Had Xavier Dolan’s “Mommy” won the Cannes Film Festival’s top honor, the Palme d’Or, Dolan would have been the youngest winner in history at 25 years old, surpassing Steven Soderbergh’s accomplished win for “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” by one year. Read more...
Photo: (Courtesy of Shayne Laverdiere)
Comic books are everywhere – Marvel and DC Comics are mining decades of storylines for a huge slate of movies and television shows. But comics are more than a source to be mined for superhero blockbusters. Read more...
Photo: In recent years, comics have been adapted into films and television shows such as “Men in Black” and “The Walking Dead.” Stories have also been adapted into comics, including James Stokoe’s comic “Godzilla: Half Century War,” (above), inspired by Toho’s original “Godzilla” mythology. (Courtesy of James Stokoe/IDW Publishing)
The first months of the year are generally a cold, desolate time at the theaters, a period of audience fodder several steps below the Oscar-campaigning pieces of November and December. Read more...
The line between Broadway and Hollywood is thinner than ever, with three movie adaptations of the musicals “Jersey Boys,” “Annie” and “Into the Woods” released just this past year and a number four times that since 2000. Read more...
Photo: “Into the Woods” (right) is a film adaptation of the 1987 Broadway Musical of the same name (left). The musical is one of the seven musicals adapted into films since 2000. (Martha Swope, Walt Disney Pictures)
In contrast to previous movie adaptations of musicals that favored big names over actual singing ability – see Russell Crowe’s performance as Javert in 2012’s “Les Misérables” – Disney’s “Into the Woods” provides a worthy adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical and a strong ensemble cast that can carry the weight of Sondheim’s winning score. Read more...
Photo: (Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures)
This post was updated at 12:10 a.m. on Dec. 22. UCLA students are some of the only people in the world that have ever seen the controversial film “The Interview” on the big screen. Read more...
Photo: Because of the canceled release of “The Interview,” UCLA students are some of the few people in the world to have ever seen the film in theaters. The event was sponsored by Sony and was screened on Dec. 8 at the James Bridges Theater prior to the threats leveled by unknown hackers. (Courtesy of Andy Tran)
Thomas Pynchon, the notoriously reclusive writer of such postmodern classics as “The Crying of Lot 49” and “Gravity’s Rainbow,” has built a career off novels deemed too dense, idiosyncratic and cerebral to ever be translated to the screen effectively. Read more...
Photo: (Warner Bros.)
