ENTERTAINMENT
March 28, 2008
"Superhero Movie," a PG-13 rated genre spoof starring Leslie Nielsen, opens in wide release today but was not screened in advance for critics. The Times review will appear in Monday's Calendar and online as soon as it is available.
ENTERTAINMENT
July 17, 2008 | Kenneth Turan, Times Movie Critic
Given THE success of "Batman Begins" three years ago, adventurous, eclectic director Christopher Nolan could have gone anywhere and done anything with his next film. So why did he elect to return to the mythical city of Gotham, to the confines of a superhero movie and the narrow world of a caped crusader imprisoned by the secret of who he really is? That sequel, "The Dark Knight," answers all those questions with a vengeance. To see it is to understand that Nolan and his co-writer brother Jonathan saw a chance to go deeper into familiar characters and mythology, a chance to meditate on darker-than-usual themes that have implications for the way we live now. A chance to disturb us in the ways these kinds of movies rarely do. With Christian Bale returning in the title role and Heath Ledger giving a shocking, indelible performance as his arch-nemesis the Joker, "The Dark Knight" may be the most hopeless, despairing comic-book movie in memory.
ENTERTAINMENT
March 31, 2008 | Mark Olsen, Special to The Times
If the mere mention of any of these strikes you as funny -- YouTube, Craigslist, Facebook, MySpace, "2 Girls, 1 Cup," Perez Hilton, Wikipedia -- you are 75% of the way to enjoying most of the humor in "Superhero Movie," the latest in a series of genre spoofs to open in theaters.
BUSINESS
March 28, 2008 | Josh Friedman, Times Staff Writer
This weekend, the campaign gets intense. Not the Clinton-Obama one, but the Sony Pictures campaign to make Jim Sturgess into a major movie star. The 26-year-old British actor, who broke out last fall in Sony's musical "Across the Universe," has a supporting role in the studio's bodice-ripper "The Other Boleyn Girl" and now headlines its blackjack drama "21," also starring Kevin Spacey, Laurence Fishburne and Kate Bosworth.
BUSINESS
March 31, 2008 | Josh Friedman, Times Staff Writer
Turning the tables on Las Vegas was a winning theme at the movie box office over the weekend, but audiences weren't in the mood for another silly spoof or a serious drama about the Iraq war. Sony Pictures' blackjack thriller "21" topped the charts with an estimated $23.7 million in opening-weekend ticket sales, the studio said Sunday, knocking 20th Century Fox's animated hit "Horton Hears a Who!" to No. 2. The Dr. Seuss tale has now grossed more than $100 million domestically.
ENTERTAINMENT
March 1, 2013 | By Amy Kaufman, Los Angeles Times
Three guys, one night, drunken debauchery. Jon Lucas and Scott Moore realized that, on paper, their new screenplay, "21 & Over," looked very derivative of "The Hangover. " Then again, they were the guys who wrote "The Hangover," which spawned the most successful R-rated comedy franchise of all time and heralded their arrival as successful Hollywood writers in 2009. And they wanted to direct a movie. So they decided to go with what they knew. "We were definitely conscious that the angle people would take on the movie is that it was a 'Hangover' retread," said Lucas, sitting next to his writing partner in a Hollywood sports bar a few weeks ago. PHOTOS: Hollywood Backlot moments "But on a very practical level," Moore chimed in, "we wanted to get another movie made and direct it ourselves.