Two new movies opened today, neither screened for critics by WW press time. Better to flunk them tardily than let them pass...

The Proposal

Now there’s a title for a romantic comedy. The premise is similarly grand: A Manhattan career woman (Sandra Bullock) blackmails her emasculated assistant (Ryan Reynolds) into a sham wedding engagement, to save herself from sudden deportation as a Canadian citizen. Unfortunately, this entails a journey from the Land of Letterman to Sarah Palin Country, where the assistant’s Alaskan family lives and where, it turns out, laughs go to die. Here Bullock undergoes a maudlin regression to girlhood, desperate less for a man than for his parents, and where’s the romance in that? It’s The Taming of the Shrew, presented by Focus on the Family Theatre, and did you know they show sitcoms on the television, for free?

Screened after WW press deadlines, Land of the Lost would have been better served not to screen at all. Short take: Go see The Hangover instead. Long take: below.

Land of the Lost

It doesn’t take access to any “quantum paleontology” time-travel devices to predict that Land of the Lost will be the flop of the summer. The refitting of Sid and Marty Krofft’s dopey television series as a $100 million Will Ferrell vehicle is a fiasco: so dismal that it appears the wrangled comedians surrendered hope early in production. The source material was never valuable—it was cheapo kiddie programming with a child in a monkey suit playing the role of Lassie—but it had certain WTF attributes, what with the cheerful actors, the rubber lizard-people and the T-Rex puppets. The movie also raises questions: What the fuck was director Brad Silberling thinking? Who the fuck hired this guy? How the fuck does Universal Pictures expect to get its money back?

Judging from the comments left on my original post reporting on Brendan Fraser and Harrison Ford shooting a medical drama in Portland (sample...

Underground cinema legend George Kuchar has been professor of film studies at the San Francisco Art Institute since 1971. For a few years in the '90s, filmmaker Jennifer Kroot was both his student and an actress in his movies before eventually becoming a close friend. Ten years later, Kroot has made It Came From Kuchar, an homage to and summation of the vast work made by George and his twin brother Mike (from Sins of the Fleshapoids to Hold Me When I'm Naked) over the past 50 years. Kroot’s doc plays at 9 pm Friday May 29  in Portland’s Queer Documentary Film Festival at the Clinton Street. She recently spoke with WW via phone about her personal journey through filmmaking alongside the brothers Kuchar.

Sam Raimi's return to horror (that is, horror beyond Peter Parker dancing) was screened after WW press deadlines. Here's Chris Stamm's review:

Drag Me to Hell

The hell of other people? Of mewling children and packed malls? Of bullies and bureaucracy? Of sickos and psychos? All scary as heck. But Argento's witches and Fulci's emissaries of the beyond? Pea soup spit-up and spinning heads? The mark of the beast and the bark of the devil? Could be my dimestore Catechism wasn't dark enough to do lasting damage, but hell-with-a-capital-h very rarely delivers the necessary shiver-shock of true horror. When I'm in the market for a new nightmare, I'll take a man wearing a mask over fire and brimstone every time.

The subVERSION Anime Fest played at the Clinton Street Theater this past Sunday, and I was there to check it out, even though, as I wrote about the...

We've got an extended holiday weekend ahead, but it's probably not quite long enough to read eight books. Conveniently, the good bibliophiles at...

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