by Richard von Busack
Any film adaptation of a celebrated novel is a sort of X-ray; any manipulation or self-importance in the text will be laid bare.
The success of the book The Lovely Bones is easy …

by Richard von Busack
FOR Terry Gilliam, Don Quixote is still the ur-text. Despite the various stops and starts he has had adapting the Cervantes classic, Gilliam repeatedly makes films about fantasy as an escape from …

by Richard von Busack
ONCE, I GOT called a pseudointellectual by a person who pronounced it “sweedo.” Youth in Revolt is a date movie for all of us movie sweedoes: people who brandish copies of La …

HAVEN’T READ Arizona writer Thomas Cobb’s 1987 novel Crazy Heart, although it was praised by both Kinky Friedman and Donald Barthelme. The novel might have provided a key for the failure of guts in the …

Closet Drama
Colin Firth plays an unopenly gay man in
early 1960s Los Angeles in ‘A Single Man’
A HANDY WINNER of the award for Most Improved Performer of 2009 is Colin Firth, whose performance in A Single …

Streep Lights
Nancy Meyers hews to romcom traditions in triangular affair with Streep, Baldwin and Martin
IN SANTA BARBARA, Jane (Meryl Streep), a successful restaurateur, hooks up with her ex-husband Jake (Alec Baldwin), despite the fact that …

Streep Lights
Nancy Meyers hews to romcom traditions in triangular affair with Streep, Baldwin and Martin
IN SANTA BARBARA, Jane (Meryl Streep), a successful restaurateur, hooks up with her ex-husband Jake (Alec Baldwin), despite the fact that …

THERE ARE moments during Sherlock Holmes when you wish you could hit director Guy Ritchie with his own storyboard; there are bone-crushing fights that you feel like applauding just to celebrate the fact that they’re …

With all of the effort that the system invests into making their leading men seem invincible, is it any wonder that we rarely get to see the sensitive side of Hollywood’s leading men? Although …

Gnar Wars by Mike Benson from Mike Benson on Vimeo.
Just in time for the season Star Wars themed snowboarding at Mountain High.  Directed by Mike Benson. Starring Casey Wrightsman, Geoff Isringhausen, Cory Whetstone, Nick Sibayan, …