By Drew Grant 10/01/12 8:50am

Big Apple Idolatry

Lindsay Lohan, a victim, for once (Patrick McMullan)

Big Apple Idolatry: Lindsay Lohan Gets Choked Out by Stalker, Justin Bieber Pukes on Stage

- This weekend’s big story was Lindsay Lohan’s stalker (or just a guy she was partying with at Double Seven), who allegedly followed her up to her hotel room at the W after they got into a fight about cell phone photos. She escaped him, but then came back to the room so he could physically assault her; it’s hard to pick the most batshit part of this whole ordeal. It’s a toss-up between the part where the guy was a congressional staffer who has posed for photos with Paul Ryan, and the part where someone let Lindsay Lohan run around a hotel unsupervised.

- Justin Bieber puke-sang his way through a recent concert, and then followed it up with an Anchorman tweet about how “Milk was a bad choice.” Read More

By Rex Reed 7/24/12 4:57pm

movies

Kazan and Dano in Ruby Sparks.

Just My Imagination: Ruby Sparks Would Be One Hell of a Girl If She Were Real, But Kazan’s Rough Draft Falls Flat

If you’re an actor looking for work, it helps to have a girlfriend who is a writer. So Paul Dano, whose dour, limburger face is matched only by a charisma that is the screen equivalent of road kill, is a lucky fellow. His roommate and offscreen squeeze, Zoe Kazan, has provided them both with the screenplay to Ruby Sparks, an engaging if lightweight romcom directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the team that hit pay dirt with Little Miss Sunshine. This one passes the time pleasantly enough, but history isn’t likely to repeat itself. The script is breezy, but neither of the two leads have the heft or charm to carry an entire feature-length film—separately or together. I kept wondering, while glancing at my watch, what it would have been like with Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried, or James Wolk and anybody.

The morose Mr. Dano plays Calvin Weir-Fields, a shy novelist in horn-rimmed glasses who wrote a best-seller at 19 but now suffers painfully from writer’s block. Well, naturally; it’s ten years later, and he doesn’t even own a computer. So emotionally underdeveloped that his shrink (welcome back, Elliot Gould) gives him a fuzzy stuffed toy to cuddle with on the couch while he’s being analyzed, Calvin is awkward, socially inept and unable to get laid. So along comes a girl he calls Ruby Sparks, who falls in love with him faster than he can speed-dial his own cell phone. There’s just one snag. She exists only in his imagination. Read More

By Rex Reed 2/29/12 9:31am

movies

Dano's off-screen stare was as sour as his on-screen presence.

Grim Like Flynn: Another Bullshit Night in [Pickled-Faced Paul Dano's] City

Paul Weitz is a writer-director (About a Boy) with talent and imagination. I can’t imagine what lured him to Being Flynn, a depressing and downbeat rendering of a book called Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, the offbeat, commercially challenging 2004 memoir by writer Nick Flynn about his fractured relationship with his creepy father, Jonathan, a failed writer himself, but mostly a Bowery bum and bona fide loser, played by Robert De Niro. Too small and dark to appeal to a large audience, it’s not a movie to cherish. Read More

By Rex Reed 7/26/11 7:13pm

movies

Ford and Craig.

Cowboys & Aliens Plays High Camp at High Noon

Cowboys & Aliens is one of the silliest movies ever made, but so many otherwise serious people have attached their names to it that, as Arthur Miller wrote in Death of a Salesman, attention must be paid. Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard are among the tangle of producers whose credits stretch from here to the Read More

By Nate Freeman 6/14/11 7:54pm

Nightlife

Paul Dano, Zoe Kazan, Carey Mulligan

The Wee Hours: Carey and Zoe and S&M

THE SUN HAD NOT GONE DOWN outside the Gramercy Park Hotel when Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan started talking about their leather.

“It’s the fucking leather,” Ms. Mulligan said, touching Ms. Kazan’s slit-laden Valentino dress.

Ms. Kazan made a deep purring noise and knocked her pointed heels at the ground.

“You’ve never done that,” said Read More

By Rex Reed 7/28/10 1:50am

We Certainly Don’t Need an Extra Man

The Extra Man is a hapless fiasco about Louis Ives, a nerdy Princeton meathead with a penchant for wearing women’s lingerie who travels to Manhattan looking for adventure, answers a roommate-wanted ad, and moves into a rabbit warren decorated with Christmas tree ornaments occupied by Harry Harrison, a fading gigolo and a penniless, Read More

By Irina Aleksander 7/21/10 1:10am

The Shindigger

Jonathan Ames Is Confused

On Monday night, the New York premiere of The Extra Man began with a man standing in front of the audience and letting out a rolling, throaty yodel that sounded like a cross between a sea otter and an exotic bird. 

This happened shortly after Shari Springer Berman, the co-director of the Read More

By Rex Reed 4/27/10 7:58pm

The Odd Couple

The Good Heart is a bizarre, idiosyncratic co-production from Denmark, Germany, France and Iceland, with all the torpor such a combination suggests. The great character actor Brian Cox plays Jacques, a cranky, mean-spirited New York bartender with a mouth as foul as week-old garbage. Alcohol and chain-smoking have wreaked havoc on his health, but in Read More