Month: January 2003

You can tell that *Final Destination* is a fantasy, because it starts out at the airport — at John F. Kennedy International Airport, actually — and we see a flight actually get into the air 30 seconds after the plane pulls back from the jetway and the captain tells the flight attendants to ‘prepare for departure.’ It’s rainy night at one of the world’s busiest airports, but there’s no waiting in line on the tarmac, listening to the captain tell you that ‘we’re about twelfth in line for takeoff and expect to be in the air in about fifteen minutes’; there’s no need to return to the gate to refuel when fifteen minutes turns into an hour. Just whoosh: and we’re on our way.

If pedophile priests and the whole condoms-are-evil thing don’t have you shaking your head in despair at the Catholic Church and its insistence that it holds a moral high ground, then here’s some retroactive fodder for you: The Vatican knew about the extermination of Jews by the Nazi regime during World War II and did nothing to try to stop it. That’s not exactly a newsflash, but the Church’s complicity-by-inaction in the Holocaust hasn’t been depicted on film as it is in Costa-Garvas’ *Amen.* In a clear, unsentimental voice, this thoughtful film turns an infuriating and frustrating predicament into a thriller of the conscience.

Theoretically, the idea of a supernatural being sneaking into a child’s bedroom and paying cash money for a body part should be creepy… but since when does the Tooth Fairy inspire terror? Guess what? She still doesn’t. Jonathan Liebesman’s laughable and cheap-looking would-be thriller pits Kyle Walsh (Chaney Kley: Legally Blonde) and Caitlin Greene (Emma … more…

This little history lesson, as depicted in Phillip Noyce’s poignant *Rabbit-Proof Fence,* is likely something of a newsflash for most American audiences, illuminating a heretofore unknown shame of our friends Down Under. But it can hardly come as a surprise — instead, it’s with a kind of deep and embarrassed resignation that we have to acknowledge yet another horror wrought by European colonialism and cultural imperialism.

Are there three more terrifying words in the English language than “Jerry Bruckheimer Presents”?* (I know, you’re thinking, “What about ‘A Michael Bay Film'”? But that’s four words.) We people who care about film — and by this I mean “we people who don’t enjoy clawing our eyes out in an effort to retain our sanity while we watch a film” — joke a lot about each successive entry in Bruckheimer’s oeuvre being a sign of the apocalypse. But this time it could really be true.

Women live lives of quiet desperation, forever in the thrall of their obeisance to the men and children who depend upon their tender loving care. At least they do in the stately, elegant, slightly too precise films of late December, when Academy members start paying attention to the product of their industry and the critics’ groups start passing out their awards candy. Beautifully produced, impeccably acted films about women quietly enduring the fate of their gender or quietly succumbing to it do very well in this arena, an unconsciously guilty reaction, perhaps, to its smothering of more puissant female voices.

Just dreadful. Ashton Kutcher and Brittany Murphy (8 Mile), without a lick of chemistry and nary a brain cell between them, are two idiots abroad in Europe on what’s supposed to be the perfect honeymoon, the perfect capper to their perfect romance. But though they lived together for nine months before the wedding, they don’t … more…

The tale of a drug dealer’s last night of freedom before a long stretch in prison is not the kind of tale one expects to be so heart-stoppingly distressing, so emotionally devastating as Spike Lee’s *25th Hour* is. But it’s impossible not to like Montgomery Brogan, who is affable and charming even if he is the scum of the earth, and so his sorry story becomes an ode in a minor key to the lost opportunities and missed chances of us all, the ones for which we have only ourselves to blame.