Actress Diane Keaton’s new memoir feels like we’re sitting beside the Oscar-winning actress on a therapist’s couch.

“Then Again” lets Keaton, best known for roles in “Annie Hall,” “The Godfather” and “Something’s Gotta Give,” open her soul for a most unconventional look at her life.

And none of it would have been possible without her mother, Dorothy Deanne Keaton Hall.

“Then Again” is like two memoirs in one, the tale of a gifted but insecure actress and her ma, a woman whose artistic talent lacked the outlet her daughter possessed.

Keaton rights that wrong in “Then Again,” a book that’s vigorously self-reflective without being boastful. The beguiling Keaton isn’t like many of her acting peers, and her thoughtful essays reflective that fact.

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Is HBO’s ‘The Pacific’ An Underrated Masterpiece?

After the brilliant “Band of Brothers,” I was excited about this HBO mini-series and then Tom Hanks had to get goddamned stupid and partisan and anti-American and ruin the whole thing. I knew he was a lib but that didn’t matter. I loved Tom Hanks and then he had to go and declare that our WWII veterans were waging a war of “terror and racism.”

It would be great to be able to go back to enjoying his work, but now — I just can’t get over this.

I’ve never seen “The Pacific.” I do know Hanks probably hurt the ratings and that the reviews weren’t very good. I also know that Hanks so toxified the atmosphere around the release that the thought of watching it still makes me ill.

35mm Projection Could Be gone by 2015

This is actually one way in which Hollywood can save a ton of money, which of course is what they’re desperate to do in order to avoid the hard work of making better movies that will make more money.

People often confuse me as some kind of purist when that’s really not true. I could care less if the projection is digital or 35MM. I love story. Tell a good story and how you project it won’t make a bit of difference.

Woody Woodpecker Movie in Development

Gee, I hope he learns stop wounding Gaia’s trees with all that awful woodpecking.

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Adam Sandler has his new movie “Jack and Jill” in theaters this weekend, and man, have the nation’s mainstream media film critics got their knives out for him on this one.

With a stunning 0 percent so far on Rotten Tomatoes the day before it hits theaters one might think Sandler had made a film that was completely, utterly and irredeemably lacking in laughs and entertainment value.

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But – taking into account that this isn’t pretentious art-house, Oscar-aiming fare – “Jack and Jill” is just another sad example of most critics’ single-minded agenda to give Sandler a smack down for daring to make movies that, while engaging in some crude humor, nearly always wind up upholding old-fashioned values like solid families, respect for elders (especially grandmas with meatballs!) and true love.

This time around, he includes a strong anti-bullying angle, and dares to have not one, not two, but three broad-sided smack downs of an atheist character – so be fully aware that while this isn’t a perfect film, it is damn funny. The packed audience I saw it with laughed their heads off while the few critics in attendance groused afterwards about what an atrocity it was.

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Many people harbor dark secrets from their past, memories that eat at their souls and cause them to live in fear of ever being discovered. And in the terrific new film “The Son of No One,” a New York City cop named Jonathan White has an even darker one than most.

Jonathan grew up in a Queens housing project where he earned the nickname “Milk” for being the only white kid surrounded by minorities. He was stuck living there with his impoverished grandmother because his cop father was killed in the line of duty. Surrounded by broken lives and with a black child named Vinny as his only true friend, Jonathan dreamed of getting out fast – particularly because a crack addict named Hanky is constantly terrorizing the kids in the building.

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Milk and Vinny find a gun and never really intend to use it other than to scare Hanky away, but in a moment of panic Milk shoots and kills the junkie. When he and Vinny move the body to cover up the killing, another drug dealer finds out and, in an ensuing tussle, the dealer tumbles down a flight of stairs to his death.

Detective Charles Stanford (Al Pacino), the former partner of Milk’s father, figures out these were innocent accidents that took out the worst human trash in the projects so Milk is never charged. The deaths are left officially unsolved.

