Richard Kelly refused to hold the audience’s hand in his excellent directorial debut, Donnie Darko, so it’s surprising that his lack of restraint cripples this thriller. James Marsden and Cameron Diaz, a married couple in 1970s Virginia, face temptation when a disfigured mystery man (Frank Langella) delivers the titular box and explains that pushing its […]
DVD
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Black Dynamite
If I could write a one-word review of Black Dynamite it would be: “Awesome.” Or maybe “righteous” would be better. It is quite simply funny, silly, stylish and enjoyable. You could also describe it as gloriously ridiculous—what Sanders has done is assembled all the best parts of 1970s Blaxploitation B-movies and taken them to absolute […]
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Quiet Chaos
Another Oscar season fast approaches, adding another year to the more than 10 that have passed since Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful so impressed the Academy. That film told the story of a Jewish father’s use of storytelling and humour to shield his son from the full force of life in a camp and the […]
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Boxed in: Coast staff picks
Forget those yuletide carols: Team Coast picks the TV and film box sets that will give their holidays a real fa-la-la-la-la. Felicity (Walt Disney Video) Disney has re-packaged and re-priced The WB’s signature series, so you can own all four seasons for a little more than what one would’ve cost you five years ago. Keri […]
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Going the extra mile: DVD picks of 2009
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: Two-Disc Special Edition (Paramount) Button remains scattershot on second viewing, hampered by David Fincher’s inability to believe in sentiment as much as technical wizardry. But the disc’s three-hour making-of documentary sets a new quality standard for behind-the-scenes extras. DVD —MP Dollhouse: Season One (20th Century Fox) The never-aired, first-season […]
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Don’t You Forget About Me: A Tribute to John Hughes
Surprisingly, the new documentary Don’t You Forget About Me isn’t a crass cash-in on tragedy, but a well-meaning love letter, filmed before John Hughes’ unexpected death. In 2006, four Canadian filmmakers embarked on a two-year quest to explore how the writer-director managed to “capture the growing pains of adolescence so perfectly” in films like The […]
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Tyson
“I attacked him…in front of these old decrepit white women…I just attacked him and stomped him,” shares Mike Tyson in Tyson, James Toback’s weirdly sympathetic documentary, told entirely in the boxer’s own words. Sure, the guy Tyson “stomped” is Don King. But the matter-of-fact way Tyson describes publicly beating a man before a host of […]
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I.O.U.S.A.
Patrick Creadon’s last feature-length documentary was Wordplay—a zippy film that followed the math-inclined word-savants who love, create and competitively solve crossword puzzles. Apparently, Creadon decided it was a good idea to follow up Wordplay‘s low-stakes fun by scaring the crap out of people. Enter I.O.U.S.A., a terrifying look at the United States’ mountainous debt problems—most […]
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DVD movie picks for summer cellar dwellers
One not-so-long-ago summer day, back when I was spending my September-May as an overworked BA-pursuer/perpetual stress-monkey and my summers as a comparatively calm video-store employee, I met a man I didn’t understand. I was trying to sell him a summer-fun video-rental coupon book; he wasn’t having any of my ace sales pitch. “I don’t watch […]