Posts Tagged ‘Michael Phillips’

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. The idea that Michael Sragow was hired as Orange County Register film critic at age 60, shortly after taking a Tribune Co. buyout from the Baltimore Sun, is the kind of surprise-happy ending that usually only happens in the movies.

Sragow this week is finally getting down to the business of picking up where he left off at the Sun, until reviews from Chicago Tribune colleague Michael Phillips began more recently taking budget-precedence. He’s also shared a wonderful introductory essay, revealing that Skyfall was his favorite movie of 2012 and that his all-time number one dates back to the Bond year of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service:

A great movie, like my all-time favorite, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, quickens my whole system…

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When it comes to Hollywood film awards season, print still matters.

Hoping to inject some momentum into the final balloting phase for the Oscars, which begins tomorrow and ends February 19, Columbia Pictures has turned a ton of PR cash into a poly-bagged extra for today’s editions of Daily Variety. You know it’s a major bit of marketing when it gets its own in-house blog item:

The 38-page, full-color bound booklet features a kudos roll call, critical praise and screenplay excerpts, as well as director Kathryn Bigelow‘s Los Angeles Times op-ed defending the film’s depiction of torture.

The final words on the back page are a quote from Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune: “A movie that will endure.”

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Here’s one of our favorite ways to use Rotten Tomatoes:

1) Click into the main page for a new movie;
2) Sort the amalgamated reviews by “Rotten” first;
3) Scroll and read what the “Top Critic”-rated journalists on the stink-side are saying.

Just about all of the Team Rotten reviewers admit that Breaking Dawn – Part 2 will greatly please the franchise’s hardcore fans. Still, critics in this group can’t help but also highlight some of the inherent problems:

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune:
“With so many scenes of well-dressed vampires sitting or standing, stiffly, while Taylor Lautner or Robert Pattinson or Kristen Stewart passes another micro-slab of dialogue like a kidney stone, Michael Sheen’s overacting’s greatly appreciated, thanks.”

Roger Ebert:
“The depiction of little Renesmee is rather curious… Her grandfather Charlie Swan (Billy Burke) observes, “My, how you’ve grown! You must be six inches taller!” And so she seems, although by my reckoning, it happened between Thanksgiving and Christmas. A human child like that, you take to see a specialist.”

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