'20 Feet From Stardom' Review: Get Into the Groove With Backup Singers
June, 13, 2013 5:24 pm | Comments On #Bruce Springsteen, Darlene Love, Lisa Fischer, Merry Clayton, Morgan Neville, Movies, Twenty Feet from StardomBruce Springsteen is trying to explain the yawning gulf, which often has little to do with actual talent, between being a backup singer and becoming a star.
“That walk to the front is complicated,” he says, adding a little later, “it can be a pretty long walk.”
Just how complicated and how long becomes clear in “20 Feet From Stardom,” a marvelously entertaining and instructive documentary about the hugely talented women (and a few men) who sing backup behind superstars including Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, Sting and many more.
Some, like Darlene Love, now a feisty 71, have gone on to become stars in their own right. Most of the others tried, at some point, to become solo artists but failed for various reasons including mediocre material, insufficient promotion and or just plain lack of ego or drive.
“20 Feet,...
Read More'The Purge' Review: A Horror Thriller Purged of Horrors, Thrills
June, 06, 2013 9:22 am | Comments On #Ethan Hawke, Movies, The Purge"The Purge" is a standard issue home-invasion movie drizzled with a thin glaze of sensationalism thanks to a provocative setup. The movie’s front cover may be enticing, but the contents prove all too familiar.
The horror thriller is set in the near future, in 2022, when a group collectively referred to as the “New Founding Fathers” now guides the country. These leaders have decreed that, one night a year, citizens can roam the streets to perpetrate mayhem and murder in a collective spasm of rage and free-for-all vigilantism.
On the designated night of the Purge, anything goes between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m., as evidenced by a montage of grainy...
Read More'Shadow Dancer' Review: A Thriller That's Too Smart to Thrill
May, 31, 2013 7:22 am | Comments On #Movies
Why isn’t Clive Owen a bigger movie star? He has the looks, the intensity and certainly the acting skills required.
Maybe it’s that he always seems to be a little too bright, to be holding something back and too aware of the ambiguities in the characters he’s playing.
Like its star, “Shadow Dancer” somehow just misses. It’s an Anglo-Irish thriller that’s almost too smart and subtle to actually thrill. On the smaller TV screen, it likely would draw you in. On a big movie screen, it fails to pop.
And that...
Read More'The Hangover Part III' Review: Thank God for Peculiar, Perverse - and Outrageously Funny - Galifianakis
May, 20, 2013 10:10 pm | Comments On #bradley cooper, Leah Rozen, Movies, reviews, the hangover part iii, Zack Galifianakis
Years from now, doctoral candidates are likely to write entire extended theses on Alan Garner, the character so memorably and brilliantly played by Zach Galifianakis in the “Hangover” series.
This bearded baby-man -- he’s a walking Chia Pet -- is pure id, one of the most transgressive characters to ever pop up in a mainstream movie. He’s annoying, peculiar, perverse, prideful, cuddly and outrageously funny, all rolled into a single squat, hirsute package.
Fortunately for “The Hangover Part III,” much of it is all about Alan. Returning fans will enjoy this raucous outing, though the fun peters out noticeably in the second half as...
Read More'The English Teacher' Review: Agile Performances Elevate This Pleasant Comedy
May, 16, 2013 6:25 pm | Comments On #julianne moore, Lily Collins, Movies, Nathan Lane, the english teacher“Pleasant” is one of those words that English teachers and editors always put on their verboten lists for aspiring writers as being too vague and namby-pamby.
But pleasant is the perfect word with which to describe “The English Teacher,” an ingratiating little comedy that aims to please and succeeds at its modest goal.
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The movie’s heroine is Linda Sinclair (Julianne Moore), a 40something English teacher at a high school in Kingston, Pa., a suburban town in northwest Pennsylvania. A single woman, she spends her days in the classroom and her nights either out on what invariably turn out to...
Read More'Sightseers' Review: Chris & Tina's Excellent - Albeit Homicidal - Adventure
May, 09, 2013 12:20 pm | Comments On #Leah Rozen, Movies, reviews, Sightseers
Shortly after bashing a complete stranger to death with a cudgel and then smashing the man’s face against a boulder for good measure, Chris rifles through the contents of his victim’s backpack.
