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Chicago Tribune: Glenn Whipp
The funniest thing about the monumentally stupid anti-comedy "Miss March" is that somehow the producers persuaded Playboy to sign off on the thing. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
You get the feeling the Walt Disney Company is determined to remake every live-action feature in its canon, with the possible exceptions of "The Happiest Millionaire" and "Superdad." The latest Disney repurposing project works rather well: a frenetic update of "Escape to Witch Mountain" (1975) in which Dwayne "Rock No Longer" Johnson reunites with the director of "The Game Plan," Andy Fickman, and in which the phrase "pimped-out" makes a brief appearance, in addition to an awful lot of head-banging action, as a reminder that it is no longer 1975. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Esposito
Mary Stuart Masterson assembles a powerful cast for her directorial debut - including stars Kristen Stewart ("Twilight") and Aaron Stanford ("X-Men: The Last Stand"), and supporting stars Bruce Dern and Elizabeth Ashley - and none of them let her down in this tale about the sometimes fleeting nature of love in a small town. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
The strategy behind the remake of "The Last House on the Left" is clear. It grinds our bones to make its bread. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
The best new film of the week, "Tokyo Sonata," can be read at least two different ways, which is a sign of quality in itself. If you view it as subtly but predominantly comic, you'll experience it differently than those pulled in by the film's dramatic implications, its depiction of modern urban life, perched on an abyss no one can quite make out in the fog. Either way, it's fascinating. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
Talk all you want about the dense novelistic embroidery of the graphic novel "Watchmen," its obsessive detail and clever subversion of superhero mythology and masked avenger cliches. But really, the appeal of the film version, such as it is, relates almost entirely to eye-for-an-eye, severed-limb-for-a-limb vengeance, two hours and 41 minutes of it, with just enough solemnity to make anyone who thought "The Dark Knight" was a little gassy think twice about which superhero myth they're calling gassy. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
"Crossing Over" crisscrosses Southern California, using overhead shots of freeways as section breaks, covering an ambitious variety of green-card tales of woe, establishing so many intersecting lines of fate and circumstance that halfway through you wonder: Is this film going to include every single Angeleno who wasn't in "Crash"? more |
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Chicago Tribune: Mark Olsen
Younger audiences, perhaps used to the adoptive personas of online realities, seem less bothered by questions of authenticity than previous generations. So it should be no surprise that the opening of "Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience," ostensibly a concert documentary, features a sequence of the band being chased by fans that seems "real" only in the same sense as an episode of "The Hills." more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
Maybe they were just too funny, deliberately. A hosehead influence on Anthrax, Megadeth and other monsters of metal, the Canadian band Anvil, led by guitarist, vocalist and tongue-flicker Steve "Lips" Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner, lacked the necessary humorlessness to conquer the world. They were big for a while. And then they weren't. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
I didn't half-mind "Fired Up," but half a mind is more than it deserves. It's "Wedding Crashers" with high school seniors and bras and panties, as opposed to Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson and copious toplessness. more |
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