Word: smiths
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last night I spent an amusing hour-and-a-half at a Kevin Smith entertainment. I listened to Smodcast (Smith podcast) 106, recorded two weeks ago, about what the writer-director called "my portly misadventure" when he was tossed off a Southwest Airlines flight for weighing too much. With his wife, Jennifer Schwalbach, alternately prodding and sedating him, Smith testifies that he is both a gentleman ("Death before discourtesy is my f---in' mantra") and a bit of a role model for fatties ("I do wear it fairly well"). Claiming he was treated "like a terrorist" and vowing revenge against...
...later last night, to sour this pleasant experience, I also had to watch Smith's new movie: the sluggish, formulaic Cop Out, which stars Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan as a couple of New York policemen tracking a drug lord and saving a kidnap victim while attending haphazardly to their respective family travails. "Nine years we been together," Paul (Morgan) says to his partner Jimmy (Willis) at the film's beginning. Indeed, the movie feels like a fourth or fifth installment of a cop-buddy franchise, when habit has replaced invention, and the stars' chemistry has evaporated. Willis puts...
...Smith's ninth feature is the first he hasn't written; the script was written by Robb and Mark Cullen, who've done a lot of TV series work (Heist, Lucky, Las Vegas). Smith has acknowledged he took this gig for the money and because he likes the genre. The first impulse is more evident here than the second. His strength has always been less in camerabatics, or even directorial competence, than in the creation of wayward characters with a little heart and filthy-funny mouths. He can't do that with a rote screenplay by other people. Blindfold...
...innocent viewer would guess is that the people making the movie like making jokes about other movies; Smith does that, and so do too many other directors. Early on, there's a scene - even if you haven't seen the movie, you've seen the clip a dozen times - where Paul interrogates a suspect using tough-guy lines from other movies: Heat, Training Day, Jaws, Schindler's List, The Color Purple and finally Willis's own Die Hard. (Willis says, "I've never seen that one.") If the riff is Smith's contribution, it's both a testing...
...sale in 2008, hoping to raise as much as $500 million. The Tengzhong offer was estimated to be closer to $150 million. "We have since considered a number of possibilities for Hummer along the way, and we are disappointed that the deal with Tengzhong could not be completed," John Smith, GM's vice president of corporate planning and alliances, said in a written statement that was released on Wednesday. "GM will now work closely with Hummer employees, dealers and suppliers to wind down the business in an orderly and responsible manner...