reviews

Though it sounds like a little slice of The Sopranos, or Goodfellas-lite, Too Much Sleep is more like early Kevin Smith: Writer/director David Maquiling, in his debut feature, turns a camera on ordinary life, and wrests dark, surprising humor from the sheer mundanity of a young slacker’s existence.

There’s something especially viscerally pleasing about seeing Law play a character from that era in Enemy at the Gates, a beautiful, satisfyingly old-fashioned movie that you could almost believe is a remake of one starring, oh, a young Orson Welles, Rosalind Russell, and Joseph Cotten. And what a boost for the war effort it would have been. Buy war bonds now!

It’s a cold, cold, cold, cold war in this retro satire from writer/directors Peter Askin and Douglas McGrath. The year is 1959 — “a good time to be a white American male” — and nebbishy prep-school teacher and sometimes driver’s ed instructor Allen Quimp (McGrath: The Insider) is delightfully bewildered to find his fantasy of … more…

Once in a while, though, those impossible ingredients add up to a romantic comedy is actually both romantic and funny, one that rings true. Maybe it’s the result of a genuine chemistry between its leads, or the comedy is tinged with a mordant humor that underscores the pain intrinsic to love, or the silliness of it all is handled with such a deft hand that it all bobs happily along on its own whimsy. Or, with When Brendan Met Trudy, it’s all of the above.

Truly, the media are scum. But the cops are just as bad. And it’s really the American public’s fault anyway. You know who you are.

Parker and Longbaugh are the world’s dumbest criminals… and right here the trouble starts. For it is the vacuous Ryan Phillippe who shuffles his way through Way as Parker, while the minor god Benicio Del Toro inhabits Longbaugh. Way is a thesis in the importance of proper casting, and the difference between an intelligent actor playing a stupid character and, well, a less intelligent actor playing stupid.

It sneaks up slowly on you, how quite astonishingly awful a movie this is. At first you think it’s just the glare off Julia’s enormous and extremely white teeth and Brad’s blond head that’s distracting you, but soon enough you realize that No, this is a comedy that isn’t funny, a romance that isn’t romantic, and an action movie that consists mainly of lots and lots of scenes of highway driving.

Though set in a grim refugee camp in Britain, Paul Pavlikovsky’s gritty Last Resort is not a harrowing exploration of the plight of political castoffs. Though revolving around an unlikely romance of lovers who cross cultural and societal barriers to be together, this is not a retelling of Romeo and Juliet. With those situations as its backdrop, Last Resort is instead a thoroughly and refreshingly internal tale of how the things that keep us from being truly free are within ourselves.

I’m getting awfully tired of defending Brendan Fraser, of saying or implying things like, ‘The only thing that saves this stinkweed of a film from itself is the fact that Fraser is so darn cute and charming.’ So is it a good thing that I can’t even say that about Monkeybone? Is it a good thing that not even Fraser’s dorky adorableness can salvage this mess of a movie?