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Filtering by Tag: Linda Holmes
Look at what you can learn to do from watching Road House. (Laura Radford)
This week, I interviewed Pulitzer Prize winner and MacArthur “Genius” grantee playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and chopped up the new Doug Liman-directed, Gyllenhaal-headlined Road House with pals Linda Holmes and Aisha Harris. Like itinerant philosophy grad Dalton from Road House ‘89 , I contain multitudes. Or at least severalitudes.
Two-hander* PCHH episodes are somewhat rare, but I was glad to be able to take part in one with pal Linda Holmes about Michael Mann’s new biopic Ferrari. That it was just the two of us allowed for some discussion of how the movie fits into the 80-year-old auteur’s filmography that we might not have gotten to with a larger panel.
Other critics who on the whole love Mann’s work as much as I do have taken more from this picture than I did. As you’ll hear, I found it to be surprisingly staid and conventional, coming from the guy who’s only other biopic was Ali, 22 years ago, and whose prior feature — almost nine years ago! — was Blackhat, a little-seen thriller that was at least as exciting as it was disjointed. In my City Paper review, I called Ferrari “a sensible sedan of a movie,” which I think fits. Good movie, but I don’t think it’s even as exceptional as Ali, never mind Heat or The Insider or Thief. As always, I’m open to revising my opinion upward upon a second viewing.
*I still don’t get why two-actor plays are called “two-handers” instead of “four-handers.”
IMF lifers Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie always wanted to crash a train together. (Paramount)
it’s an honor and a privilege to dissect the latest entry in my favorite film franchise with Linda Holmes, Wailin Wong, and Roxanna Hadadi on today’s Pop Culture Happy Hour. My estimation of the film grew when I saw it a second time after we recorded this, but it’s an accurate reflection of my somewhat perplexed initial response.
Gerry B. and Mikey C. get serious in Plane, a movie.
I heard that if you go to see Plane on Broadway, stars Gerard “Leonidas, King of Sparta” Butler and Mike “Luke Cage, Hero For Hire” Colter trade roles every night.
Pals Linda Holmes, Ronald Young, Jr. and I had a sublimely fun conversation about this somewhat fun passengers-in-trouble flick.
Ryan Gosling did a lot of hahaha training for the not-so-colorful thrillerThe Gray Man. (Paul Abell/Netflix)
Look, I cohost a podcast about The Prisoner. When a new international espionage-themed thriller appears with a lead character named Six, I have to pay attention. The Netflick The Gray Man is one of two new releases this month containing what I believe to be a deliberate Prisoner reference. The other one is Marcel, the Shell with Shoes On.
I loved Captain America: Civil War and The Nice Guys and Blade Runner 2049 and Knives Out. I appreciated No Time to Die. I wanted to love, or at least appreciate, The Gray Man. I tried to.
Matty McC meets Patty McG, in the battle you didn’t know you wanted to McSee!
A Time to Kill, the fourth big-studio adaptation of a John Grisham legal thriller to hit theaters in a 37-month period during the first Clinton Administration, is not a great showcase for our man Patty McG. There are just too many high-caliber, high-profile, and high-maintenance players in its stacked cast, and probably too much studio pressure for him to get away with anything weird. (Braveheart, released 14 months earlier, was a long time ago.) Company-man director Joel Schumacher seems to have saved all his creative chits for putting nipples on Batsuits in this era, turning in a serviceable but unshowy piece of work the summer in between Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. He sure does like to spray his actors with baby oil, though.
The good news is that our friend Linda Holmes is back this episode, lending her quadruple-threat expertise as (in increasing order of significance) a Sandra Bullock expert, and Grisham expert, an actual-albeit-no-longer-practicing lawyer, and of course as a world-class critic to our examination of the picture. Join us, won’t you, on this jurisprudent journey back to nineteen-niner-six.
A Time to Kill
Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, adapted from John Grisham’s novel
Directed by Joel Schumacher
Released July 24, 1996
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Our song: "A Degree Absolute!"
Music and Lyrics by Chris Klimek
Arranged by Casey Erin Clark and Jonathan Clark
Vocals and Keyboards by Casey Erin Clark
Guitar, Percussion, Mixing by Jonathan Clark
Bass by Marcus Newstead
The great Aisha Harris hosted this conversation wherein I had the good fortune once again to join my old pal Linda Holmes and my new pal Roxana Hadadi. I had a whole digression when we recorded about The Abyss, James Cameron’s first seafaring disaster romance, released only eight years before Titanic, and from which Titanic derives a lot of its technique and one or two of its sinking-ship set pieces.
Titanic was not a film anyone other than Cameron was pushing to make when he pitched it to Fox Chairman Bill Mechanic in early 1995. (He wanted a movie studio to pay for his dives to the wreckage, which constitute the first footage he shot for this movie.) It’s not a film where Fox would have simply hired another director to make it had Cameron acceded to the prevailing wisdom and decided to focus his energies on anything else. Cameron is also the person who cast Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, so the movie is a Cameron project from whatever the shipbuilding equivalent of “soup to nuts” would be. I think it makes sense to foreground Cameron in any discussion of it. Try to imagine Christopher Nolan making a movie now that adolescent girls embraced and returned to again and again. That’s what happened in in the last two weeks of 1997 and the first quarter of ‘98, when the gearhead writer/director of the first two Terminator films, and Aliens, and True Lies, and yes, The Abyss, turned in a romantic tragedy where in the big boat doesn’t hit the iceberg until an hour a forty minutes into the movie.
Tramell Tillman, Zach Cherry, John Turturro, Britt Lower and Adam Scott in the Apple TV+ series Severance.
I was thrilled to join my old pals Linda and Glen and my new pal Roxana Hadadi to discuss Severance, the marvelous and unsettling new Apple+ sci-fi drama.
