reviews

And the result of all that creative effort? PG-13 pornography, an SI swimsuit issue for the big screen with lots of slo-mo hair tossing, blouses unbuttoned down to there, asses shoved in the camera, closeups on moist lips. Vapid and self-consciously kitschy, these gals are a 13-year-old boy’s fantasy of a strong woman. This is Hollywood aiming T&A at little girls, but I wouldn’t let any little girl I cared about see this film.

In an attempt to make himself feel like a man and impress the girl of his dreams, nebbishy restaurant cook Yasuda (Tomoro Taguchi) concocts a scheme to rob a bank. But his careful plans fall to pieces, and try as he might to salvage them, things go from bad to worse, and he finds himself … more…

The wish to understand “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things” is what drove Douglas Adams’s philosophical detective Dirk Gently, and I’ve adopted that as my personal motto. Which is probably why I was fascinated by this new documentary from director Michael Apted. Through interviews with seven smart and witty scientists — pharmaceutical chemist Gertrude Elion, … more…

Total Recall is one of my guilty pleasures. It’s not a great movie. It’s not even the one really good science-fiction movie director Paul Verhoeven (hollow, startroop) has made — that was Robocop. But it’s a helluva lot of fun, and it moves fast enough that you never notice how silly it is till later.

Sewn together out of the scraps of far superior SF and action films, Red Planet is a frankenmovie, a soulless and charmless film that desperately hopes we won’t see the stitches that barely hold its disparate pieces together. Some mad producer somewhere saw the final cut and screamed ‘It’s alive! It’s alive!’ But, alas, it isn’t.

There was a time when juvenile comedies were not about screwing innocent pastry or injuring defenseless household pets. Long ago, movies aimed at the high-school and college crowds occasionally had some substance to them, had a point of view and something meaningful to say, even if it was buried under crass comedy. I speak of Caddyshack, from the era, now long gone, when movies starring SNL alum were not embarrassments, and the suggestion of something gross was funnier for being only a suggestion.

The Legend of Bagger Vance is Redford’s latest attempt to break through the crust of the most hard-hearted cynic and warm her heart — and as that very person, I can attest that he succeeds. Redford pulls the emotional strings of a story oft-told so sublimely that I went along with him willingly, grateful with the opportunity to get swept away in it and for a little cry at the end.

There’s something very sexy about vampires — it’s the intimacy of their assaults and the fact that they traditionally choose to appear in women’s bedrooms in the middle of the night, perhaps. Anne Rice played this up to wonderful effect in her vampire novels (though the film version of Interview with the Vampire is more silly than erotic). But way back in 1931, director Tod Browning was pretty direct about bloodsucking as a euphemism for sex in his classic Dracula.