Tag: William H. Macy

Staff Pick: “House of Games” (1987) is a Neo-Noir Classic

Screenshot House of Games 1987

“House of Games” is a hidden gem. Written and directed by David Mamet, this low-budget film was released in 1987 to positive reviews, but only managed to earn about $2.6 million at the box office.

The film is a neo-noir thriller about a prominent psychiatrist and author (Lindsay Crouse) who becomes involved with a group of con artists led by a shadowy figure named Mike (Joe Mantegna). The film is loaded with twists and turns, and saying anything more about the plot would spoil the film. Crouse and Joe Mantegna are brilliant in the lead roles, and the cast is filled with talented character actors including Mike Nussbaum, J.T. Walsh, Ricky Jay and William H. Macy. Mantegna was born to play this role. His performance seems so effortless. Meanwhile, the film wouldn’t work without Crouse’s impressive performance.

The neo-noir genre in film is a contemporary revival of the film noir genre, which was popular in Hollywood during the 1940s and 1950s. Film noir is characterized by its dark, moody, and often cynical tone, as well as its focus on crime, corruption, and the seedy underbelly of society.

Neo-noir films, on the other hand, are typically made in a more modern era and reflect the social and cultural changes that have occurred since the original film noir period. Neo-noir films often feature similar themes and motifs as traditional film noir, but they may incorporate new elements such as more complex characterizations, non-linear narratives, and new visual and stylistic techniques.

Some common elements of neo-noir films include morally ambiguous characters, femme fatales, urban decay, and a general sense of disillusionment and despair. Neo-noir films often feature complex and convoluted plotlines, as well as an emphasis on mood and atmosphere over traditional plot development.

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“The Lincoln Lawyer” is a pleasant surprise

matthew-mcconaughey-marisa-tomei-the-lincoln-lawyer

When I heard that Matthew McConaughey had the lead role, it was hard to get excited about this flick. McConaughey hasn’t exactly been challenging himself lately with the roles he chooses. Yet the rest of the cast is spectacular, with the beautiful and talented Marisa Tomei cast as the ex-wife and William H. Macy in a major role as well. Even Bryan Cranston shows up in a minor role and sexy Katherine Moennig makes an appearance and a cool prostitute.

I gave the film a shot, and I was pleasantly surprised. This legal thriller will keep you engaged throughout the film, and the chemistry between McConaughey and Tomei make this an excellent date movie as well. Their characters are divorced, but they’re still attracted to one another even if their jobs get in the way. A legal thriller might not be your first choice for a date movie, but you can do much worse. If you’re stuck at home and don’t have anyone to take to the movies, check out some free dating sites and recharge your personal life. The nice thing about a movie like “The Lincoln Lawyer” for a date flick is that there’s just enough romance and sexual tension to intrigue your date, but there plenty of excitement in the plot so that the romance and sex don’t dominate the film. Enjoy!

Winter 2011 TCA Press Tour: Day 10 – or – The Day Will Hit the Wall

The TCA tour lasts for about two weeks. That’s two weeks away from your family where you’re spending the majority of your time sitting in a hotel ballroom, listening to panel after panel about upcoming TV shows. Don’t get me wrong: I’m enough of a TV geek that I enjoy it from start to finish, but at a certain point, you find that your enjoyment begins to be regularly supplanted by the desire to just grab your shit and go the hell home. As a professional, I do my best to rise above this, which is why I invariably stick it out ’til the very last panel of the tour, but when you start considering the shit-grabbing and home-going more often than you find yourself thinking, “Say, this show sounds pretty good / awful,” this is what is known in TV critic parlance as “hitting the wall.”

And, baby, I have hit it.

When I woke up on the morning of Day 10 of the tour, I had a headache. It was the first time I’d had one since arriving in Pasadena, and, of course, I took it for what it was: a sign that both my body and mind were ready to return to Virginia. Little did I realize that it was really more of a portent of the evil that would cross my path on this day…but we’ll get to that. With a job to do, I popped a couple of Motrin, swigged some coffee, and entered into the day’s panels, which consisted of shows from the CBS family of networks, which includes, of course, CBS (“Chaos,” “Mad Love,” “The Good Wife”), but also Showtime (“The Borgias,” “Shameless,” “Californication,” “Episodes”) and The CW (“Shedding for the Wedding”). There were also executive sessions for the various networks, as well as one for the “Kick Ass Women of The CW,” featuring stars from “Hellcats,” “The Vampire Diaries,” “Nikita,” and “Smallville.”

