Alice (review)
More’s the pity that it ends up feeling pointless and empty and humorless, for it starts off rather intriguing, this modern update of Lewis Carroll’s classic novel…
More’s the pity that it ends up feeling pointless and empty and humorless, for it starts off rather intriguing, this modern update of Lewis Carroll’s classic novel…
Writer-director Kirk Jones has pulled off a little miracle with this lovely, lovely movie: He’s telling us a story both universal enough in its reach to speak to anyone who’s ever been part of a family, and specific enough in its particulars to keep it grounded in the fantasy of fiction.
This is a really great film — truly great in the classical sense of the world, as grand as our most terrible fears and as wild as our most outlandish hopes and as intimate as being alive can be.
It’s kind of awesome, the film’s self-involvement. This isn’t really a movie: it’s more director/FX-mad wannabe supervillain Roland Emmerich calling out every other disaster film that has ever come before… including his own. Aliens blowing up the Empire State Builder? What piker came up with that?

Kinda sorta Shaun of the Dead done up American style, so instead of cricket bats as weapons and jokes about tea, it’s shotguns as anti-zombie devices and a quest to find the last Twinkie.
What could have been a maddening portrait of spoiled self-entitlement is, instead, a plucky tale about how tough life could be a woman, even a beautiful one, in the 1950s…
Memo to Sandra Bullock, star and producer of *All About Steve*: When people complain about how there aren’t enough roles for “older” women in Hollywood, I don’t think they were thinking that this was the solution.
How far should we be expected to dumb down movies?
How did the Pixar folks time it just right to get this cheerful and fantastical yet never unrealistically optimistic movie before our eyes just as we are getting desperate for a movie to hug us reassuringly?
If you wanted to explain to a mentally challenged hamster about the virgin/whore dichotomy, you could do worse than to show it *Miss March.*