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I’m realizing how odd it is to complain about the Oscars or to pigeonhole the Academy’s tastes. They can get it astoundingly right (i.e., I can agree wholeheartedly) and wildly wrong (i.e., I disagree) all in the same year in the same categories. Case in point…

1992:

“Unforgiven” – Yes, yes, yes. This is a great movie. Spot on. Finally, some recognition for Clint, who by this point had been awesome for, oh, twenty some odd years — but welcome to the party, Academy.

“The Crying Game” – Oh. Okay. It’s a good movie, kind of defined by the twist. I liked the movie, but the marketing campaign — in which Miramax told us there was a big twist — was egregious and perhaps evil.

“Howard’s End” – Oh, dear Lord I hate Merchant-Ivory movies. Not my cup of tea, but right up the Academy’s collective alley. Wikipedia says it was the first film to be released by Sony Pictures Classics, so named because Sony Important and Destined to Be Remembered Forever Films sounded too presumptuous.

“A Few Good Men” – Really loved this back then, the dialogue, the speech, and Tom Cruise’s performance. And while I still enjoy it, it’s not as good as I thought it was.

“Scent of a Woman” – Ugh, are you serious, Academy? Obviously I’m not the first to point this out, but this was the turning point for Pacino, when he decided to start sentences in his normal, gravelly voice and then to SHOUT THE REST OF THE SENTENCE LIKE THIS. It’s really annoying but he was RE-WARDED! WITH AN OSCAR! (more…)

Saw The Devil’s Advocate for the third time the other night.

No one in film has so dissected and anatomized diabolical corpi with more dedication and precision than Al Pacino.

Not even the combined forces of Martin Scorcese and the chilling characters he created with Robert DeNiro can come up with the living, breathing reality of what Pacino only began to discover with his Michael Corleone of The Godfather.

Prophetically and, I imagine, presciently, I initially spelled Godfather as Todfather.

Yes. The Deathfather!

That rather says it all.

Three film titles initially leap to my mind when I think of Al Pacino’s entire body of work: The Godfather (1972), Devil’s Advocate (1997), and Insomnia (2002).

Pacino’s greatest performance to my mind can be experienced with the film Insomnia, and his portrayal of the LAPD detective, Will Dormer, an indelibly scarred soul farmed out to Alaska. He finds himself in, of all places, Alaska. A town called Nightmute.  (more…)

Let’s be clear – the upper echelons of Hollywood are dominated by weirdos, losers and mutations.  I’m not judging – I live in LA, so naturally some of my best friends are weirdos, losers and mutations.  I’m simply pointing out a fact.  Most of the normal, hardworking, all-American folks in Hollywood are crew – and they showed it with their heartfelt booing of Michael Moore when he removed the muffin from his pie-hole just long enough to run down our country during the 2003 Oscar ceremony. 

But these great Americans are generally not members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and they don’t get to vote for who takes home the Oscar.  People like Sean Penn do.  And Tim Robbins.   And tranny vomit recipient Susan Sarandon.  

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These are the kind of folks who make up the majority of Oscar voters, so it’s no wonder that the Academy Awards show is so often a festival of nitwittery that leaves normal Americans scratching their heads wondering, “Um, what the hell was that?” 

Oscar has more than its share of astonishing failures, of crazy-uncle-locked-in-the-attic nods that the Academy sorely regretted about the time the after-party coke bowls ran dry.  The terrible Oscar choices listed here are only from the last few decades since the sting of choosing How Green Is My Valley over Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon has presumably faded since 1941– well, for some of us.  Oh, and you won’t find Marisa Tomei on this list – she rocks.  Deal with that, haters. 

So, in no particular order of insanity, here are Oscar’s 10 biggest recent screw-ups: ]

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The unlimited checkbook. That’s how Big Tobacco wins every time on everything, they spend you to death. Six hundred million a year in outside legal – Chadbourne-Park, uh, Ken Starr’s firm, Kirkland & Ellis? Listen: GM and Ford, they get nailed after eleven or twelve pickups blow up, right? These clowns have never, I mean EVER… 

Why it’s a left-wing film

Once again, like “A Civil Action,” we’re presented with a left-wing film using the cover of a true story to further an overall message. And once again I’m not going waste time and energy digging into the weeds of arguing for or against the facts of this particular “true story.” So let’s stipulate the story is true and get to the bigger issue: The True Stories Left-Wing Hollywood Chooses to Tell. But first, my own biases up front…

