Woody Harrelson Page 10

Will (Foster) is just out of military hospital after being injured while serving in Iraq; his relationship with his girlfriend (Malone) is strained, and he's not happy about his new assignment informing families about the deaths of loved ones in the warzone. His mentor for the job is the jaded Tony (Harrelson), who survives by maintaining his distance from the families: "Don't touch the NOK" (next of kin), he tells Will. But Will can't help but reach out to them, and one widow (Morton) makes a particularly strong impression on him.

Continue reading: The Messenger Review

Zombies have taken over America and the few remaining humans are fending for their lives. Names are irrelevant, so they use their hometowns: Columbus (Eisenberg) is a resourceful nerd who teams up with bonkers fighter Tallahassee (Harrelson) to try to find someone else who's alive. They run into two con-artist sisters, Wichita and Little Rock (Stone and Breslin), and set off on a perilous cross-country journey to find the last enclave of humanity. Not only are they attacked at every turn by the snarling, toothy undead, but they don't really trust each other.

Continue reading: Zombieland Review

Mike (Zahn) is a lonely man-child, living in the Arizona hotel owned by his parents (Ward and Martindale). When he spots travelling businesswoman Sue (Aniston) checking in, he invents a reason to talk to her. And even she is surprised by her response to his clumsy advances. But it turns out that she's also lonely, trying to sort out her place in the world and looking for security Mike probably can't offer. On the other hand, is her high-achieving boyfriend (Harrelson) the right choice?

Continue reading: Management Review

The zesty, scandalous plot device at the center of the film and the sole reason the movie became a fairly big hit in 1993 can be summed up in one line: "Suppose... I were to offer you one million dollars for one night with your wife." And yes, that surface exposition is intriguing in its glossy, high-concept way. But in truth, the appeal of that tantalizing conundrum gets lost in a muddle of a screenplay that really is not about that spicy million-dollar offer, but rather a tepid, long-winded story of a relationship tested by temptation. In theory, the material could work. In practice, Indecent Proposal is a bland, melodramatic sit.

Continue reading: Indecent Proposal Review

Zahn is lonely guy named Mike, pushing middle age in a dead-end job working for his parents at a roadside motel in the Arizona dessert. Zahn's puppy dog eyes are reminiscent of Robert Morse -- he is cute and cuddly but he could also be a pervert or a serial killer. His Norman Bates pedigree is certainly on display when he sets his sights on uptight sales representative Sue (Aniston), staying the night at the motel for her business, a company specializing in corporate art called Corporate Bliss. When Sue gazes at Mike and Mike gazes at Sue, you know it is a match made in heaven, although Mike still could be Ted Bundy.

Continue reading: Management Review

Battle in Seattle is a high-octane depiction of the World Trade Organization riots in Seattle, Washington in late November 1999, where motives and duties are contradictory, confused, and unsettled. The non-violent protest groups end up embroiled in the very violence they abhor. Seattle Mayor Tobin (Ray Liotta) wants to appeal to the law-and-order police and to the protestors. (The night before the demonstrations he shows up both at a rally for the WTO and a rally against the WTO.) The law enforcement officials attempt to maintain the peaceful protest while at the same time chafing at the bit and waiting to crack heads. When violence erupts at the WTO protests, all the groups scatter and run blindly in all directions, and the National Guard appears to mop it all up.

Continue reading: Battle In Seattle Review

The funnyman's stable of petulant and grossly overconfident buffoons grows with the addition of Jackie Moon, owner, coach, and starting power forward for the Flint Tropics, a fictional ABA basketball squad hoping to survive the 1976 merger with the NBA.

Continue reading: Semi-Pro Review

As is explained by a pair of FBI agents, a walker is the title given to men who escort women of great importance (and elderly age) from here to there in the ladies' leisurely days of lunching and shopping. Like other men in his profession, Carter Page III (Woody Harrelson) has the breeding and education that the career demands and his taste in fashion and furniture is impeccable; he's also a flagrant homosexual. He shuttles away from his one-day-a-week job as a real estate insider to meet up with the likes of Lynn Locklear (Kristin Scott Thomas), the wife of a senator, and Abigail Delorean (Lily Tomlin), the wife of Washington's most powerful fixer (Ned Beatty).

Continue reading: The Walker Review

Bell's troubles kick off when a deputy makes the fatal mistake of arresting a pale man with a terrible bowl cut, properly named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). Chigurh strangles the deputy while his flailing boots leave a trail of scuff marks on the jail floor. As he makes his way back to his meeting spot, Llewelyn Moss (a near-stoic Josh Brolin) has come upon a massacre of drug runners in the California canyons and prairies. He leaves the drugs but takes a bag full of money for his own. Within hours, he is sending his wife to live with her mother and plotting the best way to shake the trail of dead that is left in his wake. A cocky fixer (Woody Harrelson) makes nothing but a blip on Chigurh's radar as he rifles through hotels and hospitals to find his money and the man who has "inconvenienced" him.

