Month: September 2003

These kids today — I don’t understand them. I mean, when I was in high school, kids got picked on. There were weirdoes that no one wanted to hang out with, freaks that everyone made fun of. There was taunting and teasing and ostracizing galore. And surely there were just as many guns around in the 1980s, when I was in high school, as there are today, less than 20 years later. So what’s so different that kids are suddenly killing each other over things we shrugged off when I was a kid?

Well, what did you expect? Put together a team designed not to make a good film but to make for good reality-TV ratings, and this is what you get. *The Battle of Shaker Heights* is a neither-here-nor-there mess that plays like everybody involved was more interested in playing games of oneupsmanship — hey, she got better perqs than we did! — and acting like bigshot Hollywood players than in actually doing the job they were ostensibly hired to do.

Deliver us from filmmakers who think they’re auteurs, hacks who think they’re artistes. The DVD release of this never-ran 2001 film was surely timed to coincide with director Stephen Norrington’s would-be summer blockbuster, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but instead it only extends Norrington’s crash-and-burn. Rightly forgotten after a handful of festival screenings in 2001 … more…

Oh those wild wacky passionate kids of New York City’s High School for the Performing Arts! They’re enough to make you remember that there were actually good aspects to being a teenager, like the scary, wonderful process of finding out who you are and what you can be. Following a gang of wannabe actors and … more…

So this is what we’ve come to: bad *SNL* flicks about characters who never even appeared on *SNL.*

It’s nowhere near the revelation his Dances with Wolves was, but Kevin Costner’s thematic sequel to that groundbreaking revisionist Western again explores the closing of the American frontier and the ensuing culture clash. Butting heads here are a powerful rancher (Michael Gambon: Charlotte Gray) who’s claimed an enormous spread for himself — and has the … more…

There’s evil, and then there’s *Marci X.* I can’t even begin to imagine how twisted must be the alternate universe that spawned this debacle — but as a start, it’s gotta feature lots of evil-Spock goatees and people wearing daggers on their belts and Shakespeare’s great speeches turned all harsh and mean. Only way to explain this movie. Yes, it must have fallen into our spacetime continuum from elsewhere, a Bad Place where Hollywood executives knife each other in the back for a percentage. No, I mean literally.

You’d like to be able to laugh at that twist at the psychosexual subtext of these horror flicks — the Creeper suggestively licks, with a long, slithery, reptilian tongue, the window of the bus while he eyes one hunky football player inside; instead of punishing horny teens for fornicating, like his brothers in predation, the Creeper’s gonna get him some. You’d like to be able to laugh except that, in the most noteworthy twist, Victor Salva is a convicted child molester, and so the whole psychosexual subtext is far more jeepery creepy than it should be.