Roustabout movie review
Elvis Presley takes a job as a roustabout at a carnival, gets slapped by a lot by girls with frighteningly waspish waists, and sings corny carny songs. In superbright Technicolor! Silly movie.
Month: May 2001
Pearl Harbor (review)
And now your Movietone newsreel! Dateline: Hollywood. The enemy continues his vicious and unprovoked attack on all that is right and good and decent in America with renewed vigor! As General Von Bruckheimer and Baynito Michaelini jointly launch an assault unprecedented in its force and duration, hundreds of horrified citizens are crushed in the panicked stampede to escape!
Out of the Present and The Dream Is Alive (review)
Krikalev’s story was like some weird little piece of metaphysical science fiction — the kind that’s always written by Russians and badly translated into English. How appropriately ironic is Krikalev? I thought, symbolic of an entire nation’s — an entire system of government’s — demise. I mean, the poor guy: He’s like the last kid waiting to be picked up after soccer practice, and Dad never shows up.
Moulin Rouge (review)
You’ve created a cinematic orgasm here, one that I couldn’t think you could keep ratcheting up… and then up goes the curtain, finally, on Spectacular Spectacular, the stage show Christian and his Bohemian friends create for Satine and the Moulin Rouge, and it’s simply dazzling. That word is too overused, because it doesn’t even come near to describing the way the vitality and verve of this film stunned and delighted me.
Shrek (review)
If there’s any truth to the saying that cynics are nothing but disappointed optimists, then Shrek is the very embodiment of it, its cheery and confident optimistic heart beating underneath a tough outer layer that’s grim and twisted, one that seems at first to have given up on fantasy.
The Princess Bride (review)
To avoid the first Classic Blunder, you should: A. Never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line; B. Never get involved in a land war in Asia; C. Never utter a line from The Princess Bride unless you want to be spouting quotes all day
A Knight’s Tale (review)
Prithee, dude, when thou dost compile thine list of the most offensive pig swill on yon silver screen for the Year of Our Lord 2001, forget not to includest A Knight’s Tale. Verily, mayhap it will ascend without hindrance to the very pinnacle of the accounting.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (review)
And they don’t come much geekier or more touchstony than 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail, not only damn near one of the funniest movies ever made but certainly one of the most quotable… at least for us endlessly self-referential types for whom all of life is but a never ceasing trail of opportunities to show off the ridiculous capability we have for retaining movie, computer, and science fiction trivia.
The Trumpet of the Swan (review)
It’s a good thing beloved children’s author E.B. White is dead, because this horrible adaptation of his work would have killed him. Director Richard Rich and screenwriter Judy Rothman Rofe have extracted all charm, grace, and delicate fantasy from White’s story of a mute trumpeter swan searching for his voice, and replaced it with cheesy … more…
Stargate (review)
What starts out as not the same-old, same-old sci-fi quickly degenerates into the same-old, same-old action-movie gunplay, and all the potentially interesting ideas the film introduces end up virtually unexplored.
