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It’s a measure of how, like, totally influential this little film was 20 years ago that there seems to be nothing special about it today. A punk from Hollywood and a girl from the Valley hook up? It’s like soooo who cares? But director Martha Coolidge’s transference of Romeo and Juliet to Southern California introduced … more…
It’s been sitting on a shelf since 1997 and the director is the pseudonymous “Allen Smithee” — one of these signs alone would be enough to set off alarms, and together they should spell disaster. And yet here we have a finely attuned and deftly executed little film, unassuming and unpretentious, about hustlers in Hollywood … more…
She’s the pop diva against which all others are measured, and that extends to her adventures in movie-stardom, too. With her flair for madcap comedy and a compelling intensity in dramatic roles, Barbra Streisand puts the likes of J.Lo and Britney to shame, as this collection demonstrates beautifully. Two 1972 films — Peter Bogdanovich’s goofy … more…
The music swells over the moment of victory, tears run freely down my face, fade to black, movie over. And I want to sob even longer and harder. Usually the rolling credits and the lights coming up in this kind of situation means a letup in the girly crying, but not this time. There’s something else going on besides the usual Oscar-baiting, triumph-of-the-human-and-equine-spirit shrink-wrapped Gourmet Film.
Have you not been making your required four-times-a-day supplication to Ben-and-Jen, wherein you turn to face Hollywood and think good thoughts that they actually survive as a gossip-worthy couple till their wedding? There’s really no excuse for not worshipping the adorably cutesy-poo celebrity cuddlekins of the moment, but if you haven’t, you can make up for it by taking in *Gigli* at least three times this weekend.
For a movie about a rock ‘n’ roll band, there’s not much rock ‘n’ roll in this self-consciously goofy flick, and its tricksy stylishness — from Alex Proyas (Dark City), a master of style over substance — is more of a distraction than a tonic for the feeling that we’ve seen all this before. The … more…
It makes a geek sorta wanna cry to see how Hollywood takes something as pure and lovely and necessary as developing repetitive stress injuries and/or losing sleep in order to kill cute cartoonish nasty alien Nazi undead Mongol Education Advisors and turns it into something so deadly dull that playing your little sister’s Barbie Goes Shopping! CD-ROM would be better at getting your adrenaline pumping.
You won’t hear this from anyone else, but here’s the secret of the subtly startling *Dirty Pretty Things*: It’s science fiction. Ten years ago it would have been obvious that the lawless world of the film was not our own — today, it’s so close to reality that it’d be easy to believe that calling it ‘fiction’ is a stretch, never mind ‘science fiction.’
It’s kinda like *Two Weddings, A Funeral, A Baby, and Some Hospital Visits* for Mandy Moore fans, only minus Rowan Atkinson (he was busy with *Johnny English*) and plus a lot of tedious adolescent angst. God, were we *all* this annoying in high school? No wonder we drove our parents crazy.
Of course it’s Michael Bay-ariffic in that adorably ultraviolent, homophobic kinda way, all vehicles exploding for no apparent reason and deeply repressed male emotions, the kind of stuff that can’t help but lead one to the conclusion that Michael Bay is denying that he has some serious issues with, really, just about everything he comes into contact with: women, men, cars, swimming pools, family pets, home electronics.
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