Month: March 2002

Is Rachel Griffiths a plain woman whose talent fools us into thinking she’s beautiful, or a beautiful woman so talented she’s not afraid of looking plain? Either way, Griffiths (The Rookie) secures her place as a goddess with this slice of bittersweet British tweeness from filmmaker Sara Sugarman. Annie Mary Pugh is the diametric opposite … more…

They’re the richest, the whitest, the most powerful men in the world, and once a year they gather at Zambesi Glen in Northern California to cut loose and plan their continued domination of the planet. Inspired by the exclusive men’s retreat Bohemian Grove, where Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger have frolicked, writer/director Harry Shearer (EDtv) … more…

But if you’ve been moved by that religious experience of seeing the diamond, if you damn near cry when the national anthem gets played over a tinny loudspeaker at a Little League game, if a beat-up glove gets you all choked up, then you must bring a whole damn box of Kleenex with you to the theater. Even men can cry over this one, cuz it’s about sports.

So you’re channel surfing in the middle of the night and you come across — probably on Encore or Starz! or some other channel that tries to create excitement with an exclamation point — you come across car crashes and stuff blowing up and guns, guns, guns, and reluctant-buddy cops who snipe at each other constantly (one of whom declares that he’s getting too old for this shit, the other one who takes nothing seriously) and you think to yourself: Huh. I didn’t know DeNiro made a lethal-weapon movie. This has gotta be ten years old — how did I miss this?

The computer animation may be lovely — hair is soft and realistic, fire is gorgeous — but that can’t make up for a humdrum script that steamrollers the audience with an overly sentimental story we’ve seen too many times before. As glaciers advance, a woolly mammoth, a sloth, and a sabretooth tiger team up to … more…

When her husband, Newsweek photojournalist Harrison Lloyd (David Strathairn: Simon Birch), goes missing on assignment in the Balkans, fellow Newsweeker Sarah (Andie MacDowell: Town and Country), goes in search of him. Set in 1991 amidst the beginnings of civil war in Yugoslavia, this is a brutal film, in every right way: an antidote to the … more…

And it’s based on a video game. Which narrows the audience down to teenaged boys (of all ages) who are simultaneously terrified of and drawn to caricatures of strong women. Which is basically the audience Hollywood shoots for in general anyway, so it should be looking at a hit here.