Get your 'Spring Breakers' DVDs July 9, y'all

Get your 'Spring Breakers' DVDs on July 9, y'all

This is the bleepin' Tampa Bay dream, ya'll! All this news coming out about Spring Breakers, that movie that was filmed here, so much cool (bleep) that it makes you start typing like James Franco talks in the movie, all strange and (bleep) like his drugged-up character Alien, whose real name is Al but, truth be told, he's not from this planet. Anyway, Spring Breakers drops July 9 on Blu-ray and DVD, with all kinds of extras including deleted scenes, outtakes and behind-the-scenes (bleep). Now everyone can brag: "I got Spring Breakers. On repeat! Spring Breakers ON REPEAT! Constant, ya'll," like Alien does Scarface. To prepare for this digital slice of heaven, check out Twitter for @aliengatsby, hilariously moshing dialogue from Spring Breakers and The Great Gatsby like bikinis and big booties, ya'll. Mix it up with your Calvin Klein Escape and Calvin Klein Be and smell nice. — Steve Persall, Times movie critic...

Review: 'Man of Steel' revitalizes the Superman legend

At first blush Man of Steel is everything about Superman we've seen in movies before: the infant Kal-El's exodus to Earth from Krypton, his Midwest maturation as Clark Kent, his settling into his role as world protector from arch-villains. Marlon Brando always played his dad.

Man of Steel does things differently, with director Zack Snyder retelling the myth with intimately hand-held cameras and deep-meaning conflicts. Russell Crowe steps in as the father. Superman becomes something of an art house action hero, embodied by the appropriately dimpled and chiseled Henry Cavill. This is not your father's Superman, but he could be your mom's....

'Man of Steel:' Superman, the savior?

Rising from the dead — 2006's dull reboot — like someone else we know, Superman returns as mankind's savior in Man of Steel.

Comparisons to Jesus may be sacrilegious but are unavoidable in the movie's moments of comic book deification, when crucifix poses are struck, other cheeks are turned and something like Tebowing precedes taking off in flight. There's a church scene with a stained-glass messiah peeking over Superman's shoulder, faith established in disbelievers and the superhero having two fathers, one who art in the heavens. ...

Review: Hawke, Delpy all talked out in 'Before Midnight'

Before Midnight (R) (108 min.) — Eighteen years have passed since Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, an indie romance that became an art house hit through the courage of its own pretensions. It was a chance encounter in Vienna between two young, loquacious strangers on a train, an American tourist named Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and a French student named Celine (Julie Delpy), made for each other with only one night to realize it. Personally, I wasn't impressed....

Review: 'Stories We Tell' chases family secrets

Stories We Tell (PG-13) (108 min.) — Sarah Polley is an accomplished actor and filmmaker who grew up in Toronto with a stage-struck, free-spirited mother and a father whose involvement is explained in this achingly candid documentary. Stories We Tell is an expression of emotions roiled regularly on daytime scandal TV shows although with much less composure and intelligence.

Polley directed Away From Her and Take This Waltz, movies about women finding comfort with men other than their husbands, and who couldn't be faulted for doing that. Her documentary suggests those characters were closer to Polley's experiences than anyone should expect, poignantly underlined through the writings and voice of an unlikely narrator, her father Michael....

Review: 'This is the End' an outrageous way to go out

This Is the End proves what we've always suspected: Seth Rogen is down with playing the same guy in movies each time, James Franco has a creepy man crush on him, Jonah Hill is Rosemary's baby all grown up and Danny McBride is a cannibal. Oh, yeah, and Michael Cera's sweet face masks a raging coke head sex addict who'd slap Rihanna's butt and dig the smack back.

Funny how everyone's true colors come out at Armageddon. Seriously, it's funny even if these show biz character assassinations aren't true. This Is the End isn't a documentary, thank god, or else we'd all be beamed to heaven or dunked in hell by now. It really isn't much of a movie in the traditional sense; even Harold & Kumar's similar adventures are more artistically tied together....

Review: 'The Internship' gets the job done

Another title for The Internship would be Google Crashers except that makes Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson sound like hackers.

"You mean, like, serial killers, like Freddy Krueger hacking up babysitters during summer camp?" they'd ask, mixing meanings and metaphors until logic is wadded and tossed, and protests that a point is being missed get drowned out by more distracting double talk. That's their motor-mouthed style — '80s Bill Murray times two — and eight years after Wedding Crashers it still works....

