Year: 2003

Humans are monsters, nature is serene, and the world is full of grating, saccharine Phil Collins songs, or so this latest hand-drawn animated outing from Disney would have us believe. It is Brother Bear‘s very bad luck to be released almost simultaneously with the long-awaited DVD of The Lion King — a fresh look at … more…

In space, no one can hear you scream. But they *can* hear your quadruple Weyland-Yutani 10 Terrawatt Nuclear Fusion Transtellar engines firing up from half an AU away. But I kid the greatest science fiction horror film ever made.

If this movie had been made 60 years ago and had starred Orson Welles and Barbara Stanwyck or Tyrone Power and Katharine Hepburn, you’d stay up late into the night watching it on PBS or Turner Classic and sob your eyes out even though you know it’s corny and not very realistic. So don’t avoid it now just because Angelina Jolie’s lips are enormously distracting and she can’t really act and there’s something just a little creepy about two privileged Westerners falling in love in front of a backdrop of the world’s great humanitarian disasters.

Autumn not only means football, it means actors angling for Oscars, and those two birds are killed dead with one stone, though you’ll likely want to throw many more. Cuba Gooding Jr. (Pearl Harbor) won’t be getting any nominations — in fact, his bumbling performance here makes one wonder if we can’t retract the Oscar … more…

Make no mistake, it was still the 70s in July 1981, when those infamous murders occurred on Wonderland Avenue in the Hollywood Hills. Well, we’re told the murders are infamous, as brutal as Charles Manson’s rampage 12 years earlier, though I’d never heard of them. But never mind: Brutal, bloody murder, infamous or not, is good for movies. Even better is when drugs and sleazy nightclub owners and former porn stars are involved, which is of course the case with *Wonderland,* James Cox’s hyperkinetic, retro-groovy, and sorta superfluous deconstruction of the crime.

Um, why? What was the point in remaking a horror classic and watering down all the stuff that was good about it while simultaneously playing up a bunch of stuff that’s bad about today’s slasher flicks? I don’t get it. Gone is the sudden, shocking violence and the relentless, literally breathtaking terror of Tobe Hooper’s … more…

Director Clint Eastwood’s (Unforgiven) latest film, a stunning meditation on loss, follows three childhood friends divided by tragedy as kids and reunited by another today, discovering along the way that no one ever really recovers, that tendrils of grief and rage extend into our families and the community around us. Not a happy film, nor … more…

Cate Blanchett is a goddess. So beautiful that you just want to fall at her feet and weep, sure, but the talent. My god, the talent. This is her bestest, stunningest, most remarkably surefooted performance ever, but I think I’ve said that about each of her previous roles, I’ll probably say that about the next one, too, and the one after that, and the one after that.

The one time I tried to read a John Grisham book, I had to throw it aside with great force, like Dorothy Parker would have done. Man, is the guy a lousy prose stylist, or what? But his books make great movies for the same reason they sell so well: he tells highly entertaining stories. Completely preposterous stories, true, but highly entertaining ones nevertheless.

Guys, get a clue. If you don’t typically have a lot of luck with the ladies and now a woman you’ve never met before who is suspiciously hot and apparently psychotic disrobes before you and invites you to fuck her, this is an indication that you should run.