reviews

There’s a running joke in *I, Robot* about so-and-so being the ‘dumbest smart person ever’ and some other guy being the ‘dumbest dumb person ever.’ This is ironic, because *I, Robot* may well be the dumbest movie-that-thinks-it’s-smart ever.

It’s pretty French for a Chinese movie, this bittersweet apparition of a flick, all train platforms and tortured romance and the filmy evanescence of love. Zhou Yu (the luminous Gong Li), a painter of ceramics, rides the train long hours twice a week to visit her boyfriend, Chen Qing (Tony Leung Ka Fai), a poet, … more…

It is a sad commentary on how Hollywood squanders talent that the first studio feature from Joe Nussbaum — the guy who made that sneakily brilliant little piece of geeky satire “George Lucas in Love” — is this atrocious misadventure in teen self-absorption. Squandering all the tomboy-charm points she earned in the Spy Kids flicks, … more…

Leather and swords and British accents and gorgeous guys wielding them all can make a gal overlook a lot of badness in a flick. But not quite this much. Not when perhaps the grandest legend of British history gets thoroughly demythologized, and nothing rushes in to fill all the empty spaces but self-conscious, naive posturing about freedom and equality and self-determination.

The cast is to die for: Robert Redford (Spy Game) as a retired executive, and Willem Dafoe (Spider-Man 2) as the blue-collar schmoe who kidnaps him for ransom; Helen Mirren (Calendar Girls) as the executive’s wife left to fend with FBI agents invading the house, and Alessandro Nivola (Laurel Canyon) as the grown son and … more…

It’s the perfect film for that most uncritically patriotic of holidays, the Fourth of July, all slo-mo stars-and-stripes in the warm breeze of apple-pie freedom and the golden light of soft-focus diversity. We’re the best! director Louis Schwartzberg cheers. There’s no denying that the United States is bursting with perfectly lovely and wonderful and funky … more…

‘This is one of those avant garde things,’ the elderly Cole Porter snorts amusedly as *De-Lovely* opens. He’s observing his own life and career unfolding before him, commenting from ‘offstage’ on the action. It’s the most unusual and delightful film-within-a-film structure I’ve ever seen, but this meta-flick is never so wrapped up in its own cleverness to forget to be heartrendingly romantic. As should be anything to do with Cole Porter and his music.

Call it the eternal loneliness of the superhero. Or a secret-identity crisis. In what must be quite the most tenderly tragic comic-book movie ever made, Our Hero contemplates chucking all that great power and great responsibility for a quiet, ‘normal’ life.