Shaun of the Dead movie review: necrophilia
I mean, who, precisely, said you couldn’t have a zombie romantic comedy? Why can’t the male lead express his undying devotion for his ladylove by bashing dead people in the head with a cricket bat?
Year: 2004
Trekkies 2 (review)
Geekdom is global. In case there was any doubt, now there’s Trekkies 2, Roger Nygard’s followup to his 1997 celebration of Star Trek fandom. Denise Crosby, The Next Generation‘s Lt. Tasha Yar, hosts this Trek travelogue, from the German convention (or con, in geek speak) that draws 5000 fans to the Italian priest Trekker who … more…
National Lampoon’s Gold Diggers (review)
The “world’s dumbest criminals” (Will Friedle and Chris Owen: October Sky) hit on a grand get-rich scheme: marry two rich old broads (Louise Lasser: Requiem for a Dream and Renée Taylor) and kill them for their money. Unfortunately for the boys, the broads, secretly dead broke, have only married the idiot twins in order to … more…
Ellen: The Complete Season One (review)
Quick: How long did Ellen DeGeneres’ sitcom last? Four episodes? Ten? Maybe it eeked out a full season? Get this: Ellen, one of the blandest, most generic sitcoms in recent memory, endured for five years and one hundred episodes — there’s a hole in your pop-culture memory only because the series, or at least the … more…
The Apprentice: The Complete First Season (review)
It’s hard to conceive of the alternate universe in which “reality TV” hit The Apprentice approaches actual reality. Like a Mafia don drunk on his own power, Donald Trump — holding court from a would-be intimidating oversize executive chair in an underlit conference room and, hand to God, referring to himself as “The Donald” — … more…
Wimbledon (review)
It’s downright tragic to see a cast so wasted as the highly appealing stars of Wimbledon are. This floppiest of the floppy-haired British romantic comedies shoehorns the agreeably brambly Paul Bettany (Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World) into the Hugh Grant role, where he fits comfortably as aging tennis pro Peter Colt, … more…
Vanity Fair (review)
William Makespeace Thackeray’s beloved novel gets another filmic adaptation, and if the sprawling lushness of its epic length is lost in the reduction to two and a half hours, that’s more than made up for by wickedly witty humor, sumptuous visuals, and the delightfully impish Reese Witherspoon (Legally Blonde 2: Red White and Blonde) as … more…
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (review)
In *Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow,* a digitized ‘Laurence Olivier’ appears as the Man Behind the Curtain in what is a lousy, pointless remake of, among many other classic films, *The Wizard of Oz.*
Code 46 (review)
In recent conversations about what’s great in the movies lately, I’ve been calling *Code 46* ‘*Brave New World* meets *Lost in Translation,*’ but those sorts of ‘X meets Y’ descriptions tend to demean a film, reduce it to a calculated, photocopied imitation, and *Code 46* is nothing of the kind. It is, while drawing on and inspired by classic films, utterly original, in a way that is particularly thrilling for fans of true science fiction movies.
Cellular (review)
That’s the kind of flick *Cellular* is: goofily obvious when it isn’t unexpectedly exciting. It’s one of those movies that succeeds partly by not being anywhere near as bad as you were expecting it to be — by being, really, not so bad at all, much to one’s shocked surprise. Seriously, I was anticipating two hours of that annoyingly pseudo-hip Elvis Costello-ish guy from the TV commercials who wanders around saying ‘Can you hear me now?’ into his cell phone — and why o why won’t someone kidnap *him*? — and instead the goofily obvious stuff is more than made up for by the suspense and the humor.
