Charlie Sheen lives in a big, yellow house on a T-shaped intersection in the middle of a fake neighborhood in a gated community off Mulholland Drive. When I arrive there on a Saturday afternoon in January, I am intercepted in Sheen's driveway by a security guard, a friendly, not- intimidatingly-large......
See also: *More L.A. Weekly Film Coverage More than ever, boiling this concluding year down to the 10 "best" movies feels both arbitrary and reductive. Ideally, I'd have 25 unnumbered slots. I'd cite another five, formally varied nonfiction films: Tchoupitoulas, Detropia, The Ambassador, Only the Young and How to Survive......
Throughout its five years in existence, Cinefamily has stressed the "family" aspect of its mission: Rather than rely on a single benefactor (like their neighbor, the Quentin Tarantino–owned New Beverly), it asks its audience to collectively chip in to keep the theater alive. The nonprofit cinema housed in the vintage......
Quentin Tarantino has been Googling himself, and it's starting to become a problem. The filmmaker, whose eighth feature, Django Unchained, opens on Christmas Day, is famously an analog evangelist: He writes his scripts in longhand; he bans cellphones from his sets, and hasn't had one of his own in years;......
An adaptation of George V. Higgins' 1974 novel Cogan's Trade, Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly anatomizes a self-policing underground economy of junkies, killers and administrators to indict a present-day mainstream world — the world into which the film is being released by Harvey Weinstein, heralded by misleadingly generic TV adverts......
Silver Linings Playbook, which stars Bradley Cooper as a manic-depressive man-child attempting to get his life back together after a breakdown, won the coveted Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and subsequently shot to the top of most Oscar prognosticators' Best Picture short list. The film's......
Early in Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock (played by Anthony Hopkins with a sack of fat connecting chin to neck) walks the red carpet at the premiere of his 1959 chase film, North by Northwest. "You're 60 years old!" shouts a reporter to the corpulent master of suspense, then nearing his 40th......
If Hollywood's rut du jour is the origin story as bid for franchise immortality, you can't say that Skyfall — the 23rd "official" James Bond film in 50 years — isn't on trend. Eight years ago in Casino Royale, Daniel Craig's first outing as Bond, we learned that 007 owes......
Could there be a more unsympathetic character in today's culture than a well-born white male who uses his privilege irresponsibly? A highly improvised fictional exposé in search of the elusive heart and soul of hipster nihilism, The Comedy stars alt-comic superstar Tim Heidecker as Swanson, a trust fund 35-year-old hanging......
The appropriation of mainstream/commercial culture by artists is nothing new — you can trace it back through Negativland, Craig Baldwin and other post–hip-hop culture jammers of the '80s and '90s; Guy Debord and the Situationists of the '60s; Duchamp and the Dadaists; and probably further. But in the era of......