Looking at the talent list for the various panels, there were certainly people I wanted to chat with, but I’ve always had trouble picking up interviews for Showtime series, a fact which all but killed my chances with many of the most interesting actors in attendance, including Jeremy Irons, William H. Macy, David Duchovny, and Matt LeBlanc. Heck, I couldn’t even pull a one-on-one with Colm Feore, although I did end up chatting with him later in the evening while pretending to be Canadian. (Don’t ask.) But I did at least make it into post-panel scrums for Irons, Macy, and the ever-gorgeous Carla Gugino, so there’s that, at least. And amongst the cast of CBS’s “Mad Love” is the always amiable Tyler Labine, who I’ve been interviewing at TCA since my first tour, when “Reaper” debuted, so he and I got in a good one-on-one.

Most of my afternoon, however, was spent in a funk. Maybe it’s because I’d hit the wall, but I found myself getting progressively grumpier about the way various actors’ personal publicists were acting. One assured me that I could do a walk-and-talk with their client, who was in a rush to get to another appointment, only to promise the same thing to another writer moments later and leave me in the dust. Another deigned to let me do a one-on-one with her client, then – outside of her client’s line of vision – starting tapping her watch ferociously before I’d even had two minutes of conversation. (This was particularly infuriating because the writers before and after me had neither a time limit nor been “chaperoned” during their interviews.) It was also a major bummer that the evening event was an hour-long cocktail party where the attendees were limited to the shows on The CW which were represented on the network’s panels.

Despite my relatively grouchy attitude throughout the day, there were still some highlights on the panels that are worth mentioning, so here they are…

1. Q: Given Charlie Sheen’s antics over the weekend, how would you characterize your level of concern about him, and what is the network doing to help him?
Nina Tassler (with all due sarcasm): Well, I really didn’t expect that question this morning. So I’m just…I’m really taken by surprise. Look, obviously, we’ve thought, and I personally have thought, a lot about this, and we have a high level of concern. How could we not? But I have to speak to this personally first. On a very basic, human level, concern, of course. This man is a father. He’s got children. He has a family. So, obviously, there’s concern on a personal level. But you can’t look at it simplistically. Charlie is a professional. He comes to work. He does his job extremely well. We are taping tonight, and it’s…it’s very complicated, but we have a very good relationship with Warner Bros. I have a tremendous trust and respect in the way they are managing the situation. So, on a personal level, obviously concerned. On a professional level, he does his job, he does it well, the show is a hit, and…that’s really all I have to say.

2. Question: Jason, what about your character (in “Mad Love”)?
Jason Biggs: Without giving too much away, obviously, I have sex with a sheet cake in the second episode.
Sarah Chalke: We weren’t going to reveal that!
Judy Greer: Way to go.
Jason Biggs: I don’t know if that’s a spoiler alert. Sorry, guys.
Judy Greer: That’s the cake we used for what’s her name’s birthday? Just kidding.
Jason Biggs: Yes. Yes, it was.
Judy Greer: I had a piece of that!
Jason Biggs: No. There are some situations. I wouldn’t say they are exactly, you know, akin to some of the I mean, let’s be honest. Those were very R rated, and some pushing NC 17 scenarios.
Matt Tarses: He loses his pants in Staten Island.
Jason Biggs: But I do lose my pants in Staten Island. So you do see me pantsless, which I think is what my fans demand of me in general and but yeah, there are some I mean, Matt has written, for all of us, some kinds of crazy situations. I mean, it’s inherent to this format, I think, is to create situations that are quite comical and kind of crazy. And for someone who can the person that does it right, they are funny, but they are also grounded in reality somehow, and they are with characters that you like and all that good stuff. And I feel like that’s what’s happening here. So, among those situations, which I believe there are some in every episode, one of them I lose my pants in Staten Island. The other one I have sex with a sheet cake.

3. Q: Freddy, describe what happens when you read a script that says, “Next, Rick eats a scorpion.” What was that like? And when you filmed it…I’m sure you didn’t eat a scorpion, but whatever you were holding…
Freddy Rodriquez: How are you so sure?
Q: It looked realistic. You were holding something that was wiggly and scary. Just describe what it was like when you heard you were going to do it and what it was like to do that scene.
Freddy Rodriquez: Well, to be honest, I wasn’t sure what it was going to be when I got there. And when I got there, if you remember, Tom…
Tom Spezialy: Oh, I remember.

