THE FOURTH KIND: Dr. Abigail Tyler (Milla Jovovich) recalls in detail her alien abduction experience under hypnosis.
GENRE: Supernatural docudrama
THE PITCH: Director Olatunde Osunsanmi reenacts a mysterious tale of alien abduction told by Dr. Abigail Tyler through interviews and recorded footage of close encounters in Nome, Alaska. Shot as a hybrid between a documentary and a feature film, viewers follow Tyler’s (Milla Jovovich) desperate search to uncover the truth about strange coincidences occurring to her family and the residents of Nome.
MONEY SHOTS: Dr. Tyler and her colleague Dr. Campos (Elias Koteas) reluctantly hypnotize her patient Scott Stracinsky (Enzo Cilenti) again in his bedroom after he starts to exhibit abnormal behavior. As he begins to retrace what happened to him, he springs forward, sitting straight up before hovering over the bed and speaking in ancient Sumerian.
HUMBUG DEEZ: Ghost of Christmas Present (from left, performed by Jim Carrey) chides his charge Ebenezer Scrooge (also performed by Carrey) in A Christmas Carol.
GENRE: CGI holiday drama
THE PITCH: Disney gives Charles Dickens’ classic holiday tale an animated makeover. Miserly Ebenezer Scrooge (Jim Carrey) is visited by ghosts who show him glimpses of his past, present and future in efforts to save his soul before Christmas.
MONEY SHOTS: It’s hard to pull away from the visual effects each of the ghosts utilize to show Scrooge various moments in time. Ghost of Christmas Past (Carrey) uses slingshot-ish flight sequences to take Scrooge to parts of his past. Ghost of Christmas Present (Carrey, again) hurls luminescent golden beads that turn the floor and walls translucent for he and Scrooge to spy on the present. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come (yup, you guessed it … Carrey) uses ebon shadows to transport and frighten Scrooge back on to a righteous path.
TRANCE-PARENT STORYTELLING: Lyn Cassady (George Clooney, from left), Mahmud Daash (Waleed Zuaiter) and Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) in The Men Who Stare at Goats
The Men Who Stare at Goats begins with a wonderful disclaimer: “More of this is true than you would believe.” Most films use phrases like “Based on a true story” or “Inspired by actual events” as a fig leaf for outrageous liberties with little connection to reality. The real incidents behind The Men Who Stare at Goats indeed seem stranger than fiction, but the demands of formulaic three-act screenwriting sabotage the film’s mission.
Based on the book of the same name by Welsh journalist and documentarian Jon Ronson, the film completely reimagines Ronson as Michigan reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor). Personal crises inspire Wilton to attempt to cover the 2002 invasion of Iraq. While languishing in Kuwait City and envying the embedded war correspondents, Wilton meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney). Cassady turns out to be a veteran of the U.S. Army’s First Earth Battalion, which attempted to train psychic soldiers.
DOE EYED: Newcomer Goat mesmerizes audiences and actors alike in his latest film "The Men Who Stare at Goats."
Part PSA and part celeb gnash — be on the lookout for Goat. Goat (last name unknown) is creating buzz among the Hollywood heavyweights with the hilarious scene grabs from A-lister George Clooney in their latest film The Men Who Stare At Goats. While most would illustrate a prejudice toward Goat and his mild mannered ilk, Goat has swayed public opinion of his kind through sheer talent and an inhuman work ethic.
Recently Goat indulged the press with a series of one-on-one e-mail interviews to discuss the film and his newfound celebrity status. Goat fans can follow the actor’s exploits on his Twitter page. Direct messages to Goat via Twitter were unfortunately not returned prior to the interview. The Men Who Stare at Goats opens nationwide Fri., Nov. 6.
With such critical acclaim from your stage performance in Animal Farm, how was the experience for you to leap off the stage and work as an actor in your first feature film?
If I’m being honest the transition was not difficult at all. When you possess real talent, it doesn’t matter whether it’s on the stage, in a film or even in a barnyard somewhere. It’s really about having the ability to bring a character to life and bring joy to an audience. I am just so happy that with this film more people will be able to share in my talent and see what I was born to do.
