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Ah, this is one of those movies that starts off intriguing and tricksy, gets bogged down after a while with its own inventiveness — so that you sorta squirm your way through the middle of the film, afraid that the film’s gonna end up all hat and no cattle — and redeems itself so tremendously … more…
Saw as a title made perfect sense for Saw, given the prominent, horrifying role played by that piece of hardware. Saw II as a title is pointless, except to set off the Pavlovian response of horror fans and bring them running — it has little in common with its predecessor beyond the washed-out colors and … more…
If it’s otherwise idle hands in Hollywood who make sitcoms, does that officially make them the devil’s work? Cuz it’s always seemed that way to me, with the typical sitcom’s idiotic pretense to ordinariness (*Everybody Loves Raymond* and *The King of Queens,* for instance) as a disguise for the basest stereotypes (*Everybody Loves Raymond* and *The King of Queens,* for instance) and its appeal to the lowest of the lowbrow. Except, of course, when it wants us to go all mushy over some moron learning the true meaning of fatherhood or puppies or Arbor Day — then the LAUGH sign prompting the conditioned studio audience switches over to AWWW and the bread-and-circuses entertainment switches from making fun of beer-bellied blue-collar schmoes with impossibly tolerant and beautiful wives and simply impossible mothers-in-law to asking us to welcome the spirit of Veterans’ Day into our hearts.
You can’t make this stuff up, and they didn’t: this is a true story. Mostly. Domino Harvey was a poor little rich girl who, seeking to escape the deprivations of Beverly Hills and the rough life of a fashion model, turned to — no shit — bounty hunting for adventure and excitement. I say “was” … more…
All over the country, little girls with equine fixations will be blinking their dreamy pony-filled eyes at their daddies and pleading please please please prettyplease can we see the horse movie? And oddly enough, *Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story* is the cinematic equivalent of the deployment of such adorable nascent feminine wiles: Please don’t shoot the horse with the broken leg, Daddy, Dakota Fanning with her enormous eyes brimming with tears and her quivering lip doesn’t exactly say, but she might as well have. Please nurse the horse back to health at tremendous personal expense and sacrifice so you can later give it to me as a prezzie and I can train her and we can enter the massively prestigious Breeder’s Cup race with her! Pul-eeeeeeze!
The Rock, he keeps saying things like ‘We got us a game!’ and ‘Game time!’ as the 22nd-century-or-whatever version of ‘Boo yeah’ or whatever the hell that Marine rallying cry is. Like, as a joke, I guess, a big wink at the fact that this is based on a video game, and a video game that, no matter how awesome or fun it may be, couldn’t be any less about story or character. A movie version of Ms Pac-Man couldn’t be any more or less suited to the big screen than a movie version of *Doom.*
It’s just like Devil’s Advocate except this time it’s Matthew McConaughey (Sahara) getting seduced by Satan, except Pacino ain’t Satan this time around, he’s just Pacino (William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice) doing his Al Pacino imitation, yelling a lot and chewing up the scenery, and if you’ve seen that once, you’ve seen it enough. … more…
I love it when I discover that there’s an unspoken movie rule I didn’t know I knew. Like this one: No Paul Walker movie should be more than 87 minutes long. It’s just common sense, but it only ever occurred to me when I first encountered one that broke it. C’mon, it’s gotta take a … more…
Oh, it’s totally a chick flick: there’s all sorts of stuff about shoes, and there will be some happy tears at the end. But it’s the good kind of chick flick, about real women with real problems that other real women can identify with.
Are you now, or have you ever been, a journalist? That’s what *Good Night, and Good Luck.* feels like, a smooth, sardonic smack in the face of today’s so-called newspeople, the cinematic equivalent of a withering glare and a disdainful roll of the eyes. Oh, this is an angry movie, calm and collected on the surface and seethed with reeled-in rage underneath. Yeah, it’s about Edward R. Murrow and how he took on McCarthy’s insanity, but what it’s really about is how we need a Murrow now and is there no one, not one supposed journalist, with the balls to take up Murrow’s mantle of integrity and honesty and fearlessness?
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