Freddy Rodriguez: …it was a real scorpion. I had a slight anxiety attack, to be honest, right? And then I got over it. And then I asked Brett Ratner to hold it. I would do it if he would hold it, and he refused, and we had an exchange. And after a while I got over it, and it was fun. I mean, when I read the script, there were so many great things that my character was doing in the pilot that I had to be involved even if it had to do with holding a scorpion. It was a real scorpion. I think they put Krazy Glue on the stinger, (but), yeah, it was real.
Q: What does it look like to see that thing wiggling in front of your eyes?
Freddy Rodriguez: Scary. It’s scary.
Tom Spezialy: It peed on him.
Freddy Rodriguez: Oh, yeah, it did. At one point in the night, it just…I didn’t enjoy the experience…it started peeing on me. And I didn’t know what it was. I just thought it was, like, spraying me with some sort of poison or…I wasn’t sure what it was, but it was urine.
Eric Close: Are you sure it was urine?
Freddy Rodriguez: Yeah, it was urine. Gave me golden sunshine, I guess.

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Dude, Where’s My Oscar? Bullz-Eye revisits recent Academy Award “mistakes”

Dude, Where's My Oscar?

There are times when we swear that “Entertainment Weekly” has either bugged our office or is tapping into our conference calls. Numerous pieces of ours wind up on their pages at almost the exact same time, be it a list of the best sequels, cinematic stoners, or our long-gestating piece on the Bullz-Eye Fantasy Band Draft, which will drop later this year. They’ve even named their hot/not meter “The Bullseye.” Hmmm.

And sure enough, they scooped us once again, when they put the top awards from various Academy Awards results to a new vote, to see how the current Academy would fix the previous generation’s “mistakes.” We’ve been throwing that idea around for over a year, and just when we begin to put pen to paper: boom! — they beat us to the punch. We’re not at all surprised that they saw the appeal in such a topic; every year there is at least one head-scratching moment, one that usually owes more to awarding a long-overdue actor for their overall body of work than for the performance at hand (ahem, Al Pacino, “Scent of a Woman”). Enter Bullz-Eye, Mighty Mouse-style, to save the day and make sure justice is served. We’ve examined recent Academy Award winners and their competitors, and we found a few, um, irregularities. Revisionist history begins now.

Oscar Snubs

Elaine Benes summed up our feelings for “The English Patient” as well as anyone. Actually, that’s a tad unfair; we didn’t think “Patient” was awful, just long and, in the end, anti-climactic. Without Juliette Binoche carrying her co-stars from start to finish (her Oscar, unlike this one, was well deserved), we wonder if “Patient” would have received half the praise that it did. Then there’s “Fargo,” which featured invaluable contributions from its leads, the supporting cast, and even the characters who were only in a scene or two (Marge Gunderson’s Japanese high school classmate had us in tears). It’s funny, shocking, coy, and best of all, normal, an expertly crafted movie all the way around. Guess the Academy wasn’t quite ready for the Coen brothers yet.

Oscar Snubs

To be fair, this one isn’t a staff pick; it’s mine and mine alone. My colleague Jason Zingale loved “Crash,” as did most people. I, however, loathed it like no movie I’ve seen since “Shrek.” The manner in which people would instantly spew the most hateful, ignorant nonsense in scene after scene was just unbearable, and I wanted to throttle Sandra Bullock’s ridiculously underwritten shrew of a character. Granted, “Brokeback Mountain” is not a perfect movie by any stretch, but I’ll take it over “Crash” any day of the week and twice on Sunday for the sheer fact that it didn’t try to beat me into a coma about what a racist pig I am. Fuck you, Paul Haggis.

Click here to read the rest of Dude, Where’s My Oscar? Bullz-Eye revisits recent Academy Award “mistakes”

William H. Macy is a stand-up guy

You can tell from the resignation in his eyes that poor Mr. Macy would rather shove his arm into a woodchipper than have this photo taken with D-list actress and notoriously off-key singer Bai Ling…and yet, he does the polite thing, and smiles somewhat convincingly:

Here’s Go Fug Yourself’s hilarious transcription of what each person in this picture is thinking:

WILLIAM H MACY: Save me. Someone save me.

BAI LING: I am soooooo comfortable here with William H Macy. I feel so safe. I feel so in love. I feel like I am wrapped in a giant ball of safe love. Love safe. Sove! Lafe!

WILLIAM H MACY: I fear I am about to start laughing inappropriately. The way you do at a funeral. Who wears a bikini top with a matching skirt, anyway? Although this isn’t bikini material. I don’t think. I don’t know. Felicity always wears a sensible one-piece…dress or swim suit, come to think of it. Oh my god, is she touching my butt?

BAI LING: Bai Ling Macy. Mr and Mrs William H Ling-Macy. Bai and Bill Macy-Ling. Ooh! Ooh! Personality Number Nine will LOVE being Bai Macy-Ling. That sounds like a new cut of panties!

WILLIAM H MACY: Felicity. I am so sorry. This means nothing. This crazy woman just attacked me. What was I supposed to do? I’m scared of her. She’s preternaturally strong.

Will William be rescued? Click here to read the rest of the exchange.

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