Morgan Wallen. Update, Friday, April 19 at 9:15 p.m.: Morgan Wallen has finally addressed his Nashville arrest on social media. “I didn’t feel right publicly checking in until I made amends with some folks,” he tweeted. “I’ve touched base with Nashville law enforcement, my family, and the good people at Chief’s. I’m not proud of my behavior, and I accept responsibility.” He added in another tweet that he has the “utmost respect” for police officers and that there will be “no change” to his tour.
Masturbation is such an intimate and solitary act that it almost feels intrusive to watch a movie character engaging in it onscreen. Despite being a (nearly) universal experience, cinema tends to allude to the practice of self-pleasure, preferring the titillation of partnered sex scenes. There’s still an overall discomfort with acknowledging personal sexual gratification, and it’s mainly portrayed in comedies as something aberrant or worth mocking; see Brad (Judge Reinhold) imagining Phoebe Cates’s character unclasping her red bikini top in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) or Cameron Diaz using Ben Stiller’s “hair gel” in There’s Something About Mary (1998).
Before I explain why Nicolas Cage is not quite as good at having sex while shooting people in Drive Angry 3-D as Clive Owen was in Shoot ‘Em Up, allow me to introduce myself — or reintroduce myself: As a contributing editor at New York, I’ve edited arts coverage, covered film festivals, written scores of profiles, and obsessively analyzed Mad Men. And now, I’ll also be contributing several film reviews a week to Vulture, alongside my brilliant colleague David Edelstein.
There are moments during the amiable teen comedy Fun Size when you may wonder if it’s based on an existing property, like a TV show or a comic book or something. (It was partly produced by Nickelodeon, and this has reportedly caused some concern given that it’s a PG-13 film in which a giant mechanical chicken humps a car full of teens.) Directed by Gossip Girl’s Josh Schwartz and written by The Colbert Report’s Max Werner, the film sometimes seems to assume prior knowledge on our part when introducing characters and situations.
Cursed with an excruciatingly boisterous trailer that screams “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter,” the Snow White comedy Mirror, Mirror turns out to be not that terrible — or maybe it’s that the terrible first half hour wears you down so much that the rest seems relatively pleasant. The problem is that there’s a lot of competition in the “fractured fairy tale” genre these days and it’s not enough to have beloved Brothers Grimm favorites cracking wise and dropping anachronisms.
Somewhere in the twilight between Barbie’s Dreamhouse dawn and Sex and the City’s high-heeled after-party, there lies the Princess-for-a-Day Flick. Most rom-coms contain at least one gleeful shopping-spree sequence, but a Princess-for-a-Day Flick stretches that fantasy of perfectly shod self-affirmation for two blinged-out hours, usually via mistaken identity or magical plot twist, and without ever having to pick up the tab. The only price that must be paid is the Princess Apology: That deeply hypocritical moment — much like the “Crime Doesn’t Pay” coda to an Edward G.
The Hangover Part III opens on an elegant slow-motion shot of some guards running urgently, to the strains of classical music, through the corridors of a Thai prison. They make their way to a gate beyond which we see, still in slow motion, an elaborate, cataclysmic riot already in full progress. Amid the total chaos, they make their way to the cell of goofball Chinese gangster Leslie Chow (Ken Jeong) and discover that he has fled, Shawshank Redemption–style.
There are times during The Expendables 2 when you wonder if maybe a Wayans or Zucker brother was involved in making it; you could easily re-title it Action Movie and send it out into theaters as a spoof. Of course, this sequel to 2010’s all-star-mercenaries-blowing-up-foreign-lands flick is practically a spoof already: aggressively dumb, aggressively macho, and just plain aggressively aggressive. It’s got Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dolph Lundgren and Jason Statham and Jet Li and Terry Crews and Bruce Willis and Jean-Claude Van Damme and Chuck Norris, and it’s got heads exploding in airplane propellers and knives being kicked (kicked!
Mr. and Mrs. Smith First Vacation Season 1 Episode 3 Editor’s Rating 4 stars **** «Previous Next» « PreviousEpisode NextEpisode » Mr. and Mrs. Smith First Vacation Season 1 Episode 3 Editor’s Rating 4 stars **** «Previous Next» « PreviousEpisode NextEpisode » So far, each of John and Jane’s missions has offered a fitting backdrop for the respective steps in their relationship.
Spoilers ahead for the most recent episode of Mr. Robot.
This week’s episode of Mr. Robot featured the end of Philip Price, the power-hungry CEO of E Corp with ties to cyberterrorist Whiterose and the Dark Army. Though he was one of the series’s primary villains, Price eventually outlasted his usefulness to Whiterose, which led to his professional ruin but also an honest reconciliation with his estranged daughter, Angela Moss (Portia Doubleday).