Month: July 2004

Can we please please please have a moratorium on Internet search engines figuring prominently in “‘thrillers’? I mean, come on, Google is a gift from the gods, and the other day when that virus made Google unusable, I felt like part of my brain had been cut off. But it simply is not, by any stretch of the imagination, ‘thrilling’ to see a movie hero sitting at a computer typing. Not even when it’s Denzel Washington.

Commander Riker does Thunderbirds — is this a prime example of synergistic geek heaven or what? And while it’s certainly aimed directly at the little kids — the flick owes as much to Robert Rodriguez and Spy Kids as is does to Gerry Anderson’s supermarionated brain — there enough for the big kids to enjoy … more…

Call it Dude, Where’s My Burger. If you’ve never had a White Castle hamburger — or a sackful, which is the quantity in which the tiny delicacies are typically consumed — well, know that those little squares of junky, stomach-ache-inducing, wonderful greasy goodness are well worth enshrining in the annals of Hollywood, even if this … more…

Exquisitely cinematic fear may well drip from *The Village,* but it does so effectively only at first, for Shyamalan has gone crazy with his other schtick: the twist. He’d just about reached this point with his last film, *Signs,* where the twist is the only thing the film is really about in the end, but it seems that since he just about got away with that, he figured Let’s go all the way and make a film that’s nothing but secret sauce.

If *This Is Spinal Tap* had been a drama, it would have been *Metallica: Some Kind of Monster.* Now, I don’t mean to demean Metallica or disparage the film by likening them or it to a mockumentary in which the ‘mock’ equates to ‘ridiculing’ as much as to ‘fake.’ Not at all. It’s just that *Tap* so overshadows the genre of the rock movie that it’s almost impossible not to see the spectre of Tap in a film about a heavy-metal band looking to reinvent itself and nearly disintegrating in the process. Especially not when this is the first movie about music I’ve seen since *Tap* that is as profoundly moving, if in the opposite direction: If *Tap* attained a kind of comic genius in its skewering of heavy metal, *Monster* lends it a dramatic new gravitas.

*The Bourne Supremacy* is pretty much the same movie as *Catwoman* — hyperkinetic editing, amoral antihero we’re meant to cheer for — except it’s good. Really good. So good that you can’t believe how much *Catwoman* suffers by comparison.

Margaret Cho is angry, and justifiably so. The list of things the standup comic/social activist/force of nature hates includes racism, the cultural pressures placed on women to be thin, President Bush, and ex-boyfriends (for starters), all fine things for a smart gal to get worked up about. But her rants on the state of her … more…

What happened at the world’s fair? Not much, as it turns out. Elvis Presley has a date with an adorably precocious seven-year-old Asian girl, falls in love with a nurse who’s somewhat older, breaks into song at the slightest provocation, applies for the budding astronaut program, and gets kicked in the shins (not once but … more…

There’s a running joke in *I, Robot* about so-and-so being the ‘dumbest smart person ever’ and some other guy being the ‘dumbest dumb person ever.’ This is ironic, because *I, Robot* may well be the dumbest movie-that-thinks-it’s-smart ever.