GireWire

When you think about it, a lot of places can tell filmmakers how to make movies: Columbia College. UCLA. USC. NYU.

• But how many of them can tell filmmakers ways to avoid bad reviews of their movies?
• I can.
• I offer 100 ways to warn filmmakers – beginners and veterans – on how they can avoid making simple errors that can cost them major critical points when their pictures go to market.
• Let’s face the ugly truth. Creative inbreeding in Hollywood has reached “Deliverance” proportions.  I defy anyone to sit through three movies — any three of any genre – and not notice the same rusty lines of dialogue, the same arthritic visual devices, even the same lame props and set-ups.
• Except for a handful of filmmakers who actually think outside of the Cliché Box (Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme lead the very short list), many Hollywood storytellers seem content to let their movies become narrative viruses that simply replicate themselves as quickly as possible, with different casts, of course.

So, here come the first 10 of the 100 lamest, most unimaginative ways filmmakers can dare critics to dis their works. As for those filmmakers who continue to use the following elements of creative stagnation, I can only say on behalf of film critics everywhere, “Thank you. You’ve made our day.”

Read my 100 Ways To Get A Bad Review Page.

Let’s settle once and for all the two biggest questions that the media have been obsessed with this year and practically every year before:

1. Is there too much violence in the movies?
2. Is there too much sex in the movies?

It surprises me that people don’t know the answers by now.
Continue reading “Be Glad Movies Don’t Reflect Reality”

Subway train dispatcher Walter Garber (Denzel Washington) goes John McClane in the drama “The Taking of Pelham 123.”

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For all of its visual bombast, Hollywood action stars and updated screenplay by “L.A. Confidential” writer Brian Helgeland, “The Taking of Pelham 123” remains a passionless and shallow crime drama propped up by stilted action sequences and a rock-video style purloined from the 1980s.

Minimal visualist Tony Scott directs “Pelham 123” as a routine Hollywood thriller refashioned from Joseph Sargent’s gritty, superior 1974 original starring Walter Matthau as a New York cop trying to stop a subway train hijacker.
(Read more…)

Olivia (Yara Shahidi) shows her daddy (Eddie Murphy) a new way to season pancakes in the family comedy “Imagine That.”

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Apparently, the screenwriters of “Imagine That” really love the word “good.”

“I’m good!” says Eddie Murphy.

“Evan’s good!” says Thomas Haden Church.

“You are very good!” says Martin Sheen.

“You’re good!” says Yara Shahidi.

The only thing not so good in “Imagine That” is all the rest of “Imagine That,” a zingless, bland and shallow family comedy reminiscent of the zingless, bland and shallow family comedies churned out by the Walt Disney Company following the death of its visionary founder. (Read more…)

Kate Churchill, a former producing director at Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre, follows a non-religious, 29-year-old Canadian ex-journalist (Nick Rosen) around the world as he seeks enlightenment through the practice of yoga and the teachings of yoga masters. (Read more…)

Now playing at the Century Centre in Chicago.

Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes directs a darkly comic, daringly detached indie art house road film starring John Krasinski (“The Office”) and Maya Rudolph (“SNL”) as a pregnant couple trying to find a place to raise a family. (Read more…)

Now playing at Century Centre and River East 21 in Chicago.

Buster Keaton’s 1927 classic silent comedy will be screened at the Tivoli Theater in Downers Grove on Monday, June 15 at 7:30 p.m. The event is sponsored by the Fox Valley Chapter of the American Guild of Organists with famed organist Dennis Scott handling the Wurlitzer. Admission is $10 ($5 for students and seniors). Running time is 66 minutes.

A quietly moving story about quietly moving on. Norwegian filmmaker Bent Hamer’s art house offering “O’Horten” is less interested in plot than in the moody visuals surrounding the retirement of a 67-year-old train engineer named Odd Horten (Bard Owe). (Read more…)

Now playing at the Music Box in Chicago.

The After Hours Film Society presents Ramin Bahrani’s third feature. A Senegalese taxi driver named Solo (Souleymane Sy Savane) operates in Winston-Salem, N.C. (Read more…)

Now playing at the Tivoli Theater in Downers Grove.

This would have been a review of Alex Rivera’s sci-fi drama “Sleep Dealer,” except that the distributor sent me a “screener” with a huge logo permanently embedded on the lower left of the screen, a running time-stamp on the upper right and the warning “PROPERTY OF MAYA ENTERTAINMENT. DO NOT DUPLICATE” across the middle. (Read more…)

Now playing at the Century Centre in Chicago.