reviews

What can one possible say about a movie like Valentine? It’s exactly what you’d expect it to be: stupid, oversexed, rich, young white people getting killed in various gruesome ways. Slasher flicks are so indistinguishable from one another that I’m not entirely sure that this is a new film. It’s quite possible that I saw this back in 1997. And 1993. And 1989. And 1979.

Head Over Heels. The Wedding Planner. So this is the state of romantic comedy these days: it isn’t romantic and it isn’t funny, unless, perhaps, you’re a 12-year-old girl for whom swooing over totally gorgeous guys is a new thing and totally planning your totally romantic wedding is your hobby. Where are the romantic comedies for grownups — you know, like they used to make ’em? Where is the flirty banter? Where is the sexual tension? Where have all the Cary Grants and Katherine Hepburns gone?

Thoughtful sobriety — the kind that gives The Silence of the Lambs and Seven their power to stun and shock — is the veneer that overlays the pointless cruelty of The Pledge. But thin indeed is that veneer.

State and Main, on the other hand, while the best movie about Hollywood since The Player, is a different kind of beast, one that doesn’t quite denigrate the Hollywood types so much as recognize that they are us, we are them, and we are all together. The quest for recognition and the need to tell stories are inherent attributes of our humanity, though they do get perverted sometimes, and not always in the places you’d expect.

Chocolat is an instant comfort movie. There isn’t a single event that transpires in the film that you cannot see coming from its opening moment, and yet it’s utterly appealing. And that appeal has a lot to do with how, well, comfortable a film this is. Director Lasse Halstrom doesn’t ask you to think too much about anything, but you can still feel sophisticated as well as warm and toasty, because the international cast and crew and Gallic setting will lull you into the sense that you’re consuming a Foreign Film.

Sneakers is just such a self-respecting techno-suspense flick, one that thought — rightly, at the time — it could get away with casting square Robert Redford as an ex radical hacker.