The Fog of War documentary review
Or, as the subtitle explains it, Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. Oh, how I wish we could force the current administration to experience master documentarian Errol Morris’s latest miracle…
reviews by genre
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (review)
The words I keep coming back to, the ones that seem to fit this most astonishing of films best, are ‘terrible’ and ‘awful.’ The old-fashioned senses of the words are what I’m talking about: Peter Jackson has given us a grandly eloquent film that inspires more terror and more awe than anything I’ve seen in a long time. I can compare my reaction to it only with the moviegoing experiences of my childhood, when the hugeness, the all-encompassing-ness of movies in all ways — emotionally, viscerally, visually, aurally — first astounded me, when ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ and Darth Vader’s stormtroopers horrified me to such a degree that I can still feel it.
Battlestar Galactica (review)
I can’t say that I actually have fond memories of *Battlestar Galactica.* I have only vague memories of the show itself, of shag hairdos, and Starbuck getting caught with some chick or other in a Viper launch tube, and the cool robot dog, and a kid named Boxey which I thought was kind of a neat name for some inexplicable reason, and bits from after the show jumped the shark, when they found Earth, and all the colonials could jump really high because of some ridiculous thing to do with gravity. Or was that in *V*? It’s all kind of a blur.
Horatio Hornblower: Loyalty and Duty (review)
My, how our Horatio has grown! Only a green midshipman when we first met him, he’s now captain of his own ship, the sloop *Hotspur* of His Majesty’s Navy, battling the French on the high seas in a bid to bring down the treacherous Bonaparte. If it sounds a bit like *Master and Commander,* well, that’s because Hornblower and Aubrey are contemporaries fighting the same war and the same Old Boney, and if the thought of the possibility of Ioan Gruffudd and Russell Crowe together on the same ship in those snappy uniforms and wielding swords and buckling swash is simply too delicious, then you, my friend, are not alone.
Bad Santa movie review: none more black
So, when I attended a screening on November 14, I was already primed for *Bad Santa,* the meanest, curmudgeonliest, blackest holiday movie I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen most of ’em. It’s like, How much more black could it be? And the answer is None, none more black. I haven’t laughed at film this hard all year, and maybe not last year, either. And much of that laughter sprung from shock: I spent half the film saying to myself, ‘Holy crap, I can’t believe they did that!’ and ‘They did *not* just do that!’ It’s hard to be shocking in the era of the Farrelly Brothers, but *Bad Santa* is shocking partly because it’s so unrepentant and unapologetic. There’s no attempt to infuse the film with heart or soul or sweetness or light. *Bad Santa* unrelentingly twisted. And that’s just wonderful.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World movie review: where pulp meets art
This isn’t what I was expecting. I figured on clanging swords and thundering cannons and lots of swashbuckling, but this buckles far less swash than I imagined it would. I was expecting pulpy action adventure that was a whole lot of movie fun — I wasn’t expecting pulpy action adventure with real smarts and genuine heart and a grounding in reality.
Elf (review)
If only there really were a Santa, and he really had a Naughty list, and there really were consequences for getting oneself on that list. Then we could at least hope for lumps of coal to be distributed to the guilty parties behind *Elf.* But there is no Santa, and the world is full of Naughty people who not only go coal-free but get bonuses for their Naughtiness when it doesn’t even try to appeal to anything beyond the lowest-common denominator and becomes a huge hit.
Love Actually (review)
You know me. You know I hate romantic comedies, mostly. You know I think they tend to be phony, they tend to show off the worst sides of both men and women, and they tend to be neither romantic nor comedic. So you gotta be suspecting that a film billed as ‘the ultimate romantic comedy’ would have me running screaming in opposite direction as if my life depending upon escape.
Evil Dead II, Army of Darkness, Young Frankenstein, Little Shop of Horrors, and Beetlejuice (review)
Why do slasher movies make us laugh in the instant after we jump and scream? When comedy works, it’s for the same reason that horror does: It surprises us, and laughter and screams emanate from that same primitive lizard part of our brains, one that reacts before we can think.
Bubba Ho-Tep movie review: groovy
Bruce Campbell makes me laugh just looking at him. Just thinking about him. But I never thought he’d almost make me cry. And I certainly never thought he’d almost make me cry in a movie called Bubba Ho-Tep.
