Month: June 2002

Oh yeah, it’s that good, in that shivery, transporting way that makes you wonder how flickering images viewed in the dark can be so damn powerful. In that way that, when it’s over, you’re dying to rehash every moment with your movie buddies, only you’re all too stunned to do anything but drop your jaws in amazement.

Just when I thought that Disney had passed the torch of traditional animation over to DreamWorks, along comes ‘Lilo & Stitch,’ in which they grab it back with a vengeance. This is an astonishingly lovely, tremendously moving, outrageously funny film, with a beauty that arises from a meeting of the past and the future, combining diverse elements in a way that should feel cheap and gimmicky but doesn’t. It’s just about glorious, actually, in its wonderful originality, widely emotionally engulfing like no Disney film has been since ‘The Lion King.’

Oh, this is the kind of movie during which you want to bang your head on the seat in front of you, at its cluelessness, at its idiocy, at its utterly misplaced earnestness. Why on Earth would a male screenwriter, a male director, and a male star believe that slapping a pair of boobs on themselves gives them miraculous insight into what it means to be a woman?

Dear God, but when Matthew Lillard — who has the highest Skeeve Quotient ever recorded — is the best thing in a movie, you know you’re in deep doo-doo. Deep Scooby-Doo-Doo, actually. Lillard (Thirteen Ghosts) at least believes in his character, however unlikely he is: Shaggy’s best friend is a talking dog, an unconvincing CGI … more…

Recent revelations about the secret goings-on in the Catholic Church tell us that altar boys’ lives were a lot more dangerous in the 1970s than this coming-of-age dramedy lets on. But that doesn’t diminish its startling power one whit. Restless high-schoolers Tim Sullivan (Kieran Culkin: The Cider House Rules) and Francis Doyle (Emile Hirsch) strain … more…

Okay, sure, Affleck’s Jack Ryan saves the world from nuclear war while Damon’s Jason Bourne only saves his own ass, but still: He’s onscreen with things blowing up, and Affleck doesn’t get to stab a guy in the arm. So there.

Why are most fantasy movies set in a pseudo-medieval world of dragons and knights and Euro-pagan magic? Because that’s the ethnic demographic of your average Hollywood filmmaker — even in fantasy, we turn to what we know. But as the pool of filmmakers grows — and digital equipment brings down the cost of producing a … more…

Current events lend this an urgent intensity it probably was not intended to evince. What last summer would have been merely a damned entertaining, high-class popcorn flick (like Clancy/Ryan predecessor ‘The Hunt for Red October’), its studious demeanor imbuing it with cautionary overtones, now plays disturbingly like CNN Breaking News. It is absolutely must-see.

I can’t help but imagine that this paean to codependency and manic depression was written by Melvin Udall… you know, Jack Nicholson’s misogynistic novelist in ‘As Good as It Gets.’ When asked how he creates his women characters, he replies: ‘I think about a man, and then I remove reason and accountability.’

If you’d ever hoped to hear Patrick Stewart snarl “Get off ma land!” in a Texas drawl, then here’s your chance. Yup, the go-to man for Dickens, for the Bard, for your 11th-grade English lit classics, sports a Kenny Rogers beard and drunkenly shoots off rifles in this made-for-TV production from TNT (which, along with … more…