By Corey Hall
Published: 9/22/2010
Transformers 3 Director: Michael Bay Starring: Shia Lebeouf, Josh Duhamel The buzz: Every schoolboy knows that Detroit's city motto is "If you seek a pleasant postindustrial apocalyptic wasteland, look around you." No one has taken this slogan more to heart than mega-budget schlock-ma...[MORE]
By Corey Hall
Published: 8/18/2010
It has been 20-plus years since Ice Cube busted straight outta Compton, alongside his notorious "Gangsta Rap" crew N.W.A, and scandalized the media and electrified corners of the burbs far beyond the imagining of South Central L.A. But that was then. Dude has long since found star power ...[MORE]
By Corey Hall
Published: 8/11/2010
Real Steel Director: Shawn Levy Stars: Hugh Jackman, Evangeline Lilly The buzz: Mr. tap-dance Wolverine himself stars as a down-on-his-luck pilot for a 7-foot-tall robot boxer. Filming for this mega-scale sci-fi farce has been taking place all over the area, including semi-urban Troy and the w...[MORE]
By Corey Hall
Published: 6/16/2010
You don't have to wear sunglasses at night to notice the flood of old-school chestnuts — such as The A-Team and The Karate Kid — at your nearest multiplex. Everything '80s is totally rad and gnarly-to-the-max in Tinseltown these days, with such cash cows as G.I. Joe and Transformers help...[MORE]
By Jeff Niesel
Published: 6/2/2010
When we last saw British rocker Aldous Snow (Russell Brand) in 2008's Forgetting Sarah Marshall, he was a recovering addict dating TV actress Sarah Marshall and incessantly irritating her ex-boyfriend Peter Bretter (Jason Segel). It's a few years later, and in the beginning of Get Him to the Greek, ...[MORE]
By Corey Hall
Published: 5/12/2010
Iron Man Thanks to Robert Downey Jr.'s charm, Slurpee ads and a surprise colossal 2008 summer mega hit, Marvel comics' durable Iron Man has broken into the top flight of superhero celebrity. Now even the layman on the street is vaguely familiar with old shellhead's résumé: Tony Stark...[MORE]
By Paul Knoll
Published: 4/28/2010
Some film-fests get all the glory. Cannes has glamour, Sundance has power ... and Toronto? Well, they're the largest North American fest and the most widely attended. But ask diehard sci-fi or horror fans what fest turns their cranks and it's sure to be Montreal's Fantasia. Started in 1996, Fantasia...[MORE]
By Paul Knoll
Published: 4/14/2010
Nail Gun Massacre is the Holy Grail of bad-but-awesome slasher flicks. It's a masterpiece so profoundly inept that it defies comparison — even to 1978's The Toolbox Murders! Writer-director Terry Lofton most likely thought the same back in '85, because he made NGM with love, blind ambition and...[MORE]
By Paul Knoll
Published: 4/7/2010
Adam Wingard's Home Sick plays like a nihilistic acid-fueled parody of so many soapy homecoming flicks. You know — a buddy returns home to discover his friends still stuck in the same dead-end town, their dead-end lives stuck on an endless loop. In Home Sick, nobody's a lovable loser, they're ...[MORE]
By Don Waller
Published: 4/7/2010
On Aug.12, 1975, the Runaways played their first gig — at Back Door Man fanzine founder Phast Phreddie Patterson's parents' house in north Torrance, Calif. I was there. So were the rest of the original Back Door Man staffers, a whole lotta other South Bay earthdogs, and a few adventurous ...[MORE]
By Jeff Meyers
Published: 3/24/2010
It's pretty safe to say that Michigan isn't exactly wanting for film festivals. In fact, the damn things are popping up like dandelions. Whether it's Jews, Palestinians, environmentalists or the GBLT community, if you throw a dart at a calendar, you're bound to hit a week when an ethnic or special i...[MORE]
By Corey Hall
Published: 3/3/2010
Since opening last fall in a former Cass Corridor school building, the incredibly ballsy Burton Theatre has become a boon for the film-starved downtown landscape, and this week's inaugural Detroit Independent Film Festival is further proof that cinema obsessives finally have something new to freak o...[MORE]
By Corey Hall
Published: 2/17/2010
Though he created the '90s cable cult smash Mystery Science Theater 3000, an innovative show that finally gave millions of fans an open excuse to heckle the movie screen, Joel Hodgson remains a humble Midwestern kid, just some dude named Joel, not too different from you or me. After a brief flash of...[MORE]
By Jeff Meyers
Published: 2/17/2010
There are two things that stand out about this year's crop of short-subject Oscar nominees: 1) There isn't a clunker in the bunch. In recent years there have always been one or two head-scatchers, films that were clearly outclassed by their competitors. Heck, one — 2005's West Bank Story &mdas...[MORE]
By Corey Hall
Published: 1/20/2010
Scott Cooper's life is changing every second, but you could hardly tell. He's facing the press at a swank metro Detroit hotel suite and he's calm, leaning to casual. After years slogging it out as a working actor, he made his directorial feature debut with Crazy Heart, featuring a stunning Jeff Brid...[MORE]
