reviews

There’s something just a wee bit creepy about Happy, Texas. If it were just about a pair of escaped convicts forced to pretend to be a gay couple, or just about escaped convicts tutoring little girls, or just about little girls on display for the pleasure of grown-ups, maybe I could deal. Or if it stayed all these things but were more bizarro than it is, maybe I could deal. But Happy, Texas wraps all its concepts up in a package that’s undistorted and unironic enough that it just doesn’t sit right with me.

Russell is not complacent with making the audience laugh at the oddities of war. Like an emotional roller coaster ride, Three Kings offers a disturbing moment for every humorous one. Desperate Iraqi women beg for food for their babies. Figures in elephantine gas-masks move through a gas-shrouded minefield — an intensely frightening alien world we never saw on CNN.

A bit of Titanic counterprogramming debuts today in the form of two new videos from Bennu Multimedia: a digitally remastered version of an early movie account of that famous meeting with the iceberg, and a companion documentary that looks at the aftermath of the disaster. Both videos are hosted by David McCallum, who appeared in the previously definitive Titanic film, A Night to Remember.

I noticed immediately that there were no cats on Manor Farm, which the barnyard denizens renamed Animal Farm — if there had been, the pigs who take charge could have learned a thing or two about the benevolent dictatorship with which cats rule their humans. It’s ludicrous to try to exist without humans. They possess the opposable thumb by which they are able to produce the most glorious sound in the universe: the purr of a can opener.

Oh, One True Thing could so easily have been Stepmom II. On the surface, there are lots of similarities. We’ve got cancer, we’ve got one woman giving up her career when a man should have made that sacrifice, and we’ve got it all taking place during the schmaltziest of holidays: Christmas.

The medical industry could not have been happy with Patch Adams. It makes doctors look bad. It makes hospitals look bad. It makes med schools look bad. On the other hand, it’s so painfully awful that doctors may have been pleased when the number of ER visits shot up as people ran straight from movie theaters to hospitals in diabetic shock over this sugary, gooey, treacly excuse for a film.

I’ve had my eye on Loren Dean since I first noticed him in GATTACA. Yeah, he’s cute, and I’m a sucker for that, but even more to my liking, he’s smart. He’s one of those actors who seems to fly under the radar, his talent sort of sneaking up on the viewer. His delivery is assured without being arrogant, intelligent without being showy.

Written and directed by Bruce McCulloch, Dog Park isn’t a perfect film. Some scenes have a sketch-comedy feel to them (not surprising, considering McCulloch’s comedic roots), with dialogue a bit too contrived in a few spots, and the plot suffers from a tad too many coincidences. But on the whole, Dog Park cheerfully touches on realities of love and romance that movies all too often ignore, and makes us laugh at the fears and insecurities that plague us all. I’d much rather see more films like this than the candy-coated ‘romantic comedy’ sap that Hollywood cranks out.

Are we seeing the birth of a whole new genre of suspense films? The “I see dead people” genre? I suppose it’s merely a coincidence that Stir of Echoes arrived in theaters only a month after The Sixth Sense. Unfortunately for Stir of Echoes, the scant temporal distance from Haley Joel Osment’s sad terror only serve to highlight how mediocre this film is.