The Island (review)
Welcome to *THX 11-Michael Bay*! It’s not a science fiction movie, but an incredible simulation!
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Fantastic Four (review)
Oh my, but we’ve been spoiled for comic book movies these last few years, haven’t we, with *X-Men* and *Spider-Man* and *Hulk* and *Batman Begins.* I just get all warm and squishy and totally turned on thinking about anguished, neurotic, potentially psychotic, not-at-all-well superheroes who need desperately to be hugged and coddled and, ahem, comforted after indulging their angsts and neuroses while beating the living crap out of bad guys bent on world domination or somesuch. What girl doesn’t?
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (review)
Oh my god could this be any more delicious? It’s hot and sexy and stuff blows up real good and there’s genuine *wit* and smarts and luscious allowance for the mysteries of lusty attraction and even lustier strife between men and women and did I mention it’s hot and sexy even though there’s hardly any actual sex worth mentioning actually in the movie?
Unleashed and Crash (review)
With its clear and obvious choices — think Eddie Izzard’s ‘cake? or death?’ bit — *Unleashed* really is a fairy tale next to *Crash,* where half the time when you think you’ve got a grasp on what’s the ‘right’ thing to do and the ‘right’ way to live, you turn out to be wrong, even if the other guy is wrong, too.
Sahara (review)
Sometimes you want reality from The Movies, and sometimes you just want a big ol’ cartoony popcorny action adventure flick that’s exciting and makes you laugh and doesn’t require deep thinking but also isn’t so stupid that it makes you want to cry. And I got a huge kick out of this one. So there.
The Pacifier (review)
So I’m sitting there in the dark with my little reporter notebook, diligently taking notes and formulating theses to support my contention that *The Pacifier* fails as a film, and I think it was during a burst of abject whimpering from the very famous critic sitting next to me, whom I guarantee you’ve seen on TV, that I suddenly and finally realized the futility of life, the ubiquitousness of pain, and the infinite emptiness of the universe that we puny humans on our puny planet in our puny corner of the cosmos cannot hope to ameliorate.
Constantine (review)
Fifteen years ago Bill and Ted took a seriously silly journey to the underworld, and this one is seriously freakishly disturbing. Imagine if Bosch and Dante were 21st-century geeks and they collaborated on a graphic novel (and maybe that’s a good description of Jamie Delano and Garth Ennis’s book *Hellblazer,* upon which this is based, but I don’t know cuz I’ve never seen it).
The Incredibles (review)
That teaser trailer — you know the one I’m talking about — with the fat old ex-superhero struggling to get into his spandex costume? It left such a bad taste in my mouth whenever I contemplated the film that must go with it. I imagined a gang of former masked crusaders called out of happy retirement, reluctantly huffing and puffing their way back into action, replete with very unfunny cracks about getting fat and old, and probably with an even more unfunny getting-into-shape-a-la-*Rocky* sequence thrown in for good measure.
Near Dark, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Once Bitten, Blacula, Love at First Bite, and Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter (review)
Of course, most respected anthropologists and biologists recognize that the New World Vampire, or *vampirus americanus*, differs greatly from the European species, or *vampirus continentalus*, but few films have recognized that the wide-open spaces of the U.S. produce a vastly altered creature than Europe’s dense urban spaces or intimate, if remote, medieval villages. But years before John Carpenter and the team of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez documented the vampires that dwell in the lonely stretches of the Americas, the criminally underappreciated ethnographer Kathryn Bigelow did it — spookily, grimly, hilariously, gloriously — with 1987’s *Near Dark,* in which a coven of nasty bloodsuckers roam the deserted American Southwest.
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.
