Slant Magazine

Stuck In Love

2013-06-20T00:41:55+00:00

The title of Josh Boone's new film, Stuck In Love, ostensibly refers to novelist William Borgens's (Greg Kinnear) debilitating three-year funk in which he gives over completely to pining for his ex-wife, Erica (Jennifer Connelly). But the writer-director is as interested in probing the romantic and familial issues plaguing the former couple's two children as he is in providing a portrait of one man's refusal to let go. As…

By: Andrew Schenker

World War Z

2013-06-19T20:06:39+00:00

The scars of a tumultuous production are on full display in World War Z, Marc Forster's utterly innocuous adaptation of Max Brooks's zombie-apocalypse bestseller, but the seemingly endless rewrites and reshoots hardly explain or excuse the overt and largely unconvincing heroic image given to the film's star, producer, and longtime champion, Brad Pitt. The actor-humanitarian plays Gerry Lane, a former high-ranking U.N. operative turned family man who finds himself…

By: Chris Cabin

Sinful Cinema: Disorderlies

2013-06-19T17:00:23+00:00

[Editor's Note: In Sinful Cinema, the House looks back at so-bad-they're-kinda-good movies that have been forgotten for a reason. You call them guilty pleasures; we call them rightfully buried treasures.] You gotta love Ralph Bellamy. In addition to having a reputation as an all-around nice guy and consummate professional, he ended his career on an odd, fascinating note. First, he was the guy who never…

By: Odie "Odienator" Henderson

Links for the Day: Pat Loud Interview, Michael Hastings R.I.P., James Franco on Man of Steel, Charlie Sheen Fires Selma Blair from Anger Management, & More

2013-06-19T15:46:52+00:00

The New York Times visits with the mother of all "housewives": Pat Loud. Journalist Michael Hastings is dead at 33. Remembrances here and here. Bait and twitch: Vice magazine, suicide glamour, and not staying quiet. Keith Uhlich spotlights BAMcinemaFest's can't-miss titles. James Franco offers a few impressions on Man of Steel.

By: Ed Gonzalez

Wise Blood: Id

2013-06-19T14:43:20+00:00

Nicknamed by his late grandfather after Flannery O'Connor's 1952 novel of the same name, Wise Blood, born Christopher Laufman, is barely in his twenties, but is already building a reputation as a purveyor of intrigue with his brand of sample-driven pop songs. Over the course of his two EPs, + and These Wings, Laufman blended blues, gospel, rock, electro, and hip-hop, and tied the disparate elements together with his contorting voice. With his debut full-length, Id,…

By: Andrew Henderson

Summer of '88: Who Framed Roger Rabbit

2013-06-19T13:50:11+00:00

Is there some sort of a deep political hypothesis nibbling on a carrot and overseeing the action in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I mean, the film's plot concerns a nefarious developer, Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd), who wants to dismantle Los Angeles's electrified streetcar system and replace it with a freeway-centric suburban wasteland, and in so doing appropriate and pave over a charismatic minority neighborhood, Toontown.…

By: Tim Peters

Watch Sigur Rós Live in 360 Degrees

2013-06-18T22:26:36+00:00

Sigur Rós takes on a more aggressive—or to quote our own Kevin Liedel in his review of the album, "more acute"—posture on their seventh effort, Kveikur, their first since becoming a threesome following the departure of Kjartan Sveinsson last year. The band will perform five songs from the album tomorrow, June 19th, at 2:50 EST during "Kveikur Live 360," a special "360…

By: staff

Monsters University

2013-06-18T22:20:22+00:00

A college-centric prequel to Monsters Inc., Monsters University is unfortunate proof that the animation studio previously known for its brains is now resting a little too heavily on its nominal brawn. Monsters Inc.'s success came from the imaginative land of Monstropolis, evoking a sense of place through quotidian and nuanced details of urban life and an industrial workplace. Instead of merely relying on a previously created world, this origin story envisions the loveable monsters as…

By: Nick McCarthy

Unfinished Song

2013-06-18T21:12:24+00:00

Part end-of-life romance, part grossly manipulative mush, Unfinished Song tries to stare grief and mortality in the face while practically shitting rainbows. From Hallmark adages and a cherubic granddaughter to cancer death and senior-citizen exploitation, it barely takes a step without referring to a sappy, patronizing checklist. Its closest relative is the 2008 documentary Young@Heart, which similarly followed the endeavors of a choir of spry silver foxes, but at least padded its force-fed sentiment with a steady undercurrent…

By: R. Kurt Osenlund

Things to Come

2013-06-18T20:23:50+00:00

From first to last, Things to Come was intended to bear the unmistakable stamp of H. G. Wells's personal vision. Adapted by the legendary science-fiction novelist from his nonfiction book of "future history" entitled The Shape of Things to Come, both book and film are earnest attempts to foretell the future, extrapolating from current conditions in the 1930s the course of human events over a hundred-year period. Divided…

