Parker Posey Page 2

You've Got Mail is about a woman named Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan), who's children's book store is in danger of being put out of business because of a new Barnes and Noble type book super store, owned by Joe Fox (Tom Hanks). When they meet each other they (of course) hate each other. What's the problem? They don't know that the other one is their favorite e-mail buddy. The premise is actually creative but they don't do anything with it. Hanks and Ryan have the unnecessary romances with Parker Posey and Greg Kinnear at the beginning, but the audience knows better. We know they're going to be history in about forty-five minutes. Bored yet?

Continue reading: You've Got Mail 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

Mockumentary maestro Christopher Guest -- the driving force behind "This Is Spinal Tap" and "Waiting For Guffman" -- aims his satirical squirt gun at obsessive dog owners in his latest tongue-in-cheek, interview vérité offering, "Best In Show."

Casting a wide net across kitchy Americana, Guest's cameras capture a handful of mildly lunatic canine caretakers as they travel to and prepare for a prestigious dog show.

There's Harlan Pepper (played by Guest), a North Carolina fishing shop owner and the proud papa of a sad-eyed bloodhound he's convinced is psychic. There's cross-eyed, buck-toothed Gerry and trampy Cookie Fleck (Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara), a middle-aged suburban couple with no kids but a pampered Norwich Terrier that is their pride and joy.

Continue reading: Best In Show Review

A gratuitous wise-cracking sidekick and a tummy-baring, tight-top-wearing eye-candy vampire hunter have been added to the cast of the sequel "Blade: Trinity," but it's the gal (Jessica Biel) who gets most of the laughs, albeit unintentionally, with her lethargic, ludicrously inept kung-fu fighting.

Playing the hitherto unknown hottie daughter of Whistler (Kris Kristofferson) -- that crusty veteran of the underground vampire wars who is mentor to the titular half-vamp Wesley Snipes in all three "Blade" pictures -- Biel can't swing a convincing punch or kick to save her life.

But giving Biel a run for her money as the movie's most absurd character is ironic indie-flick darling Parker Posey, disastrously cast against type as the leader of yet another tiresome uber-Goth vampire faction that pouts around in skyscraper hideouts when they're not busy reviving their millennia-old master.

Continue reading: Blade: Trinity Review