Believe it or not, I don’t hate Hollywood. People think I do and I take complete ownership of that misconception but my feelings towards today’s movie industry are something more along the lines of the parent of a bad seed. I love Hollywood, wish it would do better (both morally and creatively), forever hope it will, and for my troubles am constantly getting my heart broken. Also, to their credit, on the field of political battle, Hollywood is at least something of an honest broker. Like Keith Olbermann, Bill Maher, and the Huffington Post, leftists in Hollywood make little to no attempt to disguise their agenda. Yes, it’s unfortunate that too often they stand against good, but they’re also fairly upfront in presenting themselves as who and what they really are. On the other hand, there’s the left-wing media…

As far as the Washington Post, New York Times, Politico, Jon Stewart, the broadcast networks, the wires, and sites like Mediaite, etc…  Well, let me put it this way, the only way I’d piss on any of them is if they weren’t on fire. Yes, on a human level there are no doubt some genuinely nice people who work within these completely corrupted institutions, but as a whole they are committed leftists willfully lying and manipulating the truth to further an agenda and most unforgivably, doing so under the guise of sanctimonious elites who puff themselves up as pillars of objectivity.

There just isn’t a corner of Hell hot enough to stack the legacy of the whole bunch.   (more…)

There are certain things that make you a man.  It’s not a matter of mere plumbing or chromosomes.  A man is more than that.  A true man defeats his enemies.  A true man can make it happen with the ladies.  A true man can repeat, verbatim, all of the classic dialogue from Heat.

Heat (1995) is more than just a heist film – it’s an epic, a shambling three-hour monster of a movie that soars and frustrates, leaves your jaw hanging in awe and you scratching your head wondering what the hell is going on.  The star power it unleashes is literally unparalleled, the direction by Michal Mann is superb, the music is incredible (go buy the soundtrack now), and the cinematography creates a vision of Los Angeles that is more real than the reality.

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I will not insult your manhood by recapping the plot.  Actually, it’s so dense and convoluted it would take forever anyway.  Plus, there are the tangents that I still don’t fully get – what the hell is that whole Natalie Portman subplot doing in there anyway?  And some parts you just have to see for yourself – think Waingro’s plot line.  Bottom line: if you have never seen Heat, go buy it immediately.  Until you do, if you are biologically male, you are not entitled to stand while urinating.

For many of us, Heat has a personal connection that comes from both its time and place.  I saw Heat in Houston the day it came out (December 15, 1995), having been waiting for it for months thanks to the remarkable trailer.  I was there for a buddy’s wedding the next day; at that wedding, I would meet my hot wife for the first time.  About a month after, the giant law firm I was then slaving away for moved into the 444 South Flower building.  You probably know it best as the bank De Niro’s crew robs.  Before I quit (I had more business than many of the partners but they offered me the same crappy $500 bonus they gave to the guy caught sleeping under his desk, so I counter-offered that I’d keep everything), I must have walked past the spot where Val Kilmer first opens up with his CAR-15 a hundred times thinking, “Dude, I know where you’re coming from.” (more…)

We’ve all watched well-known, highly regarded actors for the umpteenth time on screen — perhaps even raucously enjoying both their performance and the movie — and thought about how painfully derivative and self-referential they’ve become. Somewhere along the way, over a period of many years, these talented thespians stopped surprising us. They ceased bringing to life fleshed out individuals and  began using and reusing tired sets of predictable quirks and tics.

Mind you, they’re still charismatic and entertaining to watch, but in an almost clownish way. We now go to see them not to be wowed by their acting, but to be entertained by their chewing the scenery and hamming it up. Whereas in the past they lost themselves in a part, now their well-known, theatrically overblown personalities overwhelm everything else on screen.