Continue reading: No Country For Old Men Review

When Richard Linklater released Waking Life in 2001, he became the granddaddy of a whole new kind of filmmaking process. The film had been shot and edited like a normal feature, then sent to computer jocks who basically painted over each frame, giving the images a surreal quality of undulating colors that fell somewhere between photography and animation -- an acid-trip philosophy lesson.

Linklater returns to the same technique once again (and for the last time, from what he has said, due to rampant production difficulties) for a much more literal acid trip. Based on the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name, A Scanner Darkly is a feature-length PSA on the evils of drugs and the potentially-as-damaging efforts to ferret them out of society.

Continue reading: A Scanner Darkly Review

Continue reading: Welcome To Sarajevo Review

Thank you for permitting that interruption.

Continue reading: After The Sunset Review

Whether or not it's successful, the filmmakers deserve every bit of praise for having the guts to make a movie like this, especially in an age where Washington constantly cries foul over Hollywood's depictions of sex and violence. And believe me, The People vs. Larry Flynt has plenty of both.

Continue reading: The People Vs. Larry Flynt Review

Lee's initial target for censure is the crooked corporate culture that fosters brazenly greedy and duplicitous companies such as Enron and Worldcom. Jack Armstrong (Anthony Mackie) is a vice president at a pharmaceutical company whose new HIV cure has been rejected by the FDA. When he discovers a conspiracy orchestrated by the corporation's arrogant, racist CEO (Woody Harrelson) and his ruthless Martha Stewart-ish boss (Ellen Barkin) to cook the books and keep employees and shareholders in the dark about the new drug's ineffectiveness, Jack rats out his superiors to the SEC, and the price for betraying "the family" is immediate dismissal. As luck would have it, though, a new money-making venture falls directly into his, ahem, lap - his ex-fiancé Fatima (Kerry Washington), who left him for another woman, now wants to pay him $10,000 to impregnate her and her Dominican girlfriend. Before long, Armstrong - in some sort of filthier version of the Patrick Dempsey '80s cult classic Loverboy - is occupying his time spreading his seed through NYC's upper-crust lesbian community (which includes Monica Bellucci as a Mafioso don's daughter) for wads of cash.

Continue reading: She Hate Me Review

Terrence Malick's long-awaited and severely overhyped Line is plenty red, but it isn't thin at all. In fact, it's damn thick and dense, and it meanders about like a lazy river.

Continue reading: The Thin Red Line Review

Nothing wrong with that, but the film is so riddled with cliches and old information that it's hard to muster much interest in the cause or, by extension, enthusiasm for the "film."

Continue reading: Go Further Review

At the same time, when Moore gives as brilliant performance as she does in The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, who should stop her? Moore is in every scene in this true, against-all-odds story about a woman whose penchant for winning contests keeps her family financially afloat. The teary story combined with Moore's constant presence could lead to self-indulgent tedium. It doesn't for one simple reason: Julianne Moore becomes Evelyn Ryan, not the other way around.

Continue reading: The Prize Winner Of Defiance, Ohio Review

Inspired by true events during the late 1980s at a Northern Minnesota iron mine, Country focuses on Josey Aimes (Charlize Theron), a recently separated young mother who has returned to her hometown to reassemble her life. But Josey's return does not sit well with the locals. They call her a slut, a whore, and whisper wisecracks about her two children born out of wedlock. Even Josey's father Hank (Richard Jenkins) resents her return, saying she has brought nothing but shame to the family.

Continue reading: North Country Review

Vince Boudreau (Woody Harrelson - White Men Can't Jump, The People Vs. Larry Flynt) and Cesar Dominguez (Antonio Banderas - Desperado, The Mask of Zorro) are best buddies whose careers as professional boxers are on the downswing. Fortunately for them, the undercard for the Mike Tyson match tonight just lost its scheduled fighters to a car accident and a drug overdose. If Vince and Cesar can make it from L.A. to Vegas by Showtime, they'll be paid to fight for the first time in years, facing each other, with a title shot going to the winner.

Continue reading: Play It To The Bone Review

And yet, America kept consuming it. Snoop Dogg sold millions of CDs, video games amped up the gore, and children could quote the grisly details of the O.J. Simpson murder trial as if it were written by Dr. Seuss.

Continue reading: Natural Born Killers Review

Grass amiably traces the war on marijuana throughout the 20th century, from old archival footage, newsreels, and propaganda films and moving on into 1960s counterculture footage and Presidential speeches. All of it works well in explaining -- to some extent -- the political underpinnings of the drug war. As well, the medical research over the decades (all of which conveniently states there is no basis for the criminalization of marijuana) is trotted out.

