PARIS CAN WAIT: C’EST SI BON
Not every film is intended for a wide audience, and I don’t expect everyone to be swept away by Eleanor Coppola’s romantic travelogue Paris Can Wait. It focuses on people of a certain age and takes its time meandering around…
SNATCHED FROM THE JAWS OF COMEDY
A film starring two A-list comediennes should, at the very least, be funny. Snatched fails on this count but also seems to have other ambitions. It wants to impart some thoughts about mother-daughter relationships and the contrasting goals of…
New And Notable Film Books: May 2017
MAKEUP MAN: FROM ROCKY TO STAR TREK, THE AMAZING CREATIONS OF HOLLYWOOD’S MICHAEL WESTMORE By Michael Westmore with Jake Page; foreword by Patrick Stewart (Lyons Press) Here is a highly entertaining memoir by one of the leading practitioners…
BANG! THE BERT BERNS STORY
I’m a sucker for stories about the music business in the 1960s, when it was centered around 1650 Broadway and the Brill Building in Manhattan…yet I was unfamiliar with Bert Berns before I watched Brett Berns and Bob Sarles’s…
RISK: A DISAPPOINTING PORTRAIT OF JULIAN ASSANGE
A filmmaker would have to be inept to have access to Julian Assange and not come away with interesting footage. If you saw Citizenfour, Laura Poitras’s intense, Oscar-winning feature about Edward Snowden, you would rightly expect something in the…
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2: FUN ON A GRAND SCALE
There is no reason Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 should be as good as it is. It’s a sequel, which means almost all of the concepts and characters that were fresh the first time around are now familiar.…
FLASHBACK: MEETING GINGER ROGERS
The prospect of meeting a legendary movie star was daunting to me at the age of 16, but I wasn’t going to let nervousness intrude on such a great opportunity. My benefactor was Raymond Rohauer, whose work in the…
