FiftyDeadMenWalking Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Here's a quick look at what's opening in limited release this weekend. If they're not playing where you live, keep an eye out as they make the rounds. And if all else fails, there's always DVD....

The Marc Pease Experience (pictured) is a comedy, allegedly, about a former high school musical star trying to recapture his glory, several years later, by teaming up with his old director, who still teaches at the school and is sleeping with one of his female students. Jason Schwartzman, Ben Stiller, and Anna Kendrick star -- and so far every review is negative. (Cinematical's Will Goss has a review on the way, and he tells me it will be no exception.) Playing on about a dozen screens, not in New York or L.A. but Chicago, Seattle, Denver, Tampa, Phoenix, Philadelphia, etc.

Casi Divas comes to us from Mexico and is a quasi-satire about four young women competing to star in a film adaptation of a popular TV soap opera. The indication from the lukewarm reviews is that Hispanic audiences with some connection to the stereotypical Latina characters on display might find it funny, but it won't have much crossover appeal. Playing on a couple dozen screens in New York, Southern California, and South Florida.

Shutter Island
Martin Scorsese's latest thriller looks downright spectacular. The film is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane and Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a U.S. Marshall searching for an escaped mental patient on an island off the coast of Massachusetts. DiCaprio's character comes up against a dark conspiracy and he is haunted by the memory of his late wife who is played by Michelle Williams. And yes that's Jackie Earl Haley as one of the inmates (he plays crazy REALLY well). Watch for this one on October 2.

Old Dogs
OK, the bit where Seth Green is singing "I'm All Out of Love" to the gorilla is pretty funny, and the penguin attack got me to laugh but the plot seems ridiculously simplistic. Robin Williams plays a man whose former girlfriend returns after seven years to tell him that he has twin children. With the help of his buddy played by John Travolta, Williams's character must adapt to the idea of instant fatherhood at a relatively advanced age. Wackiness enuses. This is being billed as a family movie so much of the humor is aimed at kids. This one hits theaters on November 25.

I guess when you make a movie about the Irish Republican Army and Northern Ireland's infamous "Troubles," you're bound to court some controversy. Fifty Dead Men Walking, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival despite legal threats from the man whose life it's based on (he has since dropped his suit), has now drawn more fire because of comments made by one of its stars, Rose McGowan.

During an interview in Toronto last week, McGowan, who plays an IRA operative in the film and whose father is Irish, said: "I imagine, had I grown up in Belfast, I would 100 percent have been in the IRA.... My heart just broke for the cause. Violence is not to be played out daily and provide an answer to problems, but I understand it."

This has caused a bit of a hullabaloo in that part of the world, where the IRA was officially classified as a terrorist group. (Its proponents saw themselves more as freedom fighters, striving to throw off the shackles of British rule.) Martin McGartland, the British secret agent whose infiltration of the IRA is the basis of the film, said, "Rose McGowan's comments were insulting to victims of IRA terrorism and she should apologize. It's easy to say this sort of thing when you live in L.A." A victims' advocacy group leader said, "She may as well add that she would have joined al-Qaeda and flew those planes into the Twin Towers had she been born a disgruntled Muslim."