What if you had the chance in high school to throw a school bus over a hill with Andrew W.K.? I agree — it would’ve been bad ass.
Well, check this out:
Here’s the premise of the show according to Cartoon Network:
The name says it all. Two teams destroy each other’s materials, then race to build something new from the pieces. Oh, and the losing team’s machine gets blown up. Andrew W.K. hosts Cartoon Network’s most explosive game show.
Show premieres tonight at 8:30 p.m. and pits the football team against the marching band. Should be awesome.
FAMILY JEWEL: Precious (Gabourey Sidibe, from left) and her oppressive mother Mary (Mo'Nique)
Though only 17 years old, Clareece “Precious” Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) suffers enough misfortunes for several Greek tragedies remounted in 1987 Harlem. Precious’ title character endures obesity, illiteracy, a baby with Down syndrome and a sociopathically hostile, selfish mother (Mo’Nique) — and those are just the preliminaries. When Precious gets warmed up, it becomes almost unbearably grim, but its passionate performances raise it above contemporary motivational melodrama clichés.
Though she can barely read, Precious exhibits a talent for math. When she becomes pregnant for the second time, a kindly teacher secures Precious a chance to enroll in an alternative school called Each One, Teach One. Under the tough but kindly tutelage of crusading Ms. Rain (Paula Patton), Precious bonds with her boisterous female classmates and begins to respect herself.
LEARNING CURVES: Jenny (Carey Mulligan, from left) and David (Peter Sarsgaard) in An Education
The establishment seems more firmly established in England than anywhere else. Two terrific new British films depict prodigiously intelligent characters who challenge entrenched English institutions and nearly outsmart themselves along the way. The protagonists of the soccer movie The Damned United and the coming-of-age romance An Education fit in the rebellious, angry young man tradition of English drama — although Michael Sheen’s Brian Clough isn’t exactly young, and Carey Mulligan’s Jenny is most definitely not a man.Both learn the lesson that pride goeth before a fall.
The Damned United ostensibly recounts the David-and-Goliath rivalry between soccer division cellar-dwellers Derby County and England’s crowning team, Leeds United. Rather than focus on triumph-of-the-underdog clichés, screenwriter Peter Morgan cuts back and forth between Clough(Derby’s manager) leading the team from obscurity to soccer glory beginning in 1968,to Clough,flush with victory, taking over as Leeds’ manager in 1974. Morgan wrote The Queen and Frost/Nixon (which also starred Sheen) and ignores biopic stereotypes in lieu of small but telling historical tipping points.
THE PAINS OF BEING RAW AT HEART: Willem Dafoe as He (from left) and Charlotte Gainsbourg as She in Antichrist
I can’t truly say I enjoyed watching a man nail his penis to a wooden board in the 1997 documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. I can’t even truly say I saw more than brief glimpses before I averted my eyes, as if confronted by a solar eclipse. Nevertheless, the close-up atrocity summed up the obsessions and life experiences of a self-punishing performance artist with a fatal case of cystic fibrosis and a surprisingly tender marriage.
Lars von Trier’s Antichrist eventually reveals how unguarded genitalia hold up against carpentry utensils, but without the justification of Sick’s humanism or thematic clarity. An instantly notorious award-winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Antichrist proves to be an alternately draggy, repellant and opaque cinematic experience, while clearly representing devoted efforts from several master screen artists. Were Antichrist a piece of hackwork, so to speak, it’d be easy to dismiss.
John Lithgow as "Trinity" (second from right): Killer knows best
A side effect of the Trinity plot on this season of “Dexter” is that it makes the new remake of The Stepfather, starring Dylan Walsh, seem even more superfluous than it already was. The original Stepfather offered a dark satire of suburbia and the 1980s cult of family values, with a terrific performance by Terry O’Quinn (these days zipping between life and death on “Lost”) as a Ward Cleaver-wannabe who butchers his families whenever they, inevitably, reveal human flaws.
