Entertainment 505 results

Movies, music and popular culture reports from Ex-Press staff

4Score

The Revenant is raw tension

Movie review: The Revenant Leonardo DiCaprio undergoes a horrendous series of trials — including that famous bear attack — in Alejandro G. Inarritu's masterful tale of survival

David Bowie’s Top Ten movies

Tribute: David Bowie As the world mourns the loss of an icon who changed pop music, let's not forget David Bowie's impressive, and sometimes abysmal, body of work on the big screen because it was all part of a greater performance By Katherine Monk VANCOUVER - The I-5 was a ribbon of wet blackness that emerged, intermittently, with each croaking swipe of the wipers. It was going to be a long drive from Vancouver to Tacoma, and in late October rain without someone to talk to, it was going to feel even longer. No one wanted to see Bowie with me. Not this tour, at any rate. My partner was a former music promoter. After a lifetime of walking around with a headset and a deck of laminates around her neck, she had no desire to be a plus-one in press seats. Besides, it was the Outside tour. A 1995 conceptual opera featuring Nine Inch Nails and Bowie playing the character of Nathan Adler, a man who judges the worthiness of art in a post-apocalyptic future, the Outside tour proved ...
2Score

The Forest gets lost walking in circles

Movie review: The Forest Natalie Dormer takes a long walk in a forest full of strange fruit in Jason Zada's Japanese take on Little Red Riding Hood  
3Score

Movie review: The Joy of capitalism

A woman invents a miracle mop and finds herself knee-deep in screwball dysfunction in David O. Russell's uneven fable about working-class America    

Squeezing Gervais’s not-so Golden Globes

Podcast: Pop This! To toasting and roasting Ricky Gervais as returning host of the Golden Globes, an awards show that makes some viewers walk around the house in high heels with a tall glass of pinot Featuring Lisa Christiansen and Andrea Warner. Produced by Andrea Gin. A sampling of what you might hear in Episode 9: Looking at The Golden Globes I will tell you what I genuinely think of Ricky Gervais: I think he is smug, self-congratulatory, fat-shaming...and he can be incredibly boring.... He has a lot of specific self-hatred... The only human beings who don't want to be liked are sociopaths. Mad Max. Rent is not a comedy? Empire is not nominated in the musical category? One of the great loves of my life, Spy Magazine... the monocles reviews, that's who I envision as the Hollywood Foreign Press I have the feeling they are the kind of people who go to Cannes and don't see movies I love Veep so much. A rare show without a weak link. It messes you ...

Missy Elliot and Adele duke it out

Podcast: Pop This! Adele says hello while Pop This! bids adieu to 2015 with a look the most underrated and overrated moments on last year's calendar Featuring Lisa Christiansen and Andrea Warner. Produced by Andrea Gin. A sampling of what you might hear in Episode 8: Underrated pop culture moments of 2015 "Oooh... Pizza Rat..." "If you just got a rotating tattoo that evolved every year  into pop culture’s most forgettable moment of all time…  that would be great." "Pop culture ... is this weird thing… it takes fire and everyone talks about it..." "Is the dress blue and black or gold and white?" "I want to talk about Missy Elliot's comeback... Not enough people are excited about it." "Is Star Wars overrated?" "You had me at Star Wars…" "I'm tired of squad goals..." "Caitlyn Jenner... Amazing cultural shift." "I guess capitalism needs to suck every dollar out of pop culture…" "Hotline Bling... I love that music video so much I want ...

Pop This! Hits, hisses and misses

Podcast: Pop This! Trainwreck chugs toward a cliff of critical revision while Albert Maysles's final piece of non-fiction brings an Apfel for a teacher Featuring Lisa Christiansen and Andrea Warner. Produced by Andrea Gin. A sampling of what you might hear Episode 7 as Pop This! breaks down the year in movies*: “I dream one day of owning a La-Z-Boy" “What about a La-Z- Girl?” "Sometimes I love AND hate.. but mostly love..." "My hate has grown for a few things... A lot of my hate has grown for Trainwreck." "You have to watch... It Follows." "I found Iris Apfel…. very inspiring..." "My grandmother is a huge part of my life... she made me hyperaware that we put seniors to the side…" "If The Rolling Stones Tour and people buy tickets isn’t that it…?" "Ex Machina... fantastic." "I'm playing air theramin..." "I love watching dudes bond over things that aren’t demeaning to women, The Night Before was... ridiculous and lovely and ...

Top Ten 2015: Women land box-office blows for a surprise win

Movies: Top Ten 2015 Women stormed the box-office with raw power and profound emotional insight, overcoming Hollywood's institutional misogyny By Katherine Monk Let’s hear it for the girls. Though the year started slowly with just a handful of bright moments on what seemed to be a rather bleak horizon — from a pruny soak in a Hot Tub Time Machine and a disappointing date with The Avengers — 2015 ended up celebrating the fair sex in surprise fashion, starting with Mad Max’s furious females lead by Charlize Theron. The movie was kicked from the ticket wicket by Elizabeth Banks’s Pitch Perfect chorus, but there was still plenty of room for revision as Melissa McCarthy took on the spy genre and Amy Poehler and Phyllis Smith deconstructed the adolescent female psyche in Inside Out. James Bond lost a bit of box-office mojo with Spectre – pulling in $196 million domestically, compared to Skyfall’s $304 million – but while Hollywood expressed concern over a grim ...
3Score

Murder, He Wrote

Movie review: The Hateful Eight Quentin Tarantino creates a self-conscious cartoon that puts a bullet through the brain of western myth  
3.5Score

Star Wars goes back to the future

Movie review: Star Wars - The Force Awakens The long-awaited new movie reclaims the universe of Star Wars, makes it fresh again, and still finds room for old favorites like Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher