News for
Howard Hawks

photos

board

add

contact

details

3 articles from 2008

30 July 2008 1:19 AM, PDT | From GetTheBigPicture.net | See recent Get The Big Picture news

The subject has come up plenty of times here at The Big Picture, and I'll go over it again: All movie genres have their strengths, and all of them have their weaknesses. There are terrific war movies and absolutely terrible ones. You can flip through the channels late on a Saturday night and film an old film noir that's lousy and poorly acted and you can find Laura, which is anything but. You can watch a Western made in the 1930s (Stagecoach) and it will outshine one made in the 1980s (Young Guns). Musicals can be as good as Singin' in the Rain or Moulin Rouge! or as bad as The Wiz or Phantom of the Opera.

I know a guy who hates martial arts films. Discounts them immediately and vocally. I knew a critic for a major American newspaper who refused to see Amelie because, "I don't like French things.

Colin Boyd

11 July 2008 8:50 PM, PDT | From screeninglog.com | See recent screeninglog news

Release year: 1938

The players: Director: Howard Hawks, Writers: Dudley Nichols, Hagar Wilde, Cast: Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Charles Ruggles, May Robson

The plot: Dr. David Huxley’s life is turned upside down when he meets the eccentric Susan Vance, who recruits him to help her move a leopard from her New York apartment to her aunt’s home in Connecticut.

Modern thoughts on a classic movie: Although the film was a commercial bomb upon its initial release, “Bringing Up Baby” has managed to sneak its way onto not only best comedy lists, but best film lists too. Personally though, I think the people of 1938 had the right idea in rejecting this utterly boring screw-ball classic.

Cary Grant’s Huxley is both foolish and spineless. On his wedding day, he lets a woman he barely knows talk him into taking a leopard from New York to Connecticut.

Rachel Thuro

4 April 2008 11:36 AM, PDT | From Studio Briefing | See recent Studio Briefing news

Leatherheads, studio publicists have said, is intended to be a kind of throwback to those movies of the '40s and '50s called "screwball comedies." And Rafer Guzmán in Newsday applauds George Clooney, who both stars in the football film and directs it, for imbuing it "with an irresistible charm and intelligence, raising it far above the average period piece." Likewise Claudia Puig in Usa Today comments, "Though not as clever as the Preston Sturges or Howard Hawks movies to which it pays tribute, it succeeds at what it sets out to be: smart-alecky, lightweight fun." But A.O. Scott in the New York Times is one of the critics who maintains that the film falls far short of its goal. "The actors, writers and directors who made those old studio whirligigs spin," he writes, "made it look easy. By contrast Leatherheads, the third and by a wide margin the weakest movie directed by George Clooney, looks to have been nearly as hard to make as it is to watch." Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune begins his review with the words, "Tragically, Leatherheads is just Ok." On the other hand Bob Strauss in the Los Angeles Daily News writes that Leatherheads "may not be as self-consciously arty as [Clooney's earlier] Good Night, and Good Luck or Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. It's not as good as those two, either, but it's a lot more fun than both of them combined." And Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle decides to punt. "Imagine a really nice, jolly, genial person with a mild, intermittent hygiene problem. This movie is a little like that," he writes. "It exudes goodwill and high spirits, occasionally makes you feel really good, and yet here and there and in some definite ways, it kinda sorta stinks."

Permalink | Report a problem

3 articles from 2008