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Crank it up

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Screen

A team effort

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It takes an army to make a movie. Behind the writers, directors, producers and actors, hundreds of unseen hands toil endlessly to set the...

Love high

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There are unsightlier hags in the world than Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal, and the seriously mood-swinging romantic comedy Love & Other Drugs offers several acres of surface appeal simply because their characters, Maggie and Jamie, spend a heartening amount of ...

See you on the other side

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You don’t know it at first, but this is purgatory. Well, a way station might be a better description. Regardless, all the clients who...

Home viewing: Writers on screen

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Writers themselves aren’t that dramatic or empathetic a subject,” screenwriter Sarah Gubbins says. “As a genus and species they are wont to be solitary,...

Take the psycho path

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With massive mainstream media marketing rollouts and the box office boons reaped by free social media, movies so rarely surprise us these days. Shock cameos are spoiled in the space of a tweet, while most trailers render buying the proverbial “movie cow” moot when ...

Better under the bridge

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Dreamworks seems bored with the ogre who laid the golden egg. Shrek Forever After, the fourth film in the lucrative franchise and the first in 3-D, barely tampers with the Shrek formula (oneliners, flatulence jokes, pop tunes), and not enough to breathe life into ...

The core of Apple’s man

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Apparently, writer Aaron Sorkin has decided that his “thing” is making fascinating films out of seemingly unfilmable, boring-ass ideas. I don’t have an iPhone. I don’t like Apple. I don’t like Steve Jobs. I don’t care about Steve Jobs. I didn’t care to ever see a ...

reel to reel | Week of Sept. 1, 2011

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4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days...

Guilty of misdirection

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Conviction should have been a good film. After a woman’s beloved ne’erdo-well brother is convicted of murder in a tiny hick town, it’s up to her to exonerate him, first through the system and then by going to law school and becoming a one-client attorney. Better yet...

Wildly contradictory and totally true

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Practically everyone knows of Tonya Harding, the figure skater connected with kneecapping her competitor, Nancy Kerrigan, prior to the 1994 Winter Olympics. But how...

Mechanical failure

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The Mechanic is Arthur Bishop (Jason Statham), a crack assassin who can kill his targets without leaving a trace, and even — as we learn later — implicate third parties in the crime. Impressive. Except as we watch Bishop blunder his way through target after target, ...

reel to reel | Week of Dec. 1, 2011

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Arthur Christmas Arthur Christmas is not a perfect gift, but it does feature enough holiday cheer and silly fun to make it more entertaining than 10 lords a-leaping. It helps that the film has a warm message about how tradition should never be sacrificed for ...