Alan Cumming Page 4

There's a subtle blast of righteous anger in this pointed drama, which finds present-day relevance in a true story that's more than 30 years old. The focus is on normal people who are caught up in an unjust system that leans toward ignorance and bigotry even if child's life is in danger. And watching them muster the strength to fight back is utterly riveting, because they're flawed and daunted exactly like we would be.

It takes place in 1979 Los Angeles, where Rudy (Cumming) works as a nightclub drag artist. When his hard-partying neighbour (Allman) abandons her Downs Syndrome son Marco (Leyva), Rudy steps up to take care of him. But he needs to find a longer-term solution, so he turns to Paul (Dillahunt), a divorced lawyer who has barely admitted to himself that he's gay. Rudy and Paul have only tentatively started a relationship, so Paul is reluctant. But Marco needs a guardian, so he helps Rudy get foster custody and moves them into his own home to help improve their legal status. But as they become a family, it becomes increasingly difficult for Paul to remain closeted, and when his sexuality emerges the court takes Marco away.

Even when the film shifts into a courtroom drama, it balances the drama with real-life humour and authentic emotional intensity. Watching these two compassionate men face systematic homophobia is pretty shocking, but filmmaker Fine never lets this become an issue movie: it's an involving story about people standing up for what's right. And by anchoring everything in the relationships, the film remains warm, relaxed and likeably awkward. This is mainly because Cumming and Dillahunt make such an unusual couple as the unapologetic queen and the strong-but-silent repressed guy.

Continue reading: Any Day Now Review

Since the vast majority of the audience for "Spy Kid 3D: Game Over" has probably never seen a 3D movie with cheap, old-fashioned blue-and-red-lensed cardboard glasses, here's a three-point primer for proper enjoyment of any flick in this format:

1) Sit toward the middle of the theater. Because of the twin-image nature of 3D projection, the more off-center you are from the screen, the more you'll see eye-straining "ghosting" of images through your glasses instead of proper depth of field.

2) The left lens (red) always seems uncomfortably darker than the right (blue). Get used to it.

Continue reading: Spy Kids 3d: Game Over Review

Making a Hollywood story with a decidedly un-Hollywood flair, co-writers, co-directors and co-stars Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming take a casual, almost guerilla approach to their collaborative conception called "The Anniversary Party."

It's a shoestring production shot cinema vérité style in which these two gifted journeyman actors play a shaky show biz couple throwing themselves a sixth anniversary bash even though they've just recently and tentatively reconciled after a big infidelity blow-up.

Their guests -- movie stars, directors, industry types and hangers-on -- seem vaguely uncomfortable congratulating Sally and Joe Therrian (Leigh and Cumming) on their longevity under the circumstances. But in a town where fakery is the norm, it's easy for everyone to put on a happy face -- even the non-industry next-door neighbors (Denis O'Hare and Mina Badie) who have been invited only in an attempt to ease tensions over a barking dog dispute that's threatening to turn legal.

Continue reading: The Anniversary Party Review

If you were to take the 1998 Spice Girls movie called "Spice World," then remove all the self-deprecation, all the homages to "Hard Day's Night," and all the surprising wit that made it such a great guilty pleasure, what you'd be left with would closely resemble the new "Josie and the Pussycats" movie -- although the results would still be less formulaic.

A live-action revival of the girlie rock band from the Archie comics and Saturday Morning cartoons, "Josie" is a hypocritical satire of MTV conformity that carefully tippy-toes around its mockery of the fickle pop music market so as not to rock the boat with its target audience -- those very same conformist teenagers at whom it pokes fun.

As the movie opens, the private plane carrying a boy band called Dejour (ha ha, very funny) has just been crashed on the command of their evil manager Wyatt Frame (Alan Cumming), who had to get rid of the boys after they discovered the record company's subliminal messages planted in their songs.

Continue reading: Josie & The Pussycats Review

A swashbuckling, bodice-ripping, 18th Century romp with a dance club pulse, "Plunkett and Macleane" is a slick, modern, action-comedy dropped daringly into the ambiance of a costume drama.

Based very, very loosely on the criminal career of two English highwaymen who became notorious hijacking the wealthy in London's Hyde park, the film stars hip, hot, "Trainspotting" alumni Jonny Lee Miller and Robert Carlyle as the pair of gentlemen thieves, something akin to Butch and Sundance fused with Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Miller plays James Macleane, a scam artist and aspiring blue blood, determined to buy his way into 1700s high society. He finds his ticket in an unlikely place -- in the company of Will Plunkett, a former apothecary who turned to street-level petty crime after going bankrupt. Their scheme: Put the polish on Macleane and send him into the most posh parties, where he'll scope out who's worth robbing on their way home. The duo then don masks and stage hold-ups, Macleane being so seductively polite to his prey (especially the ladies) that he's dubbed "the Gentleman Highwayman."

Continue reading: Plunkett & MacLeane Review

"The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas" is one unapologetic goofball of a movie. It makes no pretense of brains or decorum. It's dumb, screwy and proud. Yabba dabba doo!

A prequel to 1994's live-action "Flintstones" feature, it stars Mark Addy from "The Full Monty" as Fred and Stephen Baldwin's Barney (playing him dumb as a box of rocks and obviously enjoying it no end) in their younger days when they were courting Wilma and Betty (Kristen Johnston and Jane Krakowski).

The only thing really resembling plot revolves around the fact that Wilma is a down-to-earth debutante who would rather go bowling than to a fancy dress ball -- an attitude greeted with much high-hattedness when she brings Fred around to meet her parents.

Continue reading: The Flinstones In Viva Rock Vegas Review

Despite all the tongue-wagging about philandering shrinksand other rumor mill jazz, "Eyes Wide Shut" turns out to notbe entirely about sex after all.

Instead its something even more shocking by Hollywood standards-- a complex and intimate study of a couple surviving a very big bump intheir marriage.

There is sex. Plenty of it. But more frequently there'salmost sex and fantasy sex when a small marital spat between a rich,handsome couple of nine years escalates into a confession that begets adownward spiral jealousy, obsession and, most of all, temptation.

Continue reading: Eyes Wide Shut Review

If the rain-slicked new Sylvester Stallone revenge fantasy flick "Get Carter" seems a little familiar, it's with good reason.

It could be that the picture is a remake of a gnarly 1971 film of the same name (starring Michael Caine, who appears in this one too).

It could be that the bad-guy-going-after-worse-guys plot -- about a Las Vegas mob enforcer determined to find and snuff the people who whacked his estranged brother -- isn't all that different from the story of a hard-as-nails parolee avenging his daughter in last year's "The Limey."

Continue reading: Get Carter Review