Year: 2000

Erin Brockovich (review)

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If last Saturday night’s sneak-preview audience is any guide, this could be Julia Roberts’s biggest movie yet. Everything she did onscreen, everything she said either elicited ardent routs of laughter or sent what could only be called worshipful undulations rippling through the crowd. The thrall in which Roberts held these people frightened me. I’m sure execs at Universal Pictures are already peeing in their collective pants with anticipation over this weekend’s box office. Biggest opening ever for a March weekend — you read it here first.

Dolphins (review)

My impression that there is more than mere animal intelligence behind the keen eyes of a dolphin is strengthened by a new IMAX documentary called, appropriately enough, Dolphins. IMAX films have tended to be spectacles, however entertaining: Look how big! how high! how fast! Dolphins, while undoubtedly spectacular, achieves more depth with its exploration of the underwater world of these majestic aquatic mammals and how their interactions with humans have affected them — and how they affect us.

Mission to Mars (review)

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So how else can I react to Mission to Mars but with enthusiasm? Here is a mostly scientifically accurate movie about the planet that actually looks as if it were filmed there. No, it’s not a perfect film — but as one of the like-minded friends with whom I saw Mission to Mars pointed out, we’re so hungry for real science fiction on film that we can forgive its flaws.

Apollo 13 (review)

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Despite the fact that we all know how the story ends, director Ron Howard manages to make Apollo 13 not only riveting but suspenseful as well. Howard’s attention to detail goes above and beyond the call of duty.

Orphans (review)

The Scots have a dark, wry sense of humor, and perhaps only a Scottish filmmaker could have had both the audacity to attempt a black comedy about grief and the sensibility to pull it off. Best known as an actor for his award-winning performance in My Name Is Joe, Peter Mullan here he goes behind the camera in a wonderfully biting feature-film debut as writer/director. Orphans is as absurdly funny as it is heart-wrenchingly painful, and contains, in a story of apparently modest scope, some of the most poignantly real as well as some of the most bemusingly dreamy moments I think I’ve ever seen on film.

Reindeer Games (review)

And then I’m mad again. How does a waste of celluloid like Reindeer Games ever get greenlighted in the first place? Who on Earth anointed Ehren Kruger Hot Young Screenwriter? Did anyone actually read this script before shooting began, or not till after the point at which there was too much dough already invested to just write it off as a loss?

Go (review)

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So, Go’s three interconnected tales follow a diverse group of Los Angeles twentysomethings as their lives bang up against one another in a scenario that’s the 90s in a nutshell, from the Xer point of view: sex and danger that’s both exciting and terrifying (the clever script uses the word ‘go’ both in the imperative, let’s-get-out-of-here sense and also in the imperative, orgasmic sense, as a synonym for ‘come’). And is if to demonstrate typical Xer cynicism, it all happens while holly jolly Christmas passes by practically unnoticed in the background.

Mifune (review)

I knew nothing about Dogma when I saw Mifune, the latest film to earn the seal of approval from the Danish Dogma Collective. Which is probably for the best, because otherwise I’d have ended up paying too much attention to its technical aspects, and I’d have missed what turned out to be a damned entertaining movie.

Judy Berlin (review)

I’m guessing that Judy Berlin is at least a semi-autobiographical endeavor for writer/director Eric Mendelsohn, because David’s stipulations for his film also describes Mendelsohn’s: nothing sarcastic, and no plot. It is oddly captivating, though, if not in an entirely satisfying way. Like an American foreign film — or a Woody Allen film without the whining — Judy Berlin is a wandering meditation on death, lost dreams, and the boring realness of reality that never quite goes anywhere.

Not of This World (review)

Anyone close to a child — even one not your own — knows how suddenly and dramatically children can change your outlook on life. One tiny, lost newborn is all it takes to rattle the mundane complacency of the intriguingly disparate characters in Giuseppe Piccioni’s Not of This World.