reviews

I guess I’m starting to catch up a bit to the bizarrity that is Charlie Kaufman’s brain. Not that I didn’t love *Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,* but I was only 50 percent blown away by it. Like how something of the surprise is spoiled when you know there’s a ‘twist’ in a film even if you don’t know what the twist is, just knowing that a movie is written by Kaufman prepares you for the fact that it’s going to be odd and discomfiting and off-kilter, and so because you’re *expecting* that, the impact of the oddness is lessened a bit.

I don’t have a terribly impressive personal track record with Lars von Trier’s films — I haven’t seen all of them, but those I have seen have, at best, left me less than satisfied. So it was with limited expectations that I went in to *Dogville*… and expectations, at that, that were mostly along the lines that I was in for something half intriguing and half annoyingly experimental.

I couldn’t even begin to tell you what *Hellboy* is about, but unholy crap is it cool. It’s like geek soup, a goulash — ghoulash? — of everything that makes a movie neat and nerdy and like so totally awesome. Just the opening sequence alone has it all: black magic, cartoon Nazis, an icy Nordic blonde in leather, a geeky Fox Mulder-type paranormal investigator, weird machines that spin around and make the kind of disturbing throbbing noises that you know means they’re futzing around with the fabric of the universe in a bad way, freaky guns that look more like hair dryers than guns, portals into other dimensions, candy bars, a cute little red devil thing, and Rasputin.

Well, it’s no *The Rundown,* that’s for sure, and *The Rundown* wasn’t much to speak of except for The Rock and his charm and his charisma and his big toothy grin. He’s still got that movie-star It here, but It ain’t quite the same thing surrounded by action junk that thinks it’s serious drama. The Rock’s costar this time out is a big wooden stick, which is certainly an improvement over Sean Patrick William Michael George Henry Scott, but in all other aspects, this film cannot be said to be an upswing in The Rock’s Hollywood career.

Look, I’ve got no problem with Kevin Smith thinking it was time to grow up. Not that I see anything wrong or even necessarily juvenile with the kind of clever snarkiness and fanboy exuberance that Smith’s movies were full of — my god, he was a geek who made it big, maybe the most famousest of all geeks, and that’s saying something. But after *Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,* Smith told us all he was ready to move on to something… more mature. Okay, fine. I was looking forward to seeing what would spring from the fertile, irreverent imagination of a grown-up geek.

Spike Lee’s former cinematographer Ernest Dickerson checks in with a gangsta flick that’s all flashy visual angst and, despite its literary pretensions, utterly inconsequential, if bloated with a fervent desire to be seen as Art. Druglord King David (rapper DMX: Cradle 2 the Grave), stabbed in an attack with desperately pseudo-Shakespearean overtones, dies a miserable … more…

O Coen brothers, where art thou? Where is your deft touch, your perfect balance between the affected and the authentic? Why did you let Tom Hanks (Catch Me If You Can) channel George Clooney as Ulysses Everett McGill via Colonel Sanders? How did you manage to make stereotypes like elderly Southern black churchlady Mrs. Munson … more…

As the Germans march into Paris, high society retreats to the Hotel Splendide in Bordeaux, including, among a cast of delightfully screwball characters, a half-shrewd, half-ditzy actress (the splendide Isabelle Adjani) and the politician besotted with her (a sprightly Gérard Depardieu: CQ); the scientist (Jean-Marc Stehlé) with the secret weapon that could turn the tide … more…

Plausibility, alas, is not a central feature of *Taking Lives,* even as FBI-agent-versus-serial-killer movies go. The scoffing cop, Paquette, one Montreal’s supposed finest, is played by Gallic supermodel-esque hunk of manliness Olivier Martinez — if you like that kind of thing — in designer clothes, even though we all know real cops all look and dress like Wojciehowicz from *Barney Miller.*

Anyone despairing over the state of journalism in America can take heart from Audrey Brohy and Gerard Ungerman, muckrakers in the fiery, old-fashioned sense, the kind that, when they roamed the Earth in mighty herds, used to make the powerful and corrupt tremble with fear. Today, seeking out work like theirs has become a political … more…