Who are the worst offenders? My own Top 5 list was compiled with two ground rules: each candidate had to be alive (so James Dean and Marlon Brando each get a reprieve), and they have to have won at least one Academy Award for acting (which spares modern, less-laurelled hams such as Robert Downey Jr., Johnny Depp, Woody Allen, Jeff Goldblum and Mel Gibson.) Again, the following actors are not necessarily unpleasant to watch — raw charisma goes a long way — but they have become predictably one-note parodies of themselves. (more…)

After a summer of entertaining yet mostly unspectacular films, you might be asking yourself, “Is there anything truly unique in theatres?” Well, count your lucky stars, for the “Mesrine” films hit big-city art theatres last weekend, and will likely keep spreading nationwide.

What are the “Mesrine” films, you ask? They are two, two-hour-plus movies – entitled “Mesrine: Killer Instinct” and “Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1” – which combine to tell the story of Jacques Mesrine, a real-life French bank robber who became the most notorious criminal in that nation’s modern history. Basically, picture “Scarface” if Tony Montana spoke French and robbed banks instead of dealing coke, because star Vincent Cassel’s astonishing performance as the Gallic gangster conjures up memories of the best moments in both Al Pacino’s and Robert DeNiro’s wildest moments.

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“Killer Instinct” is the first film of the pair, though so much high-speed insanity unfolds on the screen in each film that you can probably understand the second film on its own, without having seen the first one. It’s kind of like when I took my dad to “Dances with Wolves” and he slept through the entire middle hour of that three-hour opus, and still managed to wake up and understand it all. Indians good, white man bad and needs to change, lots of buffaloes. He got it. And viewers can easily get this story too, because it’s so visceral.

In these movies, there’s a bank robbery, car chase, beating or shootout literally every ten minutes – heck, maybe even every seven. This at least guarantees that you won’t fall asleep due to having to read subtitles, but then again – the subtitles are easy to read, since every third word in some scenes is some variation of the seven dirty words you can’t say on television. Heck, you might even learn new ways to swear and insult people. (more…)

Pop quiz: what do the following movies have in common?

Gone with the Wind (1939), Star Wars (1977), The Sound of Music (1965), E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), The Ten Commandments (1956), Titanic (1997), Jaws (1975), Doctor Zhivago (1965), The Exorcist (1973), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1939), 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Ben-Hur (1959), Avatar (2009), Return of the Jedi (1983), The Sting (1973), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Jurassic Park (1993), The Graduate (1967), Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace (1999), Fantasia (1941), The Godfather (1972), Forrest Gump (1994), Mary Poppins (1964), The Lion King (1994)

If you said they all made scads of money, bravo — they are the top twenty-five domestic box-office champions of all time (adjusted for inflation, of course).

But consider another similarity: surprisingly few of them relied on established A-list movie stars — the most famous, the highest paid — for their moneymaking prospects. Gone with the Wind had Gable, yes. The Sting had Newman and Redford. The Godfather, Brando.

As for most of the rest, they either featured no A-listers at all, or used them before they became bonafide movie stars. In fact, many of those pictures can take credit for sending now-famous actors into the celestial Hollywood firmament in the first place. Gone with the Wind made Vivian Leigh known to the world. The Ten Commandments did it for Charlton Heston. The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman. The Godfather, Al Pacino. Star Wars, Harrison Ford. Mary Poppins, Julie Andrews. (more…)

When in 1918 D. W. Griffith asked Lillian Gish to star in a tragic story of love, opium, dreams and death, all set against a Dickensian backdrop of poverty and despair, she was intrigued. But when he told the twenty-six-year-old actress that she would be playing a twelve-year-old girl, she was incredulous. Gish was a grown adult now, and fairly tall –  what possible trick of camera or posture could create the pixyish physique and innocent features that such a part would demand?

After much arguing, Griffith grudgingly agreed to raise the character’s age from twelve to fifteen, while still insisting that she play the part as a child. Lillian wasn’t convinced she could pull it off: “Virgins are the hardest roles to play. Those dear little girls — to make them interesting takes great vitality.” But seven years together had given the director full confidence in her abilities: “I gave her an outline of what I hoped to accomplish, and let her work it out in her own way. When she got it, she had something of her own.”

