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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…
I’m watching Brendan Fraser on *The Daily Show* right now — this is what I get for procrastinating my way, as always, into writing my review late into the night, mere hours before the film opens — and Fraser is either stoned or drunk or way more surfer-dude than any Canadian I’ve ever seen. He’s hilarious, and he’s cracking me (and Jon Stewart) up with his attempts to describe the plot of *Looney Tunes: Back in Action.*
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.
When I was a couple of years old, or so I’m told, I decided to take a vegetable peeler to my finger, just to see what would happen. My mother says I was quite fascinated by all the blood and was otherwise completely unperturbed until she started screaming, and then I started screaming.
Rhymes with “penis.” Who knew there was such a thing as drag kings? I thought I was a sophisticated New Yorker, yet I was completely unaware of this admittedly fairly tiny sub-subculture of female androgyny. We think we live in a world of relative gender equality — women aren’t stoned to death in the streets … more…
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.
You cannot imagine my crushing disappointment. After months of speculation with fellow geeks about the many varied ways *The Matrix* trilogy might resolve itself and fully expecting the Wachowski brothers to go far beyond even the wildest theories we mere mortals could conceive of, we get this. Anticlimactic. Philosophically puny. Downright nonsensical. We’ve been cheated. We’ve been misled. It’s like discovering there’s no Santa Claus and getting socks under the tree in the same year.
You know you’re in trouble when you get Serious Social Issues, De-Glammed Glamourpusses, and Creatively Justifiable Nudity all in the same movie.
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.
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