Word: writer-director
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...previous film as writer-director, The 40 Year-Old Virgin, was supposed to be about how a nice fellow who'd never managed to have sex triumphs over the prodding and baiting of his jerky friends (including Rogen and Rudd) and finds a compatible mate. But The Girl (Catherine Keener) was hardly a character at all; her only function was to unleash a hearty laugh whenever Carell passed a joke. Alison, granted, is more prominent and complicated here. But for all the lip service Apatow pays to the guy-gal plot of Knocked Up, he invests much more energy...
...Wong Kar Wai also loves Cannes. The Hong Kong writer-director has been here a half-dozen times, including last year's stint as president of the Festival Jury that awards the Palme d'Or on closing night (a week from Sunday). And the Festival likes Wong enough to have chosen his new film, My Blueberry Nights, as the opening night film at a black-tie ceremony later this evening. He'll be there with his star, Norah Jones, the pop singer making her acting debut in his first American movie - a very mixed bag, with some fine scenes...
...eight movie-fan websites have a total of 6 million to 8 million unique users a month. And unlike that of many news sites, which are weekday coffee-break reads, the fan sites' traffic peaks on weekends, when visitors are making decisions about what movies to see. Writer-director Kevin Smith, who has a top-rated podcast--and a Ms. Pac-Man machine!--believes fanboys deserve all the credit for the $26 million that Clerks II earned at the box office last year, five times what the film cost. "Had I not gotten onto the Internet in 1995, I doubt...
...mellow self-deprecating charm that Schwartz says manifests itself, for instance, when he transforms, as he does often, into a "monologuist movie reviewer." Or you can see it in his thwarted dream to produce a remake of Revenge of the Nerds. Or, as the neurotic Jewish first-time writer-director of In the Land of Women, Jon Kasdan (son of Big Chill director Lawrence Kasdan), says, "He's a new kind of nerdy Jewish guy: both self-deprecating and self-possessed. He's taken the New York thing and moved it over to the West Coast--not a bad role...
...pity that Sturges and Hutton made only this film together. But her mentor, DeSylva, was Sturges' tormentor (on TCM Hutton says that "Buddy didn't like him because he didn't hit schedules") and soon hounded Paramount's prize writer-director off the lot. Partly as a result of the Sturges exile, Hutton's movies thereafter were mostly dreck, occasionally animated by her nutty novelties songs. The films are fairly summarized in these TIME reviews, most of them by Agee, wearing himself out to find new descriptions for Betty-mania...