Sometimes events that look like setbacks prove to be fortuitous. On the way home from being fitted for her costumes, Gish collapsed with Spanish Influenza, a deadly pandemic then spreading throughout the United States which ultimately killed over thirty million worldwide. By the time she rallied and recovered, her already svelte frame had degenerated so dramatically that her costumes had to be refitted. But in hindsight, this pathetic and emaciated look proved perfect for the role. (more…)

Several days ago, I had the opportunity to attend an advance screening of the HBO film “You Don’t Know Jack” about the life of Dr. Jack Kevorkian. The television movie has a strong cast including Academy Award winners Al Pacino and Susan Sarandon and is directed by Academy Award winner Barry Levinson. Despite the cast and crew, the movie often fails to bring insight into the life of the controversial doctor who became well-known for helping patients kill themselves.

The movie, which premieres this Saturday on HBO, focuses on Dr. Kevorkian’s work helping sick patients end their lives. It begins around the time that Dr. Kevorkian began actively assisting patients in their attempts to die. As the movie progresses, the doctor receives a great deal of publicity for his methods as he continues working with new patients. The film explores the methods that Dr. Kevorkian used and it also focuses on the types of patients that Dr. Kevorkian did and did not assist in bringing their lives to a close. (more…)

The passing of Robert Culp earlier this week at the age of 79 also marks yet another passing, that of a unique style of acting that’s all but dead today. What I call Big Acting, where a one-of-a-kind leading man like Culp could step into the shoes of a character and blow him up into something memorably larger-than-life. Not in a self-conscious, showy way. Not in the way that’s turned Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep into middle-aged parodies of their former selves. No, Robert Culp belonged to a rare club that includes such legendary members as Burt Lancaster, Charlton Heston and Kirk Douglas; all of whom had a magic quality that convinced you it was their characters who were big, not their acting.

That doesn’t mean Culp or the others were always in fifth gear. In fact, it was their range that was most impressive and you could argue that each was at their best when they intentionally tamped down the titan qualities of their personalities and turned them inward. This effectively gave the quiet characters they portrayed a fascinating hair-triggered explosive dimension that always kept you wondering what they were capable of. As Elmer Gantry, Burt Lancaster created an unforgettable icon. But as Labiche, the stoic railway official forced to physical action in John Frankenheimer’s “The Train,” he carried that film with the kind of quiet authority only a Burt Lancaster could possess. Or a Robert Culp.

Though the series lasted only 44 episodes and three seasons, Culp’s work as Agent Bill Maxwell on “The Greatest American Hero” ranks, in my opinion, as one of the all-time great television characters ever created. Right up there with Jim Rockford, Ralph Kramden, Al Bundy, Carl Kolchak, and Fred Sanford. (more…)

Our President’s favorite movie is The Godfather.

“You disrespected me …” says Don Corleone to a favor-seeker.

That’s one of President Obama’s favorite phrases from Marlon Brando’s Godfather.

The, by now very boring, Judeo-Christian civilization has raised us to “disrespect” criminals, bullies who rule the world by force and force alone and cold-blooded killers such as the Islamic Jihad.

Somehow our President is willing to give a pass to Don Corleone because … well … “The Don” is performed by the same actor who portrayed John McCain’s favorite movie hero, Emiliano Zapata.

Marlon Brando. (more…)

The star of Smokey and the Bandit was, of course, Burt Reynolds, a man of great passions, great flaws, and ultimately great loyalty to the people and place he came from. “I love the South,” he emphatically states to this very day. His is a career that — sometimes for worse but more often for better — stands as a testament to that simple heartfelt sentiment.

The man who would become one of the most popular movie stars of the last quarter century was born in 1936, the son of a small-town police chief in Florida. He grew up handsome and tough, randy and reckless — by fourteen, he had lost his virginity to a much older woman, and soon after knocked up the prom queen (his attempts to cajole her into marriage were rebuffed by the girl’s society-maven mother, who forced her daughter to abort the baby). Such antics were an early harbinger of both the charismatic charm and voracious, self-destructive appetites that would define (and sometimes decimate) his later career (a typical joke — Q: Why didn’t Burt Reynolds ever take Loni Anderson out to dinner? A: He made it a rule never to date married women.) (more…)