reviews

Whaddaya know: it’s a movie about music videos from a hot music-video director, Bille Woodruff, that actually looks and feels like a real movie instead of a frenetic, quick-cut advertisement. Even more surprisingly, it’s a sweetly old-fashioned movie to boot. TV’s Jessica Alba stars as Honey Daniels, a girl from the Bronx who just wants … more…

Behold the Prestige Picture(TM), the moviegoing experience that lets people who don’t want to be surprised at the movies feel like they’re seeing an Important Film about important things like Honor and Respect and Love and War and Poetry and History.

You simply can’t imagine how weird and wonderful and lovely this film is. I can go on and on about its odd beauty, how it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen and at the same time like a recurring dream you can always just barely remember when you wake up, and still you’ll be astonished by it. Because words fail. *The Triplets of Belleville* must be experienced. I could not truly convey what it’s like to laze in its saucy, sweet otherworldliness if I sat here for hours trying to find a precise turn of phrase.

So, it’s not *The Country Bears,* thank the gods, not an affront to the universe, nothing we’ll have to disavow as a species before we’re admitted to the Interstellar Federation or anything. But it ain’t *Pirates of the Caribbean,* either, it’s nothing like even a shadow of that kind of magnificent popcorny movie fun. It’s mostly just predictable and boring and all silly not-scary stuff popping out and going Boo! and– Hello, *who* is this? Tall, dark, and handsome with the scrumptious British accent and the fabulous costumes and the romantic yearning and the making my toes curl?

Why can’t we live in the alternate universe where *The Missing* really is ‘the most hauntingly powerful film of the year’ or whatever they’re pretending it is on the ubiquitous television commercials? I want to see *that* film, the one that looks like a horror western done up by the love child of Sam Raimi and Peter Weir, full of spooky mysticism and stirring adventure and Cate Blanchett kicking ass and Tommy Lee Jones doing his rugged tough-nut thing.

There’s not enough Bruce Campbell in this medieval action comedy. I kept expecting him to fall out of the sky with his clunker car and his chainsaw and berate the primitive screwheads and demonstrate the power of his boomstick, and he kept failing to do so. So the not-enough amount of Bruce Campbell present is, in fact, zero. Bruce, I’m very disappointed.

Isn’t it odd, how just as that time of the year comes around when we critics and lots of other people who love movies are starting to think about all the superlatives of the past year, that we have together in a single weekend the most terrifying film of 2003 as well as one of the funniest.

Billie Golden hails from Queens, New York, a singer of old standards in a dive where the bartender runs the noisy blender during her songs and the patrons are all 185 years old. But she dreams of serenading a more glamorous time, when elegant waiters served martinis and handsome young men lit the cigarettes — … more…