Published: 1/6/2010
JEFF MEYERS If the '70s were under the influence of angry cynicism and artistic rebellion, the rah-rah '80s an era of blockbuster egos and muscular populism, and the '90s consumed by ironic navel-gazing and fear of technology, how do we summarize the aughties? Virtual reality, the fragmentation of ...[MORE]
Published: 1/6/2010
Without the benefit of hindsight, we can only begin to guess how the decade from 2000 to 2009 will be remembered. In Hollywood, though, enough quantifiable trends have emerged that it doesn't seem hasty to label the Oh-Ohs with such pejorative descriptors as the Recycled Decade, or, How I Stopped Cr...[MORE]
Published: 12/30/2009
COREY HALL Bromance is in the air The dude-bonding genre really flowered in 2009. So too bad that the genre's Babe Ruth, Vince Vaughn, hit a slump. Elsewhere, Paul Rudd and Jason Segel were the funniest buds since Bert and Ernie in I Love You, Man, The Hangover took ritual male bonding to absurd ...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 12/23/2009
It's a tragedy that Brittany Murphy's dead. Maybe not only because she was young and beautiful and had a suitcase pimp of a hubby, but because she was a mighty skilled actress, a fact that'll likely be overshadowed by her ditzy film personas. See, beyond the Clueless, Just Married and Don't Say a Wo...[MORE]
By Corey Hall
Published: 12/16/2009
As animation continues its long, slow slog out of the showbiz ghetto, and with Pixar masterpieces such as UP nabbing awards buzz and massive box-office receipts, it's nice to see that good-old perverts Spike and Mike are still working overtime to drag cartoons back to the gutter. The average toon in...[MORE]
By Corey Hall
Published: 12/9/2009
After nearly three decades behind a counter slinging snarky opinions and cult video rentals, the Thomas Video crew have shattered the space-time continuum by producing a movie themselves (Brainwater Enterprises). Directed by Ryan Meade, produced by and starring wiseacre store owner Jim Olenski and h...[MORE]
By Corey Hall
Published: 10/21/2009
By Corey Hall
Published: 10/14/2009
This is a simple story about a regular guy with a dream, a dream that cost him more than a hundred grand, 10 years of his life and 16 inches of his small intestine. Stick It in Detroit is a labor of love in the purest sense, a sprawling chaotic comedy about a guy who discovers that his heart is wh...[MORE]
By Jeff Meyers
Published: 9/30/2009
By Hollywood standards, Whip It is practically an independent film. Working with an $11 million budget, a large cast and the need for kinetic roller derby sequences, Drew Barrymore's directorial debut was no small endeavor. What makes it work? Well, the obvious chemistry between the cast members...[MORE]
By Corey Hall
Published: 9/30/2009
Once again Michael Moore is on the outside looking in. Flint's prodigal son, and the world's most famous and controversial documentarian, is preparing to host an afternoon of private screenings and Q&A sessions for his latest film Capitalism: A Love Story, at the Riverfront 4 Theaters in the Ren...[MORE]
Published: 9/16/2009
It's really OK if you've never heard of the Burton Theatre. It doesn't technically exist. Yet. You can find it in old Chinatown. What? You weren't aware Detroit had a Chinatown? Don't feel bad, there are only remnants left, for which we have to thank Cass Corridor preservationist and landowner Joel...[MORE]
By Lee Gardner
Published: 9/16/2009
After putting global warming at the forefront of American mass consciousness with 2006's Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, director Davis Guggenheim took an entirely different tack for his follow-up, training his cameras on three iconic rock guitarists — Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Pag...[MORE]
Published: 8/26/2009
Quentin Tarantino sure is an unpredictable bastard, isn't he? The Promethean video geek brain buzzing away in his massive forehead is continually charged, seeking new ways to delight and confound fans and critics. His latest is both a bare-knuckled spin on war flick tropes, while not really a war mo...[MORE]
By Bill Holdship, Curt Guyette
Published: 8/26/2009
Interestingly, there are probably more quality films about high school — running a gamut from the comedic John Hughes flicks to Scent of a Woman — than there are ones about college. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that college is so much fun for most of us that there's really not a ...[MORE]
By Corey Hall
Published: 8/5/2009
Ocean of Pearls is the feature film debut of writer-director Sarab Neelam, who also happens to be a practicing physician in the Detroit-area with a very full schedule. The film tells a somewhat biographical story of a young Sikh doctor struggling with staying true to his religious traditions in the ...[MORE]
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