Having watched all this calmly, Tina, who is Chris’s girlfriend, makes a request: “See if he has any sandwiches,” she says. When Chris finds and hands one over, Tina avidly munches on it just feet from the bloody corpse.
“Sightseers” is a nasty but also very funny and...
Read More'The Iceman' Review: Michael Shannon Shines as Family Man, Mob Killer
May, 02, 2013 2:24 pm | Comments On #Chris Evans, Leah Rozen, Michael Shannon, Movies, review, The Iceman, Winona RyderRichard Kuklinski was a killer for hire who once claimed that he had, during the course of his lethal career in the New York and New Jersey underworld, sent more than 100 victims to their final rest.
He was convicted for five of those deaths in 1988 -- he pleaded guilty to yet another killing in 2003 -- and was sentenced to consecutive life terms. He died in a prison hospital in Trenton, N.J. in 2006 at age 70.
His story has now been brought to the big screen in “The Iceman,” a somewhat confused, brutal film that’s nonetheless compelling, mostly because of a mesmerizing performance by the gifted Michael Shannon (“Revolutionary Road” and HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire”) as Kuklinski and evocative period details.
...
Read More'Kon-Tiki' Review: A 1951 Oscar Documentary Winner Becomes a Rousing 2013 Adventure
April, 25, 2013 10:32 pm | Comments On #kon-tiki, Leah Rozen, movie reviews, Movies
Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian ethnographer, had a radical idea. What if the Polynesian islands were settled by South Americans who’d sailed 5,000 miles west across the Pacific in hand-built rafts thousands of years ago rather than by nearby Asians?
In 1947 he put his theory to the test, building a primitive raft out of balsa wood and rope and enlisting five men to set sail with him from Peru bound for the Polynesia.
The perilous voyage, dependent only on wind power and the current, was a success and Heyerdahl, who died in 2002 at age 87, became world famous. His book about the expedition became an a bestseller and “Kon-Tiki,” the filmed record that he and his crew members made about the voyage, won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 1951.
...
Read More'Pain & Gain' Review: Funny But Bloated Three Stooges With Massive Pecs
April, 25, 2013 11:55 am | Comments On #Dwayne Johnson, Leah Rozen, Mark Wahlberg, movie reviews, Movies, pain and gain
Wonders never cease. Director Michael Bay has made a movie that’s more than just loud.
His latest, “Pain & Gain,” is an entertaining moral spoof about three lunkheads pursuing their own twisted version of the American Dream. The film is fun, fast and funny, but also a bloated 20 minutes or more than it needs to be.
Bay, whose box-office crushing oeuvre includes the loud and proud “Bad Boys,” “Armageddon,” “Pearl Harbor” and the “Transformers” trilogy, keeps the volume and action at full throttle in “Pain & Gain.” But -- and it’s a big but -- he has the advantage here over his earlier movies of working with a way smarter script, by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who previously collaborated on the “...
Read More'The Angels' Share' Review: Ken Loach Pours Engaging Shot of Scotch
April, 11, 2013 4:10 pm | Comments On #Ken Loach, MoviesKen Loach, the 76-year old, British filmmaker best known for his bleak political dramas such as “The Wind that Shakes the Barley,” “Bread and Roses” and “Ladybird Ladybird,” has with “The Angels' Share” made a wee, entertaining comedy about the theft of high-priced scotch in Scotland.
Like most Loach films, it starts out focused on those barely clinging to the bottom rung of the social ladder, this time in Glasgow. Robbie (newcomer Paul Brannigan), a skinny runt of a young man, is up before a judge who’ll decide whether he goes to jail on an assault charge or can do community service instead.
The judge is feeling lenient and Robbie gets community service, a good thing since his girlfriend is about to have their first child. Harry (John Henshaw), the kindly fellow who runs the community service program, takes...
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Description
Leah Rozen was the film critic at People Magazine for thirteen years, until she decided that seeing six to eight movies a week was cruel and unusual punishment. She has also written for the New York Times and such still lamented though long departed publications as Spy, Manhattan Inc. and New York Woman.