Continue reading: Grass Review

Needless to say, things didn't turn out that way. One very large problem is that Almereyda is new to the documentary biz and doesn't seem to have figured out how things work. Normally a visual innovator in his films like Nadja and the aforementioned Hamlet, Almereyda leaves the camera static, hoping that his subjects will provide all the necessary drama. They don't. Penn looks to be in full Mr. Hollywood mode, reading a newspaper and barely paying attention, while a shaggier-than-usual Nolte is in the throes of some chemically-induced meltdown; Harrelson and Marin just look happy to have been asked along.

Continue reading: This So-Called Disaster Review

When a TV channel called True TV is being beaten by The Gardening Channel, a woman (Ellen DeGeneres) comes up with a plan to save the channel, to put a man's life on TV around the clock. They select an unintelligent video store clerk named Ed (Matthew McConaughey). Ed enjoys the fame and fortune at first, but when it interferes with his relationship with his girlfriend (Jenna Elfman) and his family, Ed decides that maybe it wasn't such a good idea.

Continue reading: Edtv Review

"EDtv" doesn't pass on a single opportunity for a laugh. A lightsatire about an earnest Everyman picked to be the subject of a 24-7 cableTV show, even when its cuts away to a shot of the show's nervous directorholed up in a broadcast van, the camera zooms in for a tight shot of hisbad hair plugs as he yells into his headset.

The first comedy in 14 years from director Ron Howard ("Ransom,"Apollo 13," "Splash"), and by far his funniest, "EDtv"stars Matthew McConaughey as Ed, an affable San Francisco video store clerkwho becomes a national sensation as the star of his own always-on "RealWorld"-like cable network after winning a contest he never plannedto enter.

Continue reading: Edtv Review

Writer David Dorfman, director Peter Segal and star Adam Sandler missed a golden opportunity in "Anger Management," a comedy bereft of laughs about a milquetoast office drone and designer of fat feline fashions (?) who is sentenced to rage therapy after an incident on an airline.

The incident: His repeated polite requests for a headset to watch the in-flight movie are absurdly mistaken for aggression by a flight crew with post-9/11 jitters. The missed opportunity: The concept's punchline should have been that he really is a rage-a-holic and the calm version of events we see is his skewed perspective of normalcy.

Instead, the picture sticks with the notions that typically dim-bulb Sandler (insert empty-eyed double-take head-cocks here) really is a misunderstood nice guy, and the actor fails to find a single genuine laugh in the story's goofball gimmick -- which is that his nutzo court-appointed therapist (Jack Nicholson, volume turned up to 11) moves in with him and makes his life a living hell.

Continue reading: Anger Management Review

What could Spike Lee have been thinking?

Right on the heels of an unalloyed masterpiece, "25th Hour," the great American filmmaker delivers "She Hate Me," a bizarre, head-scratching hodgepodge of poorly executed bad ideas.

Many film buffs consider Lee a hit-and-miss director, but even his biggest failures ("Jungle Fever," "Summer of Sam," "Bamboozled") have had some kind of coherence, some alignment of angry, passionate ideas, painted with Lee's singular vision and voice.

Continue reading: SHE HATE ME Review

"After the Sunset" is a heist flick in which the audience is left out of the best part -- the logistics of the heist. Whose dumb idea was that?

Pierce Brosnan and Salma Hayek play an ace diamond-snatching couple who begin the film by pulling off their genre-traditional One Last Big Score, swiping a multi-million-dollar rock from an armored FBI transport -- and that scene is actually crackling with creative how-they-done-it details (unlike the rest of the movie), even if the circumstances themselves make no sense. Why would the FBI be transporting a diamond?

After that, they retire to live a quiet life of sunsets on the beach and piña coladas in a Jamaican resort town. The two talented stars take great joy in giving this criminal couple a sexy playfulness that goes beyond the fact that neither of them wears much once the action shifts to the Caribbean. But almost as soon as Brosnan's old FBI nemesis (Woody Harrelson) turns up -- hoping to lure the thief back into the heist life so the lawman can make the big bust that has always eluded him -- the movie springs a leak and begins a slow and torturous sinking.

Continue reading: After The Sunset Review

The boxing/road movie romp "Play It to the Bone" is yet another sports-as-metaphor comedy from writer-director Ron Shelton, whose previous, all-too-similar efforts on behalf of baseball ("Bull Durham"), basketball ("White Men Can't Jump") and golf ("Tin Cup") have struck a harmonic chord between testosterone and romance.

But despite great casting and an obliging -- if predictable -- set-up, this one lands with the thud of a ineffective body shot, largely because Shelton's formula has worn transparently thin.

Woody Harrelson and Antonio Banderas play antagonistic best friends and washed-up middleweights, given one last chance at glory if they can get from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in an afternoon to be the substitute undercard at a Mike Tyson bout.

Continue reading: Play It To The Bone Review