Tampa Theatre named No. 3 in the world

Come on, Motion Picture Association of America. Tell us something we don't know. The MPAA's news site TheCredits.org named historic Tampa Theatre one of the 10 best movie venues in the world, one of only two U.S. theaters on the list. The 86-year-old movie palace is ranked third behind the top-ranked State Theater in Traverse City, Mich. — restored by Oscar winner Michael Moore — and Cine 32 in Auch, France. Other countries with ranked theaters include South Korea, Australia, India, Greece, Thailand and Spain. MPAA reporter Bill Keith singled out Tampa Theatre's "overly ornate Mediterranean courtyard literally (setting) the stage" and preshow performances on the Mighty Wurlitzer Organ. — Steve Persall, Times movie critic...

Review: 'Now You See Me' has the magic touch

A common ploy for illusionists is a card force, using sleight of hand to ensure the mark will choose a particular playing card from the deck. Then shuffle, distract, do whatever you want but a successfully forced card can, as ads for magic kits promise, amaze and astonish your friends.

I've been fooled by forced cards plenty of times but never when the trick was performed by a movie. That is, until the opening minutes of Now You See Me, when the card I silently picked from a full deck offered by Jesse Eisenberg's character was the right one for his illusion to succeed....

Review: 'After Earth' crashes and burns

By Steve Persall

Times Movie Critic

The twist to M. Night Shyamalan's After Earth is that there is no twist, unless you count every ounce of personality being drained from Will Smith and most from his usually charismatic son Jaden. That's more surprising than The Sixth Sense's late fake-out that made Shyamalan's career and each one since that ruined it.

By comparison, After Earth is spoiler-proof since nothing happens that isn't telegraphed in the first 20 minutes. It's elemental science fiction that truth would be stranger than, lacking any sense of allegory or wonder separating wheat from chaff within the genre....

Review: 'Frances Ha' is a rom-com — with BFFs

Frances Ha (R) (86 min.) — "I like things that look like mistakes," says the hipster hero of Noah Baumbach's movie, rationalizing another example of how together she isn't. Frances Halladay, played with chronic whimsy by Greta Gerwig, sees herself in a much better place in the world than she is. Frances is a proud underachiever whose delusions of a grander life would be pathetic if she weren't so adorably modish....

Greta Gerwig is the voice of the modern everywoman

Of course Greta Gerwig and Lena Dunham are BFFs. Why wouldn't the two clarion voices of their generation's gender be a duet? • Gerwig is the co-writer and star of Frances Ha, playing a charming, 20-something underachiever who'd fit easily with Dunham's Girls on HBO. Each of them and the characters they portray are vital to the zeitgeist, models of new roles for women in reality and art imitating it. • Yet Gerwig, 29, and Dunham, 27, are reluctant revolutionaries, not necessarily taking the lead — there are other drum majors sharing the baton — but hoping people keep falling in step behind....

Rascals are groovin' again on reunion tour

The Rascals' Once Upon a Dream tour isn't just a rock and roll reunion concert; it's the resurrection of a legacy long considered dead and buried.

For five rollicking years in the late 1960s the Rascals — first Young then not — were America's most prolific, successful rock band. Seven albums yielded nine certified Billboard hits, with Good Lovin', Groovin' and People Got to Be Free reaching No. 1 and defining the decade....

Rascals concert and Broadway show comes to Ruth Eckerd

On a summer night at a roller rink in 1966, two teenage Jersey boys bought $2.50 tickets to their destinies. • One was named Bruce. The other was called Stevie, seeing his first big-name concert. The band that night was then named the Young Rascals, riding their No. 1 hit, Good Lovin'. • Decades later, Bruce Springsteen and Steven Van Zandt covered Good Lovin' in a concert of their own. • "If you listen to the music closely you can trace the E Street Band, especially on this tour, straight back to the Rascals," Van Zandt, 62, said by telephone from a recent stop in Denmark. "It's a very, very direct line."...

Was that really Ben Affleck in Ybor City?

Was Academy Award winner Ben Affleck browsing Ybor City on Wednesday? Could be. Facebook and Twitter lit up with reported sightings of Matt Damon's friend, one in the Don Vicente de Ybor Historic Inn. It is plausible. Affleck is set to direct and star in Live by Night, based on Dennis Lehane's crime novel, largely set in Tampa and Ybor. Plus, both Lehane and Tampa's interim film liaison Krista Soroka recently sent Affleck photos of locations, including the Don Vicente, in efforts to entice him to film locally. The problem is that the state has used up all its tax incentive money for movie shoots, which means there's some question whether the production will come to town in the fall, when shooting is expected to start. You'd think a Hollywood star like Affleck could get the same state budget break as Winter the dolphin to make a movie....