By Rex Reed 10/23/12 7:46pm

movies

Jim Broadbent and Hanks in Cloud Atlas. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Atlas, Drugged: This Colossal Misuse of Cast, Crew and Cash Unceremoniously Collapses in on Itself

Almost three hours long, a lugubrious sludge of mud soup called Cloud Atlas deserves a limp nod for pure guts, I suppose, but what I’d really like to do is burn it. Based on a genre-switching, era-hopping, style-abusing, tempo-thumping novel by David Mitchell that everyone has always labeled “unfilmable,” the labyrinthine, ridiculously bloated—$100-million, anybody?—head-scratcher of a movie is the mess that proves it.

Coming at us in sections like an exploding garbage truck, this adaptation is a single film that weaves an incomprehensible literary gumbo of unrelated stories in multiple time frames over a span of 500 years. Whew! Read More

By Steve Huff 2/10/12 1:28am

Celebrity Stalkers

Madonna (Getty Images)

Madonna Stalker Robert Dewey Hoskins Escapes Mental Hospital; Has Threatened Halle Berry

Robert Dewey Hoskins, the 54-year-old drifter convicted of stalking Madonna in the late 1990s, is on the loose again in Southern California. Hoskins has also made threats against Oscar-winning actress Halle Berry, prompting Ms. Berry to consider moving overseas.

In 1996 Hoskins was jailed for 10 years after climbing a wall surrounding Madonna’s home in the Hollywood Hills and threatening to cut her throat. Hoskins was shot twice after confronting a security guard on the premises.

Hoskins has been in and out of mental institutions since he was released from prison. In spite of being described as “highly psychotic with violent tendencies” if unmedicated, he was able to simply walk away from a facility in Norwalk, CA a week ago. Read More