all year (if yer wonderin which woman is tops, look no further than Marion Cotillard’s work as Ms Piaf, cause that shiz was beyond bestness AND thunderdome!). Riley is the heart and soul of the entire picture, and the heart and soul he’s taking on is a mighty black one. He’s so convincing as Curtis, that images of his dour and helpless facial expressions are still haunting me a week after seeing this film. While Riley works wonders in front of the camera, it’s the man behind the camera that deserves major kudos. Anton Corbijn, a renowned photographer (that Joshua Tree cover shot) and music video director (Nirvana’s ‘Heart Shaped Box’), makes the most of his feature film debut here, beautifully capturing all the ugliness of Curits’ life in stark black and white. Can’t wait to see what’s next for both actor and director, for this love will never tear me apart from either one of dem

Groping Groupie Groupings: Riley’s on-screen mistress is also his off-screen kisstress. Say hello hottie to Alexandra Maria Lara. You might remember her as Hitler’s secretary in Downfall

Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten
Sittin Round The Fire Roastin A Marsh Fellow
Trailer & Mo

Looking for a killer documentary on the Clash? No probs, since one was made seven years ago. It’s called The Clash: Westway to the World, and if you’re any kind of fan, you will mos certainly enjoy it. Yearnin for a bit more? Thought you were, and yer effin lucky cause Julien Temple, the man who did right to The Sex Pistols with The Filth & The Fury, gives the Clash’s dearly missed main attraction a telling tribute. Joe Strummer may best be known as the leader singer of one of punk’s finest groups, but don’t you dare pigeonhole him like that in front of his circle of family, friends and fans (cept Paul Simonon who, for some reason, is noticeably absent). This diverse group of peeps sit around reminiscing at many a campfire, not to bury him, but to praise him! That’s right, campfires, which at first seemed a bit gimmicky for an interview technique, but its later revealed that Strummer was a big fan of that type of gathering where all were equal and could say whatever they wanted. Along with the kind words of others, Temple deftly pieces together a complete picture on his subject, mixing in plenty of hot tunes, personal home movies, photos, and pop culture goodies (like the ye olde film versions of Animal Fram and 1984, along with if…). Between this and his TF&TF, Temple is mos def tops when it comes to rawk docs. Hell, he’s even replaced my other temple as my current house of worship

Not So Easy: whilst Temple may be the man when it comes to the doc and even music videos (Tom Petty’s ‘Free Fallin’), his fictional work could use some work. One of his ‘best known films is Earth Girls Are Easy

John Grisham’s Jizzum (aka Verdict): all three be Breast In Show

I’m Not There opens on November 21st, Joe Strummer opens today, and Control is currently playing at select theaters across the country

until next thyme the balcony is clothed…