Browsing: Film and Television

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.

So Charlie Sheen says he is on a drug called Charlie Sheen. Can you imagine how long the commercial would have to be to list all the side effects of that? One of them, apparently, is that those who talk to the “Two and a Half Men” star, whose hit CBS sitcom has shut down production for at least the rest of this season, seem to think they are the only ones doing it.

If you were watching the Oscars on Sunday night, the narrative of “The King’s Speech” beating “The Social Network” played out on several levels. The Tom Hooper film won in four major categories – best picture, director and actor, as well as in one of the two screenplay categories – the first time since “The Silence of the Lambs” 19 years ago that a single movie walked away with that quartet of prizes.

Tom Ford knows how to work the spotlight. During last year’s awards season, the designer-director was riding the success of his first film, “A Single Man.” This time around, he’s introducing his long-awaited women’s collection and new boutique on Rodeo Drive with a star-studded opening party Thursday.