As an American, there is a nine in 10 chance you will marry at some point in your life. Fifty-six percent of Americans 18 years old and over are married right now. And that famous statistic about one in two marriages breaking apart? It’s still holding true, with the recent book Marriages, Families, and Intimate Relationships estimating that roughly 40 to 60 percent of new marriages will end in divorce.
On paper, Penelope looks like one of the more wacky-ass movies to come along in a while. First, there’s the fact that the movie is about a girl with a pig’s snout for a nose. Then, there’s the fact that it was produced by Reese Witherspoon, who I totally forgot existed. And it was also penned by one of the main scriptwriters from Everybody Loves Raymond. Plus, it was directed by a dude whose past experience is literally interviewing screenwriters for The Dialogue. It stars Christina Ricci as the aforementioned girl with a pig’s snout for a nose. Did I mention it’s also a children’s movie?
Sigh. The Other Boleyn Girl is a great example of the director’s importance to a movie. It proves that even with a great script and talented actors, a bad director can turn a film into shit.
It is certainly refreshing to hear that ASPSU President Rudy Soto has been working this year to bring down the price of the FlexPass for PSU students. With his plan, he told the Vanguard last week, the pass could be lowered to anywhere between $50 to over $100 (its current cost is $150 per quarter). Awesome. What’s not as awesome is the brouhaha happening as a result. Oh, bureaucracy.
I wish Charlie Bartlett wasn’t so funny. It’d be a lot easier to dislike it that way. Charlie Bartlett is another one of those high school “dramedies” that tries oh-so-very hard to be hip and insightful, an inspiration to the teenage experience, but instead it falls into every clichéd high school stereotype imaginable.
This has gotten outlandishly silly. Both part-time/adjunct and full-time PSU faculty members have entered into mediation with the PSU administration over salaries (one of the first steps on the path to a strike), and the discussion isn’t going well. Faculty representatives have reported little headway being made, and a battle is currently going on between the two sides over what amounts to a 2 percent raise. The administration is now offering a 10 percent pay raise, while faculty is now asking for 12 percent, a considerable drop from their previous demand of 20 percent.
In a world where instant gratification is king, Jumper is movie-based crack for the ADD-addled mind. The latest effort from director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) starts out with David, a loser of a 15-year old, walking out onto a frozen Ann Arbor river to retrieve a thrown snow globe. This is presumably done as a romantic gesture to the one girl who will actually talk to him.
Independent voters are the new black of national politics. The steamrolling momentum of John McCain and Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns can be attributed in large part to their support among independents. It says a lot when a guy with two years in the Senate can take on the Clintons and win, and it says even more when a guy can score the GOP nomination while only getting roughly a third of the conservative vote.
Abortion isn’t something we see tackled too often in the movie business. The topic gets skirted around sometimes, toyed with certainly, but almost never directly confronted.
Back in the day it was called VD for venereal disease. And then we had STD for sexually transmitted disease. At present, the medically appropriate term is STI, for sexually transmitted infection.
It’s a shame that the trailer for In Bruges makes it look like just another Pulp Fiction knockoff. It’s a lot more than a mere shadow of a better movie. Colin Farrell stars as Ray, a neurotic hit man who has majorly fucked up a job, who goes to lie low with his partner, Jimmy (Brendan Gleeson), in the preserved Old World tourist town of Bruges, Belgium. Ray, however, is bad at lying low, and thus shenanigans ensue.