Month: April 2002

The question was raised round this time last year: Would Memento have been as interesting run forward? As here’s the answer, kinda, in The Salton Sea, a stylishly brutal tale of revenge, trumpets, and exploding meth labs. Val Kilmer is a burnt-out speed freak who snitches to the cops. No, wait, he’s a grief-stricken musician … more…

I’ve vowed not to review any more gross-out comedies, and now it’s probably time to declare a moratorium on reviewing Aliens thrillers. I mean, if you drop the line “I say we take off and nuke the site from space — it’s the only way to be sure” into your everyday conversations, then you’ve memorized … more…

In 1999, documentarian Chris Smith brought us the triumphantly pathetic American Movie, about one man’s quest to make a low-budget horror film. Now, he gives us Home Movie, in which he uses that same cockeyed but sympathetic lens to introduce us to more true American originals: kooky but engaging people who live in weirdly fascinating … more…

The Scorpion King is like an enormous Rob Tapert production (he of Xena and Hercules fame), a big-budget syndicated series shot in New Zealand set in a make-believe fantasy past where everybody has nice teeth and speaks with modern accents. All that’s missing is Bruce Campbell.

Ben Chaplin stars with that other tabula rasa, Sandra Bullock, in what is perhaps the dullest and least interesting movie about death ever made, Murder by Numbers. If they’d called it Movie by Numbers, they wouldn’t have been far off. Maybe that’s low and obvious, but they walked right into it.

World Traveler doesn’t get off to a promising start, not to the moviegoer tired of tales of self-involved yuppie men working through their unearned midlife crises by running away from their comfortable lives. I really thought I’d had enough of movie-men, whiny in that annoyingly undemonstrative way, running off from dream jobs and beautiful wives … more…

If there’s one thing that director Clare Peploe’s adaptation of Pierre Marivaux’s 18th-century play proves, it’s that some things should stay buried in the past, where they belong. That’s not quite fair, perhaps — maybe Marivaux is fine in French, and maybe properly staged it’s a treat. Here, it comes off like a bad imitation … more…

Are you a man, a monkey, or a mouse? Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, the brilliant lunatic who conceived Being John Malkovich, now gives us an equally bizarre, startling, and hilarious exploration of what it means to be human. At the one extreme of the human experience is anally mannered researcher Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins: Antitrust); at … more…

Golden Age movie mogul Thomas Ince, 42, died in his home on November 19, 1924, from heart failure. Or was he shot to death during a weekend yachting party hosted by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst? This snippet of Roaring 20s snarkiness favors the latter explanation for one of early Hollywood’s great mysteries, and speculates … more…

It’s a rare thing that I’m not cynical enough. While my shriveled optimism lobe was thinking its optimistic little thoughts, the rest of my head was telling me that ‘without the sugar’ would translate into ‘mean-spirited.’ And still I was completely unprepared for the level of degradation I would be exposed to. Sewer rats could watch this movie and be so skeeved out that they’d need a shower.