Year: 2003

See, the first thing I’d do if I was God for a week would be to cast ‘director’ Tom Shadyac into a nice, deep, despairing pit of hell, where there’s nothing to do but watch *Dragonfly* and *Patch Adams* over and over. I know: then I’d be like, oh, everyone onscreen in *Bruce Almighty,* with a lazy selfishness and a desire to dodge reality substituting for spirituality. But clearly, Shadyac must be stopped. This is only his latest in a long line of offenses to the human race.

Twentysomething Ágúst (Hilmir Snaer Gudnason) escaped the remote Icelandic village of his birth — he now lives in Paris, writes songs, and woos Frenchwomen — but it seems he can’t escape the legacy of his father, Thódur Haraldsson (Gunnar Eyjolfsson), the local fishing magnate. Thódur has called his far-flung children home to discuss the future … more…

What is it about the human psyche that never allows us to be happy with our lives, that keeps us constantly reassessing the choices we’ve made and envying those who took other roads? There’s probably no real answer to that, but here director Patrice Leconte and writer Claude Klotz offer a piquant and poignantly humorous … more…

What is the Matrix? If you have to ask, just take a blue pill and put a cold cloth on your forehead and go lie down and take a nap, cuz there’s no way you’re gonna be able to catch up here. *The Matrix Reloaded* jumps head-first without explanation into, well, it’s kinda too much to go into.

So you think you saw *Daddy Day Care* 20 years ago, when it was called *Mr. Mom*? How wrong you are, my friend — how wrong you are. Just refer to this handy chart to discover all the differences between these two films.

It’s cuz I’m such a dork myself, I think, that Christopher Guest’s movies always ring so true to me, for all that they’re sublimely, subtly silly — they’re about people so immersed in doing what they love that they have no idea how absurd they are (which doesn’t bode well for me, I know).

Too bad for everyone who’s not a geek, who’ll dismiss *X2: X-Men United* as nonsense without even checking it out because it’s comic-booky or “just” a summer blockbuster or aimed at The Kids. Too bad for them, because they’ll miss out on one of the more germane metaphoric portrayals of the terrifying political and social landscape we’re living in today in the United States.

But it’s gotta be a parody, right? I mean, all horror movies are pretty much parodies of themselves by now, and this is gonna turn out to be a sly and subtle commentary on our expectations for horror films and will bring us some enlightenment about the kind of demented people who say things bloody murder onscreen can be ‘really really gross and cool.’

In our hyperkinetic entertainment environment, where fast and loud and obvious is never fast, loud, or obvious enough, Neil Jordan’s languorous *The Good Thief* is even more decadently delightful than it might otherwise be. Not that there’s anything necessarily inherently wrong with having your ears assaulted and your heart pounding while you hover on the edge of your seat… but too much of it can be exhausting.

There are enough Douglases onscreen here — Michael (One Night at McCool’s), dad Kirk as his dad, son Cameron as his son, mom Diana (Planes, Trains and Automobiles) as his mom — that it’s easy to imagine we’re getting the inside scoop on the real-life Douglas soap opera. We’re not, but Jesse Wigutow’s fictional screenplay … more…