By: Budd Wilkins

The Howling

2013-06-18T19:46:16+00:00

Credit widespread jealousy of Taylor Lautner's washboard abs for staving off a full-fledged werewolf revival, as body hair has never been as conspicuously in vogue as it is right now since the aftermath of the 1970s—not coincidentally the last time lycanthropy served as one of the horror genre's foremost fashion statements. The trend's failure to re-launch makes some sense, though, as Lautner's Jacob marks perhaps the first…

By: Eric Henderson

Futurama: Season Seven (Part 2)

2013-06-18T19:34:22+00:00

There isn't much that represents the metaphysical heart and soul of Futurama better than the Planet Express crew's faithful freighting ship. The ever-dependable vessel has been to hell and back, damaged and reformatted in a wealth of ways both comical and cruel, yet the lumbering lime-green spacecraft remains an iconic, trustworthy source of steadfast entertainment and excitement. The same can be said of Futurama itself,…

By: Mike LeChevallier

Kuichisan

2013-06-18T17:29:56+00:00

Late in Kuichisan, the nameless almost-baldheaded boy (Raizo Ishihara) who's the closest the film comes to a central character spouts a bunch of gibberish to a gang of young kids, to which they respond with hostile cries of "You don't make sense!" and "Busted brain!" For some viewers who, by this point, are still resisting the wantonly free-associational wavelength of this brazenly oddball doc-fiction hybrid, the moment may well play like a shamelessly self-referential joke…

By: Kenji Fujishima

Hannibal: Season One

2013-06-18T17:07:37+00:00

Hannibal is set in the kind of horror realm we might imagine when we indulge our worst fears of the hideous forms the civilized world could be capable of assuming. The cityscapes are richly foreboding shades of night blue and blood red, and the clouds rush by the screen in accelerated speed to affirm a general sense of relentless dislocating unease. The show's…

By: Chuck Bowen

The Way, Way Back

2013-06-18T17:01:25+00:00

Another white, insular teen is having yet another initially shitty summer at the beginning of The Way, Way Back, the disappointing directorial debut of Jim Rash and Nat Faxon, Alexander Payne's Oscar-winning writing partners on The Descendants. This particular smart yet tragically awkward teen happens to be named Duncan (Liam James), who's being dragged on summer vacation in Massachusetts by his mother, Pam (Toni Collette), and her sternly dickish boyfriend, Trent (Steve Carell). At first content…

By: Chris Cabin

Links for the Day: Making Love at the Movies, Taliban Ready for Peace Talks, Ebert Beyond the Screen, Brody on Vulgar Auteurism, Russell Brand vs. MSNBC, & More

2013-06-18T15:56:38+00:00

Making love in the movies. Taliban signal readiness to begin peace negotiations. For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Rebecca Morgan Frank on poets speaking with movies. Richard Brody chimes in on vulgar auteurism. Mike D'Angelo's latest scenic route leads him toward Michael Mann's Heat.

By: Ed Gonzalez

Los Angeles Film Festival 2013: Crystal Fairy, The Women and the Passenger, Workers, & I.D.

2013-06-18T14:18:23+00:00

Though writer-director Sebastiàn Silva's Crystal Fairy chronicles a Chilean desert road trip punctuated by psychoactive drug use and discursive digression, the film is not Fear and Loathing in the Atacama. Instead, it's a clear-eyed look at the fragility of tentative friendships and a clash of personalities, cultures, and desires. It's also wincingly funny: Michael Cera's Jamie, channeling a bit of Odelay-era…

By: Oscar Moralde

Empire of the Sun: Ice on the Dune

2013-06-18T13:40:30+00:00

In The X-Files episode "Hollywood A.D.," Mulder observes that Ed Wood's infamous B-movie howler Plan 9 from Outer Space is so poorly written and executed that watching it actually prevents him from thinking critically, the inadvertent effect of which is that the right side of his brain is free to make wildly illogical deductions, an immeasurable advantage when it comes to his supernatural line of work. Catharsis through stupefaction, if you…

By: Kevin Liedel

M.I.A. Brings the "Noize" on New Single

2013-06-17T18:07:27+00:00

Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam has been lying relatively low since she flipped the bird at 114 million people during the Super Bowl halftime show last year. Matangi, her first album since signing with Jay-Z's Roc Nation management, has been delayed several times, but it looks like M.I.A. is finally ready to "Bring the Noize." Following 2010's divisive Maya and last year's "Bad Girls,"…

By: Sal Cinquemani

Kanye West: Yeezus

2013-06-17T17:46:43+00:00

With Yeezus, Kanye West has once again created something singular in the world of platinum-class hip-hop: an album built on alien, angular beats, slowly morphing drones and sirens, abrupt periods of silence, and a pulse-quickening style of delivery from Yeezy himself. The album is also, at its essence, a very alluring con job. Its politics are pure posture, and for all the effort Kanye spent on the undeniably striking music, the man hasn'…

By: Ted Scheinman