Browsing: Film and Television

I have never really been one for the political scene, but it seems like everyone, including myself, takes an interest in the underbelly of the American government. From the conspiracy theorists to the romantic idealists, everyone has an opinion of how our elected officials actually behave behind the scenes. The film “The Ides of March” deals specifically with the presidential campaign.

“Dream House” was an interesting twist on the old idea of “it’s all in the protagonist’s head.” Several films have played with this idea and come up with varying versions, most recently “Black Swan,” but “Dream House” is set apart from all of these films by the order of its story line.

One thing is for certain: Every student during his or her college career wonders what comes after the “party” of college, if adulthood is really the definitive “hangover,” and what measures will be required to stay sane in the workplace. Those at least seem to be the final graduation thoughts of three fresh-out-of-college roommates now working together at a telemarketing firm in Comedy Central’s television show “Workaholics.”

A drunken father turned sobered Christian. Two sons that hate him. One son grows up to be a high school physics teacher struggling to provide a better life for his wife and two young daughters. The second son is back from Iraq and steadily becoming the spitting image of his father with an empty bottle in his hand.

Before you see a single frame in “Contagion” you listen to a cough, and by the time the movie is just a few minutes old, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Beth Emhoff – the character heard hacking off-screen – suffers a fatal seizure (relax, it’s in the trailer).

With a summer box office overrun by superhero and action movies, “The Help” might not seem like a go-to flick for a Friday night. It definitely should be, however. While Emma Stone (who recently starred in “Crazy, Stupid, Love”), Viola Davis (who was nominated for best supporting actress for her performance in the film “Doubt”), and Octavia Spencer (who is probably best known for her role on ABC’s sitcom “Ugly Betty”) may not look like the average heroines, their character portrayals in “The Help” give audiences a new definition of courage.

Wes Craven’s gleeful postmodern thriller “Scream” (1996) introduced us to a generation of teenagers raised on horror movies who couldn’t stop talking about the genre’s cliches. Fifteen years later, the kids in “Scream 4” haven’t just seen the classic horror movies, they’ve also seen the remakes, reboots and postmodern glosses – these days, to embrace a cliche is its own form of creativity.

AUSTIN – Calling the film “the biggest struggle of my professional career,” Jodie Foster introduced “The Beaver,” her drama starring the troubled Mel Gibson as a depressed father who reinvents himself with the help of a hand puppet, to its first public audience at the South by Southwest Film Conference and Festival on Wednesday night in Austin.

As he tells it, Bradley Cooper in 1999 is just another awestruck theater student in the audience of James Lipton’s interview show “Inside the Actors Studio.” Then the hunk with the laser-blue eyes seizes the chance to ask a question of Robert De Niro, his idol, his lodestar, the guy who inspired him to be an actor. De Niro tells him it’s a good one. It exceeds Cooper’s wildest dreams.