The PG-13 remake of The Stepfather seems to be vanishing with barely a trace, while John Lithgow’s Trinity killer, a.k.a. Arthur Mitchell, offers a vivid, fresh portrayal of an upstanding, all-American middle-aged male who happens to be a homicidal monster. This week’s episode, “If I Had a Hammer,” fills in the outline of Trinity’s life (I’ll call him “Trinity” for convenience sake) as husband, father of two, high school teacher, deacon at “Sacred Fellowship” church and organizer of the community home-building project called “Four Walls, One Heart.” “If I Had a Hammer” opens not with the Pete Seeger/Lee Hays protest song of the same name but the hymn “Are You Washed in the Blood?” The blood symbolism isn’t exactly subtle, but the song gives Lithgow a chance to zestfully sing an old-school church song.
Jonathan, Ray and Stella get stoned at the Park Slope co-op while tracking down the lesbian black market sperm thieves. Photo: Paul Schiraldi
Jonathan Ames and company took on a new case this week, “The Case of the Stolen Sperm.”
The lesbian couple that Ray has been donating his sperm to have suddenly disappeared and thrown his life off-balance. “Look, for years I’ve been jerking off purely for medical reasons, like lancing a wound, but trying to have a baby with them has given it new meaning,” he says. Jonathan agrees to help him track the couple down, but they find out a little more than they expect.
Long ago Tina Fey’s sitcom “30 Rock” established that resident hayseed-naif Kenneth the Page (Jack McBrayer) hails from Stone Mountain, Ga. “Stone Mountain” provided the title of last night’s episode, in which Fey’s Liz Lemon and Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaughey traveled to the Bible Belt to find a new “TGS” cast member with appeal for Middle American viewers. McBrayer was born in Macon and raised in Conyers, but it’s not surprising that “30 Rock’s” notion of Stone Mountain — located in “Western Georgia” — bears virtually no resemblance to the suburb found East of Atlanta. At one point a Stone Mountain newscaster announces that a local funnyman “has been hired by a Catholic to appear on ‘TGS’ with a black fella.” One gets the impression that “30 Rock’s” creators think that people actually live on Stone Mountain. It’s good for a few chuckles, though:
Zombies have become so popular that the corridors of our pop culture resound with ravenous moans for “Braaaiinns!” White Zombie, screening Saturday at the Plaza Theatre’s Silver Scream Spook Show, offers a kitschy reminder that the living dead weren’t always the decomposing cannibals of George Romero.
Follow the trail of body parts back a few decades, and you’ll find the origins of zombies in Haitian folklore. White Zombie shouldn’t be mistaken for a documentary about voodoo traditions, though. Filmed in 1932 to ride the horror trend established by Frankenstein and Dracula, White Zombie fudges the detail as to whether zombies are walking corpses or living people enthralled by drugs and hypnotism.
Victor Halperin’s film begins with a painfully white engaged couple, Neil and Madeline (John Harron and Madge Bellamy), stumbling across a burial ceremony shortly after their arrival in Haiti. They plan to marry as soon as possible at the estate of their new, wealthy friend Charles Beaumont (Robert W. Frazer), having forgotten the old adage, “Don’t talk to strangers because they might try to zombify your fiancée and raid her coffin.” Desperate to steal Madeline for himself, Charles enlists the aid of a sinister plantation owner with the nefarious name of Murder Legendre (Bela Lugosi, of course). Though Madeline seems to die on her wedding night, she’s actually become enthralled by Legendre.
The Leo Frank case has been examined and re-examined over the years. It’s been the subject of four film works and numerous books, the most recent of which put into even clearer perspective the trial that eventually re-energized the Ku Klux Klan and emboldened the Anti-Defamation League.
So it’s a pleasant surprise that The People vs. Leo Frank — writer/director Ben Loeterman’s half documentary, half re-enactment — still feels fresh in its depiction of Georgia’s most infamous murder trial.
Part of it is the timing: The movie comes more than 20 years after the last film work, the Emmy-winning mini-series starring Jack Lemmon and then-unknowns Peter Gallagher, Kevin Spacey and Cynthia Nixon. It also comes on the heels of Emory film studies chair Matthew Bernstein’s book about all four film works, Screening a Lynching.
Zombies have become so popular that the corridors of our pop culture resound with ravenous moans for “Braaaiinns!” White Zombie, screening Saturday at the Plaza Theatre’s Silver Scream Spook Show, offers a kitschy reminder that the living dead weren’t always the decomposing cannibals of 
