What’s up with the fuss surrounding Twilight?

Hundreds of multiplex sellouts for last night’s midnight opening? Fans camping out a day early to catch a glimpse of stars Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart as they arrive for the film’s Hollywood premiere? Hordes of screeching teenage girls going gaga over Pattinson during a recent promotional appearance at a mall in Pennsylvania?

Read More

I loved Joan Jett when I was a kid. I listened to side one of I Love Rock N’ Roll almost every day — often multiple times a day — for more than a year. I turned the volume up on my crappy little radio every time the title song came on Q102 — which at the height of its popularity, was about once an hour.

The collision of simple, classic guitar chords, her tough-girl voice and her sexy, goth-informed visage staring out from the album’s cover left me endlessly fascinated. As a pre-teen, early-’80s suburbanite, I’d never experienced anything like her.

Read More

I haven't done an exhaustive study, but it seems for the first time since I've been writing the words that appear in this space, there are no new movies opening in theaters this week. Zero.

But that's not to say there aren't plenty of worthwhile options currently residing in local theaters.

As I pointed out last week, there have been an uncommon number of strong movies released of late, including four last week: The Descendants, Hugo, The Muppets and My Week with Marilyn. That quartet follows the recently released Martha Marcy May Marlene and Like Crazy, which means a half-dozen movies in the last three weeks have garnered an A- or better from CityBeat's typically stingy crew of critics.

Read More

We’re a long way from September 2007.

Remember when nearly every political pundit was frothing at the mouth to cover the inevitable Hillary Clinton vs. Rudi Giuliani presidential battle royale?

Well, some 13 months later, Hillary is campaigning for Barack Obama and Rudi is left to drop divisive, stereotype-laden cultural bombs (all the while being one of the East Coast elites he rails against) and to brood about the demise of his beloved New York Yankees.

Oh, and more than a year after I caught it at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival, Cincinnati movie buffs finally have a chance to see Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park ... on DVD.

Picked up by IFC Films in late 2007 and distributed in many markets in early 2008, Paranoid Park never made to a Cincinnati movie house largely due to The Esquire/Mariemont theatres’ policy of not screening films available on pay-per-view TV, a format IFC simultaneously makes available in conjunction with its theatrical releases.

Business-based, behind-the-scenes details aside, Paranoid Park is the latest entry in Van Sant’s recent string of strangely poetic, curiously impressionistic films that includes Gerry, Elephant and Last Days. It’s also one of the best films of Van Sant's varied career — a thriller that subverts nearly every genre convention while still generating an odd, almost subliminal tension.

The setup, per the truncated press notes at Toronto, is simple: “Alex, a teenage skateboarder, accidentally kills a security guard in the vicinity of Paranoid Park, Portland's tough skate park. He decides to say nothing.”

Van Sant infuses this bare-bones framework with a hypnotic array of technical flourishes: the use of ambient noises, vintage Nino Rota score snippets and Elliott Smith songs; a non-linear, overlapping narrative technique; cinematographer du jour Christopher Doyle’s striking visuals; and non-professional actors that give Paranoid Park an extra layer of authenticity.

Curiously, it looks as though Van Sant will return to more conventional techniques for his next film, Milk, a look at the life of trailblazing San Francisco politician Harvey Milk (played by Sean Penn), the first openly gay man to be elected to public office.

(Paranoid Park was released on DVD on Oct. 7.)

The third annual Oxford International Film Festival (OIFF) is moving south.

Previously held on Miami University’s Oxford campus and initially set to move to the Savannah Center in West Chester for this year, festival organizers announced this week that the majority of the screenings will now take place at the Esquire Theatre (320 Ludlow Ave., Clifton) July 24-30.

Read More

When the quietly haunting notes of Nicholas Hooper’s score begin to play a little past midnight on July 15, cueing the opening scene of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, my heart feels like a hot cauldron bubbling with a jumble of emotions: excitement, anxiety, and even a slight trace of fear, in case things — god forbid — go horribly wrong.

Read More

I got an e-mail the other day with the subject line: “Julia Roberts: not a top 5 movie hooker…” Curious, I opened it and found a list of the “Top Five Working Girls (and Boy) in Movies” as compiled by Spout.com.

(Note to eager publicists or enterprising ladies of the night: Please don't take this as an invitation to litter my mailbox with like-minded subject lines.)

Read More

Like any “awards” program based on so-called subjective judgments, The Golden Globes’ track record is all over the place. Yet a quick glance at this year’s nominees for "Best Motion Picture — Drama" reveals a list that will likely align nicely with the Academy Awards' more predictable, prestige-laden fare.

Read More

And now this from the CityBeat entertainment gossip desk: A couple of actors with Cincinnati ties announced marriage engagements today.

Read More

Our largely lackluster fall movie season trudges on with five more tepidly received efforts despite the presence of some big-named veteran directors like Clint Eastwood, Barry Levinson, Kevin Smith and the newly single Guy Ritchie.

Read More