reviews

I mean to say: *Shrek,* which won the first Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film a coupla years back, and I’m tempted to think the category was invented just so that film could win it, was pretty damn brilliant, and *Shrek 2* is even better. Who does this in Hollywood? It’s enough to kindle a tiny spark of hope in me that there’s a handful of people with some heart and soul in that town, the evidence of the likes of *Van Helsing* and *Ella Enchanted* aside.

You’ve heard the story, surely, about how the face that fled an ancient city was so beautiful that a fleet of a thousand ships was launched to go after it? Yup, as we suspected all along, that most beautiful of faces belonged to none other than Orlando Bloom.

Not so much as a movie as a “Girls Gone Wild” video with the occasional slasher murder thrown in for fun. It’s island of the brain-dead as horny guys and silicone-enhanced gals romp at a tropical resort — sample pick-up line: “Wanna get nailed?” — until a mysterious figure with a machete starts offing the … more…

If you don’t know anything about legendary golfer Bobby Jones going into this film, you certainly won’t know anything on the way out. Glowing, soft-focus, hagiographic, toothless: Rowdy Herrington’s bland portrait posits Jones as a saintly, near perfect human being whose only flaw is the occasional indulgence in creative swearing when he flubs a swing. … more…

But there’s another side to the film that nauseates me: the PG-porn undertone, aimed straight at all the adult heterosexual men who’re counting the days until June 13 of this year, when the Olsens turn 18 and these horndogs no longer have to hide a lust that is no longer near-pedophiliac. It’ll likely go pretty much over the heads of the dreamy tweens, but for anyone who knows about the online countdowns to the Olsens’ majority (to which I refuse to link — find ’em yourself if you must), it’s really, really icky.

This is an indication of the willingness I had, going into *Van Helsing,* to forgive a lot. For before the psychopath point, there is a self-indulgent black-and-white interlude in which Dr. Frankenstein is run out of Transylvania by revolting, torch-wielding peasants, as well as some jam-packing of Victorian pulp into the V.H./Hyde thing, which besides calling to mind *Hunchback* (which isn’t quite Victorian, I know) also suggests that Hyde may well have been Jack the Ripper. And I was only worrying briefly about vocabulary.

We’ve seen this story many times before, though rarely in such harrowing fashion, or with subtitles: Neandethal husband wants the wifey barefoot and pregnant. He hits; she cries; he apolgizes; she forgives him. Repeat in a vicious cycle. Intense and dark, the film — which was nominated for four Goyas, Spain’s Oscar, including ones for … more…

It’s kinda like an episode of some imaginary HBO series about love and sex and the best ways to screw it all up — hardly surprising, as it comes from TV vets Maya Forbes (The Larry Sanders Show) and Wallace Wolodarsky (The Simpsons) — and that’s just fine. This small-scale flick manages a kind of … more…

Who’s afraid of twins? I mean, sure, there’s the Olsens, but apart from them? Is there something so inherently creepy about a clone — which is just a twin born years later — that it’s automatically the basis of a horror movie? I dunno: Did Dolly the sheep run amuck and kill a family of Scottish farmers with an axe one night and I just missed it?