Month: August 1999

Very Bad Things is an ugly film about ugly people doing ugly things, and I am ashamed to admit that I actually kinda liked it. My own sense of humor is fairly mordant, but this is still the blackest black comedy I’ve ever found reason to chuckle at.

To this day, the names epitomize the he-said/she-said nature of sexual harassment. But as Strange Justice shows, the truth of the matter was not so up in the air. The truth, in fact, was an ignored casualty in an all-out, inside-the-Beltway, public relations war.

Martin Scorsese may have moved on (his next film, Bringing Out the Dead, sounds like ER meets that spooky kid who sees dead people in The Sixth Sense), but great Mob drama is still alive on TV — see HBO’s excellent The Sopranos — and most of the comedies are duds. The Mafia’s movie image is ripe for parody, as Analyze This demonstrated so ably, but as Mickey Blue Eyes and Mafia! show, Mob comedies are usually more hit than miss.

Shiloh — based on Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Newbery Medal-winning book and directed by Dale Rosenbloom — is the kind of children’s movie you will not find many examples of today. It does not pander to kids’ baser instincts — a predilection for toilet humor, for instance — in order to keep kids glued to the screen with cheap, juvenile jokes. Instead, kids will be enthralled by Shiloh because it dares to explore issues that parents often fail to talk about with their children.

I get a kick out of Kenneth Branagh’s American accent. I don’t know why — probably the fact that it’s just so darn good is part of the reason. So I amused myself by listening to it for a few minutes as Celebrity opened… until I realized that Branagh was doing Woody Allen.

Well, no. Wesley Snipes isn’t quite the actor Orson Welles was. And Stephen Norrington isn’t quite the director Welles was. Blade is ludicrous plotted and full of silly, self-important characters spouting inane dialogue. Still, I found it strangely, if only momentarily, diverting.